The Divine Comedy and The Tempest

One of the fun things about having several books going at once is that it makes it easier for you see connections between them.

This morning I was reading Dorothy Sayers’ commentary on her translation of Purgatory. She describes the difference between the retributive punishment the characters undergo in Inferno as being very similar to the remedial punishments suffered by those on Mount Purgatory. The difference, she says, lies not in the nature of the suffering, but in the character of the sufferer. In Inferno, the people there have chosen their sin to the very end and so have no remorse – they do not accept the justice of their punishment, so the punishment can do them no good. On the contrary, those in Purgatory are there because they sincerely want to do the will of God and to be with him. They accept justice and “welcome the torment, as a sick man welcomes the pain of surgery” (p. 16). And they don’t just accept the suffering – they “count it all joy.”

Now, I’m a Protestant and don’t believe in Purgatory as a real state after death, but that doesn’t stop us from appreciating the story and from seeing what this means as an allegory of the soul. If we love and seek God, then the suffering we encounter in life is part of the refiner’s fire, and is for our good.

Then, this afternoon, I was rereading The Tempest to prepare for a co-op class I’ll begin teaching soon. In Act 2, a group of shipwrecked men are wandering around trying to find the rest of their companions. To one of these four men, Gonzalo, the island they find themselves on is a Paradise, or can easily be made one, but to the other three it’s “Uninhabitable and almost inaccessible,” with air that stinks of a swamp. The main difference between these men? Gonzalo is a faithful friend and counsellor, where his companions are all traitors and usurpers, “three men of sin,” as they’re called later in the play.

Not a perfect parallel, but it helped me make sense of what’s going on in that scene and another one that follows later, when the three men have a horrific vision, where Gonzalo sees and enjoys a banquet. The last time I read The Tempest I thought Gonzalo must be a lunatic.

Layers of meaning

I originally wrote the post below in April of 2019, but this past week I reread Macbeth for a class I’m teaching in Medieval cosmology and something new occurred to me this time through.

The story of the woman with the lap full of chestnuts can be looked at it from a different angle. A witch came to her wanting to take her blessings, and the woman, recognizing the evil creature, told the witch to leave, and she left. The witch attacked the husband’s ship, but she couldn’t do any permanent harm:

Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.

Evil influences can be refused. Macbeth and his lady could have rejected their evil impulses, but they chose not to.

And in Medieval and Renaissance literature, those two meanings (this one, and the one in the post below) can both be true at the same time. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrup Frye calls this the “principle of manifold or ‘polysemous’ meaning.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

First impressions of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act I, Scenes 1-5

That’s an awfully boring title, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of anything clever. :-p

The kids and I are reading Macbeth for our Medieval and Renaissance Literature class with Angelina Stanford, and I had some random things I wanted to write down before I forgot them, so here they are.

The Weird Sisters, Henry Fuseli, c. 1783

First Witch:
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap
And munched and munched and munched. “Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

This sailor must be must be quite a man, given the trip he’s on, the ship he masters, and the fact that the Witch says she can’t sink his ship. She can, however, curse the husband of this foolish woman.

I’m saying she’s foolish because here she is with her lap full of blessings gobbling them so greedily that she won’t even share when an old woman asks for some.

If you know anything about fairy tales, you know that’s a huge mistake, a mistake of wicked stepmother proportions.

The chestnuts caught my attention though because so often the chestnut tree is used in literature as a symbol of happiness and prosperity. If you know anything about Macbeth, you know that this most definitely isn’t a story about happiness and prosperity.

Let me go back to the beginning.

The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with the stage direction, “Thunder and lightening. Enter three Witches.” These three make a plan to meet with Macbeth before the day is over (to tell him he will be king, as we later learn), and saying, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they exit, and Scene 1 ends.

Given that the story begins with upheaval in nature, I’m going to assume that whatever disorder that set off this tragedy has already happened.

They reappear in Scene 3: “Thunder. Enter the three Witches.” The First Witch tells of her encounter with the sailor’s wife, which Asimov says has nothing at all to do with the play—it’s just there to please King James I, who “considered himself a particular expert on the matter of witchcraft,” and had “written a book called Demonology, in which he advocated . . . the severest measures against witches.” [Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: The English Plays, page 151]

Asimov, you’re a genius and I love you dearly, but you completely missed the boat on this one. Shakespeare wasn’t just a suck-up. He was an artist and he knew exactly what he was doing here.

