Like a dummy, I misplaced our copy of The King of the Shattered Glass (Marian Press, 2017; affiliate link), but I want to tell you about it now anyway. It would be a great book to read during Lent, and would make a nice Easter present, too.
It’s a picture book appropriate for ages six and up, written by Susan Joy Bellavance and illustrated by Sarah Tang. Basic story: An orphan girl named Marguerite works in the scullery of a medieval king’s castle, when glass is an astonishing novelty. It’s so valuable that the king insists that anyone who breaks his glass must gather up the pieces and bring them to him personally.
Marguerite, an orphan, is a pretty good kid, but on three occasions, she breaks the precious glass — as the blurb says, “through temper, the pride of a dare, and selfishness.” Each time, she has to gather her courage and own up to what she did. It’s not easy, because she’s ashamed, and because she’s afraid of punishment; and eventually, once she comes to actually know the king, and just feels bad that she broke his stuff.
Catholics, you can see where this is headed! The book is a thoughtful allegory for confession; but it works well as a satisfying little story, too.
Marguerite has some penance and growth to do, and eventually the king reveals that he is using all the glass she has shattered to make a gorgeous stained glass window showing himself putting a crown on Marguerite’s head. He then adopts her as his own daughter, and there is rejoicing.
The king, to my great relief, is truly appealing, gentle but strong, and the illustrations successfully suggest divinity (especially Christ as the source of Divine Mercy) without being too heavy-handed. Some of the pictures are more skillful than others, but all are lively and bright, some in black and white, some with deep, saturated colors.
1. Relationship with God as Father, King and Friend
2. Conscience, a gift to be developed
3. Penance, which brings healing to ourselves and others
4. Jesus, who carries our burdens
5. Adoption and family life; Baptism and Reconciliation.
The King of the Shattered Glass is not the most polished book you will ever encounter in your life, but it works very well, and it’s full of heart and theologically tight as a drum. Kids will find it memorable and appealing. Recommended!
Bellavance and Tang are collaborating on a second book, to be titled Will You Come to Mass?
In honor of FINALLY GETTING AROUND TO RECORDING A PODCAST FOR ONCE, we’re making this one free to all comers. (Normally, podcasts are for closers, I mean patrons.) Sorry it’s been so long! Or, you’re welcome! You’re welcome!
This evening, we snickered our way around hybrid wolves, Vienna sausages, the town with no bootstraps, cellulite, egg salad, William Faulkner and his sauce, the difference between boys and girls, and of course a poem by Wislawa Szymborska.
Today, on International Women’s Day, a conservative Catholic Twitter personality retweeted a story about a gubernatorial candidate who breastfed her baby in an election ad. He added this comment:
“Lady, cover that up. Breast feeding in public is fine but cover up. No one needs to have to avert their eyes uncomfortably.” (I’ve taken out his name because it’s not about him. His sentiment is very common among conservative Catholics.)
Curious, I looked up the ad in question to see how flagrant a bit of lactivism it was.
Now, a disclaimer: I’m rare among my friends in that I have some sympathy for men who find public breastfeeding distracting. Men like boobs, and I’m okay with that. I do believe women should be aware at the effect their exposed breasts can have on men.
Of course, it’s not always possible for women to be completely discreet, and lots of babies won’t tolerate covers, and of course there is often a flash of skin that shows while you position the hungry baby, and the most important thing is that a baby get fed when he’s hungry; but it does kind of bug me when moms go out of their way to turn breastfeeding into some kind of exhibitionist statement, hanging out at Starbucks with their entire titty on display like some kind of–
Um.
Watch the ad. Here’s the footage that made this Catholic conservative fellow’s eyeballs feel so uncomfortable.
Did you even see anything? I didn’t. Just a hungry baby getting fed.
This video is almost miraculous for how unboobful it is. Margaret Thatcher showed more skin on any given day than the woman in this commercial. She’s far more modest than I ever manage to be. (For the record, my own public nursing technique was to remove my glasses. Then everything got all blurry, and no one could see us.)
