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The importance of being a gung-ho newbie.

Last evening Mark and I hired a babysitter, bundled up, and walked to dinner.   We went to a new tapas restaurant about a mile away, a tiny little place that's proved very popular in our relatively-restaurant-starved neighborhood.   The tables were packed close together and we were seated almost shoulder-to-shoulder.

At first it was a little disconcerting to be able to overhear the people at the next table so well (especially since the four women six inches to our right were engaged in a vigorous, head-nodding discussion of one of their number's experience with artificial insemination), but I ordered another glass of sangria and eventually managed to ignore them, especially when the plates of food started to arrive.  After the table six inches to our left cleared out, the next thing I heard was a "Hello!"   The couple who had just arrived included someone I recognized well:  the instructor-owner of the preschool music class that I've been going to with one or another of my children for nine years.   And her husband, who teaches piano in the same studio space, but whom I'd never met.

Well, you can't exactly ignore something like that, so we wound up having a nice conversation about kids, and babysitters, and teenagers who are old enough to stay home and manage their own siblings for a couple of hours, and homeschooling, and South Minneapolis, and small businesses, and hiking trips, and the piquillos de atún.  Mark and I left before they did, and I reflected as we walked back on why I'd stuck with this particular music-and-movement class for so long.

I signed up for it in the first place because neither Mark nor I is the kind of person who spontaneously creates an environment rich in music. Mark can't noodle around on the piano (especially since we don't own one); I have a guitar but I don't think to pick it up and play it very much; neither of us are the sort who's always wandering around singing or humming.  

Now, I don't, actually, subscribe to the idea that extensive formal music training, beyond the basics, is a necessary part of every child's education.  I studied an instrument (entirely by choice) as a teenager; I had fun with it, and I acquired an appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into learning to play an instrument well.  To my mind, that kind of effort is best applied because someone wants to do it, not imposed as a requirement from outside.

But back when I was first starting out as a parent, I fervently believed that early music experiences were important for brain development, that if I could only give my children at least a little regular exposure I might be helping them if they ever chose to take on serious musical training in the future, and I might encourage them to have fun with music and rhythm.  Because I felt Mark and I were kind of deficient in the music-experience-generating department, I thought a weekly music class might fill the bill.  So when my firstborn was three and my secondborn was new, I signed us up.

It turned out that not only did the class provide what I hoped for musically, but the pedagogy was absolutely exactly in line with my new-parent, idealistic convictions of how one should teach small children. 

I remember those days.  I was on the "Continuum Concept" email list.  I was all about respecting children as human beings deserving of my full attention, but not idolizing them as the center of my universe; about living my own life and folding them into it.  I was all about giving children real tools to do real work, and modeling, rather than demanding, the behavior I wanted them to develop, and trusting that my little people were inherently social beings who naturally wanted to be like the adults around them.  I taught my eighteen-month-old to cut up vegetables safely with a real knife, the handle shortened  and the tip blunted especially for him, in Mark's workshop; that worked very well.  I gave him hammers and tacks and a little hand drill for making holes, and a child-sized shopping basket for when we went to the grocery store.  I used to take walks with that first little guy in parks, trying to get where we were going by walking ahead and discreetly peer back to see if he was catching up with me, because the books said that if parents only made it clear that we expected the children to stay with us, then they would.  (That one never worked, at least with my oldest.  I always had to give up and go fetch him.)  I bought discounted Montessori materials -- yes indeedy, I own a Pink Tower, though mine isn't pink -- and made some of my own.  I lamented the lack of a network of extended-family relationships among people who shared my value system, and set about trying to create one with some other like-minded families.

So when I settled into that first music class, I was thrilled to discover that the instructor -- the same woman we had dinner with last night -- talked to children as if they were people.  She spoke in an engaging voice, musically and with rhythm but never "sing-song."  She instructed the parents to avoid grasping the children's hands to demonstrate playing this shaker or that tambourine; the children were to be free to observe the adults having fun and making music.  She led the parents leading the children.  She clearly trusted that if the adults smiled and sang, moved with the music, echoed rhythms, clapped on cue, paused for beats of silence -- that the children would pick up on it and follow their parents' cues.  She didn't interrupt class with lengthy explanations, but incorporated instruction -- always aimed at giving the parents the tools to share music with their child -- into the singing and rhythm of the songs, so there were never any breaks in the music longer than a child's attention span.  Sometimes we would arrive to class to find technical notes -- definitions of musical terms, suggesting we listen for a particular instrument in a particular song -- on the chalkboard, but she never wasted class time on it.

Oh, and I should add that the music CDs are full of good music -- lots of folk music, a little blues, world music, spoken-word stuff.  It's not dumbed-down kid-music, it's real music chosen because it has wide human appeal.  Some of the singers are children, but they're children who sing on key.  I listen to it by choice in the car sometimes.  

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ANYWAY. 

I've stuck with this class for nine years because it's a sort of good habit.  The habit was born out of my young-mother, still-unjaded, trying-hard-to-do-everything-exactly-right zeal.  As the years have gone by, a lot of that has faded -- my energy is spread over more children, more education, more planning and organization to keep it all going smoothly.  It isn't that I reject the ideas I had when I was a first-time mother, or that I have tried them and found them impractical.  It's more that new things keep coming along and have to be incorporated, and the more time that goes by the more I see how those ideas must fit into a whole picture of a healthy life.  I also see that I don't have to work hard all the time to MAKE my life unfold according to the way I think it should.  I mostly have to live the life I have, according to my values.  If I remember those values, and don't give up on them, it all flows more naturally than I thought it would when I first started.

