Throughout my life, prayer has played various roles depending on how holy I was feeling and how much I believed.  When I was in high-school, college and on up through my twenties, I prayed all the time.  I had this non-stop running conversation with God going on in my head.  I prayed for friends, relatives and co-workers.  I prayed for the people that I knew who were dabbling in Buddhism, vegetarianism, feminism and environmentalism that God would save them from the eternal lake of fire for their despicable heresy.  I prayed for my friends who were gay that they would accept Jesus and stop being such a heinous abomination before the Apostle Paul, God and me.  I prayed for strangers as they walked by and I would ask God to touch their hearts, their minds and draw them close to Him.  I prayed for people while I was having conversations with them, asking God to use me to show his love and share the gospel with them.

When I was in college I added fasting to my regular prayer regimen.  I made the startling discovery that fasting amplified my  prayers and I certainly wanted God to hear mine!  Evidently God hears you better when you have an empty stomach, except of course in the case of famine – where either people who are starving don’t pray or it doesn’t count as fasting unless you actually have food to give up.  (Boy that God… he sure is a picky bastard!)  But like most things that involve unnecessary hardship – fasting did not come naturally to me.  I am not built to suffer, I am built to indulge.  So I was constantly changing the rules about how long I was going to fast and what constituted a real fast and if fasting through my afternoon snack would be good enough for God.

“Dear God – Today I will fast until supper.  I will spend this day reflecting on your supreme glory and lifting my voice as a humble servant on behalf of all the people in this world who do not have a personal relationship with you.  BUT!!!   I am going to let myself have a soda at lunch time God… a regular soda…not a diet soda… and I can have as much juice as I want all day long and I am not going to start this fast until I finish off this bag of Twizzlers and the rest of the Corn Nuts.  And also,  I can have a cookie at the union if I start to feel really weak, but I will not get a latte to go with it Lord.  I will only get a regular coffee, with a tiny bit of cream and no sugar.  Okay… maybe only one packet of sugar, but only one packet God.  And then I will skip dessert at dinner to make up for the packet of sugar – unless dessert is really, really good.  Then I will skip dessert tomorrow instead.

As I got older, got married, and had babies, the habit of fasting disappeared and my prayer life dwindled.  I had too many diapers to change and nursing moms don’t ever skip a meal.  When I did pray, it was generally for my husband who was not exactly ‘on fire for the Lord’.  Somehow I had managed to marry and make lots of babies with a man whose knowledge of the bible was pathetic and whose basic understanding of evangelical Christianity was abysmal.  I married a Catholic who went to parochial school through the sixth grade and if he worshiped anything – he worshiped it wrong.  Everyone knows that Catholics don’t know the real God.  They are terribly confused.  They worship the pope and Mary, instead of Jesus.  I was sure that God had sent me into my husband’s life to save him and his entire family of devout Catholic Mary worshipers from an eternity in Hell.  So I was always begging God to ‘get a grip on my husband’s life’.  Turn him around Lord!  Bring him close to you Jesus – the real Jesus – not the fake baby Jesus that is really just a prop for their fake Mary god to hold!  Discipline him God and bring him to the truth of who you really are!

But then I would freak out about the whole ‘discipline’ thing.  I had been taught that God disciplines those that he loves and that means he basically beats the shit out of his favorite people by giving them cancer or giving their babies cancer or letting them be paralyzed in a fiery car accident or melting their faces off in a propane tank explosion.  So my prayers always had distinct parameters.  I would try to back-pedal my way out of being disciplined by saying things like…

Bring my husband to you Lord, but please don’t hurt my babies to make it happen.  Please God!  Please don’t hurt my baby!  I want my husband to know you and love you as much as I do, but I don’t want you to give my baby cancer to teach him about your infinite love.  So if you could get a hold of my husband’s life without giving my baby leukemia, I would really appreciate it.  Thanks God!  Love you!  You are so awesome!  And please don’t give my baby cancer God.  Please!!  Thanks God!