So . . . what’s the deal, here? Why does this Tweeter, and so many other men (and women, too), find even the idea of public breastfeeding so disconcerting? Because that’s all there was here: An idea. We saw a woman; we saw a baby; we knew what was going on, but we sure didn’t see anything. And yet merely knowing it happened caused the fellow discomfort.
Long have I pondered over this puzzle. I can easily understand how secular men can find breastfeeding off-putting. Many men are so warped by porn that they prefer videos to living women. Actual, real, in-the-room women are unappealing to them. They only want to see women who’ve been artfully separated into parts, like a cow at the hands of a butcher.
But how is it that conservative, Catholic men tremble with consternation if they must be in the same room with a woman using her breasts as if they are some kind of, ugh, mammary glands or something? They say they are concerned with modesty and decency, but how can that be so? They’re happy to partner with Fox News, which has a “cleavage” tag on its page, and whose female news anchors routinely show abundant skin. Conservative men don’t demand draconian modesty from their political idols, male or female. Only from nursing mothers.
Truly, I believe them when they say public breastfeeding causes them discomfort. But I don’t believe it has anything to do with the woman offending their sense of modesty, decency, or chastity.
The discomfort they feel is the discomfort of being excluded. The discomfort they feel is in seeing a woman’s body in a context that has nothing to with them. It makes them uncomfortable to see a woman in a context that even temporarily excludes them.
When a woman shows half her boobs in a skin-tight dress at a gala, men feel that this display is for them (and be honest, it probably is). They understand the situation, and they are in control of it. They feel themselves to be the central actor: I am a man with eyeballs and a penis, and look! Here comes a set of breasts for me.
But if those breasts are in use for feeding a baby, where does the man fit in? He’s excluded. He feels weird and itchy and unhappy. He feels he has to look away, but it’s breasts, so he doesn’t want to look away, but when he does look, he sees something that doesn’t have anything to do with him. And he doesn’t like that, at all.
As I said, I have sympathy for men who struggle with public breastfeeding. It’s not wrong or bad or disgusting of men to be sexually aroused by the sight of a breast.
But here’s the thing: We feel what we feel, but we’re in control of what we do next. Normal, healthy, decent men can be aroused by a breast, but then immediately tell themselves, “Okay, that’s enough, now” if they find themselves acting or thinking like a creep. Men must earn the title of “man” by training themselves to get used to the idea that breasts are not always there to turn them on.
And that is a man’s responsibility, not a woman’s.
It’s a man’s responsibility to always remember that women are whole people, and not just body parts. This is true whether a woman is breastfeeding discreetly or openly, whether she’s dressed like Daisy Duke or draped like a dowager, whether she’s starring in a National Geographic special or if she’s a woman clothed with the sun. She’s a whole person, and it’s a man’s job to remember that.
It’s his responsibility to remember she is a whole person if she’s topless because he’s currently having sex with her. She’s still a whole person, always a whole person. It is his job to train himself never to forget this, and to act accordingly, even on Twitter.
It’s his job to train himself never to forget this even if, when confronted by a woman feeding her child, he has to “avert his eyes uncomfortably.” The man who whines about having to avert his eyes? Barely a man. If shifting his eyeballs is the hardest thing he’s is ever required to do, this is a soft age indeed.
And so I’ve changed my mind, in recent years, about women’s responsibility to breastfeed discreetly. I used to think she should do everything she can to cover up as much as possible, out of charity for men who struggle with chastity. But now I see that behavior as potentially propping up a culture of pornography.
As I said above, I do believe women should be aware at the effect their exposed breasts can have on men. But I’ve come to understand that that effect may very well be to help restore our culture to sexual health. Public, uncovered breastfeeding reminds everyone that women are not isolated parts. They are whole. They have a context of their own, and that context sometimes has nothing at all to do with men’s desires.
