Lent and Stuff

It's that season again. What does the word “Lent” bring into your mind? Giving up something? More church rules?  Something else to ignore in favor of real life? Or is it about looking at the spiritual dimension of life?

I haven’t heard much about Lent lately from my institutional church, the Episcopal Church. Our church is well known for not making doctrinal pronouncements. However, I think it continues to be interested in God and spiritual growth. It has sacraments, liturgical seasons, and the Book of Common Prayer. So it really isn’t a spiritual desert.

Is Lent just a time to decide what to give up? Do people still actually do this, or is it a relic of the 1950s? Is Lent about anything any more?

Is it just about rules? A list of rules is helpful for some people, especially Roman Catholics, who have plenty of rules. Other people might establish their own rules. Still others may treat Lent like new year’s resolutions, promises of better habits to observe for about a week and then forget. We are deep or shallow, consistent or not.

But why?  We live in a society where stuff is all around us. Our homes are full of stuff. The media advertises stuff.  President George W. Bush famously said after the 9-11 attacks that it’s ok to go out and shop again, as if that is what makes America strong. Stuff is baggage.

Enter Lent, a season of promise.  Lent, to me, is about unloading the baggage in order to bring the vision of God back into focus. In a world of stuff, people need to remember that life in Christ is not about stuff. It is about Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being. We pray, “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory (traditional version)”, and then we look into our garages, which are so full that we can’t get our cars into them. Lent gives the opportunity to rearrange our stuff so that God reappears in our homes and hearts.

Giving up something is a start, something important to that person.  It represents the acknowledgement that Americans have too much stuff. And yet, people with hardly any stuff still can do it. It’s the idea that passing up something strengthens the inner part of the person, lessens the gluttony of the soul, and leads the person to a greater share in the life of God. Yes, it really can happen. Yes, it isn’t always easy.

Lent has a purpose. It is about living the Christian life. It’s not about the church telling us what to do, as much as it is about looking at self denial as a way to get back on track with God. Jesus told the rich man to get rid of all he had and follow Him, and the man went away in sadness because he had a lot of stuff.

Every year I give up the same thing. Like Benjamin Franklin, who had a cycle of thirteen virtues to work on, at the end of the cycle it was time to start over. Franklin needed to start over with humility every time because he lost sight of it while working on the others. Judging from reading about his life, I’m not sure he ever mastered it. I give up complaining annually because it creeps back when I’m doing something else. Complaining is some of the stuff that clutters the garage of my soul.

That’s life. Lent formalizes it.

I also gave up potato chips.

The Blood Sugar Solution

Here is an interview that got my attention. A half hour (actually 34 minutes) with Dr. Mark Hyman. I was fascinated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGeRIEyEoE

Dr. Hyman is well known. Among other things, he is he doctor who is said to have turned around Bill Clinton's heart disease. He is chair of the Institute for Functional Medicine. Functional medicine? Hmmm. I have seen him in short television interviews, and several times on the Doctor Oz Show, where Dr. Oz gives Hyman time to present some of his medical ideas, and then says he disagrees with everything he has to say. That's the thing. We see these important people interviewed for about a minute of sound bytes, rather than seeing them take time to actually get to the point. In this interview, Dr. Hyman gets to the point.

Dr. Hyman has written several books. I have not read any of them. He has a new book called The Blood Sugar Solution. I thought this interview would be about the book. It kind of sort of is, but mostly it is about Dr. Hyman's philosophy. He says he treats causes rather than symptoms. When asked if he is a holistic doctor, he answered that he has a "whole list" to treat, meaning that he treats not just each symptom separately, but the underlying causes of the presentations of symptoms. He says that his pharmacy is the grocery store; food is his medication. Not junk food. Real food.

Hyman had things to say about type 2 diabetes. After all, his new book is about diabetes. He listed a lot of conditions that go with diabetes, including heart disease. He pointed out that most heart attack patients have diabetes or pre-diabetes. He said that statin drugs are not helpful in preventing a first heart attack and have dangerous side effects. He said that heredity does not explain the current epidemic of diabetes, since it was much less prevalent thirty years ago; it has multiple causes. He also said that type 2 diabetes is completely preventable. He has had patients who have prevented or reversed it.

