Good morning.
This is the open thread. What’s on your mind?
Verse of the Day today, instead of a Quote
Romans 8:1-2
1Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,
2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”
Wandering Views 
Good morning everyone.
I’m waiting for ol’ slowpoke.
We left Alexandria, Va. at five AM. The sun wasn’t up till we got to Richmond.
She refuses to go to the Y until sunup.
Somehow, there is logic to that in her mind.
No.
It’s always been that way.
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Chas, I’m impressed. She knows that Hendersonville traffic at 7:00 is not to be feared. On the other hand, you can’t flee the Washington metro area early enough.
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I am awake and almost ready for work. Now I just have to get the Beast moving. We had a great time yesterday at our party. It is always fun to put a collection of people together and see what happens.
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My pastor mentioned my wife’s faux presidential candidacy in his sermon yesterday. Later, I learned that our music minister has been playing, “Hail to the Chief” when she enters the sound booth to prepare for Sunday morning services.
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Praising the Lord for a new granddaughter, Samantha Alice, born around 6:30 Friday evening. All are doing well.
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Good morning. Both my Badgers and the Packers looked impressive this weekend, so in one sense, life is good.
Unfortunately, I will be attending the funeral for the son of a former coworker this morning. Another motorcycle fatality.
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Ricky, that’s funny.
Chas, your wife sounds perfectly logical to me. This is a rare morning when I’m up before the sun (I have the day off but need to get the cat to the vet for a booster vaccine, fun times).
So I’ve been picking up and cleaning, sweeping floors, shredding some old paperwork (the job that never ends).
Got the animals fed so now it’s time for some OJ and coffee for me, then the shower. We’re blasting back up into some pretty high temperatures (high 80s) again this week, although evenings and nights are still cool at least.
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Linda, congratulations on the arrival of Samantha! 🙂 Pretty name.
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I like both Samantha and Alice. Samantha will get “Sam”, it always happens that way.
My GD named her girls “Addison” and “Collins”.
Addison Elizabeth is now “Adaliz” and of course, “Collie”.
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I suspect she’ll end up being called Sammy because her sister is named Emily and is called Emmy.
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Chas, that makes sense to me (your wife’s time thing). When you’re driving, she can sit. When you go to the Y, I assume she has to move. I personally don’t like even being a passenger early in the morning (I don’t sleep well at all if I know I’m going to have to get up early), but I’d far rather sit and let someone else drive than exercise, if I were getting up early.
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Speaking of sitting and letting someone else drive, my husband and I saw the most beautiful rainbows yesterday on our way home from somewhere. He mentioned we were likely to see a rainbow. (The sky was dark and it was raining, but light was shining from somewhere onto trees ahead of us.)
Within moments of his saying that, a car passed us on the left, and in its spray was a definite rainbow. Soon we were seeing rainbows off everyone’s spray: the semi on our side of the road, the cars on the other direction of the highway. My hubby said he’d never seen that before.
And then, on the left, was a part of an arc of a large rainbow above the trees, as brilliant as any I’ve ever seen. (I grew up in Arizona, which apparently is perfect for rainbows, in retrospect: I saw many, many of them, a large percentage of them double rainbows. But I realize now that even when it rained, the sun was probably still shining, and at any given time we could usually see a good distance, ideal conditions for rainbows.) I looked for a double, and sure enough it was, and the secondary rainbow could also be seen in detail, every one of its upside-down colors showing, it was all so brilliant. My hubby said he’d never seen one so bright, and he had also never before seen a double rainbow.
Soon the whole arc showed, both sides of the road, with doubles on both ends and faintly in the middle; and the left of it we could see all way to the end; the bottom portion was absolutely luminiscent, and we could see the trees right through it as he drove. I can’t say I never saw one so bright; I probably have. But I know I haven’t seen one so bright for a quarter-century (since I left Arizona), and they just don’t get any prettier than that one. It continued to stay just ahead of us as we drove for a few minutes, then it broke up and disappeared. But it was breathtakingly beautiful while it lasted.
As we neared home, we briefly saw part of another one, this one only a portion of a rianbow and not as bright as that one, but it too had a double above it.
