Forward to the past

Tomorrow I am flying to the States to return to the Maryknoll Motherhouse from which I left the convent 41 years ago.  I have been back to visit friends several times since, but during this visit I am making the keynote presentation to the annual reunion to which all Maryknoll sisters, past and present, are invited.  It is also the 50th anniversary reunion of the group of women who entered Maryknoll the same year as I.  I’m presenting a brief overview of (get ready for this) the history of the universe, which was the topic of my latest book.  I’m also giving a homily about hope (as in Faith, Hope, and Charity) at the liturgy.  I feel rather honoured, to tell the truth.

If anyone had suggested 41 years ago that Maryknoll would ever have me back under circumstances like this, I would have laughed at the fantasy.  It is quite astonishing how much Maryknoll has changed.  I think the nuns are expected to behave much more like responsible adults now than as submissive servants.  So I’m immensely eager to talk both to those who have remained and the much greater number who left Maryknoll but who, like me, are returning to touch base with old friends.

This will be my last posting for 12 days or so when I return to the UK. 

Another cheer for yoga

Based on a few paperbacks, I began teaching myself a kind of home-grown yoga in my thirties.  I’ve given it up for alternative forms of exercise more than once, but have always ended up by adding it back into my routine.

My latest unfaithfulness has just met with a similar fate.  I’ve enjoyed using our Glider (a kind of Nordic track on air), and for several weeks have been confining my exercise to 20-30 minutes of the aerobic and mild strength-training it provides.  But I found myself getting out of my chair after sitting for as little as ten minutes with stiffness, and a need to limp across the room half bent over before the pain permitted me to return to the full upright.  It’s embarrassing in a restaurant as I wend through the tables on my way to the Ladies Room.

So three days ago I cut ten minutes off my Glider routine and put my yoga routine back in. 

It’s already made an amazing difference.

Lent is 30 days too short

There was a study recently that tried to determine how long it takes to change an ingrained habit.  It looked at behaviors like smoking, sitting up straight, indulging in unhealthy snacks, or exercising regularly.  I don’t know whether to be encouraged or otherwise by the finding that it took at least 70 days to develop a new habit and bury the impulse to grab for a cigarette or drink, to slouch, or to watch television instead of taking a walk. 

It does explain why loosing weight too quickly so often doesn’t stay off, because it’s not enough just to get the weight off.  Or why people can stop smoking for months, and then start lighting up again.  One has to scotch the errant impulse to return to one’s bad old ways, or the initial burst of will power will all be in vain.

That means more than two months of self-imposed control.  Almost two consecutive Lenten fasts of 40 days each. 

No wonder I fail so often.  I’ve been expecting a transformation after making one resolution one night.  I seem to be at least 69 resolutions short.

IRS-induced anxiety attack

I went on line today to see what was happening to the US tax refund I thought should be in my bank account by now and wasn’t.  According to the feedback in relation to my return on the IRS (the US tax revenue service) website, I’d made a mistake and instead of getting the tax refund of just under $500, I owned them more than $600.  I tried to be calm, though that was somewhat difficult as my heart rate had shot up to over 100 bpm.  I carefully went through the numbers covering the errors they said I’d made and could not find the problem,  In fact, I thought my refund should have been $75 bigger, not $600 smaller.  

At which point I told Peter I’d reached the conclusion that I had to stop trying to do so much, because somehow I just can’t get my brain cells to work as well as they used to.  I told him I’d made some kind of mistake I couldn’t identify.  (But not that the size of my mistake was well over a thousand dollars.  I was saving that for a gin&tonic moment.)

Anyway, I got as clear a grasp of the issues as my anxiety could manage and phoned the IRS customer service line.  After a ten minute wait, during which I was urged not to hang up because my call “was important to them,” an agent took my identifying information.  At first she said there had been a problem with my social security number on my return.  I asked her what she meant, because the number was complete on my copy.  She fluffled around, so I suggested we move on to the errors they’d identified.  “Oh,” she said, “that’s been changed.  You were right on your original return and we’ve reinstated your original figures.  It’s just not uploaded to our website yet.” 

So she’s reauthorizing the refund.  I’m hugely relieved, of course.  But I’m beginning to think that if my brain cells aren’t working as well as they used to, they might be working better than the cells employed by the IRS.  I strongly suspect that the “problem with my social security number on my return” was their mistake as well.

But our internet connection is still working.  What more can one ask for?  All and all, it’s turning out to be a good day.

Talks with my grandmother

We were watching a BBC programme tonight on the thought processes and entire world view of the medieval mind.  Although they never saw them, almost everyone, educated and uneducated alike, were convinced of the existence of strange creatures in far off lands.  Whether dog-headed men, for instance, were human was a significant theological question considered to be critically important for missionaries who might meet them.  The pope actually ruled that pygmies in South America were human, so that it was appropriate for missionaries to convert them to Christianity. 

