I recently had reason to take for myself the "5 Love Languages" online quiz: http://www.5lovelanguages.com/
This quiz is based on the theory, developed in the books by Gary Chapman, that there are five main ways that people express love, and thereby recognize love being expressed to them.
Mine came out in this order:
8 Receiving Gifts
8 Words of Affirmation
6 Physical Touch
6 Quality Time
2 Acts of Service
This means two things - that when I express love, I will probably do it by giving you presents or saying nice things about you, and that if you want to express love to me, I will be looking for these same behaviors in turn.
(The low ranking of "Acts of Service" is due to some noise in the system, which I blame on being an oldest child, and is something I already knew about myself - if people offer to help me, I view it as criticism and the expression, not of love, but of the opinion that I am incapable of doing the thing myself. This causes lots of unpleasant interactions both at work and in interpersonal relationships, but it's something I'm working on separately.)
Some other folks who are close to me also took this quiz, and as ever it's interesting because it acknowledges that not everyone is the same, and even in something that's thought of as so basic and elemental as Love, communication takes place through a framework of assumptions that are different for each individual, and it's important to understand the other's perspective as much as you can.
This got me thinking about how someone might not have learned the same expected expressions as I have. Mine, to me, seem so elemental, but did I learn them, and if so, from where?
I only had to think about this question for about thirty seconds to realize that my framework was built by a lifetime of saturation in pop love songs, Romantic literature, and Romantic Comedy films. And if someone hadn't been exposed to any of those things, or had been exposed much less, they might not have learned the same script for how a Lover should act and speak.
The goopy, transcendent, all-consuming, moony, aching longing type of love is not something elemental and essentially true. It's a cultural construct, from a very specific culture, namely Romantic-period Europe. Everyone I've talked to about this immediately points out that this tradition arose from a culture of royalty with plenty of means and too much time on their hands. If you don't have to work, then it's easy to let your whole being be consumed with longing for an idealized Other, and to spend your time in writing paeans to them that say that they are your whole life and eternal soul, they embody all the beauty in the world and beyond, that your life without their regard is without meaning and you would rather die than be separate from them.
Part of me wants to hear these things from someone, but realistically, in today's modern world, if someone where to carry on this way, I would be very concerned. Words like this, in today's modern society, come usually from someone who has made an ideal person up in their head, and is writing letters and poems to them. Real, actual, person-to-person relationships in today's real world are not like this.
Still, though. Cinderella dies hard.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Saturday, July 4, 2015
From Depression Baby to Decluttering, in one generation
I was thinking the other day about the Great Depression. This loomed large in my upbringing. My Dad was born two days before the Stock Market Crash in 1929, and my Mom was born in 1935.
Mom was always very concerned about waste and not making the most of what you had. The emblamatic story for her is that she used to yell at us if we ate an apple but left an unacceptable amount of white on the core. "Apples are twenty-five cents apiece!" It is a long time since apples have been that price, so that probably dates the story exactly during my difficult teenaged years in the late 1970's, when I thought this injunction was ridiculous, but I think it has been very, very rare in my life that I would start eating an apple that I didn't intend to finish as much as possible right down to the core.
Her mother, my Grandmother, was very thrifty and hung onto things just in case they might be useful later. She was a saver of string and rubber bands, she was a canner who put up food for the winter, she was a buyer of bargains at garage sales. The emblematic story about Grandma is that after she passed away, when my Mom and Dad and Mom's sisters were going through the house and getting things ready for an estate auction, they found several broken chairs in the garage, which hadn't even been in the house, they were broken chairs that Grandma had picked up at a different auction or yard sale, thinking they would be perfectly good once she fixed them (except she never fixed them, and the garage was chalk full of stuff like this).
