Category: catholicism (Page 1 of 2)

Alternative December

December 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

As December rolls along, my house continues to think it’s mid-October. There are no wreaths out, no tree, no decorations of any sort. It’s the fifteenth-of-fucking-December and there is still no Advent calendar on our wall. The only thing going for us is that the Glade plugin is pine-scented.

Every year, the same thing happens. I drive around town at 7:30 p.m. to get more medicine from CVS, hoping to stave off the fevers of at least two children, and I’m confronted with all the beauty of sparkling houses decorated with lights and lawn reindeer, a merry reminder that my house is the Scrooge on the block, the one place that still has an artificial jack-o-lantern on the porch that probably doesn’t even work anymore.

Last year was the exception to my mid-December lack-o-Christmas-cheer because last year I didn’t really work at a normal (any) job in December, so I had free time to put the Advent wreath out and dust the piano and maybe put out one of our three nativity sets. Last year still had sick kids up the wazoo, but at least I had the tree decorated and a couple of presents wrapped.

This year is a return to the mean. I’m working full-time again — teaching — thus it’s-end-of-the-term-and-grading-is-all-I-do-now mode has been activated, and I can barely blink to figure out which day it is, let alone figure out how to make my living room livable enough to put up decorations.

This time around, this December fifteenth, while driving home and enjoying other people’s Christmas lights, I realized there will never be a time (until my kids are grown, maybe, or we win the lotto) when I won’t be running around like a lunatic in December, stressed out of my gourd and barely hanging on. There will never be a time when my house will be gingerbready and ready for Christmas weeks in advance. (I’ll be happy with DAYS in advance, honestly.)

No, I will always be living my alternative Christmas. I will always be last-minuting the mistletoe. I will always be getting the tree up just in time, and wrapping all the gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve, watching It’s a Wonderful Life and crying my eyes out and self-soothing with spiked eggnog. That is MY December twenty-fourth.

And my Advent will always be ganky. It will always be helter-skelter and mismanaged. There’s just too much to fucking do in December. Too much. School stuff and work stuff and house stuff and illnesses. OMG the illnesses! Everyone cycles through three rounds of illness every flippin’ November/December now apparently. Apparently that’s a thing in my life for perpetuity or until my kids run off to college (or the circus). Apparently everyone must get sick in early December; it’s like an iron-clad rule. Everyone but me, apparently, which, I must admit, is a small but very grateful mercy.

I realized as I was driving home tonight and feeling bad about my lack of Getting All the Shit Done skillz, that I will always be living this alternative Christmas. My Decembers will always be wracked by chaos. I will never not be having hair on fire. This disordered life IS my life.

And then I sighed. A wave of relief washed over me. I’m living an alternative Christmas. I’m not like the rest of you, with your house lights and your tree up and your Christmas parties and whatnot. I’m living my own Christmas season, my own messed up Advent, my very own alternative seat-of-the-pants-flying-rodeo that is a blur and a burden, but hey-o, it’s MY burden. This is how I do Christmas. Not very nice, not very naughty either, just… well, it’s just how I do it.

It’s not my preferred way. Boy, howdy is it not my preferred way!

But it’s my way. My life and no other.

I need to accept it, embrace it, even love it. Kinda. Sorta. Maybe “love” is too strong a word. But something love-ish. Something that goes beyond acceptance into a kind of okay-ness.

It’s okay that I have literally no decorations up yet. It’s okay that I’m still behind on my end-of-term grading. And it’s okay if I don’t sign-up for something to send into my kids’ classes for their holiday parties next week. It’s all okay. It’s still Christmas even if I never put up the tree.

(Don’t worry, I’m putting up the tree. It’s just, it’s still okay EVEN IF I don’t. That’s all I’m saying. Christmas isn’t decorations. It isn’t cookies. It isn’t even presents. But yes, I do have presents for my kids; I’m not that horrible.)

Christmas is about the birth of Christ, celebrating the Incarnation, and kneeling in awe and wonder at the miracle of God becoming Man. No decorations or Christmas lights are required to celebrate the Light of the World.

So what if I’m horrible at Decembers? It’s how I roll. These hectic days are just the way things are. Can’t escape them, can’t solve them, can’t worry about them anymore.

As each new December comes around, I’m hoping it will the one where I turn things around. But that’s a vain hope. It’s a pressure I’m putting on myself that isn’t worth worrying about. I’m an alternative Decemberist. A free-spirit of suckitude. I’m just never gonna get my shit together.

And that’s okay.

Ordinary Time

January 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

After Christmastime, the church enters what’s known as Ordinary Time, and I feel like my own life this month has entered a kind of “ordinary time” that is very welcome after the ordeals of Christmas and New Year’s.

I don’t mean the normal busy flurry of activity that precedes Christmas or the merriment and unstructured time of the Christmas Octave. I mean my personal ordeals, which included catching a cold that then led to a wicked cough, which then led to back pain and sciatica in my right leg and a stint in the emergency room, and an MRI, and a spinal injection to help ease the pain, and now here I am on nerve medicine, muscle relaxers, and ibuprofen trying to manage the pain and get on with life.

And I am getting on with life. On these days when the kids are all in school, and I can sit at my desk and work, and the house is (relatively) in order, and I know what needs to be done and I have time (and health, enough) to do it, I am content. This is that ordinary time I referenced above, that time when the days pass uneventfully but with satisfaction: a day well done, a life unremarkable but nevertheless joyful.

Weirdly, despite my continued leg pain, I am joyful. I don’t know if it’s the effects of my new Panda Planner (which I can’t believe I’ve become a “planner person,” but I must say, having used the Panda Planner for almost three weeks, I can feel a difference in my organization, productivity, and well-being), or if my joy comes from facing so much physical pain that I’ve had to cling to whatever happiness and peace I can muster in order to stay sane and not despair, or maybe it’s just the medicines I’m taking that are blissing me out, but whatever the cause of the joy, I am here for it.

Maybe it’s the fact that for the past two and a half weeks, I’ve been awake at 6:30 a.m. due to the leg pain, and I’ve used those early morning hours to walk slowly around the house and listen to the Liturgy of the Hours. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time someone has found joy in early morning prayer. Saints and monks can testify to that.

I don’t know if it’s a middle-age thing (since I am officially middle-aged), but I can’t get over how grateful I am for the experience of “ordinary time.” Habit, predictability, the incremental everyday work that builds into satisfying accomplishment: I like the rhythm of it. I like that things seem ordered. Yes, of course, I still have the chaos that comes with raising happy, wild, volatile young children, but that chaos is mitigated by the ordinary beats of ordinary time. There are no big events or holidays ahead, no trips or happenings to plan for. Yes, I still have deadlines and stress, but for this brief respite in January, I can just let myself settle into the regularities of ordinary life.

It’s the ebb and flow. I love the excitement of Christmastime, but now I love the quiet of Ordinary. We need both to have a balanced life.

Creative = Make

February 22, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I’m rereading Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Be Free. I find this book, and its companion, How to Be Idle, eminently re-readable. Both Hodgkinson’s style and his philosophies are so buoyant, so carefree and merry, that I always feel emboldened and inspired when I read his books.

So I’m rereading How to Be Free, and this afternoon I read the chapter entitled, “Reject Career and All Its Empty Promises.” This chapter is relevant for me because I’m thinking about just such a thing (i.e.: chucking my career).

Anyway, the thing that struck me was how Hodgkinson implored his readers to do more manual work — not for money, necessarily, but simply for its own sake. For instance, there’s something quite wonderful about gardening or whittling a piece of wood or knitting or whatever. Not all of our work needs to be “mental work,” and not all of our time needs to be spent focusing on our narrow and restricting “careers.”

This whole thing got me thinking about creativity.

In one of the classes I teach, we spend some time trying to define creativity. Most often, my students come up with some variation of this: “Creativity is figuring out a new way of doing something or an original way to solve a problem.” It’s all about “thinking outside the box” (a most unoriginal expression if there ever was one).

I’ve always rebelled against this definition, though I don’t often say so to my students. I might prod them a little bit with Socratic questions, but I never outright dismiss their ideas. But what annoys me about “originality” and “newness” as central pillars of creativity is that it elevates novelty above all else, AND it ignores the root word of creativity itself: CREATE. Not that newness and originality aren’t aspects of creativity, but they aren’t the center of the thing. Creativity means creating.

To create. To make. To bring something into being.

When looked at this way, creativity is less about ideas and much more about THINGS. When we are creating we are making. And if creativity is making, then anyone can do it. It’s not something that only the rarefied among us is any good at. It’s open to all. Anyone can make something. And thus, everyone is creative.

Being creative, i.e.: CREATE-ive, could mean baking a cake, or drawing a picture, or throwing a party. After all, what does throwing a party really mean? It means creating a party. You gather people and food and drinks, you decorate the place, you make up a list of games and activities for everyone to play. Where once there was no party, you have MADE a party. Brought it into being.

Same thing for knitting, or gardening, or dancing. Or making music, or tinkering, or writing, or building something (or making a baby!). Anyone who does these things is being creative: where once there was nothing, something has been made.

I often hear students remark that they “aren’t very creative,” as if it’s a special skill or something. But it’s not a special skill. It’s simply the act of making. A creative person is one who creates.

And everyone is capable of creating. Everyone can make something.

Leave out whether it’s good or bad; that’s not important. The creating is what’s important. The making.

If I could implore my students to consider one thing, it would be to realize they are, in fact, creative. And that they should spend a good chunk of their time making things, whether it’s a cake or a song or a fabulous party. When we are making things, we are imitating our own Creator. I can’t think of a better way to live.

“Replacing the objective of growth”

January 29, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Consider, for example, the distance between our need to protect and regenerate Mother Earth and an economic model that regards growth at any cost as its prime objective.

Of course, some regions — very underdeveloped areas, or countries recovering from war — need their economies to grow rapidly to meet their people’s basic needs. But in the wealthier parts of the world, the fixation with constant economic growth has become destabilizing, producing vast inequalities and putting the natural world out of balance. Unlimited expansion of productivity and consumption assumes human dominance over creation, but the environmental disaster it has brought about has shattered the assumptions of that thinking. We are part of creation; we do not own it: to some extent, it owns us; we cannot live apart from it. This crisis or breach is a sign of our time.

The disruption of Covid has turned the tables, inviting us to stop, alter our routines and priorities, and to ask: What if the economic, the social, and the ecological challenges we face are really different faces of the same crisis? What if they have a common solution? Could it be that replacing the objective of growth with that of new ways of relating will allow for a different kind of economy, one that meets the needs of all within the means of our planet?

Pope Francis, Let Us Dream, p. 60

Desire Outside of Time

December 31, 2020 / / 0 Comments

In the moment of fulfillment—in the moment of joy, of play, of love—it is not so much that we feel time speeding by, it is that we do not feel the passing of time. What love and play have in common is that they both lift us up out of ourselves. They redirect our gaze away from our own interiority toward something beyond us.

But then as we become conscious that this moment will inevitably pass, that the time of departure draws near, then our experience of time is such that it appears to accelerate. The more aware we are of the ending, the faster time appears to pass. Again, it is a matter of desire. Although we may still be in the presence of that which we desire, its temporary quality—the looming horizon of finitude—renders the object both present but also soon-to-be-absent. While what we desire remains present to us, its loss now begins to color the experience so that our desire is once more activated, not for the object itself but for its permanence.

L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society Vol. 1, No. 19, “Desire Bends Time”

What’s interesting about this is that desire — while it “bends” time as Sacasas states — is tied to our temporal existence. The moment leading up to our desire, the moment of fulfillment, the moment after (the “time of departure”) are all due to our living in time. But what about that which is outside of time, i.e.: God?

As many a theologian would say, God is the fulfillment of our all our desires. And it’s precisely because He exists outside of time, and our uniting with Him in Eternity is also outside of time, that He satisfies us in a way that nothing earthly ever can. Once we have achieved the beatific vision, then there is no more “before desire” or “after desire.” There is only the fulfillment, and we never experience the “time of departure.”

The bending of time that Sacasas correctly observes re: desire, is precisely an effect of what lies at the very heart of what it means to be human. St. Augustine (I think) called it the “God-shaped hole.” We will always feel this bending of time around our desires because we will always be missing the one desire that is outside of time, the one desire for which we were made.

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