Odds and ends: old and new

1. Last fall I noticed that my ten-year anniversary as a blogger was coming up (it was in December). I was going to try and think of some cool thing to do with that, but then I forgot about it in the holiday rush and didn't remember until about a month ago.

Ten years. I was surprised, it doesn't seem like it's been that long--although when I go back and read some of those early posts, it seems like it's been centuries. Was I ever that naive? (For the record, I had two blogs before this one, which is why *cough* it's Aunt BeaN's Third Blog, right?) I've learned a few things about blogging over the years, and one of them is that when I start writing posts that sound like lectures, it means that I've learned something on an intellectual level but I'm avoiding learning it on a deeper level by thinking I should pass the information on to you. I think it comes with being a natural teacher (gifts again). As I'm learning something, I automatically start breaking it down for you guys: how would I teach this? But I haven't really learned it myself yet.

I've been learning things by the avalanche recently. Some of them I've passed on to you (see the Lent posts), but some of them I'm still ruminating on. I can't possibly tell you about radical self-acceptance until I get a little further along the path myself. It's a topic I first read about years ago when I ran across Tara Brach's book Radical Acceptance and more recently in Jim Palmer's stuff, but I'm not even close to really being there yet. Maybe I will feel more competent to pass along some thoughts soon, but in the meantime, check out Tara's blog or Jim's blog if it's a topic that interests you. Maybe you will be able to teach me.

2. Word geek moment: in the previous paragraph, is it "further" along the path or "farther" along the path? So I googled, and reinforced what I already knew--farther is for literal distances (six miles or six feet), further is for figurative distance. But the reason I was doubting is because "further along the path" is clearly figurative distance, but it doesn't sound right. Ah, the joys of being a word geek.

3. I somehow managed to completely wear myself out over the past couple of months. It snuck up on me. I've been in bed by 10:30 for two out of the past three nights with the light out by 11. You know what a night-owl I am, that is practically unheard of for me. Then this morning, I got up with MadMax at 7 so we could take his car in to be worked on. When I got back, I loaded up the dishwasher and started it, got a few other minor tasks done, and went back to bed. I slept for another hour and a half. Whaaat? Maybe I'm getting sick. At the moment, I'm thinking about going back and taking another nap. Why am I so exhausted?

4. Do you remember when I read and reviewed Gone Girl last year? For some reason I started reading reviews of it on Goodreads the other day, and was struck by how gleefully cruel they were. The ending of the book is sort of a slap in the face to anyone who would expect not even a happy ending, but any kind of resolution at all. That in itself is fine, although I didn't like it. Flynn made an artistic choice as to how she wanted to end her novel and it's entirely up to her. But what struck me was all these readers who were happily claiming that they loved the ending and it was just like real life, they knew it would end like that, etc etc. There are dozens of them. I get that you could appreciate the ending, or think it was appropriate to the amoral pose of the book, but love it? It would take a complete and utter cynic, someone who has completely given up on human kindness, to love that ending.

It depressed me. Are we so despairing these days? Have we completely lost hope that good ever wins, or even just that karma works? that someone who is awful will eventually be consumed by their awfulness? Are nice people, people who treat others with respect and courtesy and expect others to do the same, just patsies? I don't believe it, and furthermore, I don't think I'm dumb and naive to retain some faith in human kindness. So there.

5. I've been thinking about one of my favorite things I learned in grad school. In environmental theory, we learned that in Western culture, most of us see the natural world as a backdrop to human actions. Almost like a painted scene in a stage play. There's the background, and then there's the "important" human stuff that takes place in front of it. It's a fun thing to play around with, sort of like dissolving an invisible curtain between yourself and the natural world. Go for a walk or sit outside and see if you can bring the environment to life around you, so it's not just a backdrop but your habitat. There are small noises, bugs and birds and the way the grass is slowly turning green, and you can feel yourself as part of it, not separate. (Actually, if you're just about anywhere else but here, the grass has probably been green for some time now.)(Remember #1 above where I lecture you about things that I haven't fully learned myself? This would be one of them.)

6. Lent report. I gave up sweets for Lent this year, and overall it was easy. The only time I had trouble with it was when I was in a social situation where everyone else was having dessert. (and the last two days. I craved sweets those last two days.) But the good thing is that--unlike other situations-- if you say you gave up desserts for Lent, no one pushes you to have any, which was nice. Overall it went so well that I've decided I should try to limit my sweet intake all the time. I've never been one to sit down and eat an entire cake at one time, but if there are certain sweet things in the house, I'll have a couple of bites after lunch, and then a couple more bites an hour later, and then snitch a bit more while I'm fixing dinner, and so on until it's all gone. It adds up. So I'm experimenting with this. So far it's going well.

7. Time for a new look around here. I'll probably do it this weekend, just thought I should warn you. And also I need to go back and label a bunch of posts, so apologies in advance. I know for those of you who use an RSS feed, it makes them pop back up in your feed. I'll try to do it over the weekend when pageviews are down.

And that's all for me. Maybe I will go take another nap.

Lent: WWJD? part two

OK, so in the last post we established that I find Jesus to be a difficult role model. He wasn't a parent, he wasn't a spouse. He wasn't female. He was an itinerant rabbi. He voluntarily died for his beliefs. He's a pretty tough exemplar.

It's occurring to me that I'm perhaps I'm being a bit too literal here. Which is odd, because the people who are literalists about the Bible don't seem to have a problem with this. I'm definitely not a literalist when it comes to reading the Bible, but I find it difficult to use Jesus as my moral guide because I just fall so far short of his example--maybe I take him too literally?? I can't live the way he lived.

What am I missing here?

Of course there's grace and forgiveness and God loves me no matter how far I fall short, etc etc. I may not always be good at really truly believing that, but I get it intellectually. It's pretty much the cornerstone of Christianity. I don't think that's the problem.

The problem is something in the way I think about Jesus. When I compare myself to him, all I feel is guilt for how little I do, how selfish I am, how often I want to blow off what's right and just do what I want. I'm not inspired by Jesus. Thinking about him depresses me. (probably this also goes back to what I described in last year's Maundy Thursday post.) So I tend not to think about him.

If you're still reading, thank you. This is not my finest hour.

So. Enter Jim Palmer's third book, Being Jesus in Nashville. You may remember that I've briefly talked about reading his first two, Divine Nobodies and Wide Open Spaces. Honestly, I don't always agree with him, and I find myself arguing with him or rolling my eyes at him almost as often as I am touched and inspired. But I'm starting to realize that's my favorite kind of book.

As a former Evangelical pastor, he's wrestling with many of the same questions I am as a preacher's kid and former Evangelical. Our perspectives are different because Palmer came to Christianity in his late teens after a non-religious childhood and left it in his thirties (I'm not sure I have those ages exactly right, but that's the gist of his story), whereas I was raised as an Evangelical and started leaving it about the time I turned 20. I haven't regularly attended an Evangelical church since I was in my early 20s. So sometimes Palmer will spend an entire chapter going on and on about something that is obvious to me, and I'm sure my musings about my childhood faith would seem equally irrelevant to him. But more often than not, he has insights that are mind bending, or perspectives to share that really, deeply help.

OK, so back to WWJD. The premise of Palmer's third book is that he spent a year trying to recreate In His Steps (the original WWJD book) --hence the title, Being Jesus in Nashville. The first few chapters were of the duh, obvious! type, but by the time he is standing next to a dying dear friend's hospital bed and trying to figure out how he can (like Jesus) heal him, I was hooked. I've done that--not with a dying friend, but I've tried to heal someone. Shouldn't we be able to? Didn't Jesus do it all the time? And like Palmer, I was unsuccessful. How do we deal with this?

Palmer has a pretty simple solution. He says that Jesus was completely and utterly dedicated to living his life according to his gifts and his destiny (except Palmer words it better than that). Jesus was fully himself. So rather than trying to emulate Jesus's actions, we emulate Jesus by following our own path, as Jesus followed his. We can discover our own gifts, and use them to the fullest extent (hence the previous post about understanding our gifts). "I wanted to 'be Jesus,'" Palmer says, "but I noticed that all Jesus ever did was simply be himself. Jesus was never trying to emulate someone else....[he] was simply present to the world."

Palmer also points out that although we tend to think that being "like Jesus" means always putting others' needs first and never having any needs of our own, that's not how Jesus acted. His death was the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, but in his daily life, he didn't efface himself. If he needed time alone, he went off by himself. If He was angry, he said he was (or strode into the temple and started turning over tables). He surrounded himself with people who loved him. He defended the women who performed lavish acts of devotion to him (washing his feet, anointing him with oil, listening at his feet)--he didn't blow them off and say he didn't need anything from them.

