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Lent 2012: Day 24

Friday 16 March 2012

[Sharing kind words] involves very little self-sacrifice, and for the most part none at all. It can be exercised generally without much effort, with no more effort than the water makes in flowing from the spring. Moreover the occasions for it do not lie scattered over life at great distances from each other. They occur continually. They come daily. They are frequent in the day. All these are commonplaces. 

Just ask my students. And my wife. And my daughter.

The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.

Lent 2012: Day 23

Thursday 15 March 2012

Looking back -- oops.

Does it count if I post it a day later? Wouldn't be the first time...

Lent 2012: Day 22

Wednesday 14 March 2012

Kind words will set right things which have got most intricately wrong. In reality an unforgiving heart is a rare monster. Most men get tired of the justest quarrels.

If I could teach my students one extra-curricular lesson, it would be this. I have calmed furious students (sometimes furious at me, most often furious about something some peer has done) with a few kind words so often that it has become almost instinctive: “Get the kid away from the situation and say something kind.” A smile helps as well.

Yet they re-enter the same quarrel, sometimes only hours later (occasionally, even more quickly), and I can see a certain Sisyphean fatigue in them as they fuss. “A calm answer…” I mutter to myself, wondering if I can teach that by example alone.

The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.

Lent 2012: Day 21

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Criticism — being mean, in a sense — can be fun. We seem to show off a bit of our mental acumen. “Good one!” people cheer on when someone makes a particularly wittily barbed comment. It’s what “the dozens” is all about. So giving up that potential scoring comment is a form of self-denial — a big idea in Catholicism.

Faber explains it better:

The practice of kind thoughts also tells most decisively on our spiritual life. It leads to great self-denial about our talents and influence. Criticism is an element in our reputation and an item in our influence. We partly attract persons to us by it. We partly push principles by means of it. The practice of kind thoughts commits us to the surrender of all this. It makes us, again and again in life, sacrifice successes at the moment they are within reach. Our conduct becomes a perpetual voluntary forfeiture of little triumphs, the necessary result of which is a very hidden life.

That seems to be a good definition of magnanimity.

The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.

Lent 2012: Day 20

Monday 12 March 2012

[W]hat does all this doctrine of kind interpretations amount to? To nothing less, in the case of most of us, than living a new life in a new world.

In a sense, that is what Lent is all about: taking steps to create a new life from our old life. We give something up; we take up something new. Old habits die -- at least for a while -- and new ones take their place. And in the midst of our ordinary lives, we find an extraordinary renewal.

At least in theory.

living a new life in a new world

Habits, once they settle in and unpack, tend to stick around, but that has the obvious bad side as well: in trying to break a habit, we're trying to break out of a prison we've built and fortified and re-fortified all by ourselves, without much conscious thought. So I wish I could say I've been trying to employ new, kind interpretations to acts I previously would have chalked up to idiocy or malice. In the end, I've found myself consciously thinking, "Well, I should try to have a kind interpretation of this driver's actions, but such idiocy as he's exhibiting doesn't really call for kindness!" As if. It's like the cigarette smoker shaking out another stick, knowing full well she will regret it as soon as she touches fire to the tip.

The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.

Lent 2012: Day 19

Sunday 11 March 2012

When it looks like this, you have to get out.

Especially when you discover a nature reserve that's less than five miles from your home. Having lived here almost five years and only now discovering it is something of a source of embarrassment. All the times we could have simply hopped into the car and driven a few moments on a sunny spring evening for a quick walk -- a shame to admit, I tell you.

Our first day out, with the Girl looking for clues (scribbles in her flip notebook), there's only one way to take the afternoon:

Lots of new sights -- the Girl hasn't seen a bog in a while, and its soggy nature is fascinating, for all of twenty seconds. There's simply too much to see, and it's sensory overload.

The reserve is home to numerous birds, for which we search constantly -- some of us more effectively than others.

We reach the fuss point, though: the Girl is tired -- "BolÄ… mi nogi!" -- and hungry. It's time to head back.

The other trails will wait.

Dinner waits, and no matter the beauty of the walk, we march on through.

We pause only long enough for a frustration-laden picture.

But boy was that chicken afterward good...

