Fencing Bear at Prayer

Right, so, that was painful.  And, yes, it still hurts, although it seems to be passing. But am I actually going to quit? Yes and no. Yes, I need to quit, but, no, I probably won't. I'm not sure that this is entirely a good thing. Where am I going with this thought? I am still very, very tired from this past weekend.  I feel like a storm has blown through and there are still branches down in the street.  I am happy to have had the desire to blog again, at least briefly.  Will that last?  I don't know, but I realize that I actually hope so. I don't like quitting.  And yet, it is an odd form of weakness not to be able to quit doing something that hurts so very much.  Why don't I just run away? I meant this post to be a little more philosophical, not just ramblings, but not having blogged in so long, maybe this is what I need to do.  Just sit down at the page and....  And what? What is the difference between quitting and failure? ...

Five years and four or so months ago, I started this blog with a prayer.  " O God, hasten to my aid !"  I had never written a blog, and I had no idea what I was going to say.  I only knew that I wanted to write and to say something about the process of writing.  I knew also that I wanted to think about prayer and hoped that I might find others who also wanted to think about prayer.  I had an inkling at the time that I would be writing about fencing, thus the title of the blog, but I needed a persona other than my professional or private self through which to explore whatever it was that I was going to be exploring, thus my Fencing Bear mask. For the first few months, I kept my proper name out of my posts, although almost immediately I realized that I wanted other people to know that I was keeping a blog, even when things started to get, shall we say, a little embarrassing, especially those posts that I wrote that summer at Nationals.  By the middle of the...

I'm still here, just lying low for the moment.  Work on the book is proceeding apace , but I am finding it harder and harder to write about anything else.  This is a good thing, I think.  As the Preacher says, "for everything there is a season,"* and this is the season for me to finish the draft of my book.  I don't want to say much more just now, lest I scare away the Muse.  Let's just say it's going well...better than I ever dreamed possible.** *Ecclesiastes 3:1.  **Meanwhile, the Dragon Baby is snoring, probably dreaming about that squirrel she caught yesterday.*** ***Yes, that makes twice she has counted coup on the rodentia of the trees.  We're both having quite a year!

I think I overdid it a little bit on the blog posts this weekend, thanks to my demon PapaFreeak's calling me such lovely names.  But it is a good thing (I said he was my friend !-- ahem ): it has helped me clarify a number of things that have been rattling around in my head these past several months as the work on my book has proceeded apace .  I really meant it when I said this morning that I have now confessed all of my deepest, pettiest, most envious thoughts.  My therapist and I have been working on the biggest, scariest ones over the past couple of years, including several that are still (and will remain) TMI for such a public confession (ha! Take that PapaFreeak--I'm even worse than you think!), and I find myself suddenly at something of a loose end having told you yesterday about the oldest, deepest, and ugliest of my sins, my envy of my sister's physical beauty .  I rather suspect I am not yet done with that one, but of the others that I have been working o...

And that's it, I've told you everything.  All of my deepest, pettiest, most envious thoughts.  All of my weaknesses, all of my sins.  And you, Lord, have washed me clean.  Even in my darkest moments, you have been there, whether I believed it or not.  Guiding me, loving me, making manifest "the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom." Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy, and according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. Wash me yet more from my iniquity,  and cleanse me from my sin,  for I know my iniquity  and my sin is always before me. Truly, you have been here with me, in ways I could never have dreamed five years ago when I began this blog.  Then, I was but a little bear, still so full of fear and anxiety.  Now I am an older bear, older but thanks to you wiser.  You have guided my footsteps into the desert and been with me as I wrestled with my demons, making me...

I've been thinking about it, and I'm not sure my husband and son were entirely right in suggesting that my reader PapaFreeak is simply a common or garden-variety troll .  Consider the comments that he has left me over the past several months. First, there was one on my thoughts about how I feel uncomfortable at times saying "Merry Christmas": Do you really believe that you are prevented from wishing people Merry Christmas? Really? How about one of these options: Option A:-Wish people Merry Christmas. If they respond positively (as 99% of them likely will) then all is well. If they respond negatively, then you can still feel that you acted according to your own conscience. It isn't exactly a martyr's torment and death to do so. -Option B:- Why not take it one step farther? Why not say, to everyone you meet, "Merry Christmas! And if you celebrate some other holiday, I *don't* wish you any happiness at all. If you don't celebrate Chr...