But sometimes in our zeal we MAKE ourselves create a habit that turns out to be sustaining.  I doubt I would have shelled out the cash for the music class (it isn't cheap) if I hadn't had this intense sense that I needed to fix a deficiency, and if I hadn't seen how well it clicked with other things I felt intensely at the time.  It's an intensity I don't really have anymore.  And yet, as we went there week after week (and as I wrote checks quarter after quarter) the music class melted into the background of our lives and became part of What We Do and Who We Are.  And it is one of the things that keeps me anchored in the way that --- deep down --- I still believe is the way I want to teach my young children, if I can.  It keeps me modeling what I want to see.

Another thing, of course, is that network of like-minded families I mentioned.  A decade later, with eleven children among us, we're all still working together to create an extended family for our kids.  If it weren't for early zeal, I'd never have done the work to make it happen.  Now that all that passionate intensity has faded into something a little tired and comfortable, easier -- now I can see the fruits.  It keeps me connected.  I can see what's really important slowly emerging, set in relief against the background that's worn away by the little abrasions of everyday life.

Choosing the right habits.

I just saw a single out-of-context quote that caught my eye today, and I wanted to share.

Lawblogger Ann Althouse was responding to a personal-finance-blogger's post about developing daily "effortless" habits to save money so you could retire early. She wrote,

I think the key is to be selective... Where are the places where you can change the habits and actually improve your life? The $4 latte may be worth it to you if that's how you get yourself out of the house and into a public place where you encounter other people and moderate loneliness into manageable solitude. A month of daily lattes might correspond to one item of clothing that gives you a moment of manic elation but then gets lost in your closet amongst scarcely dissimilar items.

As you know, I am a big proponent of life-change through habit. I thought this quote was good for emphasizing how the "right" habits are not one-size-fits-all, and how "good" choices can have hidden costs.

It's pretty fashionable to mock people who have a $4 daily coffeeshop habit, but what Ann says is true -- for some people, the daily $4 may be staving off a much bigger problem! On the other hand, we have a bad habit of misidentifying luxuries as "needs." Maybe the question to ask is, exactly how does this thing I say I need fill a hole?

"I really need my daily latte" might mean, "I am addicted to caffeine and a latte is a tasty way to get my fix." It might mean, "I have established a ritual of stopping at the coffee shop each day, and doing the same thing every day makes me feel peaceful while changing my routine makes me feel upset." It might mean, as Ann suggested, "I need to encounter other people so I don't feel so lonely, and the latte gives me an excuse and a motivation to go do it." It might mean, "I can afford so few luxuries, and the latte is a petty luxury that makes me feel less poor -- for a few minutes out of the day, I can live like a person who doesn't have to pinch pennies."

I thought that the lesson could perhaps be extended to other types of "good" habits besides budgetary ones.

 

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First principles of good rhetoric (good meaning "good.")

In the last post, I responded to Melanie on the topic of rhetoric.  GeekLady asked in the comments to Melanie's post,

I’m interested in the rhetorical part myself, but completely unqualified to even muse on it.  My education was very weak in the area of writing in general, much less writing persuasively…

This is actually one of my biggest homeschooling concerns - effective writing is not taught in schools, and I’m not (currently) qualified to teach it myself, so how do I remedy David’s future schooling?  

I'm not sure either, but let's speculate!

(The timing is actually great, because H. and I have recently re-aligned our plans for teaching writing to the oldest kids, to include some more direct how-do-you-form-a-coherent-argument instruction.  We're not claiming to be experts in rhetoric, just in what our kids need, but we -- both instinctive argument-crafters -- are trying to figure out exactly what instruction they need, and give it to them.  Example here of an engaging lesson plan that H. came up with recently.)

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The title of this post is meant to express my desire to formulate a moral rhetoric, not merely an effective rhetoric.

Rhetoric that is good, in the moral sense, must:

• seek to express arguments that are true
• seek to understand both arguments that are true and arguments that are false
• serve ends that are good, not bad
• treat persons with the respect and love that is due to persons 

I'm a bit redundant here.  The last is a subset of the first, since to treat persons as people, not objects -- to refuse to use a person as the means to an end -- to respect persons -- is, implicitly, to express the truth about persons.

But let's take these things one at a time.

1.  Express arguments that are true.

What's the point of writing, or speaking, anything if you don't have something to say?  And what's the point of saying something that isn't true?   A moral rhetoric rejects lying and deceit in all its forms.

 

2.  Understand both arguments that are true and arguments that are false.

I take it for granted that rhetoric is receptive as well as expressive; and of course, it's a skill that must be taught, and it's hard to learn how to express arguments without learning how to understand them.  In a moral rhetoric, even though you must strive to express only true arguments, you must strive to understand the intended logic behind false ones as well, so that you can spot error and deceit.  A moral rhetorician should be able to construct false arguments (not the same as going out and arguing them to people, and therefore not a violation of #1) for several reasons:  

• first, to test true arguments and thereby sharpening them; 
• second, in order to effectively counter them during a true argument; 
• third, in order to express the truth of the opponent's personhood, by giving their argument the respect it is due as the product of a worthy adversary, striving in charity to understand the opposing argument in the same way that one hopes one's own argument will be understood.

