When I was a kid, I used to gaze at pictures of Mary and admire her pastel prettiness. She looked like a Disney princess, so beautiful and graceful and serene.
But now that I’m an adult (and a mom), I look at her and I see much more than a pretty Disney princess. I see a pretty tough cookie, a resilient woman who can teach me a lot about how to navigate the choppy waters of life. For more, check out my article Our Lady of Uncertain Times.
And Happy Friday!
Posted in Articles and columns
My reading list is as eclectic as ever these days. A little contemporary fiction, a little spiritual food for thought, a little comfort reading: I like the variety. Here’s what’s been on my nightstand.
On Mother’s Day, Scott very sweetly offered to bring me breakfast in bed. And though my pancakes were partially consumed in the company of two very rambunctious boys, who went spelunking in the caverns of the blankets of the bed, they eventually left to go eat their own meal and I hunkered down with The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey. It’s quite a good read: a retelling of Jane Eyre, set in 1960s Scotland. I am such an Eyrehead that I just had to read this book, and it’s enormously fun to see how the author reimagines the characters, the settings, and the plot. I’ve read the book so many times (and taught it, too), that I know it like the back of my hand, and I love how Livesey uses small details of the story (such as the bird imagery of the original novel) as motifs. Good stuff.
One of the best parts of last summer was discovering Margaret Silf. Her book Close to the Heart is an amazing guide to developing a prayer life, so I was thrilled to read her new book The Other Side of Chaos: Breaking Through When Life is Breaking Down. In this book, Silf writes about how the messy transitions/losses/uncertainties of our lives can actually be opportunities for tremendous spiritual growth, if we approach them with openness. I love her writing because she is wise but never pedantic; her tone is inviting, and she is a genius at offering exactly the right story to illustrate a spiritual concept. She looks at well-known Bible stories, like the Flood and the Exodus, and considers them through the lens of a spirituality of transition, with insights that blew me away. If you’re going through any kind of transition in your life right now, this book is a fabulous companion. And her chapter called “Will You Save Your Life or Spend It?” is truly amazing. I wish I could make it required reading for every person I know.
I’m one of those people who loves to re-read books, and the one series I’ve re-read more than any other is, hands-down, the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. These fabulous books describe the author’s childhood in small-town Minnesota in the early 1900s; they start when Betsy is a child and end when she is married, and they are the feel-good books to end all feel-good books. Betsy is a thoroughly modern heroine (and an aspiring writer, which is one reason I’ve always loved her), and her life in Deep Valley sounds like a heckuva lot of fun. I’ve just finished Betsy was a Junior and Betsy and Joe, which cover her last two years in high school, and reading them is like putting on my comfiest pair of slippers. They’re great to read right before bed, which is a time when I generally don’t want any angsty images entering into my subconscious. The Betsy books fill my mind with thoughts of picnics and high school essay contests and friends and family who support a young woman as she navigates her way into adulthood, and that’s a very pleasant way to end the day.
Posted in Mmmm .... books
I must have been around eight or nine; ten at the most. On the evening news, I’d heard a story that terrified me. I’m not entirely sure anymore what the story was about — a kidnapping, maybe, or a murder — but after letting the frightening images sit in my mind for a while, crowding out my ability to think of much else, I sought out my mom and told her I was scared about what I’d heard.
She put her arms around me and held me. “Yes, there are some bad people in the world,” she said. “But there are many, many more good people than there are bad people.”
I’ve thought of those words often over the years. They comforted me enormously at the time, and even in high school and college, they still had the power to help me transcend the occasional anxiety and fear. Mom was not denying that bad things happened, which she knew would have been ineffective and false. Instead, she acknowledged the bad, but gently reminded me to look at the larger picture, to remember the fundamental goodness of the universe rather than letting scary thoughts crowd it out.