It's been hours and hours and hours since I posted the first of my responses to PapaFreeak-- and he hasn't written me back!!!!   I told my husband and son about the things that he said about how much he enjoyed reading my blog (he only hates 75% of what I post!), and they immediately said, "No, no, no!  It's a troll!  Don't feed the trolls!"  But PapaFreeak is MY FRIEND!!!!   HE LIKES 25% OF WHAT I POST!!!! That's, like, one out of every four posts !  I'm not even sure I like that many of my posts.  How could he possibly be a troll?!!!! I feel sad.

I blame Augustine .  If it wasn't for his writing his Confessions way back when, none of us (including me and Elizabeth Gilbert ) would ever have had the idea that it was a worthwhile, perhaps even healing thing to confess our sins publicly before our fellow human beings and God. I can just hear Augustine's original readers: "Who does he think he is, this professor of rhetoric, complaining about how he feels guilty for stealing a couple of pears?  It's embarrassing, doesn't he realize how privileged he is, what with his education and prestigious career?  And all those details about doubting himself and his inability to stay chaste!  You'd think he'd have better things to do than to whine about why it took him so long to find God.  And blaming the Manichees for misleading him, that was just uncalled for." It couldn't have been easy reading then, just as for many it still isn't now, and I'm not talking about having to read through all te...

I'm sorry, this is so great, I just have to share it with you.  In the comments for my last post , PapaFreeak has just paid me an enormous compliment.  He reads my blog, get this, even though, he says, "I find about 75% of what you post to be odious."  ODIOUS!!!!  Isn't that the best thing you've ever heard?!  But wait, there's more: "This [he explains] is why I return: I don't understand why someone with your advantages--intelligence, health, a supportive family, good income from meaningful work in a prestigious job--is so astoundingly petty, envious, and self-pitying.  I think you fascinate me because you provide access to a mentality that is genuinely foreign to me."  Gosh, what can I say?  A FAN!!!!  This is what Elizabeth Gilbert must feel like all the time ! But PapaFreeak only finds "about 75%" of what I post to be "odious".  Which makes me wonder: what 25% could he possibly like? Could it be that, having the "...

It's been a rough week out there.  The Boston Marathon bombing, the Senate defeat of the President's gun-control bill (okay, it wasn't technically his, but he reacted as if it were), the fertilizer plant explosion in West, TX (a town I didn't even know existed until it showed up in my mother's church's Facebook feed), the on-going trial of Kermit Gosnell for mass-murdering babies--all the subject of lots of commentary from the folks in the media (except, interestingly, the last ).  I'm in the media (sort of).  Shouldn't I have something to say? Well, maybe, but on what basis?  After all, like most of us, the only thing I know about any of these things is what I read in the papers (actually, online, mainly still at NRO , 'cause, you know, there are only so many hours in the day and I am supposed to be working on a book on medieval prayer), so what could I actually add to the conversation except more rampant speculation based on my own personal convi...

I'm too tired to have anything particularly coherent to say, but this is just too cool: a WiFi-enabled aircraft! Mind you, figuring out how to balance my keyboard and iPad on my lap is proving a bit more than my sleep-deprived, dehydrated brain can manage. Plus I realize my seatmates could read whatever I am writing over my shoulder if they were so inclined which is making me feel a little shy, but I am determined to give you a report from the air, so here goes.   It should be something momentous, a great insight into the wonders of modern travel. Can you imagine doing this even five years ago? (Okay, maybe you could--I'm not exactly in the business world; they seem to get connected faster than we academics do.) I can barely imagine doing it five months ago; this is the first trip that I've been on that had such possibilites (the aircraft on my flight to Reno had the option as well, but then I was so sleep-deprived I just fell asleep). Mind you, I realized last we...

I am turning off the option to be able to comment on my blog anonymously.  I am sick to death of being chastised by readers too chicken to tell me who they are (you can do that anonymously, too, by sending me an email, you know).  Yes, I know it's petty--but so is making personal comments on someone's personal blog without introducing yourself properly. I will be happy to reconsider if I get floods of emails from readers who don't have an Open ID or Google account by which they can log in.  But, seriously, folks!  I'm baring my soul here.  The least you can do is tell me who you are before you lay into me for my faults.