So there you go. After two and a half posts worth of setup, it took two paragraphs to type that out, but I can't tell you what a game-changer that is for me. It has fundamentally changed something in my head. I'm still working out the implications (and also I'm still reading the book). There may be more to come on this topic, but that's it for now. Thank you, Jim Palmer.

Happy Easter, or Oester, or Happy Passover-- or whatever version of Spring holiday you celebrate.

Lent: WWJD? part one

I cringe to use that overworked four-letter cliché in the title of this post, because which of us doesn't cringe when we see it? But that's the topic today, so there it is.

The idea of emulating Jesus has been around since Jesus, of course, but this particular formulation of it started with Charles Sheldon's 1896 book In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? Even though it was published well over a century ago, it's still in print. It's one of the best-selling books of all time. (I confess I tried to read it years ago and I never got past the first couple of chapters.) It's a novel about a midwestern congregation that undertook to ask the question "What would Jesus do?" before they took any action.

But the question isn't easy to answer. First of all, because Jesus lived two thousand years ago. Would he carry a cell phone if he lived now? Would he have a Facebook page? Would he be a Luddite--spurning technology? Would he prefer CNN or MSNBC? or would he not want to know what was going on in the larger world so he could concentrate on the individuals around him?

The questions seem ridiculous. Probably most of us want to think that Jesus would be a simple man, eschewing the trappings of modern life, because Jesus exists firmly in our heads as a monk-like icon from a simpler time. But it's entirely possible that he was just as much a man of his times as anyone --although with a unique perspective on pretty much everything, as he expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. After all, we're talking about a man who befriended sinners, prostitutes, and tax-collectors (more or less the loan sharks of their time).

And then there's the fact that Jesus was an itinerant rabbi (teacher). He wasn't married, he wasn't raising children, and probably he would have been a little bit mystified by our current notion of what it means to hold a steady job with good benefits (as would any person from that era). He didn't have a savings account, he didn't own a home, and given the Torah's teachings against usury (charging interest), he probably would have been opposed to having a mortgage. He did few of the things that most of us would consider to be a mandatory part of a responsible adult life.

Interesting aside: when James Joyce was looking around for a role model for Leopold Bloom, the quintessential Everyman who is the central character of Ulysses, he rejected Jesus because Jesus never had to live with a woman. He went with Odysseus instead. (I know. Go figure. because Odysseus, mighty warrior and veteran of years-long absences from home, wasn't exactly your John Doe, either.)

So the question of "What would Jesus do?" is considerably more complex than the WWJD bracelet-wearers would have you believe. This came up in our small group a couple of months ago. Jesus's most direct life-choice instructions (Sell all you have and give it to the poor; "go, therefore and make disciples of all nations") imply leaving home for a Jesus-like itinerant life. They are ignored by all but a tiny minority of ultra-passionate Christians whom the rest of us secretly think are taking things just a little bit too far.

This whole issue is something that has vexed me for a long time. And honestly, my response for the most part has been to ignore it because I couldn't figure out how to resolve it. Like most people, I just try to figure out the best I can how to live a moral life. Although I'd like to be able to sugar-coat this a bit, to be entirely honest, my response to WWJD, I'm sad to say, has frequently been, what difference does it make? He was never confronted with most of the problems I face.

I can get behind "Love one another" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I can learn from Jesus's radical perspective on power and materialism as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, but Jesus as a role model? What did he know about enforcing curfews for teenagers? When did he ever have a fight with his spouse? When did he have to decide whether or not to pay the extra 30% for organic groceries? First world problems, I know, but they're some of the ones I think about.

Huh. to my surprise, this is turning into a two-part post. I'm not sure there's enough for a second post, but this one is already plenty long. More to come.

AB at the movies: Noah

I will confess up front that I thought this was a really interesting, thought-provoking movie. I went with all four members of our family, and that opinion was not shared by everybody. PellMel, for example, thought it was too dark and disturbing. We saw it a couple of weeks ago, and at the time I thought I would write a blog post about it. But then a bunch of other stuff happened and I forgot about it until I listened to some fellow church members criticize it today. So I will tell you why I liked it, and try to do it in such a way that I don't spoil the movie for you.

The main complaint, of course, is that it doesn't follow the Bible story, which is found in Genesis chapters 6-8. Here is a link to it if you'd like to go read it. It's not very long, it takes about 10 minutes to read it, so you can go do it right now. We'll wait.

There are obviously major differences between the Bible version and the movie version, no surprise there. But do they ruin the story?

1. "The Watchers." In the movie, the Watchers are enormous creatures made out of rock that were formerly fallen angels. They decide to help Noah and his family build the ark. They're a bit ridiculous, no question. In terms of movie special effects, they're sort of a cross between the Transformers, the Iron Giant, and the Rock creature from Galaxy Quest. I hope we can be forgiven for not-so-quietly quoting various different lines from Galaxy Quest while we were watching Noah ("Rock! Rock! Rock!" and "It's the simple things in life you treasure" and... oh, wait, I'm getting off topic.)

But you know, there are the Nephilim in the Bible story, and they aren't described. We know next to nothing about them. So I'm giving them a pass on this one. Sure, they took the idea and ran with it, but there's a base there in the original story. Anyway--and the importance of this cannot be overstated-- Noah is a story from the Jewish scriptures. The Old Testament is an important part of my understanding of my Christian faith, but this was a Hebrew story long before Christianity existed. The Nephilim are well-established in Jewish tradition as "those that fell from heaven." Watch the credits roll at the end of the movie and you will see that the creative team behind Noah has a number of Jewish names. I think they're allowed to interpret the Nephilim however they want--although of course also we are allowed to roll our eyes that they picked a way that happens to lend itself to big-budget movie special effects.

2. Methuselah. Methuselah does not appear in the Genesis story of Noah, but he's in the movie. So yes, they added him unnecessarily. But in their defense, they got the details right. Methuselah is indeed Noah's grandfather. If you want to read Noah's family tree, it's in Genesis 5. The writer(s) of Genesis very helpfully include everybody's ages in those family trees, so according to Genesis, Methuselah would have been 369 when Noah was born. Ancient of days, yes, but since Methuselah lived to be 969, he still had six hundred years to go. And since Noah was six hundred years old when the flood came (Gen 7:11), it isn't much of a stretch at all to surmise that Methuselah died in the flood. As far as I'm concerned, this is an acceptable change to the story--in fact, I thought it was even pretty creative and required a fair amount of attention to the details of the Genesis story.

3. Tubal-Cain. According to Genesis 4, Tubal-Cain was Cain's great great great great grandson (Cain is the son of Adam who murdered his brother Abel), which means he was probably long gone by the time of Noah. But since there aren't any ages given in Cain's family tree, it's hard to say. In the movie, Tubal-Cain is the representation of all that is evil about mankind and a great example of why mankind must be destroyed. So far, reasonable enough. But later in the movie (avoiding spoilers here), Tubal-Cain takes on a role that is completely superfluous to the story, and really--in my opinion--unnecessary. So yeah, I agree. The way Tubal-Cain is used later in the movie is a bad addition to the story.

4. Noah's sons and their wives (or lack thereof). In the Genesis story, Noah, his sons, and his sons' wives all go into the ark. In the movie, one of the major conflicts of the story happens because two of Noah's sons don't have wives. So, yeah, this one is just wrong compared to the Genesis account. But. It allows the movie to address the problem of human evil in a way that wouldn't be possible if they had stuck to the story. It puts the decision about whether or not the human race should survive directly into Noah's hands. Is the human race worth saving? And since Noah has to decide, the viewer ends up thinking about it, too. It's the moral heart of the story. I found Noah's dilemma and the way it was eventually resolved fascinating. (Although, yes, it's a bit facile to have Emma Watson deliver the morality-tale ending. But big budget movies are rarely known for subtlety.)

This change to the story also partly solves the part of the Noah story that is so distressing to people who weren't raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Those of us who learned the story in Sunday School when we were four years old tend to gloss over the part where God--the supposedly loving, merciful Creator God--kills off what must have been at least several hundred thousand people, people that He created, just because they were bad.

