Review: The Migraine Brain

If ever you find yourself thinking that spirit is stronger than flesh, or ought to be, try getting a migraine.

I'm lucky: I've been to the ER only three times with headaches. Once I forgot to open the window while stripping paint from a door. Once I was coming down with the flu. And once, earlier this year, I had a classic migraine. Tip: if you want to be ushered quickly to a private exam room, try sitting in the communal waiting room barfing into a bowl.

Some of my friends have that sort of migraine several times a month. Fortunately, after years of misery, they have found medications that help. To them--and to less seriously affected migraineurs like me (with frequent but comparatively mild migraines)--I recommend The Migraine Brain by Carolyn Bernstein, MD, and Elaine McArdle.

The authors give lots of good advice for diagnosing, preventing, treating, and living with migraines. A migraine is not a headache, they say, but "a neurological illness caused by an abnormality in your brain chemistry." Headache is one of its most frequent symptoms, but there are many other symptoms as well, and not just the familiar accompaniments such as nausea and flashing lights. Thanks to this book, Mr Neff now understands why I insist on putting a towel over our glow-in-the-dark alarm clock, why the smell of baking bread wakes me up at night, and why I can't wear turtlenecks or hairstyles with bangs. Hey, I have an abnormal brain! Who knew?

The solution? Alas, there isn't one: migraine is a chronic condition. But migraines can be aborted, reduced in number, and made less severe. The authors discuss drugs and doctors as well as complementary and alternative treatments (they like triptans, magnesium, and acupuncture but are nervous about some herbal supplements). Equally important, they suggest a lifestyle overhaul: a migraineur needs to eat right, sleep enough, take breaks, and have fun.

Or, if that's too tall an order, she can at least try drinking eight glasses of water a day while wearing a V-neck T-shirt and sitting in a darkened, odor-free room.

Review: Good in and out of bed

A few months ago when I reviewed Sarah Dunn's Secrets to Happiness, my daughter Heidi told me I'd also enjoy Jennifer Weiner's books. I usually take Heidi's advice on just about everything, but for some reason I didn't rush right out to get Weiner's first chick-lit best-seller, Good in Bed. Something about the title made me think maybe I'd need my mother's permission to read it.

(Before reading another word, note that the author's name is pronounced WYE-ner, rhymes with finer. Forget the wisecrack you were about to make.)

A couple of weeks ago, though, I went to the library in pursuit of comic novels to take along on a week's vacation. With no particular authors or titles in mind, I wandered through the new-book shelves and the paperback racks, and the more books I looked at, the worse I felt. Some of the books were similar to the New Yorker short story genre Weiner once described in an interview as "stories [that] seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what." Most had actual topics, but I didn't really want to delve into depression and dysfunction and people hurting people, at least not while relaxing in a cabin by the lake.

Suddenly Good in Bed sounded quite promising. Alas, it was already checked out, so I settled for its sequel, Certain Girls. I loved it.

The underlying conflict is between a 42-year-old mother, Cannie, and her 13-year-old daughter, Joy. Joy would like to be popular with the mean girls but does not want to alienate her nerdy friends. She wants a themed bat mitzvah party and a designer dress. Above all, she wants to distance herself from her mother, about whom she hates everything--especially after reading her mother's semi-autobiographical novel, including the X-rated parts.

Weiner dexterously alternates between Joy's viewpoint and Cannie's, seasoning the mother-daughter tension with great dollops of laugh-out-loud humor. For the first four-fifths of the book I'm thinking this is exactly the comic novel I've been looking for--and then something bad happens. Just like in life.

No spoilers in this review. I'll just say that Weiner can't help being funny and hopeful, and this book is not a downer. I liked it even better than the prequel, Good in Bed, which I read as as soon as it came back to the library.

Good in Bed lays the foundation for everything that happens in Certain Girls, and sensible people will read it first. The story takes place some 14 years earlier, when Cannie is in her late twenties and heartbroken, having just broken up with a man who is obviously (to all her friends and family) not a good bet for a long-term relationship. With all the humor of the sequel plus an improbable but delightful fairy godmother (in the form of a young, hard-drinking, big-spending movie star), this book also takes a sudden turn toward tragedy right near the end. It has to, I think, or Cannie would get permanently stuck, psychologically speaking.

Why are Weiner's books--bestsellers all--so popular? Well, she's incredibly funny. She's also intelligent--graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, for example. She connects well with readers on a personal level (if you want to be a fan, check out her blog). She tells a good story; she can be tender but is never saccharine; and her characters--despite distress and disaster--muddle through, hopefully and hilariously.

Oh, and one other thing: Cannie is a woman of size. Size 16, to be precise, and 5'10" tall--kind of like Weiner herself. Cannie's weight is not the focus of the stories, but her concern about it, and the way it makes her feel, keeps cropping up. In the "conversation" at the back of Good In Bed Weiner says, "I'd never read a book that really expressed the reality of what it's like to live in a larger-than-average body.... I wanted to encompass the unhappiness of living in a plus-size body, but also show that it's not pure, unadulterated, 200-proof misery. I wanted to show the whole scope of things--professional success, rewarding friendships, a loving, if vexing, family, a weird little dog, great meals, great adventures, and love, and self-acceptance at the end."