One of the great blessings of life with my husband is that he loves the grandeur and beauty of God’s creation as much as I do. I haven’t shared the same level of “isn’t that beautiful” awe with anyone else, ever, except my mother. Most people will say, “Yes, that’s pretty” and stop watching, but he and I marvel together.
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Ah. So Cheryl went “Somewhere” … Over the Rainbow
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I like rainbows also, but as I am surrounded by people who worship nature, appreciating them strikes me as awfully close to nature worshipping.
AQOD: have you ever known anyone who is mentally ill?
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Congrats on the new granddaughter, Linda. Samantha is the name of my heroine in the novella I’m writing, so we can call her Sam when she dresses as a man for safety’s sake on the steamer bound for the Alaskan Gold Rush.
I like that Alice middle name, though. Can I name my character after your granddaughter?
Her twin brother, btw, is Peter, but I guess I should give him L as a middle name just to be consistent. The hero’s name is Miles, but I could change that . . .
I’m surprised to realize this–Charles is the name of my hero in An Inconvenient Gamble.
Wow, talk about pandering to potential readers . . . 🙂
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Unfortunately/fortunately, I have known mentally ill people including relatives. It’s very difficult and frustrating knowing how to help–particularly when the government ties your hands and you can’t even keep them safe. 😦
One of our outlaws was shot to death by a SWAT team in San Diego, even as his father, a psychologist, pleaded with the police not to take the shot. A terrible, terrible event and I can’t imagine how he’s getting over it, albeit the event happened years ago. 😦
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Last Monday, while shopping at a JC Penny store in Potomac Mills, Va., Elvera removed a red sweater and put it with her purse. After shopping, she went to the food court to meet me. There, she discovered that she no longer had her red sweater. She went back to Penny’s and asked a clerk about it. The clerk made an announcement on the PA system. No response. Elvera had lost her red sweater. This is important because the sweater is part of a favorite outfit. As we were leaving, she wondered if she should go back. So, I turned around and went back.
Elvera went into the JC Penny store. A nice guy named Josh asked if he could help her.
She told Josh her problem. He said, “Wait here”. He went somewhere and returned with her sweater.
Elvera was overjoyed.
Problem is:
I tried to write an e-mail to the JCP headquarters to tell them how Josh at Potomac Mills was so helpful. JCP does not have a way to contact HQ by email, or any other way that I can discover. You can do lots of things online, but you can’t say someone did good.
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Wow, I read your post wrong, Chas, it sounded like Elvera had taken up shoplifting.
So who-all is going to play you-all in the movie version of Michelle’s book?? 😉
Meanwhile, the can has messed up my day. Our appointment with the vet was for 10:15. But the cat is nowhere to be found. She’s not inside and she’s not sleeping on the front porch or under any of her favorite bushes.
I can’t find her anywhere.
So I had to call the vet and tell them I had to cancel the appointment because I have no cat for the time being. If she returns later, which she will, I will take her in then and just have to see one of the other vets or whoever might be available.
Until then, I’m just sitting here, waiting for the cat to come home …
Wish I could send the border collies out to round her up, but then I’d probably just end up with 3 missing animals.
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Um, the cat. Not the can. Sheesh. When do we get that editing feature around here?
😉
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When I first read Chas’ post, I read that Elvera removed (from a rack, I mentally filled in) a red sweater and put it not “with” but IN her purse.
As I continued reading, I thought by the time you got to the food court you were going to tell us that the store security then caught up with you.
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I thought the same thing, Donna – that Elvera removed a sweater from the rack, and I was expecting to read that she accidentally walked out of the store with it. I’m not sure if I’ve actually done that, or just worried that I might. Or maybe dreamed that I had. (I do have a mental image of having done so, and thinking, “Oh no, what do I do now?”)
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You can’t carefully edit a blog for content. You should have caught on when I said it was part of a fovorite outfit.
😆
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Cheryl – A couple weeks ago, Lee & I had a very similar experience with a double rainbow. I was fascinated that I could see where the rainbow ended, right on the road in front of us! And it was the most vivid rainbow I had ever seen.
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Random Modesty ( 🙂 )- Would you include Alzheimer’s Disease as a mental illness?
We took care of my Alzheimer’s-afflicted MIL for over 4 years, in our home. It was quite an experience, sad & frustrating, but also funny at times.