Noah and his family survive because Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord, but what does that mean? Noah, being human, couldn't have been 100% perfect, and human beings being what they are, probably plenty of those people who died in the flood weren't 100% bad. It's a pretty disturbing story if you look at it from that perspective. The way the movie-makers approach this in the movie meets the dilemma head-on instead of sweeping it under the table and jumping to the Sunday School version, where a sheepish, apologetic God slaps a rainbow up in the sky and promises he'll never, ever do it again.

So all in all, I liked it. It made me think, and I even had a minor a-ha! moment while considering the conflict between exacting justice for wrongdoing, and extending mercy to imperfect human beings. Although there are plenty of big budget special effects, unlike the typical blockbuster special effects movie, there is no black-and-white distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. It made me think about good and evil, and justice and mercy. Go see it for yourself and let me know what you think.

'tis a gift to have gifts

I've been thinking about gifts, the way each of us is gifted. In the New Testament, Paul talks about "spiritual" gifts, which are a result of being filled with the Holy Spirit, but clearly this idea doesn't apply just to Christians. Everyone has their gifts. There are several lists of spiritual gifts in the New Testament, including wisdom, knowledge, administration, preaching, teaching, healing, and so on. Some of them are even a little quirky--like the gift of mercy (is that why some people find it so hard to show mercy? they don't have that gift?), and my favorite, which the King James version translates as the gift of "helps."

Christian or not, those lists are hardly exhaustive. A few that are left out: music, visual arts, cooking, writing, crafts and needle work, design, encouragement, engineering, building, computer/technological expertise --there must be dozens more. The gift of humor. The gift of entertainment--you know how some people can mesmerize a crowd by telling stories of their college days? The gift of loyalty and support--the people who make you feel better just by being around them. Some people have the gift of adventure, both of going on wild, amazing adventures and also of making adventures out of everyday experiences. The gift of play, which I don't think I ever had.

One of the reasons I've put off writing this post is because there didn't seem to be any way to do it without saying what I think my own gifts are, and that's a little scary and embarrassing. But that's silly, so here goes. I think my gifts are writing, teaching adults, helps, and a side serving of knowledge. Also I can be a leader, but it's not a major strength of mine--it only comes to the fore when I'm in a group that doesn't have someone with stronger leadership skills.

The cool thing about this is that once you figure out what your gifts are, you can maximize your time and efforts. When you play to your strengths, not only do things go more smoothly, but you enjoy your work more, and you can avoid wasting time on things that are never going to work. It helps me understand why when I am in a group, people respond to the information I present (teaching) but not to my vision for what our group or their lives could be (preaching/exhortation). And why I am not the one who ends up organizing and delegating tasks (administration), or charting a course for the future (vision). And why years ago when I was in a women's spirituality group, it didn't work to change our leader every time we met--some people just don't have the gift of leadership.

It also helps me understand some situations I've been in. An example--a couple of years ago I was working on a project with a friend where we needed to present some information to a group. It wasn't until long after we finished the project that I figured out why we were having such a hard time agreeing on how the information should be presented. I think her gift is exhortation (inspiring people to bigger and better things in their lives), but my approach was from the standpoint of a teacher--how do we break this information down so that people can understand it? If we'd seen that earlier, it would have given us a blueprint for how we could mesh our different styles.

and for the record, having a gift and being proficient or good at it are not necessarily related. At least I don't think so. I'm a perpetual beginner in writing, learning more and more about it all the time. The more I learn the more I realize how much I don't know. but conversations with other people over the years have convinced me that most people don't have this need to write things down, to get thoughts and ideas out of my head and put them down in words. (I almost said "on paper" but when was the last time I wrote anything other than a grocery list on paper?)

When I started typing, this was a setup post for something else. But you know how often I never get around to the "next" post. we'll see.

So what about you? What are your gifts?

What we did on vacation

What did we do on vacation? Not a lot, but it was a good one. Sometimes the low-key ones are just what you need. We drove over to a hot springs near Bozeman and spent a couple of nights, and then spent a night at PellMel's apartment in Bozeman, and then drove back.

The hot springs where we stayed are near Yellowstone. So we drove down there twice. We went to Yellowstone in the fall, you may remember, but although we had a good time then, it was the end of the season and we didn't see much wildlife--just plenty of spectacular scenery.

This time we saw wildlife in droves. As in, we had to slow down and wait for bison to cross the road. We had to stay in the car so we were safe from the elk. We saw mule deer, whitetail, big horn sheep, antelope, a bald eagle, several sandhill cranes, and a whole bunch of waterfowl that Dean and MadMax could identify but I can't. But mainly there were hundreds (thousands?) of bison and elk.

So I took some pictures for you. The rest of the Lent posts are firmly lodged in Never Never Land at the moment, in spite of several attempts to write them out, so maybe they will eventually appear, maybe they won't. But at least you can see buffalo roaming in the meantime.

Big horn sheep (without big horns, the two facing the road are female with
short, less curved horns, the others are still young)

Elk!

Where's the bison?

This is the Boiling River. We were all set to soak in it when--not kidding--
a BUSLOAD of teenagers from California showed up. We left and came back later. :-)

Food on Friday: Chopped Salad

I like vegetables. Some of them, anyway. Carrots, broccoli, green beans, zucchini, corn. Okra, if it's fried. Spinach in salads. But not all vegetables. In spite of all the different ways I've tried them, I still have never found a brussel sprout recipe I'd make again (and yes, that includes several that say "even haters love them cooked this way"). And I'm still learning to like greens. Kale is growing on me.

But I've known since I was teenager that for the most part, I'd rather eat veggies raw than cooked. In fact, other than okra and green beans, all of the veggies I said I liked in the previous paragraph I prefer raw. So when I happened to pick up a serving-sized container of "chopped salad" at a Whole Foods store a couple of years ago, it occurred to me that maybe that's the way I should eat vegetables.

Chopped salad has become a staple around here, any time I remember to stock up on the right stuff and have the time to do all the chopping. Honestly, it doesn't really take that long--I just made one and it took about twenty minutes. It isn't so much a recipe as a method, but here you go anyway.

Chopped Salad

Choose six or eight of the following:
Any firm, choppable veggie: zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, carrots, jicama, celery, cucumber, asparagus, bell peppers, etc.
(corn can be fresh, or drained canned, or frozen--which you don't have to thaw, just throw it in and 10 minutes later it is fine)
Greens: spinach, kale, chard, beet greens, collards, etc., and any type of lettuce or cabbage
Tomatoes, any type or color (grape, cherry, plum, regular)
Fresh fruit: apples, pears
Dried fruit: cranberries, apricots, cherries, blueberries, raisins
Beans: black, pinto, garbanzo, or black-eyed peas
Herbs: basil, oregano, thyme, cilantro
Nuts/seeds: pumpkin, sesame, pecans, walnuts, almonds, peanuts
(you can also start with a bagged chopped salad and add to it)
(also you could add cooked diced meat, cheese, hard boiled eggs, tuna--but I usually just do veggies)
(I think onions are too strong for this, but if you like raw onions, add them, too)

The key is to chop every thing somewhere between 1/4" and 1/2" in size. Broccoli and kale pretty much disappear if you chop them small enough. If you have a good sharp knife, it goes pretty fast. Dump all the chopped vegetables in a bowl, then add your favorite salad dressing (or olive oil and a splash of lemon juice or balsamic vinegar). Salt and pepper to taste.

Here is the one I made this week. It has carrots, zucchini, kale, asparagus, a bag of "southwestern chopped salad" (which included a pouch of sunflower seeds and cranberries), a can of rinsed and drained garbanzo beans, and about a dozen halved grape tomatoes that I had leftover from earlier in the week. Kinda pretty, isn't it?

(Mom brag: note chopping board MadMax made in woodshop last week!)

odds and ends: March madness

Well, my bracket is trashed. I had UVA and Wichita State in the final game. I'm not even telling you who else I had in the final four. This is the first year in forever that I haven't had at least one of the Final Four teams. And the teams we have some emotional attachment to have been out since Thursday night. Our only comfort this year is that the Tar Heels lasted longer than Duke.

The ice on the pond melted off almost entirely in one single day (today). Yesterday it was still iced over, by the end of the day today, there was only a thin skin of ice over about a third of the pond and the rest of it was gone. Now we just have to wait and see if any of the fish survived the winter. Last year we had a bunch of fish survive, but this was a much harder, colder winter.

