I can't believe it's been a month since I sat here and wrote! What have I been DOING this past month, anyway? Mostly coughing, sneezing, hacking, drinking tea, tea, and more tea, coffee, water, orange juice by the tanker-load and using ridiculous amounts of albuterol---all to keep breathing.
Breathing is good. I find I'm quite attached to it, especially when I suddenly can't.
The usual late autumn cold showed up in our household around mid-December, when I first got sick. At that point I was assuming that I'd overworked from the church consecration in November and that my usual remedy of Zicam brand zinc treatments and a bit of rest and meds and I'd be fine. And actually, by Christmas, I pretty much was. Then all of a sudden, I wasn't. Seems that we got a second virus (oh, yes, DH got this, only he got it in spades; fever, chills, the whole nine yards. His entire Christmas 'vacation' consisted of us taking care of each other and making soup). Or perhaps said second virus was in fact the flu....likely, because of DH's fever and my lesser symptoms, because I was fortunate enough to have gotten the vaccine in late November. Whatever it was, it can just go away and stay away for good as far as Casa Pedersen is concerned!
Why do we get sick? How can something so miniscule manage to rob a person of most of a month, spiralling them from sore throat to sinus concrete to asthmatic bronchitis that moves in like your least favorite relative? The scientific answer of course is that there are bacteria and viruses that, when they get a hold in us, multiply and wreak havoc with our bodies until our immun systems can rally enough to beat them back and develop immunity to further attacks of the same agent. OK. But why do we get sick? After all, given the countless number of bacteria and viruses in the world, you'd think that one of them would have done us all in by now, or else you'd think that we ought to just be immune to them all. So why do we get sick?
At this level of the question, science again has some answers. Our immune levels are depressed by stress, for one thing, and if there is any one word that describes Western society today it would be "stressed". There is clearly some mind-body feedback loop, science will admit, one which allows the emotional valence of our daily lives to affect the efficacy and numbers of our white cells and all the various types of immune defense. What that loop is, at this point, is unknown, science would say....and in that wonderful phrase that always, ALWAYS ended every single journal article I ever read while working in graduate school "more research is needed."
Maybe so, to answer the more or less mechanical aspect of that question.
But we get sick because we live in a sinful world, a world our first parents messed up and which every single one of us ever since, with the exception of one very unusual young virgin and Her even more unusual Son, have contributed to messing up even more. That young virgin, who came to be known as the Theotokos, the God-bearer, never knowingly or intentionally added to the mess-up. She was human, though, fully human, and was subject to mistakes and misunderstandings and such; the Church Fathers suggest that such a misunderstanding actuallly led to the first miracle of Christ at the wedding at Cana. Regardless, we ourselves are not to blame for getting sick, but it is nonetheless true that we very often contribute to conditions that make us sick.
We don't sleep enough. We eat junk food and scarf it down in the car running from one event to another. We sit and watch "Survivor" or movies or play video games. We forget what it is to make a good home-cooked meal and eat it at a leisurely pace. We own too much and then must worry about how to pay for it all. We are treated as chattel by corporations for whom we are less a person than a means to an increased bottom line, to "making our earnings targets" so that Wall Street will hopefully, maybe, not be disappointed and tank our stock prices, thereby necessitating the laying off of the chattel for the sake of same bottom line.
Fault? No. Guilt? No. That isn't the point. Fault and guilt are western concepts that do not fit here. No, we get sick because we're messed up. Because our world is messed up. We look forward to the Day when it will no longer be messed up, but made new, by the One by Whom and for Whom it was all made to begin with. We dion't get sick because God is mad at us and gets revenge by giving us a cold or the flu....or cancer or heart disease or mucular dystrophy or lupus or Sjogrens or any of it. We get sick because we're broken in a broken world, and sickness is one of the ways our race's brokenness shows up.
So should we pray for healing? Well, of course! Christ's miracles of healing were beyond counting. They still are. Does that mean that zap, our cold will disappear the moment we say, "Amen"? Probably not, although of course God can do as He chooses. But there is an old old saying..."Blessed is the fever that fetcheth Christ to the bedside". Truth is, by praying we have already begun healing. Closeness to God heals. Maybe not our sinuses right away, but in comparison to what really needs healing in us, a stuffy nose is pretty small. Pray. Pray. Then pray some more.
That's where January went. Lots of "Lord have mercy" prayers. Not as many full-blown morning and evening formal prayers as usual, but lots of prayer, nonetheless. Which brings a lot of healing. I'm still struggling to get the asthma part of the asthmatic bronchitis to go away. But healing has happened. One of these days, as St. John Chrysostom said, I'll "make a good beginning" at being a Christian, thanks to all the healing God gives.
Get well.
-------Mary Brigid (cough, cough)
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Thoughts on natural studies
First of all, Happy New Year to all who visit this little site from time to time. May God grant you blessings and increase and joy!
