Lift Up Your Hearts!

A friend made this comment about the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision:  While some of us commemorate this sad anniversary, others actually celebrate it.  Naturally, that set me thinking.  It's the celebration, not merely of the right to abortion, but of abortion itself, that makes this issue so weird, and so inflammatory.

I could so, so easily support leaving all difficult medical decisions to the family.  Having experienced painful, personal, life-or-death medical decisions myself, I know I don't want the government making them for me.  Because, like it or not, in this fallen world there are times when the better (not to say good) choice is to end life rather than to prolong it, to take a life rather than to save it.

But in our society there are many people who glorify, not just the legality of abortion, but the procedure itself, and that's where they lose me.  If we cheer when a criminal is executed, if the homeowner gets a thrill out of shooting the housebreaker, if the wholesale destruction of an enemy town causes rejoicing, if "pulling the plug" on an invalid is an easy decision, if we can end a child's life without grieving deeply and without seeing the action as anything other than a last, desperate resort ... then we know that no matter how necessary the choice may sometimes be, our consciences have been compromised and cannot be trusted.  And therefore we sometimes, however reluctantly, let the government in—to set the boundaries we refuse to set for ourselves.

A scene from a couple of weeks ago:

My husband, his sister, and our nephew are playing a game.  They have repeatedly assured me that they are having fun, and I must believe them, because as soon as they have completed this game they will move on to another—probably a two-person game so said nephew can return to the Lord of the Rings tome that has absorbed much of his free time this week.  (Despite repeated pleas for game-playing, he has managed to complete two of the six books thus far.  And win most of the games as well, which as you can imagine frustrates the dedicated game-players no end.)

However, an observer of the yells, groans, grimaces, and (mostly) muffled curses might be justified in imagining the participants engaged in arduous forced labor.  If this is fun, count me out.  Which they do;  my sister-in-law and I now have an agreement:  She doesn't ask me to play games with her and I don't ask her to ride roller coasters with me.  (Even though I couldn't resist sharing that Manta is the Best Roller Coaster Ever.)

It got me to thinking.  I was a reasonably normal child, and our family enjoyed playing games together; why, then, do I usually find the idea of scrubbing the kitchen floor more attractive than playing games?

I've come up with a few reasons, none of which is completely convincing in itself.

Time (specifically, the lack thereof) is certainly a big factor.  With a Bucket List^* heavy enough to make Giles Corey plead, I'm not inclined to spend hours on an activity that is neither my duty nor particularly enjoyable.  But that just begs the question:  Why do I no longer find games enjoyable?

My lastest inspiration is that not all game players are alike.  There are those who play to play, and there are those (the majority, apparently) who play to win.  I believe I am in the first category.  It's not that I don't like winning, but it makes me very uncomfortable if any of the other players is made unhappy in the process.  Perhaps it comes from being seven or more years older than my siblings; that kind of age difference precludes developing a cuthroat approach to games.  The day my young brother freaked out over being "attacked" in a game of Flinch was the day I lost interest in playing the game.  I also remember an incident when one of my childhood friends and I were playing Monopoly:  she was losing, and became upset, whereupon I shifted strategies so that she won (without, I hope, noticing that I was throwing the game), and afterwards contrived to avoid playing games with her whenever possible.

Then again, it may be my attention span.  I generally am not fond of watching movies—the thought of committing 2 - 3 hours to a movie makes me feel claustrophobic; I'm trapped.  On the other hand, I do enjoy watching several 40-minute episodes of a good mystery television series one after another.  I may end up spending three hours staring at the screen, but there are several built-in escape hatches should I wish to bail out.  Games are the same way:  The games I enjoy playing are short, and though I may play several in a row, I'm not stuck with a long-term commitment.

Or it may be a dislike of regulations and complex rules, the same attitude that turned me off completely to organized sports.  In elementary school I loved sports.  I loved soccer, and baseball, and volleyball, and every other competitive sport we played, both in gym class and at recess.  On summer nights the kids in our neighborhood almost always convened for kickball or another game until it was too dark to see.  But these were wild-and-wooly, free-for-all games, even in gym class.  We followed the basic rules about scoring, but with none of the strategy.  In soccer there were no rules about who could chase the ball, and most of the game was spent tearing up and down the field as everyone tried to get the ball into the goal.  (Needless to say our passing game was not very intelligent.)  Volleyball was a friendly game, with the main object being to get the ball over the net; there were no nasty spikes, no need to stay in your assigned position.  And the play was generally supportive, with teams encouraging one another.  It wasn't about winning, although winning was fun; it was about the sheer joy of physical activity and growing strength, endurance, agility, and skill. 

