Book, Unrecommended: Secret Keeper

(Disclaimer: This is not in reference to any church in particular. It happens everywhere.)

Pastors are in a bad spot when it comes to 1 Peter 3:3-6. They can't tell the girls in their confirmation classes to put more clothes on, because what kind of perv would notice that the little dears are dressed like streetwalkers? And I also can't exactly go up to someone and request that their daughter throw on a sweater over her skintight, lowcut, spaghetti strap suspended top on account of my husband has to look down it every time she skips up to our Lord's altar in the classy getup. I attended a Lenten supper a while back put on by a certain group of youngsters, and I wasn't sure if I was at the parish hall or Hooters. This is not a stable environment for the perpetually parturitional or postpartum Frau Pastor who worries constantly (and needlessly, I know) about her husband not having a properly proportioned wife waiting for him at home.

So anyway. I found this cute little book and hoped that it might be of some use as, perhaps, supplemental reading for 6th commandment studies or a confirmation gift to a female catechumen. But the scandal of Lutheran particularity reared its predictable head, because of course it's full of smarmy evangelical theology and piety. Eg, Lift up your arms like you're totally rocking out in worship!!!!!! If your stomach shows, quit dressing like a ho!!!!!!!!!!! Awesome!!!!!!!! (My memory may be colored slightly by annoyance with the disorienting graphics and pullquotes, and hip punctuation.) One anecdote told the thrilling tale of a girl accepting Jesus while on the phone with someone who discerned via what she had said about chaste dressing that she wasn't a Christian. Bottom line: I bought and read this so you wouldn't have to.

But what to do? The papists have resources along these lines, but their stuff is also always reliably packed with doctrinal propaganda. I have zero confidence in Our Beloved Synod's youth resource providers to come up with something useful in this regard based solely on the promo pics that turn up in our mailbox for the youth gatherings ("Yeah huh Lutherans are too young and hot, and it would be totally Law-oriented not to show it off, which is the only thing we know about being Lutheran!"). And Higher Things, while having much to recommend it, also patrols close to the antinomian border of the Lutheran neutral zone that is personal piety. I can't help getting the impression sometimes that the only sin they're really that worried about is contemporary worship--have these people forgotten how teenagers think?

It would be silly of me to imagine that there's a CPH contract for someone in this somewhere . . . but I sure wish there were. In the meantime I'll take smug comfort in the knowledge that only my Pietism is showing.

Will anyone keep reading our blog if we don't say something about Issues, Etc.?

We think we'll just leave this in the capable hands of every other Lutheran blogger in the universe.

(Heart)Breaking News

Why do online news sources feel the need to put up a detailed headline every time some horribly messed up person commits an unthinkable atrocity against his or her child? I absolutely hate it. Just the information given in the headlines is terribly upsetting to me, and what good does it do to publicize them anyway? There should be a code or something: "Anyone with a morbid interest in yet another impossibly sickening example of man's inhumanity to man, click here."

A while back one of the National Review writers kept linking to this kind of story in the Corner. I emailed her every time she did it begging her to quit, and after a while she did (although she never responded to my emails). Seriously, what is the point? Don't we all know that people are no darn good? I used to just avoid the problematic site for a while when one of these headlines would go up and hope it would have cycled out by the time I went back, but they're getting increasingly harder to avoid. I'll say this for NPR, for all their irritating bias (and their charming blindness thereunto, which really is cute), I've never heard them report on one of these purely sensationalist horror stories.

Diapering ethics stink.

At long last, my diaper questions sort of answered (yes, I do occasionally read something other than National Review). An additional variable we have to factor in is the passing on of utility costs to the congregation, since that's part of Dad's compensation--this sure gets complicated.

I'm intrigued by the gDiapers link at the end, but my cursory investigation, which is all I have the time and energy for right now, seems to indicate that this is yet another one of those products which allows only rich people to do the responsible thing?

Unto us

a child is born!
a [third] son is given!

I beat the widget and went into labor all by my very own self for the first time.
And Dad is thrilled because Babyboy held off until Easter Monday (His reasonable requests regarding the delivery of this baby: that he not have to miss church, sleep, or a meal. What a good wife I am to meet all three!)

I didn't beat Rebekah's world record of 71 minutes, but a 12:10 pm delivery for a 10:00 am check-in to the hospital isn't too shabby, if I do say so myself.

So far his brothers even seem reasonably fond of his 8 lb. 1 oz, 21" self.

And hey, someone change the counter; he's pagan no longer :)

Seeking American Wisdom

We just received our Economic Stimulus Act notice from the IRS this morning. We're in the money, I guess. And I guess I should be feeling pretty great that my government loves me so much and gives me all it's nice borrowed cash. So let's just say that's how it is. I just love that my government is borrowing cash and doling it out to poor little scrubs like me. How thoughtful.

