Lost Shakespeare Found

The only problem with great writer's of yore is that when you've read everything they've written, you've read everything they've written.  You can reread them, but it's just not the same.  I read my first novel by Flannery O'Connor in my early twenties, and I have doled out her meager catalog bit by bit.  A decade later ;), I have one collection of short stories left.

The Bible was the first adult book I read for myself.  I started at five with the story of Moses in the Bulrushes.  I went on to read all the usual Bible stories.  Preaching had me reading the New Testament, and boredom with preaching introduced me to all the weird and wacky bits no one ever reads.  The practice of a daily quiet time moved me to get my reading organized.  Starting my freshman year of college, I used three different incarnations of the One Year Bible over the course of more than a decade.  Rereading and rereading and rereading, even the wacky bits became overly familiar.

One of the best benefits of converting to Catholicism is that there are all these new books of the Bible to read.  It feels like it would if someone discovered a lost Shakespearean play, and we could all experience his wisdom and genius in a fresh way. These new-to-me books of the Bible promise to be the Holy Spirit's fine work and work in me.  Getting  around to reading them has taken longer than expected, but, at last, the time has come.  I have an amazing Catholic Bible I was given during my RCIA classes, but it's paperbound, four inches thick, and the other dimensions are pretty generous too.  It wouldn't survive the kind of hauling around my loved books receive, so I have invested in a New Catholic Answer Bible.  A rosary is embossed on the leather-like cover.  The Table of Contents refers to the helpful inserts, not the books of the Bible, and a picture of Pope Francis was included free of charge.  I'm starting with Tobit.  Let the renewal begin!

In Bed.

Adding the phrase "in bed" to the fortune in a fortune cookie is one of my husband's favorite games.  I like to work in bed.  I like nice squishy surfaces, and our king mattress offers lots of room to spread out.  It also insures nightly cleanup as sleeping under books and papers is only appealing in college.  I have a desk that I love and work at occasionally, but a big project or a new project will almost always find me in bed.

Thanks to the snow day, my bed was covered in books, papers, pens, highlighters, my writer's desk, my iPad, and some Smurfs.  I was working out the literature class I hope to teach next year.  Selecting appropriate and interesting works turned out to be way more challenging than expected.  I thought I'd split the day with "A Taste of Redwall."  Thankfully we have another snow day tomorrow, because the following short list took me all day.

Crowhook Literature List for the Middle Ages

(I know the dates aren't accurate.)

525 Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy

529 St. Benedict The Rule of St. Benedict

660 Caedmon Caedmon's Hymn

731 Venerable Bede An Ecclesiastical History of the English People

975 unknown Beowulf

1140 unknown Song of Roland

1150 St. Hildegaard Physica

1175 Ibn Jubayr The Travels of Ibn Jubayr

1274 St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica

1317 Dante The Divine Comedy

1320 Marco Polo The Travels of Marco Polo

1370 William Langland Piers Plowman

1385 unknown Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

1405 Christine de Pizan The Book of the City of Ladies

The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry

1500 Machiavelli The Prince

1516 Thomas More Utopia

1563 Montaigne Essays

1588 St. Teresa of Avila The Interior Castle

1605 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote

Good things come to those who think

Dinner Reservations

Some ideas are stickier than others.  Sitting in church listening to the details of a new project to build a wall around St. Martin DePorres Orphanage got me thinking about Redwall Abbey and Martin the Warrior.  We could put on a Redwall Feast to raise funds.  The idea was so so obvious to me that I assumed it would put itself forward.  I waited for it to be announced so I could volunteer. 

The wall was finished and a new laundry was nearly complete, but the idea still had not been put forward.  In my mind the event was taking shape in ever greater detail.  It kept growing from "A Taste of Redwall" food-centered event to an immersive dinner theater experience.  I kept finding experts and scouting actors, all the while waiting for someone else to speak up for this idea.

Then I began to see that this is my baby, so I put it forward to the St. Martin's Kids committee at church.  They are a very practical group.  They loved the idea and had very helpful questions and 

suggestions.  We all decided to let going forward rest on getting the necessary permissions from the publishers of Redwall.  It was such an intimidating process, but in the end we were green-lighted by Jim Jacques, Brian's brother.   

Pregnant by the Holy Spirit, it's not just for Mary anymore.  

Baby Girl Seems to be a Boy

This is our turtle.  When it was tiny we did our best to research the gender and decided it was a girl.  Then she went through puberty and grew long claws and a dent on her chest.  I still talk to him in a high pitched girly voice, but as long as I toss in some pellets and chase him around the tank with my fingers, we're good.

Don't you mean Di?

"Your name means Christ-like and we expect you to live up to it."