Along about middle school, however, everything changed.  Suddenly, winning mattered more than playing; ability and strategy mattered; and rules multiplied.  Sports simply were no fun anymore, and I retreated from being an eager, active player to one who did no more than the minimum required by gym class.  I vividly remember my first and last volleyball game at an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship camp in college:  I'd been told it was important for camp fellowship, and was a friendly game.  My siblings, avid volleyball players themselves, would have found it friendly and relatively non-competitive, I'm sure, but the intensity and the yelling and the insistence on hitting the ball "right" (rather than just getting it over the net) completely spoiled the game for me.  Fellowship or no fellowhip, I wasn't at that conference to be screamed at and then made to feel guilty for not enjoying the misery.  As C. S. Lewis said, "Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure."

Those are the ideas I've come up with so far.  I don't think they completely explain my attitude, but it was an interesting meditiation and I've probably unearthed some significant factors.

Do you have any other suggestions?  What kind of game-player are you? 

^*I'm told I use the term Bucket List incorrectly, that it's supposed to be for things like riding in a hot air balloon, travelling to New Zealand, or climbing Mt. Everest.  But can I help it if the things I want to accomplish before I die are more mundane?  Not that "get all our photos scanned, organized, and put into albums" doesn't seem an awful lot like climbing Mt. Everest.

I should be working on a more profound post, such as my New Year's resolutions, but going through my neglected inbox provoked a quick post for your bemusement.  It's always important to read the instructions for a new appliance, right?  So before tossing the single sheet that came with the electric lift/recliner chair we bought in honor of my father-in-law's visit, I felt obliged to look it over.  (Never mind that we've been using the chair for a month....)

Really, I do usually read instructions, and I certainly keep them for anything important.  However, the single "instruction" was a very large image of a controller with two buttons, one labelled "Down" and the other labelled "Up."  I'm pretty sure I can remember that.

The reverse of the page is more interesting.  The Important Safety Instructions there include:

• Do not reach for a product that has fallen into water.  Unplug immediately.
• Do not use while bathing or in a shower.

Did I mention that this is a recliner chair?  A large, heavy, recliner chair?  It's theoretically possible that a tornado could deposit it in our swimming pool (conveniently unplugging it as well), but by no stretch of the imagination can I conceive of installing it in the shower, even if it would fit.

We laughed when the safety instructions started telling us not to use our hair dryers in the shower.  This is beyond laughter into head-shaking grief at the state of society.  Who needs a Fiscal Cliff?  We've already jumped off a more dangerous precipice.

The Holiday Season.

It's a descriptive name, covering an increasingly wide expanse of holidays that began simply as Christmas and now includes all possible holidays of any faith (religious or secular) from Hallowe'en to New Year's Day—as long as they can be contorted to include a ritual of spending lots of money.

But it's an awkward moniker, and offensive to Christians, who are understandably miffed at having the Christmas (literally, "Christ's mass") season (technically, December 25 - January 5, unless you're Orthodox) steamrollered by beliefs, attitudes, and practices that are decidedly un-Christian in nature.  Thus the season of "peace on earth, goodwill towards men" and "tidings of comfort and joy"—taken completely out of context, of course—is also beset with the annual (and impossible) admonition to "keep Christ in (secular) Christmas," along with fighting over whether "Happy Holidays" is an acceptable greeting, and where and how Nativity scenes may be displayed.

Therefore I'm going to put forth a modest proposal:

• That Christians should freely accept that we are strangers in a strange land, and following God's instructions to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, "seek the peace and prosperity" of our country without expecting lip service to our faith from those who don't even remember, let alone follow it.  If I choose not to patronize an institution, it will be for a better reason than that an over-worked sales clerk wished me "Happy Holidays."
• That the secular world should freely acknowledge that Christmas belongs to Christians, and choose a name for the Holiday Season that more accurately reflects the meaning, purpose, and deity of this time of year in a decidedly secular and materialistic society.^*  Acknowledging both the Ancient Roman holiday of mid-to-late December, the name of which is now synonymous with excess, self-indulgence, and licentiousness, and the patron-demon of hyper-consumption, I propose that this new American holidy be called,

Mammonalia

I know better than to think that I'm the first to coin this word, but a Google search pulls up surprisingly few references, so I can safely say, you read it here first.

