Oh, I love this so much: "I don't have to make the perfect anything. I don't have to make the thing nobody's ever seen. I don't have to do any of those things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process, that's my only responsibility."
Feeling this deeply right now.
One way that I've been thinking about the river of history, especially re: parenting is cooking & baking. How teaching my kiddo these skills that I got from my dad that he got from his mom etc etc - it's a beautiful thing.
Last night my daughter ( age 15) and her friend (16) trudged around the neighborhood in the snow and then landed in my dining room. We drank tea and her friend asked me what I thought about gender roles in Catholicism, considering she'd heard a weird talk by a pregnancy center about women being naturally afraid of things like bees and men protecting women from bees (WTF??). I told her that I thought that Catholicism understood the body as good, created, and here to steward a future, much of which we will not live to see. Alas, the female body is designed to create new people and the male body is, in part, designed to protect, in the sense that creating new people is implicitly vulnerable and dangerous, much more than bees. If we see ourselves as a small piece in a long story then our role as creators and stewards makes more sense than asking, perhaps, if we'd rather have a sports car or a child, or if our bodies should be harnessed for maximum short term pleasure rather than the hard work of creating and caring. The friend replied that this made sense to her and then wondered why, if Catholics are concerned so much about stewarding the future of people, we aren't nearly as concerned about stewarding a created world and the environment. We discussed the dignity of work, and I told her that we are concerned to see people use their bodies and minds and do real work, and not to replace our ingenuity and labor with machines and fossil fuels or waste time, for example, day trading. Since both girls had taken Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, I reminded them of the time lines, which show such a long history of the world, the goodness of creation, and our "blank page," indicating we are both very important as contributors to our moment, and so small in God's redeeming vision which started well before us and will end well after us. Later that night, I sent them both your blog Leah, imagining that you'd have more to offer them on gender, stewardship and the goodness of creation and creating than I might.
This is so helpful! I've been contemplating the intersection of work and leisure and the cultivation of a leisure mindset that accepts that there is time enough for everything that needs to be done. The idea of splashing in a river of those who came before who did the same things - raising children and gardens, beautifying the world around them - and then died having done everything that they had the time for (not that they did everything but everything was done that time allowed) and the task was passed down. There is significant rest in that thought.
Oh gosh I feel like this was written directly to my heart. I often think of how crushing it would be to take on the burdens of marriage and parenthood without a vision of eternity. Whenever I see a young couple getting married, the line from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses always leaps into my mind: "it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all." Being able to view my husband and children as immortal beings gives me the grace to cope with a lot of the daily mundane struggles and the periodic serious sufferings.
When both of my grandmothers passed away within a few months of each several years ago, so much of what you write here was in my mind. They were both women who raised large families and lived through much hardship, and they will undoubtedly be forgotten entirely one day. I still often draw strength from their example of religious faith and the faithfulness to the daily tasks in family life. There's another literary quote from The Bridge of San Luis Rey that I often think of in connection to them: “We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
The connections you make to Shakespeare add so much dimension to this conversation as well. I've been thinking a lot about Twelfth Night. I hope it's okay to link a post I wrote about it here, because I ruminate on some similar things--the vows and resolutions we make in our here and now, the difficulty of carrying them out in the day-to-day, and what they mean in the light of eternity: https://gatheringlight.substack.com/p/twelfth-night-for-twelfth-night
Anyway, thank you for this. This is a really beautiful piece to reflect on at the beginning of the year. I'm looking forward to reading the original article you linked.
I so appreciated your note! And I just read Feste in a neighborhood (living room) readaloud, so I greatly appreciated your Twelfth Night essay, particularly your notes on Malvolio's threat and Feste's final song. That dissonance amid epiphanies and weddings reminds me of the news Don John is captured at the end of Much Ado. The grace and restoration isn't eternal, but it still has its day.
At the risk of cheating, I'll share about my doctoral work in historical theology. I imagine myself as the person hunting around the Catholic attic, bringing things down, dusting them off, and saying "Remember this? This was wise! This was beautiful!"
It makes me glad that part of what the academy (for all its issues) does is simply save things without knowing what use they might be in the future. That impulse to conserve and pass down is what enables me to do a dissertation project that involves multiple layers of Commentators on an ancient text. Sometimes I'm just stopped in my tracks thinking "oh my gosh I can't believe I'm reading a book that so many people have read in the last 1,000 years."
Joe's comment reminded me of these lines from Auden's poem "East Coker":
. . . And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate —but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Oh, I love this so much: "I don't have to make the perfect anything. I don't have to make the thing nobody's ever seen. I don't have to do any of those things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process, that's my only responsibility."
