bearing blog

bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

Enacting mercy, whether or not it exists.
The works of mercy are all the works of almsgiving or "charity." According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:
The traditional enumeration of the corporal works of mercy is as follows:

To feed the hungry;

To give drink to the thirsty;

To clothe the naked;

To harbour the harbourless;

To visit the sick;

To ransom the captive;

To bury the dead.

The spiritual works of mercy are:

To instruct the ignorant;

To counsel the doubtful;

To admonish sinners;

To bear wrongs patiently;

To forgive offences willingly;

To comfort the afflicted;

To pray for the living and the dead.
From Disputations:

Rocco Palmo quotes Pope Francis:

"We cannot follow Jesus on the way of charity if we don't love those around us first of all. It's necessary to do the works of mercy with mercy! The works of charity with charity!"

Which is probably why I don't often find instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner brings me much peace.

Um. Yeah.

So here's the question of the day. If you can't summon up mercy and charity in your heart as the reason to perform any of these works…

…if you have some other reason…

…is it better to try to fake it and perform them anyway, or is it better to refrain?
Sep 23, 2013

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4 comments on Enacting mercy, whether or not it exists.
Technology, productivity, and unemployment.

Interesting musing here at Engineering Ethics Blog.

The ways that people make a living today are very different from what they were a generation ago.  In 1970, Detroit was still a bustling manufacturing metropolis, thousands of women earned a decent living as telephone operators, and many newspapers provided employment to linotype operators who spent their days at the keyboard of a clunky pile of machinery that molded molten type metal into sticks.  Needless to say, you will have problems finding a manufacturing job in Detroit these days, and the other jobs are history too….

And we are by no means done…almost half of current U. S. jobs could eventually vanish as they are taken over by "computerisation."

What so often goes completely unmentioned in discussions of technological unemployment, is the question of anthropology: what is your model of the human being?

I think the model that most secular economists and researchers use is something like this.  All life is basically economic in character, and the ultimate good in this life is a smoothly functioning economy, wherein everyone capable of contributing to it works to the best of their ability and receives in turn the material benefits of their work. That is a nice picture as far as it goes, but as a philosophy of life it's somewhat lacking.

For a completely different take on technological unemployment, you should read one of a number of works that were popular in the 1930s.  Even in the teeth of the Great Depression, writers such as C. C. Furnas in The Next Hundred Years went into optimistic technophilic raptures about how the increasing efficiency and productivity brought about by technological advances would let most people earn all the money they needed by working only one or two hours a day, leaving the rest of the time for leisure pursuits such as art appreciation and charitable work.

We have certainly gone beyond Mr. Furnas's wildest dreams of increased productivity.  So what went wrong with his vision?

I'm not entirely sure, but one factor seems to be the social consensus of what kinds of work and lives are to be desired, and what kinds are to be disparaged.

Go ahead and read the whole thing. I think he's correct about that social consensus, incidentally, but another piece of the puzzle is — in my opinion — the rise of the two-income (or n-income, where n is the number of adults) household in all economic classes.

That's just a link for thought this Monday morning. See you later!

Sep 23, 2013

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No comments on Technology, productivity, and unemployment.
Temptation at home.
It’s been a long time since I was writing a great deal about weight loss and gluttony*….

(believe me, I will probably need to write more about it sometime after I have this baby… maybe even sooner, because while trying to lose weight isn’t appropriate right now, dealing with old impulses always is…)

… and it’s been an even longer time since someone emailed me with a question inspired by those old posts!

(Excuse me for my enthusiasm. I’m a little thrilled to have someone give me a reason to add a blog post. Lately, what with the homeschooling, the pregnancy, and the head lice, it’s been hard to get to the computer with enough energy left to write.)

So, anyway, reader Katherine emails:

I… have been following for the last few months. Since May when I read your semiannual maintenance post. I began reading more of your posts about weight loss.

A nice amount resonated with me. I’m a food addict and I’ve been trying to make lifestyle changes to improve that. But there is one area that does undermine me and I just wondered if you had any tips or suggestions on how to deal with it.

I struggle to not eat when I’m making meals for my kids, even if I’m not hungry. It can smell good, look good and sometimes I even need to taste it to make sure it is cooked or seasoned or the right temperature. And it can be hard for me then not to, “Oh I’ll just have a little bit.”

I know you said you chew gum cleaning up after meals, but what about when making meals for others? Do you chew gum then too? Is there a better snack you keep on hand for that? Some other trick I’m not thinking of? I enjoy a piece of gum now and then, but chewing all day would give me a headache.

Chewing gum all day would give me a headache too. I resort to the gum-after-meals because I personally have a bigger problem with cleaning up afterwards — with ending my meals — and because there’s a plausible socially acceptable excuse to do it for other reasons: an after-meal stick of sugarless gum, especially kinds that contain xylitol, reduces cavities. So, hey, good all around.

So, what to do about eating during food preparation for others. I guess it would depend on (a) why you perceive that it’s a problem and (b) why you think you do it anyway.

I can think of at least two different published systems that are effective for many and that recommend going cold-turkey on eating outside times when you have deliberately chosen to have a “meal” (where we allow that some meals are small and happen between breakfast, lunch, and dinner). One of these, quite simple, is No-S and the other, more complicated, is the Beck approach.