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Hello! Just back from a nice week in the DC area with my family, a trip we’ve been wanting to make for a long time for the kids to see the monuments and the museums.
As a bonus, we ended up staying a few blocks from the Nationals Stadium. The excitement of the city at having a team in the playoffs for the first time since 1933 made everything festive. I didn’t have a favorite NL team in the playoffs this year, but found myself rooting for the Nats by the end of the week, sad when they didn’t quite pull it off.
Meanwhile, go Tigers!
And congratulations, Linda!
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I forgot to make sure I was logged in first. Anonymous at 1:52 pm was me.
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Kevin, was that you in front of me at the food court in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum?
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Hello, Kevin. I was wondering who Anonymous at 1:52 was. Sounds like you had a good time!
Congratulations on the new grandbaby, Linda!
Shopping: my grandmother, whenever she was going shopping, would say, “I’m going shoplifting.” 😉
After Ricky’s post, I have to ask, is anyone else singing “Hail to the Chief” in their head?
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Random,
I’m getting behind in my responses to you on various threads, so I’m just going to respond to all of them here. But first, in response to your AQOD, isn’t that kind of like asking if we’ve known someone with cancer or heart disease? I’m pretty sure we all have, most within our own families. Mental illness is a pretty broad category. Or were you thinking of something more specific?
Now, you said,
You demonstrate here (and in most of your other posts as well) an incredibly ham-handed and unnuanced view of history, with no context, no qualifications, and no distinctions. You don’t just paint Christendom with a broad brush–you carry around one of those super high powered spray paint guns that you use to depict the whole history of Christendom as a kind of ongoing Christian jihad against pagans, heretics and apostates. You sound like someone who’s studied under such such esteemed and renowned historians as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and the rest of the “new atheists.”
Anyway, some sincere, Christ-loving Christians do kill people today. Christian police officers and soldiers, for example, sometimes have to kill people in the line of duty right alongside the non-Christian ones. But to define killing people in defense of Christian creeds and dogmas as “strong Christianity” is to completely miss the essence of the teachings of Christ and the apostles.
And you said elsewhere,
It’s not, as I think you’re implying, that I arrogantly and foolishly believe that I can know things while you humbly and wisely believe that you can’t. Rather, it’s that I’m thoroughly persuaded and convinced that my Christian epistemology is rational and correct in the exact same sense that you’re thoroughly persuaded and convinced that your skeptical pragmatist epistemology is rational and correct. And whether faith in one’s own lights, or faith in the Light of the World, is the more arrogant way to live is a question on which I suspect we wouldn’t agree.
Now as for the reading list, I guess I’ll suggest the following,
Both C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton are excellent at deconstructing modernism. If you haven’t already read it, I’d suggest Lewis’s Mere Christianity to start with. The Abolition of Man might be next. Also, if you like fiction, his Space Trilogy is worth reading. Especially the final book of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Chesterton goes a little deeper than Lewis in his non-fiction. I’d recommend both The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy. One good thing about these books is that you should be able to get them all at the local library.
I also said that I’d give a Calvinist explanation of God’s two wills that Roger Williams would approve of. But as I also said, it’s an exegesis of Scripture and an explanation of a paradox, but I don’t suppose it would have any value in convincing someone who’s opposed to Scripture a priori. In your case, it may just provide more fodder for mockery. Even so, I guess I’ll offer you this.
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I have to finish keeping track of my pills for our upcoming trip, to reduce my chances of croaking prematurely. Our library has Mere Christianity. I’ve read it, a long time ago. I am not going to buy a copy. I will put a hold on it, and read it again. Perhaps this will change my mind? Well (imaginary) God moves in strange ways.
Here’s my challenge. Assuming I live long enough to return (and survive a train trip through Canada and a short plain trip from Halifax area to Portland, MN and a return trip from Boston via Chicago to Seattle), we can begin. For each chapter I read of John Barry’s book about I will read a chapter of C. S. Lewis’ book and leave a comment with enough detail to indicate I read the material. I will expect you to do the same in regard to John Barry’s book — read a chapter and leave enough of a comment to indicate that you read the material. Not that I don’t trust you, but as Saint Reagan said, “Trust but verify.”