I don't read a lot of post-election analysis any more than I paid attention to most of the pre-election rhetoric.  But every once in a while a gem comes my way, and when that happens I want to share it.

Today's hopeful commentary comes from a Canadian professor, John Stackhouse.  The whole post is short, but here's the heart of it.

[I]n his article “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (collected in “The Weight of Glory” and Other Essays), [C. S.] Lewis says some hopeful words about pretty large matters to encourage us in the wake of the American election, with its global implications, and in anticipation of…well, the rest of today, and every day following:

I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis [Lewis is not thinking small, here!], not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.

I have had a dentist stop a particularly violent toothache: an abscess that kept me up all night in quite acute pain. He is now a Friend for Life. He has not eradicated toothache; he can’t even prevent the next one from happening to me, despite his best efforts (and those of his relentlessly cheerful and insistent dental hygienist). But he did his job when I needed him to do it, and while Humanity was not benefited, I in particular surely was. And that certainly means a lot to me.

So: most of us can’t work wholesale, but retail. And even those who do work wholesale are wise to take Lewis’s words to heart, as the rest of us ought to, also. Work away at “what your hand finds to do” in the providence of God, and you’ll make an actual difference.

This year's Vetrans Day tribute is to all the U.S. (and pre-U.S.) veterans among our direct ancestors.

Pequot War, 1634-1638:  Thomas Barnes, Jonathan Brewster, Thomas Bull

King Philip's War, 1675-1678:  John Curtiss, Isaac Davis, Isaac Johnson

Queen Anne's War (part of the War of the Spanish Succession), 1702-1713:  Giles Doud

French and Indian War (part of the Seven Years' War), 1754-1763:  Samuel Chapman, Moses Whitney

Revolutionary War, 1775-1983: Jonathan Burr, Erastus Chapman, Agur Curtiss, Nathaniel Fox, Nehemiah Gillett, Christopher Johnson, Stephen Kelsey, Seth Langdon, James Pennington, Oliver Scott, Joseph Scovil, Henry Shepard, Elihu Tinker, Benjamin Welles, Moses Whitney

Civil War, 1861-1865:  Phillip Barb, Anson Bradbury, Robert Bristol, David Rice, Nathan Smith

World War I, 1914-1918:  Howard Langdon, George Smith

World War II, 1939-1945:  Alice Porter (Wightman), Bill Wightman

(If you notice a significant lack of any veterans from the Korean conflict to the present, you might guess my age if you didn't already know it.)

I'm sure there were more whose names I don't know.  There must be someone from the War of 1812, but I haven't found him yet.  I'm sure they weren't all always completely honorable, because they were ordinary people.  They didn't even always fight on the same side.  But one thing, for certain, they all had in common:  They gave their bodies, their lives, their health, and their futures to stand "between their loved home and the war's desolation."  For that I thank and honor them, and those who still make that sacrifice today.

At first, I thought I was reading about an incredible medical breakthrough, instead of the evacuation of a hospital in New York City.  No, that's not true.  At first, I passed over the numbers, as I often do.  So, I suspect, do most people.  (Okay, not Joseph.  But most people.)

New mom Jo-An Tremblay-Shepherd said, "The power went off completely, and all of the monitors, you're seeing all these monitors here, and there's a lot of buzzing and whatnot and everything just went."

Tremblay-Shepherd's son, Jackson, born 27 weeks prematurely, was carried in the dark by a nurse who also held his oxygen tank.

But the back of my mind wouldn't let it go.  Born 27 weeks prematurely?  So I stopped to calculate.  Normal gestation is 40 weeks, 40 minus 27 is ... 13?  Thirteen weeks?  The quintuplets I pray for were born at more than twice that age, just shy of 28 weeks, which is 12 weeks prematurely, and although they are doing well for their age, life has not been easy for any of them.

So I turned to Google, and learned that the youngest premature baby to survive was born at 21 weeks, five days.  At 13 weeks, the baby is but three to three-and-a-half inches long.