You don't have to look just like Cannie to have an idea of how she feels. I'm not heavy, but I'm uncommonly tall and a bit ungainly (I love Julia Child), and I have seen my reflection in a restroom mirror as I washed my hands next to 5'4" sylphlike friends, feeling like a giraffe among the gazelles. What woman has not had a similar experience, whatever her age or height or weight or disability or hair shortcomings? And what is it with us and our bodies? Why is it so hard to accept variety in the way we're packaged?

"My ideal reader," Weiner says, "is any woman who's ever felt like she needed to get undressed in the dark, any woman who's ever felt miserable about the size of her hips or the shape of her face or the texture of her hair... which is to say, lamentably, every single woman in America, and probably beyond, judging from the reception Good in Bed has gotten abroad."

Cannie, at age 28 and also at age 42, is a big woman who is doing just fine.

When does an individual human's life begin?

Yesterday the FDA approved Plan B—the morning-after pill—for over-the-counter sales to 17-year-olds (though not until certain labeling changes are made). Web information about Plan B stresses that the method "isn't effective if you're already pregnant, and it won't terminate an existing pregnancy." According to the prescribing information document, it works "principally by preventing ovulation or fertilization.... In addition, it may inhibit implantation."

Does this mean Plan B is an abortifacient? Can there be an abortion without a pregnancy? And when does an individual human's life begin?

Last August Tom Brokaw asked Nancy Pelosi when she believes life begins, and she has been widely criticized for her answer: "I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition."

Pelosi was half right: theologians have indeed differed widely as to the exact time of "ensoulment," that is, when the soul enters the body and the fetus becomes human. Nevertheless, as Michael J. Gorman has shown in Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World, from its earliest days the church has opposed abortion, even though abortion was frequent in the Greco-Roman world. And the Catholic catechism is clear about what the church teaches today: "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception"-- which the church defines as the moment of fertilization.

Conception, however, can mean implantation rather than fertilization, and that is the meaning used by writers of Plan B's ad copy.

After the human egg is fertilized, from eight to eighteen days go by until it completely implants in the uterus and pregnancy begins. According to the definition used by many in the scientific community, until a fertilized egg has implanted in a woman's uterus, she has not conceived and is not pregnant, even if the fertilized egg is in her body. And if she is not pregnant, abortion is not possible. Therefore, it is reasoned, Plan B pills do not cause abortions.

The question remains, of course: does Plan B take human life? Is the fertilized egg a human person before pregnancy occurs? This is a question of faith, not science. For Christians who believe that human personhood begins with fertilization, Plan B is morally wrong. Other Christians, who also consider themselves pro-life and anti-abortion, argue that human personhood begins with implantation; for them, Plan B may be morally neutral.

As one who has favored the first group, let me give a few arguments on behalf of the second. In some ways, implantation may be a better model than fertilization of when embodied life--the union of dust and spirit--begins.

First, human beings are more than genetic codes: we require community and nourishment in order to live. Implantation brings the developing cells into community with their mother and provides them with food and hormones and everything else they need.

Second, each human being is a unique and unrepeatable individual. Until implantation is achieved, the developing cells may split into twins or triplets. Individuality is not assured until the cells attach to the uterus.

Third, fertilization can occur in a laboratory, but--so far, at least--no baby will result unless at some point implantation occurs.

And yet the fertilized egg has its very own DNA, and perhaps this is reason enough to consider it fully human. To some, though, that sounds rather disembodied. Does a cell with a DNA code have infinite value, the same as cells that have burrowed into their mother's womb and established a relationship with her that she feels in every part of her body? Is human nature based in a code or in a relationship?

These are important questions with implications not only for the morning-after pill, but also for assisted conception and embryonic stem-cell research. The answers to these questions are not as clear as some of us would like. They can't be found in the Bible or in scientific journals, though both sources contribute to our understanding of the issues involved. Christians of good faith disagree. As human beings who thrive in community, we need to keep our voices down and listen to others, as we would have others speak softly and listen to us.

Home: excerpts

Two paragraphs I liked from Marilynne Robinson's Home. Different approaches from mother and father:

How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. (252)

All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in this flesh, in this life. Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home. (102)

Happiness: A History

In my small collection of happiness books, two have long been personal favorites: The Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers (1993) for its lucid explanations, and Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson (1916) for its soothing evocations.

Now I am adding a third title to my pantheon: Happiness: A History by Darrin M. McMahon, "a professor of history at Florida State University and a frequent contributor to publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Daedalus."

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of 2006, Happiness is an engaging survey of Western philosophy from Herodotus to today's bioethicists. To learn more about the book, you can't do better than Jim Holt's excellent review. Sample its opening lines:

The history of the idea of happiness can be neatly summarized in a series of bumper sticker equations: Happiness= Luck (Homeric), Happiness=Virtue (classical), Happiness=Heaven (medieval), Happiness=Pleasure (Enlightenment) and Happiness=A Warm Puppy (contemporary). Does that look like progress? Darrin McMahon doesn't think so.

A better woman than I might sit down and read Happiness straight through. Instead, I'm enjoying it in small bites each morning, reading 10 pages or so from one subhead to the next. A couple of days ago I learned that the word fun is "a relative novelty, introduced in English only in the late seventeeth century as a variation of the Middle English fon, meaning jester or fool" (199).