The book is Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John Barry. Unlike some people whose screen name I won’t mention but who seems doubtful of his faith, I am confident you can 1) read the book and not lose your faith and 2) not go wandering off into bizarre comments about how Roger Williams only believed in toleration for other Christians, or for other religious believers. Unless you can provide some solid documentation that RG was that narrow-minded. So that’s my proposal. I think it’s reasonable. It’s not as if I asked you to read God is Not Great or something equally heretical and blasphemous. It’s a week before we depart on our train trip, though I have to concentrate more and more on getting ready. For now I have to put on my support stockings. (Boy am I getting old.) Tomorrow I am meeting with my atheist group to buck up my atheist faith, and Wednesday we are having our sort of evangelical neighbors over for dinner, though my wife does not like to talk about religion, so I presume we will only discuss ducks and chickens and gardens and fruit trees.
But that’s sort of like Wandering Views these days. Mostly people talk about pets and trips. By the way, are you going to vote for that faux Christian, Romney? So you don’t have to vote for that sort of black guy?
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Yes, Michelle, you may use “Alice.”
The Giant (grocery store) in our area has implemented a new process by which you pick up a hand-held scanner at the door, scan everything yourself as you put it in your bag, and then at the end you scan it at the checkout counter to pay. I am constantly afraid I will forget to scan something and have, indeed, almost done so except that my daughter-in-law stopped me. Sometimes I’ll kiddingly say to her, “Do you want to scan this or should I just steal it?” I hope no one overhears and takes me seriously. I don’t do the self-scan thing when I’m by myself.
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Little incoherent, there. Speaking of people mentally ill and people suffering from senility/dementia/mental illness, which is tomorrow’s AQOD, I meant to say, For each chapter I read of John Barry’s book about Roger Williams.” But you are probably smarter than I am (if not, sadly, more in touch with th nature of the universe), so you probably figured out what I meant to say.
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I’ve probably told this story before, but one time when I was young (probably 13-ish) Mom and I went out together. She decided at some point to run into the store quickly, and I stayed in the car. She came back to the car, and as she started to get in, she looked at her hand and realized she was carrying a jug of milk. She told me, “Oh, I forgot I grabbed this. Here, Cheryl–take it in and pay for it.” I didn’t say it, but I definitely did think, “Why should I be the one to take it back? You’re the one who stole it!” Honestly, I didn’t think about it till just now, but if it had been a candy bar or anything other than a jug of milk, they probably wouldn’t even believe my story that my mother forgot to pay for it. (Sure. Right. You stole it, and your mother made you bring it back in, but now you’re lying and telling us your mother took it without paying for it. Right. We get that one every day!)
I don’t like the self-scan thing either, and for me too it’s partly out of worry that I’ll miss something–maybe I’ll think it scanned when it really didn’t. But I’d also rather deal with a human being than a computer, given a choice. I used to insist on going inside to pay for gas, too, until the clerks acted annoyed at my doing so enough times that I just decided that they don’t really like having customers and I might as well get gas and get it over with, and not make them look at me too. Seriously, I think they were trying to tell me it would be easier for both of us if I would just pay outside; I knew that, but was trying to pay inside, which seemed a realistic option to me!
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I was shopping a while back, a year or two ago, I think, with some of my younger kids, and after walking out the door with our purchases, I saw one of the little ones (who didn’t know better) had an unbagged and obviously unpaid-for item in his hand. We were just feet beyond the outside door, and I thought for sure someone was going to come after us right that instant!
I quickly turned everyone around, and we headed back into the store and explained what had happened. Thankfully, there was no problem; the person I talked with thanked me for coming back in with it when I’d realized what had happened, assuring me those kinds of things happen.
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Wait a minute, Random. You agree to read 190 pages of relatively light reading–in a book that you’ve already read before!!!–if I agree to read 480 pages of (according to at least one Amazon reviewer) “dense” reading. No deal!
If you want to make this an exchange, I’ll agree to read your book if you agree to at least one of the Chesterton books I mentioned, The Everlasting Man or Orthodoxy (fewer than 200 pages each) and one Lewis book that you haven’t yet read. Heck, I’m even agreeing to you choosing fiction if it’s the last one of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength. (That’s a longer one, but since it’s fiction, you can’t compare it page for page to a non-fiction historical biography like the one you want me to read.)