I had my last day at the tax place today. It has been remarkably slow the past two weeks. I guess everyone is waiting for the last minute. I think I will do it again next year. It ended up being a fun thing to do, and you feel like you're being really useful. People are so grateful. Of course, we did have the occasional angry encounter, but overall it went pretty smoothly. I will be out of town the next two weekends, so I'm done, but I'm a bit surprised to discover that I'm disappointed to miss the final rush.

In other news, I finished my second Jane Austen class this week. We did Emma this time. It was a great bunch of students, and surprisingly satisfying. Emma is a beautifully constructed novel. Every time I read it I admire it more. The first time I read it--30 years ago--it seemed like a straightforward tale of a mean-girl being schooled by her handsome, perfect, older neighbor. But the more you read it, the more you realize how strong Emma is, how much she stands up to Mr. Knightley, and how much Mr. Knightley has to learn from her. Even though she is a petty, arrogant snob at the beginning. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

So, my class is done, my volunteering is done, MadMax is on vacation-- sounds like spring break, doesn't it? And indeed it is. Dean is working this weekend, and then we have a few days at home. Then we're headed to the Bozeman area for a few days to see Mel and check out some cool stuff. I have a stack of books to read (I'm deep in another Laurie R. King at the moment and so far it is really good) and I am happy. I know this sounds like I'm about to say I'm taking another blogging break, but I don't think I am. I have three or four half-written posts in my head that I'm trying to get motivated to type out. I didn't realize until I looked just now that it had been two and a half weeks since the last time I posted (before the Lent one). How did that happen?

Enjoy the rest of the weekend, and I hope your bracket fared better than mine. Oh, and if you're looking for something to watch this weekend, I can recommend both of the recent BBC productions of Sense and Sensibility and Emma. Part of what these Austen classes were about was watching various film adaptations of the books to see how they've been reinterpreted in the present. Neither production is perfect, and in fact, I didn't like either of them at first. But they grew on me. Both of them are worth watching. Here are the trailers:







If you're a bit of a Jane Austen nut, as apparently I am, you could spend hours picking and choosing (Marianne and Willoughby from the Emma Thompson version, Elinor and Edward from the BBC version, and etc etc ad infinitum). But that's probably just because I've spent so much time over the past two months watching these things. I ended up watching five versions each of both S&S and Emma. Not kidding. I don't recommend it, even though in hindsight I'm already feeling a bit nostalgic of being in a position where I needed to sit and watch Jane Austen movies by the hour.

Lent: this one really is about Lent

You may remember that the church tradition I grew up in didn't celebrate Lent. Lent is an adopted tradition for me. And to be honest, I have pretty mixed feelings about it. In Christian theology, the whole point of Jesus's death on the cross is so that we don't have to suffer for our sins. It's called "substitutionary atonement" if you're interested (and I just googled that and found a fascinating wikipedia article. I had no idea there were so many nuances.)

Technically speaking, Lent--like Advent--is a season of preparation for the celebration of a major church holiday (Lent for Easter, Advent for Christmas). But popularly speaking, most people use Lent as a time to identify with Christ's suffering. They give something up to identify with Jesus's voluntary surrender of his life. We suffer because Christ suffered. The 40 days are symbolic of Jesus's 40 days in the wilderness, mentioned briefly in Mark and described more fully in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, or the 40 years the Israelites spent preparing to enter the Promised Land.

There's a problem here. If Jesus's death is supposed to substitute for us so we don't have to suffer, trying to take on some of his suffering or identify with his suffering is completely missing the point. And there's no reason at all to use Lent as an opportunity for wallowing in how awful we are, we are mere worms, etc etc. That kind of hair-shirt attitude changes the focus from gratitude for Christ's sacrifice to making it all about me.

So I have lots of mixed feelings about Lent. But I do appreciate the rhythm of the church calendar: the intensity of focus on the spiritual life during Lent or Advent, followed by weeks of "ordinary time." It works much better for me than the year-round intensity of some churches I've attended, which sometimes feels to me like we are trying to whip up a frenzy of religious devotion every week. (not that there's anything wrong with that, it just doesn't suit me as well as the church calendar version, which is why we can all be grateful that there are different denominations for different people.)

Usually for me, Lent is a season of learning. This year I took a continuing ed class on the Jewish origins of Christianity, focusing on St. Paul. It was fascinating. I will tell you more about that another time.

But having said all that: here's something else. This year I gave up sweets for Lent. It has nothing at all to do with identifying with Christ's suffering, and everything to do with me taking advantage of the season to do something I wanted to do anyway. (Who's mis-using Lent now?) I didn't give up sugar, which is in all kinds of things like salad dressing and barbecue sauce and fruit yogurt. Just sweets--cookies, candy, cake, pie, and the like.

The first ten days were easy. So easy I was surprised. I should have done this months ago, I thought. But the past ten days have been a little harder. I built in an escape hatch--I could have a few bites of something if it was a special occasion--and I've taken advantage of that twice. But mostly this has been about me figuring out how it feels to not have sweets in my life. So far, so good.

there's no place like home. there's no place like home.

It's true, you know. There is no place like home. But we had to keep reminding ourselves of that on Monday. We were sitting in the sun in SoCal Sunday morning, 80 degrees, nice breeze, gorgeous day, then we got on a plane about 4:30 in the afternoon, arrived home on the midnight flight, and woke up Monday morning to about 34 degrees and raining. Ah, Montana. And it rained, or snowed, or sleeted, all dang day long. Normally we are really happy to get home after a trip and see the animals, sleep in our own bed, etc. But it was a tough transition this time. I might not have been entirely cheerful about it.

We did have a great time. Our 30th anniversary is this year, so we wanted to go on some kind of mini-trip to celebrate (the actual date of anniversary is in May, but the weather around here is nice in May--we wanted to go away while it was still cold and gray). So last fall we started looking around for someplace to go, and we decided on the BNP Paribas Open, a pro tennis tournament that is held in Indian Wells, California, near Palm Springs. It was really fun. It's a major tournament, so all the big names were there, but it's a much smaller venue than many of the other majors, so you get to see a lot more of the players.

Our favorite part was watching them practice. They post the practice schedule pretty early in the morning, and you can sit about 12 feet away from your favorites as they warm up for their matches. It was so cool. We were shameless gawkers. We saw Federer, Wawrinka, Nadal, and Li Na in the first 15 minutes after we got there. It was hard to know where to look. Later we watched Djokovic and Andy Murray practice. We also saw several matches, including Nadal's near-loss to Stepanek in the second round (and since Nadal had a bye in the first round, it was his first match of the tournament). Then last night he did lose to Dogolopov (I'm not entirely sure I spelled that right), but we had to watch that on TV since now we are back at home. It's also really fun to watch doubles--we saw several of those, too.

Why am I telling you this? I have no idea. The best part was just sitting outside, soaking up sun and gentle air. We both really wished we could stay a few more days.

Let's see what else is new around here. Oh-- I keep forgetting to tell you that I got braces. It brings back lots of memories of high school, but unfortunately, I don't look like a cute teenager anymore. More's the pity. I'm told you can barely see them. I don't know if that's really true or if my friends are just telling me that. They don't hurt as badly as I remember them hurting. Fortunately, they're only on top and I only have to wear them until Thanksgiving.

My second Jane Austen class, this one on Emma, started last night. I wasn't sure we would have enough to talk about since I only had them read the first three chapters for the first night, but we ended up running out of time to do all the things I wanted to do. If you haven't seen the new BBC version of Emma (with Romola Garai as Emma), it's pretty good. Worth checking out.

That's everything I can think of right now. We had thick-as-peanut-butter fog this morning, but once it cleared off, it really did look like spring. Now we just have to watch out for flooding while all this snow melts.

Remember I promised you a picture of green? Here you go. Not the world's greatest picture, and I guess it's more blue than green, but I took it right as we were getting in the car to drive to the airport and head home.

And here is that same view off our deck on Monday when we got back. At least the snow is starting to melt.

Food on Friday: The Cooking Grinch Strikes Again

For awhile now, we've bought a quarter cow from a local rancher, i.e., one-fourth of one of his cattle. I'm not up on cow terminology--is it a steer? a cow? I have no idea. But we get a quarter of it. Not exactly a quarter--it's not like we choose the left back quadrant or something, but he sends the ... um... whatever-you-call-it off to a small, local processing center, and they divvy it up fairly equitably so that we get some steaks, some ground beef, and some roasts. Then I go pick it up. Sometime I will tell you more about going to the processing place to pick up our meat, but that's way off topic for today, which eventually will be a recipe for sugar cookies. Ha.

