Category Archives: books

Shame that is glory and grace.

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“Extreme Humility”

More than two years ago I began to engage with Timothy Patitsas’s book The Ethics of Beauty. It’s an inconvenient book because of its unwieldiness, and I didn’t get very far into it until this summer, when I determined to read it on a regular basis, with its weight resting on my kitchen table and I hefting only a cup of tea.

Just in time for my trip earlier this month and the necessary sitting on airplanes, I discovered that the book is now on Kindle, Hallelujah! By the time I returned home I had made my way through 31% of its 729 pages, to page 224, in the middle of the chapter titled “Shame and Sacrifice.” I will start sharing my gleanings on that theme.

Father Stephen Freeman has written many times on his blog about shame, and until now I hadn’t read about it elsewhere. I particularly appreciated his explaining the toxic shame that cripples so many people in the modern world. In the last couple of years he’s written about healthy shame, too, as in the article “Can Shame Ever Be Healthy?” He credits the author John Bradshaw and his book Healing the Shame That Binds Us for clarifying the difference between the two, in an era when many people don’t want to acknowledge such a thing as the healthy version. But they are ignoring the science, according to Fr. Stephen:

“We are hard-wired for a response (one of the nine identified neuro-biological affects) that is accurately described as ‘shame.’ It is not a product of culture. It is universal, timeless, and biological. It can be compared to other effects such as the ‘surprise-startle’ effect, or the ‘distress-anguish’ effect, or the ‘interest-excitement’ effect. The ‘mechanism’ of the shame experience, whether toxic or healthy, is the same, differing only in its intensity and the issues that surround and embed themselves as complex, emotional triggers.”

Patitsas likewise sees the tendency of modern therapy to disbelieve in healthy shame, because:

“…it is so busy promoting self-regard and, ultimately, self-love, that it can’t possibly also teach us to look to the source of healthy shame outside ourselves. To replace the wrong kind of shame in us with the pure quality of shame, soul therapy must bring us face to face both with God and with other human beings who’ve seen what we’ve seen and yet have done better than us – that would be, in one person, Jesus Christ. Or, if you like, God and the saints…. Healthy shame is a fruit of deep organic processes; it is the glory upon the face of Moses when he descends from Mt. Sinai.”

It is interesting to put the insights of these two paragraphs together and begin to understand that to deal with our neurobiology and psyche, trying to create self-esteem without any reference to our Creator and Savior is a dead end, an unworthy goal. Yes, the inner man is essential, but the true self is only revealed by the Kingdom of God within, after “deep organic processes.”

To replace toxic or unhealthy shame with healthy shame, Patitsas continues,

“…we must also see Christ crucified, or else we will never overcome our false ideas about what is and isn’t shameful. Without seeing ‘the King of Glory’ hanging from the cross, a person will never be able to understand those times when accepting to be shamed by others is a necessary part of receiving God’s glory.”

Fr. Stephen points out a scriptural reference to shame that lines up with this, from Sirach 4:21:

“For there is a shame that leads to sin, and there is a shame that is glory and grace.”

May the Lord strengthen us in the latter direction!

Elizabeth rescued and blessed.

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“I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty old house; for when I went into the library, with its four windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen — a life spent with the odours of other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils, and the noise of their wrangling servants in one’s years, and parties and tattle for all amusement.”

― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

The Thracian Filly

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by Ivy

My direct experience with horses was mostly long ago when some of my childhood friends owned them and I rode a few times. My late husband and I might have gone on a ride once, too. 95% of what I know about the animals intellectually I learned just a few months ago, from the Flicka series of books by Mary O’Hara. I’d wanted to read them for more than thirty years, as I saw my children enjoying them one by one. Finally I was in the mood and our well-worn paperback copies were still on the shelf —  just the right size, too, for reading in bed at night until my eyes would begin to close.

Mary O’Hara

I’ve never read anything like them; I kept wondering who was O’Hara’s intended audience. I used to think they were young adult novels, but now I realize they aren’t. They feature plot threads of coming-of-age, and the young love between one boy and a girl who also loves horses was very sweet and believable. But the adults’ perspective on their children, and the drama of their marriage, seemed to me to be beyond the scope of what a young person would be interested in.

I was surprised at how much the books were about the animals, the wild horses that are the main business of the Wyoming ranch where the family lives and where the boys are expected to participate in the work and bear serious responsibility to a degree that is rare these days. When I read this ancient poem it took me back to O’Hara’s stories, and especially the intimate knowledge of horse behavior that she seems to have.

In the books, not all of the wild horses that the horse tamers deal with are ultimately harnessed and saddled like the one in Ivy’s drawing, and everyone in the ranch family appreciates and respects their free and spirited friskiness and is careful not to entirely kill it.

