7 Long End of the Week Takes

It’s been a long week of politics and theology around here. Time for some lighter, calmer fare.

One
For those of you who don’t yet have a copy of Let Us Keep the Feast, I can’t recommend it enough at the beginning of this new liturgical year. Advent isn’t so old yet that you won’t enjoy it’s bountiful riches.
By the same publisher, and having nothing to do with the church year, but since it came out this week, there is also Not Alone, about miscarriage, infertility and grief. I’m reading it now. I’ll be saying more about it later. So far, excellent.
Two
St. Nicholas Day is Sunday! I might have already blown it by forgetting my bag of chocolate coins in the car and having to cover my mistake, when children starting climbing over them and giggling happily, with a barrage of false rage. Started shouting about something totally unrelated and made them all “go put coats on” even though it was fairly warm. I stink at subterfuge. Plus it’s really hard to yell when I’m not actually angry.
Later, lathered guilt, or tried to, all over them about what kind of children they are. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘St. Nicholas brings children they stuff they want cause he’s nice like that. I know some very holy children who get chocolate and saints cards in their shoes, and books, because that’s what they like best.’ They looked at me with suspicion and asked who these children might be. So I told them all about Melanie’s children. ‘Well,’ said Aloucious after my glowing description of Bella, ‘I’m glad I’m not holy at all.’
Three
We’re turning out to be not totally pagan this Advent. It’s just taken awhile for the ramifications of luncheon to percolate throughout our entire lives. Just because you institute the glorious dream of only ever cooking one meal a day, it doesn’t mean that you immediately live all the way into that reality. Luncheon–its own tiny church age, constantly a matter of already and not yet. Where was I?
Oh yes, so, in spite of us all being together for meal in the middle of the day, I still labored for some time under the delusion that family prayers had to be at night. I was moaning about this to Matt, complaining about how unpleasant it all is, and he asked why we aren’t doing it at noon. This is why men should be in charge of everything and women should never speak (cough, Joke). Matt is always so clever. Luncheon was his idea in the first place. And Now Family Prayer.
Four
So we work really hard all morning, and then we collapse over a variety of hastily thrown together and gorgeously delicious lunches–pork chops with white beans, chili and cornbread, frittata and toast, curried chicken and vegetables over couscous, curried pumpkin soup with just a little bit of bacon, I could go on and on–we chat about the day so far in a calm and interesting way because the children are finally not all babies, and then, get this, the children clear the table. After that it is only a matter of them eating their advent calendar chocolate of the day, turning the calendar over to color the back while we listen to the bible online and then say noon day prayer.
What part of the bible are we listening to, you ask? Well, Exodus of course, because that’s where we were and if we stop We’ll Never Get To The End Before The Children
Go To College. Sorry…sorry about the screaming. I’ll lower my voice. Was prepared for it to be really lame but it has led, as you can imagine, to some quite interesting discussions.
Sometimes we even remember to light the…..advent candle….trying very hard not to insert any kind of expletive there.
Five
I can’t stop thinking about the whole prayer shaming thing of yesterday and the day before. So interesting to me that some portions of the Internet, some of them attempting to comment on my blog, are so lacking in knowledge about basic, what do ya call it, knowledge? Logic? Can’t fix on a word. The following argument, although that seems a dumb word, unfolds again and again.
A. All conservatives are evil and because they won’t pass a complete total ban on guns and repeal the second amendment they are at fault for all the shootings.
B. We will not look at any other reasons for the rash of shootings across this great land, including radicalized Islam.
C. The conservative who says they will pray, unless they support a total ban on guns, is a total hypocrite.
D. Praying, without action, is a useless and terrible exercise and very evil.
This is what I have gleaned from the last two days of Internet time wasting. So here is something funny. If prayer is so useless and dumb, why be angry when people say they are doing it? Praying, even if no action is taken by the one who prays (and that’s the lamest straw man ever because people who pray are usually very active in helping the helpless, but because the action isn’t the one required by a certain segment of the population, it doesn’t count) is a very useful thing to do if you’re praying To GOD. If you’re praying to yourself or some dumb idea it’s not useful, but if you pray to God, who holds the entire universe together by the power of his Word, then praying is pretty useful. Especially praying for him to attend to the wickedness of creation and begging him to have mercy lest we all perish.
Six
Also spent part of the week realizing that while I am an idealist in the sense that I have ideals and I believe in stuff, and I’m not a pragmatist in the American sense that I think the most important thing is just Solving All The Problems, I feel a certain shocking realism creeping in. So, if you have arranged your school room (I mean me not you but go with it) so that it looks pretty but you can’t reach the pencils and you can’t reach the board, you might as well give up and rearrange the room so you can use it. In a similar way, acknowledging the reality of the way people are, rather than our ideals of them, is most useful. For example, people are selfish and lazy, in general. So accounting for the selfishness and laziness of people is useful in the out working of daily life. It’s a quiet way of forgiveness. I understand that this child is tired and just isn’t going to do this task in a timely way, so I will back off and have some grace. I understand that this family at church is struggling to keep body and soul together and so I’m not going to measure their participation or responses to me according to my own stuff. And so on and so forth, from the very mundane to the great big schemes of the principalities of the nations. There’s no point being idealistic about how people should be, they are the way they are–sinners, corrupt, hypocritical, lost, unable to think clearly. It seems to me that the left, so far from having a gracious understanding of the reality of human nature, demands people to be other than they are–perfect. If the human person is a broken sinner, for whom most things are not possible, the only true solution for humanity is God, for whom all things are possible, the chief thing of which is the rescuing of the sinner from eternal death.
Seven
Speaking of reality, if any one is so unfortunate as to fall into the terrible way of having super lice, I speak hypothetically of course, I commend to you a very lovely product called called Clear Lice, available at Amazon. It is most useful and may, like Jesus himself, wipe all the tears from your eyes, all the sorrow from your soul, and all the despair from your heart.
Have a lovely weekend and go read better and holier quick takes!