So, obviously, the CBS News article was wrong.  The baby was no doubt born at 27 weeks gestation, not 27 weeks prematurely.  Not much more than a typo.  But it set me thinking:  How many of the numbers that assail us in news articles and broadcasts do we absorb without thought, let alone fact-checking?  How much information that is just plain wrong has become part of our national consciousness?  What inaccuracies, mistakes, and downright lies do we propagate unthinkingly?

Scary.

We watched the first half of the PBS documentary Half the Sky last night.  (Quarter the Sky?)  The conclusion is tonight.  I highly recommend it, but not for grandchildren.  Here's the trailer.

The shows will be available for one week at PBS video (maybe not in Europe, sorry).  Here is the link for Part 1.  I'll update with Part 2 when it is released, which should be tomorrow.  And here's Part 2.

Note on flu shots:  This year they're pushing the intradermal shot.  Personally, I think it's because they can use a lower dose, and therefore make the supply go farther.  But they're hyping it as less painful ("90% smaller needle").  No matter how many times I told him needles don't bother me ("I gave blood yesterday!"), the nurse practitioner who administered the shot kept emphasizing the small needle and consequent reduced pain.

Based on a sample size of two, I'm here to say that that is bunk.  Both Porter and I agreed that the intradermal shot hurt more than a regular injection, not less.  I hope our grandkids appreciate the sacrifice.  :)

 Last Saturday was the opening concert for the Orlando Philharmonic's 20th Anniversary season.  Pausing only briefly to wonder how the "new kid on the block" can be twenty years old already—I've done that several times already, the latest being only last month, with the first of our nephews to leave the teenage years behind—I'll just say that Maestro Christopher Wilkins once again began the season with a blockbuster program guaranteed to fill the house.  One work:  Mahler's Third Symphony.  No intermission.  Nearly 110 minutes long.  The first movement alone is longer than the entirety of Beethoven's Fifth.  The orchestra did a great job, but I have to say that they were upstaged by the members of the Florida Opera Theatre Youth Program.  Some of those kids were as young as seven, they were highly visible on a platform well above the orchestra, the part that they had to sing was brief and late in the symphony, and they did not fidget.  They sat still, they kept their hand in their laps most of the time, and they at least appeared attentive.  In short, they did better than me.

I was not familiar with Mahler's Third; it's not programmed often, and I can see why:  the orchestra is much larger than that required for most performances, and there's a large chorus as well.  E-X-P-E-N-S-I-V-E.  I'm glad the OPO took the plunge to offer it.  I do have to say, however, that—unlike Mahler's First, which was love at first hearing for me—this one may take a little more exposure for me to appreciate.  I found most of the movements reasonably enjoyable, but the sixth and last was interminable.  I don't think that had to do with the fact that we'd been sitting for so long as that to my ears it didn't seem to get anywhere.  Slowly.

Still, it was a good experience, quite possibly once-in-a-lifetime.  We don't even have a copy of Mahler's Third in our extensive music library, though that of course could be remedied.

My backblog has once again achieved unmanageable proportions, so it's time to bring back—ta da!—Casting the Net, in which I collect related—or unrelated—snippets of items that have caught my attention.  Today's post was inspired by a series of videos on math education in the U. S. sent to me by my sister-in-law.  (Um, back in March 2011; I told you I'm behind.)

First, Math Education:  An Inconvenient Truth, by M. J. McDermott, who is neither a teacher nor a mathematician, but with a degree in atmospheric sciences it's safe to say she has a pretty good grip on the kind of math elementary and secondary school students should be learning.  And she doesn't like what she sees being taught in schools today, in particular the approaches of Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (aka TERC) and Everyday Mathematics.  (duration 15:27)

Let me make two things clear up front:

1. I'd personally rather the government and other busybodies stay as much as possible out of ALL personal decisions, from health to education to the way we raise our children to the food we eat.  (Inform and educate, yes; regulate, no.)
2. Representative Akin's remarks about "legitimate rape" and pregnancy showed appalling ignorance, there's no doubt about that.

