Pray for Grace

There's an old joke that has been stuck in my head for years:

Sunday School Teacher:  "Now, Johnny, why do we pray for Grace at the start of every meal?"
Little Johnny:  "Um, is it because she's been a very naughty girl?"

I've been thinking a lot about grace, lately.

"Saying grace" is something my family used to do by rote back when I was a kid, but we let it lapse years ago.  It was a formulaic chant that was more habitual than sincere.  I think we stopped saying it because we had long stopped listening to it.

Whenever I hear other people "saying grace" or "asking for grace", I'm always struck by how often it seems like a formula, rather than a prayer.  It's like we, as a society, "say grace" (if we do) because that's what our parents made us do, and what their parents made them do, and so forth.

But...

Why should we pray for grace at the start of every meal?

Well, I guess that depends on what praying for grace actually means.

I mean, what it *means*.  To us, as people.  Forget doctrine and tradition, where does saying grace at the start of every meal touch on something we need for our souls to be nourished and our lives to be better?

Once upon a time, when food preparation was a bit hit-and-miss, we probably asked God to make sure our food kept us alive and didn't kill us.  And, when it was not certain that there *would* be a next meal, perhaps we were a bit more grateful for every plateful...

But in this day and age?  In our overstuffed, oversupplied and (let's face it) oversafe society?  When we can afford to eat badly not because we have to but because we want to?

If we don't need to care about whether our food will kill us, or where our next meal is coming from, do we still need to pray for grace?

Yes.

More than ever.

Because it's too easy to stop thinking about what we are putting into our bodies.

We need to take a moment, just before we stuff food into our mouths, to reflect on what it is that we're eating.  To think about where it came from and what's in it.

We need to take a moment to reflect on what the ingredients are in our food and ask ourselves if we can be grateful for what they will do to us.  Will eating this bring life to my body, or will it bring me joy in savouring the flavour?  If this is good for me, I should be grateful, and I should take the time to be grateful.  If this cannot bring me health or joy, then why am I eating it?

More importantly, though, we need to take a moment to reflect on what has gone into putting this food on our plates.

Am I eating something that was once alive?  What kind of life did it live?  What role did I play in the quality of its life (was it miserable because people just like me are more interested in convenience than kindness - could I be making a positive change in the lives of my fellow creatures by choosing different kinds of food)?

Where did it come from?  Am I happy with the journey this food has taken, and do I know what the consequences are?  Does it make a difference if my kiwi fruit comes from Italy or my mangoes travelled the length of the state twice?

Regardless of whether or not I can do anything about how my food was produced and transported, I should "hold it in the light".  The more I care about the food I eat, the more likely it is that I'm going to make better choices - to eat food I can be happier about - and be grateful for my ability to choose, as well as my food.

And, speaking of gratitude, whole chain of people have worked to bring me this food.  From the farmers who grew it to the packers, transporters and shopkeepers who brought it into my life.  A lot of my food is pre-packaged, which means a large team of people has also prepared it and cooked it for me.  I should take the time to be grateful for these strangers who are touching my life in this way.

When I eat with my family, usually someone I love has prepared the food for me, or someone I love has shouted us out to dinner.  I should take the time to stop and be grateful for these people who are so dear to me, and with whom I am sharing this meal.  And, if I have made this meal myself, for my family or friends, I should take the time to be grateful that I can do this for the people I love.

I've long stopped "saying grace", but lately I've been thinking it.  As I sit down to eat, I take a moment to think about what it is that I'm eating, and be grateful.  I forget to do it more often than I'd like - but on the other hand I worry that, once it becomes a habit, it will become habitual and I'll forget to mean it.

Is this food good for my body, my soul and my world?  If it is, I should be grateful.  If it isn't, what shall I do about that?

That was unexpected

Okay, I'll admit my attendance at church has been a bit sporadic over the last couple of years.  It's been awkward, and I'm lazy.

You see, I found a church I particularly liked, and started semi-regularly attending a particular meeting time... which they then "rationalised" away.  They decided they couldn't have evening services at both the main church and the daughter church, so they dropped the Sunday evening service (the one I could make it to semi-regularly) at the main church in order to keep the Saturday afternoon service going at the daughter church.

I switched to attending the daughter church, which I came to regard as "my church", but Saturday afternoons have always been awkward for me, so I haven't exactly attended regularly.  In fact, since Christmas, I think I can safely say I've visited other churches more often than I've attended my own.

Still, about a month and a half ago, I checked to make sure we still had the Saturday afternoon services at "my church" so I could come the next time I managed to have a free Saturday.

