School's out for Christmas

This past week I finished the first full semester of my MFA program--I think I now have a total of 12 credits (counting this semester and the summer intensive residency). In total I wrote three essays (totaling 52 pages), read ten books, and wrote ten short papers about the books. The first two essays were personal essays and the last was a critical essay. For the critical essay, I chose to write on a topic related to Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, a book which I commented on a bit last October. It’s been a lot of work but a good kind of work. A kind of work that I think Pieper would approve of as bordering on the leisurely, an attempt to go beyond the work-a-day world.

As Pieper wrote:

This is why the ability to be 'at leisure' is one of the basic powers of the human soul. Like the gift of contemplative self-immersion in Being, and the ability to uplift one's spirits in festivity, the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work. Only in such authentic leisure can the 'door into freedom' be opened out of the confinement of that 'hidden anxiety,' which a certain perceptive observer has seen as the distinctive character of the working world, for which 'employment and unemployment are the two poles of an existence with no escape.'

Between medical writing work and school work there hasn’t been as much creative energy or time left over to put into this blog so I think the writing here has been a bit thin in recent months. Thanks to those of you who have continued to be regular readers despite that.

The next semester starts again after the first of the year. I’m relating to my sons in a new way: the pressure of homework assignments and the relief of a break in between terms.

Is anything of meaning said?

A couple days ago I received the current issue of an email newsletter, a newsletter I never requested and have asked--without success--to be removed from the mailing list of.

Here is what is written about the featured speaker at this month's meeting. Out of courtesy I won't list the speaker or group name.

"[Speaker name] will share how she sparked, expanded and ultimately grew into her own inner vision of greatness. You'll learn about her journey in bringing her deepest expression of herself into the open for all to see and enjoy."

Huh?? What do statements like these even mean? How can anything of true value come out of such a talk?

Sure, I'll have seconds

A number of bloggers have been using the month of November as an opportunity to made daily declarations of gratitude. I've been following Julana's list. On this, the last day of November, I'm going to make a post of thanksgiving. And it's going to sound silly on the surface but upon further reflection I hope that you'll agree it's not.

I'm thankful for a good appetite.

Yes, it leads me to eat things I shouldn't eat. And yes, it puts me in the constant position of wishing the scale hit a lesser number when I stand on it. Yet, a good appetite is a profound gift.

Why did it occur to me, just now, to sing the praises of appetite?

Because I'm writing a paper on chronic kidney disease and in researching this paper I just read a study linking appetite to clinical outcome in patients with this disease. The risk of dying is 4 to 5 times greater in patients with a poor appetite compared with patients with a good appetite. Aside from the risk of death, patients with a poor appetite have a greater risk for hospitalization and report a lower quality of life compared with patients with a good appetite. The authors of this paper suggest that asking a simple question, "How's your appetite?", is a fairly accurate predictor of clinical outcome in these patients.

Appetite seems to be one of those things we have little control over. It's there in whatever degree that it chooses. From the perspective of this paper, appetite is truly a profound gift.

Now, I don't think this realization gives me license to honor my appetite by walking into kitchen and taking a handful of chocolate chips out of the Nestles bag but maybe just a few can't hurt.

Gathered around the Christmas tree, singing the blues

The Christmas season isn’t merry for everyone. Loss and grief can be accutely felt in the weeks surrounding December 25. A Covenant church in Batavia, Illinois is acknowledging and attending to this dark side of the season by holding a “Blue Christmas” service the Sunday before Christmas Day. Pastor Mick Murphy said, “This service welcomes our darkness, because it provides a place to remember that the light of Christ has been sent to overcome it.”

The service is not an "I hate Christmas" observance, Murphy stresses. "It is a service that reflects the words of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," Murphy says, quoting the lyrics that say, "And ye beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low; who toil along the winding way with painful steps and slow; look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing; O rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing."

This is a great idea and those are fabulous lyrics. (Sometimes it’s hard to beat those old hymns.)

Produce as a vehicle of grace

My oldest son has a long-time favorite dinner, steak and broccoli stir-fry using a recipe given to me by a woman I used to work with who was from Taiwan. When he was a freshman in college, coming home for the first time at Thanksgiving I made this meal for him on his first night home. How lovely, right? Wrong. It turned out to be a disaster.

