Néant or drifting, take your pick

The days just drift past with little to differentiate one from the next. Occasionally I have a meeting or appointment and yesterday supplied at a church 40 miles away.

Otherwise, life up at the end of a dirt road is extremely quiet.

So I read and read. I actually like this set-up on the front doorstep. The house has a built-in planter that demanded flowers and vinca vine. And there has to be an outrageous hibiscus to complete the scene. The fish gizmo was in a snowbank when I moved in. Who knows to which tenant when it belonged? The chair desperately needs to be repainted; I sanded it down and painted it when I moved to Vermont 18 years ago. (The basket on the chair is what I use to carry my prayer book, amice, cincture, shoes and sundries when I supply.)

As for the reading? The Blue Book (digitally on my iPad), the Barefoot Sisters' account of walking the Appalachian Trail southbound and then northbound, Guy Deslisle's Jerusalem (had I known it was originally in French, I would have tracked it down), Terry Tempest Williams' latest, When Women Were Birds, and Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name... all delicious and since I have the time, I read. (I vowed I was not going to buy any more books, but just could not resist these.)

I also have been hankering to get out and walk, partly to see if the injury from last August (when I landed on a rock and banged my ankle and gave myself a humungous hematoma that still is on my calf and from which I still have edema in my ankle and foot) and mostly because I need to walk things out as I wait and wait to see if I have been called to a congregation and, if not, think about what will I do, and avoid the reality that I must move again by 15 August. Reading and hiking are good ways to escape.

So call it nothingness or drifting, in some ways they are one and the same.

A Gem

Preparing for tonight's Inquirers' Class, I look at Percy Dearmer's Everyman's History of the Prayer Book and land on this nugget about the Thirty-Nine Articles:

'We naturally turn to the Title-page and the Prefaces for our answer. Now the Title-page is a full and descriptive one; and at the very outset it removes a common mistake. It makes no mention of the Thirty-nine Articles; for they form no part of the Prayer Book. They are bound up with it, just as hymn-books often are; but it is a mistake of the printing authorities to compel us to buy the Articles whenever we buy the Prayer Book; and it gives Church folk the impression that the Articles are binding on them, which is not the case — for a layman is perfectly free to disagree with the Articles, if he chooses. They are admirable in many ways, comprehensive and moderate, though written in an age of bitter controversy; but it would be absurd to Suppose that they could not be improved after the discoveries and experience of three and a half centuries. Nothing has been done to improve them.'

Case made, point taken.

(from the online version of said book)

New York Times notable books for 2009

Out of the 100 books they list, I have read a whopping two: Columbine and Zeitoun. Sigh.

It's not that I don't read. Both night tables are full of books. I guess it is just that I am reading books a couple of years old, such as Robert Clark's Dark Water about the 1966 flood in Florence and the controversial restoration of the Cimabue crucifixion, or finishing off Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma which I started flying to Stockton, CA in January; or Peter Chapman's Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (title says it all), or Ron Hansen's novel, Exiles, an interweaving of Gerald Hopkin's poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, and Hansen's depiction of Hopkin's life and the lives of five nuns who perished in the wreck; Terry Tempest Williams' Leap, her in-depth meditation on Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Delights; and finally Julie Greene's The Canal Builders which speaks of the silver, not gold, people who built the Panama Canal (the non-white people were paid in silver and had none of the perks that the whites did, surprise, surprise).

So there is plenty to read... just not what is on the NYT book list.

FLASH: It is snowing!!!! Hooray (never mind that I don't have snow tires on yet)!

What gives?

In the 20th September New York Times Book Review, the following non-fiction line-up in the Best Sellers list is this:

1) Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. President Obama and his team as tax cheats, petty crooks, influence peddlers and Wall Street cronies. (Number 1 last week)

6) A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O'Reilly. The Fox News commentator on his upbringing and career. (Number 5 last week)

7) Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin. A conservative manifesto from a talk-show host and president of Landmark Legal Foundation. (Number 9 last week)

And in paperbacks, Glenn Beck's 'Common Sense' is number one.

So what gives? I suppose, to be fair, the rants about Bush were pretty common and high up on the best seller list. I'd have to go back and see but not now....

Remember this?

When researching my Ph.D. dissertation, I used to spend hours pawing through the card catalogues in Princeton's Firestone Library. There was so much other stuff I could find just by starting with the general number and reading through a drawer or two. I could get wonderfully off-track, too, but that was part of the procrastination and fun. In the last two years of writing the dissertation, the library started shifting the card catalogue over to an online program (that sometimes worked and many times didn't). While it was meant to be accurate, sometimes it was too accurate and I certainly lost the serendipidous finds. So then I simply started to read the stacks and see what I could find. That form of procrastination served me well for the six-month, stopgap, below minimum wage job I had as a runner for Interlibrary Loans.

I love libraries — it's a love that stems from trailing my father on Saturday mornings when I was growing up. He'd go to the library every week to get the books for his daily commute into the city. While he was looking for books, I would explore the library, going up the narrow stairs to the mezzanine with its opaque glass floors that fascinated me. Like many libraries, the stacks simply went up between the floors. The reference room in the old library had a balcony and in junior high school, while waiting for my classical guitar lessons, I would go hang out there. Nowadays that part of the library is closed off to the public and is office space. Too bad.

And then there was prowling around in Neilson Library at Smith College. I was rather saddened to see a photo of the reference room recently: the college has removed ALL the bookcases and reference books. I guess they figure the students can get all their info online and maybe that is what they want but what will happen with the loss of books? When I think of how that room was rebuilt after the October 1975 fire (my freshman year) that burned up 2/3 of the collection in that room, how the students carefully spread the books out and spend days turning pages in an attempt to salvage as many as possible, and the hours I spent in there my senior year of college, working on translations only to find that that a volume or two of the dictionaries wasn't there, knowing that it had burned up, for all this, I am sad that the airy and bright reference room doesn't seem to have a single book in it.

Guess all of this makes me an old fogey.

Plus ça change...?

Last night I started reading Deborah and Nicholas Clifford's book, "The Troubled Roar of the Waters": Vermont in Flood and Recovery, 1927 (Durham, NH: UNH Press, 2007). They published it on the 80th anniversary of the huge flood that caused chaos in Vermont 2-5 November 1927. While all of New England and parts of Canada were affected by torrential rains, Vermont was 'covered by a "cube of water more than a mile high, a mile long, and a mile broad," according to meterologists at the time' [back book jacket]


Whole villages disappeared in the floodwaters and the book details the tragic fate of people trapped in their gaslit houses as they were swept away in the torrents.


No matter where one turned, towns were immersed under floodwaters.


Vermont had an extensive railroad network that took people to and from Boston, New York and Montréal. The dairy industry depended on the railways to carry their milk down to the lucrative markets of Boston and New York. The north-south routes were heavily damaged and really didn't get back up to steam until 1928.

What attracts my attention beyond the gripping story of the flood and its aftermath is the sociological study of Vermont in the 1920s and the importance of the state to the US at large. (I also read this with the personal knowledge that my mother was a month and four days old when this all happened.) So much of what the authors describe happening in the 1920s seems still visible even today. Looking back at the state's pride in being 'exceptional' and 'different', one sees the same desire to maintain that somewhat carmudgeonly air.

As for the title of this entry, the following quotation (51) seems particularly timely. Ignore the somewhat disparaging language of 'Papist' (it is xenophobic) — of the time and from the Rutland Herald, not reflecting the authors' opinions — as you read this description. The context is describing people's angst about losing the 'old' way of life and distrust of the following social forces: modernity, urbanism, immigration and 'radical' politics, pitted against an idealisation of folk-life and a belief in rural life and its rhythms.

