Category: quotes

Posted in musings, quotes

stay with us, Lord – praying for faith

Posted on by kristinabean

In a world that is culturally distant from God, in a society that tends toward individual isolation and values independence, self-sufficiency, skepticism, and cynicism, it can be hard to remember that God is always present with us, and even harder to feel that presence throughout the day. The urgencies and immediacies of each each moment cloud our awareness of Him, and focus our minds on the temporal and fleeting instead of the heavenly and eternal. The brokenness of our world makes it harder still to remember Him as a God both powerful and loving, because the pain of death, oppression, fear, war, terrorism, unemployment, sickness, and so on seem far more real and relevant than His high and unknown redemptive plan and purpose. Those things we see, are forced to see, time and time again; God, we have to take on a bit of faith.

And the Church, in her wisdom knowing how difficult it can be to rely on this invisible faith when the world we see is devolving into chaos and darkness, gives us these beautiful, simple prayers.

Christ rose from the dead and is always present in His Church.
Let us adore Him, and say:

Stay with us, Lord.

Lord Jesus, victor over sin and death, glorious and immortal,
Be always in our midst.

Stay with us, Lord.

Come to us in the power of Your victory,
And show our hearts the loving kindness of Your Father

Stay with us, Lord.

Come to heal a world wounded by division,
For You alone can transform our hearts and make them one.

Stay with us, Lord.

Strengthen our faith in final victory,
And renew our hope in Your second coming.

Stay with us, Lord.

(from Thursday’s Liturgy of the Hours)

That is what we pray for – His presence, His power, His love, His healing and transformation in our broken world – and it is what He has promised in His Word, so we know that one day, someday, our prayers will be fully answered and redemption fully brought forth. And in the meantime we pray for the faith to hold fast to Him when our sight and understanding fail.

Posted in musings, quotes

Arizona primaries, and loving my state well

Posted on by kristinabean

Well, the results for my state’s primary election are in, and I’m really not surprised by them. Disappointed, yes, but not surprised.

We’re known as a state that undervalues education, that struggles with racism, and that wrestles with substantial income inequality and poverty. Our national “face,” for a lot of people looking at us from afar, is Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a man who has faced accusations and lawsuits concerning abuses of power, racial profiling, election misconduct, and failure to investigate sexual crimes. So it’s not really a surprise that people who dismiss illegal immigrants as lawbreakers rather than understanding the dynamics of family ties and desperate need, who are okay with law officials playing racial favorites and coming down more harshly on Hispanics and Muslims, who harbor some nostalgia for the Wild West when might made right and the strong man was the honorable man, would overwhelmingly vote for Donald Trump.

For me, who have always looked at my state in the best possible light, it’s a disappointment that’s hard to get over. Maybe my fellow citizens here aren’t as good as I thought they were, from the subset that I happen to know well. Maybe this isn’t such a good place to live and raise my family as I’ve always thought, if people are so incredibly welcoming of the dishonest and self-serving “leaders” who offer them satisfaction and validation.

But do I love my state because of its (actual or perceived) good characteristics, or do I love it because it is my home and I want it to become the best that it possibly can be? Chesterton wrote on this exact topic over a century ago, and here I’m going to replace his example city with Arizona:

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Arizona. If we think what is really best for Arizona we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Arizona: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to [California]. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Arizona, for then it will remain Arizona, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Arizona: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. […] If men loved Arizona as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Arizona in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. […] Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I don’t know many people who love Arizona in this way (although I do know a few, and I’m incredibly thankful for them). So many people I speak to are using the state for what they can get out of it, and counting down the time until they can move away. College students come for the universities and then head out again, glad to be gone. Snowbirds come down for the golf courses and mild winters, but keep themselves apart from the permanent population and head back to the places they truly consider their homes each spring. People gripe about the job prospects, the pollution, the bad drivers, the housing market, the immigrants, the homeless, the transit system, the public schools, and (above all) the weather.

And I get that we have problems, a lot of problems, and some very serious problems. But this is my home. This is the place I love, the soil into which my roots have sunk deep, even if it is pretty lousy soil (clay or sand, take your pick!). I get angry sometimes, at work or on social media, about the constant cloud of Arizona complaints, even when they’re completely justified, in a similar way to how I get upset when someone casts aspersions on my children (I was angry at my brother-in-law for over a year because he made a negative comment about Rondel once… I’m not quite that bad about my state).

