SPV Blogging: Clerestory Window....

This is an olive branch. From the main part of church, it is impossible to tell what this is. Until this evening, in fact, I thought this was a lily that had not bloomed. But then there was this problem of those small round things. They almost look like they curl, and I wondered if they were vine tendrils. But then I found several photographs of real olive branches, and other depictions in religious art, and I am now convinced.

This is one of the larger clerestory windows, the ones in the middle of the sets of three. The others so far have been symbols of Mary, and this one can be as well. The olive branch, of course, is best known as a symbol of peace, due to the Noah story with the dove and olive branch. It's a symbol of prosperity, as well, since olive trees were so very important in Judea. Here though, considering the consistency of the Marian symbols, I think it probably fits into the varied plant-based titles of Mary, including "fruitful olive branch" and "God's olive tree" and "Fruitful olive tree of the plains."


Side note: can you imagine a Catholic church with that name? I mean, down on South Padre in Texas is "Our Lady, Star of the Sea." So I could see some church out in Nebraska: "Our Lady, Fruitful Olive Tree of the Plains". Of course, their school would be OLFOTOTP, which would be pronounced "All photo tipi." Perhaps not such a good plan. Sr. Mary: don't include this note on the church website. Thanks.

SPV Blogging: St. John Clerestory Window

St. John is usually better known by his evangelist symbol of an eagle. So why is St. John depicted as a snake in a cup or chalice here?

Once upon a time...the legend goes...St. John on Ephesus...he was given a poisoned cup of wine to drink. He blessed it, and the poison disappeared in the form of a serpent. This is interesting to me because there is a similar St. Benedict legend. In fact, my St. Benedict medal has Benedict standing, holding a copy of his rule, with a shattered cup behind him and a raven hanging out. Enemies (who had asked him to be abbot at their monastery and then had second thoughts about him when he said no) tried to poison him. When he blessed the cup of wine, it shattered and the poison obviously was not consumed. And the poisoned loaf of bread was carried away by the raven.

So poisoned wine. Blessings. Freakish results. Pretty similar. But St. John's went away in the form of a serpent, and so he gets the (very cool) symbol of the cup and snake.

On St. John's Day (December 27th) there is a traditional blessing of wine and passing of the cup--this is not the same as Eucharist, this is simply blessing wine and drinking--or bringing wine in to be blessed and then taking it back home and pouring a tad into every barrel in your cellar to intermingle and spread the blessing around. The lovely "Ask a Franciscan" page I pull a lot of information from states this is a central European tradition.

So cheers, St. John.

Why, at least in my opinion, lay Catholics keep quiet

My neighbor has been posting comments on my last entry. I started this as yet another response to his responses...but decided it probably didn't belong on the comment page. It's not directed at him, for instance. It got a little...off topic, I guess. But I wanted to put it out there because it's something that's been bugging me about Catholics vs. Bible Protestants for a long time. When I say "Bible" Protestants I mean not Lutherans or the Anglican branches or other early reformation churchs. I mean later splits, churches that returned to the fundamentals (and there's another hot button red flag word...but the churches I'm referring to are the many strains of Baptists, Pentecostals, other congregational churches who believe in the trinity, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection---essentially, if they can recite the Apostle's Creed---but renounce other facets of Catholicism and mainstream protestantism. I'm not speaking of Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Christian Scientists, etc).

Please know that there are many, many, many things that infuriate me about my church. I think the holy spirit is being denied and ignored all over this land. Many things deeply trouble me. But I stay, for many powerful reasons that have nothing to do with allegiance to some wizened German sitting in his Prada shoes in Vatican City. I stay for reasons like St. Pius V, like St. Benedict's Rule, like the fact that I've tried to leave--for the orthodox church as well as for the quakers (that is about as disparate as you can get, frankly) but cannot.

As a cradle catholic, I have a difficult time with putting faith into debate-like settings. Since faith is just that--faith--it is hard for me not to just smile and nod at folks who do not believe the way I do. It is not my job to bring souls to Christ--we are each responsible for ourselves alone, and I know that is a difference between Catholics and Protestants. I live out my life, I am there if questions arise, I try to live my faith best I can to be the best example of Catholic Christianity, but in the end, I don't go fishin'.