My friend Kate Cousino said it well: “I firmly believe public breastfeeding is a blow against pornography culture. Context is precisely what porn omits. And the context of sex and breasts is real human beings with lives–and babies.”
And men say the same thing, when they rage and sneer at women who breastfeed in public. It’s especially scandalous for Catholic, conservative, family men to behave this way, making a huge show of huffily leaving the room if their daughter-in-law begins to nurse at a family gathering, or complaining bitterly to the pastor when women dare to feed their infants in the pew without a cover.
When men do these things, they’re saying, “It’s more important for you to protect me from passing hormonal inconvenience than it is for you, who haven’t slept in four months, to just sit down and feed your baby. My obligation to exercise self-control is too hard for me. All the obligation is on you, breast-haver. Because I’m a man, you must make my world easier by caring for me, too, as you care for your new baby.”
It’s International Women’s Day. A very good day to be a man by taking responsibility for your own eyes, your own brain, your own hormones. A very good day to start your training. Women are whole people. If you work at it, you can learn to see them that way, even if they’re feeding babies.
***
Maria Lactans image By Wolfgang Sauber (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The delightful Claire Swinarski graciously invited me to be on her podcast, The Catholic Feminist. My episode, #50, is up today. It was so refreshing to talk to a young Catholic woman who both loves the Faith and isn’t allergic to the word “feminist.”
Among other topics, we talked about “#metoo,” about why Damien and I covered the Christendom story, how virginity culture objectifies people, how to teach consent so it dovetails with a Catholic understanding of human dignity, and how to come back to Christ after the Church has failed you. You can hear the podcast on The Catholic Feminist Podcast site, or listen to it right here:
Imagine you’re a college campus minister, and you’re also the mom of two young kids, both with special needs, who each have “specialists up the wazoo.”
Imagine you live out in the country in New Hampshire, with only your chickens and your vegetable gardens for company as you boil sap for maple syrup and research the ins and outs of farming hops. Your husband is in the military, and you’re waiting to hear if you’ve been accepted to a Ph.D program at the University of Aberdeen. And you have your eye on some goats, and maybe beehives.
These are thoughtfully composed knitting kits designed as gifts “for anyone who needs something to keep their hands full while their heart is on the mend.”
Cheshire received a similar gift herself several years ago, after enduring the traumatic birth of her first child in Juneau, Alaska. The newborn was airlifted to another hospital, and Cheshire was too weak to join her for several days. Then followed a time in the NICU that she describes as “brutal, brutal.”
A friend gave her some knitting materials and instructions, with the note: “You need something to keep your hands full until you can hold your baby.”
That idea of full hands remained with her, and now she’s offering it to other people, hoping to share some healing while helping to build connections between people.
People don’t know what to say, so they say nothing
Since Cheshire works with college students, I asked if she thought it was mainly modern people who struggle to come up with appropriate words. She does believe modern people have trouble sharing “deep, authentic communication,” and that pervasive social media can make human interaction superficial; but she’s defensive of millennials. In the past, she said, there was no internet, but people were not necessarily warmer or more connected.
“I know some 65-year-olds who don’t know how to relate,” Cheshire said. “Very often, people don’t know what to say, so they don’t say anything. The tragedy is, that happens when their friend really needs them to say something.”
A beautiful experience
Each element of the Busy Hands Boxes is chosen with care.
“Anyone can go to Michael’s and get cheap yarn,” Cheshire said. “I wanted it to be something that had heart at every level. Something sourced from a company that cares, something aesthetically pleasing, and beautiful to open. I wanted it to be a whole experience, to make you feel good even if you’re not knitting yet.”
The hand-painted knitting needles are made from New England maple and Russian birch.
Like the needles, the wool yarn Cheshire chose is locally sourced from Peace Fleece, a New England fiber company that “works to support pastoral communities that have been historically in conflict with the U.S.”
They are currently blending domestic wool and mohair with Navajo Rambouillet, which has been purchased at fair market prices from families living on the reservation.