And for the record, my hopeful expectation isn’t that you’ll read these books and immediately fall down on your knees in repentance and faith. Your possible eventual conversion to Christ is in God’s hands; it’s not something that I think I can manipulate into happening. But my hope is that these books might do something towards challenging your assumptions and broadening your thinking.
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A few of our local Safeway stores have installed self scanning machines, but not like the ones you guys are describing. The machines are by the check-out lines and you scan your groceries right there just as the cashiers would do. I actually think they’re fun to use, and now I’m always disappointed when I go to a Safeway that doesn’t have them.
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The one and only time I was tasked with picking up my own prescription of blood pressure meds, I took the bag and walked out. Never entered my mind I had to pay for it. Some copay thing. Anyway, wasn’t until the next day that the subject came up and I asked Hubby if I was to understand that I was to have paid for it. He said, yep. So, next time he went to town, he stopped by the Drug Store and paid. They said it happens often, no problem.
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We were notified by the band teacher last week that our disruptive disorder child was being disruptive. We had a busy weekend for him followed by a surprise for him when I went in and joined his band class for the day. Surprise! He seems to have lost his glasses during the school day, but finds them everyday on the way home on the bus. He did well, once he got over the shock of his mother coming to class.
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Yeah, Mere Christianity is a good book, but very light reading. Chesterton, however, is not light reading. I find him to be a bit on the dense side. 😉 My son, however, LOVES Chesterton.
Does seem that Ree’s idea is a little more fair. 😉
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I was at a Michael’s craft store a few weeks ago and picked up a number of small items.
But tucked under my one arm was a white board that I was thinking I could hang in my kitchen. I completely forgot all about it as I continued shopping. When I was ready to leave, I laid all the other purchases on the counter, paid for them, the clerk bagged them and out I walked — the white board, unpaid for and long since forgotten by me, still tucked under my arm.
Fortunately I realized it, turned around and set it back inside the store, near the front on a display table — out of place from where it was supposed to be, but back in their possession.
It was so strange because the clerk never noticed I had it, either.
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My great uncle (non-blood related) was nuts. He went paranoid in his middle age. Thought my great-aunt was trying to poison him. He made her take a bite of anything she made for him before he’d eat it. He threatened to kill us when we came to visit. He hid money around the house and buried it (thinking my aunt might get hold of it.) There is probably still money hidden around that house somewhere, but the property now belongs to someone else, so they will have to find it!
Yet, despite his paranoid status and obvious mental illness (to us anyway), he was highly intelligent and presented as quite normal to his doctor and other outsiders whom my aunt tried to tell. Then, they just thought something was wrong with HER. 😦
At any rate, he finally passed away. My aunt did not suddenly come into a bunch of money, nor did his death in any way incite suspicion. He was in his seventies.
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Returning or paying for goods you didn’t buy? It’s happened to me lots of times–usually at Costco. Most recently was when I had put some peanut butter in my cart but decided in the checkout line that I didn’t want it. I gave it to the cashier, told her I didn’t want it, and she put it aside without charging me. Then the person who loads things into the cart put it into the cart, thinking it was something I purchased. The guy who checks the receipt against the items in the cart didn’t notice either. I saw it when I was loading my car and I gave it to the guy who checks your Costco card when you enter.
The funny thing is, remembering how I think, before I was a Christian, I would have probably not paid for the items from Costco. I would have rationalized that it was their fault and what difference did it make anyway? But I do remember an incident before I was a Christian when I didn’t pay for something, and I went all the way back from home when I realized I didn’t. I had walked about a block from my apartment to get an ice cream sundae and while I was there, I got into a conversation with the guy who served me. Because we were both distracted from talking, I just left and forgot to pay, and he didn’t notice either. When I got home, it struck me that I hadn’t paid, and I felt terrible. Terrible enough to go back after I ate it and apologize and pay. The difference between that and the Costco incidents, I think, was the personal connection. I felt like the guy would think I was just talking to try to distract him so that I could get away without paying or something and it really bothered me that he might think that, so I inconvenienced myself by going back. I don’t think he ever realized that I hadn’t paid until I went back and he was quite surprised that I did, but I felt good about it. But still, my moral sense in that kind of situation was very selective and arbitrary.
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Oh yeah, I almost forgot. My great-grandmother was institutionalized in a state mental hospital.