The other woman in my oblate class is a convert from the southern Baptists. She's fascinating. She believes it is her calling to put that net out into deep water. As catholics, we were never trained to do so. We know what we have and don't feel the need to push...and I've encountered enough hurtful bible protestants in my time to be very fearful of the conversation.

On the other hand, we are called to live in the world. We are not a separatist cult or denomination. And there are a lot of fallacies about the Church that cause me great dismay--and that is hard to overcome in conversation with folks who were raised to hate us. The other oblate candidate gave me a list of books about the biblical defense of catholicism. About John 6 (she said growing up, they never had a sermon on John 6. And now she knows why). It's eye opening. I love listening to converts tell their stories. Tell about what the Eucharist means to them. Just as most native-born Americans couldn't pass the citizenship test, just as many Americans probably do not think about why they are American, why they stay, what they do to make this country better, to make themselves more of a part of our society, many cradle catholics fall into the category of "this is the way we've always done it." (Of course, I've met more than my fair share of, say, Church of Christ folks in Dallas, for instance, who did not think their faith through, either). Catholics as a rule do not know their bibles. They do not even know much of the tradition since the bible was put into the form it is today. They do not read up on their faith except where it convinces them how right they are already. They do not push any envelope, do not help their faith grow to be more mature, more joyful, more spirit-filled.

I remember sitting in a Renew 2000 meeting at Ruth's house and a woman brought in the hefty copy of the catechism. "Wow," she said, "Have you ever read any of this? I can't believe I believe this stuff!"

Catholics are prone to fall into superstition and blind following of silly little rules. They also, to my great dismay, fall prey to those who are trained to combat catholics--and believe the myths about their own church. Things that the church has never held to be true, or hasn't since the counter-reformation. But their cousin from the foursquare gospel church told them...so it must be true. There is such need for catechesis in our own church, something that is seriously lacking.

In the end, I am fascinated by my protestant neighbors and how often we are in agreement. (We were raised with myths about them, too--and all stereotypes, in all directions, have a root in truth or else they wouldn't ring so true). I've come to the conclusion that the parts where we agree are some of the parts that I like best about Catholicism, frankly.

SPV Blogging: Jesus is Stripped of His Clothing

Back to Lent. For a moment there, looking at the Ascension window, we were in the late spring, waiting for the pool to open, mowing the grass. But here we are, back in March. Back to the grisly drama of the way of the cross.

Our stations, I have mentioned, are impressive in their consistency and create quite a meditative state when one studies them in the quiet of this church, one at a time. Stations of the Cross are in churches because it was hard to make it to the Holy Land to do the real Way of the Cross. The Church allowed for the faithful to make a pilgrimage, of sorts, in parish churches, following the thirteen stations to the Resurrection. I think there was probably an indulgence involved. Could be still. Odd how far we move away from Christ's ideas sometimes. I don't think he would have kept a ticker tape of good deeds and sins and added and balanced it all up in the end. I really don't. But that doesn't have much to do with what we're looking at here.

Jesus is stripped of his clothing. Crucifixion. Nasty process that starts with flogging and ends with lungs filling with fluid and drowning/suffocation. This is yet one more humiliation. Look at the bewildered face on Jesus here. The humanity is so present in our stations. This is a man who suffered.

Tiny details on the side--they cast lots for his clothing, since it was too nicely made to tear apart and split up (for rags? To reweave? What would the plan be? It actually makes logical sense to cast lots instead). Note the older Jewish man looking on. I'm still not sure if these Jews on the sides of the stations are good guys or bad--I don't think they're the same as the ones who lay Jesus in the tomb back at station 13. I think these are members of the council. The ones who plotted against Jesus. But I'm not decided yet. As we move backwards through the stations, it should become more clear.