But the thing is – that Christians are supposed to trust God and believe that he is always taking care of them.  So if our baby gets leukemia, there is a reason for it.  It is part of God’s plan.  It will only bring us closer to God and make us stronger for Jesus.   But I didn’t want my baby to get leukemia for Jesus.  If God had to give my baby leukemia to bring my husband to Jesus, then I would prefer that my Mary worshiping Catholic husband just went to hell.  I’m sorry honey – but I did it to save our baby!

I do remember a brief revival in my ‘married with babies’ prayer life when my third son Drew became very ill.  He was a plump, rosy cheeked, eighteen month old, when he came down with pneumonia, spent 13 days in the ICU and eventually had emergency surgery to remove a ‘rind of pus’ that had walled itself off in his lung making it impossible for even the most potent antibiotic to kill off the infection.  Every time he coughed, the infection would break through the pus wall, flow into his blood stream and his fever would skyrocket back to 105 degrees.  After attempting to siphon the infection out of his lung with two different chest tubes, the pediatrician finally decided to send him in an ambulance to Wichita for surgery.  By the time they sent Drew to Wichita he had stopped eating and was being fed through his veins.  He had grown very weak and you could see all the bones in his back.  We were very scared.  I distinctly remember sitting beside Drew’s hospital crib in Wichita promising God that if he got my baby out of that hospital whole and healthy, I would re-dedicate my life to Jesus.  I would go to church eight days a week, I would teach Sunday school, I would host bible studies and volunteer to run VBS for the rest of my life.  I would give all my money to the poor and spend every free minute for the rest of my days walking the streets in Mexican villages converting all the Mary worshiping Catholics to the correct version of evangelical protestantism.  But I also knew that the odds were very strong that Drew would get better regardless of my prayers.  While at that hospital, I saw moms and dads with seriously ill children that were much sicker than my baby.  It was highly likely that Drew was going to survive this ordeal, but looking at those kids, I could see that their odds were not as good.  This left a grave imprint on my mind, knowing that God was going to spare my baby, but some of those kids were never going to see another Christmas or another birthday no matter how hard their parents prayed.

My baby did get better.  We brought him home.  His emaciated body had grown so weak in the hospital that he was unable to walk and he had stopped talking.  He was a year and a half old and he could no longer sit up by himself.  But Drew healed quickly.  He had youth on his side, a devoted mother and spastic brothers who kept up tornadic activity around him all day long.  Drew gained weight, and within a week he stood up on his skinny legs and tottered across the room.  He shoved fist-fulls of macaroni and cheese and fat sausages into his mouth and soon started talking again and he hasn’t shut up since.  In just a few weeks time, except for the scars on his stomach and back, you would never know that he had been so incredibly sick.

And who did I owe for the miracle of my son’s recovery?  Who did I have to thank for bringing my baby back from the brink of death?  Why God of course!  God healed my baby!  God brought him back.  The team of doctors, surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, radiologists, x-ray technicians,  pharmaceutical researchers, surgical tool inventors, paramedics, hospital administrators – what did they have to do with anything???

Except deep down I knew that if Drew had gotten this sick just a mere fifty years ago, his chance of survival would have been almost nil.  I knew that the ability to operate on an infant – the tiny tools, the properly sized respirators, the correct dosage of drugs, these were all new technologies.  God didn’t save my baby.  Humankind’s ingenuity saved him.  Dedicated doctors, curious researchers, caring nurses, organized administrators, hard working people – they saved my baby – not God.  But of course, even though on a certain level I understood and fully accepted this idea, I still thought that ultimately it was God who decided who lived and died and that advances in science had nothing to do with the delicate thread of human life. If science saved my son, it was because God ordained that science save my son.

So did I keep my hospital room promises to God?  Did I keep up my end of the bargain???

Well…. sort of...

My husband was a medical resident at the time of Drew’s illness and I had three young sons (18 months, three and five).  We went to church sporadically, but we were not exactly stalwart in anything religious at this point in our lives, but I never forgot the promise I had made and when my husband took his first job as an MD, I eventually got ridiculously involved in a church and I think you could say that I kept up my end of the deal I made with God in return for him saving my baby by using all the advances of modern medicine.