The sauce is thickened with cornstarch but instead of taking the gold cornstarch box off the shelf, I took down the other gold box that was next to the gold cornstarch box. Needless to say, cornstarch was not in the box I took down. It was baking soda. Also needless to say, the baking soda didn’t thicken the sauce. Where my brain was I don’t know but I kept adding more and more baking soda wondering why the sauce wasn’t responding as it usually did.

Eventually I figured out the problem (I think the fumes of the baking soda started stinging my eyes). I launched into a rescue effort to salvage this special meal but it was to no avail. We sat down at the table and I was the first to take a bite. It was completely inedible. The baking soda had started to literally dissolve the broccoli and even the steak. I hated to do it, but I gathered up the plates and threw out the meal. My husband and sons kindly left to bring home Chinese take-out.

It’s been a joke around here ever since. The debacle of the favorite meal. When I think about it, I can still smell the caustic smell of the baking soda working on the broccoli.

That was three years ago and I never made that meal again until last Sunday. With my son now a senior in college, it was time for me to get back in the saddle and put his favorite meal on the table once more.

All went well in the preparation. I took my time. I looked carefully at which gold box I was taking down from the cupboard. The sauce thickened nicely. Sigh of relief.

Table set. Candles lit. We sat down to eat.

My son took a few bites and nodded affirmatively. The curse is broken, he joked. I took a few bites and thought, hmmm...something’s not right. A few more bites and then I remembered the green onions still chopped in a bowl and sitting on the counter. I jumped up and sauteed them quickly while I asked them to slow down their eating. It just took a minute. I returned to the table and added green onions to each person’s plate. Then it tasted just right.

Flannery O’Connor wrote that in every good story there is a moment of grace, whether or not the reader even recognizes that it’s there. The chance to add the forgotten ingredient was a moment of grace in the three-year story of the steak stir-fry. I may never look at green onions the same again.

Together

I’m still making my way through Confessions. Actually I have all but the last chapter read and I’m now starting to go back and type up my notes from it. I’ve read it before, pieces of it, never cover to cover. This time is cover to cover. It is so dense with thoughts that I think it could be the only book one ever reads and still it wouldn’t be exhausted.

My mind is lingering on a passage in which he (Augustine) has moved to Milan and two of his friends have moved along with him. Each of them is in a state of desperate spiritual searching. About his friend Nebridius, Augustine writes, "All these things he had left and had come to Milan for no other reason than to be with me: for with a real passion for truth and wisdom, he was in the same anguish as I and the same uncertain wavering; and he continued his ardent search for the way of happiness and his close investigation of the most difficult questions." Augustine continues on to include his other friend, Alypius: "Thus there were together the mouths of three needy souls, bitterly confessing to one another their spiritual poverty and waiting upon You..."

This passage is holding my attention because I’m intrigued by it as an image of ideal Christian community, albeit pre-Christian in this example. Commitments among imperfect searching people to wait on the Lord together.

On the care and feeding of sons

Today and tomorrow are happy days. The son who is three months into his freshman college year is coming home this afternoon and the son who is three months into his senior year is coming home tomorrow. I’m thankful for the homecomings.

I’ve been reading Confessions by Saint Augustine. In recalling his years of education he writes of his father’s sacrifice for his education, yet it isn’t in a spirit of thankfulness for this education or sacrifice that he writes.

Everyone of course praised my father because, although his means did not allow it, he had somehow provided the wherewithal for his son to travel so far for the sake of his studies. Many a very much richer citizen did no such thing for his children. Yet this same father never bothered about how I was growing towards You or how chaste or unchaste I might be, so long as I grew in eloquence, however much I might lack of Your cultivation O God, who are the one true and good Lord of your field, my heart.

Now that my husband and I are nearing the end years of our educational responsibility for our sons I find those 1600-year-old words worth some soulsearching. There is so much in terms of education parents need to provide their children, so much children need to learn in order to make their way in the world, to stay safe, to thrive. To cover it all is not only overwhelming, it is impossible. From the bottom of my heart I hope that my sons have taken from their education a strong sense of learning plus faith, learning integrated with faith. It is certainly easier, however, to look at a grade and assess academic competence than it is to probe the spiritual heart of a teenager or young adult. I’m thankful that my sons went to a high school in which Confessions was required reading.

Now I’m off to the grocery store to stock the refrigerator. No matter the state of their hearts they are always hungry. :)