Chinese Food

I love Chinese food. It took me a while to warm up to it, but once I got the hang of chopsticks I dived right in. Since Chinese food features vegetables in wondrous variety quite prominently I've clung to the assumption that it is somehow healthier than western food. Until recently we had a Chinese place that would deliver, and I ordered with confidence certain that I was making a much healthier choice than the pizza which was the alternative for ordering in. Unfortunately, we were one of the few who really enjoyed the convenience of delivered Chinese and the restaurant has closed. Finding a new source and accepting that we'd have to pick it up ourselves has been hard.
Recently, I've been on a Cook's Illustrated recipe kick. Two nights a week I try something new from the cookbooks or the magazine. Tonight was Chinese night. Beef and broccoli is one of the few dishes that the entire family enjoys and they had a great recipe for it in the The New Best Recipe's Cookbook. It was wonderful, but all my illusions about the healthiness of Chinese are shattered. There was so much oil, fat in the meat and other stuff that I find myself wondering if I'll ever feel the same way about Chinese again. Also, how do they stand the stress of getting everything to come together at the last minute like that? Stir-fry is a bit fast and furious for me. I'm more of a Crock Pot kind of gal. All in all, it was delicious and educational, but I'm not sure I'll be repeating it any time soon.

Step Five

One of my favorite teachers once taught that "you don't have to take poison to know it's bad for you. You can just read the label." She was a great teacher and her influence on me continues to this day, but that particular paradigm has given me great grief. Growing up all kinds of things were labeled poison and placed out of bounds. My textbooks at the church school were very carefully edited and even good things and good books were censored. We didn't read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. We read only excerpts from most books, and they were carefully chosen to avoid anything that might be controversial. Our studies in history were very traditional and Plato himself could not have been more careful about what viewpoint we were exposed to. Our study of the Bible was limited to memorizing facts and stories and interpreting it according to a systematic theology that was quite rigid. I've already spoken about the struggle I faced in college when the same tools we had derided as evil in Old Testament Survey were suddenly supposed to be embraced and put to use in Literary Criticism. Everywhere there were signs reading "Poison, don't taste." What they really amounted to were injunctions against thinking.
Perhaps if I had been a boy and submitted to the lengthy training process that insures that one's thinking will not be too independent I may have been allowed to speculate unhindered, but I am a woman therefore never destined to question or lead. I was not allowed to speculate or wonder. Women are to absorb and pass on the accepted viewpoint--as are most people in the fundamentalist culture I grew up in. Fundamentalism is very fragile, intellectually.
My conversion began when I ran out of things to think about. I was a master of Bible trivia. I could argue the approved theology with anyone. I had read anyone who was anyone in the world of "no books written before 1950." The Christian bookstore had ceased to be a source and become an ever more tasteless series of reruns of ideas I'd heard a million times before. I couldn't read the classics, while they weren't out and out banned, in fact to an outsider they would seem to be held in reverence, but they were dangerous. People who had read the classics tended to pay for it by being marginalized and mistrusted, unless they could robustly explain where and how the classics were wrong. Anyone could be forgiven anything if they could just make you feel good for not thinking or exploring beyond the little boundaries of our mental world. I have always feared a marginal existence, being acutely aware that my life was marginal enough as it stood, so I continued to avoid the classics. I became very, very bored. There was nothing to think about, and no hope of finding anything to think about.
In the meantime, the ideas that were all I had were proving to be deeply flawed. The more I strove to perfectly apply them, the more I discovered that they simply didn't work. In fact it many cases, they caused more harm than anything else. The experiences began to take their toll. One night I found myself in Barnes and Noble wandering the philosophical/religious sections reading anything and everything. All bets about labels and the risks of "poisoning" and marginalization were off. There had to be better answers somewhere, and I had to find something. That night I found Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey. It proved to be a great start.
Yancey is a fellow former fundamentalist. He truly felt my pain, and he was careful not to poke where it already hurt. He also wasn't afraid of thinking and questioning. I was ravenous at that point, my intellectual anorexia was over and I had a lot of weight to gain. Everything Yancey wrote I read, including Soul Survivor. Soul Survivor gave me permission to read the thirteen mentor's work, and everything happened from there. Long, long story short, Yancey led to Buechner, Buechner led to Calvin's Festival of Faith and Writing, the festival led to the discovery of faithful believers who had read all sorts of "poison" and not only lived to tell about it, but had grown and were better believers for it. All kinds of taboos were flaunted with relish. Friendly arguments between every kind of Christian, some Jews and even a flaming athiest were all welcome and helpful and good. The trap was destroyed and I am out and no amount of wishing or pretending otherwise will ever change it. I like to think. Thinking is good. I can no longer worship where they expect me to freeze my thoughts about God until judgment day. Getting to know someone is a process of discovery. I want to discover more and more about God.
This series starts Here. The series continues Here.