As we began to go back to church and got more and more involved, I introduced the idea of prayer before meals to my family.  It became a habit, a ritual, a customary pause before meals.  The boys all became good at saying prayers at dinner.  One son in particular was masterful at meal time prayers.  He was the one we paraded out when the grandparents were visiting, knowing that this boy had the proper amount of reverence, devotion, fervor, gratitude and also he was wonderfully concise.  My youngest son however was a horrible pray-er.  He was awful.  He just couldn’t do it. We would try and make it really simple for Jack.  Just say three things you are thankful for Jack – just three things.  Just say, “Dear God thank you for __________ and ___________ and __________ ” But Jack could not come up with three things.  He would pause and stammer and wait and lapse into silence while our spaghetti got colder and colder and colder.  I think Jack thought that his three things had to be three amazing things, or three thing that no one else would think of or maybe Jack just wasn’t particularly thankful for anything.  After all, he is the baby of the family and usually gets everything he wants within seconds.  Perhaps gratitude was a foreign concept to him?  Do you understand gratefulness if you have never actually wanted for anything?  Or maybe Jack just thought the right people to thank were the people that actually took care of him – his brothers, him mom, his dad.  Maybe Jack – still being young and very left-brained, considered thanking an invisible deity to be strange and nonsensical.  Or maybe he just enjoyed the extra attention he got when he couldn’t think of anything to say during his prayer.

Giving up family meal prayers was probably the most awkward part of becoming an atheist for me.  (Aside from writing about it on the INTERNET!)  We would sit around the table staring at each other waiting for some kind of signal to start our meal.  How do we know when to eat?  What is the new signal?  We need a new ceremony – a song, a poem, a very short story, some kind of ritual that lets us pause and see each other prior to digging in.

And then I became an atheist making every prayer I have ever said – moot.

Still – losing one’s faith is not just a new way of thinking, it is also about establishing new habits and getting rid of old ones.  Up until six months ago, it was still very much my habit to pray and prayer is not an easy habit to break.  I went through a transition phase where I prayed to God by saying – God… I really don’t believe in you anymore, but on the off chance that you actually exist, could you help me find my lost earring? And then if I found my earring, I thanked God by saying - God, I am not sure you are even there, but if you had anything at all to do with helping me to find this lost earring – Thank You. Of course I knew that these prayers were absurd.  I knew there were people starving and dying from easily curable diseases and women were being raped by husband’s with AIDS and children were being turned into brutal soldiers and babies were suffering from abuse and neglect.  So I would add a little tag at the end of my prayers that went something like this… And God if you could please stop all the immense suffering in the world that would really be great.  You are so powerful Lord -so wise and strong and loving… so if you really do exist -  just please make it all stop.  Right now.  Thank you.

As my prayer life and my faith diminished, I found that the only time I prayed was when I couldn’t sleep.  Usually this was because I was worried about something and that worry was usually centered on one of my children, but I had some serious problems with praying for my kids at night when I couldn’t sleep.  First off – I had to apologize to God for hardly ever praying anymore and for not really believing in him anymore and then I had to spend some time promising to believe more and to pray more before I could even get to what I was really worried about.  Finally – I had to deal with the fact that I was laying on my back staring straight up at the ceiling while apologizing for never praying anymore which was not exactly a very reverent position.  Would it be better if I turned over on my stomach?  What if I laid on my side?  Do I really have to get up and kneel beside the bed?  What if my Mary worshiping Cahtolic husband wakes up while I am kneeling beside the bed?  That would be kind of embarrassing plus I would be committing the sin of demonstrating my holiness in front of someone and then I wouldn’t get the extra credit for holiness – because my husband had seen it.  And I knew that Christians are only supposed to be extra holy in secret when only God can see it.  This results in an awesome prize in heaven instead of the crappy earthly prize of only being seen by other people.  What I really needed to do was get up and go into the bathroom, lock the door and then kneel down and pray.  But was it really okay to pray beside a toilet?  Isn’t that kind of sacrilegious to pray beside the shitter?  I guess I could tiptoe out to the living room and kneel down by the couch to pray.  That would probably be the most pious thing to do, but what if someone wakes up and finds me kneeling down by the couch praying?  Not only do I lose my awesome prize in heaven, but my kids might freak out and my husband might think I had lost my mind.  It’s probably best to stay here in bed, losing the pious points, but also not disappointing God for being caught being holy or praying by a toilet.  Praying in the middle of the night was an exhausting ordeal – which was good.  I usually drifted off to sleep in no time.