Lent 2012: Day 18

Saturday 10 March 2012

We must rise to something truer. Yes! Have we not always found in our past experience that on the whole our kind interpretations were truer than our harsh ones? What mistakes have we not made in judging others! But have they not almost always been on the side of harshness? Every day some phenomenon of this kind occurs. We have seen a thing as clear as day. It could have but one meaning. We have already taken measures. We have roused our righteous indignation. All at once the whole matter is differently explained, and that in some most simple way, so simple that we are lost in astonishment that we should never have thought of it ourselves. Always distrust very plain cases, says a legal writer.

The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.

Lent 2012: Day 17

Friday 09 March 2012

A kind interpretation of actions is such a far-removed idea for me at times, but perhaps the most challenging times are when I'm in a heated situation with a student and when I'm driving in Greenville.

We must come to esteem very lightly our sharp eye for evil, on which perhaps we once prided ourselves as cleverness.

The latter is the most consistent challenge. While I don't necessarily see other drivers' motivation as being a result of evil, I constantly pride myself on the cleverness of my own driving as compared that of my fellow pilgrims on the road. This idiot doesn't know how to turn left at a traffic light. That dolt waits until the car in front of him is twenty car lengths ahead before pulling starting from a green stop light. This moron pulls so far into the intersection that it's difficult to make a left turn around her. That dork is so busy texting that he misses at least five seconds of the light. This one is a matter of merely reminding myself that I've no idea what these people drive the way they drive and that perhaps they have very good reasons. Perhaps the person hesitant to make a left turn recently had a terrible accident doing so. Maybe the person who is waiting for the care in front of him to be a seemingly ridiculous distance from him before starting is having car problems and the car doesn't respond as well as he wishes. Possibly person pulling too far in to the intersection is on the way to a critical meeting -- perhaps a family member is ill in the hospital -- and made a last-minute decision not to push the yellow light. And perhaps the person texting is texting about the death of a loved one.

Calmness while driving -- offering what Faber calls "kind interpretations" -- is fairly simple: there's very little at stake. A few moments lost here or there is hardly something to get enraged about, and whether or not the kind interpretations are justified, it all seems a relatively moot point when we consider who brief and insignificant the interaction.

The former example of heated situations with students is of much greater import. These are not brief, insignificant interactions. Like it or not, the student and I will meet again tomorrow -- and the day after and the day after that -- and will have to work together productively. So when a student begins the day with a smart comment to me, simply wants to come in and sleep, simmers with anger at a mild request from me, or any number of things that I would normally be tempted to take personally as an assault on my classroom authority and my personal dignity, I really have two choices in how I deal with the situation, and the decision I make depends on whether or not I create for myself a kind interpretation of the individual's motives. Students come to class with any number of significant and insignificant emotional weight pulling them down, and the simple truth is I have no idea when someone has placed more mass on her shoulders. Perhaps this young man comes from an abusive home and he just faced down a violently angry parent to deflect injury from a younger sibling. Maybe this young lady is responsible for a eight-week-old sibling during the night because their mother works the night shift. This young man might not have eaten breakfast this morning and had very little dinner the night before. Any one of these situations would be enough to set a day off on a crooked trail. And while I know more about these kids than the average stranger, most of them are still virtual strangers to me when it comes to the clockworks of their lives.

A kind interpretation of their anger, apathy, exhaustion, and frustration results in a kind answer, and we all know what that does.

The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.

Lent 2012: Day 16

Thursday 08 March 2012

[There] is one class of kind thoughts which must be dwelt upon apart. I allude to kind interpretations. The habit of not judging others is one which it is very difficult to acquire, and which is generally not acquired till very late on in the spiritual life. If men have ever indulged in judging others, the very sight of an action almost indeliberately suggests an internal commentary upon it.

An action occurs and what do I do? Being the cynic and pessimist I am, I assume the worse. The cause of the delay is nothing short of contempt for others. The motivation for behavior is nothing short of disrespect of authority. Up-turned corners of the mouth become a smirk. I -- and Faber, probably rightly, suggests the majority of others -- take personal insult where none is intended, disrespect where none is offered, and cowardice where none is evidenced.

Now all this is simple ruin to our souls. At any risk, at the cost of life, there must be an end of this, or it will end in everlasting banishment from God. The decree of the last judgment is absolute. It is this the measure which we have meted to others.

Perhaps this is what was really meant by "Judge not, lest ye be judged."

The quoted excerpt is from Father Frederick Faber’s Spiritual Conferences, excerpted here.

Lent 2012: Day 15

Wednesday 07 March 2012

...squared...