So anyway. Last year we didn't get one because PellMel the vegetarian was here and we already had a backlog. We always go through the steaks (yum!) and the ground beef, but roasts? I am just not a roast person. We probably have two years of roasts stashed down in our freezer. So this winter I decided I was going to do better. Once a month I've been hauling out a roast and figuring out something to do with it.

So this morning, there I am chopping a chuck roast into large chunks for beef stew and wondering about things they say in cookbooks. After dredging the meat in seasoned flour, you're supposed to brown the meat "on all sides." I'm assuming that means more than just top and bottom, because if that's all it meant, wouldn't they say to brown the meat on both sides?

So there I am trying to prop these pieces of meat up on their sides. The last time I did this I actually stood there and held them up on their sides with a pair of tongs while they browned. Hell with that, I thought this time, and just did top, bottom, and then sort of lined them up in a row so they held each other up on two of the sides, then decided I was done with it. They're now browned on two-thirds of their sides and they're tucked into the crock pot with sliced onions, red wine, and various seasonings. I'm out of carrots, but I can't imagine it will make a material difference in the outcome if I throw some carrots in there later this afternoon after I've been to the grocery store. If it will, don't tell me.

I know from experience that Dean and MadMax will love this, and I will eat a half serving and remember why I am not a big fan of roasts. I could never be a vegetarian (steak! bacon! cheeseburgers!) but I could go the rest of my life without having pot roast or beef stew and I would never notice.

Here is another silly thing I read in a cookbook. I actually got the cookbook out so I could type it word for word (this is from Desperation Dinners, which in spite of its un-appealing title is one of my all-time most used cookbooks): "When you have no idea what to cook, fry an onion. I do this a lot, and without fail, family members sniff their way into the kitchen clamoring to know what's for dinner."

Whaaaaat? How in the world does that make sense? You've now got a fried onion, no dinner, and people in the kitchen demanding to know what you're going to feed them. That is, hands down, the dumbest line I've ever read in a cookbook--even though I love that cookbook.

But the real reason I broke down to type another Food on Friday post (which I'm scheduling for while we're out of town) is because after years of searching, I finally found a sugar cookie recipe that works. MadMax adores sugar cookies--they are almost the only cookie he will eat (although he has on occasion shown an unreasonable fondness for Chips Ahoy Chunky White Fudge). I've tried probably eight different sugar cookie recipes in the last few years and never found one that was worth the trouble, since the sugar cookie mix that comes in the red pouch from Betty Crocker is actually pretty good.

But he was jonesing for sugar cookies last night and I didn't have the mix, so I pulled out one of my oldest cookbooks, one I bought not long after we got married, found a recipe for sugar cookies in the index, and voila (which in our house is almost always pronounced voy-la), the best homemade sugar cookies I've ever produced. These are the big, soft kind, not the thin crisp ones. So here you go, the recipe as written and then the way I modified it.

SUGAR COOKIES
(attributed to Nancy Cheek in the 1982 edition of Chapel Hill Favorites)
3 C sifted flour
1/2 t nutmeg
1 t soda
1 C margarine
1 C sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla

Cream margarine and sugar. Beat in egg and vanilla, add dry ingredients, mixing thoroughly. Chill at least two hours. Roll dough out, cut with cookie cutters, and bake on ungreased cookie sheets for 10-12 minutes at 325.

Which is both a bit appalling (does anybody use margarine anymore?), not to my taste (I've never been a fan of nutmeg, which I know makes me an unsophisticated slob, but there it is), and too much work. So here's what I did last night, which turned out pretty damn fabulously if I do say so myself.

SUGAR COOKIES, TAKE TWO
2 1/2 C all-purpose flour
1/2 C whole-grain spelt flour (or barley flour, or just use 3 cups regular flour)
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 C butter (1 stick), softened slightly
1/4 C shortening
1/4 C unsweetened applesauce (you could probably use 1/2 C applesauce and skip the shortening, but I haven't tried that)
scant cup of sugar (probably about 7/8 of a cup)
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt

Cream butter, shortening, applesauce, and sugar for 3-4 minutes. Add the egg, salt, and vanilla, and mix thoroughly. Add the dry ingredients half a cup at  time. Drop the cookies onto ungreased cookie sheets, using about a quarter-cup per cookie. Flatten them into thick disks three-ish inches in diameter. Bake for 14 minutes at 325 or until just barely starting to brown. Do not overbake.

What's the dumbest line you've ever read in a cookbook?

Lent: give me strength for round 5

Lent is upon us. Some of you are probably still recovering from Mardi Gras, which I completely forgot to celebrate this year. We did make it to our church's Ash Wednesday service tonight. Every year during Lent I think more than usual about religious themes, which I know is not of interest to some of you, so I'll put "Lent" in the title when that's the case. The posts won't be specifically about Lent. Or at least I don't think they will be, I've only got two planned at the moment. And just 40 days to go.

Awhile ago I decided--as I periodically do--that I should make yet another effort to come to terms with the evangelicalism of my youth, this time by reading books by evangelicals. So I looked through the Christian bestseller lists and the awards lists and picked out eight or ten books that looked promising. Most of them I pitched right back into the Salvo box after a few chapters, but I made it all the way through a few of them.

I left Evangelicalism behind thirty years ago, so I am not new to the effort to define my beliefs by comparing them to my past. I've had decades now of figuring out what I believe and how it differs from the way I was raised.

For the most part, I am pretty unconflicted about this. I have no desire at all to be an Evangelical again. There are so many things that bother me about Evangelicals these days it's hard to know where to start: the intertwining of faith and politics; the lack of questioning of consumerism and materialist values; the willingness to reduce the New Testament message of love, joy, peace and mercy to a couple of harangues on maintaining 1950s middle class morality. As a friend of mine said a couple of weeks ago, we've come to the point where people see the church as "exterminators of sin" instead of "dispensers of grace," and I think Evangelicalism is the primary culprit in that.

But that's not to say that all Evangelicals are like that. There are still things I can learn from them, and learn I did from a few of these authors. But over the past couple of days I've realized that my reading had an unintended and unwelcome side effect: it re-awakened a voice in my head I thought I was done with. It's the voice that just-below-the-level-of-consciousness tells me over and over again that I can't trust myself, I can't trust my experience, my ideas aren't worth anything, and it's a little ridiculous to think that my opinions are valid compared with the weight of all those other opinions out there, isn't it?

It's a voice I learned at least in part from being raised Evangelical. It's clear to me that not all Evangelicals have this voice, but I am naturally a person who asks questions, and the answers to my questions were often that's not how it is or accept our beautiful system of belief and stop asking questions. Or simply: you're wrong. I learned very early to keep my questions to myself and not rock the boat.

I hate rocking the boat anyway. That's why I post my opinions here in this little blog that only about 30 people read, and I make very little effort to increase my readership. Because even though I love to ask questions and to consider what I think and believe, I also hate to cause problems. I like peace. I like it when people get along. I enjoy listening to a lively discussion, but if it turns into an argument, I head for the door. I hate conflict. I am a wuss.

So anyway, for a minute--ok, maybe for the past month or so--that reawakened voice in my head caused me to forget that I do trust myself. I do value my own experience and my own opinions. (ha, and suddenly I'm remembering the post from last week that was also about learning to trust myself. This seems to be a theme.) My opinions may not be orthodox, and I may not be able to write down a logical defense that will convince anybody else, but that's OK. That's not the point.

When I finally realized what was going on, it was like a load of bricks falling off my back. Oh, yeah, I remember now. I'm OK. I can let go of that bit of legacy thinking that insidiously tries to tell me that I have to rely on an authority to tell me what to do and think. And THANK GOD for that. Literally.

Chickens (not) in the snow

Chickens are pretty tough. Ours don't like snow, but they don't seem to be a bit bothered by the cold. Of course, we close them in their coop when the temps plunge down into single digits or below zero--it's usually around 45 degrees in there. But the other day when the sun came out and it "warmed up" to the mid-twenties, they came right out and were cruising around the yard.

We've heard stories that chickens that are bored start attacking each other. So on the days when they are, um, cooped up all day, I try to take them something interesting to eat for entertainment. Interesting is in the eye of the chicken, though-- they love any kind of bread or certain leftovers.

It is dang difficult to get all five of them in one shot-- but see the fifth one over in the mini-door?