Then there’s the slightly cheeky “empathy cards” from Emily McDowell , which bear messages like “I promise never to refer to your illness as a ‘journey’ unless someone takes you on a cruise” and “Please let me be the first to punch the next person who tells you everything happens for a reason.” One Full Hands box includes a foil card featuring a medal that simply reads, “KEPT GOING.”
Cheshire heads out to the barn
Value in particularity
For Cheshire, a natural introvert who spends much of her day in pastoral work, knitting is often how she keeps going. “I need alone time, or I go crazy,” she said.
One of Cindy’s cats also enjoys solitude – photo courtesy Cindy Cheshire
After a series of stressful meetings at work, she’ll often find a quiet corner and knit for five or ten minutes. “Knitting gives me something to do in that space, to clear my head.”
She also knitted her way through a batch of nervous energy while she waited for a response to her dissertation research proposal. The topic? Identity Formation in Pauline Communities.
Cheshire says she wants to use the baptismal formula used in Galatians, Colossians, and Corinthians “as a case study to see how those communities might have understood identity, on a community and on a corporate level.”
She says, “When we read there is ‘no slave, no male, no female,’ we mostly use it as a kind of whitewashing. It doesn’t matter, we’re all one in Jesus! Everyone’s one!”
But this kind of thinking, she said, can make it easy to ignore how identity categories are actually hurting people in the congregation.
“It just perpetuates power cycles,” she says. “People in charge continue to be in charge, and they don’t have to look at other people’s experiences. But everyone has value in their own particularity.”
What do you want to do with your time?
I asked Cheshire if focusing on that particularity isn’t something of a burden for her, an already extremely busy introvert whose mission it is to foster personal, intimate connections in her work on campus.
She thought for a while, then listed all the many responsibilities she juggles. She noted that when people ask her how she does it all, she tells them she’s not doing as good a job as they think she is.
Cheshire’s daughter, wanting to join in the interview, writes up a marketing blurb for her mom’s shop
But also, she said, “God has made this situation into something good. He’s forced me and my husband to figure out something about ourselves. What’s non-negotiable? What do you really want to be doing with your time? Because you don’t have that much of it.”
Although she and her husband have no background in farming, they’re slowly learning.
“It’s a little difficult to really engage in care for creation when you’re surrounded by concrete.” she said. She’d rather work the land than support industries that exploit workers and contaminate the soil.
Some of the fruits of Bethany Farm – photo courtesy Cindy Cheshire
Their first harvests have been small, but encouraging, and they’re hoping to add berry bushes and fruit trees in the future. Of their harvests, the Cheshires save some, sell some, and give some to the food pantry. Cheshire was recently overjoyed to hear that, after she donated fresh eggs, one client was able to make brownies for the first time in ages.
“In my career,” Cheshire said, “I’ve gotten very comfortable with the fact that I rarely see the harvest. My entire job is to plant seeds and let God grow them, and maybe a few years down the line I’ll get a text message or an email from a former student saying how much their time at Newman meant to them.”
But establishing a farm gives her “something very solid to hold onto.”
Eggs from Bethany Farm chickens – photo courtesy Cindy Cheshire
Spiritual health is a real thing
One professional project she’s chosen is to reignite an interest in the spiritual life among apathetic college students. Very few students feel any kind of religious affiliation, she said, and the ones who consider themselves Catholic aren’t much interested in community; so she’s working on reformulating her approach.
“You can’t convince people to enrich their Catholic identity if they don’t see the value of spirituality to begin with,” she said. She had been warned that the campus was an anti-religious place, but is proud of the connections she’s made. She collaborates often with other groups, and sponsors “crafternoons” where students can work off some nervous energy of their own, making and building together.
“We’re trying to encourage the campus community to tend to their spiritual health, to realize that’s a real thing, just like their physical and emotional health.”
Cheshire is currently working her way through the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, which, she said, are about “finding the dignity of everything, finding God in everything.”
One of the Cheshire flock – photo courtesy Cindy Cheshire
I asked whether even knitting was part of that.