Red Waaaaalll!

Some books you give your kids to read because they are good for them. Some books you give them because they are fun. Redwall books are both. We discovered Redwall recently and I must say I wonder how I missed the party all this time. While Redwall books are not serious literature, and they do become formulaic, the world that Brian Jacques has created is so wholesome and inviting that you don't mind. When my daughter is busy absorbing a new one of the many, many books in this series, I know she is also absorbing some of the best human values--generosity, compassion, courage, and most of all love. She is also meeting evil in a reasonable form. Redwall won't give her nightmares, but it will help her to think twice about the people she meets. For children as sheltered as mine, that's a good thing.
The other thing I love about Redwall is the food. Brian Jacques is a man who believes in good "scoff" and he takes the time to describe the many feasts that take place in Redwall Abbey. We found out that they've published a cookbook, and we are drooling over the recipes. Since almost all Redwallers are vegetarians, the bonus is that the recipes are very healthy for the most part. For example my kids can't wait to sample "Deeper than Ever Tater and Beetroot Pie." How often do you think that happens?
I highly recommend Redwall, not because it is great literature--it isn't. I recommend it because it is rich in love both between the characters and the author and his audience.

Step Four and a Half

Thinking over the last step, I think I failed to convey the rather mundane texture of the experience. Once I brought in Tales of the Kingdom, that glamorized the idea of "becoming real." In actuality the real that I was was a very proud, angry, bitter woman checking a dirty job off of a dirty list. There wasn't any special manifestation of my best self or anything like that. It was just me, being me, exactly and only me--good, bad and rather ugly.
There is also a lingering Protestant glamor to the idea of the presence of Christ. Protestants, at least the ones I know, treat the presence of Christ as unusual experience to be courted and celebrated. They go to great lengths to insure the best possible atmosphere for a manifestation of Jesus in their midst. The Catholic experience is quite different. Catholics take it carefully, thoughtfully, respectfully for granted that Jesus will be theirs every Mass. This is more of what I experienced, not through the Host, but rather like sitting in the room with another person. Christ was just there. He wasn't necessarily particularly interested in me or anything else. It was as comfortable and mundane as sitting in a waiting room with a fellow patient.
The thing that makes the experience transformative is that it was transformative. Despite the ugliness of my reality and the ordinariness of Christ's presence I was healed in some measure. Perhaps it was finding Christ in the church that in my mind had the most strikes against it that helped me begin to understand that it isn't about our figuring it all out and getting it all right. It's about showing up. In any case, I keep showing up, and I keep getting better. Catholicism works for me.
This is a series that begins Here. This series continues Here.

Step Four

Here I must stray into the ineffable and try to make it at least a little effable, because converting for me wasn't all about ideas and contrasts; it was about coming home. I grew up on C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and other books that put Christian values into fantasy settings. In those settings I found the reality I kept nudging but not quite finding in my actual worship experiences. One of my favorite, lesser-known books of that type is Karen Mains, Tales of the Kingdom. In it the worshipers gather in a sacred circle of flames and become real, and the King is always present. I knew what that felt like in my heart. I knew it because I'd experienced it at various times in church or at other gatherings of Christians, and it seemed to me that that is what church really ought to be like all the time.
For those of you familiar with the book, I had a Princess Amanda experience of the worst kind, and I was badly burned. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, I discovered that some of my most cherished ideas were evil. The funny thing is that I'd acquired them not by disregarding my training, but rather they came to me from my training. It was quite painful, and church itself wasn't helping. Every time I entered church I kept bumping into my terrible ideas and their consequences, and I couldn't sit still and endure it anymore. Finally in an act of faithful desperation we decided that after our move we'd investigate any group that met in Jesus name according to their geographical distance from our house. It was amazing. I learned a lot and did some healing, but I still wasn't finding a home. On that list was St. Mary's Catholic Church. It was there because I'm a perfectionist and it met the standard. I never expected it to work out, in fact I waited for a Sunday when the kids were sick, so I wouldn't contaminate them. Catholics were not only wrong, they led people into hell. However, they still met in Jesus name and I couldn't write them off without breaking my own standards.
I sat in the back, and I mean sat--no way was I going to be kneeling. I was just checking a name off of the list. But the experience was not at all what I expected. Sitting was somehow more than enough. I don't remember the homily. I don't remember the prayers or the music. I remember little children playing all over the place. I remember being offered the gift of peace. I remember leaving feeling healed for the first time in years. I'd been real for an hour and the King had most certainly been present. It's the experience I'm still having every time I return, though now I do more than sit, not much more, but more. Healing is a slow process.
This is part of a series that begins Here. This series continues Here.

