HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

…..and you ask me, Lazarus, why I listen for the sound of my own breath?--because it stopped; stopped dead; for days and eternity---so, yes, hearing startles me, and always will

"I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail"

 

Diving into the Wreck

      
by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean            
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and et
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget      
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived her
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done 
and the treasures that prevail.    
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently                                    
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

 

photo "I Doubt if it be us"/"Framing the Peripheral Realities"/"Fragment"

by nikaa

post originally deleted, but then I remembered, this is Lent...a reminder I have no standing to condemn anyone but myself, So here it is: "As a human being I am taken aback by the arrogance and self-righteousness people display in "God's Name"

FROM TOUCHSTONE MAGAZINE (btw,who's in charge over there lately????)-Posted by James M. Kushiner....Quoting an article by Joan Frawley...

The Pope & Condoms for Africa

Joan Frawley Desmond begins her latest Cathoholic article:

I recall a friend of mine arguing that Pope John Paul II was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the developing worth who had died of AIDS. 

"Why is the pope responsible? I asked, somewhat bemused.

"Because he rejects the use of condoms," my friend replied. "So if some guy is infected with AIDS, he won't use a condom with his wife, and then she'll become infected."

"But the pope is also opposed to adultery," I told my friend. "if that guy won't follow the pope on adultery, why would he pay any attention to John Paul regarding condom use?'

------------------------------------

Not only is this in bad taste, it borders on cruel, not to mention prelest, assumption, and claiming that you can see into another's heart.

   Also, as a medical professional and and human being well aquainted with illnesses;

I am aware of MANY cases of married couples, both who have married as virgins, remained faithful, and through no fault of their own, one or the other has contracted disease or illnesses that can be spread sexually or suffered from a disease that lead to contracting a disease that can be spread sexually....yes, it is possible...

Let the Pope do his own heavy lifting with the burden God gave him-this is a tough one and maybe a one size fits all RULE may not cut it this time...God did not make us out of cookie cutters;

And last I checked the Pope still has the full weight of God and all the defenses of Heaven behind him....so I think we can stand down on this one; we would be of more use to the Pope and to these poor souls  by lifting them up in prayer.

---------------------

And what if the disease was contracted through infidelity (or choose any sin you think is the worst)...

Does that make this person a sinner, undeserving of any Grace, Mercy, Compassion, because even if he or she does repent, it's a given they will just fall again and again and again.....

Oh, wait a minute, I would fall into that category...


All those who don't...as you were, you are free to draw swords or throw rocks, OR WORDS (which, btw, hurt a hell of a lot more the swords or rocks).

A Voice So Swollen...it wont' fit your ears

Some afternoons
thud unexpectedly
and split into four pieces
on the floor.

Two large pieces, two small ones.
I could glue them back,
but what would I use them for?

Forgive me when I answer you
in a voice so swollen
it won’t fit your ears.

Words are finding their way back to me, but they are heavy

and they THUD and they are not pleasing to the ear.

So forgive me if I choose silence over the din...for awhile....

                                      *********

On "Good Letters", The IMAGE JOURNAL BLOG, Peggy Rosenthal writes

"What I treasure here—as in many of Nye’s poems—is her gift for domesticating the wild terrors of human experience, so that whatever befalls us in the wide painful world can be brought home. A simple broken bowl: Nye has a way of making small things like this “hit home” in the largest sense, home at the core of our hearts where all the evil of the universe brings its torment and all the good comes to rest....

Because “some afternoons” truly do “thud” in on us. I think of the roaring thud of natural disasters around the world, tearing down homes and ripping families apart. I think of the thud of a bomb on the home of an Afghani family, their bodies split into horribly uncountable “pieces / on the floor.” And I think of the crashes in my life and in the lives of people dear to me..."

poem: from Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Breaking My Favorite Bowl” ( Words Under the Words).

 

photos: sandig.urbanspace

TELLING STORIES....

, originally uploaded by nikaa.