But now there's the question of how to spend this borrowed cash. My knee-jerk desire is to put it in the bank, but I don't get the feeling that Mother Gov. wants this. Saving isn't stimulating. So, as a patriot, I should spend the ever-loving heck out of it. Here's the problem: everything I want is made in China or India or Iguanistan . . . and while I'm no economist (or even the ghost of an economist), spending Chinese money on Chinese goods to inspire American economic growth sounds fishy. Sushi. Tsunami. Splash.

So I figure that it's my American duty to bypass the Chinese stuff and do one of two things: 1. Give those dollars away. 2. Spend them local (as in, really local; like, direct-from-the-fatta-the-land local).

The first option hurts a bit. I like money as much as the next patriot. But I figure if I skip the retail sector and give my Economic Stimulus check to, say, the church, then those dollars are doing their jobs paying out people who do their jobs. That's stimulus, right? Help me out here.

The second option hurts as much as the first. I want an outdoor grill more than I want locally raised steaks to pan fry in the house. But the local farmer holds a dear place in my ignorant little heart, and I'd like nothing better than to fill his coffer a bit more full. That's stimulus, too? Yeah?

Ack! The pressure! It's starting to get to me! I'm seeing spots! Out! Out!

Please advise here, people. My principles are giving all of us headaches.

At the Lamb's High Feast we doze, discipline, and hope the dough is rising

Sorry to restart us on a downer, but here's a great idea from Father DMJ. Maybe the boys would let us tag along for the proposed Easter make-up service, because I've been coming up short on Lenten contemplation and Easter joy for a few years now. After a long week of dressing babies for services, hauling babies to services, keeping them quiet during services, participating only intermittently and perfunctorily during services (or, alternatively, in an official musical capacity, with accompanying anxieties), housing and feeding lots of weekend guests, and maybe even trying to mortify the flesh a little bit, all without the help of Dad who is necessarily at or preparing for church around the clock, AND having to put everything on hold whenever Small Guy gets sad or hungry, I really feel like I've missed out on Holy Week and Easter. It was such a zoo around here that we forgot to hide the eggs on Sunday and had to hold the hunt yesterday (the babies didn't seem to hold it against us too much).

Not that I didn't receive the gifts--but I didn't get to savor them, and that makes me sad.

Why pregnancy is good for me

Pregnancy is a very useful mortification of the clinging vestiges of my former quasi-feminist flesh. You know the one: the self who still likes to think of herself as an Independent Woman, against all evidence to the contrary. The self who inclined her ear too sharply to that seductive gender theory stuff in grad school seminars, who squirmed at the thought of taking her husband’s name. The self that grew up thinking Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, and who didn’t even like asking her husband to open a jar for her. (In short, the Old Adam of myself who continually forgets the futility—the utter foolishness—of these gestures toward God-like self-determination.)

Kinda hard to maintain these silly illusions throughout the various indignities and limitations of pregnancy, to say nothing of my increasing emotional and economic dependence upon my husband as my marketability decreases in inverse proportion to the number of children and the years I spend almost exclusively with them. (Not like I was ever seriously marketable in the first place, but still.)

Here’s the amazing thing: when I get to griping about anything from the fact that I’ll never have “a job where I can use my brain” to the fact that it’s pretty darn hard to tie my own shoes nowadays, my husband, who has been my hero for quite some time now, simply says, “This gives me a chance to do my job.” He hands his entire paycheck to me and trusts me completely with it. He peels the boys off me when he comes home and takes them out of my sight for awhile so I can recover some sanity (or blog about my lack of sanity). He talks with me like I'm a person who still has a brain. He even ties my shoes for me.

Wow. All along, he’s been waiting for me to get over myself so that he can get on with his calling to lay down his life for me. You know, that whole “this is my body, given for you” thing modeled by the Heavenly Bridegroom? Yeah. That’s the one. That’s incredibly powerful stuff. The importance of marriage in God’s eyes, and the horror of its brokenness in this world, is becoming clearer to me all the time.

And of course, marriage, pregnancy, and motherhood give me the chance to fulfill my end of the deal, too, when I can stop the navel-gazing long enough to remember what it’s all about. Truly, the very literal giving of a woman’s body for the life of others is sacrificial, even sacramental.

Love incarnate. Christ for church; husband for wife; wife for husband; parents for children. Christians for the world.

