Preventing single-person-itis

Marriages, families – famously difficult to live in. Religious communities – there will be someone who will insist on clicking their nails behind you in choir, or say intolerably moronic things in recreation. But what do we singles do to make sure our corners are rubbed off? Volunteering for a day a week is not the same thing at all.

I recommend adopting a granny, your own or someone else’s. One party gets a strenuous drilling in forebearance, consideration and patience, and you have someone to peel the potatoes.   Think about those stories in Cassian and hagiographies, where adopting a Difficult Widow is on a par with living in a cave.  If like me you’re not up for caves, adopt an Occasionally Mildly Trying Widow(er).

Some fairly upmarket British authoress wrote a novel, under a pseudonym, about a successful businesswoman who more or less by chance ends up adopting a non-resident granny. I found it fascinating, because by the time I’d read it I’d already spent six weeks shut up in a tiny flat on the sunny side of a noisy street in a hot summer with a Frail Little Old Lady just beginning to be able to get out of bed after a hip operation. Said FLOL had been a widow for 35 years, and was quite alone apart from a niece (mutual loathing) and a younger colleague who dropped in once a week or so. Not fun.

Update: It was Doris Lessing, who wrote The Diary of a Good Neighbour under the pseudonym Jane Somers.

 

On poping, from the roots of Anglo-Catholicism

I am bound to state plainly what I feel and have felt, since I was a Catholic, about the Anglican Church. I said, in a former page, that, on my conversion, I was not conscious of any change in me of thought or feeling, as regards matters of doctrine; this, however, was not the case as regards some matters of fact, and, unwilling as I am to give offence to religious Anglicans, I am bound to confess that I felt a great change in my view of the Church of England. I cannot tell how soon there came on me,—but very soon,—an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined it to be a portion of the Catholic Church. For the first time, I looked at it from without, and (as I should myself say) saw it as it was. Forthwith I could not get myself to see in it any thing else, than what I had so long fearfully suspected, from as far back as 1836,—a mere national institution. As if my eyes were suddenly opened, so I saw it—spontaneously, apart from any definite act of reason or any argument; and so I have seen it ever since. I suppose, the main cause of this lay in the contrast which was presented to me by the Catholic Church. Then I recognized at once a reality which was quite a new thing with me. Then I was sensible that I was not making for myself a Church by an effort of thought; I needed not to make an act of faith in her; I had not painfully to force myself into a position, but my mind fell back upon itself in relaxation and in peace, and I gazed at her almostpassively as a great objective fact. I looked at her;—at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precepts; and I said, “This is a religion;” and then, when I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up doctrinally and esthetically, it seemed to me to be the veriest of nonentities.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! How can I make a record of what passed within me, without seeming to be satirical?

Newman, Apologia, Note E, “The Anglican Church”.

I was moved to tears (admittedly not hard) by Jeffrey Steel’s post on the reason for his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism just a couple of months ago. Have a read. I have come to the conclusion that it really is hard for Anglicans, however Catholic they think they are, to “get” it (and yet the remarkable M. Evangelista gets it, and the Pope-is-an-Antichrist Cath also gets it, in a different way), and that “getting it” is not actually a requirement for being a Catholic. Vide the beatificandus quoted above.

 

Confession XI

 

Going to heaven on Jesus’ coattails

It’s not what you think you’re hanging on to, it’s what you are hanging on to when you die that matters.

I was thinking about this Anglican business. And about a conversation with Cath about the Blessed Sacrament. The Church has the reality of Christ. The Church here on earth does not understand it fully – but she doesn’t have to. The important thing is to get as many people to grab on as possible. Two millennia of lives lived in co-operation with grace (or spectacular failures to do so, deliberate or not) have shown a great deal about the best way to live in co-operation with grace, to grab on and not slip off. I have no idea why Anglicans who didn’t convert before would convert now. Completely baffled. But I can see completely that the main thing is that people are brought to let go of their straws and rags, and grab Jesus coattails. If they insist on holding on with their toes only, or on bringing their previous straw or blanket with them, it’s still a better chance of being dragged to heaven than they had before.

I apologise for any unflattering imagery, the image in my head is much more dramatic, but I can’t think how to describe it

 

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good

… for His mercy endures for ever.

fecit mihi meisque magna.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say, rejoice.  Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is nigh. Be nothing solicitous; but in every thing, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your petitions be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

That’s all for today.

Except, again, for the boy:

 

Scientific trivia

I am going through a bout of ordering piles of documents amassed over the course of three years as a preparation to starting some writing. Little pale creatures that had evolved in the shelter of huge piles hastily scurried away.

I finally decided to throw out the old laboratory catalogues a previous PhD student had left. And found: A package of biscuits, best before 10/2006. They looked O.K. I seriously considered putting them into our coffee room (with a note about their age, of course) to test my hypothesis that anything put there will be eaten eventually. Finally, however, I threw them away.

