My Writing Group is Awesome

We have christened our writing group the Pinklings, sort of like the legendary group of British writers the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers. (The last wrote the Peter Wimsey novels, the eccentric-aristocrat-becomes-psychologically-wounded-in-WW1-and-turns-amateur-detective-as-therapy series. Awesome books.) The Inklings met in a pub and drank beer. The Pinklings meet in my family room and drink tea. They were all committed Christians and brilliant writers, we are all committed Christians and....well, I'm getting a big head here.

Anyhow, latest meeting of the Pinklings we talked about my Kebra Nagast hubs. I made the same mistakes I often do...the hubs are dense with information, but the reader isn't sure why it's all important. It's in my nature to like information for its own sake I suppose. Well, it all serves a purpose inside my own brain, I connect it to other bits of information, I can think up ways just about anything is important and meaningful. Of course, the reader doesn't know this, and thinks its all a bunch of facts. Oi.

So, I need to make more connections with the Kebra Nagast articles, if I want to continue the series.

I'm just going to go ahead and give away my thunder right here: I got interested in Ethiopia in the first place because they claim to have the Lost Ark Of The Covanent, the very same one forged at the foot of Mount Sinai, and carried around through the desert for 40 years, the Ark Solomon built his famous Temple to house. Studying Ethiopian Jews and Christians I became convinced they do have the Ark, the real one. I think this because of the greatly positive effect the artifact has had on their culture, the fact that it seems to have brought out their personal best. Also, because Ethiopia has a long history of being a place of worship of the One God, stretching back ito antiquity. Moses was married to an Ethiopian. Ethiopia first mentioned in Genesis 2:13, pretty darn early in the Bible.

I came to believe that God gifted Ethiopia with the Ark because he knew it would be good for them, and that they would take care of it. In other words, it was both a blessing and a responsibility that they could handle. That of course is a very personal conclusion, but it is the reason for my ongoing fascination with Ethiopian worship.

I think I need to go back to the hubpages articles, maybe write an introduction. We'll see, I have to find a way to get what's in my head (and in my heart) onto the page.

Writing About Personal Obsessions

I've been obsessed with Ethiopia for half my life. After all, they might have the Lost Ark of the Covanent of Indiana Jones fame, and they might have had a 3,000 year old dynasty founded by a son of King Solomon. Their Judaism was more true to the One God than Israel's, their medival Christianity sure looks more pure than the medival Church of Europe. Plus there's the sheer exotic factor: their crosses are ornately beautiful, they carved churches into the sides of mountains, they have those amazing quarried rock stele things, that look like the Washington Monument and weigh 500 tons each. Like other engineering feats of the ancient world, given their massive size and weight no one can even figure out how the steles were put in place.

Besides that, they're all so good looking. I've never seen an ugly Ethiopian.

So, since I'm obsessed, I'm writing about Ethiopia. In particular, the Ethiopian sacred book called the Kebra Nagast, which translates to The Glory of Kings. I'm writing about how it was written, what it says, my own reflections, how it fits in with the Bible, ect.

I'm finding myself thinking about these articles I'm writing when I've just woken up but am not out of bed yet, and other odd times. True mark of an obsession, this. Also, I'm traveling light years from the hubpages model of write it fast, slap it up there, write on popular topics. What percentage of the population is thinking about the Kebra Nagast in the early morning hours? I'm gonna guess not too many. How many are searching the internet for it? Not too many. Ah well, it's an esoteric obsession for sure. Maybe I'm not in the realm of Hubpages with this one, I'm just not sure what realm I am in. It's not a book. I don't even know where I would send it as an article. Hubpages has made things too easy for me, and I've learned nothing about how magazine publishing even works. I passed up taking a magazine publishing workshop with a friend because I was getting together with friends that night, and the truth is, I don't feel much of a push to get published. I'm looking to teaching for money, and Hubpages gets me admiring accolades from readers, so there's my emotional fulfillment. Maybe I should ask my friend, who did go to the workshop, for advice on print publishing, then think about whether I even want to give it a try.

Managing Family Life as a Christian Mom

I read "Crazy For God"
 by Frank Schaeffer recently, and wrote a reveiw of the book on Hubpages. The review is one thing I guess, but I've been thinking about being a Christian and family life. "Crazy for God" was, well, damning about the way Christians, especially professional Christians, deal with their families.

If you are interested in the review, it is here :
http://hubpages.com/hub/Review-of-Crazy-For-God-By-Frank-Schaeffer

The evangelical community is less than thrilled with Frank Schaeffer these days. That's not too surprising, considering how harshly he critisizes them not only in "Crazy For God" but in his trilogy of semiautobiographical novels about a boy with nutty evangelical parents. ("Portofino" is the first novel in the trilogy. I haven't read it.) But I want to consider what he says seriously. He was raised by parents who were all but worshiped in the evangelical community. They traveled a great deal speaking on Christian topics and wrote many books. Frank's report of their family life was less than stellar, and that's an understatement. He makes it sound miserable.

So what are his complaints? Here we go in no particular order: 1) They claimed they were homeschooling him, but were so busy doing ministry he was left to pretty much run wild and learned almost no academic skills until someone donated money to send him to an English boarding school 2) His mom was "nutty" 3) his parents gave up the things that really mattered most to them in life b/c they were "living for God" 4) they prayed over meals so long the food was cold 5) his mom was a martyr, and never let anyone forget it 6) they didn't have family time b/c all time was spent on ministry 7) his parents competed over whose ministry affected more people 8) there were long lists of things God didn't like.