 

3.  Serve ends that are good.

Certain truths need not be expressed at all times, in all places, to all people, and in all manners.  ("The right to the communication of the truth is not unconditional" -- CCC 2488.)  

Boasting isn't part of a moral rhetoric.  Neither is detraction, which seeks maliciously to damage another's reputation.  Certain material is rightly confidential.  And "everyone should observe an appropriate reserve concerning persons' private lives" (CCC 2492).

Furthermore, the efforts of rhetoric should be turned where they can do good, and not where they might do evil.  True and non-confidential arguments could carefully be selected from among many possible true arguments to do evil -- for instance, intentionally to whip a mob into a frenzy of violence, or to induce policymakers to rank a certain threat greater than it is, or to draw attention away from some other thing that justice demands be acted upon.  Even true rhetoric is a tool that may be wielded to harmful ends.  

"The good and safety of others, respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons for being silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet language. The duty to avoid scandal often commands strict discretion. No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it." -- CCC 2489

 

4.  Treat persons with the respect and love that they are due as persons.

Again, this is really a special case of the first injunction to express the truth:  our rhetoric, if it is to be a moral rhetoric, must implicitly express the truth about the human person, by refusing to treat persons as objects.

Let me break this down into the first person, the second person, and the third person.  We must treat as real human beings the person who is speaking; the persons who are spoken to (i.e., the interlocutor and the audience); and the persons who are spoken about.

Our moral rhetoric cannot concede our own humanity.  We cannot, for example, consent to be treated as an object; we don't have the right to.

Our moral rhetoric must respect our audience and our opponents as persons.  We must not condescend to them or assume that they lack intelligence or moral character.  Here the Catechism sums up nicely our duty to even our opponents, in part by quoting yet another deviously rhetorical Jesuit:

"Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury.  He becomes guilty.... of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation,the moral fault of a neighbor.   To avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbor's thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way:

Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favorable interpretation to another's statement than to condemn it. But if he cannot do so, let him ask how the other understands it. And if the latter understands it badly, let the former correct him with love. If that does not suffice, let the Christian try all suitable ways to bring the other to a correct interpretation so that he may be saved.

 (St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises)

 

 

Our moral rhetoric must not use persons as means to a rhetorical end.  Here's a sad observation about many of us who know better than to use a human being as a machine to produce output, or as a toy to produce pleasure:   We remain eager to use a real human being in our speech.  

We use them as a caricature in our arguments to produce rhetorical effect, or as a character in our stories to produce entertainment.

This isn't moral.  When we tell a story or offer an example that includes another human being, we must always strive to do so in a way that respects that person.  Would they rightly object to being used as an example?  Are we telling the whole story?  Are we telling the story in a way that respects their autonomy?

Recently on FB I came across a blog post that gives a good example of the immoral use, in rhetoric, of a human being as a caricature -- it will serve as a blatant example of something that we should be on our guard against.  

Unfortunately, many instances of using persons as means to a rhetorical end are more subtle -- and extremely tempting, especially when we think our side is right.

 

So that's a start on a good rhetoric:  (1) seek to argue true things, (2) seek to understand arguments both true and false,  (3) serve good ends rather than bad ones, and (4) treat persons as persons.

 

An effective rhetoric that is also good?  Will have to wait for another post.  (I hope it isn't long before I think up something worthwhile to say.)

Victory and rhetoric.

I plan to post about this later this weekend, but let me point you for now to Melanie's post "Do We Know What Victory Looks Like?"

She makes two good points. First,

Most people engaging in that battle of winning hearts and minds aren’t trained. Most...are flailing, and probably doing more harm than good, because they are more focused on being right than on really trying to win people’s trust, to build bridges and make common ground wherever they are able. Most people not only don’t know how to argue, they also don’t know why to argue.

In comment box wars I often get most frustrated by people I agree with who are making a botched job arguing with people I don’t agree with. As a former writing teacher, I am especially galled by the fact that so many people don’t have a grasp of basic rhetorical principles. So many people don’t even know how to try to see things from their opponent’s perspective. They can’t figure out why the person they disagree with believes what they believe. They assume ill will. They assume the opponent is evil. Or they assume good faith but think the kind of argument that convinced them should convince anyone. They argue with a ghost, their own past selves, or their atheist brother-in-law, instead of the person with whom they are actually speaking. They make too many assertions and ask too few questions. They don’t seek to find common ground. They don’t call on authorities their opponent will find persuasive.

Second:

Utopia is much harder to imagine than dystopia. There are so many ways things can go wrong and so few they can go right. I’m thinking you would need a handful of highly charismatic leaders showing up in several places all at the same time. ... In other words, it would have to be a coalition effort... I think a scientific advance would be easier than a cultural revolution. And easiest of all would be an apocalyptic scenario. But I would prefer not to go there. I’d prefer to imagine the peaceful revolution that is won without bloodshed, or at least without a major disaster. Perhaps I’d be willing to consider an equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement. Some injuries and passive resistance, some deaths even, but not full-scale war.

Also, the problem with utopias is that what looks like utopia to one person is another person’s dystopia. My utopia would seem like a nightmare if I described it to many of my more liberal friends. So how do we get there from here? I don’t want to impose a totalitarian regime on anyone. I want a true Utopia where everyone feels free. Oh there’s the rub indeed.

...

