Lorica of St. Patrick, Part 3

I could have finished this poem of in two posts, but it would have taken such a drastic change in tone I thought it better to split it again. 

Now we come to the two verses which Cecil Frances Alexander chose not to translate and metricize, perhaps knowing that even in what we see as the benighted 19th century, no church in its right mind would include them in its hymnal, even if the seventh verse were a full enough verse to bother with. 

Verses six and seven are the poet's "therefore" to verse fives invocation of God's protection and guidance. And frankly, it makes me laugh.*

6.
          So have I invoked all these virtues between me, [and these]
          against every cruel, merciless power which may come against my body and my                   soul
          against incantations of false prophets,
          against black laws of heathenry,
          against false laws of heretics,
          against craft of idolatry,
          against spells of women and smiths and druids,
          against every knowledge that defiles men's souls.
7.
          Christ to protect me today,
          Against poison, against burning, against drowning, against death-wound,
          Until a multitude of rewards come to me!

Ok, so the first couple and last couple lines are alright. Cruel, merciless powers are kind of timeless in the 'need protection against' category. I'm not sure about incantations, but false prophets, check. The next sound a little archaic, but still kosher, so to speak. Black laws of heathenry. Not sure what would count as 'heathenry' these days, but alright, I'm good invoking virtues between me and whatever laws might be heathenous (its actually a word!). False laws of heretics. Check (though who counts as a heretic might get a little dicey). Craft of idolatry. I wasn't aware that it was a craft, I always thought people just sort of fell into it, but alright, anti-idolatry, can't argue with that.

"Spells of women and smiths and druids". My reactions, respectively: seriously?, huh?, and ok, I can see that. With a little more thinking and remembering my book of celtic mythology that I was given a while back, I'll almost give him the women. Almost. This writer was a good 300 years removed from the celtic religion being dominant. But women in Celtic mythology (at least the ones I read) were scary powerful (Their main goddess was a tripartite battle goddess, if that gives you some idea), and women in almost all pagan cultures were assumed to have some sort of magic power (heck, even today, though we have the courtesy of making it tongue in cheek. Ever hear "Never trust anything that can bleed for a week and live?").

On the smiths? I got nothing. The Celts had a smith god, but who didn't? A smith beat up the poet when he was a kid? No idea. Pass.

Druids. Yep, I can see wanting protection against them. Even if you don't believe they had any magical powers, they were the dudes who made a habit of human sacrifice. I'd be scared of the guys who made a habit of strangling, bludgeoning, slitting the throat of and/or drowning their sacrifices in peat bogs. Nasty bunch. But, since as a breed they have been extinct for the last millenium and a half, not terribly relevant.

Knowledge that defiles mens' souls. I'm with you there, Mr. 8th-century-poet-dude. You have no idea what kind of knowledge there is out there on this thing called the internet. Seriously, you have no idea. This line is more relevant than ever.

Protection against unnatural death by poison, burning, drowning and death-wound. Pretty much covers my list of ways I'd like not to die. Verse seven is basically a prayer for a peaceful, natural death. A pretty timeless thing.

Which brings us to the eighth and ninth verses. These verses, which are combined into on in Alexander's version because they belong together, are sometimes used as a benediction at the end of church services.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

This is to me a deeply comforting verse. Jesus said "I will be with you always, even unto the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20), but this drives home what 'with you' means. Christ walks beside us, because we have asked him to dwell in our hearts. He is watching our backs, and laying out the path before us. Christ woos us and wins us. He comforts us in times of trouble and brings us back to life. He surrounds us with his love, whether we are alone and at peace or in deepest trouble, and speaks to us through both our loved ones and the people we meet along the way. What more comprehensive expression of Christ with us could you ask for?

The last verse reiterates the first, with a slight clarification:

I bind unto myself today
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.
Of whom all nature hath creation,
eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
praise to the Lord of my salvation,
salvation is of Christ the Lord.

Just in case the whole "THIS God made all of creation, not those pagan fakes" was too subtle, the poet says it hear explicitly, ending his prayer the way we should probably end everything. Praising the Lord of our salvation.

~PhysicsGal

*I also kind of had to laugh at the Order of St Patrick's comment on Alexander's omission of these two verses: "This is unfortunate because those sections contain the only deliverance from witchcraft in the Breastplate.  This has left these Christians vulnerable to witchcraft attack." If this is all that's standing between us and witchcraft, we're all in trouble. 

Studying and Random Acts of Housework

My qualifying exam is rapidly approaching (yikes!) and I have started studying in earnest. Sitting down and reading through the two textbooks those who have gone before are the most valuable. They also are two textbooks that when I was using them for class I hated. They are big. They are heavy. They are densely written, lightly edited and in one case had some major layout issues. Their problems sets are horrible.

But coming back to reading them, after a year for one and 4 years for the other, I have a new appreciation of them both. They are informative, if still having all their other problems, and are readable, just not in a 'I need to know this formula!' way. Most importantly, what they are saying sounds familiar (not a good thing in a book necessarily, but it makes me slightly less terrified that I don't actually know anything).