SPV Blogging Returns: The Ascension

Another gorgeous Emil Frei window. The Ascension. Jesus, resurrected from the dead, ascends into heaven. Notice his halo in this window--I learned recently that in religious art, different halos mean different things. This is a trinity halo, only for members of the trinity, with the three red extensions dividing the circle. In comparison, the little cherubs floating on the clouds below him just have simple round halos.

Jesus' right hand is in that peculiar position seen throughout religious art. Perhaps Sr. Mary can help me with this one, but I think it's a shorthand for Jesus Christ, Son of God. I can't recall--I remember learning about it in reference to icons, where Jesus makes a similar hand gesture, although the fingers are slightly curled in different positions. On the other hand, you can see the wounds of crucifixion.

I love how three dimensional this window is. The clouds are magnificent; the sky behind is deep and recessed. The light through the yellow and orange rays--while the last window I wrote about is endearing and breathtaking in a small way that sneaks up on you, this one pulls no punches. Here is the risen Christ, here is the reason we are gathered here today.

The Name Game

Alex asked how we decided on our baby names, and as my friend Rachel just gave birth Monday to Benjamin Joseph, younger brother of Samuel Joseph (mom and baby are fine according to Marvin), I thought I'd indulge the question. I love talking about names.

Sophia is wisdom, of course. We liked Sophia, or Sofia, for a long time. The first year I taught, I taught Sophia Norman--every year I had a kid who tore my heart out and made me want to run away with them away from their lives. Sophia N. had a good homelife, smart, strong, her mother was working on her associate's degree--but I feared somehow that Sophia would get led astray. And maybe she did, or maybe she didn't. I don't know. But the image of her face is burned in my mind.

I described where Esme came from. Esme is a past participle verb in french, or something like that, meaning "to have been loved" or something else equally untranslatable. Anyway, those were in our top ten or so, with Grace, Pilar, Caridad, Emma, Cecilia, Remedios, and a couple of others that are totally gone. We liked Remedios from the Gabriel Garcia Marquez book, 100 Years of Solitude, even though every Spanish speaking friend shouted at us via email to drop it. Too many Cuban idioms. So we did--and then the others kind of fell by the wayside by that last week. She was going to be Esme Sophia, and then, lying half awake in the recovery room, the nurse asks Mike casually, "what's her name?" and I mumble, "Sophia." I decided Esme paired with my last name wasn't going to fly. Too many short e's. But as a middle name, sure. Of course, we wound up picking the tenth most popular name for girls that year. But that's ok. Mike and his sister Christy survive with common names. It's foreign to me--sometimes there'd be another Bridget or Brigit or Bridgette in the school with me, but only one time in my 32 years have I interacted with a Bridgett. That would be Bridgett Bailey, down in Georgia. She couldn't even be known as Bridgett B., since my last name was Blake--so for a whole year I was known by my first and last name. Anyway.

So since Sophia was so popular, I sat down witha baby name book and started circling names I liked well enough that were totally off the radar screen. Mostly Irish, not all. And they were: Aine (anya), Aoife (eefah), Bernadette, Ekaterina, Fiona, Maeve, Marguerite, and Olga. Mike then went through and crossed out all of them except Fiona, Maeve, and Marguerite. Then we started looking at middle names--Sage was a big one, as was SarahAnn or Sarah-Ann. Both Mike's grandmothers plus my first name plus my aunt Sarah plus who knows how many other people we could lump in with Sarah-Ann. But read that fast, and it looks like Saran. As in wrap. So we dropped that. Then one night I was sitting at this computer, probably playing solitaire in some sort of OCD attempt to make things better (all my craziness magnifies itself when I'm pregnant), and glanced up at the shelf. There was the Beatrix Potter collection. Beatrix. Beautiful lady. Beatrix. And then it just fell together. Mike liked Beatrix, and we decided Maeve (which in Irish is spelled Meadhbh and has the same root as "mead", the wine made from honey) would go best. Maeve Beatrix. Haven't met another Maeve yet. People meeting us for the first time ask one of two questions:

a) Dave? May? What is it?
b) Is she named for Maeve Binchy?

The answer to b) is no. But then I do tell them that she's named for Beatrix Potter.