I was thinking about the Great Depression mostly as a mirror of current economic worries, when more and more people are unemployed and underemployed, and having trouble making ends meet even with a 40 or 60 hour work week. The Great Depression, economically anyway, was an artifact created by unsustainable behavior by banks and the Stock Market. Terrible living conditions could arise again, from similar bad institutional actions. We might have to live through something terrible like that again, but we did get through it the first time. I'm not saying it was easy, and I'm sure there were many lives lost and destroyed and families ripped apart, but as a species, we did it, we got through it and improved lives again. So, I hope we don't have to go through another economic crisis of that severity, and I know there are some checks and balances to make sure that it doesn't happen again, but if we do, or even something not quite as severe, I have confidence that we will get through it again.
But having that picture in my mind, of Dust Bowl men and women in battered hats and dust-colored clothes, saving string, it set up a strange echo with the Decluttering theme that is all around me now (see previous post).
My turning point was one time when I was moving out of a house that had a leak in the back wall of the basement. It was built on a hill, and every time there was a strong rain, a gush of water would pour out of a crack between the bricks in that wall. Somehow, I had still been storing cardboard boxes in that basement, from when we had moved in. I had moving boxes, but I also had all the original cardboard boxes of things I had bought, including for a toaster that I didn't have any more because it had stopped working. I had the box from the new toaster as well.
All at once, I realized that I didn't need to save these boxes. Sure, cardboard might be useful one day for something, but also, there are boxes freely available in the world all the time, so if you need a box, there will be one there, or you could buy a box, we had enough money at that time to buy a box if we needed one, so there was no reason to keep them.
I got rid of all those boxes, and have bought new ones whenever I needed boxes thereafter, and have been released from the burden of having to house and care for and keep dry all that cardboard, that piles up in one's life.
In that once decision, I pivoted from the Depression Baby of my Mother and Grandmother, to a modern Declutterer, who values a clean, orderly house without too much stuff in it. Within one generation, these values have shifted entirely.
Mom was always very concerned about waste and not making the most of what you had. The emblamatic story for her is that she used to yell at us if we ate an apple but left an unacceptable amount of white on the core. "Apples are twenty-five cents apiece!" It is a long time since apples have been that price, so that probably dates the story exactly during my difficult teenaged years in the late 1970's, when I thought this injunction was ridiculous, but I think it has been very, very rare in my life that I would start eating an apple that I didn't intend to finish as much as possible right down to the core.
Her mother, my Grandmother, was very thrifty and hung onto things just in case they might be useful later. She was a saver of string and rubber bands, she was a canner who put up food for the winter, she was a buyer of bargains at garage sales. The emblematic story about Grandma is that after she passed away, when my Mom and Dad and Mom's sisters were going through the house and getting things ready for an estate auction, they found several broken chairs in the garage, which hadn't even been in the house, they were broken chairs that Grandma had picked up at a different auction or yard sale, thinking they would be perfectly good once she fixed them (except she never fixed them, and the garage was chalk full of stuff like this).
I was thinking about the Great Depression mostly as a mirror of current economic worries, when more and more people are unemployed and underemployed, and having trouble making ends meet even with a 40 or 60 hour work week. The Great Depression, economically anyway, was an artifact created by unsustainable behavior by banks and the Stock Market. Terrible living conditions could arise again, from similar bad institutional actions. We might have to live through something terrible like that again, but we did get through it the first time. I'm not saying it was easy, and I'm sure there were many lives lost and destroyed and families ripped apart, but as a species, we did it, we got through it and improved lives again. So, I hope we don't have to go through another economic crisis of that severity, and I know there are some checks and balances to make sure that it doesn't happen again, but if we do, or even something not quite as severe, I have confidence that we will get through it again.
But having that picture in my mind, of Dust Bowl men and women in battered hats and dust-colored clothes, saving string, it set up a strange echo with the Decluttering theme that is all around me now (see previous post).