(Before going on, I want to point out that these three are elsewhere in the play called the weyward/weird/wyrd sisters, so I think we’re supposed to think of them as being similar to the Fates of classical mythology, or the Norns of Norse mythology, priestesses who told the future.)

Now back to the chestnuts. Chestnuts provide a lot of nutrition and calories in a tiny little package, so they’ve always symbolised things like prosperity and fertility. Because they fall in such abundance during the harvest season, they also symbolise foresight and long life. Here’s something new I learned: They also symbolise the ability to receive ancient wisdom.

So, we have a prosperous woman (that she’s “rump-fed” tells us this) enjoying the bounty of nature, who refuses an old woman’s request for food, resulting in her husband being cursed. In Scene 5, we meet Lady Macbeth, who is as unnatural a woman as it’s possible to be.

I don’t have any conclusions exactly, mostly questions and guesses. Was Macbeth already corrupted before he met the Weird Sisters? I tend to think so, since good people don’t jump head-first into evil. CS Lewis talks about this regarding Mark Studdock’s descent in That Hideous Strength. Macbeth does briefly seem to accept that if he’s meant to be king, it’ll happen without his taking action. But Lady Macbeth must have long since fallen since she’s so quick to push her husband into evil action in order to bring about the prophecy.

First impressions of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act I, Scenes 1-5

That’s an awfully boring title, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of anything clever. :-p

The kids and I are reading Macbeth for our Medieval and Renaissance Literature class with Angelina Stanford, and I had some random things I wanted to write down before I forgot them, so here they are.

The Weird Sisters, Henry Fuseli, c. 1783

First Witch:
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap
And munched and munched and munched. “Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

This sailor must be must be quite a man, given the trip he’s on, the ship he masters, and the fact that the Witch says she can’t sink his ship. She can, however, curse the husband of this foolish woman.

I’m saying she’s foolish because here she is with her lap full of blessings gobbling them so greedily that she won’t even share when an old woman asks for some.

If you know anything about fairy tales, you know that’s a huge mistake, a mistake of wicked stepmother proportions.

The chestnuts caught my attention though because so often the chestnut tree is used in literature as a symbol of happiness and prosperity. If you know anything about Macbeth, you know that this most definitely isn’t a story about happiness and prosperity.

Let me go back to the beginning.

The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with the stage direction, “Thunder and lightening. Enter three Witches.” These three make a plan to meet with Macbeth before the day is over (to tell him he will be king, as we later learn), and saying, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they exit, and Scene 1 ends.

Given that the story begins with upheaval in nature, I’m going to assume that whatever disorder that set off this tragedy has already happened.

They reappear in Scene 3: “Thunder. Enter the three Witches.” The First Witch tells of her encounter with the sailor’s wife, which Asimov says has nothing at all to do with the play—it’s just there to please King James I, who “considered himself a particular expert on the matter of witchcraft,” and had “written a book called Demonology, in which he advocated . . . the severest measures against witches.” [Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: The English Plays, page 151]

Asimov, you’re a genius and I love you dearly, but you completely missed the boat on this one. Shakespeare wasn’t just a suck-up. He was an artist and he knew exactly what he was doing here.

(Before going on, I want to point out that these three are elsewhere in the play called the weyward/weird/wyrd sisters, so I think we’re supposed to think of them as being similar to the Fates of classical mythology, or the Norns of Norse mythology, priestesses who told the future.)

Now back to the chestnuts. Chestnuts provide a lot of nutrition and calories in a tiny little package, so they’ve always symbolised things like prosperity and fertility. Because they fall in such abundance during the harvest season, they also symbolise foresight and long life. Here’s something new I learned: They also symbolise the ability to receive ancient wisdom.

So, we have a prosperous woman (that she’s “rump-fed” tells us this) enjoying the bounty of nature, who refuses an old woman’s request for food, resulting in her husband being cursed. In Scene 5, we meet Lady Macbeth, who is as unnatural a woman as it’s possible to be.