THE THRACIAN FILLY

Ah tell me why you turn and fly,
My little Thracian filly shy?
Why turn askance
That cruel glance,
And think that such a dunce am I?

O I am blest with ample wit
To fix the bridle and the bit,
And make thee bend
Each turning-end
In harness all the course of it.

But now ’tis yet the meadow free
And frisking it with merry glee;
The master yet
Has not been met
To mount the car and manage thee.

-Anakreon (582 – 485 BC) Greece
Translated by Walter Headlam

Forest and cookie critters.

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June beetle on the Deadfall Trail

I forgot to show you the summer “bugs” I saw on my trip last week. I know you wouldn’t want to miss them, so I’ll put them at top here. Also so that I can have a flower or something more traditionally pretty at the bottom.

They were all the large size of insects that I only ever see when camping or in the forest, and Pippin does live in the forest. As soon as I would step outside in the early morning my senses took me to mountain camping trips, where the air at the beginning of the day is cool and dry and piney.

Robber Fly

 

One 95-degree midday Ivy called me over to see a creature resting in the shade on the tree swing. It was a surprisingly still subject, which enabled me to identify it as a Robber Fly. And the morning that I departed, a huge Western Sculpted Pine Borer landed on Pippin’s arm. She brushed it off and then collected it on a paper, where it sat, possibly stunned, and posed.

Western Sculpted Pine Borer
Butterfly Milkweed

My first morning we found a chipmunk on the front doorstep, which a cat had brought as an offering. The second day the sliding door would not shut, and the children and I finally figured out that a dead mouse was jammed between the two doors. I could not access it to get it out, but when she got home Pippin managed after laboring with a yardstick. The next morning another mouse was left at that back doorstep, which I disposed of. Four cats live with the family and at least two are hunters.

We watched “My Octopus Teacher” one night. Have I already mentioned that movie? I also saw it with my Colorado children last summer, and like it very much. I’ve heard a couple of people say that they wish there were less of the narrator and more of the octopus, but if it weren’t for the narrator-photographer, who visited the octopus nearly every day for a year, there would be no story. He had to tell it in his way.

As it is about how the whole experience of interacting with the octopus helped him move into a healthier life and frame of mind, I have to take it as it is, take the human subject as he is. Without agreeing with all of his presuppositions about nature, I very much appreciate that his relationship with the creature was thrilling and healing. Ivy declared that it is her favorite nature movie. Over the next several days she drew one picture after another of ocean landscapes.

Often the children would draw while I read to them, and I read for at least an hour every evening before bed. Mostly this time I read from The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon. I gave this book to my grandchildren a few years ago, thinking it was an anthology she had compiled of others’ works. But no, all the stories are by Farjeon herself.

They are the most unusual children’s stories I’ve ever read, a combination of fairy tale style with more realistic everyday happenings, and silly stories that make us laugh and laugh. But all happy hearted, and many brimming with pure Goodness. If Scout had not been away at Boy Scout Camp, he would have insisted that we read “The Princess Who Cried for the Moon,” a very long story about a whole kingdom of people who don’t have their thinking caps on.

Eleanor Farjeon

I still haven’t read the whole lot, but I did notice that the last entry in this edition is not a story by Eleanor but a piece titled, “Tea with Eleanor Farjeon,” by my beloved Rumer Godden. I read that one aloud, too, and Ivy was interested but Jamie drifted away. Eleanor sounds like the sort of old lady I would like to be. I wanted to quote from Godden’s article, but I can’t find my own copy of the storybook at the moment.

I spent six nights  last week at Pippin’s Mountain Homestead, longer than any other visit. That gave me time to go with the children to the library and to have a breakfast picnic in their favorite park that features a tiny waterfall and “jungle.” Ivy made her dragon to fly over the creek, and I discovered chicory and more.

There was lots of water play in the back yard, resulting in burned shoulders. And a big batch of gingerbread for cutting out with my new tiny animal cutters.

I suppose it’s because Pippin’s garden in the middle of the forest gets extra water, that the ferns constantly encroach. I was watering the new zinnia and dahlia sprouts and wondering at the robust ferns still popping up everywhere. They push against the deer fence that surrounds the vegetable and dahlia enclosure, and try to colonize the whole inside space, too.

Where I pulled out a few fronds to let sunlight on to a strawberry bed, we saw that frogs had been living among them. And while I aimed the hose at small flower plants, Duncan cat lay nearby in his cool and ferny hideaway and begged me to leave that colony as is. And for now it remains, another corner of the estate hospitable to critters.