Light and Momentary

So as to win, redux

You guys, I ran that 10K and it was so so SO much fun. If you had told me how genuinely happy I would feel at the end, after finishing a little more slowly than the time I had mentally labeled as "The Slowest I Could Possibly Finish Without Mortification," I wouldn't have believed you. But it's true: I was thrilled. Immediately after I crossed the finish line they handed me a finisher medal. I have been scornful about finisher medals in the past, calling them further evidence that we are living in Self-Esteem Nation, but I put that sucker around my neck and kept it there the whole way home.

When I walked in the door Stella said, "Mama! Did you win?" I told her no but she seemed to have a hard time getting her mind around the answer. "No, really, Mama," she asked me again, "did you win your race?"  And again: "Didn't you win?" The boys thought this was a hoot. "Wait, Mom," they took turns saying, "are you sure you didn't win?" It was funnier the first 12 times than the last 35, but it has made me think a lot about winning.

I have often thought about St. Paul's exhortation to run "so as to win." It's the title of an old blog post and it appears in at least one other. Always, always before now, I used that verse as a stick with which to beat myself.  You're too slow, Jamie Gladly. You're too afraid to suffer. You're not working hard enough.

But OH you guys, it has hit me -- not like a ton of bricks, because that would be too violent, but more like the stunning sunrise I watched unfurling in coral and gold on the way to the race -- so I should say it has dawned on me that I have been thinking about it in entirely the wrong way.

Beating yourself up is not a winning strategy, either in running or in the pursuit of heaven.

Winning takes time and preparation. You can't just show up on the day of the race and expect to do your best. You put in the effort one piece at a time for weeks in advance. You can spend years figuring out what your limits are and how to nudge yourself a little further. Holiness takes time.

If you really want to win against a tough field, you are going to organize your life around that goal. You will eat like someone preparing for a big race; you will prioritize like someone preparing for a big race. Holiness takes thought.

Winning demands that you recognize your limits. You will hurt yourself in a hurry if you just try to gut it out. Every athlete struggles with something; ditto for every saint in the making. Running so as to win means working with your limitations. Holiness doesn't mean we are flawless from the get-go; it means we are willing to be transformed.

Winning also requires you to play to your strengths. I was surprised to discover how much I love running intervals. (Okay, now I am feeling self-conscious about calling it a strength. If there is ever an athletic event that requires me to do a backbend crabwalk while reciting the Iliad in Greek, I will own that event. They can just go ahead and smelt me a platinum medal for that one, thanks. Running, not so much.) It is a deeply good thing for me to find joy in running intervals. I just need to keep it in balance: if I run so hard in the interval workout that I can't finish the endurance workout a few days later, I need to adjust. This same kind of balancing act is an essential part of the spiritual life: appreciate your strengths, yes, and remember too your obligation to keep working on your weaknesses. Holiness is about becoming more whole.

Winning is easier when the crowd is cheering you on. The first mile of the race flew by -- I hardly noticed my aching sacrum at first. I thought, "Hey! All I need to boost my motivation at home is 3000 people to run with!" And then at the finish line -- well, this is kind of sappy, but it makes me cry to remember the crowd. A spectator struck up a conversation with me and I told her, "I thought all week that I should just stay home. I thought, 'I'm too slow.'" And she said, with obvious sincerity, "Oh, no." She said, "It's really awesome that you came here and finished your race." And you guys, that makes me think of heaven, and of the brothers and sisters there who are cheering us on. It gives me hope that they are pulling for us to finish strong, that they are not saying, "Too bad you're so SLOW and LAZY." Holiness unfolds most easily within the communion of saints.

This sounds like a stupid Nike commercial, but winning is partially about attitude. I spent all last week in a dither, you guys. Should I stay or should I go? Was I going to hurt myself badly if I tried to run? Was I going to leave pelvis shrapnel all over the course when it exploded? Those are the saner thoughts from last week, actually. I never thought -- I mean, it literally never once crossed my mind -- that I would have so much fun! I was just going to tough it out in the name of finishing what I started, and I accidentally had a blast doing it! My sacrum hurt all the way through, but I'm so glad I ran anyway. Here again is that truth I ought to know by know: Fear is the enemy. Just show up. Holiness calls us out of fear and into trust.