I don’t have any conclusions exactly, mostly questions and guesses. Was Macbeth already corrupted before he met the Weird Sisters? I tend to think so, since good people don’t jump head-first into evil. CS Lewis talks about this regarding Mark Studdock’s descent in That Hideous Strength. Macbeth does briefly seem to accept that if he’s meant to be king, it’ll happen without his taking action. But Lady Macbeth must have long since fallen since she’s so quick to push her husband into evil action in order to bring about the prophecy.

On creativity

One day when I only had five children, my friend Michelle dropped in for lunch when I was feeling especially low. My mom, my husband, and all my kids are so creative—we have artists and musicians and storytellers—and in comparison I felt so very uncreative.

As I was complaining, I was making soup out of leftovers, pulling odds and ends out of the freezer to fill it out, absentmindedly dumping in spices, and tasting it every once in a while. When we sat down to eat, Michelle said that when she was watching me make it she was kind of horrified because I wasn’t really even paying attention to what I was doing, but she called it the best soup she’d ever eaten, and told me to stop thinking of myself as lacking in creativity.

Don’t think of “creativity” as something that’s limited to the fine or performing arts, or to writing poetry and stories.

You are made in God’s image, so you are creative! You just need to learn to recognize all the creative things you’re already doing.

Making soup without a recipe is creative. Building a chicken coop is creative. Keeping the lawn tidy and attractive is creative. Working puzzles is creative. Seeing connections between seemingly unrelated things is creative. Making your bed and placing the pillows “just so” is creative. Deciding which books out of all the possibilities your children should read next is creative. Having your spices or tools or pencils arranged so that you can find exactly what you want when you want it is creative.

Do you see the common thread here?

In all of these activities, you are imitating God’s creative work in the beginning: Bringing order out of chaos.

Take Michelle’s advice: Stop thinking of yourself as lacking in creativity. Look for the ways you are already bringing order out of chaos, and build from there.

Math update: Struggling through a dry spell

I was working on  the third installment of my Squaring the Circle series, in which I’d intended to relate what I’d learned about the nature of pi – I said I was pretty excited about it, and I really was!  I only wish I’d written that section this spring when I was still glowing from that Eureka! moment.  It’s a lot harder to write about all these weeks later, so instead* I’m reading the whole chapter on the Ancient Greeks in A History of Mathematics – before I just read the sections dealing specifically with measuring a circle.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
But here’s something fascinating about this chapter – I met nearly all of these people when I read John Mark Reynolds’ When Athens Met Jerusalem this spring and summer.  Did you know that Thales, the first philosopher, was also the first mathematician?  I didn’t, which is why I was so surprised when I wrote this post on Math and Philosophy.

All the early mathematicians were philosophers.  In fact, it is said that Pythagoras is the one who coined the words philosophy, “love of wisdom,” and mathematics, “that which is learned.” 

“Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the Pythagorean order was the confidence it maintained in the pursuit of philosophical and mathematical studies as a moral basis for the conduct of life.” (Merzbach and Boyer, p. 44)

More interesting passages from this chapter:

“ . . . mathematics was more closely related to a love of wisdom than to the exigencies of practical life.”

“Greek mathematics, in its earlier stages, frequently came closer to the ‘modern’ mathematics of today than to the ordinary arithmetic of a generation ago.”

“[T]he Pythagoreans not only established arithmetic as a branch of philosophy; they seem to have made it the basis of a unification of all aspects of the world around them.”

“The point of view of the Pythagoreans seems to have been so overwhelmingly philosophical and abstract that technical details in computation were related to a separate discipline, called logistic. This dealt with the number of things, rather than with the essence and properties of number as such, matter of concern in arithmetic. That is, the ancient Greeks made a clear distinction between mere calculation, on the one hand, and what today is known as the theory of numbers, on the other. . . .  [T]he early Ionian and Pythagorean mathematicians [have] the primary role in establishing mathematics as a rational and liberal discipline.”
That’s from the first half of the chapter.  There are sections coming up headed “Mathematics and the Liberal Arts,” and “The Academy,” so I’m looking forward to what else the authors have to say about that.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
I had a brief moment of elation today when one of my friends shared a math quiz on Facebook. 