I have a confession. I don't really know how to study. I'm one of those awful people who coasted through most of school, never really studied, and still did well. Over the years I have tried to learn, but its hard to learn a technique when the final step of the technique is "do you understand this? move on" and you already are pretty confident in your understanding. I'm not awfully good at memorizing equations, but we were always allowed an equation sheet, so no worries there. Until now.

So now I am trying to learn to study while studying for the most important exam of my life. This is what comes of not needing to all these years. If I ever have children, I will do my best to teach them to study, even if it means teaching them something difficult just so they actually have to study. That is, if I ever learn how to do it myself.

A side effect of my getting down to studying is random acts of housework. Housework that either gets put off, or I do sporadically, or don't do every single day suddenly starts getting done. I swept my front porch. I put up a clock. I swept up all the little things that keep coming off our carpet remnant. I made the dining room look pretty.

via Wikimedia Commons

I've done this since college, and luckily for me my roommate did the same thing. Our dorm / apartment was never cleaner than when one or both of us had a test or a paper. Its productive procrastination at its best! And once it was all done, which didn't take long in a small dorm room, we had nothing left to productively procrastinate with, and a nice clean room to work in. 

So I guess the conclusion to this post is, even if I don't learn to study enough to pass my qualifier, my house will be very tidy. Small comforts?

Things look better in the morning.

I recently order a huge bag of really, really fine almond flour and about an equal amount of very fine oat flour. They greatly improved the texture of my Oatmeal Muffins to the point they were like normal wheat-based muffins and not cornmeal (they still don't rise very much, but who cares?). I've been wanting to experiment more with them, since I have so much and neither flour seems to hurt me. What I have learned so far is that experimenting with baking/pastry is a lot harder than experimenting with other types of cooking, and that unless you really mess up*, the results are still delicious.

This particular experiment was inspired by the fact that I have been missing Pop Tarts of late. Yes, those almost-entirely-fake, super sweet toaster pastries. They were a treat for really long car trips and going down the shore when I was a kid. So sue me, I'm nostalgic. But I thought that I could make a healthier approximation with homemade almond/oat pastry dough and some no-sugar-added fruit butters.

So last night I blindly plunged ahead. I probably should have looked up a recipe for pastry dough using almond flour. Or even one that was half oat, half almond like I wanted. I would have seen that almond flour crusts use a lot less fat to hold it together. When making a traditional pastry, I usually used a 1:2 butter to flour by volume (I do not fear fat). Almond flour only needs a 1:5 or less fat to flour ratio (I used a 1:4. I added half the butter I was going to and noticed it was already too 'wet'). Even if I had used the correct amount, it seems a lot of nut crusts have more in common with a crumb crust than the pastry crust I wanted and needed for this application. Even with an egg thrown into the mix, it was too wet and crumbly to be a good dough for pastry. It is, in its present state, very much like a butter cookie recipe. More experimentation is needed on this front.

However, I had made this dough, I was going to use it. After letting it chill for a couple of hours, I rolled out small ovals and put in about two teaspoons of fruit butter and folded it over or layered another piece of dough on top or made a really, really big jam thumbprint with half the dough. They baked up nicely, and looked really great.Until I tried to pick one up and it crumbled. I mean, just fell apart. I eventually enlisted a large spatula to get it onto a plate so I could at least see if it tasted good. It did, but wasn't exactly a pastry.

This morning  I sat down to write a post on "delicious failures". I wanted to take some pictures of the remaining 'pastries' and a picture of how it crumbled. Lo and behold, they didn't crumble when touched! I'm guessing the butter component set  over night so while the the 'pastries' are still delicate and melt/crumble in your mouth, you can actually pick one up. They would never survive a lunchbox, but at least they don't need a fork.

You can see where this one cracked when I tried to pick it up last night

This one has apple butter in the middle. More importantly, its holding together. 

I still want to do some more experimenting with this one before I post a recipe, but its a good lesson learned. Even if your baked goods look terrible straight out of the oven, they may be perfectly fine later.

~PhysicsGal

*Exhibit A: The great sugarless, honey-less spelt carrot cake. Exhibit B: The oatmeal coffee cake with more salt than sugar and not nearly enough milk. blech and crumbly to boot.

Resolution: Things I am NOT allowed to feel guilty about

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd think that I must have been a serial killer or a mass murderer or something horrible a previous life or two ago, because I certainly have enough residual guilt about *everything* to cover something horrible done a lifetime or two ago. I will apologize for anything and everything, including things done by other people and done by things like forces of nature. This excess of guilt overflows into pretty much every aspect of life. Most recently, it has been showing up in things like my diet, since I have to be fairly strict about what I eat, and the amount I exercise, study, spend cooking, etc, etc, etc.

Today, I started to feel guilty for eating an apple. An apple. Not even a huge one or a particularly sweet one. And apples have benefits for people with insulin issues. 

So I have decided to make a list of things I will not allow myself to feel guilty for. It may initially spawn some guilt for feeling guilty for feeling guilty, but oh well.