I didn't come close to winning, of course -- I was pleased enough to be solidly in the top half of my age group. But I drove home through the stubble-stippled fields feeling eager to do it again. I wanted my family to be there next time, to soak up the joyful atmosphere at the finish. It's hard for me to explain the happy-with-a-scrim-of-tears feeling that followed me all day. There's something extraordinary about being around thousands of people who are running their hearts out after weeks of planning and effort. It made me want to keep running, to run harder. Holiness is contagious.

Like shining from shook foil

I used to think that developing a "teaching philosophy" must be the worst, most painful exercise in educator-ese, but then a teaching philosophy snuck up on me.

I believe that the glory of God shines out from the whole created world. I believe we see "through a glass darkly" in part because the glass is covered in divine fingerprints, in questions whose answers reveal Truth and Beauty as well as truth and beauty.

I believe St. Thomas Aquinas spoke a beautiful truth when he said that God calls us out of double darkness, out of ignorance as well as sin. I believe that growth in knowledge is both an obligation and a joy.

I believe it is important to keep the obligation and the joy in balance. Real learning is work, and we do our students no favors if we pretend it will always be fun. But OH my friends, we have been given minds made for learning and a world that tells forth the goodness (and creativity and purpose and wisdom and whimsy) of a living God. Real learning should also bring us joy.

I believe the first teaching philosophy I ever heard (way back in 1985, when we performed Up The Down Staircase in high school) might be the best. It is surely the most succinct: Chaucer said of the clerk of Oxford "and gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche." I believe that a good teacher must first and foundationally be a joyful learner, someone who can delight in discovering more about her topic. I believe joy is catching. One of the great rewards of my job is hearing from students who say, "I thought this class would be boring. But you have changed my mind and now I want to learn more."

Why am I telling you this? Because my sixth-grader's social studies teacher told them that they should expect to find their unit dry and boring. She said they didn't need to remember the material after the test was over, that the purpose of the unit was to teach them how to learn rather than to impart actual content they would need to retain.

This would bother me in almost any context. But she was talking about ancient Greece.

Homer: dry and boring. Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles: dry and boring. Thucydides: dry and boring. Plato: dry and boring. Joe is my military history buff -- he has spent hours poring over diagrams of Thermopylae and Salamis. "Mom," he said in pained tones, "she told us about Salamis and she said, 'All you need to know is that the Greeks won because they had faster ships.'"

Reading the ancients was one of the unexpected pleasures of my undergrad career -- peering inside the minds of people who long ago returned to dust. They had thought and written and eaten and laughed and desired and fought and prayed -- and then died. But I could still hear their voices.

Of course it's fine with me if my son's teachers do not share my belief that creation sings of the goodness of God. It's a public school. But it seems to me that a teacher's duty is to observe the world with interest, to watch for connections, to be enthusiastic about her topic. Enthusiasm is contagious.

Apathy is contagious too.

Decrepitude

Yesterday I was feeling discouraged about running again. Actually, for the past couple of weeks I've been feeling discouraged about running. In a fit of delusion moment of optimism I registered for a half-marathon in January, but we had so much snow and ice this winter that almost all of my runs were on the treadmill. I do not have it in me to do the long runs for a half-marathon on the treadmill, so I changed my event to the 10K.

It's going to be a slow 10K.

I was trying to pep-talk myself into accepting the slow. It's better to finish a slow 10K than to sit on the couch wishing you were faster. There are benefits to just showing up. But yesterday after a gentle 2-mile run I started to hurt.

My pelvis has been twinge-ing at me all this year, but this was not a twinge. This was my sacrum with a sensory semaphore, saying, "Bad idea, Jamie!" After a couple of hours it hurt too much for me to walk to work. 

I found some exercises that helped; ice made things better too. But I was exasperated. Why do I keep hurting myself? Who hurts herself in the sacrum, all of things? How did these particular genes stay in the gene pool? Wouldn't you think they'd have been gobbled up by a saber-toothed tiger? An arthritic amputee saber-toothed tiger, even? I tried to console myself with the thought that my ancestresses were the ones outsmarting the saber-toothed tigers instead of outrunning them, but...no.

As I lay in my enlarging damp spot last night (caused by melting ice on my sore sacrum, not anything that should spur you to avert your eyes), I was thinking about my need for a better strategy. My college roommates and I are doing a mud run together next month, and the run part is as much as 7 miles long. We're not going to be tearing up the course. "I know what we should do," I thought sleepily. "We should just rent a golf cart."

At least there won't be any saber-toothed tigers.

Detach

I have been thinking about the way that anything at all can draw us closer to God. The flip side of that is that anything at all can draw us away. It doesn't seem quite fair that practices intended to draw us closer can have the opposite effect, but it's true. I have firsthand experience with letting a prayer routine interfere with an actual encounter with the divine presence, with saying, "Wait a minute, Jesus, I'm not done saying the Canticle of Zechariah." That's what the lolcats call "doin it rong."

So I have tried to be unpicky about spiritual experiences, to be quietly grateful for my pastor while accepting that his replacement will probably not blend bookishness and fervor and dry humor in the measure that so pleases me, and to be accepting about the dismal music that predominates at our parish. It's not about the pastor; it's not about the choir. It's only about Jesus.

In the years since my last retreat, I had started thinking that retreats could foster the same sort of unfortunate idolatry, in which the emotional experience of the weekend becomes more important than the long-haul relationship with God and the pursuit of holiness. If you have been on a retreat in the TEC/Koinonia/Cursillo/ACTS family, you will know that there's a Saturday night event that feels a little like a foretaste of heaven. You can let it lead you to a deeper longing for heaven, or you can focus on how many people turned up and how well (or badly) the music went and how many of the retreatants cried.

But I think my discouragement was misplaced. Just like in marriage-- there are moments that are glorious and moments when it is an act of spiritual fortitude to keep the icepick in the utensil drawer and out of the offending spouse's orbit. (Just an illustration, folks! Nothing to see here-- I don't even own an icepick! Also, orbit juice is too messy for me.) It might be true that we grow closer to each other and to heaven in the difficult moments, but it would be silly to eschew the laughing moments or the sated moments (or the sated and laughing moments) for that reason.

This is the time of year when I always think back on my Lenten disciplines, some of which stick and some of which I am happy to jettison. This year I gave up sweets, and Facebook, and pulling out the gray hairs that seemed to multiply like sproingy albino bunnies the moment I published this post. It's been a good discipline to let the gray hairs be free. I have thought often about the woman in this Knitty spread, who seems so at ease with her aging self. Giving up sweets, also good -- but hard for me to maintain during Easter. Giving up Facebook has been really fruitful, but I just found out TONIGHT that Miriel is pregnant. I miss hearing from pals like Erin who haven't been blogging much lately. I had moments of thinking, "I will delete my account and never look back!" -- but I need some discernment there. Sometimes it's hard to know what's pulling us away.

But sometimes it's not. Karen left me a comment on my re-entry post, suggesting that I reconsider the plan to knit less. I have compulsive tendencies that sometimes keep me engaged in an activity long after I've stopped enjoying it. Lately knitting hasn't been feeding my soul, or even satisfying my urge to relax. No harm in cutting back there, I don't think.

This is a post in need of a tidy ending, but perhaps it's fitting that I don't have one. There are no tidy endings, at least not this side of heaven, in the search to "throw off everything that hinders." I think the best we can do is to keep praying, and puzzling, and figuring it out one day at a time.

Wrangler

Remember those posts I used to write about R, my stats program? This is a post about R. I am going to see if I can make this interesting, but you'll have to let me know if I succeed.

I am doing a presentation in June that involves a bigger sample than most of my recent work -- about 700 kids. As the database gets bigger, it's easier to get lost in it or to miss goofy things that would be more obvious in a smaller sample.

Weird fact about me: I love playing in data. I decided to get a PhD because I thought I would love teaching. And I do -- I had a blast in my class this morning, and I think they did too. (I mean, I know it's not really about having a blast. If I can cover the material and keep them laughing, I think that's a win-win.) I didn't know how much I would enjoy the research side of things.

I'm looking at a novel measure of language development that I devised for my dissertation. Like most measures of language development, it's sensitive to age. I wanted to see what was left if I pulled out the effects of age in my sample. In other words:

> newdata$stres <- rstandard(lm(new.measure ~ age, data = newdata, na.action = na.exclude))

That last little bit cost me some head-scratching: it tells R to plug in an "NA" for anybody who has missing data, so I can match up the right kid with his very own standardized residual. (Don't you hate it when somebody gives you the wrong standardized residual?)

Next up, I wanted to get each family's data on one line -- both twins, one row. I probably shouldn't feel like a genius that I figured this out, but here's the truth: if I had a roll of aluminum foil in my office I would make a little medal that said "CONQUEROR." Here's the trick: if you separate the firstborn twins--

> newdata.odd <- subset(newdata, ID %% 2 > 0)

--from the second-born twins--

> newdata.even <-subset(newdata, ID %% 2 == 0)

--then you can merge them back together by family ID! TADA!!

> newdata.merge <-merge(newdata.odd, newdata.even, by = "familyID", all = T)

In the SPSS version of this syntax that I was combing through, you have to rename all the variables yourself. But R knows better than to give you multiple columns of variables with the same name. You'll have newdata.merge$stres.x for co-twin A, and newdata.merge$stres.y for co-twin B. And if you want to estimate genetic vs. environmental influences on your shiny new measure, you're most of the way there.

I bet you can hardly stand the excitement! Preliminary results suggest that shared environment is more important for this conversational language measure than for other related measures. Extra! Extra! Read all about in two years when I get it written up and wangled through peer review!

If you are still reading, I appreciate it! (And if you know more stats than I do and you spotted something goofy, let me know.) If you skimmed down to this paragraph in hopes that it might contain something of actual interest, no hard feelings. Regularly scheduled programming will resume soon.

Who knew a post about statistics software could contain this many exclamation points?

Re-entry

My husband and I were very involved with a retreat program when we were first married, but since then I had sort of soured on retreats. It used to frustrate me when people from the retreat program would talk about needing another high. Sometimes retreats can emphasize group catharsis over The Way/The Truth/The Life, and really a person could just go to a rock concert if group catharsis is the goal.

This weekend, though, I found myself remembering our earlier retreat experiences so fondly -- all of the work and sacrifice from a crew of young adults who genuinely wanted the best for the retreatants. I've also been thinking about the re-entry question.

It's always a little tricky to come back from a retreat. The things that are so clear when you are unplugged with ample time to think get murkier in the scrum of real life. Some quick thoughts:

1. I think I need to spend less time knitting. It's hard to be present for my kids while I'm knitting, and I want to be present for the kids. I won't give it up; I'll just cut it down.

2. I think I am going to expend a little more time and a little less angst on meal prep. I am going to think about all of the times I approach the Eucharist with inadequate appreciation, and try not to sweat it when my efforts meet with an unenthusiastic reception.

3. I think I need to be more patient with teaching kids to get their chores done. If motherhood has taught me anything, it is that kids learn slowly. They didn't get out of diapers in a day; they won't get a routine down in a week. (ALAS.)

4. Life is full of vexing situations. A couple of doozies plopped themselves into my lap today. It is in the vexing situations that a person can most fruitfully take St. Teresa's advice: Let nothing disturb thee, nothing affright thee. (But I don't think that will prevent me from blogging about them. St. Teresa didn't say a WORD about blogging them.)

Holy Weekend

I said, "I don't really want to go on the retreat." I said, "I don't want to listen to rambly talks and sit through discussions in which politics and religion get conflated and watch the emotional puppetry happening." I said, "Three nights! I can't stay away for three nights."

My husband said, "You should go." I went. It was amazing.

I have spent the day grading and it is snowing outside and my daughter fought bedtime until I fell asleep unwillingly in her bed, but today I don't mind any of that. I had an amazing encounter with Jesus this weekend, with a love so tender and humble and patient that it made me say yes, YES, of course I will. I am pretty quiet about my faith in real life, for all that I shoot my mouth off here on the blog, but this morning in Panera I wanted to shout, "Attention, customers of Panera: Jesus really loves you! It's amazing!"

I wasn't sure that would be productive, so I am telling you instead: Jesus really loves you. It's amazing.