There was one moment of panic involving multiplying a four-digit number by a two-digit one – the rest I was able to do in my head, but I had to pull out pen and paper for this one.  Oh, and there was one other that threw me, but my violin daughter was watching over my shoulder at that moment and said, “Think of it this way . . .” and then I was able to do it in my head.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
Here’s an interesting article you should read – Research on the Teaching of Math, which I think is a reprint of the appendix of the same name in Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn’s book Teaching the Trivium. They cover what they’ve learned of the history of teaching math, research on brain development, and suggestions for what to do with your own children.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~
* Here’s a bonus article:  Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators.  I printed it out two days ago, but I’ve been avoiding reading it because I’m afraid it’ll be depressing.
:-p

Fresh paint

This is the color we're using for our new laundry room. It's kind of a robin's egg blue, and you can see in the pictures below how it changes color a bit depending on the light.  I love colors that do that -- more blue in some lights, more green in others.

When you read advice on choosing paint, you're usually told that the color will be much more intense on the wall than it is on the little paint card, so you should decide on which shade you like, then use the one that's one step lighter than that.

It doesn't work that way for me. I guess I'm afraid of getting too intense a color, so I naturally pick something that's lighter than what I'd really want. And then I put it on and I'm always disappointed with it.

But this time I ignored the advice and bought the color I liked best.

And this time the color is perfect.

Apraxia Awareness Day

My nineteen year old son, the one who takes care of the animals and milks the goats, was diagnosed with Childhood Apraxia of Speech a few months before his fourth birthday.  When he was seen by a specialist at nine years of age, the specialist said that it was the severest case he'd ever had, and described some other problems that we knew he had, we'd just never had them actually named before.

I've never blogged about this because I try to respect my children's privacy, so I rarely mention their weaknesses unless I have something useful to say to moms about raising and educating children, and I can do it discreetly, which is obviously impossible to do when writing about the only child in my family who has an actual medically diagnosed handicap of a rather profound nature.

So, for now, I want to point you to an article that nicely summarizes the condition and mentions some of the difficulties faced by these children and their families -- What Is Apraxia and Why Should You Care?

If this is something that y'all would find helpful for me to blog about, then I'll try harder to figure out how to write about it.  Until now I've only mentioned it in a generic "learning differences" kind of way, both because I don't know how my son would feel about me being more specific, and because that way the information might be useful to any mom.

Let me know what you think.

Blue is my favorite color

Not because I love blue more than any other color -- I love lots of colors.  Red, for example.  And purple.  And black, and green, and brown...  And I love any number of combinations of colors:  Black and brown, yellow and white, green and grey, green and orange in spite of not particularly loving orange.

That hasn't always been the case.  Not loving orange, that is. When I was in first grade my favorite outfit was an orange and yellow one my mother made me, and for the art contest that year my drawing featured a lot of orange and yellow.  Everyone's drawings were hung in the hall and when I got to school the morning the ribbons had been awarded I rushed to mine to see whether I'd won anything.  I had! -- an orange ribbon, which was nice since it matched the picture, but puzzling.  I knew what a blue ribbon meant, and a red one, but not orange.  Then I noticed something strange.  All the pictures had ribbons and the ribbons coordinated perfectly with the dominant colors in the work.  So I understood: The ribbons didn't mean anything.

But, back to blue.  People like to ask kids what their favorite color is, and they expect you to have an answer, and if you say, "I like purple and green and yellow," because you happen to be standing next to a flower bed featuring that particularly lovely combination they'll say, "But which one do you like best?"  So you have to come up with one color that you like best.  I'd noticed that most girls my age liked pink the best, so I decided that blue would be my favorite.

Learning to navigate the questions asked by adults is just part of growing up.  By elementary school I'd learned that "A mommy" was the wrong answer to the standard "What do you want to be when you grow up?" question.  I amused myself by thinking up various careers and trying them out on the grown-ups to see which ones got the best reaction.  Conclusion:  It didn't really matter which one it was, so long as it wasn't Mommy. 

Grown-ups are so strange.