Well, if this is the big disease that leads to many other diseases, it must be time to read his book. He didn't give details on what foods will take the disease away, but he said they are in his book.

This interview was done three months ago by Randy Alvarez, on wellnesshour.com, and posted on YouTube.  Dr. Hyman has an interesting website, drhyman.com. His new book has a website, bloodsugarsolution.com.

Child Abuse

It's hard to stop thinking about it. It's heartbreaking. How could we let it happen? How can a teenager live with all this? The news reporting has been full of it.

http://www.channel3000.com/news/30529168/detail.html

A 15-year old girl was found walking barefoot and wearing pajamas. A man stopped his car to help her and ended her terrible ordeal. He took her to the police. The girl had escaped from her home after fearing that her stepmother would throw her down the stairs.

The story unfolded, as described in the link above. The girl had been imprisoned and beaten in the basement by her father and stepmother, with no bathroom other than a box, and not allowed to eat, since she was ten years old. Her eighteen-year-old stepbrother had sexually assaulted her since she was ten years old. She ate garbage when she could. She weighed seventy pounds and was said to be starving.

This scenario took place in Madison, not inner city Milwaukee. The people are white, not black or some other race. While they don't live in my neighborhood, in a way they are my neighbors. We are all members of the human condition. The human condition includes providing our children with the basic necessities of life, including a safe and nurturing home. This girl's family failed her.

The girl didn't go to school. She didn't go anywhere. Her biological mother had given up custody because she was married to a sex offender. Her father didn't love her enough to give her a chance to live a normal life. Abandonment and abuse are scars she will carry for a long time.

It calls to mind the story of Jaycee Dugard, who was abducted, imprisoned and sexually abused in California a few years ago. Jaycee Dugard escaped back to her loving family. Both Jaycee Dugard and the Madison girl were not found by the safety net of social workers who came to their homes because they were monitoring someone in the home, Dugard's captor, and the fifteen-year-old girls stepbrother. The system failed both girls.

Jaycee Dugard gave birth to two children fathered by her captor; the Madison girl was so malnourished that police said she had not entered puberty by age fifteen.

Something is terribly wrong with people who are entrusted with children, and yet they become cruel predators. The court system is dealing with the family of the Madison girl, but it can not give back the interrupted life she didn't have. Foster care is likely to be a better alternative than her own family. But what will go on in the heart of a girl who has been so badly violated, as she lives into adulthood? Hillary Clinton once said that it takes a village. This girl will need the whole human village.

Patti Brennan's Cave

This morning I actually got excited about science.  Thanks to Wisconsin Public Television, I watched a program that made a difference. In contrast to the usual banality of television, I saw my friend Patti Brennan in a panel of people representing various science disciplines. Usually I don’t connect with science presentations more difficult than the level of Animal Planet, but here were men and women who were talking about collaboration.

Patti Brenan is a nurse, and more than a nurse. Calling her a nurse is like calling cake straw. She is a teacher of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and much more. On this day, rebroadcast from December, 2010, she talked about collaboration of medical practitioners and home care. This was exciting to me. If I understood her correctly, she was saying that the trend now is to keep patients in the hospital for shorter time periods and have them recover at home earlier than had formerly been done. Her vision was to create virtual environments that she called caves. The cave would be created after someone in the medical field recorded visually the home environment of the patient, to give a better picture of the home environment’s ability to manage the patient’s needs. She pointed out that homes sometimes are not well adapted to recovery situations. How is the home set up for locating medications; does the home have space for a patient’s elevated leg without tripping someone; is the kitchen arranged well for doing what is needed; do you have to put important equipment on the living room coffee table? And so on.

The cave Patti described would show these things and others that normally would not be in a person’s range of view.  She said something like, suppose I’m here and you’re over there and both are seeing different views. The cave would bring them into one viewing range. This would enable medical people to assist the person in the home with accurate ideas of the person’s recovery environment. It would be virtual collaboration of the patient at home and the appropriate medical person. Wow!