I think that this optimistic view — of life, of others, of the world — is one of the very greatest gifts my mom has given me. Mom’s default position is positive thinking. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen her angry, or upset, or hurt, or sad. But Mom’s approach to life is marked by openness, by warmth, by a belief that people are, as Anne Frank wrote, fundamentally good at heart. Mom presumes the goodwill of others; she always has, as long as I’ve known her. There is nothing cynical or bitter about her interactions with other people. I can’t help but feel that this is a rare, precious quality these days, when so much of our conversation, both online and in life, comes from a place of presuming the worst rather than the best about one another.
They say that your personality shows in your face, and when it comes to Mom, that’s totally true. She has one of the friendliest faces I know, with a smile that is genuine and inviting. “Your mom is so sweet!” I have heard throughout my life, even from people who have only met her once. Even though there have been rough times in her life, including the tragic death of her father when I was a baby, Mom seems to have a well of optimism deep inside, a well that never runs dry. She’s not naive about the world, and she recognizes the existence of what is bad. But she actively seeks out, recognizes, and savors what is good, whether it’s a visit from a friend, a colorful flowerbed, the eager faces of her former students, or time spent with family. She gives goodness a place of honor in her thoughts, and this attitude makes me think of a line from the children’s book The Secret Garden: “Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”
The older I get, the more I realize that so much of who I am today is due to my mom’s example. And when you are a kid, it is a very great gift to be raised by someone who looks at the world kindly and who — maybe without even knowing that she’s doing it — teaches you to do the same.
Mom was right, all those years ago: there are many, many good people in the world.
And I was lucky to be raised by one of the best.
Posted in The Best Gift My Mom Gave Me
A few weeks ago, sitting at a stoplight in my car, I turned to look at Luke. He was sitting in his carseat, his little legs dangling, his fuzzy dark crew-cutted head shining in the sun. He saw me looking at him, and smiled.
“I love you, Lukey,” I told him.
He kept smiling at me with his coffee-colored eyes. “Yes,” he said.
As with many things Luke says, there was a certain enigmatic nature to his response. As the light changed and I drove on, I found myself pondering the subtext to his reply. Was it, “Yes, you’ve told me that before”? Was it, “I love you, too, Mommy”?
Or maybe the subtext was a simple, “Yes, I am loved by you.” Maybe it was his way of saying, Of course you love me. I know that. I accept that.
I kind of like this third interpretation. I like to think that Luke sees himself as totally lovable, that it is absolutely no stretch for him to accept that his mom is totally crazy about him.
I think Luke is onto something here, little carseat mystic that he is. It’s a useful reality check for me, and my spiritual life. If God were to turn around in the driver’s seat, smile, and say, “I love you, Ginny,” what would my response be? It’s human to want to protest on some level, to feel totally unworthy. But it’s far better to be like my little boy, and to respond with a simple, “Yes.”
Because if we can truly believe in that divine love, if we can fully accept it without resistance or argument — well, I can’t help but feel that we’d all have the confidence to change the world, for good.
Posted in Adventures in Parenting
There was a time in my childhood when my mom was on a quest to find the perfect enchilada. She tried out numerous recipes, and every one was, somehow, disappointing — too dry, too bland, you name it. I don’t remember her ever finding the perfect enchilada during my childhood, but a few years back, when I was hosting a party for Scott’s birthday, she shared a recipe from a cookbook she bought in New Mexico. It was the best enchilada I’ve had outside a restaurant, and I guess it’s proof that if you are willing to keep up the search, you will eventually be rewarded.
I thought of Mom’s enchilada quest just recently, as I watched the latest film version of Jane Eyre. For about the last fifteen years, I’ve been on my own quest to find the perfect Jane Eyre movie adaptation. And though some have come close, none of them has ever been exactly right … until now. This movie was, in a word, excellent.
And believe you me, I am picky about my Jane Eyres. I first read the novel in sixth grade, when much of it flew right over my head. A few years later, though, I re-read it, and the novel sank into my very bones. When I lived abroad the year after graduating from college, my battered paperback edition came with me. Like Jane, I was thirsting for new adventure, encountering surprising new experiences and constantly navigating the line between throwing myself into them with wild abandon and not losing my moral center. Jane was a fabulous companion for that journey. For years, I’ve wanted to see a movie adaptation that was worthy of the book. And guess what? I’ve found it.