My turning point was one time when I was moving out of a house that had a leak in the back wall of the basement. It was built on a hill, and every time there was a strong rain, a gush of water would pour out of a crack between the bricks in that wall. Somehow, I had still been storing cardboard boxes in that basement, from when we had moved in. I had moving boxes, but I also had all the original cardboard boxes of things I had bought, including for a toaster that I didn't have any more because it had stopped working. I had the box from the new toaster as well.
All at once, I realized that I didn't need to save these boxes. Sure, cardboard might be useful one day for something, but also, there are boxes freely available in the world all the time, so if you need a box, there will be one there, or you could buy a box, we had enough money at that time to buy a box if we needed one, so there was no reason to keep them.
I got rid of all those boxes, and have bought new ones whenever I needed boxes thereafter, and have been released from the burden of having to house and care for and keep dry all that cardboard, that piles up in one's life.
In that once decision, I pivoted from the Depression Baby of my Mother and Grandmother, to a modern Declutterer, who values a clean, orderly house without too much stuff in it. Within one generation, these values have shifted entirely.
Finding what's Individual in what's Formal and Traditional
The church I go to is in the midst of a search for a new Rector (Priest in charge), and as part of the process we were all asked to complete a survey whose results will be collated into a Parish Profile. This gets shared with priests who are looking for a new parish, and then we work on selection until we find a good match.
One of the questions was about the Liturgy. I take this to be a blanket term covering the way we do Church - the choices we make from the official prayer book for the order of services, what is said when, what the readings are for that Sunday (there's a Lectionary with a full set for a three year cycle), whether we say the Mass or sing it and whether we use a contemporary version, or more traditional, or Latin, or a mix of all of them.
If you were brought up Lutheran, you might wonder what I'm talking about, because my understanding is that Lutheran churches are given much less discretion and are instructed to be much more standardized. But Episcopalian parishes, while sticking pretty strictly to traditional forms, do have some latitude about how various parts of the service are performed. For example, at my church, the Prayers of the People (those are the prayers in which we remember all who have asked for our prayers, the sick and the troubled, and also those who have recently died, and "all whose lives are closely linked with ours") are read out of the Book of Common Prayer, the only part that changes week to week is the specific names that are read out. But at my Mom's church, the Prayers of the People were written by the people, the members of that particular congregation, and so they include some prayers for the natural environment and that kind of thing that are more top of mind for people in Colorado. So, latitude like that is an example of what's possible.
I can't remember the exact wording of the survey question that asked about the Liturgy, but it was about how important it is to keep the Liturgy the same as it is in our church now, that is pretty traditional.
There was a space for comments, and what I wrote there was that keeping to a traditional Liturgy, keeping to an unchanging formal structure, was essential to Episcopalianism, because the essence of our denomination is that the formal structure is there are stays the same, and then every person is free to make whatever meaning of it that they do. The formal structure is fixed and the same, and the meaning made is individual and specific. And not just specific to the person, it is specific to what's going on with that person right on that day. Because the tradition is so rich, and deep and broad and connected to so much else in Western Culture, not to mention to many of our own lives and families and childhoods, that every week you can connect with something different in it, or understand something in a different way. It enables a vast and rich journey, in and through. So even in the one person, the meaning you make of the Liturgy can be individual and specific to that particular day and time of your life.
If the outward expression, the Liturgy, were to change, and morph and be updated and rewritten designed to reflect our ideas and our place and time, I'm sure that it would end up a shallower experience. Because what do we know? How could we write something better than what we have, out of what we happen to think right now?
This tradition, in which I participate every Sunday, especially when Choir is in session because then you're right up the front, robed and in the midst of all of it, was not invented but it was wrought, over centuries and centuries. What we do is the same as what the Early Christians did, in each other's houses, and it's the same as what Archbishops have been doing in Cathedrals in English for centuries and centuries, and it's the same as my Grandma and my Mom and Aunts have done all their lives, and it's the same as my Godfather and Godmothers (I have two), and the man who baptised me, all of whom were the best, best friends of my parents during their young marriage, it's the same as what was done that very day of my Baptism, when I was welcomed into the body of the Church, and everyone who was there read out that they would help my parents and my Godparents raise me and protect me and make sure I grew in my spiritual life. (All of those people are still doing that, and now I have stood and promised to do that for ten or eleven others.)
