May 2008

I am reading Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird in which she cites Phillip Lopate’s poem as an example of shaping one’s paranoia “into something artistic and true.” I chuckled. In that sort of painful and true kind of way.

[quote=Stanley Hauerwas]
One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.
[/quote]

I must admit that until this week, I knew nothing of the beginning's of Mother's Day. Like Valentine's day, I wrongly assumed that it was yet another Hallmark Holiday, full of sentimentality and the idealization of motherhood, which is a noble but hardly sentimental or idealized profession (it is a profession, whether paid or unpaid!). How wrong I was! For the first time today, read in church, I heard the words of Julia Ward Howe, who apparently wrote something other than the Battle Hymn of the Republic.