Our next, and probably final, pregnancy, hopefully in the next 18 months or so, will either produce Edward Raphael (although I teeter on this one...Mike is Edward Michael, I'm Sarah Bridgett...but we have time to decide), meaning "God had healed", and also an archangel name like his father, or a girl name that we've decided on for the most part but I am loathe to share. Marguerite would probably be the middle name--Marguerite Hall is where Mike and I met, and it means Daisy, or Pearl, and it's a lovely name. But the first name, once the baby is named, will roll off people's backs just fine. But before the baby is even conceived? I don't want the deluge of criticism like with our first set of choices. Sigh.

So there ya go.

I'm Highly Interested in...

Sophia's middle name is Esme. It is stolen directly from the JD Salinger story, For Esme with Love and Squalor. In this story (part of the Nine Stories collection), an anonymous narrator, possibly Seymour but my mom and I have debated that, is in England during WWII. He's in training there, and during his moments of leave, he wanders through the town nearby. There he listens to a children's choir, and then runs into one of the performers in a cafe. She is a young teenager and introduces herself as Esme.

They talk. She finds out he's a writer and boldly asks if he'll write a story and dedicate it to her. What should the story include? She asks for squalor. He's curious why.

"I'm highly interested in squalor," is her reply.

In Texas this past week, we stayed at my brother's house. His daughter is 6 months younger than Sophia and they played excellently. She is growing up just fine, still very innocent and sweet. But that's not the point. She and Sophia watched some TV--and I am not anti-TV, it's just that if I had cable or satellite, I would watch it constantly, so we don't. We do have a DVD player and put it to good use. But at Ian's house, they have satellite, and so Sophia got to watch Dora and a bunch of mid-morning kids cartoons I'd never heard of, nor could I repeat their names or plots to you. She even got to watch some things that are on our verboten list, like Spongebob, mostly because there is more than one TV in the house and darn it, it was my spring break too. I knit and chatted and went to the store and the library and whatnot. So I didn't run the show all day long.

One evening, while they are watching Mulan on the Disney channel, with commercials, which is new for Sophia, she runs out of the room to find me.

"Mom! I think I'm highly interested in floam." Like she's mocking Salinger.

Floam. It's one of those gross things that came on the market when I was teaching. Gooey like slime but with little pellets--I don't know, styrofoam? Plastic? Whatever. Supposedly it can dry and be floamy. I don't know much about floam because I wouldn't list floam as one of my interests.

"Ok..." I answer.

"And the TV said it was &19.95."

"Well, that's if we call and buy something through the commercial. I think we can still buy much smaller amounts in the store."

I'm going to let her buy some floam when we're in the near occasion of floam sometime soon. She's going to use her own money and maybe learn a lesson about commercials. Or maybe it will be just like she thought. Because that one "highly interested in floam" moment has spread. And not in the typical "I want that, Moooooommmmm, can I have it?" way. In a scrutinizing ruminating way.

"How much do you think floam costs?" she asks in the car on the way back from Texas.

"I don't know--probably a few dollars if you buy a small amount."

Later: "Do you think you can build things out of floam? Decorate things? What kind of colors are available?"

"I don't know Sophia, I don't know much about it. It's not something I'm interested in."

"Well, I am. I'll have to find out."

So I guess we're going to find out.

And....We're Back.

I am back in town now, home from Texas. I want to write about Texas, about knitting, about spring. About what Sophia is currently "highly interested in." I have Pius to write about and post pictures of, and I have a much larger collection of heart shaped rocks now. Rob and Janet continue to search for houses, Maeve continues to be Maeve.

And in two days, on Thursday, I will have been blogging here at SCM for one year.

But right now it is Tuesday. Sophia goes to art camp and then to piano and back to art camp. I believe this afternoon will be spent at the grocery store Or the ironing board. So other things must wait. Till this evening, then.