Lest we in the modrn world are tempted to feel a superior disdain for such ignorance, it is worth reflecting on just how many things in our own world view we have never seen but are just as real to us as dog-headed humans.  It is science that tells us about worm holes and gravity, about atoms and quarks and even dinosaurs. 

I was reminded of one of my African students studying at the university where I was teaching who told me that he’d talked to his grandmother the night before.  This was not remarkable until I realized he hadn’t talked to her on the telephone as I’d assumed but in a dream.  Perhaps still not immensely remarkable until I realized he believed it was actually his grandmother who had visited him in the night, and not a mere figment of his dreaming imagination.

But the real revelation, and the one that has influenced my thinking ever since, was the realization that there is no way to prove whether his perception of the world was the right one or whether mine was.  It is a question simply beyond the capacity of science to answer:  which of our perceptions are “real” and which are not? 

The best scientists can do is to say that only events that are potentially observable by more than one person can be scientifically verified.  Private experiences like dreams and feelings and hallucinations that cannot be shared by others are beyond the scope of the scientific method.  Science can study what people say they dreamed about, or the brain waves or other physiological changes that accompany various thoughts and feelings, but science cannot study private experience directly.  This insistence that scientific observations be verified by other observers or in repeated experiments has eliminated a lot of false reports.  However, that still skirts over the phenomenon of mass delusions when entire crowds of people are convinced they see or hear something like an apparition the rest of us think perhaps wasn’t really there. 

We live in mystery.  Even when we think we know something absolutely, there is always room for an alternative possibility, and that, god help me, I might be wrong.

Thinking the unthinkable

At last the world seems to have righted itself, and after three sessions with three different telephone engineers, our internet connection finally seems to be stabilized.  I do say that with some reservations because it has yet to be sorely tested by a seriously serious rain storm.  But so far it has survived several showers, which it was not wont to do for the last ten days.

It’s astonishing to think that I spent the first half century of my life without the internet, and that I am now so bereft without it.  I was surprised how much I missed writing this blog too, and now have a stack of little bits of paper on which I have scribbled reminders to myself about everything from world conditions to downright trivia I might write about.

I might as well begin with the confession that I am considering the unthinkable.  If Hilary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination instead of Barak Obama, I’m not sure I can bring myself to vote for her.  On the other hand, voting for a Republican, no matter how much of a rebel McCain has been, right now is beyond what I could force my hand to do.  

Perhaps I will protest by abstaining.  Not sure though.  Is that the coward’s way out?  

It could be worse.  I doubt my moral courage would be sufficient if I were living in Zimbabwe.  It’s scary to think my own biggest worry is getting a reliable internet connection.

The peskiest problems are intermittent

I’m getting a little tired of lucky days.  We woke up this morning to discover that our internet connection was once again, apropos nothing, out of order.  After a fraught half hour talking to the phone company representatives, I had shaved their promise to send an engineer to track down the problem from ten days to 48 hours.  Then I moved the cable from our internet router to each of the five phone outlets in the house to see if, by chance, there was one that worked.  None of them did.  So I put everything back exactly the way it was in the first place.

At which point we once again had a functioning internet connection.  This makes absolutely no sense to me, but if it goes down again, I will unplug everything again and see if it starts working again when I put it back together.  If it does, I will at least have narrowed down the source of the problem to our internal telephone cabling.  But I think the problem is outside.  It rained again last night and I suspect water is creeping into one of the connections.  When the sun comes out it evaporates, only to reappear when it rains again.

If that’s the problem and an engineer does have to come out, I hope it’s raining.  Otherwise I will have to convince him that it is not a phantom problem concocted by some daft woman who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

No matter what the field, the hardest problems to pin down are the ones that come and go.  I’ve had recent experience with intermittently functioning electrical sockets, telephone lines, showers, and computers.  I imagine the worst is when one is dealing with a physical or mental illness.  I remember research that suggested that having a consistently mentally ill parent was not nearly as destructive for a child as having one whose behaviour was unpredictable.

I can well imagine, because just having a temperamental internet connection is frazzling me.  In the meantime, I am amazed how fast I have become dependent on a technology I only started to use fifteen years ago.  And that was a dial-up.

The case against shock and awe

For the last couple of months there has been a particularly awful story about a child abduction in the papers here.  About six weeks ago, a nine-year-old girl disappeared on her way home from school.  It triggered an unprecedented search by police and the local community, and her mother appealed in tears for information and for Shannon to come home.  Two weeks ago she was found alive hidden in the drawer under a bed in a house less than a mile from her home. 