Addendum

You know what?  I’m going to have to add something to that last post where I said, “It’salways worse when you’re living through it than it will be when you’reremembering it.”

That’s true for the routine difficulties we all live through because we’re human, but even though that’s the usual kind of hardship we face, it isn’t the only kind.

There are the calamitous ones. 

Like the death of a loved one that leaves you in a state of shock, where you’re just numbly going through the motions because things must be done and you are the one who must do them. 

Or a severe illness of the sort that allows your body to keep working, albeit in a badly reduced capacity, and you just keep muddling through because… well, because that’s just what you do.

In situations like those it’s actually the opposite of the routine kind of hardship.  When you’ve finally climbed out on the other side of that vale, you look back and think, “That was awful!  How was I even able to live like that?”

In both cases it’s the grace of God.  “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.  For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.”

Bless the LORD, O my soul.

Some initial thoughts on the 2012 CiRCE conference

because I can’t go back to reading Ideas Have Consequences as long as I’m full of this conference – I’m afraid it’ll make my head explode


“The world that God made is best known through harmony.” ~John Hodges


In the first session, “A Contemplation of Creation, Part I,” Andrew Kern talked about creation, metaphor, and analogy. He said that the Law of God, the Torah, should not be thought of as a legal code, but as the wisdom of God. Notice that it begins with the story of his creation, and of his care for his people. Torah teaches us of his creation, his craftsmanship, his artistry. The core principle is harmony, unity in diversity.

All of the creation myths in the world embody the Myth of Violence. Think about the Greek story of Chaos and the Titans and the gods. Think of the modern myth of the Big Bang. Only the Biblical account does not begin in violence – a Triune God, at unity within the Godhead, creating out of his love and peace. The world we live in today is very angry at us because only we have the Myth of Peace. Referencing Elizabeth’s Theokritoff’s book Living in God's Creation he said that we are the bond of unity in creation – we are to unite the disparate aspects of the created order and bring them into unity with God.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

John Hodges gave his lecture, “Music and Metaphor: Towards a Sacramental View of Creation,” right after Andrew Kern, and he swore that they hadn’t been comparing notes. The quote at the top is from his lecture, which was all about harmony.

He said that Christ used metaphors to teach about himself – “I am the vine,” “I am the door” – but the metaphor works the other way too. Since Christ was there first, and since creation reflects the creator, the reason we even have vines in the first place is because they are like God in some way.

Other insights from John Hodges:

Metaphor is taking two disparate things and bringing them into harmony

Art is embodying something that is not able to be perceived except through that medium

Our Triune God is invisible; Trinity cannot be imaged logically

Perception of beauty = the ability to see harmony

Our ability to perceive beauty (and beauty itself) is fallen – we have broken perception; therefore we must help our students hone their ability to see harmony, we must teach them what to listen for in music, what to look for in the arts, show them what it is about a great work that makes it worth loving

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I was impressed (again) with the importance of having a harmonious household – that our relations with each other should be harmonious is the obvious application, but our relationship with our things and the things’ relationship with each other also should be in harmony. Making the home a harmonious environment is foundational to teaching our children what harmony is, and teaching them to love it.

And of course, the reason I keep harping on this is because I need to hear it myself. OFTEN.

Comparisons are odious

[Every once in a while, when the mood strikes, I'll add posts from my old, defunct blog on to this one in their proper historical places. Today I ran across one that was originally posted in May of 2008 and decided to repost it. Because I haven't changed any.]


My oldest children participate in a community chorus that focuses on the great music of the Church, historical and contemporary, putting on a concert twice each year. Every spring the director has the graduating seniors sing a special song together, and she includes a brief bio on each in the program.

Well, the spring concert was last night and Elaienar [aka Eldest Daughter] was included in the “graduating senior” group even though if I had to get technical about it I’d say she finished 12th grade last year. I didn’t think about mentioning it to the director back then since Elai was busy with other things that spring and high school graduation would be, for us, a rather artificial way of marking our children’s milestones. But we had no objection to her being part of the graduating group, since this is the last year she’ll be singing with the group as a student. If she continues to sing with them, it will be as a mentor.