To me this sounded wonderful. I might add that Patti explained all this in a few minutes in a way that a non-professional like me could understand. It seemed like a really good way to enable a recovering person to be at home without feeling cut off from medical assistance, and also a way for the patient to avoid making mistakes due to limitations of the home environment. I really liked Patti’s cave idea. I think she was describing some ongoing research that people in her field are doing in collaboration with some other scientific disciplines, so that something like this could actually happen.

My experience with this situation is limited. After my (now deceased) husband had knee replacement surgery in 2001, one knee at a time, not both the same day, he came home. A nurse came in and showed him and me how to do the recommended exercises. She did some medical checking on him. That was good. But as I remember it, that was about all. We were on our own. The cave would have been helpful and reassuring.

Again, the same husband went on kidney dialysis a couple of years later. He went to the dialysis center several times every week, where the medical people performed the service with what looked to me like a lot of equipment. After several years, he came home and said that the people at the dialysis center suggested that he have his dialysis done at home. Immediately I was terrified of being left alone with this monster machine. I felt huge trepidation at the thought of being the one who would use this device to keep him alive. No details on how to accomplish it came home with the suggestion. In theory, home dialysis sounded like a good idea. In practice, I would have felt better with Patti’s cave if it had existed. I declined the invitation. The cave is an outstanding idea.

The other presenters in the televised panel talked about ways to use science to accomplish collaboration among science professionals.  I was impressed with the anthropologist who talked about how people who work together across discipline lines need to address language issues. They all have their own specialized vocabularies. I saw this as a second major point in the discussion. Medical people sometimes talk to their patients in language that seems obscure and unhelpful. The doctor/nurse professional and the patient create another cross-professional situation. (The profession of the patient is to be an ordinary human being.) What does it mean when the nurse asks if a person had any emesis? I think the common patient response would be, “Huh? Are you asking if I puked?”

Since I am healthy, I don’t experience some of this, but I am impressed that all the panelists in the presentation who represent different approaches to science actually are trying to do things together. I am extremely impressed with Patti’s way of sending her vision directly home to me.

Thanks, Patti. Thanks also to Wisconsin Public Television.

Paula Deen's Diabetes

http://gma.yahoo.com/paula-deen-caught-eating-cheeseburger-150609231--abc-news.html

Good Morning America, from ABC, gave an update on television cook Paula Deen's diabetes, by "catching" her eating a cheeseburger while on a cruise, at a party she was hosting. It seems that news reporting has become trivial and invasive. While diabetes is a serious condition, and Deen has appeared several times on television to talk about how it is going with her, this hardly is worth reporting on national television.

The amusing part of this version of Deen's ABC appearance is the comments on the Good Morning America website. As of right now, the news story has 2778 comments -- not bad for non-news. The comments are better than the story. They also confirm my view that news about Deen eating a cheeseburger is not news, although it appears that a lot of people find Deen interesting. I give a sample.

Whoever felt the need to "report" this news needs to be chased around the room being slapped on the back of the head with a fried pork chop. Silly article.


Dear GOD!!! The horror of it all!!! Eating a cheeseburger? I am truly appalled!!! 

Wars, deaths, economic ruin, and we're hung up on what Paula is eating? Get a grip people!


Seriously? This is news? People with diabetes can eat a cheeseburger. Get back to us when she starts mainlining pure cane sugar.


And on and on. Paula Deen may be shortening her life, but it's her business.

Jack Kennedy -- Book Review

Jack Kennedy – Book Review

Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero is a fascinating book. Television commentator and author Christ Matthews said his 2011 book addresses the question of what President John F. Kennedy was like.  It’s energetic, absorbing, fast moving, and easy to read. The book is 90% Jack Kennedy the politician, and 10% Jack Kennedy living the rest of his life. Just as Kennedy compartmentalized his life (according to Matthews), Matthews compartmentalized the parts of Kennedy in his book. The book reads like Chris Matthews telling about it with his energetic television speaking style.

Most of the book is about Jack Kennedy campaigning, first for congress, then senate, and finally President. Some of it is the life that led up to campaigning, and some of it is the life of the President. Matthews describes Kennedy’s well-known heroic acts, such as saving the men he commanded as a young man in the navy, which is chronicled in Kennedy’s best-selling book PT-109. Matthews points out that Kennedy lived his life with constant pain from his bad back and Addison’s disease. Matthews tells how Kennedy hated war and as President saved us from nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He writes about Kennedy’s thinking that brought about the Peace Corps.  He says that Kennedy wanted to be a hero like the men he read about as a child. He wanted to make a difference.