No-S is summed up as “no snacks, no sweets, no seconds except on days that start with S.” It emphatically does NOT define liquids as snacks, even rich and caloric ones like milkshakes or beer, because it’s a behavior modification technique rather than a calorie-counting one. Chewing gum — unless it tended to exacerbate cravings for sweets and is problematic for that reason — would be compatible with that system. But taking a bite of foods you’re cooking (except, I suppose, liquids like broths or sauces) would be incompatible with the system — yes, even in order to find out if there’s enough salt. And it would also be incompatible with the system to eat other snacks while cooking, even something like celery sticks. The whole point is to condition you not to eat when it isn’t mealtime.

The Beck approach is based on cognitive-behavioral therapy. It’s quite different from No-S, as it’s a controlled-calorie system that writes “snacks” and “sweets” into the budget, while teaching techniques to help people discontinue unhelpful behaviors. One of the pieces of advice I remember about it — a piece that I didn’t end up following — was not to rely on a crutch like gum or sugarless candy to keep your mouth busy so you wouldn’t eat things. Beck thought that in her system, it was preferable to learn to cope with cravings and temptations some other way besides putting something in your mouth.

I mention these not as diet-book recommendations (though you could certainly investigate them) but to point out that each system hangs together in its own way, and what makes sense in one doesn’t make sense in another. Ultimately, of course, everyone who needs a system, needs a personalized one.

One person can’t touch chips without eating every chip in sight, so it makes more sense (at least temporarily) to expose herself to chps with caution; another person reacts to food restriction with binging, so it makes more sense for him (at least temporarily) to give himself permission to have some of whatever he wants, until “forbidden” foods lose their power over him.

+ + +

So, let’s examine some of what you wrote. Starting with this one.

…sometimes I even need to taste it to make sure it is cooked or seasoned or the right temperature.

I challenge this assumption. When you’re ferreting out unnecessary eating, I have found it helpful to question every instance of “I need to put this in my mouth because…” Often they aren’t really “need tos.” And this one sounds like a false “need to.”
- If you’re unsure whether something is cooked through, tasting it isn’t safe. Make sure it is cooked by cutting into meat and observing the color and texture, by using a thermometer to find out if it has come up to the prescribed doneness temperature, or by paying attention to how long it has been cooking.
- Whether something is correctly seasoned or not is subjective, especially if you’re talking about salt or hot pepper. Even if it tastes the right amount of “salty” to you, it might not to others. So there’s no need to taste food for that reason. Follow the recipe for herbs and garlic, err on the side of under-salting and under-spicing food, and pass the salt and pepper at the table.
- Temperature can be tested with a thermometer or a fingertip, or you can touch a spoon to the outside of your lip.
If you are the sort of person who generally struggles with “just one taste” turning into “just one more bite” and then into a whole serving’s worth of bites — and let me say that I am one of those people too, so believe me, I get it — it will help you avoid the second, third, and nth tastes if you steer clear of that first “just one taste.” That holds true even if you are tempted to think that this “just one taste” will be different somehow because you have a “good” reason to take a bite of the food. But it will not affect you any differently just because it can be defined as “good.”

I struggle to not eat when I’m making meals for my kids, even if I’m not hungry.

I think to figure out what about your situation is especially tempting, you need to ask yourself… what’s actually wrong with eating the food you are preparing for your children? Is it because you’ve already had your own meal? Is it because you think the kid food is not good for you and you should eat something better for you? Is it the “I’m not hungry so I shouldn’t eat” thing?

Because what jumps out at me is the “when I’m making meals for my kids” part — not “for me and for my kids,” or “for my family,” but “for my kids.” Are you eating at a different time from your children? Different stuff, because of different tastes or dietary needs? Or are you doing something like packing lunches for them for the future, or making things to go in the freezer?

Is part of the problem that you’re making two sets of meals — one for yourself and one for your kids — and that gives you two opportunities to eat a meal?

In any case, you are unhappy with this situation and it is probably time to shake it up a bit — experiment with trying different things.

Would it help if you made meals for your kids at the same time that you are typically making a meal or a snack for yourself? So that you have in your pocket the ability to tell yourself: “I deserve to have a real meal on a plate. I’m not a dog who gets fed on table scraps. I’m going to have my lunch in just a moment, when the children are eating their lunch, and my lunch will be just as good or better than what these guys are having.”

Or… you could decide that you DO want to have the food you are making “for the children.” And then you could commit to it. There’s no shame in eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, with a glass of milk (or chocolate milk!) and an apple on the side. Just commit to it! Put it on a plate, say “This is my lunch,” eat it, and be done with it.

After all, if the food you are making for your children looks good and smells good and you want to eat it, why not… plan on eating it?

I think if it were me, I might try an experiment of just eating the same food I’m making for my kids for a couple of weeks (but on a plate, not standing at the stove). “After all,” I would reason, “here I am eating bits these pepperoni pizzas and grilled cheese sandwiches day after day, even when I’ve already had a lunch. Clearly I must WANT them on some level, and telling myself not to eat them isn’t working. So I’ll just eat them. Not in addition to my ‘real’ lunch, but AS my ‘real’ lunch.”

If you know I am going to have a full serving of the meal I am preparing, on a plate, like a grownup, I find it is easier to tell myself, “hey, I don’t want to eat this standing next to the stove. I want to sit down and enjoy it like a human being. ”

A sociable person might say, “I want to sit down with my kids and reconnect with them over a meal! Or with family and friends!”