"But any walk within fictional worlds has the same function as a child’s play. Children play with puppets, toy horses, or kites in order to get acquainted with the physical laws of the universe and with the actions that someday they really will preform. Likewise, to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.

This is the consoling function of narrative–the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. And it has always been the paramount function of myth: to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience."

from “Possible Woods” by Umberto Eco

Scenes from a Marriage, Day Lilies, and learning how to see through another's eyes

  A Few More Words on Reading "Day Lillies Elaine Neil Orr

Bits and Pieces from Image Journal's  Glen Workshop, 2008 Santa Fe

"Sheer habit, they stand so close; one flesh, truth, metaphors, doesn't matter. They just know they are not complete unless they are touching.

Ah, but this new twist in the plot;

Something has shifted the gravity in the world. Everything appears the same to the individual eye, but try looking together, they cannot even find the same point on the horizon.  Some-days they can't even find the horizon.

This  "mis-seeing" , this seemingly incompatible dissonance in vision  of late, has them wondering if they even occupy the same space on this earth, or even the same plain of existence. 

It seems to be unfair for something like this to appear so late in the game; twisting and tangling what was the straight and effortless home stretch that belonged to them; should belong to them; hard earned after successfully navigating a road that had more than it's share of unexpected detours, ill marked paths, and a couple  of near plunges down deep precipices that  came close to cutting the journey short,  or frightened them into abandoning it altogether."

Every writer knows that you never introduce a major conflict so late in the plot line.  It just isn't done.  And for good reasons.

Too dangerous; comedies become tragedies, or vice versa;

What has been so carefully planned, polished, edited and re-edited and is a hair's breath from being neatly wrapped up, tied up with a ribbon and ready to present to the world, whole and complete suddenly slips through the author's fingers and like a ball of yarn rolls uncontrollable, following only the tune of gravity- unraveling, shrinking, twisting, tangling and strangling everything that made sense, predictable probabilities, and any remnant of the illusion of control over how things should turn out when the author, the storyteller lets loose words and  worlds by uttering that first word...attempting to tame something that refuses to be tamed, yet pretending that THIS TIME it will be different, this time the unexpected is expected so even surprises won't be a surprise.

Any writer knows that writing has more in common with life, and is just as dangerous.  Plots won't be tamed and only a fool, or a bad writer approaches a story with any less fear and trembling than he approaches life.

The reckoning for each, without fail,will come.  And the real character of the danger is revealed.  It's not that the story, so close to being finished, proofed, and sent off to the publisher, by an impulsive whim to throw in one last plot twist has been ruined, made irredeemable flawed, but that the storyteller himself, has been challenged, tested; tempted, fallen and has failed or lost faith in the one thing needful to be a good, a true storyteller...knowing this one thing....that there is only one True Story and all stories are just a variation on this one True Theme.  Every beginning made will dance toward the same Perfect Ending, but the steps of each dance is unique, some wildly winding and whirling, some even, predictable and some silent, still with movement that is barely perceptible.  Yet in the end they are all the same, if True, will land in the same perfect place.

Unless one believes and is willing to dance to whatever music that accompanied every story, and follow it's lead until the closing cadence, then one must consider carefully before setting your hand, or voice to that very first Word.  It is a choice to begin;  and you may get to choose to shape, design, and mold it into an image as you please; or the only choice you get to make is to stay true to the sacred trust that goes along with uttering that first word- to journey to whoever the story lead-, a choice you may have to make 1000 times or more before the end...

...Resisting temptation, frustration, laziness, and pride and presumption that  leads to neglect, and even abandonment; judging  what was entrusted to you to be  fatally flawed and irredeemable; smug satisfaction to think you can take "lessons learned" and just walk away instead of laboring to retrace steps, untangle knots, and recasting your  preconceived, narrowed and limited vision of what you perceived to be  "happily ever after"( which is another name for  of Truth, Beauty, and Wholeness) into something that had not even existed in your imagination before you began.

