Jalapeños are a Lifestyle

Anne’s blog says it all:

http://kidsisterofblessedimelda.blogspot.com/2006/01/i-am-home.html

She neglected to mention that those of you awaiting coming into the Catholic church at the Easter Vigil have a very real advantage…..FRESH chrism. [grin] As in all things sacramental, God uses real fallible, ordinary things to work wonders. Both the miraculous spiritual blessings of God and the mundane ordinariness of living in this world of decay were evident as Anne and her daughters were brought into full communion with the Catholic Church.

Even though we were on the road longer than we were there, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.

Because it is Martin Luther King Day and because it is a “short week” (some wretched friend of mine is making me drive to Illinois, in JANUARY…the things I DO!! (love you Anne)) we spent most of our schoolday today immersed in the civil rights struggle of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. We read Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges, discovered that the PBS series “Eyes on the Prize” is out-of-print, available only on video and $800 on Amazon.com….I don’t love my children that much, nor do I care to have them that educated…and then watched, “The Long Walk Home with Cissy Spacek and Whoppi Goldberg.  In preparation for watching the movie about the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, the children were forced to learn who Rosa Parks was. [Here I am throwing my hand to my forehead dramatically and shrieking "Torture!!"] It was time very well spent, even if it was a little hard for Nicky to take. She was very upset at the treatment the African-American characters received and openly sobbed during the movie. But none of this is my reason for blogging about today’s events, my real reason is this.

Thank you.

For every single one of you who sat at a lunch counter, walked instead of riding the bus, who risked insult and bodily injury, who signed up voters, who held your temper when it would have been easy and even justifiable to strike back, who gave money to the cause, who pitched in and made a difference. Thank you. My children and I appreciate the difference you have made in our world today.

May we all be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin.

If I could fashion myself as the perfect writer, I think I would like the imagination of Tolkien, the depth of C.S. Lewis, the vocabulary of William Buckley, and humor of Wodehouse, the edge of Ann Coulter, and the grace of Peggy Noonan. I have never read a word of hers that didn’t shine a gentle, warm light on whatever it was to be lucky enough to have her writing about it. Her book, John Paul the Great, is no exception.

With her customary, grace, and respect she writes with love, affection, and candor about John Paul II and the faith he inspired in Catholics, in Christians, and most especially, in her. She made me smile with her story of coffee and the rosary. (“I don’t have a cup of coffee in the morning — I have a glass of coffee, because it’s bigger.”) And stand in stunned awe of Mother Teresa who experienced a perdio of spiritual darkness that began shortly after she left her convent to serve the poor until her death. She then deftly turned to admiration of John Paul II who accelerated Mother Teresa’s canonization process because he knew that he spiritual heroism was greater, much greater, than any of us suspected. John Paul II knew that the canonization process would force into the public arena what Mother Teresa had kept so privately and that his flock would be instructed and inspired.

“Great men lift us up. They tell us by their presence that everything is possible, that as children of God we are part of God, and as part of God we can, with him, accomplish anything. Anything.”

And great writers tell us about great men. Thank you Ms. Noonan. I enjoyed your telling and your willingness to share your own journey.

Ok. So the yoga workouts have been really good for me. All that time slowly breathing, paying attention to what my body is telling me about what is too much. Paying attention to the balance between strength and flexibility, between rest and recovery, and the connection (and I believe there is one) between the body, the mind and the spirit. I am not feeling as righteous as when I threw my body at the FIRM wall 4-5 times a week but I am feeling GOOD (except for a miserable run of migraines but that is just life in my body). I am also thinking a lot about some of the principles of balance that underlie the practice of yoga and musing about how perhaps it might behoove me to consider moving the idea of balance from exercise into other parts of my life. Then one of the video instructors suggested that too much weight reflected an imbalance of some sort. Well that made sense to me and I decided to investigate some more yoga ideas about diet and eating. So I did a little looking…have I mentioned how much I love Amazon.com?…and found a book intriguingly titled The Yoga of Eating. I read the reader reviews and decided it might be worth a gander.

Fictional works aside, I have never in my life have I so vehemently disagreed with some of the foundational assumptions of an author and yet agreed with so much. The Yoga of Eating is just such a book. My first time through, I couldn’t stop reading and I had to wait for my second and third times through to actually take the time to fetch my underlining pen and highlighters. My biggest disagreement with Mr. Eisenstein is his premise that there is no Creator and the body itself is a fountain of divine wisdom if we’d only just listen. However, I found that when I substituted the idea that God had made our bodies with the ability to communicate to us what we needed to stay healthy and balanced and that we should just listen, I had a foundation I could work with. There were still places and ideas that absolutely didn’t fit with my personal belief system; nevertheless, there was a lot that I think I needed to hear.

For example:

“The proper function of willpower and self-discipline is to extend wisdom and insight into times of imperfect clarity.”