Am I going to let this love just be an emotion, or am I going to put it into action, working to transform my home into a thing of beauty and grace? I tend towards contemplation instead of action, but true love will, I think, result in both. I think of a pastor at my church who, after years of traveling and living across the world, has settled down here and devotes himself to building community, establishing relationships across lines of race and religion, and creating a literal oasis in the desert. He sees Arizona with objective eyes, but because he also sees it as his home, he has made it part of his vocation to labor for its betterment, instead of leaving or complaining. If there were more like him, maybe someday Arizona really could become “fairer than Florence” – and maybe then, we would elect politicians who displayed things like beauty, love, justice, and truth.

Posted in musings, quotes

the prayer of daniel

Posted on by kristinabean

Daniel was one of the righteous men of his generation, the young exiles to Babylon. He kept the law of God, in spirit and in letter, despite the extraordinarily serious threats made upon him because of it. And yet, when he prays for his people, his nation, he makes no distinction between himself and them. He confesses for them, including himself in their number; he begs for God’s mercy, making no mention of his own righteousness or years of faithfulness.

Do we do this when we pray for our country, our churches, our communities? Or do we, in our prayers, distance ourselves from the ones we’re praying for? Do we see ourselves a step above them, separate from their problems and sins? Daniel could easily have done so, and yet he did not. Foreshadowing the intercessory mediation of Christ, he metaphorically took the sins of his nation upon himself and sought mercy at the throne of grace. As members of Christ’s earthly body, faced with the brokenness and sin of our nation, surely we can do no less, in our prayers and in our lives.

 

“O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments, we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments. Neither have we heeded Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers and all the people of the land.

O Lord, righteousness belongs to You, but to us shame of face, […] because we have sinned against You. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against Him. […]

O Lord, according to all Your righteousness, I pray, let Your anger and Your fury be turned away from [us]. Hear the prayer of Your servant, and his supplications, and for the Lord’s sake cause Your face to shine on Your sanctuary, which is desolate.

O my God, incline Your ear and hear; open Your eyes and see our desolations […]; for we do not present our supplications before You because of our righteous deeds, but because of Your great mercies.

O Lord, hear!

O Lord, forgive!

O Lord, listen and act!” (from Daniel 9:4-19)

 

Posted in musings, quotes

is it really that bad to want to be a homemaker?

Posted on by kristinabean

Indeed, while a vibrant Cuban women’s movement flourished in Havana during the first part of the twentieth century (Stoner 1991), the writings of early Cuban feminist Mariblanca Sabas Alomá ([1930] 2003) make clear that the desired outcomes of social and political reform for many poor urban women in Havana were economic and conjugal stability – meaning the possibility of remaining within the unpaid domestic sphere with the support of a male breadwinner – rather than the right to work and autonomy from men. – Elise Andaya, Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era, pg 41

The perspective of this author seems to be that the highest goal for women, the most progressive and ideal, is to join the paid workforce and be free of dependency on men. While I agree with her that the ability for financial independence is necessary, I take issue with the demeaning tone she uses throughout her book to describe women who live out more stereotypical female roles in the context of marriage and child-raising. It is consistently presented as the lesser option, the choice of the unenlightened and ignorant, or (alternately) the luxury or prison of the wealthy.

I think even in the United States today, where women have the right to work outside the home, can be financially autonomous and self-sufficient, and are culturally encouraged to obtain an education and pursue a career, a lot of women still desire the stability offered by marriage as well the ability to devote substantial amounts of time to their young children that the financial support of a partner enables. We have found that we can achieve autonomy, but that it is a hard and lonely road, and that the interdependency of committed marriage and family life can often bring joy and fulfillment. The simple truth is that while many women choose careers that bring them incredible satisfaction and purpose, many other women work simply out of financial necessity (often occasioned by family breakdown) and would love to spend more time making their homes and neighborhoods places of beauty and community and raising their own children instead of outsourcing their care. The benefits they can bring to their families and communities in the context of the “unpaid domestic sphere” are not the less for being monetarily unrecognized, and it is a harsh devaluation of the family, the child, and the task of raising the child to act as though the financial remuneration for a job is its only source of worth.

