Finding Time For Serenity

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Description

Almost every woman knows the press of busy days - days when we can't keep track of what we've done (or haven't done), much less find five minutes to rest. These daily meditations from best-selling author Barbara Crafton - wife, grandmother, priest, retreat leader, and spiritual director - will help women restore the balance and bring perspective into their daily lives.

Crafton explores the things women know well: bags under the eyes, people who monopolize meetings, office politics, middle-age pride, kids leaving home, faith, love, destiny, the impossible images women's magazines perpetuate, friendship, and many more. Here she becomes the wise and funny friend every woman needs every day.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Women's Interests
• Christian Living
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Date de parution: 01 août 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780819225979
• Langue: English

Extrait

Finding Time for Serenity
Every Woman's Book of Days
BARBARA CAWTHORNE CRAFTON
Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
First Published in 1994 by Ballantine Books.
Revised edition published in 2004 by Morehouse Publishing, 4775 Linglestown Road, Harrisburg, PA 17112
Morehouse Publishing, 445 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Morehouse Publishing is an imprint of Church Publishing Incorporated. www.churchpublishing.org
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crafton, Barbara Cawthorne.
Finding time for serenity: every woman's book of days / Barbara Cawthorne Crafton.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Ballantine Books, c1994.
ISBN 978-0-8192-2121-6
1.      Women—Conduct of life. 2. Devotional calendars. I. Title.
BJ1610.C74 2004 242’.643—dc22
2003026995
Printed in the United States of America
T o Mary Fisher, a busy woman and an inspiration to many
F OREWORD TO THIS S ECOND E DITION
I am grateful to everyone who appears in this book. They number in the thousands: doctors, homeless people, my friends, members of my family, colleagues at work, famous artists and writers I've never met, seafarers, people I pass in the street and doubtless will never meet again. Some of them are alive and some are dead. I am indebted to all of them.
I'll never write another book, I told myself and anyone else who would listen after I had finished writing this book ten years ago. Since then, almost all my work has been precisely that. I keep forgetting that there are 365 days in a year.
But thanks to Morehouse for bringing it back, to Debra Farrington and Ryan Masteller. Enjoy these little essays: may they give you a little something to start your day, and may it be a little something you need.
B. C. C.
The Geranium Farm
2004
JANUARY 1
“ 10–9–8–7–6–5–4–3–2–1 … Happy New Year! ”
I n Korea, the New Year is celebrated with a ritual of reverence for old people: The children make a ceremonial bow before their elders, kneeling all the way down until their foreheads touch the ground. Parents do the same before the grandparents; everybody bows to anyone who is older. And when the elder accepts the gesture of respect, the child is rewarded with a coin…even if the child is all grown up.
I'm going to go on a diet , Americans say to ourselves on this day, and get back to my pre-pregnancy weight once and for all . Some of us have been saying that for twenty-five years now. But as we pull off the last page of last year's calendar, we say it again. I'm going to do something so that I'll be like I was when I was young. Thin. Full of pep. Maybe this year I'll do something about these bags under my eyes .
But do you really want to be what you were in those days? So you're fatter now—you're also smarter. More sure of yourself. You can't be those things when you're young and inexperienced; it takes time to learn from your mistakes. Wisdom takes time to accumulate. That's why the Koreans honor the old: wisdom lives in them. And it lives in us, too, more and more as the years pass. Stick around long enough and the errors of your youth can become the stuff of which good advice is made. You can be proud of the things you learned the hard way. They may have left a few scars, but they have made you wise.
JANUARY 2
“ O brave new world, that has such people in ’t! ”
— THE TEMPEST , ACT V SCENE I
W hen we looked forward to the end of the twentieth century from the middle of it, we thought we'd have more things figured out than we do. If you grew up expecting to be a wife and mother in a fairly predictable way, you've already been surprised by how unpredictable that life turned out to be. If you grew up expecting the women's movement to have pretty much settled things by now, you've already been surprised at how unsettled things still are.
So many things are possible for us now. We have choices we didn't have before. Great: now we have to be terrific in two worlds instead of one. We look at beautiful pictures of food in magazines and wish we had time to make dishes look and taste as lovely as that. Or we look at a list in another magazine of the ten hottest careers for women and notice that ours is not among them, and we feel just the tiniest bit judged.