Yesterday (a Saturday), I had managed to block off the afternoon specifically for going to church.  I scooted over (literally - for some reason I thought taking the kick scooter would be the most convenient way to travel there) only to find...

You guessed it - they no longer have Saturday afternoon services at the daughter church.

But you probably didn't guess that the church wasn't there.

And, yet, *a* church is still standing exactly where my church used to be.  In the month or two since I last walked past "my church" and checked the times on the sign outside the building, the building has been taken over by a different church.

I came to the building from the wrong side (most convenient for scooting) and assumed they'd just changed the times.  When I walked around to check the sign, I discovered it was now a completely different church.  And I mean completely different.

It was St Oswalds Anglican Church.  It's now St Mary's and St George's Coptic Orthodox Church.

It's been so long since I attended "my church", I didn't even know they were getting rid of the thing.  I feel both amused and chastened.

The water will bind you, and keep you.

Every now and then, when I visit a place, I wonder if I could live there.  I've noticed, over the years, that my answer is almost always "no" if the town has no river.

It's a strange thing to have as your "deal breaker", but I've always lived in towns with rivers.  I've also always lived on the coast (which is a fairly normal thing for someone who grew up in Australia), but the ocean is something I see occasionally during the month.  The river is something I see almost every day.  Ideally, I would like to have both in my habitat but, if I had to choose one, I would choose a river.

I have great difficulty understanding towns that don't have a body of water near by.  Surely all towns were built on the water?  The water is what keeps your crops and cattle alive and powers your mills.  The water is what brings the ships (and the ships are what bring the goods).  The water is where the fish live - and fish are tasty and nourishing.  How could you build a town where there is no deep water?

And yet, I have been to towns where the only water is a trickling creek some where outside the town itself... oh, and some underground thingy that probably should be left alone - I'm almost entirely sure underground water tables were meant to stay under ground.  Don't they feed the rivers and lakes in different parts of the country?  Should you really be pumping water out of them, just because you were too stupid to build your town on a real river?

Mostly, though, towns without water completely disorient me.  I feel like I have no sense of what is up or down until I can find the shore.  It's strange, the way water defines the boundaries of your personal map.  The coast marks the furthest reach of the land, and the rivers bisect it and divide it into meaningful spaces.  North and South, East and West...  they mean little to me without the water to provide the context.  I travel East when I head towards the coast.  I travel South when I cross the river.

More than that, though, the river is a place to go.  It's hard to explain, but there are times when you just need to go somewhere, and the river is a prominent point in my universe.  It's not where I always go, but it's where I often go.  If I need to ride my bike somewhere I'll often head to the river.  When I lived in Tasmania, I was walking distance from the river, so that was where I'd often walk.

If I couldn't go for a walk by the river...

I would find that a very hard place to live indeed.

My home town has a river running through it.  The name of the town is irrelevant, as are the state and country in which this town lies.  The river is not.

Raise your hand if you could see that coming.

For the majority of the last year and a bit:

Me:  I can do anything!  I can do everything! 
Most people I know: You should probably reconsider that.
Me:  Pshaw!  If I can handle X, then surely I can take on Y and Z at the same time!
Most people I know:  That is probably a bad idea.

Well, I was almost right.  I could do anything and everything right up to the point where I couldn't.  Then I just needed to sit down for a while and stop expecting miracles - but unfortunately, that was the exact point where I needed to pull yet another miracle out of my hat (and, about 15 hours of well planned miracles, at that).

I was expecting the prac to be no more taxing than everything else I've been juggling - except I've still been juggling everything else while trying to do the prac.

Oddly enough, it didn't work.

I was offered the chance to keep pushing and hope for the best.  I've decided to take a rain check on that.  I'll kick myself for it later.  Right now I'm sleeping a lot. 

If there is one thing I've learnt over the years, nothing is as make-or-break as you think it is... unless you break.  Right now, I'm going to give "not breaking" a shot.  If I really care about this, I can make it up later.

Those who can't

There's an old saying:  "Those who can, do.  Those who can't, teach."

It's a terrible saying that is meant to insult teachers (particularly, I suppose, university and trade teachers).

I've often wondered, though, where does that leave the people who can't teach?  What do they do?

I had my first "proper" teaching day at prac today, and it sucked.  I was so terrible I even surprised myself - and, quite frankly, I usually expect to be terrible, so I'm not normally surprised to found out I am.

