Light and Momentary

Time 2020-12-11 02:03:35

Web Name: Light and Momentary

WebSite: http://www.mostgladly.net

ID:130203

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I have come to think that one of the most telling indices of a person s faith might be her thoughts on hell. In the days when I struggled more with scrupulosity I regarded hell with a mix of horror and fascination. I did not see clearly then that God loved me so much that he wanted me to stay out of hell even more than I wanted to stay out of hell -- that he was more invested in my sanctification than I was. And yet I also had (and still have) a tendency widespread among the scrupulous: I love to be right. Here is a true fact: a person who mutters fine, go to hell then; we ll see who s right when an argument about the faith goes poorly is not a compelling witness to the beauty and redemptive power of the gospel.I once heard a priest say that when Jesus said I thirst he wasn t just talking about physical thirst; he was saying, I thirst for souls. The pairing of those two meanings is particularly poignant: here in my agony, says the Lord, I desire for all people to see me lifted up and be freed from the poison of sin. He came to be with us in a world full of physical suffering, to experience physical sufferings like thirst, and to love us unstoppably even in the worst of it.COVID has offered me many opportunities to think about whether I d rather be loving or be right. My church s Facebook announcements have recently been a forum for the most vocal right-wingers in the parish to complain nastily about the precautions in place, and I find it wearying. I hear an echo of the me from 20 years ago, thinking, Fine, get COVID then; we ll see who s right. I don t really mean that. But the Lord wants me to pray for them, to desire his very best for them -- and I m not there today, friends; I m not there. (Why, though, would they be publicly ugly to our fantabulous pastor who is working SO HARD to make the sacraments available safely? I do not understand. I am tired of trying to understand.) I would like Donald Trump to go to prison for tax evasion and money laundering. Is that a hunger for justice or a petty desire for vengeance? Since 2015 I have tried to avoid uncharitable language about Trump -- I don t care how much he weighs or what color makeup he wears. My concern is the competence void. But it is not very charitable to wish him in prison. Fine, face the SDNY then; we ll see who s right is not the same as wishing eternal damnation on someone. But it feels to me like it is in the same neighborhood.All through the pandemic I have been thinking about Our Lord s eagerness to alleviate physical suffering, even when doing so created hassles and hazards for him. And I have been thinking, too, about his willingness to walk before us into the valley of the shadow, to make a path through it for us. The pandemic is a temporal struggle to be viewed in the light of eternity. (On that topic, may I recommend this homily from the newly elevated Cardinal Cantalamessa? Love him.) Maybe tonight it is best for me to close the social media tabs, and offer up all of my uncertainties. Teach me, I will pray as I am falling asleep, how to thirst. I submitted revised manuscripts on November 2, November 16, and November 30 (today!) and I am ready to be done revising things for a while. I wrote 30 blog posts in 30 days. Last November I was so weighed down by grief and uncertainty that I only posted three times, and it felt good to return to daily blogging in November this year. But I might be done blogging for a few days.I brought home another foster dog. (Laverne s family returned yesterday. She growled ferociously at the strangers on the porch until she realized they were not actually strangers, and then she lost her little doggy mind. She was so glad to see them again.) This is Duncan. He is much mellower than Laverne so far.I ll be back in a few days with some fun Duncan stories. Imagine a world in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. When COVID-19 hit the US, she was prepared to smack it down hard. There was a non-disbanded pandemic team, there were PPE stockpiles, there were trained contact tracers ready to roll. The initial outbreak was largely confined to the coasts, with slower spread and lower caseloads in the months that followed. But remember in March when they warned us about effective public health measures? I can t remember the quote exactly, but it was something like when public health measures do what they were supposed to do, people think they were overkill. Our alternate-universe Hillary Clinton saw her always-fragile popularity tank across the spring and summer. She s destroying our economy for a virus that s not even that bad! people grumbled. We would never have been like Italy. All that hype about overwhelming the healthcare system was just scare tactics! The Republican candidates campaigned on restoring normalcy, protecting freedom, preserving economic stability. Clinton lost big in November.Who is our president-elect