Hotter than what? And according to whom? The career that's hot for you is the one that warms your heart. Maybe you do the work you do because you really love it. Or maybe you don't, and you do it because the people you love have to eat. Is one less strong and brave than the other? I don't think so. Who cares whether or not it's on somebody's hot list? Or beautiful enough to be in a magazine? Choices are supposed to make people more free, not less so.
So don't let the magazine pictures make you feel inadequate. Or the hot job lists, either. You can't do everything, and only a few things relating to any kind of work are glamorous. It's your commitment to what you do that makes it good for you.
JANUARY 3
“ On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eleven pipers piping. …” — THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
B y the way, Christmas is not over. You've got until the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th) to do all the things you didn't get to before December 25th. That's what the Church calendar says, and I'm going by that. This has the following advantages:
1. You can send out your Christmas cards now, when they will be much more noticeable. You can also respond in an informed way to the news people sent you in their cards which arrived on time. That way you won't be sending Mr. and Mrs. cards to people who divorced during the year.
2. You can buy things on sale in a store that doesn't look and sound like the Commodities Exchange, and…a salesperson will be around when you need one.
3. You don't have to take your tree down right away.
4. You can keep playing Christmas music on the stereo.
5. You can call people to wish them a Merry Christmas when they'll actually have time to talk to you.
6. You can space out some of the gifts you give to your children. They don't all have to come on the same day. It can be more like Chanukah. The benefits of this are enormous. No sensory overload. No present frenzy in which a gift is barely acknowledged before the next one is torn into. And your kids actually learn to wait.
With a little encouragement, people are at their best at this time of year. Let's not revert to our crabby selves too quickly. We've got all year.
JANUARY 4
“ Where can I flee from your presence? ” — PSALM 139:6
I got up this morning at five o'clock. I thought I would have some time to myself—two hours, maybe, in a silent house.
Looking forward to this delicious slice of privacy at the day's beginning, I went to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. And as I waited for the kettle to boil, I heard a noise outside the door. Oh, no. It was Rosie, eldest grandchild. Up early, just like me.
“It's too early for you to be up,” I said severely. And then I looked at her and thought of what it was like when I was four years old and awakened to hear my grandmother in the kitchen. What was I making, Rosie wanted to know. Tea, I answered, and got her some juice.
I did regret my lost two hours, and yet I also think that four-year-olds have the right to expect their grandmothers to be glad to see them. I remember feeling exactly the same ambivalence when her mother got up at the crack of many a long-ago dawn and destroyed my quiet time. I needed it. But she also needed me. And I needed her. I didn't know then how short the time with her would seem when it was over. Hardly any time at all. And now? You talk about quiet.
Rosie's feet were bare. Aren't your feet cold? No, she said. I got her some socks anyway. She drank her juice and chattered happily on and on about her school and the cookies she and her mother made to take there for the Christmas party. She had no sense of having interrupted anything important. And she was right. She's a pretty important person. There'll be other mornings for me alone.
JANUARY 5
“ Oh, how good and pleasant it is! ” — PSALM 133:1
R adio playing nice music. House sort of clean. Laundry done. Candles on the table, ready to light. Table set. Food all ready to cook quickly. Recipe we both like. Even a nice dessert made.
I had the day off today, so I had time to make things really nice. I got all the house things done and still had five or six wonderful hours. I was alone all day. I could listen to the music I like without irritating anyone. Even the phone calls were all people I wanted to talk to. And there weren't all that many of them.
I am very aware of how nice this is: just to take care of the house and make a good dinner. So different from a normal, hectic day, with its appointments and interruptions, places to be on time, things to pick up on the way home, things to decide. We have to have take-out meals sometimes, or meals eaten at different times from everyone else because I get home so much later than my family. There are weeks in which I don't feel I see them very much, these people I love the most. A hurried good-bye in the morning and an evening in which we're too sleepy to interact much.
I leaf through a magazine. A psychologist writes that I should be having one meal a day which the whole family eats together. I don't always do that. But we do the best we can. We enjoy one another when we are together. And at least the phone calls are regular and frequent and satisfying. Full of love.
Don't worry if you can't do the best thing every time—you'll rob yourself of the enjoyment of the things you can do.
JANUARY 6
“ What do you mean by coming in here at eighteen minutes past the hour? ”
— SCROOGE, TO BOB CRATCHITT , A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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