One thing I would like to point out is that the Civil Rights Movement was built upon the aftermath of a full-scale war. Which is an unpleasant thing to think about. And which means that perhaps we should not look too much at it as a model for "peaceful" progress, because at numerous points along the way that progress was indeed defended and enforced at gunpoint; and many people armed themselves for self-defense, too. See Ida B. Wells-Barnett. It was a moral fight, but she wasn't afraid to announce she would kill people to protect her family.

Gotta run, more later.

ADDED: This doesn't count as my "more later," this is just a copy of my comment at Melanie's post.

I completely agree with you on the rhetoric. What amazes me is that people don’t see how much better they would be able to argue if they understood their opponents on their own terms. Even leaving aside general benefits like a higher level of discourse or better mutual understanding—you could really approach it completely self-servingly. “I won’t win unless I grok my opponent and his argument.” Yet people on all sides of an issue routinely behave as if to attempt to understand an opponent’s argument from his perspective is to concede ground to him. How small-minded, and how foolish.

You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of how in the years during and after WWI, several states banned instruction in the German language. (Google Meyer v. Nebraska for this—an important case in compulsory-education history)

Really? Don’t you think if you want to win a war against somebody, it might be useful if some of your young people entering the army can understand the enemy’s radio transmissions and interrogate captured soldiers? Why even bother with cracking the Enigma machine?

But I digress. On FB and twitter, where communications are short, I have taken to the decision that victory generally looks like “convincing someone that their opponent might possibly have reason and good will, and be led astray as the result of holding different assumptions or having different information, rather than being a caricature of evil or stupidity.” Unfortunately, this means that I am often attempting to wrest that victory out of people on my own “side” of an argument.

I would like to continue this discussion, yes, mostly from the rhetoric point of view. I think it is related to the notion that no human person may be “used,” but may only be responded to with love. I see a lot of “use” of human persons on FB—repeating of stories and memes, often distorted, about real people in order to score what the repeater thinks are points or to make some kind of a wisecrack. I also think there is a lot of dehumanization going on—to give an example (that, i should add, i am guilty of because of using shorthand on Twitter to stay under character limit) I am personally disgusted by theuse of the term “pro-aborts” as a noun for human beings. I get the point, but I don’t like the implication that a person should be referred to as the embodiment of a single political position. Maybe the character limit is a proportionate reason to do so on Twitter, I don’t know, but surely not anywhere else.

I am off to morning Mass and then the gym, but I will try to post on this later this weekend. Suffice it to say I am more interested in tackling the rhetorical end than the utopia end, but I like your insistence that i you don’t want to live in a utopia that would be a dystopia for anyone else. Nevertheless, this isn’t possible. Our notion of Hell and Mercy coexisting is founded on the possibility that some would see Heaven itself as a dystopia, and so they must be free to remain outside.

I see a number of themes intertwined here.

1. Every Utopia can be someone else's dystopia. In the case of a supernatural, truly perfect Utopia, the possibility remains that some will view it as a dystopia anyway, because humans have free will and can reject even the perfectly good. In the case of quasi-Utopias created by humans, it is guaranteed primarily because humans cannot create a perfect world (all human attempts will fall short and contain design flaws, some quite terrible), and secondarily because some humans will always reject some of the good elements in a quasi-Utopia.

2. This is related to the theme of "judging by loving."

3. Government of any kind implies the threat of force and forced punishment against those who would endanger the government and the people it protects. It always carries the danger that the force will be turned inappropriately by representatives of the government against the people it protects. Even the enforcement of just laws requires this. When we say we want laws to protect a wider class of people, we are suggesting the use of power to defend those people: the power to search for, to arrest, to hold for judging, and to incarcerate those who would violate the protective laws that we want to set up. So when we say that we hope to achieve this by a change of hearts rather than by force, what we are really saying is that we want a large enough majority to have the instinct to protect those people, that we are willing to bear the costs of using and threatening force against the people who don't; and ideally, that the majority who want to protect the wider class of people becomes so large that only very few remain who would even WANT to violate the protected people, let alone risk the law coming down on them.

4. Christians cannot actually make a human justice system (courts, procedures, sentencing, rehabilitation) that mirrors our vision of God's justice, but if we want to try -- and we should -- then contemplating this idea of "judging by loving" is a good place to start.

5. No human being can say or do anything that removes him or her from the class of "human beings deserving of love and compassion." In the name of Christ I reject either the idea that anyone has lost the right to compassion, or that invoking compassion somehow denies justice or truth. We can err both by denial of justice AND by denial of compassion. Maybe no human is capable of any act or statement that perfectly combines justice and truth with mercy and compassion. However, it is our duty to try always, because that is the example we are given.

6. And the same attempt -- to combine justice and truth with mercy and compassion, always remembering that persons never can waive their right to be treated as persons rather than as objects -- that has to underlie our rhetoric as well as our attempts at social change. This means we can't "use" persons in any way whatsoever. We must always respect their autonomy, complexity, and identity as a child of God.

7. That is a principle of morally upright argument. It isn't necessarily a principle of effective argument (although in the end, I believe morally upright argument has the better hand). We have to be willing to forgo what may appear in the short term to be effective, if it is not wholly in the service of truth -- including the subtler aspects of the dignity of the human person -- such as "my opponent is a human person worthy of respect for that reason alone."

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Homeschooling "substitutes:" Building your own network.

