Category Archives: Reading

Grace for All Things

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Today’s epiphany, courtesy Hudson Taylor (via Adventures in Autism):

…In the easiest position He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult, His grace is sufficient.

I don’t remember particularly questioning God’s sufficiency in difficulty; my faulty thinking was more about assuming I could reach a level of competency that would leave me grateful for– but somehow less completely dependant on– God’s provision of grace for the smaller roles.

Taylor goes on with more encouraging reminders about sufficiency.
The illustration:

It matters little to my servant whether I send him to buy a few cash worth of things, or the most expensive articles. In either case he looks to me for the money and brings me his purchases.

What a lovely picture of dependency and trust.

So, if God should place me in serious perplexity, must He not meet much guidance; in positions of great difficulty, much grace; in circumstances of great pressure and trial, much strength? No fear that His resources will prove unequal to the emergency! And His resources are mine, for He is mine, and is with me and dwells in me.

Such a great and precious promise from our faithful God and Father:

2 Corinthians 12:9
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Not Worth the Effort

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From A.W. Tozer’s book The Pursuit of God.

The heart’s fierce desire to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through the years and the burden will become intolerable.

Such a burden is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.

Mere Christianity

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To think about.

An excerpt from that book by C.S. Lewis.

…The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for a few moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.

He [Jesus] never talked in vague, idealistic gas. When he said, “Be perfect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder– in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn how to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Enchantment

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I’ve started reading Orson Scott Card’s book Enchantment on the advice of some NaNo pseudo-acquaintance who read my NaNo’s premise. It’s surprised me a couple times.

And there’s a few lines I’ve liked. In the context of the protagonist’s mother (Esther) talking with his fiancée (Ruthie):

[Ruthie] might not realize it consciously, but she had let some thing slip, and Esther had picked up on it. That was the way communication was among women, most of the time; few women realized it, but they all depended on it. “Women’s intuition” wasn’t intuition at all, it was heightened observation, unconscious registration of subtle clues…Esther didn’t need to be told any of this. She knew, because she had trained herself to know these things. It was a school at least as rigorous as any university, but there was no diploma, no extra title to add to her name. She simply knew things, and, unlike most women, knew exactly why and how she knew.

Aren’t we most likely to consider brilliant those who think like us?

This has been my theory about “women’s intuition” as long as I’ve considered its existence, so finding someone else articulating it inclines me to think well of him for a few more pages. He has enough of these redeeming moments it’s been fairly easy to continue reading, even though nothing much had happen-happened yet (only things hinted at).

In the same conversation Ruthie is trying to explain to Esther’s husband (Piotr) the difference between the “Bible of scarcity” and the “feminine Bible,” an idea she was eating up in her Jewish philosophy class (all these characters call themselves Jewish); the idea that all the distasteful stuff in the bible can be separated from the nice stuff:

“It’s the Bible of scarcity that makes Jews think they have the right to displace the Palestinians. In the feminine Bible, the lamb lies down with the lion.”

“Lions are always glad when lambs act like that,” said Piotr. “Saves them all that energy wasted in hunting and chasing.”

It kind of loses its punch when the girl guilts him into apologizing for it.
Later, he asks his wife what’s for dinner.

“Soup,” she said. “Can’t you smell it?”
“The house always smells like good food,” said Piotr. “It’s the perfume of love.”

How to Become a Saint While Changing Diapers

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You gotta love that title. It’s another chapter title from The Angel and the Ants (here if you want to browse the other excerpts).

Reading this chapter I felt again that twinge I get when wishing my life now showed the fruits of a more structured childhood (not that I’d want to have lived that childhood, necessarily, but it would be nice to have had all that learning and training behind me). Both musicians (Suzuki-type) and traditional Catholics are (I imagine) simply stuffed full of information at an age where there are fewer distractions to prevent its taking root.

The reason I think of this now, is that Kreeft sites several fine distinctions on the “do all as unto the Lord” idea, from broader reading than I would have found without him, and applies it to this idea of “living a life of sanctity” emphasized in his book.

“Seeds,” he calls them, and they are drawn from that sea of tradition and reading available for those brave enough to wade in:

  • From The Devine Milieu Kreeft shares the suggestion that “Not only our operatio but also our opus, not only our acts of working, but also the works we produce will somehow be used by God … We are to be doing the very best work we can because that work is to be part of God’s eternal kingdom, unimaginably transformed by death and resurrection. We are cooperating with God right now in building this new world; our pen, or shovel, or computer, is the extension of the fingers of Christ, the body of Christ.”
  • Summarizing Opus Dei, Kreeft says, its “whole reason for existence is to address the problem of the sanctification of daily work directly and explicitly. Its fundamental answer is traditional: to offer up our work to God, to pour the infinitely precious soul of a pure intention, a Godward intention, into every secular action.”
  • Kreeft observes that Vatican II encouraged Catholics to “study and profit from the wisdom in other world religions.” Here is an example he takes from the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu book (Kreeft’s words):
    • “The way to sanctity amidst activity is to work not for the fruit of the work, not out of desire for success, not looking forward, but looking backwards, so to speak, to the source and motive of the act: love and duty and obedience to God. Do what you do because it is your God-given task now. If you act out of desire for success, you bind yourself to the fear of failure. If we will only one thing– God’s will– we are free.” (emphasis mine)
  • Finally, a quote from Mother Theresa: “God did not put me here to be successful. God put me here to be faithful.”

Depending on the mood or state-of-mind I am in, any of these ideas may be the one that strikes home, and causes me to reassess my attitude and approach to my current work(s). Along with the Lewis quote I mentioned earlier, these are things I want to keep in mind.

Reference works

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Okay, I just started “using” my two favorite new reference works: Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia, and Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth.

The absolute coolest.

Okay, I was one of those (home schooled) kids who would sit down with my mom’s old set of World Book Encyclopedia and just read like crazy. To send me there to look something up for a project was to lose me for the morning.

And now I have this reallyreally cool double set of fantastical creatures, and it’s actually what you would call “scholarly:” based on research and not just a collection of one person’s ideas of things. I’m enjoying it immensely.

~~~

Anyway, I bought them initially because all my projects seem to have this element of the fantastic in them, so I wanted to be as… authentic as possible.

One interesting thing I’ve already read ties very closely to an earlier post I wrote while reading Mindhunter. It was a very long entry about werewolves (did you know there are were-everythings? Whatever animal is common in the area: panthers, hares, boar(s?), crocodiles…).

In it the author mentions a “highly publicized” incident in the late 1500s where a man in Germany “in the guise of a wolf raped, murdered, and ate humans, including his own family, as well as terrorizing the region for some twenty-five years until caught, tortured, and executed.”

The era of serial killers has been said to have begun with Jack the Ripper (late 1800s). But there really is “nothing new under the sun…”

Whew. I can see why that “werewolf” story made it across the channel. (Big story in England in 1590, according to the encyclopedia).

~~~

Anyway-anyway, fascinating books. Lots of interesting readings.

I’m getting the impression it will be the same type of information as the names I choose. That is, many of the names my characters have actually mean something related to their role or personality. This is nothing I expect a reader to know. It’s sort of a game I play with myself, a kind of “in” joke or story, for my own benefit and mental exercise.

Yes, it looks like I’ve got the new-book giddies. It’s fun. I haven’t had that for quite a while.

Positivity

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I think one of my favorite things about Robin McKinley’s book Beauty is that she changes the sisters to be kind and loving.

This is a departure from the original story, but it adds an appropriate and satisfying level of complexity that didn’t, couldn’t, exist before. When home is a place you like, and want, to be, leaving into peril has more significance.

All the “heroines” who face danger so well and take daring chances (Cinderella, after all, did marry a complete stranger) do so from an unavoidably what-have-I-got-to-lose base.

One who allows their protagonist to have loving friends/family, and good times, good memories, is also (I believe) a less-lazy writer. Angst and isolation are the cheap shortcut to a reader’s pity. They are the “givens” in so many works of fiction (look at Disney, and Anne McCaffery).

It is understandable, and even forgivable (most people on some level seem to want to protect someone else– it affirms both our superiority and our competency), but this is also what makes positive characters (and supporting characters) so praiseworthy.

Remembering

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From C.S. Lewis:

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own” or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life– the life God is sending one, day by day.”

I’m reading something off the best-seller list!

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Probably for the first time in my life. Though, in my own defense, I didn’t know it was there when I bought it. ;o)

The Thirteenth Tale is one of those stories within a story, where the frame and the content reflect on one another and (you know inevitably) they will entwine.

Sort of a love-letter to Story and reading at times, its beginning especially reminded me of Inkheart. In that story the protagonist’s father is a book doctor (rebinding, restoring old books) in this, the protagonist’s father owns a used-book shop, and makes his living on 6 or so transactions a year, involving rare books and their collectors.

Both protagonists are female and well read; they enjoy reading almost as a religion, drawing strength and security from familiar tomes. Also, they both have mothers that are alive but absent. Not through abandoning or divorce but other circumstances that result in the protagonists’ being unusually (though not inappropriately) close to their fathers.

I told Jay about five pages into this one that it was the same story by a different author. But it isn’t, quite. The style of this one (Thirteen) is quite elaborate and is loaded unashamedly with metaphor and simile, but (in contrast to some other books I’ve read: Inkheart and The Goose Girl come to mind) they don’t draw attention to themselves (very much) so I can enjoy their originality more without thinking to much about how clever the author is trying to be.

It has been such fun having a novel to read. I’ve missed it. It just seems like there’s so many stinkers out there I’m reluctant to invest my time without knowing more. But then, sometimes, knowing more takes the sharpest edge of the fun off. That is, known books are familiar friends, but they don’t make you tense from excitement or not-knowing. At least… I guess it depends how often (or recently) you’ve read them.

I am enjoying this book. About a third of the way through.

Interestingly enough, I started another book after I picked Thirteen up (a new book from Sunday School). Created to be His Help Meet, by Debi Pearl. It has been just as fascinating, though in an entirely different way.

A unique look at some mutt-mixes

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From Mutts: America’s Dogs that I mentioned earlier:

  • The Chesapeake Bay Retriever mix: A lab in a Leather Jacket
  • The Golden retriever-setter mix: If it’s Irish or Gordon setter, beware a beauty over brains blend
  • Lab-Australian Sheppard mix: “A young lab is a runaway boxcar and an Aussie outfits the chassis with Boeing engines. This dog has to have something to do…Something. Anything. Repeat often until tired. (Warning: you will tire far sooner than the dog.)”
  • Irish Setter mix: the gorgeous airhead of the dog world.
  • Greyhound-Lab mix: A beautiful creature mentally, physically, and spiritually, unless you’re a squirrel. Continue reading »