Besides my middle of the night prayers were usually just more desperate pleas to ward off ‘God’s discipline’.

God – I know we are not exactly the most Christian family on the face of the earth and if we really loved you as much as we should, we would sell everything we had, give it to the poor and go open a missionary hospital in Africa.  I know we are not really obeying your word by living a very comfortable life in America and by occasionally purchasing things on clearance from the Pottery Barn catalog – but could you please not give anyone in my family leukemia to make us better Christians Lord?  I promise to start having early morning bible studies with my kids and to read a James Dobson book with my husband if you please don’t give us cancer to bring us closer to you God.  I will also start to give a full ten percent BEFORE TAXES GOD… no… I will give eleven percent!  ELEVEN PERCENT GOD!!!  BEFORE TAXES GOD!!! And I will never buy anything from the Pottery Barn catalog again!  Just please don’t give my babies cancer!  And please don’t kill my husband in a fiery car crash!  Eleven percent before taxes GOD and no cancer!  Okay God!  Okay?  Thanks God!  You are the best God EVER!!!  And sorry for laying here on my back while saying this prayer.  Just remember -  no cancer God!  You are awesome!

A few days ago, I was visiting a friend’s house and a meal was served.  The food was laid out on the kitchen counters buffet style and we went around the kitchen filling our plates with hamburgers, hot dogs, and garden fresh tomatoes.  The food looked delicious, but just as my kids and I were about to dig into the condiments, someone behind us intoned, “Let’s pray.”  My children were their usual tumultous pile of boyhood and didn’t hear the request to pray until the prayer was halfway finished.  It was one of those Mary worshiping Catholic prayers… “Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from your bounty…..“  I whispered to my kids, “Boys… boys… they’re praying.”  My boys quieted down and caught maybe the last dozen words of the prayer.  I still have an automatic impulse to direct my kids to quiet down during a prayer, but I did say, ‘they’re praying’ instead of ‘we’re praying’, so a shift has been made.  Perhaps someday I won’t feel the need to stop placing pickles atop my hamburger when others start demonstrating public piety to an imaginary deity.  I don’t need to thank God for my food.  Even if there was a God, I wouldn’t thank him for my food unless he started giving food in equal amounts to everyone.  Every good parent knows better than to give some kids plenty and other kids nothing, and yet if you examine the world situation, and believe in a ‘father type god’ you would have to admit that he is a pretty crappy parent with a penchant for severe favoritism.  When I want to show gratitude for my food, I prefer to thank my husband for bringing home the bacon so that I can buy groceries and myself for growing a fabulous garden and Kay for raising some fine grass finished beef and Darla for her free range eggs and a nearby dairy for it’s delicious milk from healthy cows and my sister for a generous amount of pork from her home raised pigs.  I am not sure where the line is in terms of respect for the prayers of the household that is serving you homegrown tomatoes on a hamburger buffet, but I do know that I am perfectly willing to prostitute myself and at least be quiet for a few moments of prayer so that I can enjoy the food and the company.   But I don’t think I will shush my kids again.  I am sure that someone else will do it for me anyway.  At this point in my life – prayer is a supremely silly act and though I am frequently silly around my kids, I don’t need them to see me pausing in respect so that other people can speak to an imaginary deity that only gives food in abundance to those with the money to pay for it.

I had to buy this magazine.  Sorry.  I couldn’t help myself.  It was like I was possessed or… or… hypnotized… or maybe I was channeling Sylvia Plath, but on a recent trip to the grocery store it jumped into my cart and I lacked the strength to pull it back out.

As a result I have been sucked into the latest chapter in the Bristol Palin/Levi Johnston love story – and by ‘sucked in’ I mean I have spent the past four days watching every interview, video, commercial and YouTube mash-up ever made about these two young people.

I think I might need an intervention.

I did take a small break today to take a few boys to go see Inception during which I fell asleep...twice.  On the way home from the theater Ethan said, “I heard that the writer took ten years to finish that show”.