in that alternate universe? Hello it is Laverne friends it is my last night here friends. I am trying to write while getting belly rubs so pardon any typos. Wait, Joe has a dirty forehead and I must lick it clean before I continue.Honestly, these people and their insufficiently licked faces. What are they going to do without me?So these are things you might not know about the Gladlys House:They have a Beeping Pot. I can almost reach it friends if I stand on my hind legs but then they say things like DOWN LAVERNE and OFF LAVERNE. Really though would you stay down and off if you lived in a house with a Beeping Pot full of good-smelling things? Today Jamie gave me some nibbles from the pot after they cooled down maybe there will be more nibbles tomorrow. Across the street there is an Evil Minion of Satan. They laugh when I get worried about her but friends I think you would be worried too because do you like Evil Minions of Satan? (Answer: no. You are a sensible reader. I can tell from here.) Jamie says, Honestly, Laverne, you could eat that dog up in about four bites, but is Jamie eating any Evil Minions of Satan? No she is not.I have a strategy for avoiding the EMoS do you want to know in case you need it for the future? Here you go: first you whimper very loudly in place and then you pull hard to the left for 25 yards while looking over your shoulder followed by a hard pull to the right while continuing to whimper. I have been doing this for five days now and I have not yet been eaten OR possessed by the EMoS so probably you should try it too.In the back yard they have a Boing Machine and it is interesting also scary. Joe likes to boing very high on the Boing Machine and I cannot decide whether this is more interesting or more scary. I think he should stop doing flips though and give me more belly rubs.People in this house think they can stop giving me belly rubs before I give them permission to stop. I am working hard to teach them better manners than that but some of them are kind of slow learners. Luckily for them I am a patient dog.I am very sleepy friends very sleepy. For my first few nights here I needed to make sure that no one was breaking in and also that my other foster family was not waiting for me in the yard. So I would go to the front door and cry for my family and then I would go to the back door and whine GO AWAY to the intruders. The Gladlys did not understand that I was being Appropriately Vigilant and they said silly things like Laverne lie down it s 1 in the morning (see above re: slow learners).But you know constant vigilance makes a girl pretty tired and I think I scared off all the intruders with my fierce relentless midnight whining. So maybe I will say good night friends it was nice talking with you let me know if anybody has any dirty faces at your house. It turns out that today is the day of November on which I say to myself, Huh, 30 posts in 30 days is a lot of blog posting. If you read this blog in an RSS aggregator, has it been messed up? Feedly recently burped up 6 days worth of posts as if I had written them all at once, but my RSS feed seems to be working okay for Ravelry. I don t know if that s a me issue or a Feedly issue.I suppose if your feed reader isn t working well, you re not going to be able to tell me because you won t see the post. Laverne has decided that this is not a terrible place to be. It took her most of the day to reach this conclusion, but she is seeking out affection and accepting belly rubs a little gingerly. She isn t eating or drinking very much and she seems reluctant to do her business in front of people she doesn t know very well yet (I mean, I can sympathize with that feeling), but she is doing so much better tonight.Today I finished my portion of the revisions for paper #3. You guys, I feel SO RELIEVED. It is likely that my co-author will recommend some minor final tweaks, but we re almost there. I told a friend tonight that I feel like a crane came along and removed a house from on top of me. I have been so squashed down by the weight of that task. It was so much work! Yikes! Academic publishing is a weird little ecosystem, because it is entirely possible that the editor could look at our stevedore-esque efforts to address every single concern raised in the review process and say, ...nah, reject. But I m not going to think about that right now.Today I made the Penitential Cranberry Sauce and the cornbread for stuffing, and whoops, I should have turned off the stock in time for it to cool. I m not sure there would have been room for it in the fridge, though. Hm. Maybe I will put it in the Instant Pot overnight on the slow cooker setting.A 16-pound turkey awaits my ministrations. I didn t get around to placing my turkey order until later than usual, and the butcher shop couldn t get me a fresh turkey smaller than 16 pounds. Nobody wants big turkeys this year, the guy on the phone explained. All right, I said, 16 pounds it is. It will be fine. We go through an astounding quantity of food when the college kids are home. If they re scrounging