A person like me in the middle of the school day might say, “I can’t wait to send the kids away for Break Time and take this grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of soup and sit down with it in front of the computer in peace and quiet and enjoy it while I check my email and then have a cup of coffee and really relax for half an hour before going back to work.”

+ + +

As a side note, I admit that feel a little at sea when trying to answer reader questions.

The context in which I have chosen to interpret my food issues is “gluttony.” I had a great deal of personal success framing them in that way. There were elements of addiction over which I had little control, but interacting with those were also elements over which I did have control. I tried to tease them apart and, where appropriate, accuse myself.

I’m loath to tell anyone else where addiction (the disability) ends and gluttony (the weakness) begins. That (besides lacking details) is why I didn’t use the word “gluttony” while writing about Katherine’s question.

But it is possible to step back and, without naming the cause as either addiction or gluttony-the-personal-weakness, identify acts that are objectively gluttonous. There is no self-shaming to be implied in this. Only “hey, here is something I do, and I am identifying it as a problem that I want to work on.” To see your activities with clear eyes.

Aquinas says that gluttony is the act of eating too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily, not counting when you “think it necessary” for yourself. One of the reasons I have found that definition less than useful is that it’s shockingly easy for me to convince myself that eating some thing “is necessary.”

(“Needing” to taste food repeatedly to make sure it’s seasoned properly is only one example. I would tell myself things like “I only had pastries for breakfast, now I ‘need’ to eat my second breakfast which will provide me with protein and necessary minerals,” or “I don’t know if there will be food where I’m going and I might get hungry, so I ‘need’ to eat a full meal before I get there” followed by “I ‘need’ to eat because it’s what everybody else is doing.” Now I’m pregnant and I still struggle with what I “need” to eat because I’m pregnant and I “need” more food and better food.)

Dissatisfied with the way that this “necessary” loophole keeps undermining my resolve, plus the vagueness of the “too”‘s in that discussion, I proposed an alternate categorization here. I found it a lot more helpful in accusing myself and in changing my behavior.

But that’s me. It’s not necessarily you, or the reader, or anyone else.

+ + +

Anyone else have some ideas for experiments to try, in order to break the habit of eating while preparing children’s meals? My suggestion — to plan on eating the apparently desirable children’s meal as one’s own meal — can’t be the only one.

[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.

I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
Sep 20, 2013

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3 comments on Temptation at home.
Comment tightening, hopefully temporarily.

Typepad is experiencing a surge in spam, and I'm having trouble keeping up with it, so I'm temporarily requiring commenter authentication instead of just a captcha.

Hoping to have a new post out in a couple of hours.

Sep 20, 2013

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No comments on Comment tightening, hopefully temporarily.
No longer bouncing, I hope.

A kind reader let me know that email to bearing@bearingblog.com had been bouncing. It's fixed now, so if you tried to email and failed recently, you can try again.

My apologies for the excess of spam commentary that's been appearing lately. The spamcatcher seems to be missing a lot and I can't quite keep up with it manually. If it persists I'll look more deeply into it.

Sep 18, 2013

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No comments on No longer bouncing, I hope.
Buggy.

Those of you who know me in real life or in a simulacrum thereof know what has been keeping me busy the last couple of days:

Head lice.

One of our friends called us to let us know that her eight-year-old turned up with head lice.

It didn't take long to locate some suspicious specks in the hair of our seven-year-old daughter, her boon companion.

And then it was off to the late-night pharmacy for some lice removal kits, the kind that come with a decent metal-toothed comb… and a serious combing-through of the kids' hair… and the inevitable discovery of a pile of egg casings (ew) and a couple live ones (EW)…

… and then we were off on the nitpicking roller coaster.

Today's post, therefore, is….

Things I have learned since our family got head lice

1.

Everybody has a story

Were you under the impression that there was a stigma about getting head lice?

At least here in the upper Midwest, my impression is that mothers brag

about it, trading tales like nightmare epidural stories.

Last night I bowed out early from a homeschooling co-op parents' meeting by explaining that I had to go home and help my husband with combing out the kids.

It seemed like everyone had a "been there, done that" story.

"Oh, I'm so sorry.

You have mostly boys?

Well, when WE got it, I had four little girls with waist-length curly hair."

"MY daughter got it during her first year of COLLEGE."

"I spent an entire summer combing out children's hair while they played with my iPad."

Similarly, everyone has something to recommend.

"Do they have a LouseBuster where you live?"

"Have you tried going to LadiBugs over in Hopkins?

They sell this great peppermint spray that keeps the bugs from coming back.

All natural."

"Four words:

ORGANIC RAW COCONUT OIL."

"I have to send you the link for the Cetaphil method!"

"Did you try the shower cap thing?"

I am almost embarrassed to admit that in a flurry of panic I had just run to the drugstore and bought three packages of the only thing I could find, namely, the dreaded "poison shampoo."

2.

More new uses for homeschooling science supplies

I am pleased to discover, at least, that the handheld microscopes with push-button LED lighting (40-70x magnification) have gotten more use this week than I expected them to get all year.

They join my mini portable analytical electronic centigram scale in the ranks of Items I Bought For Science-Related Learning That Have Been Repurposed For Unexpected Household Duty.