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when fear skews our ethics

Posted on by kristinabean

“…a growing body of research suggested that investing in education and work for women propelled economic development and led to lower birth rates. Later in the 1967 meeting University of Chicago sociologist Philip Hauser alluded to this research when he asked the delegates: ‘Do we really know whether the classical approach of family planning propaganda and clinical services is more useful in reducing birth rates than the same effort spent on building a road into the village or constructing a soap factory where women can work or furthering education for girls?’ But population control activists tended to dismiss an emphasis on female workforce participation and education as a strategy dreamed up by unrealistic feminists. And Polgar [head of research for Planned Parenthood Federation of America] didn’t mention the alternative approach from the podium. Instead, he gazed out at the delgates and, according to minutes from the meeting, ‘urged that sociologists stimulate biologists to find a method of sex determination, since some parents have additional children in order to get one of specified sex.'” – Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, pg 99-100

“Others talked about the necessity of an Asian pregnancy police, foreshadowing China’s system of birth permits under the one-child policy, and suggested flying planes over India once a year to spray it with a ‘contraceptive aerial mist.’ And the racist application of birth control was no longer confined to the developing world. In 1973 African American and Native American women across the American South and Southwest alleged in federal district court that they had been sterilized under threat of their welfare benefits being withdrawn. Gerhard Gesell, the judge who heard Relf v. Weinberger, concluded in his ruling that the women had been coerced. He estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor American women had been sterilized under federal programs, adding, ‘the dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky.'” – Ibid, pg 104

The idea was that families would have fewer children if they didn’t have to keep trying and trying to have a child of the sex they desired. Instead of a family having 3 or 4 or more daughters before having a son, and having 4 or 5 total children, the parents could eliminate those daughters, or most of them, and end up only having 1 or 2 children. In the 1960s, when the world was as scared of population growth as we are of climate change, that reduction in the birth rate was the pot at the end of the rainbow. But instead of choosing to support economic development and female empowerment (which has historically led to lower birth rates on its own), Western nations and foundations decided to tie their aid money to population control programs, leading to mass sterilizations, countless abortions, and the eventual skewing of the gender ratios across the world due to Polgar’s final vague and understated observation above.

Was it all just a response of fear to the specter of a world overfilled with people, starving and suffering and dying? While I think that played a role, there was a definite racial component to the issue, as the decreasing birth rate in the West combined with the economic development of the rest of the world struck fear into the hearts of white Americans and Europeans worried about losing their hold on global power and wealth. And the result of those fears, both the altruistic and the selfish racist fears, was death and suffering – for the men who underwent forced sterilizations during Indira Gandhi’s rule in India, for the women whose babies were aborted because of the one-child policy in China, for the aborted babies themselves (mostly girls), for the men who are growing up to find themselves consigned to singleness due to a shortage of women.

It is never wise to forsake the path of righteousness in response to fear. We must have a more constant moral compass than that of pragmatism and self help, or the very things that we think good, in our efforts to avoid what we fear, will end up hurting us (or others) in ways we never dreamed of, just as much or even more than the things we were trying to avoid. Such a moral compass will also help us determine whether or not our fears are ethically just – as a fear of humanity starving and suffering would be, while a fear of the global gains of other races would not. Population control wasn’t the solution for the fears of the 1960s; economic development and education accomplished the same ends without the oppression and injustice. Maybe Christianity was right when it said that children are blessings; and maybe if we worked together for the common good instead of seeking our own good at the expense of other human beings we could conquer the evils we fear without causing greater evils yet to roam the earth.

Posted in musings, quotes

the politics of anger

Posted on by kristinabean

I have been trying not to post much overtly political content on this blog, because it’s not my area of expertise and because it’s not what I typically enjoy writing about.

However, I wanted to share a quote from Mitt Romney’s recent speech condemning the candidacy of Donald Trump, because I thought it was particularly eloquent and historically informed.

I understand the anger Americans feel today. In the past, our presidents have channeled that anger and forged it into resolve, into endurance and high purpose, and into the will to defeat the enemies of freedom. Our anger was transformed into energy directed for good.

Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes. He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press.

This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.