In the eighteenth century a truly radical philosophy developed, one that Lively Dust finds charming:

To dance, to sing, to enjoy our food, to revel in our bodies and the company of others--in short, to delight in a world of our own making--was not to defy God's will but to live as nature had intended. This was our earthly purpose.

Warm puppies are also pleasant.

Cheap food as a spiritual discipline

My friend Jennifer read my January 18 post, "Please advise us on our Lenten plans," and wrote:

I would love to do this, but I confess it would be for material, not spiritual reasons--I need to save money!

I answered:

The whole point of my blog is that the material and the spiritual are inextricably linked--so your reasons are fine.

With unemployment rising and salaries being frozen or reduced, many of us have considerably less to spend on food this year than last. Can we still eat meals that nourish body and soul?

"Honoring the Body" by Stephanie Paulsell

Here's a story believed by a lot of cradle Christians:

Once upon a time God created Adam and Eve with bodies and souls. Right away they gave in to a bodily desire--hunger--and fell into sin. Then they gave in to another bodily desire--lust--and conceived Cain. From then on, spirit and flesh have been at war in the human body. Spirit is good, flesh is bad. The Christian must subdue the flesh through the work of the Holy Spirit, and then, when the body dies, the person will waft into a state of spiritual bliss unencumbered by a body. In some versions of the story, the Christian will eventually be given a spiritual body (whatever that is), presumably one that will no longer cause the problems that bedevil the physical body. And they all lived happily ever after.

If you find yourself agreeing with any part of that story (or if you recoil from a faith with such a negative view of the body), try this book: Honoring the Body by Stephanie Paulsell, an ordained Disciples of Christ minister and a professor at Harvard Divinity School. Paulsell believes that the body is good, and she invites us to explore with her "how we might honor the body in activities that punctuate our daily lives: bathing, clothing, eating, working, exercising, loving, and suffering."

Students of scripture or theology might study the human body in light of, say, St. Paul's spirit/flesh dichotomy or the church's doctrines of incarnation and resurrection. Paulsell's book, a volume in Jossey-Bass's Practices of Faith series, takes a different path: seeking "wisdom from "scripture, history, and [especially] contemporary experience, in story and song and poetry." It's a fine introduction to Christian thought on the goodness of the body, a refreshing corrective to legions of Christian writers who favored asceticism over paradise, and a helpful embodiment of interpretations now being taught by biblical scholars and theologians.

Here's a sample story from chapter 6, "Blessing Our Table Life":

Diana is in the midst of seminary education, learning to be the minister God is calling her to be. She is smart and funny and an exceptionally good listener, and so she has done very well. But she began to get a little tense, a little nervous, before her field education, her year of supervised ministry in a parish, began. She finally admitted that what she was anxious about was her role as cupbearer during the Eucharist, a task her teaching pastor had asked her to assume. Having been born with cerebral palsy, Diana jerks a bit when she walks and drags one leg. She was afraid, really afraid, that she would spill the cup on the floor or, worse, on someone she was serving. But, being Diana, she didn't ask to be relieved of this duty; she gave it a try. And things went well. Nothing spilled, but she remained extremely vigilant.

One spring Sunday, Diana served again as cupbearer and walked from person to person kneeling at the rail at the front of her church, offering them a drink. "The blood of Christ," she said to each one, "the cup of salvation." And as she raised the cup to each person's lips, taking the utmost care not to fall, she saw her own reflection in the shiny silver chalice. Over and over again, she saw the reflection of her body in the cup. This is my broken body, she thought, serving this church. This is my body, teaching people what we do with brokenness in the church. Here in this cup is new life, and here is my body, expressing the truth of what this new life means!

We are not disembodied spirits, nor ever will be. We are Christ's body, taken, blessed, broken, and given. His body, and our bodies in his, are honorable.

Another medieval gumshoe

I was telling my friend Sharon about Margaret Frazer's medieval mystery series featuring Dame Frevisse, and she asked if I'd discovered Candace M. Robb's medieval sleuth, Owen Archer.

Now I have! Book 1, The Apothecary Rose, was a delight, and Sharon tells me it's only a warm-up for the rest of the series. I'm looking forward to many pleasant winter evenings with the next six books.

Unlike Dame Frevisse (early 1400s) and Brother Cadfael (early 1100s), Owen (late 1300s) is not a member of a religious order. St. Mary's Abbey (York) is, however, significant to this story, and its resident herbalist, Brother Wulfstan, plays an important role.

Like Frazer and Ellis Peters, Robb mixes actual historical characters--in The Apothecary Rose, that would be primarily John Thoresby, Lord Chancellor of England and Archbishop of York--with invented villagers, monastics, miscreants, victims, and villains. All three authors show meticulous attention to historical detail without allowing it to overwhelm the story.

And what is The Apothecary Rose about? Well, of course, someone has been murdered. Two people, in fact. And more before the story ends. As the story unfolds, people undergo terrifying events. Someone falls in love. Eventually the truth comes out and justice is restored. This is a medieval mystery, after all.