"He stands on the outside looking in.
She stands on inside, and can't fathom the existence of an "outside"

Too late, too tired, too much to ask to retrace their steps, to find that one place at the still point of the turning world where they can look out and see the same vision.  So they still stand close, always touching, but somehow not complete.  And it is just out of habit now.  Soon, out of habit, they will forget what is missing.Soon."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“

I was standing today in the dark tool shed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no tool shed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular carry at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”

C.S. Lewis,

From: Meditation in a Toolshed

photo: Andrei Rosetti

Again for my classmates: writings from the past-THE BONES WITH ALL THE SKIN AND FLESH SCRAPED OFF

FROM GLEN WORKSHOP, 2006....

I am leaving tomorrow for Santa Fe.  My apologies to those who have been waiting for these chapters.

“Be properly scared, and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions. . . . Cheers, Tarfunk.”  Flannery O"Conner

Looking forward to seeing you all again. 

____________________________________________________________

FRAGMENTS

IV. GREAT LENT 2006: CONFESSION:

"With the Cross that Catches All Thieves, He Caught That Thief For Life."

Confession           

The words claw their passage      
From the mouth, a lifetime's shame revealed,
as the best face crumbles.
The secret me is thrown before God
like a shackled intruder,
the strong man who always threatens to return
is finally bound; I am released.
The priest begins to speak,
but instead of condemnation he grants eternity's pardon,
and all that was named is no more.
I am reformed to begin again,
daring to believe in such miracles.                         
                                —Stephen Baile  (1)

Where does sin go when you are not allowed to speak of it, confess it, or even admit that sin is sin?
The Lament is silenced.
The church is practicing her prerogative of binding and loosing.
Love is loosed
No greater love is to be found than not offending another's sensibilities.
Sin is bound.
Bound so tight it is nowhere to be found, except in me.
My soul was never served notice on the new rules, of no rules.
All is lost

Speaking, I would commit a greater sin, against love.
If I remain silent, never reveal in all its darkness, the evil that lives in me,
I take the weaker medicine, and die slower.

What happens to the soul when the church's confession of sin
becomes nothing more than a vague declaration of corporate wrongs
done to anonymous persons half a world away?
How do you stop the numbing of your own heart as you break law after law?
murdering with words and deeds the person standing right next to you?

When you violate the Word that is carved into your heart before memory?
How do you lift your eyes to heaven when there is no absolution proclaimed?
Neither is there a call to turn from this road, since all roads are one.
Who will unbind your heart and conscience, and free to stand and begin the climb again,
to that God-imaged person you were meant to be?

When I close my eyes demons sneer and dance in the darkness.
Ordinary sounds startle my senses, they all become whispers and wailing’s
accusing me of what I already know. 
It will not do to assure me that it was all washed away at that font, long years ago.
That infant wailed because she knew.

She wept for the sorrow of the stain, and the joy of the cleansing.
But she also wept for the struggle, and violence to come.
The evil that tempt, succeed in ripping her from that state of purity;
and she would go willingly.
Most of all she wept because the day would come when she would cease to weep,
and she would forget Him who will never forget her.

This daughter of the Immortal King demands to know
what she will answer Her Father when her poor soul stands before Him
unprepared and unable to give answer.

I do not fear the His future words, " I do not know you".
I fear more my words, spoken today;
"Father, I do not remember you,
I can't recall the slightest contour of your face, or the touch of your hand.
And your voice, the voice that sang and still sings all things into existence, I have become deaf to it.
I have locked myself in the silence of my soul and will never hear, again, the music of the spheres."

Sola is a very small word, and it shrinks and stinks in this noon of the dark night.
Sola the soul, who has turned away.

THIS WAS WRITTEN OVER A YEAR AGO, BUT I PROMISED MY CLASSMATES SOME MORE OF MY WRITING: " THE POWER OF NAMING NAMES"

ESPECIALLY FOR LAURA....