And just now a fellow PhD came to me asking how he could calculate if some of his results differed significantly if he had only these values. Both the term ‘reptetions’ and the information that without them one cannot make any statistical tests for differences seemed to be quite some news to him. I have been thinking of late that I am getting quite cynical about the (scientific) world, yet it seems, as such a thing can still shock me, that I am not cynical enough yet.

 

Projects and nostalgia

Recently accomplished:

• Freezing litre of chopped dill
• Freezing 3 kg of peppers
• Freezing four kg of trimmed and chopped yellow string beans
• First stage (long soak in 70% spirit of 3 kg of fruit) of cornelian berry liqueur
• Pasteurizing lots of tomato slop
• Experiment in a Russian roulette sort of way with pasteurizing aubergines (bring it on, botulins!)
• PIE!

To do:

• Chop and freeze next 7 kg of peppers
• Pasteurize tomato slop made from tomatoes with flavour, if I can find any at this date
• Chop and freeze that parsley that is looking at me reproachfully from the bottom of the fridge
• First stage of quince liqueur
• Take lamp to menders. This black and battered angle poise lamp has sported the same dark red ribbon for ten years, a ribbon taken from an Easter egg Aelianus gave me when we were both carefree undergrads (and the lamp was already old and battered). In fact, I may even have a photo of the egg. Thorntons. My room was on the High Street. I am wondering whether telling the man not to remove it if possible, and in any case not to lose it, is a sufficient safeguard. I might have to take it off for safekeeping before handing the lamp over.

 

The sorrows of every-day life

Our local supermarket has stopped having Weetabix in store! I only noticed they had them a short while ago, and was going on about how a whole new live had started for me. Alas, now they only have Weetabix minies left, and even the ‘Originals’ among the minies don’t have the same taste. Plus they take ages to entirely dissolve!
O.K., so I admit that Weetabix are a somewhat aquired taste, a taste possibly not shared with me by the multitude, but still I go in grief and wonder where they might still sell the real thing…

P.S.: Mystery of the day: What is the purpose of staffing parish offices with species of dragon? Wishing to talk to the parish priest (who said you should call him) is made to feel like a crime in itself (even without mentioning that it is about something as bizarre as making an appointment for confession…)

 

For the boy :-)

 

Do NOT mention ‘group dynamics’ to me!

Within the last year, due to some decisions made at a period of happy ignorance of these things, I have undergone quite a number of didactic courses. Apart from slight attacks of hysteria at the sight of flipcharts, or the sound of terms like ‚partner interview’ or ‘flashlight’, I have actually as yet never made true of my initial resolution of not cooperating in this kind of nonsense .

A day at which my alarm clock rings at 5 am, and that after a four-hours sleep, already labours at a slight disadvantage at winning my joyful acceptance. After a four-hours travel including intermittent napping, coffee, and some exercise at the fresh air (not that much exercise, but all the fresher air), I was slowly getting ready to activly participate again in this world’s manyfold events. I would even have been punctual for the course, if either the bus had used its display to show which stop it was approaching or else station names had been consistent between my invitation letter, the map in the bus or the signs of the busstops. Even after another refreshing walk back after I had missed the right stop there was still some chance for arriving in time if not for the most pronounced lack of any signs on the most inconspiciously looking of doors of what is quite an important educational center.

The result of this was that I arrived at the course room when an ‘introduction round’ was already in full swing. Now, as I said, I have some experience. I have told groups who I am, where I work, what I do for work, a hobby of mine, why I was coming here, what I was hoping to learn, how I was feeling this morning, or what I would be doing right now if I wasn’t taking part in the course. I have even written these things on little cards or interviewed my neighbour about them. I thought nothing in this line could shock me anymore. Still I was stunned when today, as I had furtively crept into the room and just sat down, expectant eyes already looked at me, waiting for my to have my say. There seemed to have been a question about things important in one’s job, as the two persons before me had said something about ‘helping people to …’ (I was then just coming into the room), or ‘balancing job and family’. Slightly put out I inquired what it was that I should tell? My name, my job and the thing that is most important to me in live! To a group of strangers! First thing I come into a room!! What on earth do you expect?!!! I looked at them in distinctly unamused disbelief. Trying to make a joke of it, I gave my name and job and added that I was finding it slightly difficult to come up with the most important thing in life at this short notice early in the morning. ‘Well, try to!’, was the answer.

At which point, though shy among strange people (which those who know me never believe…), my righteous indignation got the better of me, and I flatly, firmly and repeatedly refused to answer. O for an attempt at ‘creating a nice course atmosphere’ gone epically wrong! I spent the next two hours at least sitting there with crossed arms and legs, exsudating non-cooperation.

—

And I ask myself: What did they expect? That we all have such standard, or such superficial ‘most important things in life’ that we do not mind telling them a bunch of strangers at command? Or that we make up some nice, polished, socially acceptable lie? For a moment I was indeed in the temptation of giving the only reasonable and truthful answer coming to my mind: God. Should I have done? I wonder. But then, a Charismatic I may be, but not a ‘re-born’ Christian flinging ‘how he found Jesus’ into any willing or unwilling ear he meets, not…

[subsiding grumbling]