I was over prepared and underprepared at the same time (no mean feat), and I was also just plain awful.  I was boring.  I gave the students work that veered wildly between "too easy" and "too confusing".  I had no sense of where I was with the crowd, and I could see all the horrible things I was doing as I was doing them...  But couldn't catch myself.  I just kept grinding downhill, and taking those poor students with me.

There are two things about myself that I know to be equally true:
1.  I'm a frickin' genius.
2.  I'm the thickest of dunces.

When I'm in the zone, and on a role, you can't stop me.  I can solve any problem.  I can handle any situation.  I just sit there and say to myself "Well, Sharon, you're a frickin' genius, how do we make this better?" and a few minutes (heck, sometimes just a few seconds) of frenzied thinking reveals a solution that was worth the arrogance.  Sometimes I can come up with something instantly.  Sometimes I can say "leave it with me", and by the next day I'll have an answer that works.  I have this power.

But I also hit these points where all I can do is make mistakes and repeat them.  I'll say to myself, "well, Sharon, you're a frickin' genius, how do we make this better", and from deep inside something in me says "I got nothin'.  Just keep doing that thing that isn't working and hope it gets better."  When I'm a dunce, I'm a serious dunce.  I can't even read the situation, let alone handle it.  It may take me five years to realise what's actually going on. (No, seriously.  On more than one occasion I've had the "Oh, that's what she said" moments several years after the event).

And then I'm standing there, feeling completely useless while part of me screams "make it better!  Make it better!" and the rest of me screams back: "I don't know how!  I don't know how!"

I had a large portion of those moments when I was a high school teacher.  I'm having them again, now.

Yesterday, because I didn't have any classes in the morning, they got me to catalogue some resources for them.  I solved six problems before lunch.  Yesterday, I was a genius.

Today I was teaching, and I feel like I'm drowning in my own incompetence.

If this prac has taught me one thing, it's this:  I really like being a librarian.

Actually, I already knew that.  I just thought I might also like being an ESL teacher.  I think, now, I can safely say I don't like being any kind of teacher.  It makes me feel stupid and useless.

Maybe "those who can't teach should stop trying to kid themselves" should be the other part of that saying.

Other people's houses

As a homeless vagrant, I spend a lot of time in other people's houses.  Most of the time it's my mother's house, but I've been doing a bit of house-sitting of late, so I'm getting to experience the joy that is "The Homes of Others".

One of the joys of staying in other people's houses is the fact that other people put their stuff in weird places.  This is not usually a problem, unless you find you need it and then you can't find it.  There was one place I recently house-sat on two separate occasions.  The first time I spent days trying to find the matches before I gave up.  The second time I spent days trying to find batteries before giving up - but I managed to find the matches in the process.

At the moment I'm staying at my aunt's house with her two youngest "children" (both in their early 20s), in which she has kindly offered me shelter while I'm on prac in Brisbane and she's away at a conference.

Whenever I stay with family I'm always amazed by how different their homes are.  My mother's home and my grandmother's home were always very similar in things like the basic location of bits-and-bobs.  Yet, when I visit places belonging to my aunts and uncles, they have their bits and bobs in entirely different places.  I spend vast periods of time opening and closing draws thinking "surely, these people were raised by my grandmother, so it must be here somewhere?"

And things that are hardest to find are always the things you need in a hurry.

When you cut your finger on the edge of a jagged can, a few thoughts go through your head at the same time:  "Well, that seemed entirely unnecessary", "hey, I'm bleeding" and "when was my last tetanus shot" for example.  Very quickly, though, one thought takes prominence:  "I should probably clean this with disinfectant and put a dressing on it."

I'm sure my aunt must have disinfectant in the house somewhere.  I can't imagine her not having it.  She had three children and a large succession of pets, so I'm pretty sure infection control was something that would be on her radar.  Couldn't find it though.  I asked my cousin if he new where it was.  He searched for approximately 5 seconds and then declared they probably never had any.

I swear that man is going to die if he ever leaves home.  He lives in this house, so I occasionally ask him questions about things that are worth knowing (mostly to do with food preparation, sanitation or simply "where is the...").  Nine times out of ten he doesn't know - something I've chalked up to the fact that he's a "boy" who lives in a cave attached to the house and only comes out to eat food which has been prepared for him or take-away.  However, not knowing anything about the location of the first-aid stuff was a bit alarming.

As was the fact that he suggested I wouldn't need disinfectant anyway, as the human body is good at taking care of that sort of thing and I cut myself on a sterile can...