The puzzle is important--I suppose it's the mind of the mystery. The mystery's body is equally important. In this case, the body includes a comfortable inn next to a well-stocked apothecary, an archbishop's furs and a medicine woman's rags, monks and highwaymen, mud and cobblestones, home-brewed ale and herbal potions, a wise pariah and an evil churchman...

Time to quit writing and go to the library. Book 2, The Lady Chapel, is on the shelf.

A very material Christmas

At least 100,000 nonprofits nationwide will be forced to close their doors in the next two years as a result of the financial crisis, according to Paul Light, professor of public service at New York University. The dire prediction was made Wednesday at a forum on the impact of the crisis on nonprofits and social service delivery in New York City.

--crain's new york business, 19 November 2008

One December years ago while dispiritedly shopping for Christmas presents, I suddenly realized what Marshall Fields's Musak was playing:

"If I were a rich man (ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum) ..."

I suppose they were trying to set the mood.

Well, the mood this year is indigo, or darker, and decisions must be made. Should Christians celebrate the Nativity with schadenfreude, rejoicing that, after decades of manic spending, Americans may this year reject materialism in favor of the season's true meaning? Or should patriotic Americans (who are still employed) gather their credit cards and spend as much as they possibly can in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the economy?

There's a way to resolve this dilemma, but few there be that find it.

First, let's get one thing straight: the true meaning of Christmas is not about spirit. It has little to do with the vague goodwill that carolers and eggnog are supposed to produce, and even less to do with mystical piety or disembodied spirituality. Christmas--the incarnation ("becoming flesh"--meat, as in chili con carne)--is about a God who loves the material world so much that he becomes part of it.

In the Hebrew scriptures, this God is described as favoring lovemaking, babies, feasts, and comical animals well before the Christian scriptures add that he was born in a barn, became a healer, and earned a reputation for his taste in food and wine. The true meaning of Christmas is about God's love for the material world--so no guilt trips about buying presents and having a great dinner, okay?

Then should we try to rescue retailers by grabbing our credit cards and charging out on another out-of-control Christmas spending spree ($460 billion in 2007)? Here's an alternate idea, one that simultaneously honors the material side of Christmas and helps the economy:

Go out and buy to your heart's content, but give a percentage of what you spend to someone who really needs it.

The economy doesn't care what you do with that thing you bought. You can give it to a coworker who will thank you politely and then put it on a shelf in the basement. You can give it to a teenager who will return it for something much cooler. You can give it to a child who will be confused about its origin because it's one of approximately 98 gifts she got this year. Or you can give it to someone who is out of work or homeless or hungry or cold.

Alternately, you can give the value of the gift--a percentage of your Christmas budget--to an agency that knows who needs help and is equipped to provide it.

How high should the percentage be? To put the $460 billion spent on Christmas last year in perspective, look at the revenues of several major relief organizations:

• American Red Cross, $5.8 billion
• Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest), $676 million
• Catholic Charities USA, $148 million
• Children's Defense Fund, $18 million
• Northern Illinois Food Bank, $30 million

Total of these five charities, $6.7 billion. That's less than 1.5% of what we spent on Christmas presents last year.

Imagine what would happen to the economy--and to human happiness--if we donated a full 10% of our Christmas spending ($46 billion! the equivalent of eight Red Crosses!) to people in need. Perhaps some to a national organization that responds to emergencies, some to a local organization where we might volunteer time as well as money. (The next post, "What to get the Neffs for Christmas," tells how to find the agency of your dreams.)

The thing is, most of us could do this so easily. Even during a recession. And without giving up presents or carols or a good Christmas dinner.

Resurrection, body and soul

Four months ago I mentioned a pre-publication review of Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews by Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson. Since then our rabbi gave Mr Neff a copy of the book, which I've now read. It's a fine study of the resurrection of the body, particularly in the Hebrew Bible and subsequent rabbinic teachings.

Here are a couple of gems about the unity of the person, as taught in the early centuries of the common era:

Whatever notions of the soul circulated in ancient Judaism, in rabbinic theology God was not thought to have fulfilled his promises until the whole person returned, body included. Like death, a disembodied existence was deemed to be other than the last word, for the person is not 'the ghost in the machine' (that is, the body) but rather a unity of body and soul. (204)

Both Tertullian and Irenaeus go to some pains to argue against a view of salvation that is understood strictly in terms of the survival or salvation of the soul.... As the orthodox saw it, the texture of humanity was a seamless, indivisible work of art, composed of flesh and soul--very much like the view of the rabbis we examined in the previous chapter. God will reward the blessed, body and soul. . . . Only if the whole person, both elements of which were created by God, were raised could humanity be redeemed and justice achieved. (233)

And here's a thought-provoking observation about why so many contemporary people do not believe in a literal resurrection of the body:

The major change has been widespread skepticism about the one who performs the expected resurrection--the personal, supernatural God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who intervenes in the course of human and natural events and brings about results that are otherwise impossible. The tendency among many modern people ... has been either to doubt all claims of the existence of God or to redefine God so that the word refers to human ideals and feelings alone and not to the source of miraculous acts and providential guidance. In short, in the modern world, the idea of a God who does things has become highly problematic. And whatever else one may say about a God who does not do anything, one thing is sure: he does not resurrect the dead. (215)

Someone you should know: Dame Frevisse

Margaret Frazer, The Apostate's Tale (New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2007)

By the time I was reading book 3 in the now 17-book Dame Frevisse Medieval Mystery series, I was hooked. Mr Neff quickly followed suit, and you can be sure that when Mr Neff and I both like a book, it’s really good.

