Judy went to church with us again. Yeah. I love talking to her. Came home and had a 2-hour power nap. I do love napping. I would sleep on that sofa all the time except that it doesn't allow me to shift my position. Eight-hours in one position doesn't work for me.
I finished Mike's book on the diaconate today. Another piece of him finished. The book is the one Mike Berstene has submitted to Paulist Press for publication. No word yet, but Cylin said the publishing business shuts down during the summer; I guess everyone goes on vacation. We'll see what the Fall brings.
Some of the book was more than tedious for me, very old style academic. But some of the chapters flowed more easily. I remember one of the deacons saying he hadn’t read the draft Mike had sent him because it was too dense. I have to tell him which chapters to read. The ones that flow easily are the ones that represent Mike’s passion for his point of view. He talked about the deacon as an icon of Christ. He said to achieve it, the deacon must be self-aware of his own failings and be self-compassionate. If that is not achieved, he cannot be compassionate with the people he serves.
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Musings: I'm putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
The readings in church were on hospitality today. Most of the examples were hospitality involving serving food and drink, addressing the guests' physical needs. The story of Martha and Mary deviates from this theme. Martha was rushing around, putting food together to serve Jesus. Mary was sitting at his feet, drinking him in. When Martha criticizes Jesus for allowing her sister just to sit there and not help her, Jesus responds, "Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her." The interpretation of this has been hotly debated according to my brief internet search.
It is confusing. Has Mary chosen the better part for herself or him? If this is about hospitality, then it is for his sake, not for hers. In my brief Internet search, it said that Mary had chosen the better part because she is attending to Christ's words, which were beneficial for her. The message of the reading is that we all should do that.
I got a slightly different slant on that. I thought hospitality is what we all offer each other. My mother, my poor maligned mother, came to mind. She was a devoted parent. She attended diligently to all our physical needs to perfection. But she couldn't listen to us. She made no effort to sit and hear what we had to say. That would have been too frightening for her. We might have thought something different from what she did, and that would have been devastating.
Martha attended to the body; Mary attended to the soul. Perhaps the theory is that when we attend to our souls, we are always attending to the soul of Christ. How's that for a solution which includes both Christ and Mary. Of course, sitting around contemplating our navels, or the navels of others, and expecting someone else to attend to the bodily needs doesn't sound like a winning solution either.
A parent's job is a hard one. They are responsible for forming the child. They have to hold an image of what they want their child to be like when they grow up. That's their job. On the other hand, they have to be open to what the child is about that conflicts with their point of view, at least in the modern world. The primary job of a parent is providing for a child's physical needs and forming them to help them find their place is the social world. While it is painful for the child to have their essence ignored, life is long. Let them search out that satisfaction elsewhere. That's what growing up is about.