Really?  That's you're understanding of reality?  You think the human body just happily processes infections and tin-cans that have shopping-center detritus on the outside and food on the inside are sterile?  Forget dying in a motorcycling accident, my man; you are going to get gangrene.

A bit of updating

Practicum stuff so far:

I appear to have survived the first week.  I have to admit, I was actually concerned I wouldn't.  As I was preparing myself mentally for this prac, I was remembering all of the things that went horribly, horribly wrong back when I was a high school teacher, and starting to freak out a bit.

People usually laugh when I mention that I was a really bad teacher.  They think I'm making some sort of self-depreciating joke.  I am prone to self-depreciating jokes, but it's actually a bit of a ruse - I occasionally through in comments about my real faults, and let people think I'm joking so that I can feel I've given fair warning without actually making anyone wary.

Yet, it's true.  I was a really bad teacher.  I really didn't belong in a high school environment, and I failed a lot.  I fail a lot as a general rule, but when you are responsible for the academic development of 80-odd teenagers, stuffing things up takes on a whole new dimension.  Nobody holds you accountable quite like a teenager.

One of the reasons I left teaching was I honestly felt traumatised by just how badly my little failures blew out of proportion in that environment.  I had let myself forget how much I hated being in that situation until this prac came up.  Suddenly, I remembered I'm still a little bundle of stuff-ups, and can probably fail this thing six ways to Sunday.

I'm at my best when I can help, but I can't hurt.  In a teaching environment, I can hurt big-time.  It's not my happy place.

So far, it's been "not horrible".  I've learnt a lot from watching the teachers in that environment - both things I should do, and things I shouldn't do.  I'll probably talk about some of them over on the other blog.

One thing I had forgotten about the teaching environment, though, is how tiring it is.  You start earlier in the morning than normal people (getting to work ahead of the students to get some extra preparation in) and spend most of the day on your feat, and "on".  It's like being on stage for four hours straight.  And then there's several hours in the afternoon spent trying to prepare for the next day.  Add in the fact that I have to get up at 5am just to get out of the house in time to catch the bus...

I'm bone weary.  Ich bin müde.  Ma olen väga väsinud.  No matter how you say it, I'm so dang tired I can barely think coherently.

And I have an assignment due on Monday - as well as lesson plans for 15 hours worth of teaching.

It is helping to crystalise something, though - I think I'd rather support teachers than be one.

The Dragon

I have a plastic dragon on my desk at home.  It’s an expensive toy I saw in an expensive toyshop, and I liked the look of it, so I bought it.  It’s not one of those new-agey things that people get because dragons are so, like, spiritual, ya know?  It’s a genuine plastic toy. 

It’s the kind of thing you might buy if you were a six year old boy who wanted to play dragons and warriors (and had parents willing to buy the expensive stuff).  I also bought a centaur and a gryphon (with a birdman riding it!) at the same time, so it really is dragons-and-monsters type stuff.

I bought it partly because I’ve always loved the kinds of toys they make for six-year-old boys*, and partly because it’s beautiful.  It’s just a glorious model.  Whoever sculpted the original just did a lovely job.  It’s so wonderfully detailed. 

You can see webbing in the skin of the wings, the tongues (two heads) are ever-so-subtly forked and there are various patterns of scaling in different parts of the body.  There are slightly different horns on each of the heads (intentionally so – not from lack of attention) and the musculature in the arms and legs is anatomically sound.  It’s also quite well weighted and balanced.

The paint has been applied by hand by someone who (although no doubt following a chart as he or she painted several hundred identical dragons) payed attention to shade and detailing.  It’s not perfect, but it also isn’t slap-dash and careless.  And whoever designed the details of the paint work did a great job.

The toy is a mass-produced plastic figure pumped out of some factory in China, but it is well designed and well executed.  It’s lovely.  The design and detail on the centaur and gryphon are also very well done, but this dragon is a thing of great beauty.  And yet, so many people would probably just see “plastic toy dragon” and assume it was therefor ineligible to be “art”.

We often dismiss things just because they are mass produced, or made for an audience we don’t want to be associated with or don’t respect (like children).  We fail to see the beauty and the art that went into the original design.  I have yet to see a “proper” sculpture that could top this dragon for attention to detail and depth of imagination.  A lot of figurines are like that, though – they are wonderful sculptures in miniature, and we just don’t see the art through the plastic.

So here’s to the artists behind the toys:  occasionally, someone notices how good your work is, and they are amazed (and hats off in particular to whoever designed the two-headed dragon in Papo’s 2005 toy line – you rock).

*Admit it - they have the coolest toys.