The books

Frevisse is a 15th-century nun at St. Frideswide’s priory in Oxfordshire, England. As the niece-by-marriage of Geoffrey Chaucer’s son Thomas and cousin to his daughter Alice, Countess of Suffolk—actual historical characters, by the way—Dame Frevisse rides out of the nunnery surprisingly often, inadvertently getting involved in affairs of state, church politics, and even smuggling. Some of the best tales, though, take place at the priory itself. Practicing hospitality as enjoined by the Benedictine rule, the nuns open their gates to all comers, providing them with food and a place to stay. In turn, the guests offer gifts, adventure, and sometimes mayhem.

In 1431, when the series begins (The Novice's Tale), Frevisse is a thirtyish no-nonsense good-hearted woman who loves tradition and tends to get involved in other people’s problems—a lot like our other favorite heroine, Precious Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Both series stretch the definition of mystery: the crime rarely happens in the early chapters, and in some books nobody gets killed at all. Both are full of local color. And though both protagonists are intensely practical, both also think a lot about moral and ethical questions. In The Apostate's Tale, Dame Frevisse butts heads with a shameless narcissist.

The story begins during Holy Week 1452. Cecely, a runaway nun, has returned to St. Frideswide’s with her young bastard son in tow. At the same time, the ailing mother of one of the sisters arrives. In quick succession follow a businessman and two servants, several members of Cecely’s late paramour’s family, a mother and daughter who differ as to the value of the monastic life, and eventually the Abbot and his retinue. With few winter food stores remaining and not many provisions available in the nearby village, the nine resident nuns wonder how they will manage to accommodate so many guests. And then a would-be murderer strikes—and strikes again. No wonder the prioress has a nervous breakdown.

The authors

Margaret Frazer is the pen name of two women who began the series, mystery writer Mary Monica Pulver and amateur archeologist/historian Gail Frazer. They met at the Society for Creative Anachronism, became friends, and wrote the first six Dame Frevisse novels together. Then Pulver went on to other pursuits and Frazer continued the series on her own—while repeatedly battling cancer.

With Frazer as the sole author, the books have moved closer to the thin line separating period mysteries from historical fiction. Frazer loves research. One of her pet peeves, she said in an interview, is writers who rely on clichés about life in the middle ages (“streets deep in filth,” constant “lawless violence”), “who play fast and loose with facts to make their story-telling easier.” Frazer takes pains to make the Priory of St. Frideswide historically accurate, and Frevisse’s participation in the Benedictine life of prayer rings true.

Soul and body

More than any of the previous books in the series, Apostate slips into Dame Frevisse’s soul as she prays, sings the daily office, and goes about her work. Book 10, The Squire's Tale, foreshadowed this book's spiritual sensitivity with this lovely paragraph about the liturgical hours:

Frevisse ... sank into her own familiar place, made sure of her breviary and Psalter in front of her, then slid forward to kneel in prayer until everyone was in place and the Office began, continuing the unending weave of prayers and psalms begun years into centuries ago and never ceasing, prayed and sung by so many women and men in so many places, their lives given to the prayers and petitions and their lives lost to all memory but God's, that sometimes it seemed to Frevisse that here and now this hands-count of nuns no more made the prayers than someone made a river: they simply stepped into the endless flow, to be carried by it the way a river carried whatever came into its way. (41)

In Apostate, Frevisse’s theological and mystic musings take center stage as she enters the church and joins in the prayer of the church:

Here was the reason for all else. All the duties and rules and limits of her life were for this—these times of prayer when she could reach beyond life’s limits toward God and joy and the soul’s freedom. (35)

Despite her mysticism, Frevisse is realistic and unsentimental about the religious life. She explains to another sister that she hasn’t been given the gift of holiness, and that she doesn’t expect to achieve it in this life:

My hope isn’t for holiness, only that I grow enough—can set my roots of faith and belief and love deep enough—that like a deep-rooted plant growing taller than a shallow-rooted one, I finally come as near to God in my mind and soul and heart as I can, no matter how much in the world my body has to be. (125)

Not that she discounts the importance of her earthbound body. In typical medieval fashion, she values asceticism rather more than we do today, but she also accepts her body’s needs. Up for prayer in the middle of a cold night,

shivering as she went, she thought wryly of how strongly the body fought to prevail over the mind’s soul-longing. Whatever her mind’s intent, her body did not want the cold church and more prayer; it wanted the warm kitchen and more sleep, wanted them very badly. . . . Only for a saint, she supposed, would the desire for God be so great they could not only forgo but even forget the body’s desires. She also thought, equally wryly, that if that were the way of it, she was assuredly very far from sainthood. (54–55)

Such practical realism is typical of most of the sisters at St. Frideswide’s, with the exception of the maddeningly ethereal Dame Thomasine. Eventually even she admits to fatigue. “You haven’t been kind to your body, you know,” the ever-direct Dame Frevisse tells her.

And yet our bodies are God’s gift to us. Shouldn’t we treat them with at least a little pity, with a little kindness, in what little time they have to be alive? . . . Our flesh is the vessel that carries the fire of God’s love. You have no right to break your body, either on purpose or through plain carelessness. (233–34)

Still, these are not books of theology. The characters are well developed, and the stories are entertaining even after a hard day’s work. At first I thought Dame Frevisse would be a pale imitation of the hearty Brother Cadfael, a 12th-century Benedictine monastic who similarly pursues murderers and hangs out with a herbalist. The more I read, the more I preferred Dame Frevisse. Simultaneously flawed and virtuous, she’s believably wise and delightfully opinionated, and she deserves her own TV series. Thanks to the Britain’s ITV, Derek Jacobi is Brother Cadfael. I’ve always thought Queen Latifah would make a fine Mma Ramotswe. But who should be cast as the forthright Dame Frevisse--it's a mystery. Nominations?

Learn more

News article about Gail Frazer: http://erstarnews.com/content/view/2618/141/f

Interview with Frazer: http://jeriwesterson.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/interview_with_.html

Frazer's own website: http://www.margaretfrazer.com/index.html

Plot summaries with spoilers: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/philipg/detectives/frevisse.html

Book descriptions:

http://www.margaretfrazer.com/books/frevisse.html

Of making many books there may be an end

Fifteen years ago or so, when AOL had made e-mail easy and everyone was getting into it, the frugal Mr Neff suggested that we use e-mail instead of the telephone to stay in touch when he traveled. I objected. "E-mail is so Protestant," I said--"all word, and no real presence."

From body to word
Back in the late fifteenth century, when Mr Gutenberg's invention had made books easy and everyone was getting into them, the printed word became cool. Newly discovered ancient sources were now available to everyone who could read, and their authority seemed to trump that of the local bishop. As Martin Luther sang, "That word, above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth."

Church services began morphing from sacral rites and mysteries into classroom lectures. Eventually, in many circles, salvation would hinge on saying the right words rather than on receiving the church's sacraments, and devotion would mean regularly reading from a book rather than kneeling before the Eucharist.

An embodied church--one with jewel-toned windows, a rumbling organ, mold and incense, bread and wine, cold holy water and trickling oil--became a tourist attraction, an exercise in nostalgia. Modern spirituality could be bought at Borders, and the coffee was good too.

The word falters
Borders, it turns out, was so twentieth century. The giant bookseller is in financial trouble: in March, it admitted it was looking at a number of options including putting itself up for sale, and Tuesday it announced it would lay off 274 corporate employees, a twenty percent reduction.

Publishers are in trouble too, or at least trying to keep trouble at bay. In April, Thomas Nelson said it would cut its number of new titles in half and reduce its workforce by ten percent. In May, Zondervan laid off five executives including the publisher; while Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books, replaced CEO Peter Olson, 58, with Markus Dohle, 39.

Yesterday HarperCollins replaced CEO Jane Friedman, 62, with Brian Murray, 41. Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine for bookstores, libraries, and publishers, recently cut their reviewers' pay in half; Tuesday they laid off their religion editor (never mind that religion books consistently outsell books in all other categories).

What's next?
Is this just the normal shuffling of personnel, unusual only in that so much is happening at once? Is it merely a cyclical changing of the guard as Boomers age and a younger generation matures? Is it nothing more than one industry's response to recession? (The airlines have been having a rotten spring too.)

Or is something more paradigmatic happening here? Will future historians say the Age of the Book lasted from about 1500 to about 2000? Will the Digital Age eventually turn books into curious antiques? (If you haven't already seen the YouTube video "Introducing the Book," click here now.)

New CEO Murray says that this is "a time when digital technologies are creating new opportunities to bring authors and readers together." If the book, the technological wonder of 1500, inexorably moved people away from real, embodied presence, where will digital technologies take us?

Looking 60

A wise and sensible article in Sunday's Chicago Tribune begins, "For me, 60 need not be the new 30. I've already been 30, and I prefer adventure to repetition."

Martha Woodroof (pictured at right) describes a number of aging female celebrities who paint, dye, and tuck as they strive to avoid looking their age. Woodruff asks, "So what, exactly, is wrong with looking 60 if you are 60?"

I enjoyed her article so much that I went in search of her book, How to Stop Screwing Up: 12 Steps to Real Life and a Pretty Good Time (Hampton Roads, 2007). Alas, Amazon just doesn't get it. Here's their suggested pairing:

Better Together

Buy this book with How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways to Look 10 Years Younger, 10 Pounds Lighter, 10 Times Better by Charla Krupp today!

Out of the squirrel cage

I have not posted anything for quite a while. This is partly because I’ve been traveling (Maryland, Cape Cod) and partly because I’ve been thinking. Or, more accurately, squirrel caging, defined by one website as “the act of rumination on negative thoughts.” Mr. Neff calls this obsessing. I call it seeking information and making contingency plans.

I have not wanted to turn this blog into a confessional of any sort. I completely understand a friend of mine who, during her first visit with a spiritual director, said, “I don’t want this to be about me.”

But maybe I’m being too reticent. Lively Dust is about being human, earthbound, mortal. It’s about the interplay between spirit and flesh. If I can write about food and wine, maybe I can also write about malfunctioning bodies, even if one of them belongs to me.

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I have known for five years that I have a defective aortic valve and an aneurysm of the aortic root. Every year I get scanned various ways, and so far my structural defects have not affected my daily life. But last month I learned that my heart is growing less efficient (qualifiers like “moderate-to-severe” appeared on my report), and my cardiologist predicts that sometime between now and Medicare I will be split open, my heart will be stopped and removed from my body, machines will sustain me, and my aorta and two valves will be repaired or replaced as needed.

I can think of several ways I’d rather spend a day.

Yes, I know my chances of full recovery are excellent. As my incredibly young doctor-chick with the perky smile and Gap trousers puts it, “Almost everybody survives. You just gotta do what you gotta do.” She’s absolutely right.

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Still, I do not “go gentle into that good night,” even the good night induced by anesthesia. Though I accept that “all flesh is grass” (Isa 40.6) and that “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Eccl 3.20), I resonate with Woody Allen’s observation: “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

The prospect of heart removal, repair, and replacement is a powerful memento mori, even though I may well go on for another twenty, thirty, even forty years. My great-great-aunt Emma, when she was 97 and living with her 94-year-old sister, Ella, said to my mother, “We’re coping fine right now, but I do sometimes wonder what we’ll do when we get old.”

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Squirrel-caging isn’t all bad. After running round and round the wheel day after day, eventually this squirrel gets bored and goes off in search of nuts. Today I caramelized six pounds of onions. Tonight I will set a pound of navy beans to soak, and I will put a batch of bread dough in the refrigerator to rise overnight. Tomorrow a dear friend I have known since we were eight years old arrives from Italy, where she has lived for the last thirty-some years.

Over the years our parents have died, our children have grown, our bodies have slowed. But thank goodness we are not pure spirits, even if the dust part of us isn’t as lively as it once was. Tomorrow night we’ll enjoy hearty peasant food and drink good red wine as we talk about books, travel, friends, family, and the way we used to scandalize the small college town where our fathers were respectable professors (“What will people think?” my mother kept wailing).

It takes a body to enjoy an evening like that. An imperfect one will do.

A Little Daily Wisdom

Paraclete Press has just published a book of daily devotions edited by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, A Little Daily Wisdom: Christian Women Mystics. I'm not a fan of the devotional genre, though I've written two such books myself--but this one is unusual. There are no canned prayers, no chirpy little inspirational thoughts, no Scripture texts taken out of context, and no--thanks be to God--application questions. Instead, each day offers a few lines, freshly translated, from a woman writer who lived sometime between 1098 (the birth year of St. Hildegard of Bingen) and 1582 (the death year of St. Teresa of Avila).

When I first picked up the book, I narcissistically turned to my own birth date and read words by Gertrude the Great that seem to turn today's common wisdom on its head. Acknowledging the close relationship between body and soul, she sees an inverse relationship between them:

When your body is touched and troubled by pain, it’s like your soul is bathed in air and sunlight, coming to it through the painful body, and this gives the soul a wonderful clarity. The greater the pain, or the more general the suffering, the more purification or clarification goes on in the soul.

I've long been familiar with the slogan mens sana in corpore sano, "a healthy mind in a healthy body"--I think it was the motto of a school I once attended--that goes back to the Roman poet Juvenal. I've always thought it meant that the healthier the mind (and the soul), the healthier the body, and vice versa. Want to increase your resistance to disease? Practice gratitude! Want to lift depression? Exercise!

But Gertrude the Great turns this relationship around. I doubt if she ever suggests that a sick soul produces a healthy body (though I haven't read the whole book yet), and yet here she seems to be saying that a troubled body produces a pure soul. Would Juvenal approve?

Possibly. I checked out the source of his bon mot, and it turns out that he wasn't expecting good health and comfort to follow him all the days of his life:

It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.
Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,
which places the length of life last among nature’s blessings,
which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,
does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes
the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than
the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.

Short life, suffering, hardship, hard work--these are givens, and one can only pray for the strength of mind and body to endure them. That's a long way from my usual way of thinking, but it's not so far from Gertrude's call to endurance as a means of purification:

This is especially true of the painful problems of the heart. When these are endured, humbly and patiently, they give the soul a splendid luster, the nearer and better and closer they touch it.

I like the way Gertrude sums up her counsel. After observing that suffering leads to clarity, she suggests another route to the same end:

But remember that kind actions—more than anything else—cause the soul to shine with brilliance.

Kind actions under any circumstances are virtuous. Kind actions while suffering are saintly.

In my experience, most devotional books do not plant little ideas in my mind that keep popping out and making me examine my assumptions. This one does.

I have only one minor complaint about A Little Daily Wisdom. It has those dumb little fold-back flaps that keep the book from lying flat but definitely do not work to mark one's place. I've hacked off the front flap and am using it as a bookmark. If the back flap keeps getting in the way I'll hack it off too, though I hate to do so because it bears a lovely picture of the author, plus the information that she has a Ph.D. in medieval studies, teaches at Shorter College, and has written books about Benedict (of Nursia) and Hildegard of Bingen. It also gives directions to her website.
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Forty years and flowers

My first blogpost looked forward to spring, and our fortieth anniversary, and the voice of the turtledove being heard in the land.

Reasonable expectations for the end of March, unless you live in the Midwest. I must have forgotten that. And this year, winter in Chicagoland has been exceptionally long and bleak. A sales associate at an Eddie Bauer store said to me, "We're having a hard time selling spring clothes. People are just too cold to think about them."

The dogs stand at the window by the front door, mournfully remembering when they used to go for walks.

Friends say, "I don't know why I feel so tired all the time."

We were going to celebrate our anniversary locally, but how is that possible when winter refuses to leave?

So, ever optimistic, we headed for a part of the country known for its gray skies and heavy rainfall. The state my mother escaped from sixty years ago, moving to Southern California in search of sunshine. "You came here to get away from Chicago?" said a bookstore employee yesterday, disbelieving. "Why?"

The pictures show why. It's nippy here, and it rains part of every day. But spring has arrived.

The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Song of Songs 2.12-13

Far away from Chicago.

"You shall delight in rich fare"

Tonight for the Easter Vigil at St. Mike’s, I’ll be reading from Isaiah 55, a stirring proclamation of God’s generosity and bounty, a fitting end to dreary Lent, and a call to the Easter feast! Here are excerpts:

Thus says the Lord:
All you who are thirsty,
come to the water!
You who have no money,
come, receive grain and eat;
come, without paying and without cost,
drink wine and milk!
Why spend your money for what is not bread,
your wages for what fails to satisfy?
Heed me, and you shall eat well,
you shall delight in rich fare. . . .

For just as from the heavens
the rain and snow come down
and do not return there
till they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,
giving seed to the one who sows
and bread to the one who eats,
so shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
my word shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.

—Isaiah 55:1–2, 10–11

Therefore let us celebrate the feast!

—1 Corinthians 5:8

Resurrection

The most dismal Easter service I ever experienced was in an Episcopal church we visited twenty-some years ago. The priest (a good man, but a recent seminary grad) basically said in his homily, “Christ wasn’t really raised from the dead, but it doesn’t matter because . . .”

That's the kind of sermon that makes me say with Mary Magdalene, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.” I far prefer novelist John Updike's poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter," which begins:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

So I appreciated Rachel Zoll's article in this morning's Washington Post, "Resurrection Misunderstood by Many, Scholars Say." Three of the scholars she cites are Jon Levenson, author of Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, Kevin Madigan, co-author with Levenson of Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (to be published April 28), and N.T. Wright, author of The Resurrection of the Son of God and the recently published Surprised by Hope.

What do these three theologians--an American Jew, an Irish-American Catholic, and a bishop of the Church of England--have in common? All three, according to Zoll, "have been challenging the idea, part of Greek philosophy and popular now, that resurrection for Jews and the followers of Jesus is simply the survival of an individual's soul in the hereafter. The scholars say resurrection occurs for the whole person -- body and soul."

Get ready to say it tonight or tomorrow morning:

Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Alleluia!

Beyond Smells and Bells

My sainted father--and I call him that without a trace of irony--once told me that there were two kinds of worship he simply couldn't identify with: charismatic and liturgical. This from a man who studied history and theology, taught worship in a seminary, and wrote a book called And Worship Him. Dad's favorite definition of worship was from Ilion T. Jones: "what a thinking man does as he approaches another thinking being called God."

"We must not seek a brand of worship that is purely aesthetic," my father wrote in 1967. "Worship must be orderly and beautiful, but . . . it should have the functional beauty of a jet airplane rather than the embellishment of a nineteenth-century railway coach." My father liked old-school Protestant services with stately hymns, long sermons, and immobile congregations.

I do not.

My frequent attempts to change my father's views were unsuccessful, however. I should never have taken him to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church; its jet-airplane decor did not sufficiently atone for its Anglo-Catholic liturgy. And if Dad were still living, I probably shouldn't give him Mark Galli's new book either--though I'm quite sure I would anyway. Hope springs eternal.

Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy (Paraclete, 2008) is a short, easy-to-read introduction that explains and defends liturgical worship "for those who find themselves attracted to liturgy but don't quite know why." Galli, an Anglican, draws mostly from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (with occasional quotations from Methodist, Lutheran, or Catholic liturgies) as he sings the praises of liturgy: how it can draw us closer to God and to one another; how it can affect our sense of time and place; how it can transform our faith, our imagination, our entire being.

"In a culture that assumes that truth is a product of the mind, the liturgy helps us experience truth in both mind and body."

--Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells, 11

Galli belongs to a church teeming with Wheaton College students, many with little previous experience of ancient liturgies. His book is tailor-made for them. It is also ideal for their often baffled parents.

Mark is clearly in love with liturgy, but he is not triumphalist about it: he recognizes that liturgy is no guarantee of spiritual life, and he does not denigrate other forms of Christian worship. Readers from non-liturgical traditions may be challenged by his assertions, but they will not feel threatened.

I wish I could test the book on my father. Clearly not attracted to liturgy, he would not be part of the readership Galli had in mind. Nevertheless, I like to think Dad--and others like him--would find Galli's apologia illuminating.

Munchies

The wife of an aging, infirm relative informs us that he is now on Marinol, a synthetic marijuana (who knew)? Contrary to her hopes, it has not yet made him mellow. Rather, he is acting like an insane three-year-old. It has, however, cured his anorexia.