FRAGMENTS

II THE POWER OF NAMING NAMES

In three weeks, Nathaniel Eastwood Carlson would have been celebrating his 21st birthday. (AUG 3, 2008, Nathaniel would have been 24)
Twenty times this day has rolled across my horizon; and twenty times I have swallowed the grief, still fresh, and still cold.
I have never spoken his name out loud.  I have written it down only once before.  The only visible mark, that confirms his existence is in our "Family Bible" on the page labeled "Deaths".

When I began recording the official comings and goings of our family, I always thought the bottom line of the "Births", and "Deaths" pages would eventually converge.   For every birth, a death, in an "Ecclesiastes-for everything there is a season" sort of way.
It's how the world works, or at least how I thought it worked. You are born, and then you die.  In between you might garner mention on other pages, baptisms or marriage, but you were only guaranteed the two entries.

No matter how many generations of Carlson's sojourn on this earth, recording their comings and goings, births and rebirths, unions and partings, the accounting will never balance.
Add and subtract, multiply and divide, there will always be the tiny remainder of Nathaniel Eastwood Carlson.
And each year, on this day, I note that my world is still unbalanced, tilted ever so lightly.  But I have learned to step as if all was level and firm.

Nathaniel died while still hidden in my womb.  No one knows why, and no one even thought it should matter.   
After all, the obscene mindset of this culture, that clings to the illusion that it doesn't know when life begins, refused to acknowledge his lovely, mysterious, short life.
Nathaniel never drew a breath, I never held him, or even saw him. 
These oft worshiped things called physical senses denied him.
And in theological circles I was enclosed in at the time, the seen always trumped the unseen.  So I silenced my rebellion and gave my assent. Negated Nathaniel's existence was the first step into the dark ream being called "the culture of death".  It would be a long sojourn.  He was only a potential, but he never, truly was a real live boy. And even if we were mistaken, God's mercy was more than enough to paper over our ignorance.
They were wrong, but in going against everything that my spirit was crying out, I was more wrong.

I open the Family Bible and look his name, and the date he ceased to be.  It is written lightly, tentatively, like it is a question and not statement of fact.

Was I aware then, of a desperate, unholy hope that human lives could be erased from the mind and the heart?  Did I even contemplate the next steps in this line of thought, that would lead me to value human life on my own terms, disregarding the absolute value God placed on it when he said  "And it was Good". 

I know that if I wrote lightly, and the day came when his memory became indistinguishable between reality and myth, I could blot it out, sparing myself a lifetime of hard questions.  A few strokes would erase him and level my world.  But I had no idea the shifting sands I built these hopes on were nothing less than the dust of crushed dry bones of those I would wipe from memory.
This was the old "Eden syndrome", and I was playing Eve's part.  Usurping God and claiming for myself, power over all matters of life and death, good and evil, being and nothingness.
It was a temptation that would be a motif of my life.

Sands Shift.  It took ten years, and the birth of two other children, and the death of my father before I would write that name in whisper strokes.  I only transferred to paper what was written on my heart and would not give me rest until I spoke it.
The realization of the permanence of things created ex nihlo was beginning to dawn. The sun was rising blood red, dark and horrible.
In another ten years I would reach the place that I could shout his name, along with curses that I am too shamed to recall, to God or anybody else.
But it would be many more years to dredge the black silt from my throat that would allow speaking clearly the other truths that came.
I can look back at that young woman, almost and then mother, and forgive her hubris, but not her sins.
She has paid dearly for any denial or ignorance of the Sacramental Mysteries called Life, and so did others.

____________________SCHISM__________________

 

 

...but is the eternity that awaits you

In case you didn't read the short story "Day Lilies" in it's entirety, or you missed
the point, or you are wondering why the story and certain lines reached out and
grasped me and wouldn't let go, here it is from another angle.

Maybe you are a poetry person, and you need it distilled down even further.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone away
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you

RSThomas

photo: decemberstephme

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE...A Few More Words From Elaine Neil Orr

More from the short story Day Lilies by Elaine Neil Orr's

photo by ☮hanna

There were two truths about herself that Ellen had told her friend.
She wanted phone calls about awards and she did not want anyone else in her community to be named Ellen.
She had grown up a white girl in West Africa where other girls had names like Tunji and Deli or possibly Esther and Ruth.
Her parents had been missionaries.