“Yeah – and it took ten years to watch it too.” I replied.

The movie is long.

And confusing.

And then you stop caring.

And then you fall asleep.

And then you get ‘jumped’ and you wake back up to find that they are shooting ‘projections’.

And then you remember how little you cared in the first place.

And you fall back to sleep.

And while you are sleeping you start having a dream, that is inside of a dream, that is inside of a dream and you loooooooong for someone to kill you so that your brain will be turned into scrambled eggs under a pile of dreams so deep that you can never climb out.  But the dream lasts for fifty years which is 350 years in dog years, but only five minutes in reality and for some strange reason, Juno is in this movie – or the actress that played Juno.  Or maybe Juno was in the dream, that was inside of the dream, that was inside of the dream. Either way, you arrive at the same conclusion which is that the actress who plays Juno belongs in a psychological thriller/action adventure type film about as much as I belong in a psychological thriller/action adventure type film, which I don’t.  Because the actress formerly known as Juno lacks the necessary intensity for a psychological thriller as well as the upper arm definition for action adventure.  Also her voice has that permanent ironic lilt that makes every word that comes out of her mouth drip with ridicule and she can’t really stop her face from looking sarcastic either.  It makes about as much sense to put the actress formerly known as Juno in an action/adventure/thriller as it does to cast Bristol Palin in a love story with a red neck high school dropout who can’t keep a job.

Speaking of Bristol Palin.

Did you hear that she is back together with the father of her child redneck high-school dropout/ former playgirl model/pistachio ad man, Levi Johnston?

Also!

Did you know that at one point, Levi had the the name ‘Bristol’ tattooed on his wedding ring finger?  Shortly after the baby was born, they broke up, so he had his ‘Bristol’ tattoo covered with something that resembles a big black… smudge?  Someday his son will ask him what that big black smudge is and won’t he ever have a story to tell!

He will also have to explain why the name ‘Johnston’ is tattooed on his arm. Is that sort of like a reminder?  Sometimes I write reminders on my hands, but they usually have more to do with grocery items or errands than they have to do with helping me to remember who I am.  I can also usually remember who my husband and kids are too, so I have yet to tattoo their names on any of my body parts, but I do occasionally mix the names of my kids up calling Ethan, Calder or Drew, Jack – still I don’t see how a tattoo on my body would help me remember which kid is which.  It would be better if the tattoos were on my kid’s bodies, preferably across their foreheads so that I could easily see their names when I was addressing them and therefore be less likely to call my sons by the wrong name.  But ultimately, I think that this whole tattoo strategy of Levi has more to do with grizzly bear attacks than it has to do with memory loss. Levi shot his first grizzly bear when he was seven.  I think maybe if you hunt grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness you might want to take steps to make it easier to identify your remains just in case the grizzly bear shoots back.  And if the grizzly bear shoots back and eats both your face and your fingerprints, it really would be smart to have your name tattooed across your arm which the bear won’t eat because it is already full of face and fingerprints.  However, the grizzly bear theory does not hold up in the case of Levi Johnston’s sister Mercede who has the name ‘Levi’ tattooed on her wrist.  Because if she ever gets her face and fingerprints eaten off by a grizzly bear, everyone is going to think that it was actually Levi who was eaten.  But then again, if Levi gets eaten by a grizzly bear and all that gets left behind is his ring finger, they might eventually discover the name Bristol under that black smudge and then everyone is going to think that Bristol was eaten by a grizzly bear.  So now I am thinking that this whole ‘name tattoo thing’ to help people identify your remains in case your face and fingerprints are eaten by a grizzly bear while hunting in the Alaska wilderness is not very sound.

I can’t wait to see where they are going to have the name of their son tattooed!

On Bristol?

On Levi?

Or maybe they should just go ahead and tattoo the baby’s name on the BABY!

I would suggest right across the forehead.  Especially if they decide to have any more kids.

In the meantime, Bristol has been actively involved in the Candie’s Foundation to prevent teen pregnancy.  The catch phrase for this campaign is ‘pause before you play.” which does not exactly push abstinence does it?  It does push ‘pausing’ but that is rapidly followed by ‘playing’ which falls far from the mark of demanding absolute abstinence.  Yet Bristol continues to promise to maintain her pledge to remain abstinent from sex until she is married – which lucky for her appears to be right around the corner.  The article in the Us magazine that I bought suggests a wedding this summer.