(The scale got borrowed first to measure out grams of laxative for a child who needed to be weaned slowly off it after a bout of chronic constipation.

Later it was borrowed to weigh coffee grounds, which is what happens when your husband used to work as a chemical engineer for a Giant Company That Sells Coffee Among Other Things and can't bear the thought of measuring coffee in "scoops" when he once upon a time did it in milligrams.)

(I promise you we cleaned the scale well in between.)

3.

Homeschooling guilt ensues inevitably

Probably if we were in school we'd be thinking "If only the kids were homeschooled, they wouldn't get lice."

As it is, not being able to think something like that, we think "If only I was a better homeschooler, I'd have organized this into an entomology unit study and we'd be identifying the differences between the second and third instar instead of growling 'GET OUT OF MY LIGHT' at curious siblings and then just smashing the little bastards with my thumb as fast as I can find them."

Um, I mean smashing the instars, not the siblings.

That was

clear, wasn't it?

4.

A fearful new power.

I made a discovery last night while combing out my three-year-old for the first time just to check.

You know the "cradle cap" type dandruff?

The persistent scaly stuff that shows up on newborns and sometimes lasts past toddlerhood?

The stuff that ruins the finish on the smooth and downy newborn scalp, so that

new mothers bemoan and trade tips about getting it off with warm water or olive oil or breastmilk, and discuss whether gently scratching with a fingernail or rubbing with a washcloth is better?

The cradle cap flaky skin scales that can turn the gentlest mother into a primal picker and scraper, like an obsessive-compulsive gorilla mother?

Um.

THE NIT COMB TAKES IT RIGHT OUT.

Come January when my new baby is born I am afraid I will be unstoppable.

5.

Only physical removal is foolproof

You know, the chemicals can speed it up, but when you get right down to it the only thing you can be sure of is that if you comb out a louse, that louse isn't in the hair anymore, and if you comb out an egg, that louse will not hatch on your head.

Combing, combing, combing.

6.

The dryer is your friend.

Your friend that runs all the time.

It's fairly reassuring, given the alarming stories about head lice, to read over the CDC website and see what they have to say about it.

Nits in the hair don't necessarily mean you have an active infestation.

Schools shouldn't have a no-nit policy.

With the possible exception of bedmates, you shouldn't chemically treat household members who aren't infested.

They can't live very long off a human scalp, and there are lots of surfaces they can't cling to at all.

So while some people, upon getting the bad news, are probably ready to fumigate and scrub down their entire house, that would really be overkill.

Still, I was amused by this pair of statements from the website:

Machine wash and dry clothing, bed linens, and other items that an infested person wore or used during the 2 days before treatment using the hot water (130°F) laundry cycle and the high heat drying cycle. … Vacuum the floor and furniture, particularly where the infested person sat or lay.

and

However, spending much time and money on housecleaning activities is not necessary.

Um.

Can we say "mutually exclusive?"

At least when you have three infested children who like to roll on the floor and build forts out of bedding.

I cannot count how many loads of bedding and towels I passed through the dryer in the last few days.

It was a lot.

Especially after my infested daughter was caught building a fort out of the clean sheets.

And in the end I wound up just confiscating all the extra cushions and pillows, not so much because I believed that the act of sealing them up in a

bag for two weeks would kill lice, but just because there would be so many fewer of them to keep track of.

7. You know what else is in my kids' hair in small quantities, and is tough to get out with a nit comb?

Glitter.

8. At least this didn't happen during first trimester

Can I get an "Amen?"

+ + +

I'll probably think of more before too long, but now it's time to go lie down.

Oof, what a day.

Posted with Blogsy

Sep 13, 2013

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9 comments on Buggy.
Interpreting the Beatitudes: on not reinventing the wheel.

A few days ago the Office of Readings contained an excerpt from Sermon 95 of St. Leo the Great, “Homily on the Beatitudes, St. Matthew 5:1-9.” I hadn’t been familiar with that particular Homily and the excerpt piqued my interest, so I searched out the entirety — it really isn’t very long — and read the whole thing.

There must be countless homilies and other reflections on the Beatitudes out there for the picking, I thought as I read it over. They are much-examined, in part, because they offer a blueprint for holiness: if we can only (with God’s help) follow the directions faithfully, become the kind of people that The Lord calls “blessed,” then we cannot go wrong. Simple! But the other reason the Beatitudes are much-examined is that they are also kind of cryptic, at least to moderns reading them in translation. Poor in spirit? They that mourn? The makers of what sort of peace? What do those words mean? What is going on here? Exactly who are these people called blessed, and how can we become like them?

I can’t be the only one who has listened to the Beatitudes proclaimed from the pulpit, or read them and read again, and considered what I think they might mean more precisely. As someone who lives far from poverty, who has little to mourn, handicapped in peace-making and mercy, who rarely feels pure-hearted or righteous… I tend to look for loopholes.

But you know, I am always trying to read between the lines every time I read it, or most any Scripture passage. I figure that I am pretty smart. I can figure something about it out, maybe not everything, but something.

And then sometimes I come across something like this — some piece of explication and interpretation that has been around for centuries. And it is perfectly straightforward. And I wonder: what the hell am I doing expending so much brainpower trying to come up with my own spin? Why am I reinventing the wheel?

