Fencing Bear at Prayer

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.)...

I am, to put it mildly, in something of a dilemma. Here I've been, keeping this blog for a little over two years, not entirely secretly (at least, not to myself) in the hope that somehow, if I wrote about it honestly and openly enough, I might undergo something like a spiritual journey, ending in enlightenment or, at the very least, awakening, much as Elizabeth Gilbert herself describes in Eat, Pray, Love . Well, as I am sure some of you have already guessed, something huge has happened to me over the past six weeks that I am all-too-willing to class as a major spiritual event (I don't know how to categorize it otherwise), perhaps even the transformation that I had been hoping for, but--irony of ironies-- I can't talk about it here on my blog! I really don't know what to do now. Even hinting at the source of my awakening could be problematic, although it is possible that hinting in the way that I am now could be even worse. Oh, there are so many things that I want...

I was afraid this would happen. What if, I sometimes wondered, I finally found peace, grace, the experience of the presence of God, what have you, that ineffable joy I have been longing for all of my life, that sense of being loved and cherished for myself in a world made new by.... Well, I was in full flood there for the moment, but my son came to give me a hug, by the by planting himself on the chaise longue next to me and leaning over my shoulder as if he were trying to read while I typed. And then I freaked out (he wasn't doing anything other than leaning on me) and then I lost the peace I was trying to write about because I started wanting something other than what was. And now I am in anguish again because I could not fulfill my plan, which was to write, and instead accept the gift that my son was giving me of his attention. Which should mean, given the original premise with which I sat down to write, that now this is going to be a really long post. Sigh. And now , of c...

The August issue of Yoga Journal showed up yesterday (August?! It still feels like March here in Chicago!), and as usual I'm flipping through wishing I looked like the models in the photographs and not my graying, wrinkled, flabby self. I've been practicing yoga in one form or another since I was in college, starting, yes, with Richard Hittleman's 28 Day Exercise Plan , but I look nothing like the women and men who grace the pages of Yoga Journal. So, I know most of them are, like, yoga teachers and stuff, and therefore must practice hours and hours a day, but still, yoga is supposed to have all these powerful effects even if you don't do it for a career. For example, the Home Practice feature for this month is a sequence of poses by Ana Forrest designed to help with abs. I've been doing these poses intensively once a week for the past six months or so, and, yes, they definitely help tone the abs. I'm not so sure, however, about all of the other things that...

It would be easier, really, if I were an atheist; even better, a prodigal atheist. Then I could descend into profligate living, waste all my substance, wreck my health, spend years wallowing in sin and, at the end of it all, return home to have God forgive all and kill the fatted calf for me. As it is, I'm stuck with being the older one, you know , the brother (or, in my case, the sister) who stays home (read: goes to church), cares for the family estate (read: spends my life writing about the Christian tradition), and has to watch as all the returning younger siblings get all the attention and food. I'm not even any good at pretending to be an atheist. I have no intellectual qualms about believing in an Ultimate Reality that exists in and of Itself and yet loves its creatures . That's easy. It makes infinite sense, much more so than all of the tortuous efforts atheists usually make to try to prove that what we sense and can measure is the only thing that is. Okay, ye...

"At that time, during the reign of Cynigils, the West Saxons, anciently known as the Gewissae, accepted the Faith of Christ through the preaching of Bishop Birinus. He had come to Britain at the direction of Pope Honorius [I, reigned A.D. 625-638], having promised in his presence that he would sow the seeds of our holy Faith in the most inland and remote regions of the English, where no other teacher had been before him. He was accordingly consecrated bishop by Asterius, Bishop of Genoa, at the Pope's command; but when he had reached Britain and entered the territory of the Gewissae, he found them completely heathen, and decided that it would be better to begin to preach the word of God among them rather than seek more distant converts. He therefore evangelized that province, and when he had instructed its king, he baptized him and his people. It happened at the time that the most holy and victorious Oswald was present, and greeted King Cynigils as he came from the font, ...