(Before going on, let me say that there will be some spoilers in what I say. If you’ve never read Jane Eyre, you should stop reading this post. Actually, if you’ve never read Jane Eyre, you should stop reading this post and immediately go start reading Jane Eyre, because yes, it’s that good. And then please come back and tell me how you liked it, okay?)
So what worked in this movie version:
1) Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester. Great casting. He really captured the tortured quality of the man, and his desire for redemption. Too many of the other movie Rochesters act just plain angry, which frankly makes the character come across (pardon my French) as a real jackass. Rochester only really works as a character if you understand that his brusqueness is the result of someone who knows he’s made an epic mistake, and who keeps on making more epic mistakes in an effort to correct that first one, while still painfully aware that he is going about it wrong. It’s not easy to communicate this on-screen, but the actor nailed it.
2) Mia Wasikowska as Jane. I’d never seen her before in any films (yes, I totally missed the Alice in Wonderland of a few years ago), and she also did a great job of not making Jane into a namby-pamby goody-two-shoes. What’s tough about the character is that so much of her depth and passion is lived in her thoughts, not in her interactions with the other characters; I think it takes a very sensitive actress to show those depths on her face. She manages to make Jane both believably Victorian and totally modern.
3) The screenplay. It’s tough to distill this novel into a two-hour movie, but this screenplay did a great job of being economical while still including a few extra little touches to enhance the characters. I also love how they started the movie with Jane fleeing from Rochester and being taken in by the Rivers family, with the rest of the story told in flashback. That established a certain tension (why is this girl wandering the moors so upset and all alone?) and also helped draw connections between her formative years (oh, that terrible school!) and the woman she became.
4) Judi Dench. Any movie is better with her in it.
5) Giving enough weight to the character of St. John Rivers. You might recall, fellow Eyre-heads, that after Jane flees from Rochester, she is taken in by the Rivers siblings. St. John, the clergyman, proposes marriage and tells her that she should come with him to India as a missionary — not because he loves her, but because it would be noble of her to dedicate her life to God’s service. This section takes up almost an entire third of the book. In most movie adaptations, they give it ten minutes, which always makes me want to throw something at the screen. Because the whole point of this second proposal (which Jane rejects, smart girl that she is), is to show that Jane knows what she wants and will not settle for less. Rochester offers her passion without morality; St. John offers her morality without passion. The book shows us that the second option is just as soul-killing as the first. Jane knows that a marriage without love would compromise her very sense of self, just as love without marriage would do. And she knows herself well enough to refuse both options — only to be rewarded, movingly, in the end.
This film version really *gets* that. Rather than treating the St. John section as a boring episode to rush through before getting Jane back to the now-blind-and-reformed Rochester, they do let us see his religious extremism, and the way that he tries to guilt her into marrying him. (He’s an even more chilling character in the book.) I’ve long had a hunch that Charlotte Bronte’s creation of St. John as a character speaks volumes about her own understanding of God. She seems to have believed that God wants us to live moral lives, yes, but — above all — he also wants us to live joyful ones. The book has survived over the generations for many reasons, but I think that implicit message is a large part of its appeal. There are lots of things in this world that look like they’ll lead you to joy (Rochester tries most of them in his wanderings about the continent), but this book says that the real thing is worth waiting for — even if it requires tremendous amounts of self-knowledge and patience.
I had to wait a long time to find the perfect Jane Eyre, too. And I’m happy that the wait is over.
Posted in Musings
What’s the best gift your mom gave you? Today I’m delighted to have Brett Hoover here to share his thoughts. Brett is a Paulist priest and visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author of Comfort: An Atlas for the Body and Soul (which is a great read, by the way). Thanks, Brett!
On Returning Home and Divine Fedoras: My Mom and God
Brett C. Hoover, CSP
Like a lot of Americans, I left home at eighteen. I wanted to go away to college, and my parents wanted me to go. “It will be good for you,” my mom said. She was right. That was more than a quarter century ago.
My mom is now seventy-two, retired from her job as registrar at a Catholic school. In 2010 she had a mild stroke on Christmas Eve. There are the other health problems, enough that I can see the pain on her face sometimes. She bears it with a quiet strength. She jokes that her social life revolves around doctor visits, but she is being modest. She lunches with her fellow school retirees. She and a group of women friends, self-dubbed “the elders,” travel together annually. Last fall she and my dad went to southern Africa for three weeks. She came back alive with stories of a hippopotamus that lazed near their cabin on the water and of having tea in a tin shack in Soweto. Mom knows how to choose her words carefully in vividly recounting a story. No doubt the precocious vocabulary of my sister’s seven-year-old son is, in some way, related.
I am now forty-four years old myself. After living most of my adult life on the East Coast (with stints in the Midwest and Northern California), I moved back to Southern California in August, not far from where I was born. I don’t live with my parents. I’m a priest, and I teach at a Catholic university. I actually live about forty miles away from my mom and dad, but I see them frequently. We have lunch, celebrate birthdays and holidays. They came and visited the campus where I teach one Friday afternoon. This past semester, when I taught once a week at a remote campus in their county, we had a standing Tuesday lunch date.
Even though my parents are both quite self-sufficient, I worry about them—the inevitable role reversal of middle age. I expected this. The surprise has been the pleasant pattern of everyday companionship we have developed.
When I was a young man, naturally, my mom and I fought. Especially in college, I tried out new thoughts in a probably frustratingly scattershot manner, and she had her opinions about all that. Once on the telephone, I dismissed the desire of some women to be stay-at-home moms. My mom’s response to my careless sexism was appropriately sarcastic; after all, I had directly benefited from her years as a stay-at-home mom. But such is youth. Somehow I wanted to rebel and to please her. She wanted me to be my own person but to do so by following her advice.
All these years later, however, these ordinary parent-child tensions have disappeared. I no longer have much to prove to her. She, settled into her doting grandparental phase, has little need to restlessly self-examine her every parental move. So instead of fighting we laugh a lot. We gossip. We take pride in the roster of kind people we call family and friends. She and my dad ask about my work. I tease them about the incessant bickering that has arisen late in their fifty-year marriage. As with many couples, this is less a series of discrete arguments than a rehearsal of the same two or three lifelong disagreements. My mom tells me it is an odd gesture of love, a sign of continued interest in the other person after decades of coping with the differences between them.
Easter week, my oldest friend, his wife, and their daughter (like a second grandchild to my parents) visited from out of town. We drove down to my parents’ house for Easter Sunday dinner, sitting down together in what mom calls the “great room” of their downsized house. “Great” or not, the room definitely functions as social center of their home, including the necessary addition of a lanky, squeaky cat named Maya. Mom served a lovely dinner that afternoon, including a Persian dish made in honor of my friend’s wife, who grew up in Tehran. Another old friend, a social worker, showed up with her law-student daughter, who is lethally bright and quietly charming.
As everyone talked there in the “great room,” I had one of those moments where I fell out of the conversation. I felt that peculiar warmth that comes not from one’s own happiness but from observing the happiness of the people that you love most.
I often imagine, in moments like these, that God is another, half-invisible guest at dinner. In my whimsical imaginings, God sits at the table with a glass of red wine in his hand, a counterpart to my mom with her flute of sparkling wine. Other times, God has been seated at a restaurant bar, nursing a tumbler of scotch just like my grandfather used to drink. For some reason, I often picture God wearing a fedora, as if Divine Mystery somehow belonged to 1940s film noir.
A courteous Supreme Being, the hat-wearing God of my imagination always raises a glass. And then winks.
Posted in The Best Gift My Mom Gave Me
My kids are pretty young, which has its downsides. There are lots of little tasks, like brushing teeth and tying shoes, that still require our help. Concepts like “Mommy and Daddy would like to talk for a few minutes without interruption” are hard for the three-year-old mind to grasp (and, frankly, hard for the five-year-old mind to grasp, too). Toughest of all, we’re not out of the diaper woods yet, even though it feels like we’ve been wandering in them about as long as the Israelites wandered in the desert. So yes, a part of me looks forward to those mythical Easier Years when the boys will dress/bathe/shoe themselves and I will no longer have to hold an odiferous pull-up at arm’s length while scurrying to the trash bin.
