Weekend of Electric January 16&17: Prayer

The weekend is upon us.  For several months, before I began my new degree in earnest, I had no concept of weekends, much like the darling of Downton, the Dowager Countess Violet Grantham.  I would wake up on a Thursday and assess the Nothing I had to do and it would rather depress me.

There is an entire Backstory to how my weekends reappeared, and it is an interesting tale, even for the uninitiated, but it will be penned at a later date.

Media: Prayer (by monk and video)

Location/Length: BBC/only a few minutes (valuable minutes)

How I found it/Reason for Sharing: Certain prayers are often on my radar.  This one, being presented by a soft-spoken Father Giles, a Benedictine monk, puts my heart right every time I watch it.

What I love: The light.

The Greatest Freedom of All

 

Let there be lit

I read.  I collect books and I read.  I don’t read as often as I should nor as ravenously as I did when I was 11 but I can do, when I want to and when I tell the outside world to carry on without me.

I am an email subscriber to LitHub, the online literary magazine that promotes reading, thought, ideas, literature, all the good stuff.  I read it, if not daily, then sub-daily, weekly, and in great chunks.  I wish I read it regularly, in the mornings over coffee.  Do people do that?  Or is it a situation of my imagination?   I hope they do.  I hope that there is in the world someone wo reads LitHub over coffee every morning; to know that there is in this slightly-off-kilter world a place, even if it is just one desk in one home, where someone opens the laptop lid, takes the coffee cup in hand, and enjoys both, simultaneously, enriching soul and caffiene habit.

But today this article, entitled ‘The Truth of Ray Bradbury’s Prophetic Vision’ appeared in my FB LitHub news feed and struck me as something I ought to have read and ought to have known before now.  And so it is with so much: I feel I ought to have known it and then the shame of not knowing it and then ensues the not-very-subtle argument with myself about becoming a better person.  But what a hubristic approach to literature and learning.

This article intrigued me not because of its Science Fictional leanings (I confess I have never given William S. Burroughs his fair due) but because of what it says about reading.  As a teacher I promoted reading in every way I could, including the subversive ways, which included condoning Harry Potter at the Evangelical School and turning a blind eye when students underlined passages in school copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby.

I miss the classroom and what I miss most is the discussion and the critical learning brought on by critical mass: that series of moments in which no one knows what we’re talking about and then, suddenly, we all do.  It’s a wonderful thing and while it cannot be entirely planned, it can be sculpted, it can be drawn out when conditions are right.  It is akin to using one’s sail: it is impossible if there is no wind, but when a wind arises, do not expect the sail to do any of the work: it is the sailor’s job.  So the teacher’s when the students are alive (to the wind in their cognitive sails).

The line in the article of most rich significance, in my view, is this, the last one:

Why bother to ban books when people voluntarily ignore them? Books don’t have to be hunted to extinction. Books die as a result of our taking them for granted. As the world of books steadily shrinks publisher by publisher, shop by shop, library by library and reader by reader, the result is the same. Only here and there, powerless to resist the general momentum of society, do a few people remain who love literature enough to try somehow to preserve it. So perhaps Bradbury suggests, at the end of this dark fable, all is not lost. Not quite.

I want to believe that there are more than a few of us left, but I know enough about humanity and the difficulties of literature to believe there is a great readership out there–especially in America at this moment.

The article is pinned below, and I encourage you to peruse it, if only to buck the trends that say our reading habits are confied to social platforms and easy news.  And if you want to grab a cup of coffee, you just go right ahead.  LitHub away.

https://lithub.com/the-truth-of-ray-bradburys-prophetic-vision/

 

A Reflection on the Women who are ever-present throughout my day(s)

This post was written on International Women’s Day and posted on the 3rd of April. (Just to note.)

I do not have a regular calendar above my desk because we do not live near a Half Price Books.  Half Price Books hands out the most amazing author-and-book-themed calendars at the end of every year, free, if you spend $25 at their store which,  for us, is really no challenge whatsoever. But since we don’t live near a HPB, I don’t have one this year.  So I didn’t know that today was International Women’s Day until John mentioned it in passing on our drive home from Milwaukee.

Milwaukee.  City of breweries.  Butt of many a dumb-Midwesterner joke.  Setting for the appallingly awful ‘That 70’s Show’ and, in actuality, not a terrible place at all.  In fact, for a city, it’s all right.  It bears a great resemblance to Portland in the mid-to-late ’90s and was home, for quite a few years, to the redoubtable Golda Meir.  Golda Meir.! Who knew?!  Apparently, a lot of people, but indeed, not I: at least, not until we moved to Wisconsin.

Though in point of fact, moving to Wisconsin did not provide me this information, but having a Masters thesis to complete and an inherent need, therefore, for an academic library did the trick. In September I signed on as a Patron of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Library so that I could use their stacks to my heart’s (and degree’s) content.  Enter Golda Meir.  The library is named after the formidable first (and only) woman prime minister of Israel and it is only one of many reminders, on International Women’s Day, of the inundation of my day by equally formidable, though perhaps less well-known, women in my life.

Here’s one:
This morning, as I do every morning, I looked out the front windows at the house across the street.  It is the home of Anna and Chuck, who have welcomed us so unreservedly into this, our new neighborhood.  Anna, who had never laid eyes on us before, appeared at our back door with wine, cheese, and a lot of enthusiasm the day after we pulled up in our big yellow Penske truck.  This woman is, to me, as necessary to life as Golda Meir.  Maybe more so.  I do not look out across North 16th Street and see Golda Meir, but something better: a yellow-and-stone house where a friend lives: a woman who has refreshed the hearts of the saints.

So it isn’t just the big-time women who ought to be honored on these International days but the women who make us better citizens of our neighborhoods, better neighbors which is, after all, part of Christ’s commission: Love the Lord your God with all your heard, soul, mind and love your neighbor just as well.