It has been an infirm Christmas season here. Well before Nativity, I came down with a cold. Then my dh got the cold. Then I got better, but my sons got the cold. Then all of a sudden a few days ago, my husband turned worse, and a day or so lateer, I tanked too. So at the moment the count is: one plain cold (the 19 year old), two cases of asthmatic bronchitis (myself and my 16 year old) and one plain bronchitis (the dh). The cats and dogs are healthy, the bearded dragon is growing like a weed, and the silkworms I'm cultivating to feed the greedy and gluttonous maw of my dragon are also progressing like I'd raised them all my life. So the news is not entirely bleak, just croupy and dotted with many used tissues. LOL!
One normally thinks of the person who decides to raise a reptile as a pet as, well, younger than I am, at least. I have written about Fantus before, of course, because he is a fascinating little creature from whom I derive not only a great amount of laughter and fun, but who regularly teaches me about God's wonderful creation, about my place in the world, about virtue, and about myself. Fantus is growing well, as I said.... on November 14 he weighed 65 grams and was about 11 inches long. On New Year's Eve, he was 175 grams and almot 15 inches. Growing, indeed. He appears quite healthy, very interested in everything, tastes things whenever he can (including having developed a bizarre and apparently potentially dangerous predilection for chomping on my HAIR!) And Fantus has discovered the wonderful world of the silkworm.
And I have discovered the satisfaction of keeping an entire ecology going for the sake of one little bearded dragon.
Silkworms come from eggs that are laid at the end of the worms' lifecycle, once they have cocooned and then emerged as non-flying, non-eating, single-mindedly-mating moths. The eggs, unless they inexplicably delay a year, will progress for a couple of weeks, then hatch into itty-bitty black worms that must be fed almost immediately. They live their first couple of weeks in a petri dish, fed two or three times, until they are ready to move out into the general population of silkworms that have already been hatched and are munching their mulberry chow contentedly in a dedicated cat box set aside for this one cause. The "frass" (excrement) can be left in the box, but I worry that it will breed bacteria (the number one reason that worms die before they are meant to) so I clean quadrants of the box from time to time and in between times, grate silkworm chow for tem to continue to munch. A full grown silkworm is about 3 inches long; and at some point it will find a convenient wall of the cat box (or, in my case, having been moved to a separate container, the wall of that box) and start to lay down silk. It carefully lays an intricate blanket of the silk which will serve to hold the cocoon in place, then starts spinning the silk around itself, creating the cocoon. I now have one completed cocoon in the box, and another that seems to be searching for just the right place to spin. In a few weeks, the moth will emerge, hopefully find a lady- or boy-moth and we will have eggs deposited for the next round.
All this for one little lizard.
God did this too, of course. He spoke the stars into being, spun the worlds from His fingers, brought light and water and air and eventually all the myriad forms of life on this little world out of all the worlds in the far flung universe. This was not for one little dragon, but for the One little Baby that would someday be born on that world, Who would come to save all the other babies that had ever been born on that world. All the butterflies and moths and dragons and fish and the rest of it....to create a Kingdom that we will, God willing, someday share and serve and rule with His own Son, our Lord and God and Savior.
Is it presumptious to think that God took great joy when the first butterfly wiggled out of its cocoon, spread its wings to dry in the young sunlight, and finally fluttered off to pollinate the new flowers, the new dew clinging to its tiny furry legs? Is it too cheeky to think that God watched with glee as the first foal struggled to its shaky feet as its mother tenderly licked it clean and dry in the slanting sunbeams? I think not.
I enjoy watching my silkworms. They (believe it or not) greet me when I approach, because of course, this big thing coming up means more silkworm chow on the way (the highest good in the silkworm universe). I enjoy the feel of them, thinking of how the product of these lowly, soft little creatures has clothed me (not often, of course, but sometimes!) and how singlemindedly they work to find the next crumb, the next little shred of chow that has yet to be chomped up by one of the big boys that are soon to be transferred to the other box for cocooning. I love picking the tiny babies out of the frass (no smell, it's not nasty at all) and placing them carefully on a patch of chow that the big guys haven't discovered yet.
There is much to be said for the study of nature and its ways of teaching us the ways of God, I think. Fantus loves the silkworms, but he of course has no clue at all of how they get there.... suddenly here I come with the baby jar that I dust them with calcium powder in (more calcium means a healthy dragon!) and he is there, weaving back and forth and trying to get out through the glass in his expectancy. We don't very often have a clue about what all God did for us either. We start at the Nativity narrative, and that is proper. But step outside tonight if the sky is clear and stare up at the Pleides (the cluster of seven tiny stars in the winter night sky). Think about the ancient prophet who looked at those same stars and and talked about "He Who made the Pleides and Orion, who turns the day into night and the darkness of night into dawn....the Lord is His name." Think about how much we will never know this side of Heaven about what He really DID to make this planet, this place, so that we can wait with expectation for the revelation of His Son, at His Nativity, at His Theophany, at His Resurrection, at His Second Coming.
