Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 65

Dreams, Burning Bushes and the Voice of God

Photo by Manuel Sorenson, via Flickr

In the Bible, people are always being told what to do in dreams and bushes that don’t burn and angelic visits. Not only that, half the time what they’re being told doesn’t make sense. Go sacrifice your only child, the one who’s supposed to grow up and give you descendants beyond count. You’re gonna have a baby even though you’ve never had sex. Go, thou stutter-er, and tell the king of Egypt to free his slaves.

And they always do it. And it works out because it was God talking.

We set these people up as examples to emulate. But in my life it’s led to a twisted view of my will versus God’s will. A view that says anything that makes sense to me must, because it seems rational, be contrary God’s will. And any whisper in the brain suggesting something scary, irrational or involving what feels like unwise risk must, therefore, be God’s will.

(I said it was twisted.)

This is a neurosis I’ve struggled with for years, most notably when I was battling anxiety, and I’ve come to think it stems from the faulty understanding of Scripture that causes Scripture itself to be a stumbling block for so many reasonable people.

Being modern people, we tend to take words at face value. Being people of written history, people whose grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents have been literate, we approach the Bible like a newspaper, rather than a compilation of tales and poetry passed down through oral tradition over the course of generations before it was written down. The book And God Said What? taught me a lot about literary forms of Biblical times. The author goes through the forms, most of which are no longer in use–hence our difficulty in making sense of them–and stresses that the point of Scripture is to communicate truths about God, not historical events.

People get really nervous about the idea that you can’t take every word of the Bible as literal, historical truth. We think if that’s the case, is any of it true? I struggle with this a bit myself, in all honesty. But again, that’s a sign that we’re imposing a modern sensibility, formed and steeped in the idea that you must be able to prove something scientifically in order for it to be true, upon people who just didn’t experience the world that way.

Photo by spratmackrel, via Flickr

In any case, the reason I’m going through all this is because we have a tendency to think that God talked to people differently in ancient times than he does now. And although it feels like blasphemy to say it, I can’t help wondering if many of those stories about dreams and burning bushes were less historical events and more images people came up with to try to explain to others how they discerned God’s will. I knew a girl once, angry, broken, seeking and resisting, who sat in an oak forest in the fall and threw a challenge to the skies: Prove it, then. At that moment, an autumn breeze swept a cascade of leaves down and one of them landed on her palm. That was how she encountered God.

Modern audiences recognize that God didn’t literally pick one leaf off a tree and place it in her hand. At the same time, we recognize her encounter as genuine. That’s the form our narratives take today–and we’ve all seen similar stories come through on email and Facebook.

Discerning the right course of action is hard enough without placing unreasonable expectations for clarity on God. We’d all like to have a billboard with our name on it, laying out in black and white the “right” decision. But putting those kinds of expectations on God throws roadblocks in the way of faith. It’s time to stop expecting God to behave the way He does in stories and start paying attention to the ways He does speak in real life.

Sunday Snippets

It’s Sunday Snippets time over at This That & The Other Thing. Come join us!

This week’s question is whether we like the questions of the week. I notice not everyone is doing them, which I’m sorry to see, because by and large I think it’s interesting to see what people’s experiences are. I don’t always have anything deeply profound to add, but I like there being a teeny bit of real content in my otherwise-all-link posts.

I haven’t written much over the Christmas season… it is my respite time. But I did have some thoughts on the typical sanitized version of the nativity story. And here is a short gallery of cute pictures illustrating what the end of Advent looked like in our household.

And oh, I have to share my 7 Quick Takes, because every mom deserves to crow a bit when she gets through (or mostly through) toilet training. Right?

On Graduating From Diapers (mostly), and Other Quick Takes

 

 

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Equal excitement for another gift

Michael is in underwear! I admit, when I picked Christmas break to push him over the hump from “toilet trained while naked” to “toilet trained while clothed,” I was more than half expecting it to be a very messy, unhappy two weeks. And it started off that way. I started off with him in diapers, knowing there would be a learning curve. But Christmas Eve when he opened the package of dinosaur-and-Pixar briefs, he went insane with excitement. It was cracking me up. Alex, flummoxed, said, “He’s excited by underwear?”