The I Cannot Feel Guilty About List

1. Eating Apples or unsweetened apple sauce
2. Eating fresh berries or cherries
3. eating stone fruit with a little cream for desert.
4. Eating vegetables, excepting winter squash and sweet potatoes. (what the heck do those count as anyway?! Vegetable or starch?)
5. Walking "only" 4 miles a day.
6. Eating eggs (residual guilt from my childhood when the media said eggs were evil, even though I never believed them).

It really gets my goat

I get angry at things. Not always the things other people get upset about, but I can get very irritated by things. And people. Particularly people being stupid. 

Stupid is the polite if inaccurate term for what irritates me. Anti-vaccine people annoy me because they utterly fail to understand what they are citing  and because they are killing children. My fellow Christians who like to discount scientific discoveries annoy me because they are being willfully ignorant and turning a blind eye to some really cook aspects of creation. My fellow scientists are currently annoying me by being willfully ignorant the other way. 

This is a thing that causes me low level irritation on a daily basis, but then I saw this blogpost from one of the science bloggers I follow. Two things bothered me about this post. One, he was basing his entire argument off some truly awful questions. Another is his exhibition of the worst habit of contemporary science writers (and writers in general) to broadly generalize about anyone they view as an 'enemy' in a manner that makes them seem irrational.  Things like this quotation are particularly irritating.

A professed belief in something like creationism is one of the essential markers of a particular brand of political conservatism. As a result, even people who know the scientific answer are prone to giving the answer they’re “supposed” to give as a member of a particular political affiliation. And the number of people who self-identify as political conservatives, like the number who deny the Big Bang and evolution, is pretty consistent over the last thirty years.

Note that the answers he is talking about are the true/false responses given to the statements "“The universe began with a huge explosion”  “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” 

Now I object to several things. One, the assumption that just because I believe in creation means I'm a right-wing nut job (I also object to my beliefs being co-opted by a political party, but that's a separate issue). Two, that there is one version of creationism. I also think true/false polls are terrible ways of gauging people's views.  

Attention non-religious science-types. The 'creationism' that you refer to so derisively is in fact Young Earth Creationism. This is a very narrow slice of people who believe that the universe was created and not just a random event. There are several flavors of creationism (main forms summarized here). If you went around and seriously interviewed a wide swath of Christians (since we are the 'creationists' everyone seems to want to poke), I'm willing to bet good money you would find most of them to be either Old Earth Creationists, or Theistic Evolutionists (I myself fall largely into the later category). But if you just straight up asked me "Are you a creationist?" I would probably answer yes.

I believe that the universe began with the Big Bang. I believe the the prima causa of the Big Bang was God. I believe that God used evolution to create the variety of life we have today, with a little nudging in the direction he wanted it to go. When it comes to the physics or the biology or the chemistry, I do not deny the scientific evidence or theories. I will argue for them with people who don't believe in the science. Why is science so threatened that I want to, and do, believe to know Who's behind the curtain?

Fellow scientists. You get mad as all get out when people deride your science without doing any research or learning beyond their own prejudices and maybe one newspaper article. Could you do other people the courtesy of not doing the same?

Before dawn...

Much to the bafflement of my colleagues, I enjoy getting up early. These days I do it for practical reasons as well, but even in college when I didn't have to I would get up well before the sun most of the year. Partly its because I like getting up in increments. Get up. Have coffee. Check emails. Eat. Get shower. I dislike being rushed.

But mostly I like getting up before the sun because I like to watch the world come awake. Blackness gives way to grey, the birds start to wake up and get noisy. Sunlight starts to creep through my kitchen windows.

 Its the most peaceful time of day. Almost no one else is up. Trucks are still in their garages, the neighborhood dogs haven't woken up yet. Everything is still. Nothing is hectic before the sun rises.

And you know what? I'm ok if everyone would rather stay asleep. I get enjoy this time of day all by myself. Even days like today that are cloudy and hazy. Its possibly the only time of day when I don't feel like I need to be doing things, because no on else is.

When Teaching is Reviving

Some days, like Tuesday, teaching is exhausting. Trying to lead the horse to water and make it drink and understand what its drinking. Prodding other tired, reluctant people to interact with me. Trying to make difficult topics easily understandable.

Then there are days like today that remind me why I love teaching. Classes that as a whole are willing to work with you. The handful of students sprinkled throughout who really want to learn and participate in their learning. I had students answer questions correctly that I had never had students answer before. Two of the students inspired me after class to come up with a new way to describe things that seemed to help them and several other students understand. These are the kind of days I love.

Its days like these that keep me going even on the days when I am just so bone tired and anxious and not at all in the mood to stand in front of 35 people and try to get them to comprehend a small slice of the workings of the universe. Its days like these that even when I walk into the classroom in an absolutely terrible mood, I leave feeling 10 pounds lighter and happy.

I honestly don't understand my colleagues who hate doing TAs (teacher assisting). The four classes I teach are the best part of my semester.