Matthews clearly liked and admired Kennedy. Maybe that’s why so much of the book is about Kennedy the politician while it tells less about Kennedy the person. Kennedy’s early life is there, but it seems to me that Matthews gives little treatment to the legendary Kennedy family. Kennedy’s reputation as a charmer and womanizer is shown almost as an afterthought. Events that led up to his marriage to Jackie Bouvier are almost absent. The births of his children appear almost insignificant, including a stillborn daughter who was born while he was on one of his travels. The death of his son Patrick at two days of age gets more emphasis. The birth of John Jr. is mentioned sometime after the event.  Deaths in the family, his older brother Joe Jr. and a sister, clearly had an impact on him, although Matthews says relatively little about them. Brother Bobby was assassinated several years after Jack’s death. The assassination of Jack Kennedy is not there at all, except in comments by Jackie after the fact. I think it was too much for Matthews the Kennedy admirer to contemplate.

Kennedy’s life is shown through many interviews, books and comments from the people around him. These people told of a man who couldn’t stand to be alone, a man who would do almost anything to achieve his political goals, a Catholic who went to confession even while president.

 Does all this answer the question of what Jack Kennedy was really like? I find myself asking why he and Jackie stayed married while he was repeatedly unfaithful to her. I find myself asking why Jack needed to carve time out of all his political activity to have sexual encounters with many women. Perhaps that is the elusive part of Jack Kennedy. Maybe that is how national politicians live. Where were the Senate and House of Representatives while Kennedy was making important decisions with the men who were always with him?

I liked the book very much, but questions remain.

Books I have Known

A difference exists between reading and knowing a book. I read many books, but I know cookbooks. Cookbooks are life’s little instruction books of the culinary type.

Every January my mind fixes itself on food. After indulging in holiday foods during December, I once again focus on everyday kinds of foods.  I return to books about cooking.

I enjoy cookbooks, especially old ones. The old ones tell us how to prepare foods. In recent years of cookbookery, some beautiful, pictorial books have arrived, but the old ones are the basic how-to manuals.  They don’t specialize like today’s volumes. The pictures are black and white, with some line drawings.

The cookbooks I know best are two: Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1953 edition, and The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, 8^th edition, completely revised by Wilma Lord Perkins, 1948. I read others, but I know these.

The BH&G book is my first cookbook. I bought it when I was twelve years old, when my junior high school home economics class did a class purchase. The cover has fallen off. The title page is missing. Many pages are frayed and becoming brown. This book, and Mrs. Robertson, my teacher, taught me how to cook. Here is where I learned to make pie. Here is where I went when I was forgetting Mrs. Robertson’s lessons about making applesauce, biscuits and muffins.  Here is where I learned to make pancakes from real ingredients.

The Fannie Farmer book is another treasure. My mother gave it to me in 1962 when I married Rick. My copy is very worn, with the cover detached. It is in better condition than the BH&G book only because it has more traditional binding; the other book is spiral bound. In this book Fannie Farmer taught me how to make bread after my new husband wanted me to make bread like the bread his mother made. Fortunately, I had eaten his mother’s wonderful bread.  The book taught me how to make brownies and sugar cookies, which my children and grandchildren still like.  The page about sugar cookies is brown and stained with dropped ingredients. The book taught me about soup from bones and vegetables rather than cans.

The worst book in my hall of fame, according to my husband and children, is the book that showed me how to make the all-time worst entrée they ever had to eat. Oats, Tomatoes and Cheese casserole is a legend among them. (I like it.) This little vegetarian cookbook is called Cooking With Conscience: a Book for People Concerned About World Hunger, by Alice Benjamin and Harriett Corrigan (Vineyard Books, 1975). It has some other equally strange concoctions, and overall I would rate it about average. Today the stores have many vegetarian cookbooks that would rate higher. This is a book that I read but don’t know as a friend of my kitchen. However, it is part of my history.

Long live the cookbook.