Be Not Idle

In the spirit of St. Mary Magdeline’s feast day, my history professor came up with the following:

 ”Mary Magdeline was from a wealthy family. Her uncle, Joseph of Arimethea, was wealthy enough to afford a very good tomb. He was also friendly with Pontius Pilate so…”

And that’s where my note-taking ends because it wasn’t even remotely funny anymore. I have absolutely no idea where he gets this crap from. He also lectured today (and previously) that “inferential reasoning” and “most Jewish scholars” say that Jesus definitely was married or the Saducees would have attacked him. 

I give up. I’ve asked him about his sources, and he lent me a book written by a University of Michigan instructor in the ’50s with footnotes that wouldn’t pass muster in a high school student’s essay today. (For example, a comment that Buddhist missionaries obviously influenced the religious environment of Jesus’ time leads to this footnote: Gospel of John.) No chapter, no verse – and no explanation linking Buddhist thought with that in the Gospel.  The book also treated Gnostic writings as equal to Book of Tobit and such. 

I promised myself I wouldn’t even bother to ask him for sources anymore, especially since other students roll their eyes and today mutter “There she goes again.” But when he peppers his talks with dirty jokes and “On the History channel I saw…”, I want to scream.

Jeff Miller aka “The Curt Jester” has a post about women who were ordained as priests in a Protestant church – and insist they’re Catholic priests because they “remain faithful to the (Catholic) church”.  They’ve been excommunicated, of course, but they and their supports don’t “feel” the excommunication. 

Therefore, they’re not.

 This actually reminds me of an interesting anecdote that someone told me (and I have permission to share).  There was a married woman who started having an adulterous affair. Her husband and children were upset, of course, but even worse was the blithe way in which she wanted to incorporate her lover into their lives. Namely, she wanted her lover to move into the same home as her husband.

I know there are people (like NOW ex-president Patricia Ireland) who think that bigamy is fine if only people in the relationship are “open-minded”. However, the husband (and children) weren’t having it.

Her husband filed for a divorce. After it was finalized, the ex-wife continued to refer to herself as his wife.  She remarried. When he remarried, she showed up at the hotel where the ceremony took place – with her NEW husband - in order to object.

So that’s what I think of women who excommunicate themselves and then insist they’re in communion with the Church.  

One of the Baby Rabbits – the quality is poor either because I was moving too much or the camera was zoomed in too close.

I also took photos of Mother Rabbit and her brood. Only once was her head up.  The rest of the time, she was grooming the heck out of them. She actually managed to flip one of them (on the far left) onto its back. It kept nursing, its white belly exposed and its legs kicking  a little.

When I mow the lawn or weed the garden behind the house, I always watch for Mr. Toad, the amphibian that suns himself near the garden. It’s not unusual for him to leap suddenly from the grass or scurry into the flowerbed.

So today when I was coming around the side of the deck, I wasn’t particularly surprised to see movement in the grass head of me. But it was too fast and furry to be a toad and too slow to be a chipmunk. It was followed by a small explosion of other bodies running away from the horrible Mower of Earsplitting Doom.

Bunnies! Two itsy bitsy rabbits went hopping through the grass and into the garden along the privacy fence. One remained in the grassy nook between the trunks of the maple cluster until it, too, lost its nerve and made a run for the greenery. Since I like the lawn is little longer and my yard is relatively dog-free,  the backyard must have looked like a little sanctuary (until I began mowing).

I figured that their mother had left them in what she thought was a safe place, so I kept mowing.  Then she burst from the garden and ran away, leaving the three little ones behind. I got a nice look at them, since they weren’t sure at first if I were evil, too.  They are very young, so that their ears are more round than long, and I could hold them in one hand (which I wouldn’t). Then they voted that although I didn’t make a lot of racket, I was clearly a Hateful Beast. They hid in the mums.

Mother took several hours return.  She was none too subtle, either.  I looked up and there she was in front of the deck, scratching her ear. I moved and she hopped over to the corner of the deck, “hidden” by a statue of Our Lady. I could see one exquisite black pool of an eye staring at me. Once in a while the long fuzzy frond of an ear would twitch into view. 

While she waited, the three youngsters came out from the garden. I left the deck and moved to the bedroom to get a better view from that window and saw something unusual: a wild rabbit grooming her brood while they nursed.

I took some nice photos before she spooked and hid in the sedum. Then I realized there were FIVE babies. Cute ones, too. 

As a young minister, I was asked by a funeral director to hold a graveside service for a homeless man who had no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a new cemetery way back in the country, and this man would be the first to be buried there.