That said, there are things my kids do right now that bowl me over with their cuteness. There are things they say that make me grab the pen and notebook and put their quotations down in writing, so these observations don’t slip through the cracks of my memory and disappear forever. And some of the most memorable of these quotations are when the kids get something wrong.
To wit:
*About a year ago, Matthew informed me that he goes to a “Montessaurus school.” (I believe the “Montessaurus” was the dinosaur who learned at his own pace and got to choose his own activities.)
*On Easter Sunday, my mom the Easter bunny put a plastic Slinky into each of the boys’ baskets. According to Luke, the Easter Bunny gave him a “Stinky.” It’s an honest mistake, really, if you figure that “stinky” is a word with which he is not unfamiliar (see reference to pull-ups, above).
*While watching a nature show, Matthew commented on the fact that some animals are chased by “creditors.” (I actually think that one is brilliant. Being deeply in debt, being stalked by a lion through the savannah — it’s probably pretty much the same feeling.)
What are your favorite “kid sayings”? Have your own kids (or grandkids, siblings, cousins, etc.) gotten a word or saying adorably wrong?
Posted in Adventures in Parenting
As a teacher, I’m a strange hybrid: a work-outside-the-home mom who, for two months every summer, becomes a stay-at-home mom. And I have found that when I’m home, I’m sometimes at a bit of a loss when it comes to entertaining my kiddos. I don’t have the big bag of tricks that full-time stay-at-home-moms have — which is why Sarah Reinhard’s new book Catholic Family Fun is, as they say, scratching me right where I itch.
Sarah (who blogs at SnoringScholar.com) was one of the first online buddies I got to know when I started blogging in 2008. And her other books (about observing Advent and Lent with kids) are super. So it’s not surprising that Catholic Family Fun is such a treat. It’s full of all kinds of activities that parents can do with kids, everything from games to service activities to theatrical productions to homemade greeting cards. And what makes this book “Catholic” is that, for every activity, there is a short section called “Faith Angle” that shows parents how they can make that particular activity tie in with the Catholic faith. (For example, the entry about homemade greeting cards suggests that you help your kids make get-well cards for people on the parish prayer list; the section on a visit to the zoo invites you to see if you and your kids can remember times that animals appear in Bible stories). Sarah also explains how each activity can be adapted in various ways to fit your needs, and the appendix at the end is super-helpful in organizing the activities by cost, duration, and prep time.
As I read the book, I dog-eared several pages with my favorite activities, and last Saturday morning I piloted one of them. The activity was a scavenger hunt, and, taking a cue from Sarah, I adapted it to meet the personality of my own little test subject (a five-year-old who is learning how to read and who loves a challenge).
I announced to Matthew that we were going to do a scavenger hunt, and he was immediately intrigued. “What’s that?”
“It’s where I write a list of things for you to find,” I told him. “It’s really fun.” I grabbed a notebook and a pen, parked myself on the couch, and within about five minutes (an interval during which I had to constantly angle my notebook away from the eager eyes of my little guinea pig), I had come up with a list of seven items for him to find.
I handed him the list and it was so gratifying to see him read each item aloud to himself, slowly. After each one he’d say, “Oh!” and dash off, laughing, to find the necessary object. We made a pile of them on the rug, and he could hardly contain himself with the excitement of it all.
“Mommy, let’s do another one!” he said the moment we were done. So I grabbed the pen again, whipped out another list (I made it harder this time: it had items like “Find a mammal” and “Find a book that has purple on the cover”) and he ran around blissfully. Inexplicably, he started to exclaim “Ay, caramba!” to himself each time he located an item, which I found simultaneously perplexing (where on earth did he learn that?) and really super adorable. Happy shouts of “Ay, caramba!” echoed around the house, and our little pile on the carpet grew bigger, and I sat on the sofa and thought: Thank you, Sarah. This activity is gold.