Here's something on the co-schooling spectrum that I will bet any reader with older kids could start setting up now: a personal network of online "substitute teachers" to help each other out when one of the moms get sick, but older kids have tasks that need completion.

From the very smart Rebecca Frech at Shoved to Them:

Yesterday morning, as I curled up on the couch under my snuggly blankie (You know you have one too), I started making my calls.

"I'm sick," I told one of my homeschooling friends. "I need a sub today. #2 has a paper due later this week and needs his rough draft proofed."

"Have him send it to me," she replied.

I contacted another mom by email and asked for their help fielding math questions and called the only one who lives near me for help with the littlest kids, before I let myself begin to doze off.

There were a lot of years in homeschooling that I would have let my own sick day be an excuse for the kids to take a day off. As they've gotten to higher grades and more work, it's not always feasible for them to take a break. Add to that the battle to get back on track once we're off our schedules, and having subs begins to make a lot of sense.

 

I, personally, have a superpower that lets me fall ill on Friday afternoon, be sick all weekend, and be better on Monday morning. It tends to ruin my weekends but keeps me on track.

Nevertheless, I am not perfect, and occasionally I fall ill at 10:30 am on a Wednesday. This is not a terribly big deal for elementary school kids -- it is entirely workable to lie on the couch and watch nature movies with them, for instance, or let them start a big art project and call it a day -- but as they get into high school, even though they can do much of their work independently, they still need feedback. And often they need that feedback NOW or they can't go on to do the next thing. And then you're stalled out.

One of the things I love about this idea is that most of the homeschooling parents in such a network could be people you have never met in real life, since assignments can be emailed so easily, and we have things like Skype and FaceTime for direct questioning. I do a lot of this in my regular, real-life co-schooling arrangement, but I never thought about having a less formalized, more emergency-based reciprocal arrangement. It should be relatively easy to set something like that up, and could be fun, too. You might find yourself calling on each other in non-emergencies as well.

Younger children really need direct attention, so the online thing won't work so well, but it really strikes me that it would be a good idea for a mother of younger kids to identify another homeschooler living nearby who has children in the same age-range to serve as emergency substitute teacher. Here is what I would do if I found such a person and I was trying to build it from scratch:

1. Get together for two planned play dates a year to stay in touch.
2. Have a "basic lesson plan" that can be picked up at a moments notice. Will you squirrel away the materials for a big multi-age arts and crafts project, to be used only in case of emergency? Will the substitute teacher fold the "temporary students" into her own children's lessons? Will the children all do worksheets and reading interspersed with an educational video or play math and language board games together?
3. If you're troubled by the question, "But what if I get sick 4 times this year and she only gets sick once or not at all? That's not fair!" you could agree in advance to "even it up" at the end of the year by having the "freeloading" family offer a few afternoons of free babysitting, or host a couple of pizza-party playdates.

Hey, before you know it you may even be regular co-schoolers! But even if you aren't, think what you will gain in peace of mind.

 

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Nighttime peace.

I think our youngest is night-weaned now. What with the co-sleeping, with him being well over three, and what with his unusually agreeable nature, it wasn't hard. We waited for an opportunity, that is, a string of weeks with no overnight trips planned for Mark. And then we changed places so that after the 3-year-old fell asleep nursing, Mark slept between him and me. We got up with a crying boy twice, and offered him ice cream or chocolate milk. That was it; he wakes up once in a while, and Mark says, "Shh, go back to sleep," and he snuggles up to his daddy and drops back out.

I miss him.

I have night-weaned three little co-sleepers before, and each time I was pregnant and in desperate need of deeper, wholly-uninterrupted sleep, plus some extra space around me. That's not the case now; I am not, therefore, relishing a few short months of solid sleeping before expecting a newborn to come along and shake things up. Co-sleeping has been good to us overall; I am well-adapted to the kind of sleep a mother gets when she sleeps every night next to her nursling, which is to say that I move from light sleep to deeper sleep easily, and I could not tell you "how many times he nurses" at night because I don't fully wake for it. But it is still a treat to fall into a deep sleep once in a while, especially on a Sunday afternoon when Mark takes all the kids and promises me an hour or two.

I woke up this morning, pleasantly well-rested, and thought about the fuzzy warm feeling of my little boy's head against my chin, and wondered if I would ever wake up with it again. Probably, I decided; Mark will be gone some nights and he will snuggle with me again; or maybe he will be sick, or maybe he will squeeze in between his dad and mama without Mark noticing. Still: Surely I don't have many more mornings like that with him left.

I suddenly felt, momentarily, very empty-armed.

I am not a touchable person. I am an anti-hugger, with mad skillz for turning aside and deftly deflecting people who come at me with kissy-faces and wide-open arms. Thank God for oxytocin, which makes it so that the few people who have made it past my prickly exterior -- my husband, my small children -- do not actually revolt me, unless they slobber on my face or something. (I could almost feel Maternal Affection burbling through my veins for the first time right after giving birth. What? What's that ... That feeling? As if I wanted to hold that baby? Why, I've heard tales of such things! How very interesting!).

As my older children grow older, I can see it happening in reverse -- the stifling of the hugging and the caresses. From my end. If a long-legged child comes up behind me while I am absorbed in planning or writing, and impulsively wraps his arms around my shoulders, I jump. "Sorry," he says sheepishly, and we both have a good laugh. But next time he'll remember my reaction, and he'll stop himself and pass me by, and go on to the kitchen in search of a glass of cold water, and I won't even know that he had the impulse to reach out and hug me.