Feeling this deeply right now.
One way that I've been thinking about the river of history, especially re: parenting is cooking & baking. How teaching my kiddo these skills that I got from my dad that he got from his mom etc etc - it's a beautiful thing.
Last night my daughter ( age 15) and her friend (16) trudged around the neighborhood in the snow and then landed in my dining room. We drank tea and her friend asked me what I thought about gender roles in Catholicism, considering she'd heard a weird talk by a pregnancy center about women being naturally afraid of things like bees and men protecting women from bees (WTF??). I told her that I thought that Catholicism understood the body as good, created, and here to steward a future, much of which we will not live to see. Alas, the female body is designed to create new people and the male body is, in part, designed to protect, in the sense that creating new people is implicitly vulnerable and dangerous, much more than bees. If we see ourselves as a small piece in a long story then our role as creators and stewards makes more sense than asking, perhaps, if we'd rather have a sports car or a child, or if our bodies should be harnessed for maximum short term pleasure rather than the hard work of creating and caring. The friend replied that this made sense to her and then wondered why, if Catholics are concerned so much about stewarding the future of people, we aren't nearly as concerned about stewarding a created world and the environment. We discussed the dignity of work, and I told her that we are concerned to see people use their bodies and minds and do real work, and not to replace our ingenuity and labor with machines and fossil fuels or waste time, for example, day trading. Since both girls had taken Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, I reminded them of the time lines, which show such a long history of the world, the goodness of creation, and our "blank page," indicating we are both very important as contributors to our moment, and so small in God's redeeming vision which started well before us and will end well after us. Later that night, I sent them both your blog Leah, imagining that you'd have more to offer them on gender, stewardship and the goodness of creation and creating than I might.
I love your response and what she heard is the strangest “birds and bees” take I’ve heard of!
This is so helpful! I've been contemplating the intersection of work and leisure and the cultivation of a leisure mindset that accepts that there is time enough for everything that needs to be done. The idea of splashing in a river of those who came before who did the same things - raising children and gardens, beautifying the world around them - and then died having done everything that they had the time for (not that they did everything but everything was done that time allowed) and the task was passed down. There is significant rest in that thought.
Oh gosh I feel like this was written directly to my heart. I often think of how crushing it would be to take on the burdens of marriage and parenthood without a vision of eternity. Whenever I see a young couple getting married, the line from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses always leaps into my mind: "it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all." Being able to view my husband and children as immortal beings gives me the grace to cope with a lot of the daily mundane struggles and the periodic serious sufferings.
When both of my grandmothers passed away within a few months of each several years ago, so much of what you write here was in my mind. They were both women who raised large families and lived through much hardship, and they will undoubtedly be forgotten entirely one day. I still often draw strength from their example of religious faith and the faithfulness to the daily tasks in family life. There's another literary quote from The Bridge of San Luis Rey that I often think of in connection to them: “We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
The connections you make to Shakespeare add so much dimension to this conversation as well. I've been thinking a lot about Twelfth Night. I hope it's okay to link a post I wrote about it here, because I ruminate on some similar things--the vows and resolutions we make in our here and now, the difficulty of carrying them out in the day-to-day, and what they mean in the light of eternity: https://gatheringlight.substack.com/p/twelfth-night-for-twelfth-night
Anyway, thank you for this. This is a really beautiful piece to reflect on at the beginning of the year. I'm looking forward to reading the original article you linked.
I so appreciated your note! And I just read Feste in a neighborhood (living room) readaloud, so I greatly appreciated your Twelfth Night essay, particularly your notes on Malvolio's threat and Feste's final song. That dissonance amid epiphanies and weddings reminds me of the news Don John is captured at the end of Much Ado. The grace and restoration isn't eternal, but it still has its day.
At the risk of cheating, I'll share about my doctoral work in historical theology. I imagine myself as the person hunting around the Catholic attic, bringing things down, dusting them off, and saying "Remember this? This was wise! This was beautiful!"
It makes me glad that part of what the academy (for all its issues) does is simply save things without knowing what use they might be in the future. That impulse to conserve and pass down is what enables me to do a dissertation project that involves multiple layers of Commentators on an ancient text. Sometimes I'm just stopped in my tracks thinking "oh my gosh I can't believe I'm reading a book that so many people have read in the last 1,000 years."
Joe's comment reminded me of these lines from Auden's poem "East Coker":
. . . And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate —but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Have you ever read the play Arcadia?
I love that part of "East Coker."