“Often we use self-discipline to tell our inner voice to shut up, preferring to trust in the rational mind and its received beliefs. This is unfortunate: What if our inner appetites and urges are telling us something important?” [emphasis mine]

“Second-guessing and ignoring the body is what has gotten us into this mess in the first place, and we will not get out of it by imposing on the body yet another set of dietary principles, no matter how new-and-improved they might be.”

“Healing then is not the fixing of a miscreant body, but the removal of the impediments to self-healing, an unleashing of the body’s natural repair systems.”

“If the body and soul are not separate, then to heal the body at the deepest level is a work of the soul.”

In short this book was a fountain of really good ideas for someone like me who in fighting this weight problem has increasingly picked up the bludgeon and turned it on myself. When a completely anonymous instructor on a completely impersonal video suggested that there might be a mind-body disconnect, I said “well DUH!” At this point I don’t even think of my body as part of ME. It’s IT! And I am really unhappy with IT right now Thankyouverymuch. After so long a fight, so long a struggle, it should be patently obvious that it isn’t diet or exercise that is my problem…or I would have be “fixed” a long time ago. This book has given me some real food for thought and perhaps the motivation to put down the bludgeon and just listen for a while. To be still. To be grateful.

So what am I doing with what I learned so far? I am eating organic, minimally processed foods as much as possible…so that the signals my body receives from what I eat are as true to what God intended as possible. I have started calling artifical addditives “food lies” to increase my distaste for them. I am eating when I am hungry but paying attenion to what I am eating for as long as I am eating it. I am drinking when I am thirsty. And I am resolutely ignoring all of the myriad diet tips/dogmas that show up at this time of year. I am also pretending that this is just to make me healthy and balanced not to lose weight. Maybe if I pretend long enough I can make that last part true.

January 2005:

• Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism by P. J. O’Rourke
• All’s Well that End Well by William Shakespeare
• Christian Jihad by Ergun Mehmet Caner

• State of Fear by Michael Crichton
• Playing for Time by Fania Fenelon
• Frankenstein by Dean Koontz
• The Lamb’s Supper by Scott Hahn
• Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare

March 2005:

• Curves: Permanent Weight Loss Without Permanent Dieting by Gary Heavin
• A Handbook of Guadalupe by Brother Francis Mary
• Eucharistic Miracles by Joan Caroll Cruz
• Inside the Passion by John Bartunel and Mel Gibson
• Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Unveiling Islam by Ergun Mehet Caner
• Crossing the Threshold of Hope by John Paul II
• Heirs of the Fisherman: Scenes of Papal Death and Succession by John-Peter Pham
• Father Elijah by Michael O’Brien
• Outlandish Companion by Diana Gabaldon

May 2005:

• The Rule of St. Benedict
• Mother Teresa: A Simple Path by Lucinda Vardy
• Christ in Dachau by Fr. John Lenz
• The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
• The Origin and Development of Roman Liturgical Vestments

June 2005:

• The Long Journey by Roberta Kells Dorr
• Detoxify or Die by Sherry Rogers
• The Serpent Garden by Judith Merkle Riley
• The Blessed Sacrament by Thomas Aquinas

July 2005:

• The Detox Book by Fife
• Power Juices and Super Drinks by Meyerowitz
• Juice Fasting and Detoxification by Meyerowitz
• 100 People Who are Screwing Up America by Vernard Goldberg

• ???

• ???
• A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon

• ???

• C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church by Joseph Pearce
• The Gilded Chamber by Rebecca Kohn
• A Mother’s Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot

I received some truly wonderful books for Christmas. I am having a fine time diving into literary criticism of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, slurping up Peggy Noonan’s book on JPII, and other thought-provoking and brain-stretching books and I am reading them. Really, I am!

However, (you knew that was coming since I started out with thinly disguised excuses) I must confess that I just finished Undead and Unappreciated by Mary Janice Davidson. I bought it for the sole purpose of exposing such mindless trash for the brain-rotting plague that it is. OK…no need to beat it out of me. That’s a lie. I bought it because the title cracked me up. Imagine if you will a shallow, vain, woman addicted to designer shoes who dies and then wakes up to find herself the Queen of the Vampires. In this episode, she discovers that she has a long-lost sister who just happens to be the Spawn of Satan, cleverly disguised as a sweet blonde co-ed who is so strait-laced she refuses a drink because she is under-aged. Betsy (Elizabeth Taylor) also meets up with the Devil Herself, and is tempted to sell her soul for a pair of Roger Vivier shoes. “The holy grail of footgear” we are told.

The writing is spotty but when Ms. Davidson is “on” the results are laugh out-loud funny and delightfully unexpected. I intend to go back and read the first two in the series so I can hear Betsy tell me about waking up at her funeral in a pair of totally inappropriate shoes.