I kind of wish I knew whether there would be any more children, something I don't know right now. Because then I could know whether I will regret not keeping the sleeping, warm, fuzzy three-year-old, scented faintly with chocolate ice cream and strawberry-flavored toothpaste, next to me just a few months longer. I wonder if that nightly exposure is the only thing that keeps my arms open at all.

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How to get an egg Benedict. A one-egg Benedict.

I may have mentioned before that my favorite typical diner breakfast is eggs Benedict, but that I don't often order it because it's always too big.

 

This is the nature of eggs Benedict, because it is usually made on an English muffin. An English muffin is split into halves. Each half is topped with a slice of ham. Each slice of ham is topped with a poached or over-easy egg. Each egg is topped with a generous spoonful of silky hollandaise sauce. And there you go: a beautiful breakfast, but it's twice as big as what I can eat first thing in the morning. At least if I plan on having lunch later.

I have tried asking for half a Benedict. This innocent request has actually been rejected by actual hash-slingers, on the grounds that a Benedict consumes an integer number of English muffins.

(Personally, although I do enjoy a good English muffin, I have learned rather to like a Benedict made on whole-grain toast, especially if it has a lot of hemp seeds and such in it. But the two-egg Benedict still reigns, even when the toast may be substituted.)

I can't share eggs Benedict with anyone because I am usually eating restaurant breakfasts alone. I can't box it up and take it home because I am usually going out to run errands afterwards, and I am not at all confident in the food safety of a poached egg sitting warmly in my car with an egg-yolk-and-butter sauce. And I just can't throw it away. So I generally save the two-eggs Benedict experience for when I am not getting around to breakfast until 10:30 or 11 and I can call it brunch.

Anyway, this morning I found myself at a South Minneapolis diner wishing for a Benedict. I swam a mile this morning before getting here, so I was good and hungry, but still -- at 8:30 a.m., I try to stick with the "one egg is enough eggs for me" mantra.

And then I had an inspiration!

Here at this diner, as at so many diners, the omelettes and scrambles are three-egg omelettes and scrambles. The breakfast sandwiches and huevos rancheros are two-egg breakfast sandwiches and dos-huevos huevos rancheros. So sad! I am always having to leave half my breakfast behind.

But the kids' menu at this diner, as at so many diners, has a meal with "one egg, toast, and choice of meat!"

I decided to order for myself from the kids' menu, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. LIKE A BOSS.

Number 50, please. Egg over easy, with ham, and let the toast be seven-grain.

Plus a side of hollandaise sauce.

And a side salad. Since your "whole menu is available all day."

And coffee.

I mentally prepared myself to have my eligibility for a children's meal challenged.

I even rehearsed a retort in my head: "I may be an adult, but I'm a child-sized adult."

(It's true. My son was taller than me before he maxed out on children's menu eligibility.)

But my brazen confidence paid off and Zing! Moments later I was assembling my own egg Benedict.

Nothing is impossible!

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Daily habits of truth and love.

When I was writing about forming new habits for healthy, non-gluttonous eating, I remember suggesting that it was important to  choose habits that you could practice every single day.  

Make a list of behaviors that you can experiment with, starting with one. I really think you can do any sort of thing, but I suggest that you start with something that is clear and objective and that can be practiced proactively and at least daily. The more often you find opportunities to practice each habit, the faster it can become second nature.

We've just been given an example of good "daily" habits in Pope Francis's homilies.  Let me give you some background, and then take you to the ones I mean.

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I admit that I went a bit off the rails with the concept of the "spiritual poverty" that Francis I  means to attack.  In the passage that I quoted when he  was talking about the great "other kind of poverty" of our times, he was specifically referring to moral relativism:  

There is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the “tyranny of relativism”, which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples.

And that brings me to a second reason for my name.

 Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace.

But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

I think it's particularly interesting that F1 asserts that relativism "endangers the coexistence of peoples."  An awful lot of people assert that a relativistic attitude -- one that denies dogma qua dogma  -- is essential for the coexistence of peoples.  This must be rejected, however, because moral relativism admits the legitimacy of an every-man-for-himself, every-people-for-itself philosophy; tolerating a desire for genocide hardly promotes "coexistence."  

Anyway.  According to F1, the great spiritual poverty of our time is relativism which endangers the coexistence of peoples, and its opposite is a recognition of the common nature of all human beings which leads us to "[care]  for the good of others, of everyone."

It's interesting how the one is a sort of flip-side, masquerading as the other.  For the good intention of "coexistence" people reject the idea of absolute good or absolute truth, thinking that it is a belief in absolutes that destabilizes coexistence.  And yet what is really required for coexistence is an absolute belief that other, "different" human beings are equally deserving of recognition of their humanity and a response of love and mercy.  That human beings may never be used as a means to an end.

This comes largely from the legacy of John Paul II.  The moral instruction of his massive work on the Theology of the Body can all be summed up in "Human beings may never be used as a means to an end."  

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The sign of contradiction that today's poverty of spirit requires is a radical rejection of all that objectifies and seeks to use human persons as means to an end. 

• It requires detachment from easy ways of thinking and easy ways of feeling comfortable and satisfied -- not physical comfort and satiation, but emotional comfort, self-satisfaction.  
• It requires a non-judgmentalism of persons based in recognition of our common humanity, which necessarily implies admitting our common heritage of original sin and need for free gifts of grace.

Let's take a look at some of the themes that we've gone over here, of mercy, judging only by loving, and detachment.

- The means by which God judges us is identical to loving us.   Which seems to teach us that the only right way to judge is to love.  

- "If you're going to judge me correctly, you have to understand that I was conceived a sinner -- in other words, that the propensity to do wrong came to me through no fault of my own."  I

- ...None of us can pat ourselves on the back for achieving whatever spiritual riches we have; ergo, even the most objectively horrible people must be reached out to with love and compassion and a recognition of "there but for the grace of God go I."   

- “The Lord will say this clearly: his anointing is meant for the poor, prisoners and the sick, for those who are sorrowing and alone. The ointment is not intended just to make us fragrant, much less to be kept in a jar, for then it would become rancid … and the heart bitter. ” 

-"Living Holy Week following Jesus means learning how to go beyond ourselves... to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence, to be the first to move towards our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most distant, those who are forgotten, those who are most in need of understanding, consolation and help."   That is, not just the physically repulsive but also the morally repulsive, are human too, and deserve to be treated as such.

-One thing we know we do have to be somewhat detached from are spiritual consolations of all kinds.

 

+++

So here are two "how do we live this every day?" suggestions from recent homilies.

On the theme of detachment:  Complaining too often can distance us from Jesus, says Pope Francis

The disciples had had such high hopes that Jesus would be the one who would redeem Israel, but they thought their hopes were destroyed, he said on Wednesday.

“And they stewed, so to speak, their lives in the juice of their complaints and kept going on and on and on with the complaining,” the Pope said. “I think that many times when difficult things happen, including when we are visited by the cross, we run the risk of closing ourselves off in complaints.”

When all people can think of is how wrong things are going, Pope Francis said, the Lord is close, “but we don’t recognise him. He walks with us, but we don’t recognise him.”

...

“Complaining seems safer. It’s something certain. This is my truth: failure,” he said before adding that the Gospel story shows how very patient Jesus is with the disciples, first listening to them and then explaining things step by step, until they see him.

Complaining and griping, about others and about things in one’s own life, is harmful “because it dashes hope. Don’t get into this game of a life of complaints.”

 

On the theme of radical rejection of objectification:  Quit gossiping and recover the value of meekness. 

Christians need to recover the value of meekness, particularly when they are tempted to speak ill of one another, Pope Francis said during his early morning Mass on Tuesday.

Complaining behind each others’ backs is a temptation that comes “from the Evil One who does not want the Spirit to dwell among us and give peace, meekness to the Christian community,” the Pope said.

...The new life offered through the grace of baptism is something that Christians must work on developing; even though it “principally depends on the Spirit,” he added, it also takes effort on the part of each individual to cooperate with that grace.

...

He said the virtue of meekness, which is a key to harmony, has been “a bit forgotten.”

Meekness, he said, has “many enemies” and the first is gossip. “When one prefers gossiping, gossiping about another, it’s like clobbering another. This is normal, it happens to everyone, including me, it is a temptation of the Evil One.”

The struggle against such harmful chatter, he said, is something that continually sows tensions in parishes, families, neighborhoods and among friends. “But this is not the new life” promised by baptism, because when the Holy Spirit descends, “it gives birth to a new life within us, it makes us meek, charitable,” the Pope explained.

It looks like Francis is going to lead us on a sort of "little way" of detachment and of non-objectification.  Really?  This is what the Pope is going to tell the whole world to detach from?  Griping?  Really?  This is the way the Pope is going to suggest that we begin loving our neighbor as ourselves?  By abstaining from... gossip?

But it's utterly true.  

Griping is a sign of undue attachment to an alternative "reality," something wished-for and unattainable.  If we let go of what we wish would happen, and focus on what is happening, we can move forward.  We should be working toward things that are and that can be, not on things that cannot be.

Gossiping is, really, using another person as a means to an end.  In this case you are "using" another person as a character in a story you tell for entertainment.  

These are maybe ways of starting small, of beginning at the beginning.  The very fundamentals of detachment, of respecting persons as persons.  

And what's great about these is that any of us can begin practicing habits of not-griping, of not-gossiping, today and every day.  These are ways to begin immediately growing in the habit of truth and love.  

And yet, griping and gossiping are such universal behaviours that these habits -- these new "Franciscan habits" -- appear truly radical.  A radical rejection of attachment to what can't be had.  A radical rejection of exploitation of persons.  So radical we won't even talk about people behind our backs.

Battle of wits.

H. and I were dismayed at some of our seventh- and eighth-graders' writing recently.  We thought we had mostly mechanics problems, but some careful probing of their paragraph-composing ability revealed that they needed a refresher course in constructing logical arguments.  

So H. spent some time working with them on syllogisms.  

You know the sort.  All men are mortal.   Socrates is a man.  Therefore Socrates is mortal.  (Although it turns out that there are lots more kinds that I never learned about in school.  Fortunately H. is on the case.)

"Might as well do it anyway," I theorized.  "It's the sort of thing that lots of people get in school.  Can't hurt.  Might help."

Today H. gave them a copy of Vizzini's speech from The Princess Bride -- the one with the Battle of Wits over the iocane powder and the two cups of wine -- and challenged the kids to find and articulate as many syllogisms -- explicit and implicit, valid and not valid -- as they could.

