in search of something like quiet

When I graduated from St. John’s in 1991, I ran face-first into my first experience of not knowing what was next.  I hadn’t put much (any) thought into what I was going to do after college and spun my wheels for a few years as a result.

Finishing the master’s degree in December reminded me that I really need to have at least one fair-sized iron in the fire (thanks, Protestant work ethic!) or I can tend to get antsy and drive Cheryl crazy.  As being a tortured young bohemian is no longer an option, and as long as more grad school holds all the appeal of being personally waterboarded by Dick Cheney, the most immediate iron is work.

Except that work is driving me crazy right now.  I need some distance on the weekends.  I want to bake bread.  And I want to learn to be ok with not being the finest bread baker in the county.

***

We live sort of unbalanced lives, don’t we?  Better to say that I feel unbalanced these days.  I’d really like to relax (sleep in once in a while, etc) and I definitely will once I’ve ensured that all my caseload kids are successful, taught Chris to read before kindergarten, grown a huge vegetable garden and planned dinner for the next three weeks.  You see my point.

I want Chris to have a drive to be successful, but I want him to be able to be happy, to be able to just sit for a while and take in the world.  And I’m going to teach him that, just as soon as I make this big pot of chicken stock…

kidlit frenzy

My lunch book groups are putting the finishing touches on two Jerry Spinelli books this week – Crash and Maniac Magee. The group doing Crash only has one kid on whom I can count to actually do the reading, much less understand much of it, and has been decimated by kids leaving the school, so I’m not sure what the discussion is going to be like.

The Maniac Magee group, on the other hand, is all kids from our class, including several who are really into the book and who keep coming up to me and whispering, “Mr. Carle! This book is racist!” or “The old man died!”. I’m looking forward to that discussion.

I think I’m learning how to do groups like this. The mix is essential, as is the selection of books. My principal, understandably from her point of view, doesn’t want me reading stuff with the kids that’s going to get her calls from angry parents, but at the same time, the kids understand when a book is meaty and when it isn’t. We had a good discussion earlier this year on The Whipping Boy, but Soup, which bored even me to tears, fell flat. They want something with issues, and I don’t blame them. By the fifth grade, you get that the world isn’t A Child’s Garden of Verse.

I’d like to be able to get into the Dark is Rising sequence with a group at some point (talk about meaty discussion matter), but I’m not sure that’ll happen. Maybe Coraline next since the movie is out.

Holocaust denial, reprised

I’m sort of an in-betweener regarding religion (which wouldn’t make those of the lukewarm-therefore-I-spit-you-out persuasion very happy).  I don’t operate by faith, but reserve the right to wonder and be unsure.  I actually won trophies for my knowledge of scripture when I was a teenager, and can pray publicly with the best of them under duress, but I’m not sure to what, if anything, I might be praying.  I’m not a big fan of praying publicly at any rate.  Neither was Jesus.

This sort of back-and-forth irritates my wife, who has accused me of being hostile to religion.  I’m not.  I’m hostile to the kind of religion that tells our gay friends that they’re damned for being who they are, that condemns any “other” to eternal perdition simply for being the other.  I’m hostile to idiocy in the guise of faith.

Which brings me to the topic at hand.  This week, Benedict XVI rehabilitated four bishops of the Catholic Church who (among other things) seem to have a problem understanding the historical fact of the Shoah, the Nazi murder of six million Jews that we regularly call the Holocaust.

I come to this with deep appreciation for more than a few Catholics.  Fr. Roy Bourgeois of School of the Americas Watch and my own sister number among my heroes on a political level, whether or not I share their faith.

But where Bishop Richard Williamson, who recently denied the fact of the Holocaust in a televised interview, now calls his own comments “imprudent”, I could easily come up with several alternative adjectives,  beginning with “stupid”.  Were I not inviting some folks I value to this blog who wouldn’t likely appreciate the language I would use, I could come up with hundreds of alternative adjectives.

I would like to see the Catholic Church (which has no reason in particular to listen to me) fulfill its great role as a champion of the poor.  Instead, under Benedict, it seems bent on rolling back time and engaging in the kind of full-throated idiocy regarding other religions that makes it that much more an anachronism.

And that’s too bad.