Since then her 29-year old mother, aunt, stepfather, his uncle, and a grandmother have been arrested.  The 21-year-old stepfather was apparently in possession of child pornogrophy, the mother, who has six other children by five different fathers, was charged with child abuse and whatever crime is associated with knowing where her daughter was all along.  One theory is that she has been planning on running away with the uncle who himself is charged with abduction and has since tried to slit his wrists in prison.  Shannon herself does not want to see her mother, her six half brothers and sisters have been taken into care, and the house where they were living was boarded up.  Meanwhile, the police are trying to keep the community from taking the law into their own hands.  As you can see, the story has all the charm of a badly-written soap.

A neighbour expressed the opinion that we should return to public flogging for people like this to teach them a lesson.  I said I understood the impulse, but unfortunately flogging and other such livid punishments rarely teach the intended lesson.  Too often the lesson that is learned is that the biggest bully is the one who wins.  It suggests, therefore, that the floggee should get better at beating up other people, so that we are actually encouraging them to become more effective bullies rather than teaching them to find other ways to respond.  I said I know it’s satisfying to lash out, but it’s a lot harder to show by example how to behave with respect and discipline. 

He was unconvinced.  I think I might as well have been talking to Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.   

 

When in Rome…

Several years ago when Peter and I spent a week in Rome, I got over any lingering doubt I might have harboured that the Roman Catholic Church represented some kind of spiritual home for me.  I came away with a renewed distaste for its arrogance and chauvinism, for its intolerance and use of fear and superstition to bully compliance.

Unlike many, I was also not greatly enamoured with Pope John Paul II, or not did I tremble with the discovery that John XXIII was now Blessed John XXIII.  Not surprisingly I was hardly impressed either with the election of Benedict XVI, Pope JP’s erstwhile Enforcer.

So I am quite surprised to discover that Benedict has engaged in three initiatives about which I am practically enthusiastic.  First, this Pope seems to be making an extraordinary attempt after 500 years to re-evaluate Martin Luther on the grounds that Luther’s first and major concern was to purge the Church of corrupt practices.  Luther was not bent first and foremost on creating a schism.  And perhaps the power and corruption entrenched in the established Church authorities at that time contributed to their refusal to give any credence to Luther’s persuasive arguments.

Then under Benedict’s direction, the Vatican has somewhat belatedly admitted that Galileo was not a heretic after all but a scientist who actually was right.  Moreover, the conclusion that Earth does revolve around the sun is not quite the crushing blow to Christian belief that Galileo was accused of propagating.  This realignment is important not so much for the updating of Catholic theology with the view held by the scientific community for centuries but because it is a demonstration that the rejection of science on a priori religious grounds is bound to fail.  As the earliest – and deeply religious – scientists argued, it was Jesus who said that “by their fruits you will know them,” and science is showing us the unsuspected and glorious fruits of creation.  Let us, therefore, change our limited view of God, rather than force Him into our narrow, fearful blindness.  In this context, the Pope has called for a serious review of the theory of evolution, among other modern contentious scientific theories, and I think is trying to suggest that faith and rationality are not intrinsically incompatible.

Finally, Benedict has set up a permanent Catholic-Muslin Forum in response to a call by Muslim scholars for a permanent dialogue with Christendom.  This will not eliminate the theological clashes between two world faiths each claiming to be the sole guardians of the one True Faith.  But to look for common ground and to approach each other with respect rather than destructive rivaly may begin to heal the terrible wounds going back more than a thousand years. 

Not to mention the wounds created by the Pope’s earlier undiplomatic suggestion that Islam was a creed of violence.  Given the history of Christianity, perhaps not the best way to begin.

All right, so there’s still a long long road ahead.  But I’m amazed that it is this Pope who has even suggested the road map.

Five lucky days

Our run of luck that began last weekend has continued.  Our internet connection sputtered on and off before finally retreating completely late Sunday.  Since then it has been the inevitable telephone calls with the “helpful” automated “press 1 if…” through to the five or six levels until you finally get put on hold to listen to Vivaldi until a live person materializes.

An engineer arrived this morning.  His – and our – first discovery was that the telephone cables draped through our loft and into five outlets below must have been put together by a spaghetti-maker.  No wonder I could make no sense of them.  Thank heavens he was bright and made an effort over and above basic requirements to get to the root of the problem.  Somewhere in the middle of testing and reconnecting, to the amazement of everyone, our internet connection reappeared.  He does not know why.  Which means it might disappear again without explanation.   Or it might be okay for years.  If we do lose the connection again, we’ll have to get an engineer at the cost of $150 an hour to test for the wonky strand of spaghetti.

We live in hope.