I've had times in my life where the service felt confronting, or bizarrely ritualistic, or insulting, or boring, or cynical and hypocritical, or meaningless, or too meaningful. But as I have participated, in the church year that rolls around and around, each time around the circle I find myself going deeper, and finding more to it.
You can't do this mystical spiral-style development if the Liturgy changes all the time. It has to stay the same, to allow my own individual and specific meaning-making of it to progress and grow.
One of the questions was about the Liturgy. I take this to be a blanket term covering the way we do Church - the choices we make from the official prayer book for the order of services, what is said when, what the readings are for that Sunday (there's a Lectionary with a full set for a three year cycle), whether we say the Mass or sing it and whether we use a contemporary version, or more traditional, or Latin, or a mix of all of them.
If you were brought up Lutheran, you might wonder what I'm talking about, because my understanding is that Lutheran churches are given much less discretion and are instructed to be much more standardized. But Episcopalian parishes, while sticking pretty strictly to traditional forms, do have some latitude about how various parts of the service are performed. For example, at my church, the Prayers of the People (those are the prayers in which we remember all who have asked for our prayers, the sick and the troubled, and also those who have recently died, and "all whose lives are closely linked with ours") are read out of the Book of Common Prayer, the only part that changes week to week is the specific names that are read out. But at my Mom's church, the Prayers of the People were written by the people, the members of that particular congregation, and so they include some prayers for the natural environment and that kind of thing that are more top of mind for people in Colorado. So, latitude like that is an example of what's possible.
I can't remember the exact wording of the survey question that asked about the Liturgy, but it was about how important it is to keep the Liturgy the same as it is in our church now, that is pretty traditional.
There was a space for comments, and what I wrote there was that keeping to a traditional Liturgy, keeping to an unchanging formal structure, was essential to Episcopalianism, because the essence of our denomination is that the formal structure is there are stays the same, and then every person is free to make whatever meaning of it that they do. The formal structure is fixed and the same, and the meaning made is individual and specific. And not just specific to the person, it is specific to what's going on with that person right on that day. Because the tradition is so rich, and deep and broad and connected to so much else in Western Culture, not to mention to many of our own lives and families and childhoods, that every week you can connect with something different in it, or understand something in a different way. It enables a vast and rich journey, in and through. So even in the one person, the meaning you make of the Liturgy can be individual and specific to that particular day and time of your life.
If the outward expression, the Liturgy, were to change, and morph and be updated and rewritten designed to reflect our ideas and our place and time, I'm sure that it would end up a shallower experience. Because what do we know? How could we write something better than what we have, out of what we happen to think right now?
This tradition, in which I participate every Sunday, especially when Choir is in session because then you're right up the front, robed and in the midst of all of it, was not invented but it was wrought, over centuries and centuries. What we do is the same as what the Early Christians did, in each other's houses, and it's the same as what Archbishops have been doing in Cathedrals in English for centuries and centuries, and it's the same as my Grandma and my Mom and Aunts have done all their lives, and it's the same as my Godfather and Godmothers (I have two), and the man who baptised me, all of whom were the best, best friends of my parents during their young marriage, it's the same as what was done that very day of my Baptism, when I was welcomed into the body of the Church, and everyone who was there read out that they would help my parents and my Godparents raise me and protect me and make sure I grew in my spiritual life. (All of those people are still doing that, and now I have stood and promised to do that for ten or eleven others.)
I've had times in my life where the service felt confronting, or bizarrely ritualistic, or insulting, or boring, or cynical and hypocritical, or meaningless, or too meaningful. But as I have participated, in the church year that rolls around and around, each time around the circle I find myself going deeper, and finding more to it.