Phew!

That was a close one.

So I think Levi will be keeping his stick on the ice, but should he forget, there is always the baby to remind him of the consequences.  And that baby’s name is Tripp. (I am just writing that as a helpful reminder to Levi, because he doesn’t have Tripp’s name tattooed anywhere on his body yet.  At least not anywhere that I can see.)

More Candies Foundation ads to prevent teen pregnancy here.

Congrats to Levi and Bristol!

First of all – I much prefer the hand written invite as it is far more personal.

Second – Remember to include the crucial details like the date!

Third – It helps to draw the eye to the date with fabulous illustrations.

Don’t forget time and place!  Try to be as particular as you can, but if you can’t be super particular, you might want to add in some more awesome illustrations.  This will help to distract your guests from their frustrations.

Instruct your guests as to what they should contribute.

Don’t be afraid to be specific.

You may even have to get a little snippy about it, but don’t worry – it will only make the party better.

I like to give my guests options.  Not a lot of options, but enough to make them feel a teensy bit empowered.

Always include a map.

Always!

Cross out any bad maps that you may have drawn by accident.

I struggle with RSVP’s because I hate to obligate people with my party invites and let’s face it – an RSVP does have a certain Nazi like obligation to it.  So I like to give people an out.  I tell them that it is perfectly okay to NOT RSVP, but if they don’t, they may not get any food.  This puts us all on the same page.

This is the hand drawn map that I slaved over for this invite, but I tried to make it look like I just threw it together!  Because that helps people to relax!

Always include a key with your maps.

Because what hell is map without key?

Help your guests with pronunciation.

That way when they stop and ask for directions, they won’t sound like idiots.

Promise to be smart for them!

Be specific in your directions!  This will help your guests to arrive in time to help weed the pepper patch.

How exactly could you resist an invitation such as this?

But remember  – there will aways be people who are threatened by your genius.

But you’re friendly so go ahead and invite them anyway!

It’s just not that hard to give them a faulty map.

I spotted these shoes in a catalog the other day.

And even though the price was ludicrous, I decided that I must have them.

Yes.

I must.

I must have them and I will wear them to…

I will wear them when I…

I will wear them when I am at the…

And that is when I decided to go back to college.

So that I have somewhere to wear these shoes.

Because I just don’t see myself wearing these while I am working the cash register at the garden center.

Nor could I find a good enough reason to wear them while chauffeuring the kids, shopping for groceries, or watching movies on Netflix.

I also don’t think they would be very good gardening shoes.

I guess I could get a different job instead of going back to school. One that might require the occasional uppity ensemble that would go with a pair of bright red wedges, but that seems like a lot of hassle and commitment just for a pair of shoes. Plus, I really like my job.

So college it is.

I’ve been thinking about going back for a while anyway.  But with the urgent need to purchase these shoes pressing down on me, it feels kind of like an emergency now.  I am not sure what I would study, but I have long wanted to do some exhaustive research on the topic of whether Jane Austen was possibly an atheist.  I know she was a vicar’s daughter, but could not that very fact only serve to point her more in the direction of atheism?  And when you add in her rapier wit, her ability to slice through the bullshit of her time and the way she made fun of everything and everybody in her books, you could regard her at the very least as an extreme skeptic. I see no evidence for a devout faith in her books, but I do see a profound desire in her writing for people to treat each other well.

It would be easier to consider Jane an atheist if she had been able to read Darwin’s Origin of Species.  So I decided to find out if that was even a remote possibility and quickly sketched out a time-line to see if their paths could possibly have intersected.

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Charles Darwin/ Jane Austen (and other literary figures) timeline…

1809 – Charles Darwin is born

1811 – Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility.

1813 – Pride and Prejudice published

1814 – Mansfield Park published

1816 – Charlotte Bronte is born and that same year Jane writes Emma

1817 – Jane Austen dies – Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published posthumously.

