Saturday gibbers

Some stray thoughts, quote me not -

*I have a friend who is easily hurt, to whom I would like to advise: "Stop being hurt, start being." But I'm not giving that advice because nobody has asked me to, not even his self.

*KDM hasn't been to see a commercial barber in a year because I have been cutting his hair. He doesn't mind my using him to learn the trade, a free haircut suits him fine. To make the routine more agreeable it is usually carried out near the kitchen window on a bright day, where his coffee-filled belly meets the stroking fingers of the sun seamlessly, and he promptly dozes off to a distant mental plain amongst the monotonous snipping of my scissors.

*KDM and I went chair shopping today. It occurred to me that I never buy household furnishings by myself because I don't have firm opinions for what's best for our abode. But if he presents two or more options then I often come to a quick decision, with which he almost always concurs. I wonder if it says something about my originality, or, the lack of it.

*Saint Patrick's Day is very near. My husband is big part Irish but hardly Irish-like. This frustrates my romantic longings and tender conceptions for the tribe of Kelts. My findings in him for some hints or representations for the Emerald Islander limit to a short tamperer and a positive disposition for potatoes. The latter, I have come to realize, is rather more of the disposition he shared with tribesmen of a different sort: those who tinker with earth or otherwise work with their hands.

For that matter he's not even very well informed about his ancestral roots. His consciousness for being Irish is rather of a diffused type. His only emotional allegiance seems to be completely to the country he was born into: America, where he needs not to be overly conscious of his older roots and won't get in trouble for being tribally agnostic, where the number of tribes frustrates anyone's need to be tribal.

*I heard that some big city people who don't believe in God are staging campaigns on public buses with slogans that say something like "We don't need God to be good." There's truth in that statement, as in "virtuous pagans," and Communists preach morals and have their version of saints. But my second thought is that it really is a comment on what they deem to be the creed of religious people. Christians are notoriously "nice people," Christian children endlessly told to be "nice" with one another, and many a Christian evangelists paint Jesus the quintessential "nice guy." So if the pagans think our objective is no more than "to be good," we can't really blame them.

Is that all there is to it?

I would think the ravishing beauty and prospect of being face to face with a Triune God, its unfathomable matrix of joy and ecstasy that the saints have written and told, that, I would think, is our reason to be Christian.

*Next time I give Thanks, I'll thank God for making me a creature capable of being "shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter." (GKC)