When I was younger, and would think about the beginnings of WWII, I always wondered how the leaders of those nations had risen to power. What was there about Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, or Adolf Hitler that appealed to the average citizen in their countries and enabled their positions? Believing (naively, I suppose) in the basic decency of humanity, I couldn’t understand the draw of a strongman manipulating society’s anger and discontent for hateful and violent purposes.

To be honest, I still don’t understand. I know that Germany was broken after WWI, poverty-stricken, ripped of her national pride, and that there was an easy opening for a leader who could ride that anger to power without the constraints of conscience. But that anger could just as well have turned to national reform, to the iron strength of will needed to accomplish the slow and difficult task of national transformation – as in fact it did in the years following WWII. Did the anger lead to all that evil simply because one man decided to use it for his own advantage, for the fulfilling of his own twisted ideology and vendettas?

This election cycle is forcing me to admit that my people, my fellow Americans, are not at heart such a good people as I had always hoped and believed them to be. They are angry – maybe justly, maybe not – and they are letting that anger carry them away, without watching their feet, without taking care to stay within the boundaries of morality and good conscience. The strongman is playing off their emotions, using and manipulating them for his own purposes, and they don’t see it. Or maybe they do see it, and they don’t care, because it feels so good to be able to openly blame someone else for all their problems and struggles, whether or not that scapegoat has any rational basis. So anti-Mexican rhetoric is spewed forth in the southwest, anti-Cuban tirades in Florida, and anti-Muslim attacks on a national level. What happened to liberty for all, my racist conservative compatriots? Does freedom only extend to those who look and think like you?

I used to think that America was a great nation because her people were great, because her people held a basic set of principles that were good and noble. Maybe she was, once, but she is not anymore, because her people have forsaken their calling and their creed. Maybe she will be again, if enough people care enough to begin rebuilding the traditions and principles that gave her beauty and strength through the centuries, but when the siren of the strongman sounds so sweetly in the ears of her people, I fear for when it comes time to pay the piper.

Posted in art, musings, quotes

{fine art friday} -Japanese Madonna and Child

Posted on by kristinabean

One of the beautiful things about the Church is her universality – her appeal to people from all cultures and eras, and her significance and importance to them. The stories of the Church – the stories of Christ – and above all the stories central to the Gospel – fulfill the echos whispered in different ways in human traditions and legends, and fulfill the longing questions of our hearts. So while each culture is able to remain fully Christian and hold true to the meaning and teaching of each story, they are also able to take those stories and imagine them in culturally significant ways. Most notably, we appropriate the people and events of those stories to our own cultures by making them “look like us.” We envision Jesus and His family and disciples to fit our own ethnic background, and we layer the Church’s stories into the rhythms of our own cultural sense of time and emotion.

So in the parts of the Church heavily influenced by Europe, we see Jesus depicted as a white man, and we see the fasts and feasts of the Church, the focal stories, aligned with the seasonal changes of the Northern Hemisphere. The birth of Jesus, for example – the beginning of a new hope for humanity – comes at the Winter Solstice, as if by His birth He reverses the plunge into darkness and heralds the dawning light. Many of even our most traditional and spiritual Christmas songs focus on this aspect of the birth, something that makes singing them in the paradisaical Arizona winter somewhat odd… Likewise, His resurrection is celebrated in the height of spring, surrounded by all the natural reminders of new life.

Likewise, in other areas of the world, one can see different cultural influences on the artwork and life of the Church. This set of four paintings of the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus, by an unknown artist from Japan, illustrates that in several ways.

Madonna of the Cherry Blossoms
Madonna of the Bamboo Grove
Madonna of the Moon
Madonna of the Snow

Clockwise from top left: Madonna of the Cherry Blossoms, Madonna of the Bamboo Grove, Madonna of the Moon, Madonna of the Snow

Obviously a significant difference between these and Western Madonnas in that both Mary and Jesus are Japanese. It makes the motherhood of Mary, the humanity of the Word made flesh, more immediately and emotionally palpable to the people painting and praying with theses images; it allows them to feel close and connected to these people who, after all, are not just historical people but living members of the body of Christ.

