Hobbit-Sense at OneFreeGarden.com

Quick Takes makes a comeback at Hobbit-Sense!  Amazing.

1.  So, I found an ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS WEBSITE this week, courtesy a link from someone’s facebook.  It’s called Not Always Right, and is a collection of stories from customers who were a bit off, weird, stupid, or just plain annoying.  There are some that are off-color, but most are fine and they are absolutely hilarious.

2.  Of course, this makes me think of a few interesting customer experiences I’ve heard of.  My grandmother works at a grocery store, and my teenaged sister got her first job in the same chain this summer.  Grandma is famous in the house for her tales of frustration with customers who are annoying, stupid, or downright rude.  A recent one goes like this:

Customer buying ice: “Is that an expiration date?”

Grandma: “I don’t think so.”

Customer: “Well, if it’s past its expiration date, I don’t want it!”

(I’d hate to be her kid learning earth science!)

3.  I’ve been holding off on seeing the new Harry Potter flick- I really want to see it, but I thought it’d be cool to go to the Imax 3d cinema which is actually the closest movie theatre to my home.  Somehow I totally blitzed myself out of common sense on it, though– I had checked when it was coming probably a month or more ago, and it said July 29.  I think I suffered from some sort of delusion though, because I decided that the movie must be coming out in all theatres on that day.  And I persisted in this, so that when I found out it was coming out July 15 or whatever day it was, I decided that the date had been moved up and the Imax would also move its date up.

I don’t really understand how I missed just how weird a line of thought that was.  On the bright side, I will be seeing it sometime this week.

4.  Inspired by #4 at Jen’s Quick Takes, I don’t have any good recommendations for books about caving– but I do have a story about caves from when I was 3 and visited Yugoslavia with my dad.  We went to the Postojna Caves (Po-stoy-na) in Slovenia, which are the deepest caves in Europe.  I remember going in, that it has a little open-air train with what looked to me like brightly and variously colored school chairs stuck on it, so we sat on that and went off on the tour.  Being very deep caves, and in a limestone-rich geologic area, they have MASSIVE stalagtites amd stalagmites, huge.  Apparently, these terrified me, so my poor dad had to sit through the ride with a screaming three year old on his lap.

Ironically enough, when I visted the Wieliczka salt mine outside Krakow last year, I saw a billboard leading up to it that reminded me of this, and told the story to another girl on the trip.  On the way out, I took a second look at the billboard and saw that it was, in fact, and ad for those exact mines that had terrified me almost 2 decades before.  :)

5.  This week, I spent a couple days filling in my boss’ shoes while she was at a corporate meeting.  It’s been interesting.  The nice thing is that, because I worked at the kiosk, I have a surprising number of answers, most of them correct, fortunately.  I got a call this morning from a new store that doesn’t have the computer in yet saying $300 was missing– and I just knew it was a particularly crappy type of calculator that seems to mysteriously populate our stores.  Score one for the manager!

6.  Oh my gosh, how did it get to be this late?  I’m still in pajamas!  Do you think I can claim lost pajama time because I didn’t stay asleep the whole night?

7.  Target color codes their stock!  A new employee’s brother works for their distribution center and apparently that’s how they organise it.  I don’t know if that’s shipping only, but they have a lot of great stuff that’s… not in any logical arrangement.  And suddenly the vast separation between trash cans and trash bags becomes so much clearer.  On the cool side, I went into one yesterday that had a special escalator for carriages (carts? around here shopping carts are “carriages” just like some parts of the South call them “buggies”).  I just pushed my carriage into a track and then I stepped onto the escalator and met it at the bottom… I know I shouldn’t be that wowed, but it was pretty awesome as far as shopping carriages go.

And there we have it, a quick takes successfully done.  I wish I had more pics but the few links in here have some cool ones so check it out.

-the Rosy Gardener

Two posts in one week– amazing!  Thanks so much for bearing with me.  This one has been floating around in the forefront of my mind for about a week I think (and longer in the background) and I’m waiting for my company’s tech guy to call me back so I figured this was a good use of a bit of downtime.

There is a concept articulated very clearly in Catholic teaching that goes something like this: “Love the sinner, abhor the sin.”  There may well be other traditions that have this idea, but it seems to get discarded really quickly these days, by Christians of all stripes, including Catholics.  And it usually comes from misguided understanding of love.

Let me make a collectivised version of the argument:

God’s love is unconditional.  Therefore, we Christians are called to love unconditionally.  Unconditional love doesn’t stop because we don’t like something about the person.  In fact, people who make a big deal about other people’s choices in the name of Jesus often act in unloving ways.  So, when people single out things they think are wrong about people (individually or as groups), they’re not really loving them as they are.  So you can’t just separate sin and sinner and call that Christian charity.

The above argument is not without merit.  True enough, some people pound on sins, usually a few favorite vices, in a way that is basically devoid of any charity.  But the argument above has some serious issues.  One is that it misunderstands the entire point of abhoring sin and loving sinners, and the other is that it ends up destroying the very caritas or agape love it thinks it’s promoting.  And here’s why:

I have witnessed the effect of the anti-sin-abhorrence crowd in them, and any who follow it to its end invariably come to the same point:  they lose any sense of what makes a sin, and why it matters.  It is a very feel-good, teddy-bear faith to have a wishy-washy sense of “sin.”  Why?  Because when we reduce sin in this way, the only things that get called sins are either fairly obvious (like, say, murder) or very vague (“imposing on others,” for instance, or “hurting other people”), and everything else, including some very serious sins, become matters of opinion or, even worse, “personal preferences.”  No honesty discussion of morality happens when everything is prefaced by, “Well, this is what’s right for me.” But more importantly, there can be no true love without a strong concept of sin.