BUT it seems to me that we're always missing the main issue:  Rape doesn't change what abortion IS.  (Or is not.)  Either abortion following rape compounds one assault with another, so that there are two innocent victims of the crime instead of one, or it does not.  If it does not, then it makes not the slightest bit of difference whether the abortion is done on woman who has been raped or on a woman who simply does not want to be pregnant.  On the other hand, if abortion does double the number of victims, then even in the case of rape it is rightly an agonizing decision, and we need to help the woman through it, not somehow think to reassure her by insisting that because she was the victim of violence, the obvious right course of action is to inflict violence on another.

Did you ever wonder if some political ads might really have been created by the opposition?

It's not a typo, because the same mistake is also made—twice—in the text on the reverse.

Certainly one can be a successful, even brilliant, politician without a good grasp of spelling and grammar.  No one can be good at everything; the trick is to surround yourself with a good staff.  As far as I know, John Mica is reasonably good at his job.  I even voted for him at an early point in his career, before he was gerrymandered out of our district.  Now he's back, thanks to more district-line politics, and recently we received this mailing.  I haven't ruled out voting for him again, but I'll admit my confidence in his all-important staff has been significantly diminished.

Where are the writers—and proofreaders—of yesteryear?

Our generation has a problem with permanence.

By "our generation" I mean to cover a large age span:  whenever the seeds were planted, they had sprouted by the 1960's, blossomed during the 80's, and are in full fruit now.

For five quick examples, consider how many of the following are now considered unusual, even weird, and perhaps unhealthy?

• Commitment to one sexual partner, in marriage, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?
• Accepting a job with the intention of remaining loyal to the same company until retirement?
• Taking an employee into your company with the intent of nurturing his growth and supporting him through retirement?
• Joining a local church, determined to remain supportive and active through all the ups and downs, good times and bad, ins and outs, insults and annoyances?
• Living life in one house, one neighborhood, one community through multiple generations?

I could go on.  Although I think these changes signal a societal character defect of great import, I'll be the first to admit that there's a plus side to each of them.   In addition, they are only possible because of a freedom of choice that didn't exist in the past.  It's no great sign of admirable character to do a good thing when you have little opportunity to do otherwise.

However, I'm not here to analyze, bemoan, or extol any part of our commitment phobia.  My purpose is merely to ask one burning question:  In an age so fearful of permanence,

How does one explain the popularity ot tattoos?

My library copy of Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking looks to still be several weeks away, but if you have 19 minutes you can hear a TED talk by Susan Cain, the author.  (H/T DSTB)  I like that she acknowledges the value of both introverts and extroverts, and stresses the need to use the best talents of the entire spectrum in addressing the problems of today.

Quotes are too hard to pull from a talk, but here's a short one from the introduction, where she describes her first summer camp experience:

In my family, reading was the primary group activity. ... [F]or us it was just a different way of being social. You had the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you were also free to go roaming around the adventure land inside your own mind.  And I had this idea, that camp was gonna be just like this, but better.  I had a vision of ten girls sitting in a cabin, cosily reading books in their matching nightgowns....

The world lost a wonderful writer today, though at 98 you can hardly say she died young.  Dora Jessie Saint, aka Miss Read, was one of my favorite authors.  Her stories, almost all depicting English village life, were written between 1955 and 1996.  As you can imagine, there was a great deal of societal change over those years, and Miss Read did not ignore it, but demonstrated that good character and old-fashioned virtues never change.

Her stories are not exciting, they have little action and less plot.  Yet they are delightful, a refreshment to the soul, like a long walk through the countryside with spring all around, or a cool breeze through a garden on a warm summer day.

Miss Read has been described as the Jan Karon of England.  I enjoyed reading the Mitford books, but that comparison is wrong on so many levels.  Not only do Fairacre and Thrush Green predate Mitford by decades, but as a writer Miss Read is immeasurably the superior.

(H/T to DSTB for the news.)

... and also why it's great to be attending a church close to home.

Sunday:  Palm/Passion Sunday Service

Tuesday:  Stations of the Cross

Wednesday:  Tennebrae Service

Thursday:  Maundy Thursday Service, Agape Meal, Stripping of the Altar, Prayer Vigil

Friday:  Good Friday Liturgy

Saturday:  Easter Vigil, Baptisms, Kindling of New Fire, joyous ringing of bells, First Eucharist of Easter

Sunday:  Easter Sunday (singing Rutter, Vivaldi, Handel, and much, much more!)

And these are only the services we attended/plan to attend; I've left out quite a few.