You can't do this mystical spiral-style development if the Liturgy changes all the time. It has to stay the same, to allow my own individual and specific meaning-making of it to progress and grow.
Themes of Equality and Freedom
NPR reads the Declaration of Independence out in its entirety each year. I only caught part of it, so I looked the whole thing up online, and spent some time reading it on this day to celebrate my country's birth. This part spoke to me especially, those beautiful words of Thomas Jefferson, who was such an extraordinary writer:
We watched the live stream of Bernie Sanders' address in the capital of our State, so sad that we were unable to be there in person and be counted. Who knows what distance he can go as a candidate, but it's been a revelation having someone campaigning who is willing to say out loud these things that I agree with but everyone else has been too fearful to say - that it should be possible to earn a living wage by working 40 hours per week; that wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few, in this wealthiest nation in the history of Earth; that everyone deserves the same access to health care and to education and that we as a people owe it to all to provide it for everyone who needs it. I am exciting to watch this bubble rise for as long as it can before it bursts, and I hope it pulls the national political conversion in this direction. The most exciting thing about the campaign is that it is crowd-sourced, in a way pioneered by President Obama, but now mature enough to work for this unlikely man. Billions of small contributions can now be sourced, efficiently, from the populace at large, giving us a different option from a few billion dollar contributions from a tiny number of donors. Bernie reminds us that we live in a country that has one vote for one person. This is still the rule, as tough as politics has been over the last few years/decades. The government is us. It was set up this way so that we could ask for the leaders who would represent our interests and work to provide us the best and safest lives (see above).
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that preventing same-sex couples from marrying denied their Constitutional rights, and so ordered that same-sex marriage be made legal, from sea to shining sea, as I saw in an online post from Melissa Etheridge. Only a few days later, at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in America, the assembly passed a strong vote to allow Episcopal Priests to perform marriage ceremonies for any same-sex couple who wanted one (the vote included the option to opt out, by an individual Priest or by a Bishop for his or her Diocese, in recognition that some folks might still be having a hard time getting their heads around the fact that someone that used to be wrong is now agreed by nearly everyone to be right). I was proud of this decision, but not surprised, because my church is known for being welcoming to everyone. Everyone. Every last one. It doesn't matter what you have done (got divorced, danced, drunk alcohol, committed a crime, fallen in love and built a life with someone of your same sex), and it doesn't matter what you think (my own Priest quoted a line from a prayer that is part of the Eucharist, saying of God, "only you know our faith", and he pointed out that human beings are notoriously unreliable about their own mental states, so it doesn't matter what you think you believe, all are welcome).
The New Yorker's front section editorial in its July 6 issue, an issue featuring on its cover a tribute of the nine people killed in Charleston, South Carolina, is headlined, "The Confederacy's Final Retreat." It says, "The rearguard movement of Republicans in the aftermath of the slaughter in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church marked the relinquishing of the Confederacy’s best-fortified positions: the cultural ones." And it's true that something seems to have shifted following that tragedy. A lot of the changes and the impact is around a symbol, the Confederate Battle Flag, which is technically just a piece of cloth, and some people are rightly expressing concern that people will feel like the work is done when in fact removing a cloth symbol is just an easy outward symbol of some deeper transformations that still need to happen to eradicate racism and improve lives for African-Americans. But it does seem that there's agreement that although the flag is just a piece of cloth, it hurts people, and so we shouldn't display it, even though we might have a right to. I am in full agreement with this application of principles of Free Speech. Sure, you have the right to say hateful things, but you shouldn't say them, because they hurt people - do actual damage - and you shouldn't do things that hurt others. (A grad school professor of mine used to use this effective and pithy phrase - "Just because you have the right to believe whatever you want doesn't mean that whatever you believe is right.")("Can" and "ought" are two different things.)