Unfortunately, we’d forgotten about the bio, so when Elai was asked to write one up at the last moment, she wrote one that was short on facts but long on wit. I thought it portrayed her personality in a way that a list of facts wouldn’t do.

But the dear director, bless her heart and we do love her to pieces, doesn’t share Elai’s quirky sense of humor, so the bio that was written up in the program was nothing like what she had written. It was sweet and affectionate, but it looked so dull next to everyone else’s lists of accomplishments and awards and honors and scholarships and where they’re all going to college. If I’d known it was going to be rewritten I’d’ve had her supply more facts to pad it.

You may not believe this, but I actually woke up this morning with a sick tummy because it was bothering me so.

When I’m at home doing what we’ve set out to do, I’m reasonably happy with what we’re doing and I like the way things are working out. It’s just when these occasions where it’s impossible not to make a comparison occur that I doubt and second-guess the Lord’s leading. And I don’t like being different – it’s so uncomfortable. Really, I just want to fit in… I want everyone else to like me and approve of me. Elai says I have an inferiority complex – she’s not worried about the bio at all because she honestly doesn’t care what other people think about her and her abilities.

Blech.

See, I should make this into a post that encourages other people to trust the Lord.

Something spiritual.

Like my favorite bloggers would do.
:-p

Limbo

It feels like nothing's happening. Our Missouri house is finished but we're waiting on paperwork so the construction loan can be converted. And waiting... The renovation cost us a lot more than we'd estimated, so we're rethinking our original plan, which was for me and the four younger children to move out there next month. We think we ought to get the extra debt we went into paid down first before starting to move...

On the other hand, a lot is happening. My oldest son has been taking EMT classes this summer, and right now he's running some errands related to putting in his application for a volunteer position at the local fire and rescue station. This afternoon will be his first day on the job as a bagger (working for tips) at the commissary.

Tomorrow, the kids are going down to the county fair -- their group of volunteers at George Washington's birthplace is putting on a play in the evening. Mike won't be able to go since he has to stay home and milk the goats, but a friend and I are going. I haven't been to a county fair in ages and I'm looking forward to it.

We had a yard sale last weekend, advertised in the local paper and everything, but we had a lousy turnout. We've always done really well at yard sales, but this (along with an unadvertised attempt two weeks earlier) is the first time we've had one since moving here four years ago. I don't think it'll be worth it to try again. We were trying to get rid of stuff preparatory to moving, plus make a little money. Usually we just drop stuff off at the local charity thrift store. We have a few items that the thrift store won't take, like a bed, so I guess we'll try Craigslist or something like that. I'd hate to have to take it to the dump.

And of course, there's painting and repairs that we need to do to get the house ready to go on the market in the spring.

So I have plenty of regular, daily work to be doing, but I don't like not knowing for sure what our longer-range goals are. I have a hard time staying on task when I don't have a clear goal and timeline before me. So far, all of our deadlines have been receding, which makes it feel like we're not accomplishing our goals, but when I compare where we are today with where we were this time last, we really have made progress... just a whole lot slower than we originally thought.

All this slowness and waiting gives us plenty of time to second-guess ourselves, too. We keep wondering if we're really making the right decisions. We know that in the end God works all things together for good, but it sure would be comfortable if we had some way of knowing that what we're doing now, today, is Good in itself -- is pleasing to the Lord -- and not just stupid mistakes that he'll eventually make good in spite of us.

On love and mortality

Since our 20th anniversary in February I’m starting to feel like the years are going by too fast. Even if we make it to fifty years it won’t have been long enough.

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12)

Memory is a funny thing

Sunday night, Mosey came to me humming a tune and wanted to know what it was. I told her it was “Rise up, oh men of God,” and she went to look it up in the Trinity (Presbyterian) hymnal so she could play it on the piano.

It wasn’t in that hymnal, which I thought was odd — I know I’ve played it a lot in the last few years, and that’s the hymnal I use most often — but I told her to check the Baptist hymnal, the one I grew up with. Sure enough it was there. St. Thomas is the tune’s name, so I looked it up in the Trinity. “I love thy kingdom, Lord” is one of the two hymns sung to St. Thomas in the Trinity. It’s also the hymn we had sung before the Gospel reading that very morning.