(Not that it is a pointless exercise to consider what one can find on one’s own in the depths of the Gospels… but one should remember that we need not leave it at that. Wiser people than I have written down things worth reading, against which I could measure and evaluate my own thoughts. If nothing else they might provide a counterbalance, originating as they do outside myself.)

What does St. Leo say to illuminate the blueprints for holiness? What are these people like, that the Lord calls blessed?

“Poor in spirit,” he explains, means the humble: the submissive, those who do not exhibit loftiness of mind and (in the case of the rich) those who use the abundance they have “not for the increasing of … pride” but “on works of kindness.”

It would perhaps be doubtful what poor He was speaking of, if in saying blessed are the poor He had added nothing which would explain the sort of poor: and then that poverty by itself would appear sufficient to win the kingdom of heaven which many suffer from hard and heavy necessity.

But when He says blessed are the poor in spirit, He shows that the kingdom of heaven must be assigned to those who are recommended by the humility of their spirits rather than by the smallness of their means. Yet it cannot be doubted that this possession of humility is more easily acquired by the poor than the rich: for submissiveness is the companion of those that want, while loftiness of mind dwells with riches.

Notwithstanding, even in many of the rich is found that spirit which uses its abundance not for the increasing of its pride but on works of kindness, and counts that for the greatest gain which it expends in the relief of others’ hardships. It is given to every kind and rank of men to share in this virtue, because men may be equal in will, though unequal in fortune: and it does not matter how different they are in earthly means, who are found equal in spiritual possessions.

“Those that mourn” means, says St. Leo, specifically those who mourn sin and iniquity:

This mourning, beloved, to which eternal comforting is promised, is not the same as the affliction of this world: nor do those laments which are poured out in the sorrowings of the whole human race make any one blessed. The reason for holy groanings, the cause of blessed tears, is very different. Religious grief mourns sin either that of others’ or one’s own: nor does it mourn for that which is wrought by God’s justice, but it laments over that which is committed by man’s iniquity, where he that does wrong is more to be deplored than he who suffers it, because the unjust man’s wrongdoing plunges him into punishment, but the just man’s endurance leads him on to glory.

The “earth” promised to the “meek” — the gentle, the humble, the modest, those who are “prepared to endure all injuries” — that is, all those who practice self-mastery over their passions — is defined as the heavenly transformation and perfection of their own bodies, when the passions of the body will no longer struggle against the will of the soul in union with the will of God.

To the meek and gentle, to the humble and modest, and to those who are prepared to endure all injuries, the earth is promised for their possession. And this is not to be reckoned a small or cheap inheritance, as if it were distinct from our heavenly dwelling, since it is no other than these who are understood to enter the kingdom of heaven. The earth, then, which is promised to the meek, and is to be given to the gentle in possession, is the flesh of the saints, which in reward for their humility will be changed in a happy resurrection, and clothed with the glory of immortality, in nothing now to act contrary to the spirit, and to be in complete unity and agreement with the will of the soul.

For then the outer man will be the peaceful and unblemished possession of the inner man: then the mind, engrossed in beholding God, will be hampered by no obstacles of human weakness nor will it any more have to be said “The body which is corrupted, weighs upon the soul, and its earthly house presses down the sense which thinks many things” (Wisdom 9:15)…

Blessed are they who “hunger and thirst after righteousness,” i.e., those who crave “to be admitted to all the deepest mysteries” and to know God. I have always read this as a desire for justice, but St. Leo seems to think that it includes a desire for the grasping of Truth. I suppose the two are pretty closely linked!

It is nothing bodily, nothing earthly, that this hunger, this thirst seeks for: but it desires to be satiated with the good food of righteousness, and wants to be admitted to all the deepest mysteries, and be filled with the Lord Himself. … spurning all things temporal, it is seized with the utmost eagerness for eating and drinking righteousness, and grasps the truth of that first commandment which says: “You shall love the Lord your God out of all your heart, and out of all your mind, and out of all your strength” : since to love God is nothing else but to love righteousness.

Blessed are the merciful, recast here as “those who do good“:

The faith of those who do good is free from anxiety: you shall have all your desires, and shall obtain without end what you love.

Blessed are the pure of heart, which St. Leo says means those who strive after the virtues implicit in the other beatitudes, and not after their opposites:

What, then, is it to have the heart pure, but to strive after those virtues which are mentioned above? And how great the blessedness of seeing God, what mind can conceive, what tongue declare? And yet this shall ensue when man’s nature is transformed, so that no longer in a mirror, nor in a riddle, but face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12) it sees the very Godhead as He is (1 John 3:2), which no man could see ; and through the unspeakable joy of eternal contemplation obtains that which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of man.

Rightly is this blessedness promised to purity of heart. For the brightness of the true light will not be able to be seen by the unclean sight: and that which will be happiness to minds that are bright and clean, will be a punishment to those that are stained. Therefore, let the mists of earth’s vanities be shunned, and your inward eyes purged from all the filth of wickedness, that the sight may be free to feed on this great manifestation of God.

The “blessed peace-makers” must mean not those who seek just any sort of peace and harmonious coexistence. It can refer only to those who in their peace are in accord with God in the unity of the Spirit and in alignment with the universal law of good:

This blessedness, beloved, belongs not to any and every kind of agreement and harmony, but to that of which the Apostle speaks: have peace towards God ; and of which the Prophet David speaks: Much peace have they that love Your law, and they have no cause of offenses. This peace even the closest ties of friendship and the exactest likeness of mind do not really gain, if they do not agree with God’s will.