Now in her American life, if she went to a party and was introduced to another woman named Ellen, she left.
Or even if she wasn’t introduced but just heard that some other woman at the party shared her name, she left.
Her reasons were obscure; she could hardly explain to her husband. Once she had tried:

“I came to the U.S. when I was fifteen. I felt so lost.
At night in bed, I would say to myself, ‘I’m Ellen and I grew up in Nigeria.’ I would say it over and over.”

“Right,” he had commented.

“Is that all you’re going to say?”

“You felt lost so you said your name to yourself at night. Ok.”

And then he had turned on the television, signaling to his wife that she was being self-absorbed.....

****

Ellen grieved over years of tedious arguments with Martin when now she could see that neither of them had been right or wrong.
They had only been so different in their habits and desires. Since her father’s death, dreams dragged through her nights like heavy,
twined cables under the Atlantic.

She had a dream of her own death in which no one noticed her absence.

Ellen needed some things to keep her afloat and in the world. Her name, for example, or a certificate of merit that would say:
Look. You have performed splendidly. Many people love you.

"How are you going to manage with only living people as guides, people swayed by the heat or a deadline, people who believed time ran out? "

I love it when I find sentences and groups of words that are like little treasures.
I found myself writing down almost every other one in this short story By Image Journal's Newsletter's Artist of the Month, Elaine Neil Orr.

 

Image is also the annual Sponsor of the Glen Workshop

Elaine Neil Orr

Elaine Neil Orr tells the truth about the way modern westerners think. Perhaps because she was raised in Nigeria, she has some critical distance from the American mind. Though the language of psychology allows us to sanitize and dissect our pride, fear, hunger, and self-absorption, the ancient demons have not been eradicated. They live with us even in our quietest moments, among the gentlest and most cerebral of people. In her fiction, Orr paints this phenomenon unsparingly, with a wry, light touch. Her prose is a pleasure: energetic, surprising, and perfectly matched to the mind of her characters. The result is at once comic and devastating. In her story “Day Lilies,” we can laugh at the main character’s narcissism, but her mind is drawn so carefully, her foibles presented with such honesty, that we can’t really distance ourselves from her.

Like Chekhov, Orr isolates small, emotional movements so as to illuminate their cataclysmic significance. Her subject is the ethics of love, not just as an emotion but as a choice that transforms us, a force that can break the spell of contemporary self-obsession.

Read Elaine Neil Orr's Day Lilies, featured in Issue 54

EXCERPT:

As she sat in her office chair looking out the window, she remembered her father’s hands, always
so beautifully groomed, the nails cut across but  tapered slightly at the edges and the skin under
the nails the color of opal. How sad she had been in his last hours as the skin turned lavender, almost blue. 
But somehow her witness of that change had brought an intimacy with her father that Ellen had not experienced before, this though she had been in love  with him all of her life. She had never known exactly how to say, I am fourteen; can you tell me what to do now? In the weeks before his death, she did not say, my father, how can I  help you? I am sorry for the distress I caused you when I left my husband. She had never said, Dad, you sometimes frightened me with your requirements.

When she felt her father’s hand on her shoulder, she did not turn around.

“You were so focused as a little girl;
you would stick your tongue out between your teeth when you played.”

“I guess that explains the braces later,” she answered,
remembering how he was the one who took her to the orthodontist....

“You were already where you wanted to be when you were little, suspended in eternity.
Why do you ask so much of yourself now?”

Ellen stood and turned to face her father.
For some reason, she imagined he would be wearing his tan jacket and a blue shirt underneath it.
But no one was there. Only the door she had closed behind her.

She sat again in her chair.
Holding her knees with both hands, she was coming to know what the ancients meant by angels.
They meant beings who are closer to the living after they die than they were before, messengers who still desire to make something right.