As if that weren’t bad enough, not only am I the one who picked out that hymn, but I’m the one who played it during the service! And yet, the words that came to me when I heard the tune by itself were the ones I grew up with.

That's muh boy

Yesterday while we were turning the calendar page over, I mentioned to my little man that his 8th birthday is next month. And that’s when it struck me… he won’t be home for it. My mom and I spent at least an hour on the phone together Saturday going over our upcoming commitments (and they are legion) and planning how to get all the kids out to her house, half-way across the country, for their regular summer visit. We’ll be doing it in two batches, the boys one time and the girls next.

So I told him, “You’ll be at Grandma’s on your birthday this year.”

It fell out this way two years ago too, and I would have thought he’d prefer it that way. But he said, “I’d rather be with you on my birthday… When I’m with you I get tools, but when I’m at Grandma’s I only get toys.”

:-D

Comparisons are odious

My oldest children participate in a community chorus that focuses on the great music of the Church, historical and contemporary, putting on a concert twice each year. Every spring the director has the graduating seniors sing a special song together, and she includes a brief bio on each in the program.

Well, the spring concert was last night and Elaienar was included in the “graduating senior” group even though if I had to get technical about it I’d say she finished 12th grade last year. I didn’t think about mentioning it to the director back then since Elai was busy with other things that spring and high school graduation would be, for us, a rather artificial way of marking our children’s milestones. But we had no objection to her being part of the graduating group, since this is the last year she’ll be singing with the group as a student. If she continues to sing with them, it will be as a mentor.

Unfortunately, we’d forgotten about the bio, so when Elai was asked to write one up at the last moment, she wrote one that was short on facts but long on wit. I thought it portrayed her personality in a way that a list of facts wouldn’t do.

But the dear director, bless her heart and we do love her to pieces, doesn’t share Elai’s quirky sense of humor, so the bio that was written up in the program was nothing like what she had written. It was sweet and affectionate, but it looked so dull next to everyone else’s lists of accomplishments and awards and honors and scholarships and where they’re all going to college. If I’d known it was going to be rewritten I’d’ve had her supply more facts to pad it.

You may not believe this, but I actually woke up this morning with a sick tummy because it was bothering me so.

When I’m at home doing what we’ve set out to do, I’m reasonably happy with what we’re doing and I like the way things are working out. It’s just when these occasions where it’s impossible not to make a comparison occur that I doubt and second-guess the Lord’s leading. And I don’t like being different – it’s so uncomfortable. Really, I just want to fit in… I want everyone else to like me and approve of me. Elai says I have an inferiority complex – she’s not worried about the bio at all because she honestly doesn’t care what other people think about her and her abilities.

Blech.

See, I should make this into a post that encourages other people to trust the Lord.

Something spiritual.

Like my favorite bloggers would do.
:-p

The pleasure of a grown daughter

Last fall my baby sister, who is single and lives alone, was diagnosed with cancer. She began chemotherapy almost immediately and because she lives in Arkansas, there was nothing I could do beyond praying for her and trying to encourage her. How I longed to be able to cook for her and do things for her!

I couldn't go to her, but my seventeen year old daughter could. We spent the end of 2006 reading up on cancer and nutrition, and planning meals, and then she rode back to Arkansas with my parents when they went home from their Christmas visit with us. She took her books with her, and has been writing me about her studies, in addition to regular food reports.

It's been hard for all of us having her gone for so long, but this is one thing we've been raising our daughters to be able to do - to serve those in need - and I'm so glad she's been able to do it. I'm also incredibly thankful that we've homeschooled all our children from the very beginning. If she were in a traditional school of any sort, it would have been impossible for her to go without dropping out of her senior year. As it is, she has been able to continue her studies, though they've taken a different path from what we had planned at the beginning of the school year.

I don't expect that when she returns things will back to the way they were before - she will have changed, and so will we. But I do look forward to reading and discussing things with her again face to face, continuing to train her to be a godly wife and mother, and simply enjoying her companionship. I also expect that the years between now and her eventual (Lord willing!) marriage will be similar to this one.

Bittersweet.