Here they are earlier this week when it was about 2 degrees above zero--the red light is their heat lamp

We haven't been getting as many eggs, though, usually one or two per day. They're almost two years old now, so they are due to start slowing down on the laying anyway. It will be interesting to see this spring if their production increases. Dean is pushing to get 2-3 new pullets when they have them at our local livestock store in a few weeks. He wants blue eggs (these all lay brown eggs).

We've also had visitors to the feeder that is inside the chicken yard fence, but not inside the coop. The only sign is footprints in the snow. One set we're pretty sure are pheasant. I tried to get a shot with chicken prints and pheasant prints in the same picture so you could see the size comparison, but it's been so cold this week the chickens have barely poked their heads out of the coop.

Sadie's foot print for size comparison--these are way too small to be chicken prints, probably pheasant?

Then a few days ago there was something new. I have no idea what this is--maybe a mouse or vole, dragging its tail behind it? Whatever. We are happy to feed the local wildlife. (this is a terrible picture, I hope you can see the little footprints--click to enlarge. that's my footprint off to the left for size comparison.)

Anybody know what would make this kind of print?

And here is the picture from our deck about an hour ago--the same shot that I've posted several times in spring and summer with the pond and the mountains in the background. The white dots, of course, are falling snow. It doesn't look like much in this picture unless you know that poor Dean had shoveled off the deck about an hour before I took this picture. Ahhh, winter--you can go away now.

So, you can see why we are sincerely hoping that March has come in like a lion so it can go out like a lamb. We've had about enough. When we get back from our weekend away, I will post a picture a green-filled picture for contrast. I hope. :-)

black hole of need, part 2

I deleted the end of the previous post because no matter how hard I tried, it came off sounding like either let them eat cake or I am so awesome that I help people less fortunate than myself. There is no good way to talk about what I was trying to say. I guess it boils down to this: there is unlimited need, but each one of us has limited resources. You have to figure out how to manage this gap, this huge, ocean-sized gap, between the amount that you can realistically do, and the need that is out there. And if you're going to help, you have to be sure that help is wanted, first of all, and that you can give it without condescending. And without doing it just to pad your resumé, so to speak--so you have credentials in the "I help people" conversation.

It occurred to me later, as I thought of all of you--at least those of you that I know read here--that maybe most of you already know this, because it seems pretty damn obvious once you state it like that. You don't do anyone any good if you burn out, or if you're forcing yourself to continue to help when you're feeling bitter and resentful. Also there is a way in which charity can make make people more victimized than they were when you started, i.e., you reinforce the gulf between helper and help-ee by the way you help. Sometimes people need to help themselves.

We've started a conversation in our church recently about how we can be more involved in helping those in our community who need help. And while at first I was entirely enthusiastic about this, the more I hear about it, the more I've thought to myself that sounds exhausting. I'm already doing more than I really want to do--not just at church but in other venues as well--and how am I going to add a bunch more on top of that?

And I guess the answer is the same as it's always been. You just have to figure out what you can do. I do think that "good works" motivated by guilt, ought to, and should are the proverbial clanging gong from 1 Corinthians 13. If you aren't acting out of love, joy at the opportunity to help, gratitude that you are able to help, are you doing more harm than good?

And yet sometimes you do just have to suck it up and help someone because they need help, even when you don't want to, even when your motivation sucks, even when you are all out.

I really need a vacation, and thank the lord one is coming up-- Dean and I are headed south for a four-day weekend next week. I can't remember the last time I needed to get away as badly as I do right now. But my handy-dandy ever-ready guilty conscience helpfully tells me that people who are poor, or mentally ill, or victimized, or whatever, don't get to take a break. They don't get weekends away to recharge so they can come back prepared to fight the good fight again another day. But I do.

Ack. I'm just getting myself tied up in knots. I've been taking pictures of the chickens tiptoeing around in the snow that I will post before I go so this mangled mess of a post won't be on top. :-) Hope the weather is better where you are-- we've had either a blizzard or a winter storm going for the past five days running now.

the black hole of need

When I was a senior in high school, I was sitting in physics class one day when a girl I didn't really know started to cry. She was sitting a couple of seats back and a couple of rows over from me, and although she was probably making at least some effort to be quiet, it was soon apparent to everyone in the class that she was upset.

So. This was physics class. The male-female ratio was at least 4:1, maybe higher. I was, for better or worse, the female sitting closest to the front of the class, and the teacher--one of my all-time favorites-- looked at me with pleading in his eyes. Please, do something. Don't make me deal with a hysterical female. I dutifully got up, went back to her desk, and led her to the girl's restroom.

Where she proceeded to continue to fall apart, more loudly and with more abandon. She had only moved to town a few months ago, she had no friends, she had been thinking about suicide. I was raised to be helpful, and my religious beliefs told me that I should help those in need, and I sincerely did want to help. So I took her (we'll call her Lydia) under my wing. I introduced her to my friends, we talked on the phone, I tried to get her involved in activities, I told her about our church (because at that time in my life, I believed church/faith/Christianity was/were the answer to everything) and prayed for her.

I had seen my parents take on various troubled people in similar circumstances, and after a few months, the person would heal from whatever trauma they were dealing with and they would get better. They would move on, grateful to my parents for helping them out. But Lydia wasn't like that. She was probably mentally ill, although we certainly didn't talk about those things back then, let alone deal with them. She didn't get better.

She continued to be difficult and needy and prone to drama. None of my friends really cared for her, but I didn't know how to back off. She seemed to me to be a black hole of need--no matter how much I poured into her, she needed more. I ended up spending a major portion of my senior year of high school hanging out with someone I didn't really like and didn't really know what to do with, because I felt like I should. I should love her, I should help her. I only escaped because the next fall I went off to college, while she stayed home and went to the junior college.

In hindsight, I probably did every single thing wrong that you could do in that situation. I had no boundaries, with Lydia or anyone else, no way to slow down her long, draining assault on my resources, and no way to get any perspective on a different way of doing things. I ended up feeling resentful and burned out. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd do much better now. After Lydia and several other similar experiences over the years, now I solve the problem by just not getting personally involved with black-hole people. We donate money to various organizations in our town that deal with them. Is that enough?

I'm not sure. Probably not. But I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently. I've decided at the very least that it's OK to channel my desire to help into an avenue that suits my particular situation. That, actually, was part of my reasoning behind becoming a tax prep volunteer. It was something contained, structured, but with a definite tangible benefit, that I could do without getting sucked into a situation with infinite needs.

This originally had a different ending, but I decided to make that into its own post. To be continued.

a break from my previously scheduled break

TRIGGER ALERT: If you are sensitive to issues of childhood sexual abuse, please avoid this post. 

I'm still on a blogging break. I just needed to post this one. Also, I'm not using full names because I was reminded recently that google searches can bring attention to things you didn't plan for widespread consumption (I'll tell you that story another time, as it is much more cheerful than this one).

If you've been around awhile, you may remember that I wrote a post a couple of years ago about what it was like to be a survivor of sexual abuse while all of that mess at UPenn was happening, and how difficult it was to have it thrown in your face all the time. Guess what? Thank you, Mr. Famous Film Director (hereafter referred to as FFD), it's happening again.

I can't comment on their situation at all, because I don't know either of them and I have no idea what happened. Dylan is doing what she has to do, and I'm not going to judge or blame her for that. Although I've seen and enjoyed a couple of the FFD's films, I'm not a huge fan of his, and it means nothing to me to either go or not go to his films.

But there are a few parallels to my own history and so I've been re-thinking some of my own decisions. Is it necessary to go public to heal? My abuser was also a public person, although on a miniscule stage compared to the FFD. It's a difficult call to make. If you say nothing, then (obviously) no one knows. There is a feeling that the perp is getting away with it. Or that you are letting your fear of confrontation impede your healing. But on the other hand, if you're a private person, making a public statement and causing a public scandal is its own kind of trauma. I'm a very private person, so I decided long ago that I would rather suffer in silence than try to make a big public statement about my abuse. 

I mean suffer literally. As Dylan has stated, it is enormously difficult to maintain your trust in your own perceptions, your own experience, when that experience is being denied again and again by the people around you, people who have no idea what happened, but who respect and admire the perpetrator.

Let me back up a little bit. There were certain aspects of my abuse that I was aware of throughout my childhood and up into my twenties. When I was about thirty, I had one of those "repressed memory" situations where I "remembered" some further, more explicit abuse. I've never been able to determine in my own mind how much of that other, more specific abuse actually occurred-- I was very young at the time, maybe about four or five, and the memories are hazy at best. 