 

It was a very fun lesson to overhear while I was making lunch.

 

This is the kind of thing they came up with:

• If you are strong, then you trust your strength to save you.  You are strong, therefore I can not choose the glass in front of you.
• If you have been to Australia, then you are used to people not trusting you. You have  been to Australia. Therefore you are used to not being trusted.
• If I can find out what kind of man you are, then it is simple.  This is not simple, therefore I can’t find out what kind of man you are.
• Iocane comes from Australia and Australia is populated by criminals.  You obtained the iocane.  Therefore you are a criminal.

 

We were amused to discover that the entire battle of wits includes one incorrect assumption (that one of the goblets is not poisoned) but that Vizzini repeatedly comes to the correct conclusion anyway ("Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me" and "Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.")

 

 

Augustine and attachment.

St. Augustine, in Book 1, Chapter 7, of The Confessions:

Who is there to remind me of the sin of my infancy (for sin there was:  no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant...); who can remind me of it?  Some ... tiny child now, in whom I might observe conduct I do not remember in myself?  

What then was my sin at that age?  Was it perhaps that I cried so greedily for those breasts?  Certainly if I behaved like that now, greedy... for food suitable to my age, I should provoke derision and be very properly rebuked.  

My behavior then was equally deserving of rebuke, but since I would not have been able to understand... neither custom nor common sense allowed any rebuke to be given.  

After all, we eradicate these habits and throw them off as we grow up.... so can we suppose that even in an infant such actions were good -- the actions of a child who

• begs tearfully for objects that would harm him if given, 
• gets into a tantrum when [persons] will not comply with his whims, 
• and tries to hurt many people... simply because they will not immediately... obey his commands, commands which would damage him if they were carried out?  

The only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent.

Yeah, I know.  It grates on me too.  But Augustine's writing about original sin, and that's not something I can reject out of hand.  Let's see what we can do about it.

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It grates because it sounds too hard on the normal, natural instincts of babies.  These are the instincts that drive maternal attachment and are their only means of communicating their needs to the adults that are charged with their care.  Those "greedy" cries are the same cries that stimulate a mother's milk, that activate compassion and an urge to protect the helpless child.  

You read something like that, and you kind of cringe, because someone is bound to take it too far and try to punish babies for crying.  (Though if they do, it's not Augustine's fault:   he approvingly describes parents and nurses who "charm away" and "cheerfully condone" babies' behavior, and says right there that "neither custom nor common sense" allows for a baby to be rebuked.)

Now that we know what we know about the biological basis of human attachment, can we really say that the "greediness" of babies is anything worthy of rebuke, or even that it is a consequence of original sin?

My edition of The Confessions (Ignatius Critical Editions, 2012) has a footnote here:

Critics of Augustine often point out how harsh he is toward babies... The point here, however, is not to condemn children for their seemingly selfish behavior when hungry or tired, but simply to point out that... we are born wholly "I-centered" with only our own interests in mind.  In a very mundane way, this now shows the noxious effects of the concupiscence Adam brought about when he turned himself and all his descendents away from God.  This is why we must learn to "speak" anew, to come to God with desires and intentions not turned in on self but on him.

Just like the parents and nurses Augustine describes, I'm used to treating infants' demands as necessary and natural communication.   So, if it's necessary and natural, how could it also be worthy of rebuke?  (Even if you add a modifier and make it "objectively" worthy of rebuke, the implication being that subjectively -- considering the infant's position -- it is not worthy of rebuke).

Consider this:  the adults who are charged with care of an infant, any infant -- its mother, father, siblings, other members of the household -- are themselves fallen creatures, self-centered, "I"-centered.  Perhaps we could consider the "wholly I-centered" nature of a newborn baby as a defense mechanism against the I-centeredness of adults.  If babies were not so relentlessly demanding, maybe more of them would be left unfed, unwarmed, untouched.  

And that makes it not so odd, then, to turn it around and say:  If adults were not themselves, by nature, "I"-centered, then babies might come programmed with an entirely different set of mechanisms to communicate their needs.  Maybe they wouldn't even need to communicate their needs because adults would provide for them before a need ever made itself known.

It's kind of like pain.  Pain is, we are told, a consequence of original sin.  Pain is objectively bad, but necessary in a world full of hazards; it communicates a bodily need.   So we can listen to it, and often we should immediately do its bidding.  We should be grateful for it, considering the circumstances in which we live.

• Move your hand away from that hot stove.  
• Stop walking and take the thorn from the sole of your foot.   
• Rest this limb until it feels better.

So it is with the "greed" of babies:   a necessary fault, one we should listen to and respond to immediately -- "cheerfully" even -- and be grateful for, considering the circumstances in which we live.

Once man and woman had fallen, maybe we could not have survived unless the most innocent -- those who have that feature, "the weakness of their frames" -- also shared the ability to clamor greedily from the very beginning.   Unless the greediness of the parents is somehow transmitted to the offspring, perhaps the offspring would not have had a chance in a world full of "I"-centered grownups who have the power to provide food and warmth, or to withhold it.

Parents who stay in touch with our babies know that the "greediness" of babies is something they need to have to make their way in the world, and so we respond to it.   We can appreciate the power they have of making their needs known, of drawing us outside of ourselves by clamoring from their own center.  We regard it, properly, as not a bug, but a feature.

A feature, that is, not of the original code, but instead of humanity's "plan B."  O felix culpa!  O happy fault!