Thank God it's September!  Because I really, really hate August.   I don't know why, but somehow August always makes me crazy.  Perhaps it's the promise, perpetually unfulfilled, of vacation, of having all of the time that you need to get everything done that you put off during the school year.  Perhaps it's simply the lack of external structure, leaving you free to become obsessed (read, binge).  Perhaps it's just the heat.  What I do know is that this year at least, it left me paralyzed.  Not--let me hasten to add--that I have been doing nothing but sitting on the couch these past four and a half weeks.  Just look at the list of books I've been reading (although, to be fair, at least half of those were July's; okay, and I sat on the couch to read them, but still, it's a lot of books!).  Not to mention my Writing Time : see, at the bottom, how I finished my translation!  (Well, the revised draft.  It still needs polishing.)...

Check it out: Psalter of the Virgin Mary has a new look! Plus several new tabs . And now over half of Book VII from John of Garland 's Epithalamium . More to come!  Subscribe today!  Or, you know, pop in from time to time.

I wonder what it would be like to trust my experience as a source of knowledge.  To know something other than what I read in books.  Because then I would have something to write about other than other people's ideas.  Something that I created.  Something that I understood. Why this anxiety?  Because everything I think to write about feels so forced.  Okay, so I'm trying to force this exercise, maybe it's just a part of the process of learning to write in brief, daily sessions.  Step one: start keeping a file of things that I observe that might turn into topics to write about.  What Prof. Boice calls "prewriting": reading, noticing, collecting, taking notes, organizing, filing, outlining. But for blog posts?  I've never needed any of that stuff before, I always just sat down to write when an idea (usually in the form of a title) crystallized and I knew what the gist of the argument was going to be.  And the few occasions when I have...

See, here is what I really don't believe .  I don't believe I can write a book in such brief, daily sessions.  Hundreds of blog posts?  Sure.  Thousands of lines in translation?  Working on it .*  But an actual, honest-to-goodness scholarly book?  Pull the other one, it's got bells on. Plus--and this is the thought that came to me yesterday as I was walking home after writing my first twenty-minute post (yes, I am going to try to make this a regular exercise, see how terrified I am, I can't even admit it to you, much less myself that I'm doing it)--as this very sentence demonstrates, I'm a butterfly.  I hate sticking to developing one thought day after day after day.  It's the main reason (among others) that I like blogging so much: each post is a complete thought in itself, I don't need to come back to it day after day after day, rereading what I've written the day before in order to get back into the mood that I had before.  I can j...

This is bad.  I have been asked to preach at our university chapel in a couple of weeks, and I am feeling somewhat panicked about what I am going to say.  I know what I should be doing, thanks to Prof. Boice : writing a little something every day, rather than waiting until the last minute--say, the Saturday afternoon before--and writing whatever comes to me at that moment in a binge.  But. But just the thought of doing a little bit of work now and then tomorrow and the next day, in the kind of brief, daily sessions that Prof. Boice recommends, is making me even more anxious than the thought of trying to come up with 1,300 words in a single session.  Which I know I could.  I often do, writing pieces for my blog.  Indeed, I like sitting down, writing for an hour or so, and being able to post whatever it is that I've written right then.  It isn't always brilliant, but occasionally, it's not bad.  Plus, I get to practice writing regularly, which is ...

I've been meaning to write this post since yesterday, but there just hasn't been time. First, yesterday, after walking the dog and making breakfast and having a shower and reading a little bit more in Robert Boice's How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure (1994), there was some translation to do , which took until it was time to leave for campus in order to go to a workshop . Then there were proofs to correct for the article that I had accepted this winter (my first new piece in over three years!), then there was a meeting with some of our graduate students who were worried about what the future holds for them as academics (I told them about Boice's other book , which I now need to read myself even though I am no longer "new" to the whole business of "being faculty"). Then there was more work to do on the proofs, at which time it was after time to go home, interrupt my son's game of Minecraft with his friends,...

Okay, I think I have the hang of this. Now I just need some more content. I'm thinking maybe something theological... But why when I go back and edit does the image move left? Still a few bugs to work out here... - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Hmmmm.... - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad