“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ’Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.”
Category Archives: Libri
Re-membering
“My great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother are all alive for me because they are part of my story. My children and grandchildren and I tell stories about Hugh, my husband. We laugh and we remember–re-member. I tell stories about my friend, the theologian Canon Tallis, who was far more than my spiritual director, with whom I had one of those wonders, a spiritual friendship. I do not believe that these stories are their immortality–that is something quite different. But remembering their stories is the best way I know to have them remain part of my mortal life. And I need them to be part of me, while at the same time I am quite willing for them all to be doing whatever it is that God has in mind for them to do. Can those who are part of that great cloud of witnesses which has gone before us be in two places at once? I believe that they can, just as Jesus could, after the Resurrection.”
It wasn’t a VW bus, was it?
“There was a time when good academic qualifications guaranteed a job, but not any more. One reason is academic inflation. In the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be gaining academic qualifications than since the beginning of history. But as more people get them, their currency value is falling sharply. A university degree used to be an open sesame to a professional position. The minimum requirement for some jobs is now a Master’s degree, even a PhD. What next? But there is a second problem. Many companies are facing a crisis in graduate recruitment. It’s not that there aren’t enough graduates to go around; there are more and more. But too many don’t have what business urgently needs: they can’t communicate well, they can’t work in teams and they can’t think creatively. But why should they? University degrees aren’t designed to make people creative. They are designed to do other things and often do them well. But complaining that graduates aren’t creative is like saying, “I bought a bus and it sank”.
16-year-olds are people too?
“There is a natural and accepted view that one of the main purposes of education is to prepare young people directly for a place in the labour market. Obviously, general education should do this. But there are two complications. First, thinking of education as a preparation for something that happens later can overlook the fact that the first 16 or 18 years of a person’s life are not a rehearsal. Young people are living their lives now. What they become and what they do later depends on the attitudes and abilities they develop as they are growing up. Linear assumptions about supply and demand can and do cut off many potentially valuable and formative experiences on the grounds of utility.”
Merton and Day
So I finally did it. I went out and got myself a spiritual director. And as I was explaining to her what I’ve been doing recently in my prayer life (this was difficult and guilt inducing!) I mentioned that I had been reading a lot of Merton, and before that some Dorthy Day. Which Sister thought was an odd combination. And for half a second or so, I nearly began to correct her, and say that it wasn’t odd at all, actually, but I thought better of that and moved on. But I have kept thinking about it, and I think I was right (though the ideas are rough and not backed by specific texts at the moment – my Tulane degree is cringing as I write this!), they are really not far removed when you get down to what they each preached. Simply, love your neighbor. And that means everyone. Both felt senses of guilt for the state the world was in, based mostly on their pre-conversion lifestyles. Both argued that love of God comes to fruition in caring for other people as well and as sacrificially as we can. Merton did this with prayer behind closed doors, but there seem to be times in his writing where the thinks that if her were worth his salt, he would be out doing exactly what Dorthy Day was doing. On the other hand, Day emphasizes the need for spiritual grounding to survive the sort of work she engaged in. The two complement each other clearly. The fact that both felt they had been forgiven so much stirred both of them to charity and forgiveness, though neither ever shied to name and denounce sin wherever they found it. The honesty, often the bluntness of both of their writings shines of the desire to know and be known, to open themselves and to thereby lead their readers further down whatever their personal paths might be. Merton felt he needed the cloister to keep him from the temptations of the world, and that that sort of solitude was necessary for his salvation. But he repeats that it does not free him from the necessity of loving his neighbor, within the monastery walls or without them. The two have different methods, because of their different gifts and struggles, but one message. Love greatly, for you are greatly loved.
Black beans and sweet potatoes?
Last week was black bean and sweet potato week here at the Baker house. I know that probably sounds strange to you, because it did to me a couple of weeks ago. But we (and by “we” I mean Craig) had purchased many, many pounds of sweet potatoes about a month ago, and they needed to be eaten. And black beans are cheap (as were sweet potatoes, hence our abundance). And I generally trust Moosewood cookbooks, so I thought I’d give the “black bean and sweet potato hash” a try. Now, I’m not one to make hashes, as a general rule, so this involved a little bravery to start with. Here’s the recipe, so you can see for yourself what I was getting into.
Merton on Suffering
Merton is speaking of seeing his father in a hospital bed, unable to speak and disfigured by a brain tumor. He is 14 or 15 years old, and has no faith or relationship with God to speak of.
Man’s Power over Nature?
“Let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man. Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be witheld from some men by other men–by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of producion, or those who make the goods. What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those alread alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercied by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
It’s been a while…
So I apologize for that. Life is crazy, even though “busy” might not be the most appropriate term. Here’s the update, and I promise that I’m going to make an honest attempt to get back on the blogging wagon.
I’m frantically trying to finish two sewing projects, plus the mending of diapers, except that we managed to leave all our cloth diapers, except the ones the girls were wearing when we left, at home. And this week has taught me, in case I needed reminding, that I hate disposable diapers. There is a whole post in itself there. This is why I feel busy, despite spending most of my days at home on the couch. (Ok, not most, but as much as I can manage.)
Holy Housework
I had been wondering where the burst of cleaning and ordering energy that I’ve had for the last couple of weeks had come from, and I now have a couple of theories. (For two pregnancies I looked forward to the “nesting” phase when I would actually want to clean – it never came. Maybe this is what it feels like!) Freedom from the requirements of a job has certainly helped, since I have hours back in my days with no commute, no papers to grade or lessons to plan, not to mention the time I actually spent teaching.