Believe me, you don't have to educate me about repressed memories--either the reasons why we should believe them, or why they are complete bunk, depending on who you talk to. I've done lots of reading on this topic, and I've heard both sides, and all I have to go on is my own experience. And my own experience is inconclusive, I have to say. Twenty years later, I'm still not sure exactly what happened.

So for the record, when I speak of my abuse, I'm talking about the things I definitely remember, the things I knew about before the "repressed memories" appeared. But it wasn't until the repressed memories resurfaced (or my brain made them up, depending on which side you're on), that I took those other events--the ones I definitely remember-- seriously.

Because they "weren't that bad." I wasn't raped, I wasn't sodomized. I was just shamed and embarrassed and miserable--all in a specifically sexual context-- and I wasn't about to say one single word to anybody. I wasn't even old enough to believe I was at fault, I just knew I was in an ugly, uncomfortable situation and I had to deal with it alone.

Now that I type that out, it occurs to me to wonder, why did I think I had to deal with it alone? Did he threaten me? Did I try to talk to someone and they didn't believe me? Was I sure before I even tried to say anything that no one would believe me? I honestly don't know the answer to that. I just know that it never occurred to me to say anything to anyone until I was in my thirties.

Once I did finally tell someone about it, I was obsessed with my recovery for two or three years. I needed to be. That's how you work through it. There was a long time when I thought that the fact that I had been sexually abused as a child was the most important thing about me, the defining thing that made me who I am. But eventually as I worked with a therapist, attended a support group, and read and read and wrote and wrote, I began to heal.

At some point when I was in my late 30s, I realized one day that I hadn't thought about my abuse in weeks. It made me so happy. It still comes up --here I am, you know, typing this-- and every once in awhile it gives me a few really bad hours or even days. But it doesn't consume me anymore, and it sure as hell doesn't define who I am. 

Besides my support group and my therapist, I did tell some people about it, but other than my immediate family, I never told anyone who knows my abuser. For one thing, I was fairly sure that I was his only victim. I was dealing with this as an adult, so I could rationally think through the fact that most abusers have a pattern, and the pattern of behavior he exhibited with me was something that almost certainly couldn't have happened with anyone else--and that's all I'm going to say about that. If I'd been worried that he was still abusing someone else, maybe I would have made some sort of public statement.

For another thing, there were plenty of people who had positive interactions with my abuser who never saw this side of him. It didn't make sense to me to destroy their experience of him when I was capable of dealing with it myself. And also--it would be dishonest to deny it--I was afraid of the consequences. 

None of us can say what happened between Dylan and the FFD. I'm inclined to believe her because her story dovetails so well with my own, but people have lied about abuse before. Part of me wants to support her in whatever she needs to do to heal, but part of me also wants to ask her, what is the point in trying to get millions of people to make a judgement about something that they are completely incapable of making a judgement about? If she needed to say her piece and if saying it succeeded in giving her strength and peace of mind, then it was entirely worth it. The victim's right to heal takes precedence over whatever other needs might be going on here, and if it did help her along the road to recovery, that in itself is enough reason for her to do it.  

But I'm not sure I buy parts of the conversation about what it takes to heal from abuse, and I certainly don't buy "if you don't say anything, it means he got away with it." I know my therapist pushed me (gently) to go public. You can't heal unless you open up about what happened. If you don't publicly state your experience, you're lying by omission. You're still in denial about what happened. Of course it was never that blunt--a good therapist would never be that directive, and both of these therapists were great. But they made it clear, subtly, what they felt was the path to healing. But here is something else: someone who abuses a child is dealing with demons the rest of us can't even imagine--I know that because I could feel them. He didn't get away with anything.

For what it's worth, I did eventually confront my abuser, and he absolutely, categorically denied that anything untoward had ever happened between us. The confrontation was an enormously difficult thing to do, and it was entirely unsatisfying. My word against his word, my hazy memories against his firm denial. If I had it to do over again knowing how it would have turned out, I'm not sure I would do it again. I guess the one benefit is that now I know what he would say--before I confronted him, I had no idea how he would respond. A part of me secretly hoped that he would break down, confess all, and feel terrible about it. But that didn't happen. 

I think there is a script among some therapists. You need to do x, y and z to heal. You must confront your abuser, you must publicly speak your truth. But you know, that puts a lot of burden on the victim, especially if the victim is a private, introverted person. It makes you vulnerable to hate and backlash from people who have no idea what's going on, and it sets you up to be ridiculed and accused-in-return by your abuser. It also requires a big public exposure, which is in itself a form of punishment for an introverted person.

For me what has been more important is to learn to trust my own experience, my own knowledge of what happened to me. I'm leaving justice and karma to someone else (it will possibly sound too hokey to say capital-S Someone Else, but I'll do it anyway.) And that has been damn difficult, and it's something I still work on--not just in this particular context, but in other contexts as well. It also made a huge difference when he died several years ago. I've made major strides in being free of the whole thing since his death, even if he was frail and elderly at the end. I am often glad he's gone, and maybe that's my own little form of revenge.

So no conclusions, this is just what I've been thinking about.

regroup regather

You know, I occasionally overload myself, and now would be one of those times. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, I signed up to be a volunteer tax preparer with the VITA program through our local United Way. In spite of the fact that it is not really an interest of mine, and that the training has been far more time consuming than I was expecting (and thank God for that since the alternative would have been to turn the tax-ignorant me out upon the unsuspecting taxpayers of our county), I'm feeling no inclination to quit. And I'm teaching this class on Sense and Sensibility, and I'm both a participant and a co-leader of the small groups we're starting at our church, and I'm behind on two other projects (one grad-school related and the other the months-late revision of our family cookbook)(*wince* MMM and cheery-o).

So, in other words, I'm a bit swamped. So blogging/facebook/internet time are the things that are getting booted from my list of things to do. I'll be back in a couple of weeks, maybe three. And of course I'm still checking e-mail and probably (because of my groups) I'll be in and out of FB occasionally, but for the most part, I'm gathering in my attention span so I can get some of this stuff done. See you soon.

the zen-ish moment

Many years ago, I discovered what I think of as the travel mindset. Getting packed and ready to go may be a frantic mess, but once you get to the airport and get in line to check in, you let all the travel anxiety go. You just insert yourself into the travel system and let the system take care of you.

Like everybody, I have some travel horror stories to tell, like the time I got stuck in Salt Lake City for three days while trying to get back home from a weekend trip to California. But horror stories aside, for the most part, you get where you need to go. You just have to have a good book (or three) and some food (granola bars, bag of nuts, etc), and you're set. Well, if you're me, you also have to have some dramamine, but you get the idea.

I look at it as a completely acceptable, valid excuse to sit and read all day. Sometimes I wander around the airport, see what's there, buy a magazine or a cheesy souvenir. Over the years, this has worked out so well that now the travel day--which I used to dread--is one of my favorite parts of vacation.

Of course it helps that I'm not travelling with toddlers anymore. Thank the saints and all the stars. Although it does help, even with kids. I first started trying this out when MadMax was 3 or 4, and even though I would still worry about entertaining him, I could let go of everything else--what if we miss our flight, what if they lose our bags, what if, what if, WHAT IF?? --> all of that stuff, which I am fairly expert at, you can just let go.

I've discovered that something similar works at the post office. Not always, because standing in line at the post office is right up there in my list of things that might be described as hell on earth, but usually I can just relax and stand there in line and not worry about how long it's taking. Sometimes I chat with complete and utter strangers (like many introverts, I find it easier to make small talk with strangers than with people I know).

I'm finding as I play with this idea that those moments of calm can occur anywhere, anytime. I think of it as zen calm, but since I've never seriously undertaken zen discipline, it may not be very close. Zen-ish, then. In the midst of traffic, waiting to pick up the kid at school, any time I'm in a situation that is out of my control, if I just give in to it, let go of the need to be in control, I can reach a sort of calm stillness. (I typed clam stillness first, which is possibly different than what I mean, but I bet clams live a pretty zen life.)

I've never experienced true enlightenment, I don't think. When I think of capital-E Enlightenment, Elizabeth Gilchrist's phrase from Eat, Pray Love comes to mind: she says she was "catapulted into the lap of God." As I said when I reviewed it, I didn't care for that book, but that phrase stuck in my head. A moment of perfect bliss, feeling like you are connected to everything and everything is connected to you, suffused by light and love-- I've never been there.