We pause momentarily here wishing Jane had lived to write a hundred more books…

1822 – Louis Pasteur is born

1830 – Emily Dickinson is born

1832 – Louisa May Alcott is born.

1838 – Best sellers this year are Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist both by Dickens

1847 – Charlotte Bronte writes Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte writes Wuthering Heights

1850 – Nathaniel Hawthorne writes The Scarlett Letter

1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1856 – Neanderthal Skull is found near Dusseldorf Germany and five pro slavers are murdered by John Brown in my own neck of the woods – Pottawatomie Creek.

1859 – Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species is published.

From this time-line one can see that Darwin would have had no influence over Jane, and yet Jane had considerable influence over Darwin.  She was one of his favorite authors.  Which brings me back to the idea of Jane having the kind of mind that could have doubted the existence of God, in the midst of a religious family, even without the overwhelming scientific evidence that Darwin would eventually provide (that being that the world could easily have created itself without the intervention of a deity.)  If a mind like Jane’s was appealing to Darwin, it is interesting to consider what Jane’s reaction to Darwin might have been.  I’d like to imagine the two of them exchanging letters, though I dare say that Jane’s letters would have been a lot more fun to read than those of Darwin.

___________________________________________________________________________________

A few Jane Austen Quotes that point towards her general attitude of skepticism…

A woman, especially, if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be

________________________

Now, what was this blog about?

Oh yes!

Shoes!

I guess I don’t really need to go to college to find out if Jane was an atheist.  I can do my own research on the internet and Google is far less expensive than a Master’s Degree.   Although it doesn’t really give me an opportunity to wear a pair of fabulous red wedges does it?

You never know what you are going to experience on a river deep in the Ozarks of Missouri. Wild boar, rabid coons, wild-eyed hillbillies, and then there’s the times when a guy gets his face smashed in by a mad man on a canoe and wobbles into your picnic spot with a bleeding head.

We had stopped for lunch on a sandy island in the middle of the river and the man in the photo and two of his friends pulled up beside us in their canoes. The guy with the bleeding face said he had just been attacked by a man ‘for no good reason.’

His friends were strangely quiet about the attack.

We weren’t sure what exactly ‘no good reason’ meant so we kept our distance from Mr. Smashed Face and his entourage making quiet clucking sounds of sympathy as we quickly herded the kids to the other side of the island.

The guy was clearly in distress. He held his bleeding face in his hands. His friends waited patiently beside him until he pulled himself back together and then they all took off together in their canoes down the river.  We never saw him again.

When we reached the end of our trip, there were half a dozen rangers lined up on shore. Evidently, Mr. Smashed Face had reported the crime and the rangers were waiting for the head basher to show up. There were rumors flying around about a severely unbalanced man out there… somewhere… on the Current River… who randomly bashes people in the head ‘for no good reason’.  Scenes from the movie Deliverance flashed through my mind. I was glad we were done for the day.

Strangely, the strange times were not yet over.

When we got back to camp there was a different guy in a pick up truck who kept circling the campground with a confederate flag flying proudly behind him. Eventually, the rangers asked Mr. Confederate Flag to stop his parade, which was a relief, because I don’t know what kind of person circles a campground with a confederate flag flying unless they are looking for trouble.

Turns out that Mr. Confederate Flag was not a Missourian. He was from further south and we were to eventually learn that one of his  buddies was from Illinois as he stopped by our campground to give us an update on how the rangers were treating (or mistreating) Mr. Confederate Flag.  We asked him why his friend was parading the flag in the first place. The Illinoisan said that his friend was a soldier and he didn’t really know why he was doing it. Then he made sure to remind us that ‘Illinois is where the union was born.” We just nodded our heads and let the silence fall between us. He eventually wandered down the road to his own camp probably stopping at each site on his way to give everyone else an update too.

The rest of the trip was without incident and I have some photos up under ‘snapshot’ on the header, but the confederate flag incident made me wonder what people think about that particular symbol.  To me it is an emblem of slavery and war and general backwards thinking. But to other people it means something entirely different.  What does the confederate flag mean to you?  And in the spirit of the river weekend when the following type of question was asked by they boys several times – who do you think would win in a fight?  Mr. Smashed Face or Mr. Confederate Flag?