Flap

When I taught first grade, I had a student whom I will refer to as Oscar--not his real name--and Oscar was brilliant. So brilliant that when we had him tested, he was up above 160 on the IQ. Brilliant. In fact, I remember commenting to my friends at the time that he was the first person I knew who was documented as smarter than me (I was tested in second grade; I did rather well). Of course, since then I've met other kids smarter than me, and I know for sure that I have friends who are smarter than me, but they've never shown me their test results. But here was Oscar with his 165.

He was also more than a tad strange. Not a bad kid, but patently strange. His conversation skills were limited at that point to mimicking other conversations he'd heard, whether in class or from movies. He loved knock knock jokes but didn't get them when others told them to him. Recitation of facts was a big deal, too. He gave me a watch for Christmas and told me it bothered him when we were late for PE--could I please keep better track of the time? We were never late again and he stopped flapping.

Flapping. He would flap his hands in front of him, like a bird trying to take off. Not when everything went according to plan--only when snags in his day threw him off course. He would flap. Sometimes jump. And once he started with this, the rest of the day was ruined--for him and for me. So I learned what Oscar needed and the rest of my year went pretty smoothly.

I've been flapping this week.

Daylight savings time starts early this year, therefore all our brilliant computers will be off by an hour. Mike is a computer consultant. He is at clients all week. Monday night, he got home at 1 in the morning. Last night, at 10. I failed to notice this was coming, as I prepare to pack up for the weekend and then for next week. Failed to take into account that this week, with worship commission, church cleaning, haircut, art & environment, three tutoring sessions, packing for two trips, school, housecleaning, voting, fish fry, groceries, Target--that I would also be doing this with two children in tow and nobody to give them a bath but me.

Wah wah, I know. I've done the single parent gig before, and been ok for the first few days. But I usually had more prep time and it wasn't during other big things. And, frankly, I'm doing this week pretty well, too. It's just that the blog, the house, the kids--they get a little less of me than usual. Because when I have certain expectations flap and they flap aren't met flap, I panic flap flap and flap. I don't panic like normal people--I do work avoidance like knitting. Like cleaning the grout in the bathroom. And flapping.

So I know I have more Pius blogging to do--it will happen in the next day or so--and I have other things to say, too. Always have something to say.

Like Johnny would say, more to come.

Fish Fry and Stations

Fish Fry. Last year I wrote this about the fish fry. Actually, it's how this blog started, when it comes down to it.

Tonight was our second fish fry of this Lent. I worked the line for the first time--in the to go room. The folks who run this--Kathy and Tom, with no small help from Sr. Mary and many others--seem to have it down. Everybody looked real tired by the time I ducked out at ten to 7, but we'd run out of fish--I guess that's a good sign. I hope so. I made my oreo cake this week. I noticed it was all gone when I picked up my pan (which I then dutifully left in the back of church).

I went upstairs to lead stations of the cross. This is the first time I've led, and I had 4 adults and a baby join me. We used a book of stations that parishioners wrote--I did the 14th--and Sr. Mary used my photographs of our stations throughout. A few of them--Mary's, George's, Sr. Roberta's--were beautifully written and thoughtful. It was a lovely pause in my day, in my week. I'd never seen it that way before.

So now I smell like fish and need to get Sophia and her friends from the kids night out we attend at a small Christian/non-denominational church out in Webster (our neighbors are the connection). This of course makes me wonder if we could get something started at Pius once in a while. Maybe once summer rolls around. As if I need to think about that. Ha!

I look at some more houses with Rob & Janet tomorrow, and my mother in law, Mary Helen, is coming to make dinner and spend time. Right now Pete and Steve and Mary and Frank and some other guy are in my living room with Mike. Making a huge mess and watching Rome. Of course, Maeve is really responsible for the mess.

Gotta run. Have a good weekend.

SPV Blogging: It's Almost St. Pat's, After All

Three in One, Triune God. Here depicted as Patrick did, according to legend: in the shamrock. Of course, the Irish were already pretty hip to the idea of gods with several faces or personas--he probably didn't have to use the shamrock.

Up close, it looks hastily done. Emil Frei stops by the workshop and says to the assistant, "oh, and it's an Irish church."

"Ja, ja, the shamrock," is the reply, and he scribbles one in on the window he's working on at the moment.