“Let’s do it again!” he said after completing the second list, but as it was 11:20 in the morning and I had not yet showered, I told him we’d have to wait.
About twenty minutes later, I wandered into the dining room where I found Scott sitting at the table, notebook and pen in hand, with Matthew hovering eagerly nearby. Daddy’s list proved to be even more challenging than mine, containing items like “Find a stuffed animal who is wearing clothes.” But Matthew was thrilled with the game and, honestly, so am I. It’s easy to pull off, it fills my son with joy, and he even gets to practice his reading in the process.
So I think my “fun quotient” just rose a few points. And what’s even cooler is that this is just the beginning. I have several more ideas to try, all thanks to Sarah’s great little book.
I think we’ll be hearing a lot more “Ay, caramba!” around here … and, as Matthew would be the first to tell you, that’s a very good thing indeed.
Thanks to Pauline Books for the review copy. For even more information and activity ideas, check out the book’s website.
Posted in Mmmm .... books
At Mass yesterday, it was the First Holy Communion for the kids in the parish CCD program. The priest invited them to stand around the altar during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and it was so sweet to see the girls in their white dresses and the boys in their dark suits and little ties, their chins barely clearing the altar, watching with such rapt attention. They were amazingly well-behaved; the beautiful mystery of what they were seeing seemed to be resonating with them.
I thought about the times that I’ve stood close to the altar myself during Mass, at retreats and at my own wedding. And there’s no doubt about it, it’s a moving experience. I’m currently at a period of my life where we’re usually about as far away from the altar as you can get, a function of 1) having a very restless three-year-old and 2) habitually coming into Mass a few minutes late, in spite of our strenuous efforts to be on time. And I have to admit that I do miss being close to the action, so to speak.
I wasn’t at all close today; we were, unsurprisingly, in the very back row of the church. But as I watched those little children all gathered in hushed silence around Father, and later, as I saw their parents come up and join the children for the Our Father, I thought about how that will be me one of these years. I looked at Lukey, who was lying on his stomach on the kneeler as if it were a surfboard, and in my mind I fast-forwarded to the time when we’d be celebrating his First Communion, and he’d be entering into the mystery of it all himself. And I know that when my boys prepare for their First Communion, I’ll get to be close to the experience in a totally new way. I’ll get to see it all from their perspective, and answer their questions, and watch their faces as they process the mystery of it all for the very first time.
And I love thinking about how this ritual is, by its very nature, all about closeness and intimacy. Even when we’re sitting in the very back row of the church, even when we totally miss the words of the consecration because we are trying to keep a small child from foraging through a stranger’s purse, we still get to walk down that aisle and hold the body of Christ in our hands. We get to take Christ into our very selves, our very body and blood …and you simply can’t get any closer than that.
Posted in Musings
My relationship with my parents has always been a solid one. I like to say that in the cosmic lottery of parents, my sister and I hit the jackpot — Mom and Dad are kind, wise, ethical people whose love and counsel have helped me through more than one rocky period in my life. I think I always took that for granted when I was younger, but it’s fascinating how, as an adult, I have learned to think about them more consciously, to trace all the ways that their lived example has shaped and influenced me. And that in turn makes me think about the ways that I am influencing my own kids.
In the spirit of that, I wanted to share this great article called Go Ahead: Write About Your Parents, Again. It’s by Tarn Wilson, whose beautiful guest-post about her mom was featured on this very blog last fall. It’s geared towards writers, but there’s wisdom for everyone here because it really explores the impact of our parents on our lives. One great quote:
All cultures have their origin stories, their creation myths, which reveal their foundational beliefs about human nature, good and evil, power hierarchies, and the qualities of a hero. Our family story is our personal origin story. When we examine it, we see more clearly the assumptions—faulty or inspired—by which we live.
If you blog or journal or write about your life, it’s totally worth a read. If you are a parent — or if you’ve ever had a parent — it’s also totally worth a read. Guaranteed to get you thinking.
The Mother and Sister of the Artist by Berthe Morisot
Posted in On writing