She said, “I love watching the process of turning a pile of string into something beautiful. It’s something that’s real, and something that’s very elemental. It’s the absolute opposite of digital, and it connects you to all these generations of people who have done this before.”
Cheshire said knitting forces her to notice and intentionally relax the tension she holds in her hands. She was recently contemplating the hidden years of Christ, before He began His public ministry. The takeaway, she said, was Christ saying, “Remember, I was an artisan, too.”
chalkboard wall in the Cheshire kitchen – photo courtesy Cindy Cheshire
Why the name, “Bethany Farm Knits?” Her shop, and her five-acre farm, are named after Bethlehem Farm in West Virginia. It’s a family of intentional Catholic communities, where Cheshire has led mission trips with the students from the Newman Center. The farms are named after Biblical towns, and the Cheshires chose “Bethany” for theirs.
She said ,”It’s where Jesus experienced friendship and hospitality” with His friends Mary and Martha — and also resurrection, when He raised their brother Lazarus from the dead.
“Those things are very much a theme in our family life,” Cheshire said: “Hospitality and resurrection.”
They say that God never answers “no” to a prayer. His only answers are “yes,” “not yet” or “something better.” I believe this, in theory, but in practice, “not yet” feels much worse than you would expect. You understand the justification for waiting: If we force events that are not ready, things may go terribly wrong, and who will be there to save you then?
But that does not make the pain any less. There is no escape. You still have to labor the long way.
Almost any time I’m writing, I’m writing with kids around.
A lot of what I publish, including this post, is hasty and unpolished, so I feel a little weird about giving writing advice. Nevertheless, I do produce about 3,500 to 5,500 words most weeks, whether I feel like it or not, and most of that is done while I’m the only adult in a house with one or more little kids; so I guess I have something to say about writing through distractions.
Full disclosure: I do most of my writing while I’m alone with a toddler, but some amount of writing when I have older kids in the house who can help with the younger kids. Moms of only young kids: It does get easier!
Here are some details of how writing gets done around here. These are in no particular order, because it’s vacation week, my kids are fighting over the Spirograph and repeatedly shrieking the “la la la la laaaa” part of “Crocodile Rock,” and it’s vacation week, and they are shrieking. I have bolded some parts to make it look organized.
Don’t expect to sit down and write something start-to-finish. Most often, I get an idea while I’m driving or at Mass or shopping, and I’ll write down a few notes on a receipt, or email it to myself. I usually know when I’m next going to have a block of time to write, so I keep my thoughts about it simmering, and the rest of the essay is often halfway written before I even sit down. I haven’t always been able to do this. It used to be that, if I didn’t immediately pin down an idea, it was gone. Keeping an idea for later is a skill you can cultivate with practice.
Always be writing, even if you’re not writing. Being a writer means you always have some aspect of the project going on, even if that’s just looking around for inspiration, mulling over what you’ve already written, talking an idea over with someone, or wondering why some phrase from Moby Dick keeps popping up in your head every time “Chiquitita” comes on the radio. (There is no joke here. It just seems like something that would happen.)
Yes, set aside specific writing time. Most often, I write for two hours (or more) in the morning, and that’s when I get the biggest chunk of writing done. The easiest way to make this happen is to let the toddler watch TV, and that is often what we do. It’s not ideal, but it’s not the end of the world. The longest I can stand to let the kids watch TV is about as long as I can stand to write without taking a break, so that works out. I try not to let one kid watch TV alone. I can live with two kids watching TV together without me, though.
Get something done. If I spend an honest hour or more trying to write and I’m just not making any headway, I will often slap my laptop shut and throw myself wholeheartedly into something else productive, like cooking dinner ahead of time or getting caught up on some housework I was planning to do later. Discouragement snowballs quickly, and if you can’t write but also can’t get anything else done, you’ll finish up the day feeling useless, and tomorrow will be even harder. So make a good try, and if you can’t write, get something done. Sure, it would be more healthy to sternly remind the yawning void that you have intrinsic value even if you don’t produce anything, but sometimes it’s easier just to work with the void.
Write in ridiculous times and places because life is ridiculous. I write while they are in the bath (I sit on a cooler. It’s much more comfortable that typing on the toilet).
In warm months, I write outside while they play, but this one is tough, as they want a lot of engagement, and it’s hard to find enough shade to see the screen properly.
I write on the couch while they climb back and forth across the back of my neck, and I write while I nurse.
I write when I wake up very early and can’t get back to sleep (most of my book was written and edited between the hours of 2 and 6 a.m.).
I write squirreled away in my bedroom while big kids are home to watch little kids or while my husband is home to wrangle kids and make them fold laundry.
I write in the dentist’s waiting room and in the car while I’m waiting to pick people up from the library or Girl Scouts or Shakespeare Club. Sometimes I write while I’m cooking supper, so I can give them two reasons to feel guilty for interrupting me (which they don’t).
Expect and embrace interruptions (well, up to a point). If you’re writing at home with kids around, there will be interruptions. I have worked on getting the kids to take it seriously when I’m typing — to understand that Mama is working a real job just like Daddy works a real job; and that, when Mama is typing, that means Mama is talking, and I’m not available until my hands are still.
But still, if I am home, I am their mother, and I don’t want to be 100% off limits unless I have an especially stressful deadline. So if it’s extremely important that I not be interrupted, I will be very clear that I need to be left alone for x amount of time. If I’m just plodding through something, though, I’ll leave my door open or write in the kitchen, so they can find me if they have a really, really important banana joke or something.
I also have deliberately cultivated the ability to put a bookmark in my thoughts so I can take care of an interruption and then get back to writing. I have also cultivated the ability to grimly push ahead with writing while ignoring howls, kicks, messes, and bids for attention.
It’s actually useful to have to come back to an essay more than once. Think of those interruptions as a chance to freshen up your perspective, so when you come back to an essay, you can read it more objectively. Quiet, void! This is totally a thing!
Wanting to write does not make you a bad mother. Other mothers in other generations haven’t felt the deep, urgent, guilty need to be available to their kids at every moment. The work I do is real work, and it’s normal and reasonable to feel frustrated at interruptions. At the same time, I don’t want my kids to feel guilty or afraid of talking to me if they need something. So I constantly reassess how much time I am spending with them, what I do with my time, what my tone is when I do respond to them, and so on.
But it’s not horrible for them to know that they’re not the center of the universe, and it’s not horrible for them to see their mother doing something other than childcare, cooking, and cleaning.
Just as with nutrition, I don’t stress out about getting the balance right hour to hour or even day to day. Throughout the course of the week, though, I do try to make corrections if I feel guilty night after night about not spending enough time with the kids.
Accept that writing takes time, and that time will be subtracted from your day. It sounds silly, but many mothers believe they can sort of sneak writing in around the edges while taking care of everything else at the same level as when they’re not writing. This is crazy. If you’re spending time writing, you’re not spending time on something else, so that something else won’t get done. You have to decide what’s more important to get done, writing or the other thing, and that’s all there is to it.
Someone asked J. K. Rowling how she managed to write a series of bestselling books while raising a baby alone, and she said, “I didn’t do housework for four years! I’m not Superwoman, and living in squalor, that was the answer.” Sometimes I look at how squalid my house is, and I think, “Damn, I better do some better writing, to justify this.” Either that, or write up a few cheap listicles and then go scrub the shower.
Power through the troughs. There are times when I sit down to my computer like a cat with six different mice to chase, and I just can’t decide which one looks the tastiest. And there are times when the alphabet looks soggy and unfamiliar, and I have a hard time fighting my way all the way through a sentence until I reach the predicate. You’d think I’d write better when I’m refreshed, rested, and feeling upbeat and optimistic, and that it would be harder to write in times of extreme exhaustion, but in fact it doesn’t have anything to do with anything.
Every single writer I have ever talked to goes through this crap sometimes. It’s horrible. It will make you think you’re on your way to EOBD (Early Onset Brain Death), and whatever success you’ve had in the past was just some combination of luck and trickery, and now you’re done, just done, and everyone has been laughing at you for years.
Keep writing anyway, bucko. Eventually that fickle muse will find her way back to your shoulder, so you better be already in the habit of working when she does.
There is one consolation to writing when you feel zero inspiration, and that is to remind yourself that you’re not struggling, you’re in training. Every time you finish an essay without the aid of delight, you’ve completed another round of training for when delight in writing returns (and it will return). Every time you force yourself to express something you don’t care much about because life is meaningless and whatnot, you’ll find your mind that much more agile and responsive when the ideas again come waltzing up one after another, begging for a dance. Tra la la!
Husband. Back when I was writing for my rinky dink little Blogspot blog with twenty-seven readers, my husband saw that it was important for my mental health, and didn’t make me feel bad for spending time writing almost every day, even when there wasn’t even the hint of getting paid for it. Without him making time and space for me to write, and without him reassuring me that it was important to him because it was important to me, I would probably have scrapped it years ago. So now you know whose fault it is that I keep cranking it out! If you don’t have a husband like this, see if you can find a friend who will reassure you that you’re good, and believe them, dammit.
It may just be that you can’t all the writing you want to do right now. There are just too many other things going on. Kids too needy, obligations too pressing, sleep too not-having-enough. I firmly believe that writers will always find a way to write, somehow. It’s a sickness. It’s a compulsion. It’s a thing that will fight its way back up to the surface when the time is right. Writers gonna write, so if you’re a writer, you will find yourself writing. Right?
When I was an adolescent, our Catholic girl’s group made a large batch of cards for the residents of a nursing home. “YOU ARE LOVED,” we spelled out over and over again, switching to scented markers when we got bored. We added a few stickers, then we threw all the cards in a bag to be delivered, and we got back to our real lives.
I felt obscurely ashamed and angry at the disingenuousness of this exercise, thinking how little it would mean to some ailing old woman to get a card from a girl she never met. Or, I thought, maybe it would mean a lot, and that would be even worse. “You [whoever you are] ought to feel loved [passive voice] by someone who couldn’t even be bothered to sign her name, because she has field hockey now [smiling sun sticker].” How worthless. Worse than no card at all.
But it never occurred to me to fix it by being sincere — by actually showing actual love to actual people, spending time with a lonely stranger. I didn’t want to do that, either. So I scrapped the whole thing.
I felt something of the same angry distaste when I was little and would occasionally watch Mr. Rogers at my grandparents’ house. My sister and I thought he was unbearably goony (and it didn’t help that I was secretly terrified of Lady Elaine). When his show came on, we would elaborately die of boredom, rolling our eyes so hard, we could see the inside of our snarky little skulls.
But I also didn’t like how he was always talking directly to me. You don’t know me! You’re just on TV! You don’t even know if I’m watching or not, so why are you pretending you care about me? I pretended to be bored, but I was also truly angry.
There was something more, though. I couldn’t deal with his face. I just didn’t want to look at it. He had that smile of extreme simplicity that you see in people who have gone through tremendous sorrows, or in the mentally impaired at Mass. It’s a radical openness, a lantern that burns too bright.
Looking at his face now, fifty years after his first show aired, I think that I was very wrong about this man’s sincerity.
Mr. Rogers was remembered by François Clemmons on StoryCorps a few years ago. (The very short StoryCorps features on National Public Radio are almost always worth a listen — sort of the audio equivalent of Humans of New York.) In this edition, Clemmons tells how Fred Rogers invited him to come play a policeman on his show.
“I grew up in the ghetto. I did not have a positive opinion of police officers. Policemen were siccing police dogs and water hoses on people,” he says. “And I really had a hard time putting myself in that role. So I was not excited about being Officer Clemmons at all.”
But he agreed; and one show in particular stands out in his mind. It was 1969.