Views such as these... reflect a general sense of crisis among old-stock Americans, who saw what they imagined as an earlier and homogeneous and harmonious society — native, Protestant, and middle-class — challenged by a modern culture increasingly influenced by immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. Even those lovely white churches adorning the village greens were no longer much a part of the lives of Vermonters as they once had been. "Papists Have Increased 20% in Ten Years," read a headline in the Rutland Herald, and though in the United States as a whole, Protestant church membership was rising at roughly the same rate, that was not true of Vermont. A study of President Coolidge's home county of Windsor revealed a severe drop in Protestant church-going, and in 1931 a committee chaired by [Governor] John Weeks — himself a man of profound Protestant convictions — discovered that while 51.9 percent of adult Vermonters were church members, without the Papists, the figure would have been far worse, for only 36 percent of the state's non-Catholic population over the age of thirteen belonged to any congregation (the national average was 46.5 percent).

Evidently church going 80 years ago wasn't a high priority either — perhaps for very different reasons but nonetheless, it's a pretty low percentage of folks who attended church. Given how strong the Congregational church is historically in Vermont, it's amazing that we've had an incorporated Episcopal diocese for 175 years with 48 congregations. This little historical foray offers some perspective as I worry about our shrinking numbers. Maybe what is happening in 2008 isn't that much different from what was going on in 1927... before all the suffering of the Great Depression... where it seems we might be headed as well.

A nugget from André Gide (1869-1951)

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

+

This quotation really doesn't need much explaining. I think it fits well to the current situation in the Anglican Communion.

I have read a lot of André Gide's works, starting with La Symphonie Pastorale, then La Porte Etroite (which has led me to pondering about Gide, since this week's gospel is on the narrow door), Les Faux Monnayeurs, and so on. I plowed through his journals and many other novels.

Perhaps my favourite quote from him, one that has always stuck with me and which I have tried to live is:

Le sage est celui qui s'étonne de tout. The wise one is the one who marvels at everything.

The rest of the quotation speaks about seeing each new day as a marvel. It comes from Les Nourritures Terrestres.

Yes. Gide's life was pretty wild — wild enough that thirty years ago, the details of his sexual doings were not mentioned in books or classes. Despite it, he was a wonderful lyrical author.

In any event, read, mark and inwardly digest this one nugget:

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Who gets first dibs?

Young Guy?


La Doyenne?

Orange Guy?

No. I DO!!!

But, then, after I've finished the book, who should get it next?

[Update]

While I took my Sunday afternoon nap (after reading 80 pages), La Doyenne snuck in, took the book and managed to power read through to chapter 22 (out of 36, plus an epilogue), page 474. Smart cat!

Pre-50th reading

You can't search inside as the little photo indicates, but here is a birthday book that Compa has just given me, Once in a Promised Land, by Laila Halaby. It looks really good — a haunting cover of a swimmer and an airplane.

The inside jacket blurb reads:

kan
ya ma kan
fee qadeem az-aamaan

They say there was or there wasn't in older times a story as old as life, as young as this moment, a story that is yours and is mine.

++++

Once in a Promised Land is the story of Jassim and Salwa, who left the deserts of their native Jordan for those of Arizona, each chasing mirages of opportunity and freedomm. Although the couple life far from Ground Zero, they cannot escape the dust cloud of paranoia settling over the nation.

A hydrologist, Jassim believes passionately in his mission to make water accessible to all people, but his work is threatened by an FBI witch hunt for domestic terrorists. A Palestinian now twice displaced, Salwa embraces the American dream. She grapples to put down roots in an unwelcoming climate, becoming pregnant against her husband's wishes.

When Jassim kills a teenage boy in a terrible accident and Salwa becomes hopelessly entangled with a shadowy young American, their tenuous lives in exile and their fragile marriage begin to unravel. Once in a Promised Land is a dramatic and achingly honest look at what it means to straddle cultures, to be viewed with suspicion, and to struggle to find safe haven.