So the challenge that I hope to live up to is to treat everyone equally. To welcome everyone. To love everyone, no matter where they are from or what they look like or what they have done or what they think. That's the ideal of the Democracy, in which I live, and that is the ideal of the church in which I am a member, and that's the ideal of the universe in which I hope to live.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.Government is by the people, of the people, for the people.
We watched the live stream of Bernie Sanders' address in the capital of our State, so sad that we were unable to be there in person and be counted. Who knows what distance he can go as a candidate, but it's been a revelation having someone campaigning who is willing to say out loud these things that I agree with but everyone else has been too fearful to say - that it should be possible to earn a living wage by working 40 hours per week; that wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few, in this wealthiest nation in the history of Earth; that everyone deserves the same access to health care and to education and that we as a people owe it to all to provide it for everyone who needs it. I am exciting to watch this bubble rise for as long as it can before it bursts, and I hope it pulls the national political conversion in this direction. The most exciting thing about the campaign is that it is crowd-sourced, in a way pioneered by President Obama, but now mature enough to work for this unlikely man. Billions of small contributions can now be sourced, efficiently, from the populace at large, giving us a different option from a few billion dollar contributions from a tiny number of donors. Bernie reminds us that we live in a country that has one vote for one person. This is still the rule, as tough as politics has been over the last few years/decades. The government is us. It was set up this way so that we could ask for the leaders who would represent our interests and work to provide us the best and safest lives (see above).
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that preventing same-sex couples from marrying denied their Constitutional rights, and so ordered that same-sex marriage be made legal, from sea to shining sea, as I saw in an online post from Melissa Etheridge. Only a few days later, at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in America, the assembly passed a strong vote to allow Episcopal Priests to perform marriage ceremonies for any same-sex couple who wanted one (the vote included the option to opt out, by an individual Priest or by a Bishop for his or her Diocese, in recognition that some folks might still be having a hard time getting their heads around the fact that someone that used to be wrong is now agreed by nearly everyone to be right). I was proud of this decision, but not surprised, because my church is known for being welcoming to everyone. Everyone. Every last one. It doesn't matter what you have done (got divorced, danced, drunk alcohol, committed a crime, fallen in love and built a life with someone of your same sex), and it doesn't matter what you think (my own Priest quoted a line from a prayer that is part of the Eucharist, saying of God, "only you know our faith", and he pointed out that human beings are notoriously unreliable about their own mental states, so it doesn't matter what you think you believe, all are welcome).
The New Yorker's front section editorial in its July 6 issue, an issue featuring on its cover a tribute of the nine people killed in Charleston, South Carolina, is headlined, "The Confederacy's Final Retreat." It says, "The rearguard movement of Republicans in the aftermath of the slaughter in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church marked the relinquishing of the Confederacy’s best-fortified positions: the cultural ones." And it's true that something seems to have shifted following that tragedy. A lot of the changes and the impact is around a symbol, the Confederate Battle Flag, which is technically just a piece of cloth, and some people are rightly expressing concern that people will feel like the work is done when in fact removing a cloth symbol is just an easy outward symbol of some deeper transformations that still need to happen to eradicate racism and improve lives for African-Americans. But it does seem that there's agreement that although the flag is just a piece of cloth, it hurts people, and so we shouldn't display it, even though we might have a right to. I am in full agreement with this application of principles of Free Speech. Sure, you have the right to say hateful things, but you shouldn't say them, because they hurt people - do actual damage - and you shouldn't do things that hurt others. (A grad school professor of mine used to use this effective and pithy phrase - "Just because you have the right to believe whatever you want doesn't mean that whatever you believe is right.")("Can" and "ought" are two different things.)
So the challenge that I hope to live up to is to treat everyone equally. To welcome everyone. To love everyone, no matter where they are from or what they look like or what they have done or what they think. That's the ideal of the Democracy, in which I live, and that is the ideal of the church in which I am a member, and that's the ideal of the universe in which I hope to live.
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