Most recent Ink and Watercolor. I like to think of this as a vision of Vic and I sitting companionably on a bench as we hike/visit the Alps. Good morning. Working through Kathleen Norris again. As a young wife setting up house on her grandmother’s farm in the “desert” of South Dakota, her interest is peaked when she visits a monastery 90 miles north to hear a author speak. Afterwards, she had a list of questions and wrote them in a letter to one of the monks she had met. He answered as best he could and sent her a dense book on theology. When that didn’t do the trick he advised her to read the letters of Flannery O’Connor. In O’Connor Norris found a kindred soul: a serious writer striving to incorporate faith into the human experience. Norris struggled with the twin desires to write and to explore faith—a combination she had come to see as impossible while in college—and while not antagonistic to her grandmother’s little church down the road, she cou...
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“Age is Just a Number”
“Age is Just a Number” I don’t like those banal sayings: “You’re only as old as you think you are.” “Age is just a number.” Arggghh, me thinks the elderly do protest too much. Yet, I’m living it. When in our twenties and thirties, we would load up the kids (those born to us and those we took in) and travel to my grandmother’s senior-living apartment in Florida. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, enjoyed our visits, enjoyed being around ‘young folk’ and bitterly complained that she was surrounded by old people. She never joined in with the myriad of activities available to her: bingo, cards, outings to town in an 15-seater old-people-mobile. She hated living with old people, with scheduled activities, and nurse check-ins. She refused to be babysat or to drink the kool-aid of Oldness. As children, we grandkids would call her our modern grandma , as opposed to my father’s mother, who was our old-fashioned grandmother. I loved them both. My modern grandmother lived in a retir...
Amsterdam. Recent watercolor. The Desert Fathers and Mothers, according to Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me defined sin as “bad thoughts.” They said that sin, at its source, was a matter of the mind, of skewed thinking. From these bad thoughts came bad actions. Somewhere along the line bad actions began to edge out bad thoughts in importance. “Well, everyone has bad thoughts,” we say, “you can’t control them, so just concentrate on the actions. Besides, bad thought alone, don’t hurt anyone” And while it is true from a victim’s standpoint, (I would much rather you think bad thoughts about me then physically assault me,) neglecting the inner source of the drive to assault me (bad thoughts of greed, impatience, competition, control, etc) fails to address the human condition at its core, thus cutting off the thinker in this scenario from the only path of rescue. The church as it grew in power both politically and socially, turned the Desert Fathers’s and Mother’s focus from our ...

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