Indaba to the rescue

About 3/4 of the world's Anglican bishops are meeting in Lambeth (England) this week for their decennial state-of-the-church confab. The elephant in the living room this time is the 1/4 of the world's Anglican bishops who are pointedly staying away, having already met in Jerusalem to complain about the direction the Western church is heading.

Reporter Douglas LeBlanc explains how the Lambeth bishops hope to keep the peace: "Instead of meeting in plenary session, bishops will gather in 'indaba' groups (this Zulu word, the conference website explains, 'refers to a small group that gathers, without time pressures and constraints, to 'chew over' important issues')."

As the sun sets on the British empire, perhaps the bishops should note that Indaba is also the name of a South African winery. If the Church of England isn't one's cup of tea, one need only recall that "Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, / There's music and laughter and good red wine . . . "

Hybrid vigor

Byron, my Texas-born son-in-law, used to sing “I’m a Methodist Till I Die”, until he up and joined a Vineyard Church. His Methodist mother can handle that, but she panicked when his little brother decided to marry a Catholic. So I thought I should tread carefully when Byron’s 13-year-old daughter—my granddaughter Katie, pictured above—and I walked past St. Michael’s Catholic Community last week.

“That’s my church,” I said. Her eyes widened. I’ve been a Catholic longer than she has lived, but she doesn’t always pay attention. “You know,” I bravely continued, “Catholics and Protestants used to be really different from one another, but they’re not so different anymore.” Katie attended an Episcopal church for a couple of years when her family lived in Asia. “In fact,” I plowed on, “if you went to Catholic services, you’d find they’re a lot like your church in Taipei.”

Katie chewed on that for a minute, then asked, “Is the Vineyard Church Protestant?”

I love it when religious people mix it up. At Mr Neff’s Episcopal parish, many of the pillars started out Roman Catholic. Many Catholics of my acquaintance spent several years pretending to be Protestants, often in the Pentecostal tradition. I have Presbyterian friends who know a lot about the Bible but very little about John Calvin, Catholic friends who don’t know how to say the rosary but happily sing “Amazing Grace,” Protestant friends whose main spiritual adviser is a rabbi, Baptist friends who get together with nuns to pray the liturgical hours . . .

Veterinarians looking at a similar phenomenon call it “hybrid vigor.”

The AKC, the guardians of canine orthodoxy, don’t much care for hybrids. They believe that breeds (most of which have been developed over the last century or two) should be kept distinct so that individual breed standards are preserved. According to many conscientious breeders, the increasingly popular mixed-breed “designer dogs” are an abomination.

I suppose it’s not surprising that a woman who has belonged to three different Christian denominations is all in favor of mutts. Sure, if two really fine Great Danes fall in love, their offspring will probably meet AKC standards. But when you breed for good qualities, problems often sneak in the back door. Those Great Dane puppies have a high risk for hip dysplasia, just as toy poodles are prone to progressive retinal atrophy and Maltese often have bad teeth. By contrast, though my miniature schnauzer–yorkie cross inherited a double dose of the barking gene, her health is excellent, as is that of her lap-sitting shih-tzu–toy poodle sister.

I’m glad my extended family includes Protestants and Catholics, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews, the devout and the agnostic. (So far we don’t have any Hindus, Muslims, or Orthodox Christians at our Thanksgiving tables, but we have a few extra chairs if any show up.) Catholic piety, Calvinist theology, post-modern skepticism, Episcopal inclusiveness, evangelical certainty—these are all good things, but you don’t want any of them to get out of hand. Hybrid vigor isn’t just for dogs.

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

Middle age: coming and going

Countless eons ago when Mr Neff turned 35, I posted an announcement on his office bulletin board: “If, as Psalm 90:10 attests, ‘The days of our years are threescore and ten,’ congratulations to David for having reached middle age!’” Last October when our younger daughter turned 35, I tried congratulating her on the same achievement. “Mother,” she protested, “35 is not middle-aged.”

So I decided I needed an objective definition of middle age. I went to the Web, of course, and found that the Collins French Dictionary and Grammar is right in saying that midlife boundaries are indistinct (one online English-French dictionary defines middle-aged as "of a certain age;" another defines it as "fiftyish").

Though medical researchers often refer to people aged 35 to 55 as middle-aged, most English-speaking Web sites define middle age as the years from 40 to 60: Check out Answer.com, Encarta, Collins, American Heritage, and thefreedictionary, for example.

As lifespans increase and Boomers refuse to grow up, however, many sources are now extending middle-age upward. Wikipedia notes that for the OED, middle age begins at age 45, whereas for Erik Erikson, it ends at age 65. Merriam-Webster suggests ages 45 to 64; WebDictionary, 45 to 65, and Your Dictionary, 40 to 65.

Even the 40-to-60 span reflects changing attitudes: the 1913 edition of Webster defined middle age as "being about the middle of the ordinary age of man; between 30 and 50 years old."

Depending on which definition you choose, my daughters may possibly be middle-aged, or they may hang on to young adulthood for up to ten more years. By the same definitions, I may be middle-aged, or I may have left that category as long as ten years ago. Most likely, though, I'm going to change categories six weeks from tomorrow, when I turn 60. (My kids and grandkids began the celebration early by performing a wicked parody of "I Will Survive"--for the original, click here--and by giving me DVDs of my favorite British comedy, As Time Goes By. I'm guessing this means they think I am leaving middle age behind.)

For the sake of discussion, let's say middle age does end at 60. That makes sense in France, for example, where people retire at 60 and thereafter belong to le troisième âge (le quatrième âge begins in the mid-70s). But just what is a post-middle-aged pre-retired American?

Are we middle-aged longer than the French because we don't know when to quit working?

Or have we become prefixes (post-middle-aged, pre-senior, semi-retired) or present participles (aging, graying, or, in French, les croulants--the crumbling ones)?

What is this space between midlife and old age?

Followers of the Benedictine tradition learn to pause at the threshold when passing between rooms, when entering buildings, and, by extension, when changing activities, experiences, and ways of life. Maybe these are the threshold years--a time to stop, take stock, give thanks, breathe deeply, get ready for the next step.

Threshold: Nice concept, rotten label.

So it's back to middle-aged. "Neither old nor young," says Wiktionary. That's fine. Whatever the term and whatever the age, Epicurus offers this good advice:

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.

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?

Virtuous bag lady rewarded

During Lent I posted two articles about giving up plastic bags; see "Plastic bags" or "Give up carbon for Lent" if you're still in a self-flagellating mood.

Or, now that endless Ordinary Time (the green season!) has returned, rejoice with me--my tiny good deeds have been rewarded.

Last week, as usual, I parked the car in Trader Joe's parking lot, hurried to the entrance, read the sign that asks, "Did you leave your reusable bag in the car?", sighed heavily, and allowed my good and evil angels a moment to duke it out.

The weather was perfect. My car was in a nearby space. I was not in an extreme hurry. Not to return to the car would have been lazy indeed, and probably one of the seven deadly sins.

I went back and got my bag. And when I checked out, I filled out one of those little tickets that enters virtuous bag ladies in a raffle for a bag of groceries.

They phoned Sunday, while I was at church, to tell me I'd won. Here's a picture of the booty--just what we need for our forthcoming family vacation, and a new Trader Joe's bag as well.

I'm delighted, and I love Trader Joe's, but I do have a question for them: What's the point of bringing my own bag when nearly everything you sell is swathed in plastic?

The French Market is in full swing

spinach
cucumber
green beans
bell pepper
red onion
strawberries
whole grain bread

all of it local