According to Dale Preston, who taught me a couple of things about stained glass, even though lead is what holds these windows together, it doesn't pose a great risk to folks who work on it. He used Emil Frei's assistants as the example--decades of exposure to daily lead (give us this day...) and they never had ill effects. Of course, that was in the days when they couldn't test precisely, and frankly, you have to have a bellyfull before an adult will show symptoms of poisoning. But this was our reassurance that we weren't going to keel over in our introduction class.

It sure didn't negatively affect the product.

SPV Blogging: Where He's Headed

So he says goodbye.

The window of Jesus saying goodbye to his mother is flanked, as all the large windows are, by windows of two angels. Above are three small angel faces. But below him is this: the road ahead.

Most of the large windows has some sort of symbol below it, either of what just happened, what's coming, or something of importance. The ones that don't are sitting above confessionals--but this one has the road. Green fields, trees, a town in the distance. He's on his way.

New Mah Jongg

The new set arrived yesterday! Here is a sampling of tiles, from the new one, from my original set (Brian and Maloki gave it to me in 2000), and the older 1930s/1940s bakelite set (although it is not known if it is bakelite or catalin, a bakelite competitor. It's a light butter yellow instead of the usualy bakelite orange, but its edges are sharp, which tends to be a bakelite trait as opposed to the other. But of course, now I'm rambling).

I took the same sampling of tiles from each set. The top three are the three dragons: white, green, red. The second row has the joker, two flowers, and the east wind. The bottom row has a 1 Bam (the bird tile), a 3 Bam, 1 Dot, 6 Dot, and 7 Crak.





The bakelite set is old enough, it didn't have jokers--but it did have lots and lots of extra "flowers" of various sorts--occupations, seasons, and flowers--and I took 8 of them and put maneki neko stickers on them. They're from mahjongtiles.com. Maneki nekos are Japanese good luck symbols. I have one that my friend Alyssa gave me, whom we refer to as Happy Lucky Kitty (the maneki neko, not Alyssa).

Lucky kitties as jokers makes sense to me, more than whatever the other jokers depict--dragon heads? Hard to say. It's nice to pick up the joker and see Happy Lucky Kitty sending you good luck.

SPV Blogging: Jesus and His Mother

The sky is blue, partly cloudy. Any other day like this, it would be laundry or cabinet building or taking care of a garden. It looks like the blustery March day that's outside my window right now. A clear, cool day with wind blowing the winter away. This more than just a spring day, however. This day is one of those that Mary will hold in her heart--not happy, but important. Heart pierced by a sword indeed. She and her son stand beneath an arch under this blue sky, wishing there were better words to say. This is her son--but after 40 days in the desert, how has he changed? He's leaving for good this time, although she will see him along the road. Still, there is this moment when she realizes that he is her son, but he belongs to someone else as well.

This window depicts them as barefoot. All the other windows show them with shoes on. Everyone wears shoes--to not be able to afford shoes, or to be stripped of ones shoes, was shameful. But to choose to go barefoot was a sign of mourning. Their shoes are off; his left foot is planted near her, but his right is already on the road.



Notice the little clover, or shamrock, planted next to that foot. Emil Frei leaves no detail out.

This last picture, however, once I got these home and looked at them larger on the computer screen, is the one that made me gasp. I had always seen her hand on his heart, his right hand holding the edge of her cloak. But look where his other hand is. I never ever noticed it until this close up.

I cannot overstate how much this window stirs something within me. Until I started really looking at this one, I had an image of Mary in my mind that was cool, almost passive. My image of Jesus had him detached from those around him--he had apostles and friends, but not relationships like this. Raised in Catholic churches, most of the time I see him as a child, or crucified. But there is so much in between that is human. Of course he was going to miss his mother. And he must have known what the separation was going to do to her.



Good liturgical art, good church art, isn't for art's sake. It's not so we can have a pretty building to gather in. It's to communicate ideas of the divine to those gathered. It's to meditate upon, ruminate upon, be there day after day until suddenly you see it.