Now Serving Number One

Today is the first anniversary of my collaborative blog, The Shepherd's fish.  When I started it I hoped to reconnect with friends and to get better at blogging .  Both wishes have been granted.  As we have opened our lives to each other, we have found support and courage, facing together the trials of our lives.  We've also found humor, kindness, and a broader perspective on the work of God in the world.  We've talked about everything from runaway dogs to runaway kids and laughed and cried at both of them.  I'm so thankful to God for this godly gaggle and the way they've used this new strength to reach out and grow, touching other lives.  It's a beautiful ripple as we leap up to praise our Shepherd.

 I've been learning how to listen to Jesus, and this time I think I got it right.  The result has done good and brought new strength instead of new stress.  I am glad I obeyed.  The more I test the work in my life in this way, the more I realize how important it is to be sure my service is not for anyone else but Christ for his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

A Glorious Synthesis

God and art has long been one of my favorite intersections.  A few years ago I discovered Sister Wendy's videos and I am slowly becoming a Sister Wendy omnivore.  If you are a person of any kind of faith, you will find her uplifting. Her discussions of great art are very accessible which may be the best thing about her work.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in her book of prayers for children.  Each prayer grows out of a work of art.  The works chosen are the kind that reward prolonged study, and the prayers have the profundity of all things simple.  Get this book for the children you know.  It will be a blessing. 

A Tale of Five Iliads

Ok, it's six if you count The Children's Homer.  How does a woman end up with five copies of the Iliad?  It helps to be scatter-brained.  It all began when my mother-in-law downsized and gave us her set of The Great Books--the set I had envied since day one.  They are a reverend object not to be dragged around and read, but more to be admired from a distance.  Then my mother downsized her classroom and gave me a cheap, secondhand copy of The Iliad that sucked into our family book void, never to be seen until it was too late.  I wanted a copy I could write in, so I went to B&N and bought a copy of the Iliad, and--I thought-- a copy of The Odyssey.  When I got home I had two different translations of The Iliad.  One was much cheaper than the other, so I started that, intending to return the other one.  Came the day when I was in pressing need of reading material, so I grabbed the other version since it was close to hand.  Behold, sometimes, you get what you pay for and the Fagles translation is much better than the one I had started reading.  My legs were numb when I decided I could live with owning two, no three, no four copies of The Iliad.  You know how it is when you're a parent.  I wanted my kids to enjoy all the wealth I had just discovered so I bought them

The Children's Homer.  Still one short?  You are clever to keep up.  After watching it for months and encouraging others to buy it, I went into Love Inc, and they practically gave me a second set of The Great Books in a better binding and just loved enough that we don't feel bad about loving it some more.

Buying books is an adventure.  The great thing about the ancients is that they cost their publishers nothing, so you can get them in all kinds of modes, traditional bound, e-book, document file.  You can pay nothing, or next to nothing at thrift stores, or you can buy them in hand bound leather editions.  All of Shakespeare can be bought for the nook for about 6 bucks.  If you're comfortable with reading off your computer it's all there for free if you look.
So let my surplus inventory be a warning and a comfort.  If you end up with three copies of the Iliad, you're still two short of me.

PS. I have found Robert Fagles translations of The Odyssey and The Aeneid to be worth the extra dollars too.

Where I Come From

I have to admit as a homeschool mom I'm always hoping for a snow day so my older kids can stay home.  I miss them even though I know I've done the right thing sending them to school.  Tricky thing about snow days in Michigan, is living in Michigan.  We see a lot of snow.  It's always cold (try swimming in the lake in July).  We are tough and used to this, so school never seems to close.  Except for the last two days.  Wow, that's weather to make Alaskans shrug their shoulders enigmatically.  I don't care.  It meant two more days of having my big girls home.

Unlike wimpy Indiana where driving in such weather is illegal, Kurt went to work, and it really felt like the old days.  We slept in, but the big girls jumped in upping my homeschooling manpower so that we could finish the essential work in a couple hours.  It was fun, and I mean that non-homeschoolers.  It was really fun.  No such delight expected tomorrow.  We're back to the usual, well, as usual at it gets in a world where throwing boiling water out your back door is a science experiment.  If I didn't have such wonderful friends I'd be moving to Florida--then again, they didn't get a single day off.  

Hanging Up My Straight Jacket

There are things I've committed to doing in order to break free from the internal prison of fundamentalism.  

1.  I reserve my primary energy for my kids.

2.  I write both for my novel and for my personal blog.

3.  I take my friends wherever I find them.  I don't check ID, political affiliation, or theological preferences anymore.

4.  I make time and means for growing in my relationships, most importantly with my husband, but also on Shepherd's fish and in my local 3D life.

5.  I work on projects to make the world better, currently raising funds for St. Martin DePorres Orphanage in Tanzania.

6.  I read the Great Books for my own enrichment and to teach at the Homeschool Cooperative.

7.  Last but most important, I grow in my Catholic faith.