+++

The book looks good. I will start it as soon as I finish Riverbend's Baghdad Burning II: Girl Blog from Iraq. I will do so tonight.

Compa and I celebrated my 50th tonight because she has to fly out tomorrow to a meeting in Chicago and I will go to my parents' until Friday. It has been a quiet and gentle evening, just perfect.

Riverbend is still alive!

The blogging world, myself included, has been worrying about what has happened to Riverbend of Baghdad Burning. She hadn't posted anything since 20 February.

And today she posted sad but not so unexpected news: her family is leaving Iraq.

If you haven't read her writings, do. More than anyone else, she has given me a clearer understanding of what this blasphemous war has done to her country, her people, the co-existence of Shia and Sunni families. She analyses the political, social, economic and religious situation in language that is true and insightful. Most of all, she provides details of what daily life in Iraq used to be like and what hellish life Iraqis now lead.

You can either read her blog or buy her two books, Baghdad Burning I and II: Girlblog from Iraq.

We will never meet, but I hold her and her family in my prayers.

... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend... Riverbend

Thanks to Wounded Bird for alerting me to the new post.

Into the maws of the system

This afternoon was a lost cause in productivity. I had a 2.15 PM appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. So I was told to arrive fifteen minutes ahead of time to have x-rays done on the two items in question, my left wrist and foot. I knew that wasn't enough time so I showed up half an hour early for the x-rays (that are done digitally!). That took half an hour so I arrived right on time for the appointment.

Not. I didn't get into the examining room until 4.00 PM and then once in there sat for another 15-20 minutes until the doctor arrived. I always bring work or a book with me so I wasn't exactly chafing at the bit and I had my cell phone so I kept rescheduling the meeting I had with the choir director to choose hymns. I managed to read 50 pages of Riverbend's second book, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (if you haven't read her books, you absolutely must because it is the most unvarnished view of life in Iraq post March 2004 you will get). Even the doctor noted the book (as well as saying she hoped I had had something to read).

The upshot of the afternoon? [I so wished I had had my camera to take photos of my x-rays :) ]

Last May, I knew I had broken something in my foot or toe just before going off to France. I wanted to confirm what I had done. Indeed, I had broken the second metatarsal at the joint (on the diagonal). That's why the natural crease in a shoe bothers it because it's right above where the injury was. Good to know I wasn't making that up.

Then the wrist was tackled. I have had a ganglion cyst there for two years. The wrist bones are a little askew from my having landed hard on it (falling on ice five years ago). The cyst wasn't big but since it's my dominant hand, it was getting in the way. The doctor aspirated the cyst, and then punched a lot of little holes in it ('It will look like a showerhead') so it won't close up and refill. I am to keep it wrapped up tightly to keep it from filling out like a balloon. They sent me off with soft cotton wrap that they put under casts and I have the sticky material that comes in a variety of colours. I have a big roll of purple wrap that someone got at a feed store (!, it's a lot cheaper that way) last year when I was complaining about my wrist bothering me, so I can sport a colour-coordinated wrist during Holy Week. Then I can go back to the pink I have here.

Then it was a mad dash back to meet with the choir director for 45 minutes to choose hymns. I have been doing that with his predecessor and now him ever since I arrived here. It's good to talk with him, to find out what his thoughts are, get a sneak preview of the liturgies and lectionary that lie ahead of us and think about what we'll sing. There's always a bit of side-tracking into other conversations, pastoral, theological, you name it.

Then youth group. Our seventh graders were kind of distracted tonight but we covered a wide range of subjects: racism, is there heaven or hell, is there God, what's so important about Jerusalem (we are making a model of Jerusalem), why were there the Crusades and occasional mutterings of 'I don't believe Jesus rose.' Is it labour intensive to have three adults and two boys? It doesn't matter. I think the adults seem to enjoy the time (largely) and the boys may not admit it but they keep showing up week after week.

