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On Sacramental Worlds

So before I was a Christian, the angst-unit that I was perpetually dealing with went like this: "Here I am, full of potential and surrounded by innumerable possibilities for self-expression and having adventures and experiencing pleasure of all kinds, but...what's the point?"

Even if I had a life that was maximally fulfilled with amazing friendships and a husband and children and...Pottery Barn furniture, and writing, and striding through airports in Europe on my way to, um, maybe an International Women of Mystery conference, and even if said life went on (hypothetically) forever, and even if my neurotransmitters were all hopping to attention and saluting such that I was never ever depressed and in fact in constant low-grade ecstasy...

...what was the point? There was this disconnect between all of the above-- the "is," the stuff of experience and matter, both good and bad, and the Other Realm.

The Other Realm was the place that existed in stories, especially quest stories, where good was really good and not just the maximum pleasure for the maximum number of people, and bad was really bad and to be defeated. That Other Realm was where "ought" lived, and actually the BEST kind of other-realm stories were the kinds where "is" and "ought" intersected in some way, so that a physical thing-- a ring, say, or a baby, or a place that you got to through a door in a hedge-- was actually charged with real meaning, real good or real bad.

I wanted a reality that demanded something of me beyond fulfilling my potential.

In other words, I wanted a sacramental world.

And whatever else I have now, I have that.

Ali, trying to convince Nate that the beverage on offer is acceptable:

"Black tea! It's like coffee...but tea!"

"He's been inducted as, from what I can tell, a knight of cheese. They have knights of everything in France... Fish are funny. I mean, snails are sad, and so are frogs, but fish are just funny. You use them to hit people with...there aren't a lot of foods that aren't novelty foods that are just funny. Fish are funny. And then there are sardines and anchovies and kippers. Kippers are funny."


--emma goes on what is an almost beat-poet-esque stream of consciousness rant while reading a Peter Mayle book.

Real life?

How confusing it is not to be in San Jose dancing with Persian aunties. What is all this cold whiteness on the ground? Where are the huge mounds of saffron rice? Why is Maria not laughing at my cell phone? Why is Todd not explaining local flora, and why is James not asking if they are edible? I am a little sad.

Outstanding week. God bless Ali and Rachel Hadiashar!

Here is Oscar Wilde, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Lord Peter Wimsey.

Ali, luckily, whipped out her camera and got a picture-- not of Lord Peter actually carrying the Oscar Wilde doll downstairs in his jaws, but of the immediate aftermath. Lord Peter dropped Oscar Wilde in the middle of the kitchen floor and then went to sit on the rug in front of the kitchen sink. It was a very peculiar situation all round. The picture will be posted when Ali emails it to me. There's now a cat toothmark on Oscar Wilde's left eye.

Poor John Harmon.

He needs to formulate a Cunning Plan.

From the Department of Massive Understatement

"The Blitz makes me nervous."

--Emma (she's not the only roommate I have who makes blogworthy comments-- she's just dominated that catagory recently.)

You know what would make election week more fun?

If, after all the results were in, everyone got invited to Washington to a feast, in which we acclaimed the president-elect as our lawful chief, and were fed on roast venison and frothy tankards of mead. That'd be pretty sweet.

Emma's interpretation of

what's going through Eugene Wrayburn's head when he first sees Lizzie Hexam:

"Hey! You're cute, and surprisingly clean for your station in life."

Emma, while ordering tea catalogues:

"Twinings is too exciting for _words_!"

So I came home, and

Emma had some troubling news for me.

Apparently Lord Peter Wimsey has figured out how to get himself up on top of our fridge.

I guess it makes a little more sense if you know he's a cat.

A little bit shameful

I've joined Facebook. Not very hortus conclusus, is it, this blogosphere?

OK, got to write this even though v. sleepy

So I just got finished writing my comment in response to Leslie's comment in response to the post below, and I got into bed and picked up my current bedtime book, which is one of these big Ignatius Press editions of Chesterton (shocker), and I run within the first page into the following line:

"...those questions about the will to believe and the operation of grace, and the fact that something more than reason is needed to bring any of us into the most reasonable of all philosophies."

"The righteous will always accept logic"-- but which one of us is righteous?

It is too late at night to argue Pelegianism. Now I am going to bed.

PS yes, Leslie, I know you're not a Pelegian.

The article this is from is called "The 'Short Story' in Germ"

"Steele writes like a man at one with his audience. He does not feel the need to argue or convince; it is enough to appeal to the sense of right and wrong. As he said himself, when exposing the tyranny of husbands, 'touching upon the malady tenderly is half way to the cure; and there are some faults which need only to be observed, to be amended.' His business was not so much to create sentiments as to awaken them by a vivid description, and teach his readers to recognise their own principles in some poignant situation."

--The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IX. From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift.

Okay, so this is the moral center of the domestic novel. Good to know. Query: can we cross-apply it to Jane Austen-type comedies of manners?

I'm nervous, posting this.

Okay. Let’s talk about abortion.

I’d rather not. I am not a controversialist. I’d much rather stay at home in Bag End and smoke my pipe and eat large, rich dinners. But there are times when we must venture forth.

When I was fifteen or so, one of my favorite books was The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I’m not actually a hundred per cent sure I ever finished it, but I fully embraced its vision. Plus I definitely saw the movie, which had Natasha Richardson in it.