That may seem a little weird or backwards, but I am convinced that it’s true.  Why?  Because love doesn’t mean not seeing the flaws, even if a lovey-dovey couple goes through that phase.  When the honeymoon’s over, even the most rose-colored-glasses-wearing pair is going to realise that there are some things that seriously tick them off about each other.  A marriage doesn’t last because they decide that those aren’t really flaws– a marriage lasts because they decide that they love each other beyond those flaws, in spite of them, even.

If we go into Christian love blind to any flaws, we aren’t capable of actual Christian love.  I remember going to confession during Lent at my Catholic high school.  A girl in my math class had decided to pick on me a bit, and I’d finally had enough and started scoring her on her insults in a little scoreboard I made in a notebook called the “Bitch Olympics.”  It wasn’t particularly nasty, but it was somewhat effective, especially as the girl and her friends seemed to find it amusing.  Irony of ironies, we ended up on the same pew waiting for confession, and she said teasing me was on her confession list and I had to admit that the Bitch Olympics were on mine.

I got into the confessional, a nice dark one, with the kneeler and the screen, and even better, a priest I didn’t know at all.  He sounded old, with a withered strength to his voice.  I went through the usual- being mean to siblings, talking back to parents, and then I got to the Bitch Olympics, which certainly ranks among my most inventive sins.  Naturally, I detailed how she teased me, and how I knew it was wrong but did I mention she was teasing me?  And that I just didn’t like her?  The response I got was something like this:

Love isn’t a commandment because it’s easy.  It’s a commandment because it’s hard but it’s the right thing.  And Jesus commanded us to do it.  It doesn’t matter that you don’t like this girl, or that she’s mean to you.  You have to love her anyway.

I think when we take away the idea of sin, we are really robbing ourselves of the true virtue and commandment of love.  If we just accept the sins, downgrading them and acting like they don’t matter, we’re doing everyone involved a massive disservice.  It may seem like it’s no biggie, but think about two options a parent has when his child does something wrong– what about parents of kids who get involved in drugs or become promiscuous?  Who loves the child more, the “anything goes” parent, or the one who still loves his child despite these terrible deeds, and takes all the suffering that comes with it?

And while we’re talking about wayward children, if there isn’t any real sin beyond biggies or vague non-harm principles, why would Jesus bother to die for us?  I know it’s not what’s intended when people say you can’t separate sin and sinner, but the end result is that we actually denigrate the love of God for us.  Dying on a cross for perfect people isn’t nearly as heroic as dying for people who are pretty darn awful.  ”Blind love” that just ignores the things we don’t like doesn’t seem like real love at all.  I could keep going on and on trying to articulate it, but once again GK does it better:

Love means loving the unlovable, or it is no virtue at all. - GKC

Have a great week!

-Rosy

(A brief note that this is in no way a criticism of actual vegetarians.)

I’ve been mulling over this idea for a while but it was only in a conversation with Plush Appendix over the weekend that I put a name to it. I call it vegetarianism of faith not because of an abstenance borne of good will. Rather, this is the choice to avoid the “meatier” elements of faith, because they are disagreeable to the person.

That is, rather than go for the real core of faith, we stay at a comfortable surface level, where differences are matters of opinion rather than truth and honest discernment. This mentality leads to a tricky kind of idolatry, one which tends to replace God with a shifting notion of “social good” and, as Chesterton put it, “not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

The common good is certainly a Christian idea, but the mistake is in mistaking that for the whole of faith. These are the sort of people who point to Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day as examples of their kind of Catholocism or Christianity, and then proceed to make all sorts of unjustified assumptions that will aid in their avoidance of the center of their faith. They are very results focused- Mother Teresa is a hero because of all the help she gave the poor. But easily overlooked is why she did those things.

Mother Teresa didn’t do these things because she believed in a social good- she did those things because she loves Jesus. It wasn’t an ideology of common good, or a high ideal, even though those can be parts of it. But mistaking the effects of a deep love for Jesus as the equal of that love is an easy way out of the more difficult parts of faith. The moral requirements, the challenges to the ego, the reliance on God, and perhaps most importantly the awareness of one’s flaws– all these are easily set aside when faith is reduced to “being a good person,” which is an effect, not the source.

And yet practicioners of this meatless faith will claim that those who go beyond the broth are polemical because, having had the better portion, they will not surrender it or compromise its potency.

At the risk of adding even more to my various food metaphors, I will offer one last though, which is a challenge to everyone, myself included. As much as I wish it were otherwise, I’m often a vegetarian when it comes to faith. But I have found a useful reminder in the wedding feast at Cana: a lot of times we settle for the cheap wine. But if we will wait, and plead for help, and follow Mary’s injunction to “do whatever he tells you,” we will get the better wine. Our task then is to discern what are the hearty things we leave in the bowl, what is the cheap wine we’re settling for.

Thanks for bearing with my long absence and any lack of cohesion due to writing this on the small screen of an iTouch.

Best,
-Rosy