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I don’t remember any time I’ve walked out of a store without paying.
However, just a few months ago, I bought a small item at Lowes. I gave the checkout man what I thought was a $5.00 bill and what I though was correct change. He gave me $15.00 back. I started to hand it back to him. He said, “No, you gave me a twenty.”
It works the other way too.
Thursday evening, Elvera and I were standing outside the Metro station waiting for, what we thought was the shuttle to our hotel. After a few minutes, a guy came up and said, “You look like you’re waiting for a shuttle.” I said, “Yes”. He said, “other side. This side is for buses only. You need to be on the ‘Kiss & Ride’ side.”
You can’t imagine how grateful we were for a guy who went out of his way to help.
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I noticed on yesterday’s WV Random said he was going to ask about knowing anyone “insane” rather than “mentally ill.” That’s what I meant by specific.
Years ago, my sister had a cocaine addiction that eventually led to an episode of paranoid schizophrenia that lasted for a total of about a year with some lingering effects for at least a couple more years. I don’t know if she ever struggled with some of the effects in later years, but she didn’t talk about it if she did. At it’s worst, though, she was picked up after some extremely bizarre behavior which led her to be taken to the state mental institution where she was held against her will for a few weeks before we were able to get her into to a private institution for a few more weeks. One of the attendants at the state institution told us that when she was brought in, she was more insane than anyone he’d scene before. Thank God, though, since it was the result of the long-term effects of drug abuse, it was pretty much reversible after she stopped using cocaine.
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I mean seen, not scene.
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I have never taken anything without paying, however, when Abi was 2…she loved cheese…I checked out of the store, walked to the car and as I was preparing to get her out of the grocery cart and put her in her car seat…much to my surprise, as I lifted her out…she held onto the biggest block of cheese I’d ever seen! Somehow she lifted it as I shopped in the butter/cheese aisle…and put it in her lap…the cashier didn’t even see it! We marched ourselves back into the store and everyone had a grand laugh….(they all knew me as a regular and everyone loved Abi!)
Mental illness…yes, I have known a few who have suffered. My Mother’s sister…and once when looking through an old photo album…there was a picture of my Mom’s Aunt…a caption under the photo “Aunt Bert….she had 9 kids and died of mental disease”….I asked my Mom if having 9 kids gave you mental disease!
A friend sent this to me the other day on FB:
Insanity does not run through my family
Rather it strolls through, taking it’s time, getting to know everyone personally 🙂
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I think we have a deal. At least one Chesterton book (wasn’t he a Catholic instead of a Protestant, but whatever) and at least one Lewis book I haven’t read. I’ve long had a taste (on and off over the years) for science fiction, so I’ll read the science fiction one, perhaps the entire trilogy. Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength.
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Perhaps an atheist who posts comments on a religious website is a bit crazy. I have two crazy siblings. A brother who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and/or bi-polar illness. He has never shown signs of harming anyone, but has been observed talking to himself and wandering the streets and has been picked up by the police.
Although not diagnosed by a psychiatrist, I have a sister who is fairly wacky. She told my family that she had been born again when she was about 13, and has never stopped talking about Christ since. In fact, she has never stopped talking about anything ever since. Non-stop babbling seems to be a way she has of controlling people. I suspect she suffers from narcissism or some similar behavior disorder.
An interesting couple of books I’ve read are Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. The books suggest that psychiatrists do not have much of a handle on mental illness. Many of the treatments that have been applied to mentally ill people have been very dubious and perhaps quite harmful. Lobotomies, shock treatment, questionable drugs, etc.
In my final job, working for a library system, a co-worker of mine went crazy and showed signs of being dangerous, though he never actually harmed anyone. He was a devout (though fairly quiet) Christian, from a small town near the charmingly named Turkey, TX.
Many tyrannies, particularly Communist variety, have used forced psychiatry as an alternative way of punishing dissenters.
This comes to mind because of a history of arguments about homosexuality. It was quite common at one time on worldmagblog to accuse homosexuals of being mentally ill. At one time homosexuality was labeled as a mental illness by the psychiatric profession, and the changing of that label provoked considerable hue and cry on wmb about an evil scheme to approve homosexuality. (The current commotion about homosexual marriage is relatively small stuff compared to that.)