I was not familiar with the backwoods area, and I soon became lost. Being a typical man, I did not stop to ask for directions. I finally arrived an hour late. I saw the backhoe and the open
grave, but the hearse was nowhere in sight. The gravediggers were eating lunch. I apologized to them for my tardiness, and I stepped to the side of the open grave. There I saw the vault lid
already in place.

I assured the workers I would not hold them up for long. The workers gathered around the grave and stood silently as I began to pour out my heart and soul. As I preached about ‘looking forward to a brighter tomorrow’ and ‘the glory that is to come,’ the workers began to say ‘Amen,’ ‘Praise the Lord,’ and ‘Glory!’ The fervor of these men truly inspired me. So, I preached and I preached like I had never preached before, all the way from Genesis to Revelations.

I finally closed the lengthy service with a prayer, thanked the men, and walked to my car. As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I heard one digger say to another, ‘I ain’t EVER seen nuttin’ like that before, and I been puttin’ in septic tanks for t’irty years.”

Via the Curt Jester, a MySpace poll shows the Catholic Church is out of touch with young people. He writes:

Of course what most of these poll (sic) indicate is that people think that the Church is out of touch with the morality of the modern culture, that it is not an echo chamber for current societal ethics. The only thing the Church needs to be in touch with is the Holy Spirit.

If the Church were to bend with trends, it would be no use to anyone – least of all young people. The world is full of “rebels” who are easily swayed to follow trends or parrot conspiracy theories, or gossip about anti-celebrities (who are really just celebrities with anti-establishment reps). The easy way to get them to do what someone else wants? Make them think that someone, somewhere, is against them and they can rebel. (Advertisers took lessons from Satan, eh?)

My “baby” brother told me about a girl he met at college. He found her annoying because she looked down her nose at hicks, geeks, and the out-of-touch. At a party, she went on about a tattoo she really, really wanted to get. He asked her why getting a tattoo was so important.

“I want to be different,” she said, “like everybody else.”

Then she got angry when he laughed his butt off.

http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/archives/2008/07/o ut-of-touch.php

‘Distribution’ means selling all the toxic, contaminated junk as quickly as possible. – The Story of Stuff

Known on-line as a Feminist Greenie, I received a link to a short film called The Story of Stuff.  I won’t be adding its website to the Blogroll**, but it is worth checking out as a new-tech version of an old-school film style: youth-friendly propaganda. I wouldn’t rank it with Reefer Madness, but it stands alongside Last Prom Night(an ’80s short against drunk-driving) and the shock-u-mentary about bad bus behavior leading to a watery end that made my fourth grade class cry.

The Story of Stuff has several elements that make it child-friendly, including cartoon-style graphics and a narrator with the enthusiastic delivery of an elementary teacher. The narrator, Annie Leonard, also wrote the film.

It scores points for classic use of stereotypes. Last Prom Night had stereotypical partying teenagers, including a jock and a popular girl who need alcohol to celebrate. The bus propaganda piece had a sexual stereotype: the female driver is so scared by mice loose on her bus that she doesn’t notice the semitruck coming head-on.  The Story of Stuff has a cartoon character called Business who is bigger than the cartoon of Government. When Government leaned over and gave Business’s shoes a good shine, I laughed! 

Ms. Leonard scores points for historical quotes, including a dig at President Bush’s post-9/11 plea for Americans to go shopping. However, the film loses a few for quoting a nutter business guru who thought “consumerism” was a synonym for “America’s greatness”. (I should mention that the website quotes Ché Guevarra, my least favorite revolutionary. Using a Guevarra quote would have dropped the film into the negative category, as he was not an environmentalist. He advocated world-wide nuclear war in order to create a new world from the ashes.)

There’s a lot I agree with in the piece: buying local preserves resources, ”perceived obsolescence” is for suckers, and planned obsolescence is a big scam. However, I don’t believe ”we aren’t paying for what we buy” nor “Business is Evil”.  The US consumer isn’t the primary cause for rural people going to cities to find work in South and Central America, as this rural-to-urban trend has been a hallmark of civilization even before Sargon I organized the first dynasty in Mesopotamia. 

Ninety-nine percent (of everything we buy) goes to the trash within 6 months.

Like all good propaganda films, this has startling statistics (see above). Unfortunately, the website didn’t give all the answers to my questions, unless I hunt down the bibliographic material. However, I couldn’t find the ones I wanted in my library system. (And purchasing them would be consumerism!)

I’m left wanting to know more.