Similarity of bad desires, leagues in crimes, associations of vice, cannot merit this peace. The love of the world does not consort with the love of God, nor does he enter the alliance of the sons of God who will not separate himself from the children of this generation. Whereas they who are in mind always with God, giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace Ephesians 4:3, never dissent from the eternal law, uttering that prayer of faith, “Your will be done as in heaven so on earth” (Matthew 6:10). These are the peacemakers…

Besides these clarifications of terms, St. Leo links each beatitude together and implies that having attained one, a person approaches another, and so on.

I am sensing a general theme here in St. Leo’s concept of the Beatitudes, which could be summed up in a single sound bite:

“You will receive exactly that which you seek.”

Posted with Blogsy

Sep 12, 2013

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No comments on Interpreting the Beatitudes: on not reinventing the wheel.
It’s been a while since I had a homemaking post: Laundry.

Dorian put up a lazy-laundry-system post in her 7 Quick Takes on Friday, managing (as you can see by the ellipses in the excerpt I pulled below) to stretch it out into several separate takes, since she is a lazy cheater and we can all see through her façade "organized, brilliant web whiz" façade.

So, I read Harvard Homemaker’s post about laundry and was pleasantly surprised to learn that not only do I already understand laundry, but I also do something that was not on the list. I thought “hey, I should write about that. Need something to blog about.”

Then I thought “well, hey, what should I call this tip. It could be ‘Lazy Mom’s Guide to Laundry with Kids.’”

…Anyway: here’s my exciting tip that has no picture because my laundry room is cramped and non-photogenic.

I have a set of shelves in the laundry room and a basket for each family member, along with one for linens. I let the kids make labels for their baskets to add an element of “fun” that lasted for 47 seconds. (Remember, kids: Mom believes that work IS fun!)

When I take a load of laundry out of the dryer, I put each item into the appropriate person’s basket. I do not fold the items.

Once a day, each child is supposed to put away his/her clothes from said basket and return the empty basket to the shelf.

…“How do I handle folding the kids’ clothes?”

Gentle Reader: I do not care.

Since I went to the trouble of describing my similar system in her comments, and I am not posting much, I decided to make it into a blog post. Whee!

I have a similar system, only I do it weekly instead of daily.

We wash and dry baskets as they fill up, one or two a day, so they don’t get too stinky. and we let the clean unsorted laundry pile up in baskets in the laundry room, which is also the kids’ bathroom.

Here's a picture of my unsorted clean laundry, because I'm unafraid to show you the gritty reality of life. You don't get to see the bathroom part, because my nine-year-old ran in to use it while I was framing the photo.

Then on Wednesday afternoons while the 3yo is having a bath and I need to be in there supervising anyway, I sort all the laundry into individual baskets.

Not individual people's baskets, but individual closets' baskets.

My two oldest boys share a room, and I don't wish to devote brain cells to remembering which one of them has black socks and which one of them has white socks, or which one of them has striped underwear and which one of them has solid underwear, or whether we have already handed down this tee shirt from the 13-y-o to the 9-y-o, so all their things get jumbled together in their baskets.

And my daughter and my 3-y-o share a closet in the downstairs hall (where I can supervise them when it is time to put clothes away), so I don't see much point in separating their clothes from each other. She can tell her clothes apart from her brother's perfectly well. So those two kids' clothes get jumbled together in their baskets.

Downstairs (cough) "linens" – tablecloths, napkins, dishcloths, aprons, cleaning rags, etc. — go in another basket. If I finish sorting before the 3yo is done with his bath, I will fold and separate these to make putting them away easier. My stuff goes in my basket and my husband's stuff goes in his basket. Since the upstairs linen closet is right there and nobody else can fold a fitted sheet without making me want to scream at them, I put those things away as I go.

Theoretically the kids are supposed to put their clothes and the downstairs linens away on Thursday mornings, before our co-schooling people show up, and they do unless I forget to tell them to.

So, not too different from Dorian's system, but lower-frequency.

It isn’t totally bump free, but it works well enough, especially since nobody in the entire house gives a flying $%(*# about wrinkles. Thank God I married another engineer.

Sep 9, 2013

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2 comments on It’s been a while since I had a homemaking post: Laundry.
Amy Welborn wrote two posts this week that, together with an earlier one, form a tidy little share-able package about being tired of institutional school and why.

The earlier post is here: So, About That School Family

My point was that I have been doing the – (deep breath) – school supplies - does your uniform fit? – your teacher wants what? we just bought all the school supplies – book covers? Why do we have to do bookcovers? - welcome to our SCHOOL FAMILY – parent/teacher meeting – beginning of the year orientation – parent/teacher conferences – giftwrap sales – please return these papers signed on Tuesdays – please return THESE papers signed on Mondays – I have to find an article for music class – but I get extra credit if you go to the PTO meeting! – make an adobe model out of sugar cubes – is your field trip shirt the green one or the blue one? – yes, I signed your planner – wait,don’t throw that away, we need the box tops – SCHOOL FAMILY – you need a check for what? – do you have hot lunch today or not? – candygrams – wait, is it a jeans day today – boosterthon? Try not to run too many laps, okay? - please send cupcakes/cookies/goldfish but NO PEANUTS – POSTERBOARD – SCHOOL FAMILY.