Rogers had been resting his feet in a plastic pool on a hot day.
“He invited me to come over and to rest my feet in the water with him,” Clemmons recalls. “The icon Fred Rogers not only was showing my brown skin in the tub with his white skin as two friends, but as I was getting out of that tub, he was helping me dry my feet.”
Something to think about during Lent, as Holy Thursday approaches.
Fred Rogers clearly saw his career as an opportunity to invite, to serve, and to model charity. When he dried Clemmons’ feet, he wasn’t only doing it for the cameras — although that in itself was a momentous statement in 1969. He wasn’t merely modelling charity; he was being charitable, personally, to the actual person beside him.
Rogers didn’t hide behind the TV screen and consider that he had discharged his duty by broadcasting his message to the millions of people who watched his show. Talking to a crowd was not a substitute for talking to the man in front of him. Writers and social media warriors, take heed: There is no substitute for the personal.
[Clemmons] says he’ll never forget the day Rogers wrapped up the program, as he always did, by hanging up his sweater and saying, “You make every day a special day just by being you, and I like you just the way you are.” This time in particular, Rogers had been looking right at Clemmons, and after they wrapped, he walked over.
Clemmons asked him, “Fred, were you talking to me?”
“Yes, I have been talking to you for years,” Rogers said, as Clemmons recalls. “But you heard me today.”
Okay, so, that sounds familiar. Doesn’t it? Who talks that way? You know who. That’s why I still find it hard to look Fred Rogers in the face. He was a holy man.
Flu season isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s expensive. In your quest to find some physical relief, you’ll end up paying through the nose for medicine and remedies. And your nose is already busy sneezing! Isn’t there anything you can do to alleviate the fiscal pain, if not the physical?
No; but let’s pretend there is for a second. Here are some tips:
Create a barrier. The flu is transmitted through tiny droplets that are airborne, so you can contract the virus simply by breathing in a space where an infected person has coughed or sneezed. So, like, Earth. Your only recourse is to make a barrier. Try taking a cotton swab and carefully lining your nostrils with super glue. Pinch delicately. For added protection, do the same for your lips. Also your eyelids and your ears. Feel better yet? What?
Clean your bathtub. Yes, right now. Use one of those “clinging foam” cleansers, preferably one known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and a profound sense of the cold robbies. Do not open windows. Do as many jumping jacks as possible, and then stand there panting and wheezing and drawing those healthful bleach molecules into your mucus membranes and lungs. Cleans you right out from the inside, where it counts.
Remember the dignity of your orifice. Find a hole, cram something in. Make new holes if necessary. I’m not kidding: warm oregano oil in your ears, friggin’ onions in your ears, some kind of berry nonsense up your hoo hah, what do I care. The main thing is to create what scientists call a “ridiculous environment” so the bad microbes will suddenly come to themselves, be filled with shame, and flee.
Isolate. Stand in the middle of the town commons and shout, “I think This Is Us looks stupid and emotionally manipulative!” You’ll become an instant pariah, and thus cutting your risk of exposure to almost zero.
Sto lat! May you live to be a hundred and never have to find out what elderberries taste like.
Lent is a time to refocus our hearts and revive our love of the Lord and one another
A Companion for the Forty Days of Lent (from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday)
Designed in a convenient, easy-to-use format:
– Inspiring reflections from some of the most gifted Catholic writers for each day
– Faith-filled essays
– Prayers, poetry, and devotions
– Meditations for the Way of the Cross
– A treasury of spiritual insights
By spending a few moments meditating on the inspiring daily reflections and the short prayers that follow them, you will discover all that is true, good, and beautiful about the Catholic Faith.
Let the profound yet practical insights you will find in this little spiritual treasury form and focus your spiritual life, filling it with new conviction and purpose.
To enter, use the Rafflecopter form below (or click on the link that says “a Rafflecopter giveaway,” if the form doesn’t show up). I’ll choose two names at random, and will announce the winners on Friday. Winners may choose a code for iOS or Android.