 

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The underwear didn’t seem to be doing the trick, though. We were setting the timer for thirty minutes between bathroom breaks, and Michael did not like that schedule. Then we left for my in-laws’ house. We decided not to mess with toileting on the road (it’s a 4-hour drive, not counting stops). We just put him in a disposable and took off. And when we arrived, he was dry. And he hasn’t wet his underwear since. Can you believe that? He’s still not convinced of the need to do his other business in the toilet, but I’m crossing my fingers to clear that hurdle soon.

 

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Christian says Michael’s so focused on the physical, he just doesn’t have the attention to spare for learning to talk. But I think a 25-month-old who can be toilet trained is clearly cognitively ready to be pushed toward speech. I’ve decided it’s time to go ahead and see about some speech therapy. I’m guessing it won’t take very many sessions to get him talking.

 

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Christmas break is long this year, a full two school weeks off, but so far it’s been good. New playthings help, of course, but they still bicker plenty. Yet I’ve been taking time to really be with them–focused on Trivial Pursuit, or the threading of a wooden rosary, or whatever, not allowing half my heart & mind to drift to the writing not getting done. It is truly amazing how that has shifted the way I see my children. I am feeling these constant shivers of awe and gratitude and, well, presence. So much of these early years I’ve felt overwhelmed by the demands of physical caring for multiple littles (especially because Julianna still needs help with so much), and guilty for how quickly the frustration built. People were always telling me to enjoy it because it’s so fleeting, but there was just so much weight to bear, all those admonitions only made me feel worse for feeling the burden to be so heavy. For the first time, I’m feeling that weight lifting, allowing me to enjoy the kids and live in the moment. I’m going to have to write a full post on this one, there’s so much to say on the topic.

 

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Okay, finishing up with the Grammar police:

 

 

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Lest you think that is merely a cute spelling to draw attention, here’s the sign in their window:

 

I know it’s dark and hard to read, but it says Discount Walpapper. Ahem.

 

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Oh, why not add the other photo I took on the road? I call this one Creepy Mary:

 

 

What in the world? It looks like they glued on a statue’s head backwards and then put a littler Mary head on top. My question is….why?

 

Making New Year’s Resolutions Stick

English: New Year’s Resolutions postcard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I didn’t intend to write today, as I’m on double deadline with kids at home (and, uh, I overslept my writing time this morning). But since today is that ubiquitous New Year’s Resolutions day, and I’m someone who has always made generally successful resolutions, I’ll put in my two cents on how to make them stick.

1. Keep them focused. “Get healthy” is amorphous and doomed to fail because you don’t know what it means. What does that mean? Eat more vegetables? Exercise more? Work less?

2. Keep them measurable–and realistic. For instance, I’m setting a goal to practice my flute 3 times a week this year. I’d rather say 5 times a week but the experience of the last few months has taught me that I won’t be able to fulfill that.

3. Focus on the spiritual (i.e. relationships) as well as the physical. You are a body and a soul, and your spiritual and physical health can uplift or undermine each other.

4. Don’t do this today just because it’s New Year’s. It’s an artificial deadline. People don’t like to hear this, but when you’re ready to do something, you simply do it. Two examples: My dad’s father quite smoking cold turkey one day because it was rough on his wife (see what I mean about physical and spiritual/relational?). I started losing weight in October of 2012 without any premeditation whatsoever, simply because someone mentioned the vehicle to make it happen (Loseit.com). This was after a decade of insisting to my husband that I was not capable of losing weight because of factors a) b) and c). When you’re ready to do it, you’ll do it.