So, now, it's time to close up shop for the day. One last thought... today was the fifteenth anniversary of consecration of the Most Rev'd Martín Barahona, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of the Region of Central America (IARCA) and Bishop of the Anglican Episcopal Church of El Salvador. The church has been richly graced by his leadership. It has been costly for his family and him what with all the travels he has to make but I am so glad he is where he is right now. May God continue to bless him and guide him in this important ministry. Asi sea. Amén.

Pet Peeve

Last night, in part of my downtime, I plowed through Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown's latest paperback release, Sour Puss. I have read every Sneaky Pie Brown mystery — in fact, they were really the first and only mysteries I read. My mystery reading is selective and rare.

So why did I find myself annoyed as I read this book? For the same reason that the past two or three other Sneaky Pie Brown/Mrs Murphy mysteries have bugged me: there's simply way too much blatant 'product placement.' I don't need to know that Harry buys Woolverine boots over Timberland boots because Timberland has gone down the drain. There's a whole chapter on which SUV Ned should buy because he shouldn't be driving an Audi to the Virginia legislature. So someone pipes in with how good the Cadillac Escalade is. (That one will tout a SUV like that in the first place is a put-off.) And so it goes. There are many places where the name of the product could easily be dropped.

I am not sure I will boycott reading these mysteries but, frankly, the obvious selling-out is a real disappointment. It's one example of the sickness of our capitalist system — one can't even escape into a mystery without being bombarded by advertising.

Rant off.

Hiding out, sort of, and reading!

I know it's not Friday yet but this is sort of how I feel right now, wanting to go hide under a blanket (fortunately, it's late enough in the day that I can), like Orange Boy.

I don't know why I am so tired all the time but I am. Whatever, the idea of closing up shop early sounds really good to me.

Besides, it's below 0 out and no sane person or cat should be up and about when it's like that, especially in an old drafty house like this one.

Even better, I have two new books, in the sense of 'hot off the press,' with which to spend time:

The first is Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's A Wing and a Prayer (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2007), a collection of meditations and the two homilies she preached the weekend of her investiture and seating at the Cathedral in Washington. I have already peeked at several meditations and look forward to reading the entire collection. In her meditation, 'Sharing the Wealth,' she speaks of an event that happened in the fall of September 2005 that still brings tears to my eyes because right after this happened, El Salvador then was hit with a rain storm that wouldn't go away and caused great flooding and loss of homes:

'The Diocese of El Salvador is poor and rural, with five thousand Anglicans and six clergy gathered in seventeen congregations, and they know something about hurricanes.... In late September of 2005, after hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, the bishop of El Salvador [the Most Rev'd Martín Barahona] promised that his diocese was going to contribute all of their income from that month to relief work on the Gulf Coast. All of it, from every congregation in the diocese. Every penny. They know what it is to be victims of natural disaster, and they are sharing what they have with others who have lost everything. Their knowledge of common suffering prompted a desire to share, and it brings joy to all' (55).

That is but a small taste of PB KJS's new book.

The second book is the Rev'd John C. Morris's First Comes Love? The Ever-Changing Face of Marriage (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2007).

John is a colleague of mine and this book represents the formalised presentation of his oft-presented talk, 'The Twenty-One Traditions of Marriage.' John is a fabulous story-teller, a former elementary school teacher (which means he can access concrete examples in ways that many of us can't) and inquisitive student of something, marriage, that we all think we know a lot about. As his book shows us, we don't. As for the notion of 'biblical marriage,' well, just read the first four chapters.

I feel I know his book because I have attended two or three of his presentations and even translated one (with his permission) into Spanish to use in El Salvador last summer. So I look forward to seeing how he has synthesised his talks into a book that even at first glance and rifling through its pages, retains John's wonderful sense of humour and maintains a readily accessible and useful resorce for individuals and study groups.

Is this a plug for my friend's book? You betcha it is!

Worth closing up shop and going to bed to read for!