I’ve known several Christians who were mentally ill. I do not consider religious belief to be a sign of mental illness. In fact Communists have persecuted religious belief with that as an excuse. I was not happy when Christians who complained about that persecution were oblivious to the poor judgment of using such terms against homosexuals.
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I have a friend who many years ago was diagnosed as paranoid-schizophrenic. She’s done well on the series of medications that have been available to her through the years. They allow her to be, for the most part, functional although she has many quirks and is now in an assisted living facility.
Occasionally she’ll stop taking the medications and then the does spin out quite a bit. But mostly she’s good about taking it. She has an extremely high IQ, by the way, and is a voracious reader.
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Great! I already put the Roger Williams bio on hold at the library. You’re right that Chesterton is Roman Catholic (and C.S. Lewis is Anglo-Catholic) and there are things on which I don’t agree with either of them and things about which they aren’t in agreement with each other. They both happened to have accepted more aspects of evolution than I do, although they emphatically rejected what Chesterton referred to as “evolutionism” which is the historical narrative constructed out of evolutionary theory. He was also astute enough to recognize the “cheats” scientists used to construct that narrative.
But I’ve learned lots from both of them, and I definitely deeply respect both of them. And more than anyone else, they’ve helped me to recognize the assumptions of modernism that I had just blindly accepted as a woman of my time and the patent absurdity of many of those assumptions. I read C.S. Lewis immediately before and after my conversion, so his insights were more surprising to me. I didn’t start reading Chesterton until recent years, so he wasn’t as startling, but the depths of his insight are truly a pleasure to consider. As I understand it, Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man was one of the things God used in leading to C.S. Lewis’s conversion. And He used C.S. Lewis in the process of my own conversion.
While you and your wife are in Boston, you should take a short trip a few miles north and say “Hi” to my family for me in Wakefield.
🙂
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Random,
I’ve mentioned before that my mother was mentally ill (one of the reasons you think we’re long-lost cousins). Exactly the nature of it – who knows? She didn’t trust anyone with an M.D., so it was pretty tough to get any kind of diagnosis on her. She was treated for depression numerous times, and initially she would find the medication helpful, but she never stayed with it because of the side effects.
During her last years, in the nursing home, they considered her paranoid. She may have been, but from her point of view her fears were rational. The nursing home staff prevented her from following what she considered a healthy diet, by not cooking the foods that she thought she should be eating and only giving her what they thought was healthy, and they tried to make her take medications that she thought were bad for her.
They also thought she was delusional when she was found walking around the basement crying for her mother (who had committed suicide over 70 years earlier), but she knew perfectly well that her mother was dead (well, that is, not living on the same plane of existence as we are – she believed that people either get reincarnated or live on another plane of existence). She had been crying for her mother now and then for my entire life. She wanted someone to mother her, and no one in the nursing home was doing it.
The very last couple years, she was given antipsychotic medicine, but I doubt they actually thought she was psychotic. I have since read that uncooperative people in nursing homes are often given that in order to make them more tractable. I felt bad, seeing her actually sitting in front of the TV like all the other residents, when I went to see her after my father’s death. She would never have willingly sat in front of a TV because she was concerned about the effect of the electromagnetic radiation.
But at the time I had not yet read about the off-label use of antipsychotic meds. I don’t know whether I’d have said anything if I had known; they were the ones who had to deal with her every day, and she was the hardest-to-live-with person I’ve ever known. Plus at that point she wasn’t talking intelligibly (though I don’t know if that was itself a symptom of the med), so it was that much harder to deal with her.
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And I suppose since depression is considered a form of mental illness, the person I know best who has dealt with mental illness is myself.
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Tonight at the grocery store I ran into the mom of former piano students of mine. I hadn’t seen her since sometime between the births of 3rd and 4th Arrows, 11-15 years ago. She remembered my oldest three kids, and had heard I’d had a fourth and fifth, but did not know about my sixth. Her three children are all grown up now and had left the area, but two of them are back around here and one is studying in Spain.
It’s always fun catching up with people one hasn’t seen in a long time. Interesting to see what the kids you remember being 11, 12, 13, 14 are doing in their twenties, and to hear the perspective of those who have been empty-nesters.
We had a nice chat, and parted with a hug.
I enjoy days like that. Always a blessing to see where God is taking people in life.
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