5. To conclude, I wrap these suggestions together with a quote from Thomas Merton:

It should be accepted as a most elementary human and moral truth that no man can live a fully sane and decent life unless he is able to say “no” on occasion to his natural bodily appetites. No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiosity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person. He has renounced his spiritual freedom and become the servant of bodily impulse. Therefore his mind and will are not fully his own. They are under the power of his appetites. (From New Seeds of Contemplation)

Respite

There is no such thing as a truly quiet day (holiday or otherwise) in a house with four children, three of them boys. And yet something unexpected happened on Christmas day this year. I made a sort of off-the-cuff, vague decision that wasn’t so much a decision as a shrug and a “whatever.”

I never turned the computer on.

Ordinarily when I try to “unplug,” I find myself chafing for a fix, even though I know the chances are slim that all that connecting will actually make me feel like I’ve done something worthwhile. I’m always pursuing a bit more “productivity.” So it was an unexpected grace, on Christmas, not to feel compelled to do anything besides be.

I took a forty minute walk with my dad and had a chance for concentrated conversation. I sat and watched an entire movie with my kids without feeling the slightest desire to go read, scrapbook, or clean something. I spent an hour–an hour!–sitting at the kitchen table with Julianna, helping her finish making a rosary her grandmother gave her last Christmas, which has lain 1/3 complete for a year. And at the end of the day I felt positively brimming over with love, and a peace of heart I rarely feel. In the light of that grace everything looked different. I was able to brush aside Michael throwing books (well, after a couple minutes of discipline) and laugh at how he spent the whole day getting into a) cereal boxes, b) the refrigerator, c) the candy dish no matter how high it was put, d) his brothers’ Lego, e) candy canes he picked up from who knows where, f) you get the idea. I was able to be truly present in the moment when the kids were singing the Johnny Appleseed song as a bedtime prayer, Alex poised beside Michael on the toddler bed, Michael swinging his legs. To marvel at how beautifully, sincerely grateful Nicholas was, and how often he felt a desire to thank us and my parents for is favorite gifts. To chuckle at the menagerie of stuffed animals Michael feels compelled to sleep with, most of them bigger than he is.

Most of the time I feel like Donald Duck being chased by a lit fuse–running for my life to keep from getting my bum scorched.  But in the last month or so, I’ve had unexpected moments in which I have a moment to breathe–when the spinning vortex of insanity lifts for a moment, and I think, Hey, things they are a-changin’. I get a brief glimpse of what my world might look like a few years hence.

Then the madness closes in again, but somehow in its wake, life has a bittersweet tang to it. I need these moments of respite–a flash, an unplugged day–to help keep the normal demands of parenthood from blocking the view from the heights.

Begin my Christmas-season blog respite. I’ll see you around New Year’s.

A Christmas Story By Alex

Late Advent In Pictures

Because I’m Pretty Sure Jesus Had Exploding Diapers, Too

Mangiatoioa abbandonata (abandoned manger) (Photo credit: lorenzoridi)

Every year when Christmas comes around, we get treated to a lot of reflections on the holy child. We try to imagine what God as a human being must have been like as an infant, and quite honestly a lot of nonsense makes its way into the common lore.

It first struck me when the choir I sang in during grad school performed a version of Silent Night containing a lyric I’d never heard before (and thank God I’ve never heard since):

…Lovely boy with golden hair…

Blond hair? Really? News flash: Jesus was Jewish! I had to grit my teeth to get through that concert.

And then there’s this one:

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.

Right. Because God in human form would never cry. Because He had telepathy and lightning bolts to communicate that he was hungry, tired, gassy or dirty. Riiiight.

We believe in a God who is fully divine and fully human. And I think very often we focus on the divine nature because the human one is inconvenient, or uncomfortable. Birth in a stable was probably pretty gross. Pretty smelly, and not just because of the animals. Baby Jesus had to nurse every two or three hours, just like our babies. And just like our babies, I’m pretty sure he had exploding diapers, too.

In order for Jesus to be fully human, a true bridge between Heaven and Earth, he had to have had the full range of human experience. To be fully human is to embrace the messiness of life on Earth–misunderstandings born of an imperfect mode of communication, entering into relationships without knowing what is going on in someone else’s head. It involves risk.