Atwood’s dystopia was my dystopia: her worst case scenario was mine, pretty much. And here was her worst case scenario: conservative Christians (exagerations or extrapolations of conservative Christians, as Orwell’s party was of the Communist party) have come to power in America. They have remade it as she imagines they would really secretly like it to be: a place where women have no rights whatsoever, and where men have wives and also official concubines who are breeders, because most of the upper-class, or wife-class, women are infertile. In this world, women’s bodies are instruments that the male conspiracy uses to play its games of power. It’s as though men were the European powers of the late 19th century, and women’s bodies were the contested continents-- Asia, Africa, South America-- terrain only valuable if it has value to its colonial overlords. And a key instrument in their domination was, of course, the absolute prohibition of abortion.

The golden past that the main character cannot quite remember, the past before the zealots came to power, was the woman’s movement of the 1970’s and 80’s, and a key feature of that past, it is implied, was free access to abortion.

I don’t know if Atwood actually believed that this scenario is what They-- the Christians, the conservatives-- really want. Probably not: it’s satire, reducto ad absurdam and all that. I’m pretty sure, though, that I believed it-- that on some level, a level where I enjoyed being the prospective victim of such a conspiracy, enjoyed the guilt-capital that would give me, I did buy it. I believed, or played with believing, that that’s what a lot of men, maybe most men, certainly most conservatives, were really hoping for.

Look, I was fifteen.

This is what I meant, if I meant anything, when I went to the pro-abortion march on Washington in 1992. That’s what I was thinking of, I think, when I talked about a woman’s right to choose, when I wanted the bumper stickers that said “Keep Your Laws Off My Body.”

Well, that was a piece of it, anyway. I don’t want to oversimplify.

And that’s why I think that one of the best things we can do as human beings who disagree with other human beings is to understand our opponents’ worst case scenarios, the wacky far fetched chilling things they picture when they imagine what would happen if we “had our way.” Don’t judge a man till you’ve walked a mile in his boots-- that’s the idea, except that in this case, it’s Don’t judge a man till you’ve spent an afternoon wearing the tinfoil helmet he uses to keep the Council on Foreign Relations from beaming his thoughts up to the mothership.

You may not end up agreeing with each other. I can never think that it is right to abort a baby, and on that subject I will have an irreducable disagreement with someone who does think that it’s okay. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about having a right to do something that wrong. (If, God forbid, it comes down to a choice between the life of the mother and the life of the baby...I can only pity anyone in the position to make such a choice, and pray that I’m never there.)

So, you might not end up agreeing. But you might end up seeing that at least in some cases, your minds are not as alien to each other as they seem at first glance. No conservative Christian I know-- no one I know-- could react with anything other than horror to the society described by Atwood. I do not, as a conservative Christian, have the same view of men’s and women’s roles as I did when I was a liberal. But no Christian can deny women’s human dignity, their part in bearing God’s image, and still remain orthodox. No one I know could look at anyone being treated as the women in The Handmaid’s Tale were treated and judge that a good thing.

The lie I believed when I marched on Washington in ‘92 was, then, twofold. The first part was that people who believed that abortion should be illegal actually secretly wanted to subject women to slavery. I don’t think I really believed this, not on the deepest level. But here’s the thing about conspiracy theories: the emotional weight of things you don’t really totally with your rational mind believe can be nearly as great as the emotional weight of a well-considered, well-reasoned and accurate beliefs. The oomph, the fear, remains as energy: energy that wants to be used against The Conspiracy, even if you don’t actually believe The Conspiracy exists.

The second part of the lie was that the choice in front of us, as a society, was between enslaving women and denying their humanity, or being pro-free access to abortion. I wasn;t in favor of the first option, so I figured I was in favor of the second.

But if you think about it...this is crazy. None of us has the right to do whatever we want with our own bodies, let alone with other people’s bodies. We’re not allowed to hurt other people, even if they are utterly dependent on us for survival-- indeed, we have a sense that it’s when a child is utterly dependent on us that we have the greatest connection to her, the greatest obligation and also the greatest delight in caring for her. Calling us to affirm the dignity of all human beings, their right to life and to respect, does not diminish our own dignity or chip away at our own sense of our value as human beings. On the contrary: seeing the value in all other humans, however dependant, however undeveloped, allows us to see our own value more clearly. What we do to others, we implicity say it’s okay for them to do to us, just as when we call something that someone else does wrong, we implicitly say that it would be wrong if we did it as well.

Anyway. That’s what’s been going through my head lately, among other things. I really like getting along with people, and I really don’t like acrimonious debate. I’m not writing this to start a debate, acrimonious or otherwise. I’m writing it because it’s been on my mind and heart. I would like to know what other people think about this, but please don’t yell at me. Or use all caps, which is the internet version of yelling.

Classic Heather and Susannah Quote

S: Heather, you want to play bocce?
H: I’d rather eat hay.

To clarify: Spring is not getting redone; Spring is wonderful.

I'm Back

...from France, and from new-apartment craziness, et cetera. I am now sort of settled in Florence (not the Italian one. The one next to Easthampton) in a funky place with a huge, great kitchen and two fabulous roommates (although I'm not sure where Adam is; I haven't seen him in days) and a currently impaired bathroom. It's getting redone, which is wonderful.

And so is Spring, which has finally arrived.

95 hours, 34 minutes till plane leaves for France. Whooooeeee!