– thing for twenty-five (25) years.

The first post from this week is here: An Intuition and an Encounter

No one makes money when a school teaches out of ten-year old textbooks using methods that are either common sense, instinctive, or learned twenty years ago. Seriously. No one makes money that way. The only way people make money is when everything is upended and everyone has to start over. Common Core isn’t about kids. It’s about textbook companies making bank from new editions that must be purchased. It’s about entities that make money from teacher training. It’s about financial incentives given to districts and teachers. It’s about testing companies making money from testing. It’s about consultants raking in bucks from helpfully helping everyone out.

We can all cry “common standards! national standards! The rest of the world does it! Must be good! “…and some of us are crying that. And it seems like deep common sense to say yes to that. Except when it doesn’t.

Do a bit of research. Have some conversations. Are the French universally ecstatic with their education system? The Japanese? Germans? Are they?

The followup post to that is here: A School that Knows Its Place

I thought hard about what it really is that I resent about institutional schooling. I realized (and this goes back to the “school family” theme) that my problem is in the all-encompassing presumptions of education (and I’m talking both public and private here.) The insistence and assumption that the school be the center of a child – and by extension, the family’s life, and that no one has anything better to do than attend to the business that the school sets out for us, even after we leave. The conviction that education = schooling. The territorial expansion beyond teaching content and skills. The determination to teach everyone everything, fix everyone and build awesome diverse communities.

I mean, I just want to say, Educational System? Yeah, you. BACK OFF.

(Because, as St. Augustine several hundred years ago - it doesn’t work.)

All of these posts are worth clicking through and reading the whole thing. These excerpts aren't meant to encapsulate them, but to encourage ou to want more.

+ + +

A few weeks ago this enormous homeschooling infographic was making the rounds.

(Definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it. I'm not going to embed because I only want to draw attention to part of it right now.)

One of the sections was titled "Main Reason for Homeschooling." The breakdown went like this:
Most important reasons parents say they homeschool their kids (students, ages 5-17, 2007):

36 %: To provide religious or moral instruction

21 % : Concern about the environment of other schools: safety, drugs, and negative peer pressure

17 %: Dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools

14 %: Unique Family Situation such as time, finances, travel, and distances

7 %: Nontraditional approach to child's education

4 %: Child has other special needs

2%: Child has a physical or mental health problem
I'm not surprised that 36 percent of homeschoolers, the largest portion, cite "religious and moral instruction" as the main reason they homeschool.

I suspect the proportion would be even broader and more inclusive if it had employed terms that don't have a traditional-religious flavor, like "pass on your family's philosophy and values and ethics." Because when you get right down to it, even if you are the sort of person who doesn't go in for organized religion and doesn't much like the term "morality" — and there are plenty of homeschoolers like that — passing on our values to our children and raising them in accordance with our values is essentially the central act of raising children.

So it's not too surprising that it's the "most important reason" that's given to say why you have chosen, well, whatever educational path anyone chose, if there was a choice.

+ + +

But it isn't the answer I would pick for main reason I homeschool specifically. There's a perfectly good elementary school at my parish that provides excellent religious and moral instruction, and nothing would stop me from providing more outside school hours. There are several high-quality high schools, too.

I think I fall more in that seven percent who say "nontraditional approach."

Because no matter how wonderful the religious and moral education at a given Catholic school, they aren't going to let my thirteen-year-old learn alongside my seven-year-old and my nine-year-old and their preschool siblings.

Keeping siblings together is pretty nontraditional.

So is deliberately putting your kids in a situation where the teacher, rather than being an expert, is learning the same material alongside them. I'm an expert in some of the stuff I teach, of course, so they do get that. But not in everything. There's an entirely different kind of learning environment when the teacher, who's never used real watercolors or mixed paint in her life, reads the how-to from a book and says… well… let's all try it together and see how it turns out. Or when a question comes up in Latin translation and the teacher has to say, "I don't know. Let's look it up in the Henle grammar. Or let's Google it."

(This teacher has to say that a lot.)

Learning along with the teacher is fun, but pretty nontraditional.

And those are my things. Those are my reasons.

Amy Welborn's distaste with the rat-race aspect of schooling — which I suppose falls more under "dissatisfaction with academic instruction?" – or is it more "nontraditional" because she desires something that's… older than the modern trend of centralized, controlling schooling that reaches into the family structure? —

well, I share that, too. She articulated what I hope to avoid much better than I do.

I always have the image of the cars coming to pick up children, stretching into the distance, winding around corners, clogging up the neighborhood where the neighborhood children used to walk home from school, but now they don't.

I am not going to sit in the pick-up lane if I can help it.
Sep 7, 2013

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7 comments on
Fasting for peace. (UPDATED)
Trying to make up a little for my lack of posting last week. I'll be busy this weekend gearing up for the start of co-schooling, which we staggered three weeks later than the start of the home-schooling, so I don't think I'll post a lot.

+ + +

I realize there's a lot of geopolitics going on that would be worth commenting on, but I haven't the energy. My focus is highly family-centered right now. But I'll just toss this one off, and maybe because it is both intensely global and intensely local:

You know that Pope Francis declared a global day of fasting and prayer and penance for
- world peace,
- particularly in the Middle East,
- particularly in Syria,
no?