Sanitizing Jesus’ human experience serves to hold him at a distance. If we view him as superhuman rather than human, we can write off his holiness, his total commitment to discerning and carrying out God’s will, by saying, “Well, he was God after all. It’s different for me.” It makes him other. Separate. It absolves us of the responsibility to seek.

In Jesus, God embraced the messiness of life on Earth in order to show that holiness can be found despite (and within) the mess.

Our challenge is to do the same.

Related articles

The Not So Silent Night (glanier.wordpress.com)
Jesus the Human Being (thehighcalling.org)

Sunday Snippets

Time for another gathering of Catholic bloggers over at RAnn’s This, That & The Other Thing blog hop! Care to join us? Today’s question of the week is: What are your family’s (non-religious) Christmas traditions?

My answer: Errrrr….

I’m punting to my husband’s family, because mine adjusted everything around church choir obligations and extended family gatherings. Although I’m sure one of my sisters will correct me if I’m blanking on some perfectly obvious and inviolable tradition. Although I guess gingerbread men count, don’t they?

My husband’s family, however, has deeply detailed traditions, mostly food-related. (They are Italian after all.) Fish soup on Christmas Eve. And an egg-drop soup that um, we’ve abandoned in our house. Santa comes overnight and no one is allowed downstairs until everyone is ready. Christmas Day is spent at home with the immediate family, playing with the new toys, and a big lasagna dinner with cannoli and other Christmas cookies for dessert.

So that’s my contribution. As for relevant posts:

I did a two-part series on child abuse and how I hope to offer my children another layer of defense from all exploitation through a proper understanding of their sexuality. Those posts are here and here.

You know you need to know how Julianna feels about having Down syndrome.

Ringing Bells & Taking Pride and Michael Meets Advent, two reflections on our busiest week of Advent activities.

7 Quick Takes

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Proof that at this point, she still had her glasses.

On November 30, we went to St. Louis for the day. We know Julianna had her glasses because we have pictures from that night when she rode a horse. We also know that as of the time she got up from nap on December 1st, she did not have them. The time in between is a blank for everyone in the family. Did we have them Sunday morning when we went to church or not? What we do know is that they have not been seen since. This may seem like a trivial thing to put in a blog post, but imagine the vexation. Between September and November, Michael broke the earpieces–twice. (The glasses are bendy, but earpieces must be firm.) And now they vanish altogether? Keeping this girl in glasses getting to be a very expensive proposition.

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The other day my older sister mentioned she had made 5 dozen gingerbread men. This reminded me of something that struck me when we were making gingerbread ourselves (our gingerbread is all gone, btw). When we were kids, we made 6-inch-tall cutout gingerbread men (exactly like that picture, only bigger). We made them for each of our classmates, and for our teachers, and we kept a bunch at home to eat, along with other cutout shapes. Now there were four girls in our family, and although I graduated with sixteen in my 8th grade glass, we started with 32. And my sisters’ classes were larger than mine. Can you imagine the volume of gingerbread my mother made? How did she do that?

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As long as we’re talking Christmas, here’s a 4 1/2-minute video of Christian and me playing two pieces from my new collection Come to the Manger.

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Pray for me. Or just wish me luck. Today is the day I have set for starting to transition Michael from toilet trained-while-naked-on-the-bottom to toilet-trained-while-clothed. Not looking forward to the process. But very much looking forward to being done.

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I dedicated a couple of posts this week to child sexual abuse and more specifically, my own attempts to protect my children by arming them. Here’s part 1, and here’s part 2, where I outline our approach to sex ed with our kids.

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I had some good news on the medical front this week. My mother’s family carries a genetic condition called BHD, which is supposed to impact 1 out of 2 people in the family. But until this summer every single person who had been tested, in two generations, had been positive. One of my cousins was the first to test negative, and this week I was the second. One less thing to worry about!

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Uh…blank? Oh, I know what I’ll share: this reflection on the coming weekend’s readings.