Since his death, her father had already spoken to her twice....

Six months since the stroke and Ellen no longer questioned her father’s presence. Sitting in her office she was becoming grateful for his death. Not that she did not weep often and literally hold herself and rock in a sadness larger than the ocean she had crossed as a girl.

At the moment, however, she was annoyed.

Why did you leave?” she asked. She did not mean why did you die? She meant she wasn’t through with the conversation at hand. “What do you mean I ask so much of myself? You asked so much of me. Remember! I need some absolution. 
I think I lost something. Was I too ambitious? I don’t know. Tell me.”  Her voice was rising and she wondered too late if her colleague in the next office could hear her.

Ellen let her eyes rest in the branches of a tree outside her window. Perhaps she sat for fifteen minutes, maybe only two or three. And then she felt a movement, like a shift in a lock, unloosening something in her most interior self.
Ellen breathed deeply. Her shoulders relaxed. “He’s telling her to ease up.” Now she was almost whispering. “Maybe I could ease up on my students. They have their losses too. Maybe we still have time.” Her father had said she lived in eternity.

Ellen began to wish she had had a grandfather, someone she had known as a girl and who had
died before her father. James and Ben were her  grandfathers’ names. But they were dead before she was born, and growing up as she had in Africa, she might not have known them anyway.

Ellen realized that what she had needed for a long time was an ancestor.
How are you going to manage with only living people as guides,
people swayed by the heat or a deadline, people who believed time ran out?

No wonder Nigerians revered their ancestors.
How much can the living know? The idea swelled up in her, large and green.
It was preposterous to wish for people dead. What was more preposterous was to be so alone when the dead—your “late” father, as Nigerians would say—could provide so much perspective.....



Read the entire short story HERE

click right HERE to find out about  Elaine Neil Orr's  memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life   

 

 Image: Art Faith Mystery: A Quarterly Journal,

and is also the sponsor of the annual Glen Workshop

To read more about Image and its suite of programs,
check out our brochure (below). (PDF file)

photo by marcus counihan

Maybe this is a serious theological issue, or it's a distraction so I don't have to talk about the manuscript deadline I missed...again

DISCLAIMER: Yes, this post is about sex…and not for young readers

A recent post by “molleth” mentioned this: “QF measure quantity over quality, or, more often, preaches quantity AND quality: have babies non-stop, homeschool, be a sex goddess for your hubby, mother your children, keep your house spotless, grind your own wheat and bake your own bread, practice weekly hospitality, blah blah blah…” [emphasis mine]

To those who currently practice or used to practice hyper-patriarchy, what does this mean? Besides being available for sex whenever hubby feels the need, what else does this imply? I sense in some conservative Christian circles that, while it is not okay to dress like a tramp outside the house, in the bedroom XXX attire is okay and encouraged. Does anyone else get this message? It is as if they merely pretend to eschew the world’s values because deep down, what really turns a man on is the skanky ho. ??

Also, another sex question that goes beyond VF… Is sex merely for procreative purposes or, within marriage, can it be for recreational purposes also? Anne, correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the Catholic Church say that sex is for procreative purposes? But is their stance only or primarily for procreative purposes? What nature, biology, experience, and psychology teach me is that sex is not only for a biological purpose… it is also FUN!! :) I have studied primates in college. They copulate when the FEMALE is in heat, not whenever the male wants some. Therefore, you can clearly look at that and say that chimpanzees and other primates copulate strictly for procreative purposes. However, given that our species is far more advanced in our capacity for abstract thought, our ability to reason, our ability to find pleasure and enjoyment out of life, not to mention our status as being spiritual beings in the image of God… wouldn’t you think that sex for us would be MORE than sex for chimpanzees? Honestly, if it were ONLY for procreation, then my husband and I would have to simplify our menu quite a bit… no more side dishes, only one main course! :)

(Cally, please respond with that chapter title from the book you were reading—something about “The Joys of Un-Kinky Sex.”)

(http://whitewashedfeminist.com/)