But sometimes these little pockets of zen-ish calm at an airport or in the post office lead to a kind of enlargement of consciousness, a feeling of accessing something beyond myself (see previous post about spirituality). Especially when I'm reading. And those moments .... oh, let's just say they make up for a lot of other moments of confusion, fear, anguish, etc.

I typed that much on Friday, plus a lot more that I just cut and put in another post that will probably appear on Thursday, and then let it sit over the weekend in accordance with my new plan to let things stew a few days before I click publish. Then last night I had one of those other moments, maybe you have them, maybe you don't, where I get tangled up in a load of crap. I sent an e-mail to a family group and got back a bunch of very sneering, negative vibes--which may have been real, or may have been my projection of things I've felt in the past, I don't know which and it doesn't really matter. I started to panic about my new class, which starts tonight. I had a strange experience at the grocery store yesterday afternoon which didn't really register at the time but came back full force.

So there I was at about 12:30 a.m. last night, letting myself get buried under this load of self-contempt and self-criticism. It's a hell of a lot harder to try to find zen-ish calm under those circumstances than it is while you're reading a book at DIA. But I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, so I tried. And it helped. I don't think I got to zen calm, but I got back to the point where I could go to sleep.

Work in progress.

Church

I know I have a pretty even mix of church-goers and non-church-goers around here, and I like it that way. It reflects my own ambivalence. When I was growing up, we went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night--really, every time the church doors were open, we were there. There were definitely times when I hated it, but it wasn't always bad.

For one thing, it gave me a lifelong deep love of the old standard hymns. For another, we knew that church building as if it were our home, all the nooks and crannies and the little used closets, and the baptistry that was like a mini-swimming pool. Usually the baptistry was locked, but every once in awhile it would be open, and you could go stand in it--it was dry when it wasn't in use--and look out over the empty sanctuary and get a completely different perspective than the usual one from the pews.

But when I hit adolescence and church started to intrude on my plans for what I thought I should be able to do at church time, I started to resent it more and more. I had "Forsake not the gathering of yourselves together" (Hebrews 10:25) thrown at me more times than I care to count. It wasn't until I was in college that it occurred to me that the writer of Hebrews' encouragement to stay in close contact with your fellow believers might have had little or nothing to do with the southern baptist round of organized church activities--sunday school, Girls in Action, interminable boring sermons, etc.

So I've spent a great deal of my adult life trying not to go to church too often, because I didn't want to get to the point where it became rote, just thoughtless repetition instead of something that's meaningful. Because it is still meaningful to me, in spite of everything. I've written several posts about why it's still important to me to go to church even though my belief system doesn't really match up with much of the stated purpose of our denomination (the second half of this one, and this one, for starters), so I won't get sidetracked about that right this minute, because that's not my point today.

And I am getting to the point, really. So, you will probably remember that I finally joined our church a couple of years ago after attending for 18 years without being a member--my small silent protest against our denomination's discrimination against the LGBT community. When they finally got rid of that, I joined. We've never been the most regular attenders--we average once or twice a month--but we're members in good standing.

And once I was a member, I lost my excuse for not being one of the lay leaders of the church. Our church is small--about 200 active members-- and in order for any few of us not to get burned out, all of us have to rotate through various responsibilities to keep the church running.

I did my part, for the most part--I volunteered in the nursery, I taught Sunday School (for the record, I am a terrible Sunday School teacher), I learned to run the sound board, I served on a couple of committees, we went on a mission trip to New Orleans after Katrina. But I was never a deacon or an elder, in spite of being asked many times (as everyone in our church has been), because I wasn't a member. And I was so grateful for that. Sitting through meetings is....  I'm sure it's one of the circles of hell. It has to be.

But once I finally joined, my excuse was gone, and I figured it was time to step up. So after giving it some thought, I decided I would be a deacon, because deacons actually do things, they do the work of the church--visiting the elderly shut-ins and those who are hospitalized, organizing food drives and delivering baskets of food to people, coordinating food for funerals, etc. So now I am in my first year of a three-year term as a deacon on the Hospital team. Maybe I will tell you more about that another time.

And then for a variety of reasons, about half the choir ended up deciding they didn't want to be in choir anymore, so we temporarily joined the choir to help out the lovely woman who is the choir director. (and ended up loving it, by the way, our choir is a hoot. a year later we are still there.) And then in a moment of what could only have been pure desperation, they asked me to help out with a temporary church website while our new one is being designed. And while I was doing that, they discovered I knew a bit about PowerPoint, so I was drafted to help with the presentation of the weekly small groups we're about to start.

So suddenly I am at church all the time. As anyone who is involved in church can tell you, it changes your experience of church to be in on all the little petty arguments, the endless debates, the hard work, the drudgery. You can no longer just waltz in the door and sit down and have your profound spiritual experience while our gorgeous, historic pipe organ plays, and then sashay back out again. You leave a bit of your sweat and blood every time you darken the door, and your attention might be just as much on hitting that C, B-natural, B-flat chromatic progression as it is on the actual words of the choir anthem.

But I'm discovering to my surprise that I don't really mind. There are a lot of  really great people that go to our church, and I'm getting to know them better and appreciate them more. In addition to the hard work, there's a lot of fun and laughter. It's amazing to see what we're actually doing in our community from the perspective of the people who are doing it. It's turning out OK.

on further reflection

Yesterday I said, "I guess I object to the implied arrogance, that Merullo can be so sure that his ideas about spirituality are so important that we all need to know..." 

Even as I wrote that, it occurred to me that somebody could say that about me, too, but I was on my way to a different point at the time. But that's what I've been thinking about since I published yesterday's post. How is that different from me? I put my ideas about spirituality in a blog post a couple of weeks ago and put it out there in the blogosphere. Couldn't someone say the same thing about me, too? How are arrogant are you, AuntBeaN, that you think we all need to hear your definition of spirituality? (and maybe that's one of the reasons that post sat in my draft folder for so long.)

I want to split hairs here, because I have a couple dozen regular readers, sometimes up to 40 or 50 if it's an interesting post (or if there are pictures of the chickens), but I'm hardly putting my ideas out there with the assumption that the general public "needs" to hear them. I'm not submitting my ideas to an agent or a mainline publisher because I feel I deserve to be heard. I'm not expecting you to pay $12 for Aunt Bean's Book.

But what would be wrong with that? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And all of us, me included, deserve to be heard. So why exactly do I have such a strong negative gut reaction when someone else does it? 

It occurred to me that this is an unexamined holdover from my Evangelical upbringing, a prejudice I didn't realize I was still carrying around. We were taught/coached that you can't trust your own ideas about spirituality, because human thinking is inherently flawed. You have to rely on the Bible--which of course meant "you have to rely on the Bible the way it has been interpreted by conservative Christians in our tradition." Don't think, just do as you're told. Don't come up with your own ideas about this stuff, leave it to the experts. And you already know how strongly I disagree with that.

So I think maybe I owe Mr. Merullo an apology. And maybe the guy who wrote The Shack, too (because not only was there the post I linked to yesterday, but I went on and on for two more posts). At some level my former Evangelical self was reacting to their assumption that they can have a valid personal opinion about spirituality--which of course, they can. 

Maybe it feels wrong to me because it appears that they step easily into the shoes of spiritual teacher, and they seem to have utter confidence that they have a right to do so--something that at this point in my life is impossible for me. But that may be my own insecurity projecting that onto them. It's possible they had to fight hard with their own personal demons to reach that point. Or it could be the old male privilege thing--it's a battle that as a woman I have to fight that they don't.

Anyway. Here's what I know: all of us have valid opinions about spirituality (well, all of us who are interested in this stuff). We're all trying to figure out how to integrate spirituality into living in the twenty-first century, and that doesn't always allow for easy integration. Any one of us is as qualified to give our opinion about how that works as the next person. I might still argue with The Shack guy because his tone was so much I AM DELIVERING TRUTH TO YOU, but Merullo is pretty low-key. At least so far. I still haven't finished the book.

Oddly, I've never had any problem taking spiritual lessons/advice from the most unlikely sources--children's movies, interviews on the radio, billboards, mystery novels, whatever--as long as it's not actually couched as spiritual teaching. It's only when someone tries to specifically teach me something about spirituality that my cycnicism kicks in--and that's not necessarily a bad thing, as we've discussed before, so it's not going to stop. There is a lot of nonsense out there. Maybe I want to see how you live before I take any advice from you. But I think I can dump this automatic prejudice against all spiritual teachers that I didn't know I had.