For example, Ms. Leonard points out breastmilk is contaminated by dangerous chemicals. Which chemicals? Is it phthalates, which are found in plastics and medical packaging? Or mercury, which is found in low-energy bulbs and other electronics?

Recent studies show that our waterways are contaminated with estrogen and various chemicals used in medicine, including anti-depressants.  Birth control pills contain high levels of estrogen which trick the body into suspending ovulation, but the body flushes out excess estrogen. Wildlife studies have shown a strong correlation between high levels of estrogen in the water and mutations in amphibians, such as hermophedite frogs. So naturally a good choice would be for everyone to use NFP instead of the Pill, no? (No. One of the funders of the documentary is the Tides Foundation, which wants “reproductive justice” for all and supports various agencies that promote and distribute birth control pills.)

There’s also a lot of shaky causality. Ms. Leonard points out that that surveys reveal the US National Happiness peaked in the 1950s. She thinks it’s caused by our culture’s materialism. We’re caught in the unending wheel of consumerism and we can’t get off. Maybe. Or maybe it’s because the Sexual Revolution turned people into commodities themselves. Or maybe it’s because the Big Band era ended and the ’60s brought our country into an age of really bad music.  :)

The film, which runs about 20 minutes, can be viewed in segments: http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html

Ambrose-a-rama (see blogroll) wrote recently about how she misses American-style kitchens in which family and friends gather. By her description, it seems as if Chinese kitchens have the same utilitarian and closed-to-guest qualities as a laundryroom. 

That got me to thinking about how, until I moved into this house, most of the kitchens I’ve been in have had a counter or “passthrough” separating it from the dining area. That doesn’t mean that people didn’t gather in the kitchen; it meant that they usually stood up when they did.   The passthroughs kept a nice distance between the busy cook and her guests.  (Holidays weren’t complete until Mom snapped “Get out of my kitchen!” to a would-be moocher, most often Dad.)

The passthroughs were the perfect height for leaning, or were short enough to be accompanied by barstools.  Cleaning up afterwards is a group project, with the table cleared of dirty dishes and immediately filled with whatever game is beginning.  Most nights it’s either a card game or a cribbage game. And there is always talking back and forth. 

My father recalls his mother and aunts in the kitchen, laughing and chattering like magpies. He gets a happy smile on his face when he talks about it.

The exception to the passthrough was the old farmhouses like the Kennedy home and, until recently, my eldest brother’s house. Those rambling houses had a breakfast table in the kitchen and a diningroom adjoining.

But whether the kitchen had a table or not, one rule held true for Michigan houses: The most-used door was the kitchen door. It didn’t matter where the front door was. Family and friends entered by the kitchen door.  My grandparents’ home in Marquette had a nice porch and a portucus leading into the livingroom.  My father would bring the luggage in and out through that door, but that was it. The rest of the time, we dashed up the walkway past the garage and bounded up the steps to the kitchen door. The smell was always a combination of cooking and a clean underlying smell. 

At my maternal grandparents’s house, the front door was treated more like a really big window.  We’d walk into the garage, then through the mudroom that led to the kitchen. My grandmother made her own bread, and that scent mingled with the ever-present ghost of cigarettes.

My house is set up differently than those I’ve loved in my childhood.  The front door leads into the livingroom, which leads into a kitchen with a dining area.  The kitchen door is a sliding glass door that locks from within.  One of the things on my To Do list, which my parents have also mentioned, is to replace the existing door with a regular door that I could open from the outside.

 Why?

 So everyone could walk past my front door and come in through the kitchen! 

Organized Home, the website of organizer Cynthia Townley Ewer,  has many helpful checklists. One of her most popular features is the Christmas Countdown. It helps families finish holiday chores earlier so they can enjoy the actual event. 

She’s running a ”Christmas in July” poll, asking when people begin to prepare for Christmas.

http://organizedchristmas.com/poll-when-do-you-prepare-for-c hristmas

I thought I’d be among the earlybirds since I start getting ready after Halloween. I take out my Advent books and dig out the Advent wreath.

But more than half of the respondents start earlier, including 19% in the summer!

At first I thought, That’s crazy. Why start preparing so many months ahead?  I wondered if the respondents were thinking about Christ or just the hoopla and packaging that’s surrounding the holy day.

 Then, of course, I got one of those Holy Ghost smacks in the head. The thought came to me: How many months ahead should one be preparing for the Second Coming of Christ? 

I spend most days caught up in daily chores. There are a myriad of trivial activities and enthusiasms to distract me from my mortality.  How much do I prepare?