I've always wanted to know how to knit. My granny, who was good at that kind of thing preferred crochet. Why it always had to knitting and crochet wouldn't do, I don't know, but the end of it is that Granny never taught me how to knit. She taught me how to sew, how to quilt, embroidery, cross-stitch and crochet, but knitting has always been a mystery.
Secretly, I was always hoping to make friends with a knitter who would initiate me. This was foolish on many levels. A. I'm very hard to teach anything to, being rather pig-headed. B. I have limited time for developing new friendships and my current inventory of friends lacks a knitter. C. Waiting for romantic notions of that kind to be fulfilled is very often a good way never to learn how to knit.
So.... I took matters into my own hands and bought a book. This is my usual method for making up for a shortfall in personal relationships. My library is much larger than my circle of friends for many reasons, but it nevertheless is a source of quiet melancholy that I tend to learn things from books more than people. The book is quite helpful. It took several tries, but I can now cast on and do a basic stretch of knitting. I'm finding it as interesting and soothing as I thought I would. Maybe after I get good at it, I'll be able to give someone else the gift I always wanted.

Step Three

Recently, I was discussing my various religious experiences, in particular the powerful emphasis placed on the individual conscience by the group I grew up with. Very sharply the person I was talking to juxtaposed that teaching with the crushing conformity that was required of me by the same group. "How could a group that believed so strongly in the individual conscience deny you anything?" he asked. I was stumped. The two had lived together side by side for so long that I hadn't ever wondered about it. Since then I've been puzzling it over.
It turns out that that question works in nicely to bring out one of the reasons for my conversion. My church felt strongly that each person must "work out their own salvation with fear and trembling." The way they understand that means that you have to read the Bible and figure out what to do for yourself, no one else can do it for you. There is some truth to that. We are each accountable to sort out for ourselves the moral choices that lay ahead of us in life. We can't let someone else take responsibility for our ethics. However, and it's a big however, puzzling out the Bible is a very difficult task. It is demanding in every possible way, and the fact that several religions haven't given up working away at it is undeniable proof. Requiring such a huge task from ordinary people whose gifts may lie in such diverse areas as carpentry or nuclear physics or veterinary medicine is unfair. When even such greats as St. Paul and St. Thomas Acqinas called their precious and amazing theological achievements crap, how is a regular guy supposed to get it right? Even if you are firmly convinced that the regular guy can and must get it right, such an idea causes tremendous anxiety to everyone but fools.
I believe that the conformity that so often prevailed in the group I was raised in is a response to that anxiety. The fact that everyone else was living and interpreting the Bible as you did was the easiest and most direct source of corroborating evidence for your chosen understanding of what God wanted from you. If all the skirts were the same length. If all the beards were shaved off. If everyone gathered as a family for a devotional period each night after supper, then you were in good company--you were getting it right. Foundational to each individual's peace of mind was this sense of cooperative correctness. In other words, authority other than the Bible assured them that they understood the Bible correctly.
Another interesting aspect of this is the tendency of fundamentalist/evangelical groups to glom onto a "bright light," a person who seems or actually is, rather intelligent and to accept his say so, after all he's an expert. Superstar preachers take the place of the settled elegance of the Catholic Magisterium. In either case, it's more about the freedom to choose the theology each person feels comfortable with than it is some great theological insight, or so it seems to me.
I prefer to let dedicated, talented people, who have sacrificially devoted their lives to the work, puzzle over the ins and outs of theology. I like that Catholics have been thinking productively about all these things for 2,000 years now. I may not understand or agree with all the conclusions they've come to, but I don't think anyone can argue that they haven't put enough thought into it. They keep thinking about it too, and they trust God that he will give them the right answers as they work cooperatively to discover his truth. Catholics have formalized the informal agreements that every church I ever belonged to lived by unacknowledged. I believe that this has given them great strength and benefited their theology with generations of faithful servant's discernment and inspiration. I also like it that three women are formally recognized contributors to that tradition.
So what about my individual conscience, now that it's not busy trying to wrestle orthodoxy out of the Bible on its own, what keeps it busy? The much more important matters of living an orthodox Christian life. I've exchanged the amazing dung for the greater riches of knowing God and serving Him. Letting Pope Benedict and all the bishops bear their great burdens frees me to bear mine. I have enough to do discerning God's will in my work with my children, in my writing, in my charity work, in my willful sinful life without trying to do that job as well. I'm content to be an organ contributing to the body, rather than the entire body by myself.
This is a series that begins here. The series continues here.