Well, that got worse before it got better

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were a flurry. We were actually glad, though, when our dinner for 4 expanded to dinner for 12. First, our oldest grandson and his girlfriend said they'd join us. Then, on Christmas Eve after the grocery stores were closed, our youngest asked if it was too late for her crew to join us, too, for dinner, after all. Good thing I'd bought a way bigger ham than we needed.

I'd convinced myself that it would be okay to support the evening Mass in addition to Midnight and Christmas morning. Fortunately, we used the parish's normal Christmas schedule rather than our normal Sunday schedule. But even so, I really could have used that extra three hours. Maybe then I wouldn't have been par-baking pie crusts at 3:15 Christmas morning, or trying to cook and help with wrapping at the same time on Christmas Day.

Dinner ended up being very nice; there was nothing fancy, yet everything was good; well, the mashed potatoes were a little dry, since we ate about 90 minutes later than scheduled, which was about 75 minutes after everything was ready. It also included a very nice uncured ham that I was able to pick up on sale at Whole Foods when I went for my bulk spices (cinnamon sticks, cured allspice, fresh whole cloves), carrots with a cream sherry and honey glaze, and some canned green beans that our middle daughter and her husband contributed along with half the potatoes to round out enough food for the extra folks. Oh, and my daughter and I were the only partakers of the absolutely delicious cabernet-blueberry cranberry sauce. I screwed up the pie crusts something awful, but the pies were still yummy despite them.

After opening gifts, the anticipated altercation occurred, at least in part because it was anticipated, and two people left mad. Apparently one of the kids left a candy cane lying around, and our dog got it. Amid the already-hubbub of grandchildren excited about gifts, our middle daughter's husband raised his voice to call someone's attention to the situation, our youngest daughter took offense at his raised voice, our son-in-law and middle daughter took offense at her offense and left. Ugh. I may henceforth refer to this as The Catastrophic, Calamitous outCome of the Canine Candy Cane Caper^©.

These adults judge each other too harshly. They have too much a sense of superiority.

I taught them well, apparently, the part of myself that most needs to die.

Conforming (phase 2), An Enneagram Exercise and The Value System of Jesus Christ (step 11), session 1

I have been warned against enneagrams, that they are not solidly grounded in Christian orthodoxy and that there may be negative spiritual influences in them. As a charismatic Catholic, I tend to be careful with both of these possible concerns. So I have read this exercise, and I plan to be very careful in its application.

One thing that I appreciate about the retreat's approach is its insistence that we not try to pigeonhole ourselves into one center or type.  As I read, I could look back over the arc of my life and see that I may previously have had a very different center and type from the one that I think most applies to me now. I can especially see the value of being aware of my current type from the standpoint of seeking the grace to grow out of my current areas of struggle and weakness.

That said, I can see that this sort of thing might tend to cause us to be too focused on ourselves and not enough on Jesus Christ. The retreat seems pretty Christocentric, though, so I'm hopeful it will avoid this trap moving forward. I do appreciate their inclusion of fear and deceit along with the traditional seven deadly sins; in my experience, these are often bigger drivers than we realize.

I am not going to share here what I see as my current center and type. They seem obvious to me, and I can see that they are now perhaps quite different from what they may have been at other points in my life.  Perhaps readers who think they know me well (and who have time to read the lengthy exercise) might share in a comment what they see in me.

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, 
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear . . . - Is 11, 1-3

Two things strike me about this passage, the first of two included in this step. The first is that it seems to put the enneagram - or any other analytic personality tool - in its proper perspective. Only the wisdom of the Spirit can provide a suitable lens for transforming the heart from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. We tend to put too much value on our analysis; this tendency is an inherent component of our rationality. There is value in analysis, just not so much as we attribute to it.

I nearly forgot the second thing that struck me from this reading, as I was distracted in the middle of my writing by some other tasks I needed to attend to. After two additional times of reading through it, now I remember!  I was struck again by our modern misunderstanding of what the fear of the Lord really is. At its best and most useful, it isn't a matter of being wary of divine karma, as one of Flip Wilson's characters proclaimed (and, later, George and Tammy sang) that "God's gonna get'cha for that!" One of my earliest posts was on this topic, actually. (It's hard to believe that I have been recording my thoughts here for nearly 8 years, and also that such an old post seems to stand the test of time.)

As truly provided by the Holy Spirit, the fear of the Lord is indeed a thing to be delighted in. Along with the other gifts from these verses, it is our guide into the life to which God calls us. I delight that God gives me something greater to direct my life than my worldly fears!

How, umm . . . particular I am

Yes, that's the word: particular. I couldn't possibly mean that increasingly popular adjective that pertains to the "posterior opening of the alimentary canal," which is of course also found in the last four letters of its definition.

There's a puzzle that I do almost every day because it only takes about a minute. The objective is to find four words in a 6x6 letter grid that wind through the grid from each edge to the opposite edge. Acceptable solutions are often not unique; there can be more than one way to wind through the puzzle to make the same word. However, I have found that, when this is the case, there has always been one solution that doesn't reuse any letter in the grid twice. The same letter might occupy adjacent or diagonal spots in the grid that will both allow the formation of a given answer, but one of those spots will be needed for another answer in another direction, for which the other will not work. The puzzle doesn't require that grid letters be used only once, or award extra points for finding the solution that doesn't reuse any of them, but it just seems to me that the best solution is the one that doesn't use any grid letter more than once. Sometimes there are multiple words that could use alternate paths through the grid . . .

Oh, I've spent too much time on this.  Okay.  Okay.

Anal.