around for snacks tomorrow night I ll tell them to go gnaw on the turkey carcass.Tonight s burning question: will Laverne finally break down and pee before we go to sleep for the night? Tune in tomorrow. We have a new foster dog. She is far and away the shyest of the dogs we ve had here.Her owner surrendered her to the shelter a couple of weeks ago, and she has been living with a foster family that had planned to leave town for Thanksgiving. We told them she could stay here with us over the holiday, and they dropped her off this afternoon.Well. Laverne had some Thoughts about coming to our house. She growled at me when I tried to take her leash from their son, so I gave it back. They wound up carrying her up the porch steps (she weighs 50 pounds, so this was not like tucking a little purse dog under your arm) and plunking her on our welcome mat. We got the storm door closed behind them, and Laverne sat there, immobile and tense, for a solid hour.We tried the treats they brought; we tried our peanut butter-oat dog treats. We tried peanut butter on a spoon. I scrambled her an egg, which they told us she loves, and she just looked at it, like, Haven t you ever heard that you re not supposed to eat any food when you visit hell? I m Laverne, not Persephone. Slowly she let us pet her, and after that first hour we got the front door closed. But things didn t really improve from there. She spent the next two hours in the same spot, waiting forlornly for her family. At one point after I thought she and I were on petting terms, she told me to back the heck off.After a little walk she came back inside more willingly, and parked herself on the steps for half an hour or so. Our steps are not the place I would choose to park myself if I were a 50-pound dog. She did not appear comfortable, but she was also not willing to move. As I wrote this post she eased cautiously down the steps and took up her station on the welcome mat, right by our drafty front door. With some coaxing she consented to move a foot or so to her dog bed, and she fell asleep there. I guess there are some tenuous good signs so far: she made a small effort at grooming herself, she gave Pete s face a tiny lick (he is her favorite so far), and she relaxed enough to fall asleep. But man, you have to wonder what could be in this dog s past to make her feel this anxious. I hope she is not having sad dreams about her other foster family. Four of my five children are home this week and Alex assures me that I do not have to send him mashed potatoes in the mail. I know, objectively, that he is in Manhattan, able to obtain any quantity of any type of food his heart desires. But I cannot shake the certainty that he will be pining for MY mashed potatoes.I am holding out hope for a spectacular Easter.Stella is suggesting that we mix it up a little this year, since this will be the smallest Thanksgiving dinner of her entire life. She wonders: is pumpkin pie truly necessary? She suggests that key lime pie would be a better alternative.We will of course be eating pumpkin pie on Thursday. (Side note: in another year I would have ended that sentence with because we are not heretics. But this year I am so troubled by the conflation of heresy with political affiliation that I can t make that little joke any more. Serve pumpkin pie, or don t serve pumpkin pie. No skin off my nose. In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.) But this key lime pie is so easy and our Thanksgiving is so much smaller than usual that I am perfectly happy to make a pre-Thanksgiving pie.Here s what you do: make or buy a graham cracker crust. If you make it, let it cool. Combine a can of sweetened condensed milk, 1.25 cups of heavy cream, and key lime juice to taste. It should be tart enough to make you wince a little bit. Whip with an electric mixer until it holds its shape. Plop into the crust and chill. I think most key lime pie recipes require eggs and baking, but we love this no-bake version at our house. If you are looking for low-stress alternatives to more conventional Thanksgiving dessert recipes here in this most unconventional November, Stella thinks you can t go wrong with this one. This morning I was talking to an old friend who is in the middle of some hard things. I cannot do anything about the work stuff or the family stuff or the health stuff, but my ears pricked up when she said she had been looking unsuccessfully for a Christmas ornament: she wanted a Santa Claus wearing a mask.That is a problem I can solve.I am going to add a pompon to the top of his hat, and I have a bunch of ends to weave in. But he s almost done.Pete wants me to make one for our tree too, and I think I will extend the mask a little higher (even Santa needs to cover his nose) and make it slightly less rectangular.I started to write out the pattern, but I got to the short-row section of the beard and the pattern degenerated into and then I kind of wung it; you can too. I ll pay closer attention next time.

TAGS:Light and Momentary 

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