The bacon and who's bringing it home

Concordian Sisters agree that barefoot and pregnant is the way to be, like it or not. Or you don't have to be barefoot, but after putting socks on so many other people, who feels like putting on her own? Our platform is submission to God and our husbands, and specifically to the scriptural mandate to be fruitful and multiply to whatever extent God sees fit. We try, or try to try, to be the women that God and the church say we should be. Take that, feminist professors!

Now. The sine qua non of CSPP is that there is a husband out there bringing home the bacon. And here is where it gets tricky, because people who are young and in love want to get married. Sometimes they're still in college. Sometimes they're looking at another year or two or four of seminary. Students don't make any money. You do the math (don't forget to factor in tuition and insurance).

It used to be that a father would ask a prospective son-in-law how the latter planned to support the former's daughter. Does anyone do this any more? It seems strange to me that a lot of young women are effectively being asked to put their husbands through school--especially the seminary--and no one in the church, even us crazy folks, says boo about it.

As usual, I'm chief of sinners in this department. I got married a week after graduating from college to a guy just starting at the seminary. To make matters worse, I spent his time there vainly pursuing a pointless degree of my own. Obviously there wasn't room for a baby in our lives. Looking back, I'm inclined to ask myself, what business did we have getting married?

Why do I bother thinking about this? Because someday one or more of our little babies are going to be young and in love. What do we tell them? You can't get married until you're done with school, even if you've got six years to go? To engaged people, six months or six weeks is a purgatorial delay. But again, there was a time when a man wouldn't carry anyone across his threshold unless he owned that threshold fair and square and had the wherewithal to hold onto it. Jacob waited seven years and a week. Why do we think it shouldn't be like that for us? This troubles me.

Book, long-windedly reviewed and more or less recommended (Part I)

Gilbert Meilaender’s Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (Second Edition)

I’m always looking for a good read in the field of bioethics. This was pretty good, although it felt a bit thin overall (hence the “primer” part of the subtitle, I suppose).

Reflections on just a few of the topics addressed:

Organ Donation: This chapter provided me with the most new food for thought, probably because I’ve read and reflected on it the least. Now I just have to figure out how to work these neat phrases like “noble cannibalism,” “useful precadaver,” and “non-heart-beating cadaver,” into everyday conversation. (No, he’s not necessarily against organ donation—just brings into the conversation some nuances that I hadn’t previously considered, including discussion of living donors.)

Embryos: Apparently in the first edition, Meilaender “gave considerable weight” to the possibility that “a new individual human being comes into existence only after ‘twinning’ has or has not occurred.” I’m pleased to see that he has now concluded that “the argument that individuality is not established until approximately fourteen days of development is not going to stand the test of the embryological evidence and is likely to seem increasingly arbitrary” (ix). Individual, unique human life from the moment of conception seems to be the most consistent, Biblical, and logically tenable position.

Abortion: I wasn’t expecting to find anything new or disconcerting here; I was rather surprised to find that he counts pregnancies resulting from rape or incest among the “genuinely exceptional circumstances” in which the “privacy argument” for abortion may narrowly and legitimately apply. He argues that a woman may legitimately choose to abort if either she or the child must die, then applies the same argument to cases of rape or incest: “In the ordinary sense, of course, a woman’s continued life is not threatened by such a pregnancy; yet, the case bears important analogies to that where lives conflict. For in this instance, even though the fetus is, of course, formally innocent, its continued existence within the woman may constitute for her an embodiment of the original attack upon her person….she may find the courage and strength to love and let live even the one whose presence embodies the attack of her enemy. But, again, we cannot claim that such a decision would be the only way to follow Christ” (14).

I don’t know. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to carry to term a child who was conceived in violence, no matter with intent to parent or to place the child for adoption. I don’t doubt that the mother would be ambivalent at best toward the child she carried, and that the pregnancy would indeed constitute a sort of re-living of the original violence.

But this is one of the places where I found the book to be particularly thin. There are a few more sentences in this section, but what I’ve quoted here is the gist of it. Even if we only consider things from the woman’s point of view--What about the woundedness that most women experience for the rest of their lives after an abortion? Will choosing to perpetrate another form of violence upon her person somehow negate the first act? Won’t it only compound the pain and the regrets? Meilaender simply doesn’t ask, much less answer, these questions. This seemed like an almost offhand treatment of a tremendously difficult situation.

All in all, I think the book is best where is serves as a review of what's at stake and a starting point for thinking about some of the stuff that we tend to neglect till we or someone we love is in a crisis (organ donation, end-of-life stuff, etc.) Probably a good resource for pastors to have on hand, yada yada.

Stay tuned for book review, Part II: Meilaender Meanders; or, Watching a Bioethicist Wiggle around the Topic of Contraception.