On notice so short that North American pastors didn't even have a chance to mention it from a Sunday pulpit?

Craaaaaaazy.

Anyway, since it doesn't appear to be a binding and obligatory-type fast, one can pretty much plan to do whatever seems most appropriate to respond to this call.

(UPDATED: Here is a link to the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' guidelines confirming this. Information on Fasting)

I think the children (all under 14) and I (pregnant) will treat it as we would a Lenten Friday; I'll go to Mass and Confession as I do on First Saturdays anyway, but with an extra intention; Mark will plan a fast of his own; and all of us will take the time for some family prayer in the afternoon.

Bearing in mind that

(deep breath)

—–this is NOT a competition,

—–nor even a canonical duty, but a rather suddenly-thrust-upon-us exhortation and encouragement,

—–nor even just for Catholics and people who do things the Catholic way, but for everyone to do in their own individual ways–

I renew the invitation to the whole Church to live this day intensely, and even now I express gratitude to the other Christian brethren, to the brethren of other religions and to the men and women of good will who desire to join in this initiative, in places and ways of their own—

are you responding to this call? How?
Sep 6, 2013

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3 comments on Fasting for peace. (UPDATED)
Baby XY.

Looks like it'll be boy, boy, girl, boy… boy.

I spent my first three pregnancies avoiding unnecessary interventions, including routine ultrasounds, and feeling fine about it.

But I have to say… of all the expensive, usually-unnecessary interventions there are in the world of prenatal self-care, the 20-week scan — now that I judge it necessary — is kind of fun.

The young sir is doing fine, and so am I, and so is my placenta and all that stuff.

Cool trivia: Estimated weight is 454 grams.

Sep 5, 2013

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3 comments on Baby XY.
Full-time.

Time for a blurry cell-phone selfie in the mirror in my closet:

That's not-quite twenty weeks. I feel bigger than I look, I think.

+ + +

The other day, in the YMCA locker room, was the first time that someone said to me with a smile, "So is this your first pregnancy?"

I love the shock value of "No, it's my fifth." The wide eyes and the Wow. I am pretty sure this makes me a bad person.

+ + +

I was pregnant with just number four the first time someone else — in the same locker room — followed that question with a brief lecture on overpopulation destroying the planet.

I said, "I think we should welcome and accept children from all kinds of familes, don't you?"

+ + +

I have to tell you, I'm absolutely tickled to be pregnant with my fifth child. Whether there would likely be a number five was a much-discussed subject around here.

I really didn't know what kinds of feelings to expect — I have experienced each pregnancy with more ambivalence than you might think, considering that none were surprises. There's just so much going on physically, and so much preparation to make, and the ever-looming Day of No Choice that comes some estimated day in the future, and the hopes for a good outcome and the worries about all the bad things that might happen.

So I'm pleasantly surprised to find myself simply happy about this new child, and about the prospects of being mother-of-five, which just has a very cool ring to it, don't you think? I feel like I'm earning a shiny new badge.

+ + +

At the same time there's been a sort of odd stop-in-my-tracks realization that, indeed, the way this story is turning out is that I am spending my entire, er, career or active life or whatever you want to call it, almost exclusively mothering. I mean, I kind of knew that this was what was going to happen, but it sort of hit me in the last few months.

Don't ask me why this is hitting me now and not the last time I was pregnant. I was thirty-five years old when I had my fourth baby, and what with the general intention to keep homeschooling as long as it is working out, I was already quite clearly not expected to be off the hook for full-time involvement until my mid-fifties. I'll be thirty-nine when I have number five, which brings me into later-mid-fifties, not that big of a difference really.

(Perhaps it feels big because I lost my own mom when she was fifty-four; in that sense there was and is an infinite distance between mid- and late fifties.)

I haven't, either, chosen to keep active in my field even part-time on the side — I explored it for a while, and decided I didn't want the added stress; and I haven't, either, thrown my extra energy into working for any cause I care about. The volunteer work I do is local, the kinds of things that parents do to help keep their kids' Scout troops and homeschooling co-ops going from year to year.

I have a lot of energy, a decent amount of talent for setting up systems and organizing stuff (not people, just stuff); but apparently, I have a limited supply of giving-a-shit.

Or maybe you could call it a limited supply of caring, and I can't afford to spend it much except on the people I have relationships with.

The people who need me, personally, to give a shit about them, and no one else can replace me.

This is not everybody's problem. I have friends I admire who raise several young children and are also pillars of a community, doing good and useful and vital work. I am happy for them and grateful for their example (and often beneficiaries of their efforts).

Caring for and about my family, even though there's nothing especially needy about my family, requires my full-time effort. It seems this will last about as long as I can stand to have a full-time anything.

+ + +

That's the thing I wake up surprised about, almost every day: That it's an endlessly fascinating challenge, that I always have something to think hard about, that I go to bed satisfied almost every night . I am happy every morning when I step out onto the porch with my coffee and watch the school buses rumble by, or if I happen to glance further down to the end of the block, where the busy east-west road crosses, and can catch a glimpse of the morning rush hour line-up to get onto the highway.

My job takes me nowhere that I am not curious to explore. And I've signed up for another adventure, is what it feels like. And I haven't had time to pack yet, but I will.

Aug 29, 2013

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6 comments on Full-time.