Something else I learned about these paintings, and Japanese art in general, that I also found very fascinating was that the four seasons of the year are central to Japanese art and poetry. Back in the tenth and eleventh centuries, nature was seen as a powerful, frightening, and unpredictable force, and aristocratic poets began to simultaneously tame it and use it as a lens to understand human emotion (which was probably also a powerful and unpredictable force that they wished to tame and control more completely!). As one author put it, Japanese culture focused mainly not on nature itself, but on a “secondary nature” –

…not a direct apprehension or participation in the natural world but a culturally constructed view of the non-human realm as representative of inner feelings experienced through profound associations made with outer phenomena connected with the rotation of the seasons and cycles of the year that are meaningful for their symbolic and aesthetically oriented value. – Steven Heine, in a review of Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Art by Haruo Shirane

By placing Mary and Jesus within each of those four seasons, the artist not only signifies their presence with us at all times of the year, he or she also meditates on the presence of Jesus, the importance of the incarnation, the loving motherhood of Mary, through all the various emotions we undergo as humans. He is with us in the springtime when the cherry blossoms give us hope for renewal and revival; He is with us in the autumn when we watch the lonely moon in our own melancholy and withdrawal. The cultural patterns of the year are drawn up into the eternal promises of Christ; they are not obliterated by His presence, but glorified.

Posted in musings, quotes

the courtesy of St. Francis

Posted on by kristinabean

“I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for the men. […] He only saw the image of God multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man was always a man and did not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honoured all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernadine was really interested in him; in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document.” – G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

Can you imagine treating everyone you encountered in this way? Giving them the courtesy and honor of seeing them as an individual and caring about their story for their own sake? It is so hard sometimes, weighed down as I am by my own problems and my own daily busyness, to genuinely look outside of myself into the heart of another person. But love consists in that type of respect, not simply in meeting another person’s physical needs, because service and charity can be given in an impersonal, agenda-driven manner, but taking another person seriously, valuing them and their past and their future, their history and the dreams, is worth far more.

Posted in musings, quotes

gazing at the crucifixion

Posted on by kristinabean

“You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God.” – G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

It’s difficult to think long about the Crucifixion of Christ. There is someone we love, or at least respect, suffering incredible pain and humiliation. It is offensive, uncomfortable; the physical reality of it is raw and bloody, the emotional reality of it shameful and cruel. So much nicer, so much cleaner, to gloss over the whole event and focus on the empty tomb, the glorified and resurrected body of the risen Christ, the ethereal and heavenly realities of the Ascension, the vague spiritual dimensions of Pentecost.

But then, when our suffering comes, we’re left without an anchor, without a companion, without a guide to lead us through the vale, because we’ve never drawn near to Him in His suffering. It is the whole point of His coming: to suffer with us, to suffer for us, to become one with us in our pain and deprivation and shame, that we might someday become one with Him in His glory and joy and abundance. And until that someday comes, even our suffering can be given a higher purpose and beauty by unifying it with His suffering.

Stand at the foot of the cross, with Mary His mother and John the Beloved Disciple. Watch Him suffer, helpless to comfort or deliver Him; lament and mourn the injustice and cruelty of His death. Weep and let your heart be softened in gazing upon His suffering, that when you see the suffering of those around you your heart may be moved with compassion and pity for them as well. Weep and know that He weeps with you in your suffering, for the suffering of the world.

Posted in quotes

of heaven and hell

Posted on by kristinabean

“Nay, I will venture to say more than this;—it is fearful, but it is right to say it;—that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man. We know how unhappy we are apt to feel at present, when alone in the midst of strangers, or of men of different tastes and habits from ourselves. How miserable, for example, would it be to have to live in a foreign land, among a people whose faces we never saw before, and whose language we could not learn. And this is but a faint illustration of the loneliness of a man of earthly dispositions and tastes, thrust into the society of saints and angels. How forlorn would he wander through the courts of heaven! He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder. He would feel himself always in His presence. He could no longer turn his thoughts another way, as he does now, when conscience reproaches him. He would know that the Eternal Eye was ever upon him; and that Eye of holiness, which is joy and life to holy creatures, would seem to him an Eye of wrath and punishment. God cannot change His nature. Holy He must ever be. But while He is holy, no unholy soul can be happy in heaven. Fire does not inflame iron, but it inflames straw. It would cease to be fire if it did not. And so heaven itself would be fire to those, who would fain escape across the great gulf from the torments of hell. The finger of Lazarus would but increase their thirst. The very “heaven that is over their head” will be “brass” to them.”

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons