Meditation on Quill Pens

I just found this great piece over at the Shrine of the Holy Whapping. Here's an excerpt (but, really, go read the whole thing):

I'm in a drawing class right now where we're copying the techniques of the old masters--sanguine pencil, quills, ink-and-wash. Perhaps there's a certain magisterial nostalgia at work here, tapping into the methods that made men like Bernini and Borromini so great, but it's more than that. The quill, this thing that was walking around on a goose a few months ago, is actually pretty easy to use once you slice off the tip and fall into the regular rhythm of dipping and scrawling, tiny mucilagenous pools forming unexpected and delightfully serendipitous shadows at the edges of your sketch. Or you turn it sideways and the line goes down to a milimeter with absentminded, scratchy ease.

Three pens in one, thick, thin, thinner, and perhaps in the end a lot nicer than all the fancy rapidographs and micron pens you can get at the store. At least for some jobs. It could get to be a pain after a while, but like the tiniest of scalpels, it's good for those small, quick, delicate jobs. We look to the past not because of a mere love of ancient things, but because they knew what they were doing.

Perhaps we're not willing to give them credit. As with quills, so with a million other things, including old stories, old books, old tradition, or old philosophy. We invent superstitions like those nebulous Dark Ages to discredit Aquinas and Augustine or pretend the ancient Egyptians were too stupid to build pyramids on their own without construction foremen from Planet X. The ingenuity of the human mind is so easily forgotten in the days of push-button publishing. Perhaps things are too easy. The past is safely cordoned off, behind glass, to be studied in a safe and sterile laboratory. Medieval man lived face-down in the mud, and the cathedrals and castles came out of nowhere. C.S. Lewis speaks of the incredulity modern folk have when asked to read an old text--Piers Plowman, perhaps, or Boëthius. What does that have to do with me? Don't we have historians to deal with that? And so we continue to repeat past mistakes, in higher and more extravagant pitches.

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Love: The Chemical Reaction?

Mom got us a subscription to National Geographic for Christmas. She figured since we liked it as kids, it would be good for our kids.

This month's issue arrived within days of the release of Pope Benedict's new encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. By a strange coincidence the subject of this month's cover story is Love. The article focuses on the chemical differences between "the passion of early romance" and "long-term love" and is framed by accounts of the author's relationship with her husband.

The science the article investigates is fascinating. Evidently when staring at pictures of one's beloved in the first stages of passionate romance dopamine levels rise; the seratonin levels of a person in the throes of infatuation are comparable to those of a person with OCD; and high levels of oxytocin appear to be linked to the deep bonds of long-term relationships as well as the parent-child bond.

But the troubling a priori assumption of the article seems to be that the mysterious range of phenomena we lump together as "love" can be traced solely to a physiological, chemical, or psychological cause. In short, to something purely material with no spiritual element at all.

The views I found most disturbing were voiced by a professor from Rutgers University, who explains everything in terms of evolutionary anthropology and chemical reactions. In the caption on a photo of an Italian bride and groom emerging from the church in a gleeful embrace she says, "Look at the joy of this man... he has just won the most important thing in his life: the opportunity to pass along his DNA." So much for love and the dignity of the human person. This formulation objectifies them and reduces them to the sum of their body parts.

The author, Lauren Slater, doesn't seem to attach herself to any one of these views and indeed the final story of staring at a photo of her husband while on the other end of the phone he stares at a photo of her is quite touching. But an awareness of love as a mystery that science can never solve is left for an editor's note at the front of the magazine which ends: "Science can explain how love affects the brain-- but not the mystery of how it affects the heart."

I'm by no means anti-science; but I do not think that science alone can unlock all the mysteries of the universe. In the end there are some questions science can't answer and these are the province of philosophy and theology. When we throw those out and try to make a religion of science our understanding of ourselves and of the world is impoverished.

The final photo in the story says it all to me. The caption reads:

What's kept Emily and Marion Grillot married for 58 years? It may be the bond forged by having children--20 of them, plus 77 grandkids, many pictured in the Grillot's Ohio home. It could be the calming effect of oxytocin, a chemical thought to be plentiful in long-term couples. For Mr. Grillot, a farmer, 'it's our commitment and concern for one another. Some call it love.'"

The photo shows an old couple sitting in two rocking chairs. Behind and between them in the background is a shelf lined with photos of children and grandchildren. You can make out at least a dozen wedding photos, including a black and white one that must be the couple's own portrait, as well as pictures of family groups, the couple cradling grandbabies, and what are obviously the obligatory school pictures. Also prominent are statues of the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin. Emily has a huge grin and Marion smiles more subtly, posing with his baseball cap on his knee.

God is love, Pope Benedict tells us, and clearly God's love is a solid foundation for the Grillot's long and child-blessed marriage. But the God who laid the foundation of the world can't be measured, instead he is the ultimate measure of all things. Science will never be able to tell us about the deepest mystery of love, which is the nature of God himself. But it seems that many people today would make science into a religion, and close their eyes to the possibility that there is indeed more to life and love than can be quantified by the scientific mind. It may, however, be experienced by the soul in an encounter with God.

Love cannot be reduced to a biological process because God is love and God, except in his incarnation, is not biological. God is Spirit and Love is a spiritual reality.

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A beautiful day...

Feels like spring. I decided to walk down to the park to enjoy the good weather while it lasts. As I was crossing a street I suddenly recalled that the last time I had gone that way I was feeling so very nauseous I was afraid I might throw up before I got to the park. I had to suck on mints to keep myself from gagging.
That was maybe two months ago. Now I feel so much better. I feel healthy, if a little sore in the back and big in the belly. I really need to be walking more than I am. Getting some exercise at least. When the weather is this nice it's hard to recall why I don't go out when the weather is cold and nasty. But I do want to resolve that even if February is brutal, I will try to get out and do some walking, so I don't get as winded as I did today.

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another review of The Right to Be Wrong by Kevin Seamus Hasson

At catholicexchange.com by Mary Kochan. Much better than my little ramblings. Check it out.

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good book

Mom lent me a good book while we were in Texas over Christmas: The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

I'm a big fan of sci-fi and like time travel stories. This one is different.

THe narative structure is part of what makes it so fascinating--mom said she finished it and then went back to the beginning and read it again. Two intercut first person narratives. Jumps back and forth in time, a bit disorienting. Fortunately each section starts with a date and the current ages of the protagonists.

I don't want to say too much, but I liked the characters, found their dilemma to be novel and compelling. Good characterization. I cared about these people and was anxious to find out what happened next. One of those books I had a hard time putting down.

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The Present

Of all the Christmas/Epiphany presents I got this year one was clearly the best: the crocheted Noah's Ark baby blanket my sister Theresa made.



She's a full time student, working on her senior thesis this semester, and yet somehow she managed to crochet this adorable blanket (which is not a small one either) and all the animals. I just hope her classes didn't suffer too much. (I should note that she didn't complete the project over the semester. There was a little work left to do and she finished it over the two weeks that we were in Texas so Dom and I were really able to appreciate the work that wne into it.)

I should mention that this is her first crochet project ever. She's never done this before.

My favorite part of the blanket is a bit hard to see in this picture: the two llamas at the bottom that she substituted for the Noah and "Mrs Noah" of the original patter which she thought looked "dorky". There's a whole inside joke about llamas that's been running since sometime early last year-- Dom and I even bought her a children's book when we were on the honeymoon called Llama, Llama Red Pajama-- and she created these llamas herself without a pattern. Is my sister talented or what?

(That's Theresa on the left, in her new bathrobe, I'm on the right and you can just glimpse the baby the blanket is for in the small bulge of my belly.)

We got quite a few great baby gifts while we were in Texas: a family friend knitted a cute yellow hat (her first knitting project), my sister's roommate brought back adorable fur-lined leather booties from England, my parents brought a bib from Canada and my friend Sarah gave us a great picture book. I'm loving all the baby stuff, I just can't wait till I get to use it all!

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A Great New Children's Book

Some Background

My quixotic quest in recent years has been to find a good book of Bible stories for kids. I've always loved children's books, but I discovered that there is a real lack of a good Catholic children's Bible when I was teaching 4th grade religious education. The kids didn't seem to know the basic stories-- most of them couldn't identify who Abraham was. I tried to read to them out of the children's Bibles the parish had in the store room, all of which had either bad pictures, bad text, or both.

I went out to the bookstore to find my own Bible after I tried to read my class the story of the last supper from a picture Bible that was missing the words of consecration... instead I had to get the kids to recite them from memory (fortuantely they could all do that).

I have spent hours flipping through Bibles looking in vain for something with beautiful art that draws me into the text matched with beautiful language, preferably a text that does no damage to important theological concepts and ideally one that helps to explain concepts imbedded in the stories but not explicitly stated.

The Find

Finally today I found a book that does most of those things: Who Laid the Cornerstone of the World?.The only thing it lacks from my vision is that it is not a complete children's Bible. Instead it excerpts eleven stories. But this is really a strength not a weakness because the book has a strong focus.

Taking it's title from the Book of Job-- it was the title and the cover illustration that grabbed my eye in the store-- it presents a collection of stories linked not so much by theme as by the idea of the questions children ask. As the Introduction says:

The title of this collection is a question put to Job by God himself, and it is the sort of basic question asked by every child: "Who made me and where did everything come from?" "What happens when we die?" "How did evil get into a perfect world?" "Why do people have to suffer?" These are not childish questions; they are only childlike. The child in each of us never stops asking them.

Of course, many adults know that these stories contain the answers to these questions, but many do not think of them in this way. They are almost too familiar as stories that people do not make the connection. The book makes these implicit questions explicit in the subtitles to each story. For example: "In the Beginning: The story of creation and why the world exists." "The Wily Serpent: The story of Adam and Eve and why there is both good and bad" "The Tower that Reached to Heaven: The story of the tower of Babel and why it people find it so hard to understand one another" and my favorite "The Day Everything Went Wrong: The story of Job and how bad things happen to good people."


Ann Pilling the Storyteller

The text itself has a grace and poetry all of its own that drew me in. The bible should have beautiful language and Pilling does this well:

On the fifth day, he set about making all kinds of living creatures, and he was extravagant. He created millions of everything: swarms of sea creatures to fiull the deep and flocks of fowl to fly above them in the sky. Some of these creatures were so tiny that they looked like specks of brilliant light. Everything, whether great or small, belonged to its own species and was separate from the next. Everything had its own special way of life. Although God had made countless numbers of creatures, he knew every single one of them.

I love that word extravagant. I love her emphasis on God's loving attention to detail. At the end she adds:

It is hard to understand how the Creator, who made huge things like the sun, the moon and the stars, could take the same care over the little things, and know all his creatures one by one. Yet he did, and he does, because he is Love.

Best of all, as I read I discovered that these stories were not as much translations so much as retellings. I love the way Pilling fearlessly adds her own text to the original stories to emphasize lessons about who God is and how he relates to us. The story of Adam and Eve concludes:

That is why there is both bad and good in the world, when God meant there to be only good. He had given Adam and Eve freedom, which meant that they were free too choose bad things as well as good, and they chose to do bad. But God went on providing for them, even as he sent them off to work in the world beyond Eden.

As Adam and Eve walked away hand in hand, God watched them from the entrance to his garden, and he looked sad.

This doesn't sound like a moral of the story ending, but it clearly and concisely sums up the main ideas: sin is the consequence of our choice, it makes God sad, God does not stop loving us, but always provides, God does not want there to be bad in the world, but allows us the freedom to choose bad.


Another thing I liked is that there is an attempt to make connections between stories. In the story of Noah she explicitly draws the parallels with her telling of the creation story:

For 150 days the world was covered with water. There were no signs of life because everything had perished. It was just as it had been in the awful chaos time before the world was made.

and after Noah and the animals are commanded to leave the ark:

"Come out of the ark... You and your family and all the creatures with you. Everything must have young and multiply." It was just as if the world were being created all over again.

Of course, Noah's ark has parallels to the creation story that are obvious to adults, and maybe some kids see it too or have it pointed out to them. However, I don't remember consciously making these kind of connections until I was in college. I think it's wonderful to find a children's book that doesn't see these as separate, discrete stories, but as a part of a thematic whole.


Underlying Pilling's approach is a solid understanding of the Bible's pedagogy. Her text makes the lessons integral to the telling of the story, it feels natural.

I notice on Amazon that Pilling also wrote The Kingfisher Book of Bible Stories and a quick comparison of the texts show that my favorite lines from Who Laid the Cornerstone are not in the Kingfisher. Also the Kingfisher pictures aren't as good.


The Illustrations

Of course in children's books good pictures are just as important as a good text. I've seen picture Bibles that had an adequate text but pictures which were too cartoonish for my taste or whose style simply did not appeal to me for one reason or another. Too often I feel the pictures dumb down the story or bear only a passing relationship to the text.

Helen Cann has provided beautiful artwork, water colors done in a wide range of colors from soft watery blue tones for the creation story, bold bright colors for other stories.

Each story has it's own palette and thematic borders: spiralling waves for creation, animals on ramps for Noah, flames for the fiery furnace, sea creatures for the story of Jonah, a winding road for the good Samaritan. Sometimes they are mostly decorative, sometimes they actually tell a part of the story.

The animals and people are naturalistic and the people look appropriately Semetic, Egyptian, etc. except in the great tower of Bable scene where at the end one can identify a wide range of ethnic types. The clothing is more detailed than the generic robes in many Bible story books, and feels appropriately matched to the characters.

Adults and children alike will appreciate the detailed visual elements.


Final Note

Who Laid the Cornerstone is published by Loyola Press who also publish Amy Welborn's excellent children's books: The Loyola Kid's Book of Saints and The Loyola Kids Book of Heroes. I'm thinking someone over there at Loyola is doing something right. I'll have to keep my eye on them.

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