Thanks, Fantus. You're a very wise dragon. :-)
Mary Brigid
It has been an infirm Christmas season here. Well before Nativity, I came down with a cold. Then my dh got the cold. Then I got better, but my sons got the cold. Then all of a sudden a few days ago, my husband turned worse, and a day or so lateer, I tanked too. So at the moment the count is: one plain cold (the 19 year old), two cases of asthmatic bronchitis (myself and my 16 year old) and one plain bronchitis (the dh). The cats and dogs are healthy, the bearded dragon is growing like a weed, and the silkworms I'm cultivating to feed the greedy and gluttonous maw of my dragon are also progressing like I'd raised them all my life. So the news is not entirely bleak, just croupy and dotted with many used tissues. LOL!
One normally thinks of the person who decides to raise a reptile as a pet as, well, younger than I am, at least. I have written about Fantus before, of course, because he is a fascinating little creature from whom I derive not only a great amount of laughter and fun, but who regularly teaches me about God's wonderful creation, about my place in the world, about virtue, and about myself. Fantus is growing well, as I said.... on November 14 he weighed 65 grams and was about 11 inches long. On New Year's Eve, he was 175 grams and almot 15 inches. Growing, indeed. He appears quite healthy, very interested in everything, tastes things whenever he can (including having developed a bizarre and apparently potentially dangerous predilection for chomping on my HAIR!) And Fantus has discovered the wonderful world of the silkworm.
And I have discovered the satisfaction of keeping an entire ecology going for the sake of one little bearded dragon.
Silkworms come from eggs that are laid at the end of the worms' lifecycle, once they have cocooned and then emerged as non-flying, non-eating, single-mindedly-mating moths. The eggs, unless they inexplicably delay a year, will progress for a couple of weeks, then hatch into itty-bitty black worms that must be fed almost immediately. They live their first couple of weeks in a petri dish, fed two or three times, until they are ready to move out into the general population of silkworms that have already been hatched and are munching their mulberry chow contentedly in a dedicated cat box set aside for this one cause. The "frass" (excrement) can be left in the box, but I worry that it will breed bacteria (the number one reason that worms die before they are meant to) so I clean quadrants of the box from time to time and in between times, grate silkworm chow for tem to continue to munch. A full grown silkworm is about 3 inches long; and at some point it will find a convenient wall of the cat box (or, in my case, having been moved to a separate container, the wall of that box) and start to lay down silk. It carefully lays an intricate blanket of the silk which will serve to hold the cocoon in place, then starts spinning the silk around itself, creating the cocoon. I now have one completed cocoon in the box, and another that seems to be searching for just the right place to spin. In a few weeks, the moth will emerge, hopefully find a lady- or boy-moth and we will have eggs deposited for the next round.
All this for one little lizard.
God did this too, of course. He spoke the stars into being, spun the worlds from His fingers, brought light and water and air and eventually all the myriad forms of life on this little world out of all the worlds in the far flung universe. This was not for one little dragon, but for the One little Baby that would someday be born on that world, Who would come to save all the other babies that had ever been born on that world. All the butterflies and moths and dragons and fish and the rest of it....to create a Kingdom that we will, God willing, someday share and serve and rule with His own Son, our Lord and God and Savior.
Is it presumptious to think that God took great joy when the first butterfly wiggled out of its cocoon, spread its wings to dry in the young sunlight, and finally fluttered off to pollinate the new flowers, the new dew clinging to its tiny furry legs? Is it too cheeky to think that God watched with glee as the first foal struggled to its shaky feet as its mother tenderly licked it clean and dry in the slanting sunbeams? I think not.
I enjoy watching my silkworms. They (believe it or not) greet me when I approach, because of course, this big thing coming up means more silkworm chow on the way (the highest good in the silkworm universe). I enjoy the feel of them, thinking of how the product of these lowly, soft little creatures has clothed me (not often, of course, but sometimes!) and how singlemindedly they work to find the next crumb, the next little shred of chow that has yet to be chomped up by one of the big boys that are soon to be transferred to the other box for cocooning. I love picking the tiny babies out of the frass (no smell, it's not nasty at all) and placing them carefully on a patch of chow that the big guys haven't discovered yet.
There is much to be said for the study of nature and its ways of teaching us the ways of God, I think. Fantus loves the silkworms, but he of course has no clue at all of how they get there.... suddenly here I come with the baby jar that I dust them with calcium powder in (more calcium means a healthy dragon!) and he is there, weaving back and forth and trying to get out through the glass in his expectancy. We don't very often have a clue about what all God did for us either. We start at the Nativity narrative, and that is proper. But step outside tonight if the sky is clear and stare up at the Pleides (the cluster of seven tiny stars in the winter night sky). Think about the ancient prophet who looked at those same stars and and talked about "He Who made the Pleides and Orion, who turns the day into night and the darkness of night into dawn....the Lord is His name." Think about how much we will never know this side of Heaven about what He really DID to make this planet, this place, so that we can wait with expectation for the revelation of His Son, at His Nativity, at His Theophany, at His Resurrection, at His Second Coming.
Thanks, Fantus. You're a very wise dragon. :-)
Mary Brigid
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