What can I learn from all of this? I guess the biggest thing is "Be real." Or maybe, there's no point not being real with your kids, since you can't fool them. I kind of think that summed up most of what happened to Frank Schaeffer. His father comes out alot better than his mom in the memoir, and I think it boils down to his father was open about his weaknesses.

In "Crazy For God" Edith Schaeffer comes off as tragic. At least I think so. Here is a woman who traveled the world to talk about marriage and family, to advise other women how to be Christian wives and mothers, and her own kids don't like her. They love her, but they're pretty critical. One of Frank's sisters said that she had never had an actual conversation with her mother in her life: her mother always had an agenda. Even sadder, the daughter said this in her fifties, so it can hardly be dismissed as adolescent angst. Another one of the daughters suffered three nervous breakdowns, not exactly the hallmark of a happy life.

Well, again, how to avoid this sort of thing? How can a Christian woman so admired by other Christian women for her family life end up with a pack of resentful offspring? (I once knew a pastor who wrote books about parenting, and he told me when his kids were teenagers they read his books and had a ball quoting his own words back to him.)

Is the problem professional Christians? Professional parents? Paul once advised Christians to live a quiet life and work with their hands. I suppose the type of ministry the Schaeffers were doing involved living a loud life and working by talking. Is the problem that Christians have trouble finding balance in their lives? Someone once told me that John Wimber's wife Carol was asked why she didn't do more "ministry," and she replied that she wanted to spend most of her time on the people she had the most influence on, and that was her own children. The world in general rewards us most for the things where we are having the least lasting impact. All Christians would agree that time spent in personal prayer is valuable, but one gets no reward at all from the world for this. Being an excellent parent when no one can see you (the most important time to be a good parent) doesn't get much of a reward. Having internal integrity gets little reward: only people who know you well can even recognize this.

The big tangible rewards all come from things with little long term value and no eternal value: having a job that pays well, being good looking, being a polished public speaker, being a celebrity of some sort. Jesus said the last will be first in His Kingdom. Maybe this is what he was talking about.

Where's Your Thesis Statement?

So I showed my hub "My Son Becomes a Man" to my writing group, they hemmed and hawed a bit, and then someone asked, "What's your point exactly?"

I tried to explain my point. Something along the lines of masculinity is this powerful force that can get dark and violent, but that very same force drives men to take charge, stand up for right, and care for loved ones.

Halfway decent thesis, but it was in my brain, and not on the page. I'm going back to the article, and working some rewrites.

I made some changes, and it wasn't as painful as i thought it would be.

It's Friday, I have the house to myself, and I'm going to do some laundry, then curl up with a book.

Here is the new improved hub:
http://hubpages.com/hub/My-Son-Becomes-A-Man-What-Manhood-Means-To-A-Woman

Wingedcentaur, Irish Seal People, and the Dead Kennedys

It's the middle of the night and I can't sleep. So I have decided to blog. It was either that or read a 8 part series of hubs by someone called wingedcentaur about the Kennedy Assassinations. And I used to think that you came across some odd things watching TV in the middle of the night.

OK, since I am here I am going to write a little about ideas I have for upcoming hubs. I want to write something about biblical literalism. I have plans to include some things I learned reading a book called "The People of the Sea," which is about the celtic legend of the selchie. A selchie is a seal in the water, and then when it comes up on land it turns into a human being. These legends come from Ireland and Scotland, and the author of "People of the Sea" traveled around the british Isles in the 1950s collecting and recording tales about the selchies. It's a lovely book. I should write a review of the book! I never thought of that. What could sea people possibly have to do with biblical literalism you may be wondering? Right now my brain is too fried to explain that train of logic, if logical it is. You will have to wait for me to write the hub.

As for me, I'm going to go check out what theory wingedcentaur has about those Kennedys.

Writing the Hub "My Son Becomes A Man"

I've been writing on Hubpages quite a bit, under the name graceomalley. I'm beginning to develop my own way of writing hubs, and it's not quite like what others are doing. A few days ago I read the advice that a hubber should be able to turn out a 600 word hub in an hour. This is from a very experienced and successful hubber, whose picture is permanently on the Hubpages home page. She's also a bit of an overacheiver if you ask me. She's homeschooling six kids while renovating her home and earning one third of her household income by writing online and editing.

Well, I don't write that fast. Then again, I'm writing pretty different stuff. This hubber's latest article was 600 words on styles of chandeleirs. Had great pictures. She's learned a thing or two renovating that house. My latest, by way of contrast, was 2,000 words about the meaning of manhood. I included what it is like for me as a mother to live with my teenage son as he grows into a man, reflections from my dating experience, events in sports, and a childhood incident of domestic abuse. It's a complicated subject really.

Here's the link: http://hubpages.com/hub/My-Son-Becomes-A-Man-What-Manhood-Means-To-A-Woman

I'm finding my way on Hubpages. It's not like I took forever to write that article. It was all done on the same day, including writing the text, finding pictures and posting links. It was a Saturday, and my family was milling around me all day, asking for stuff. I made a big pot of chili, did laundry, and was on the hostess crew for a church potluck that Saturday too. I got to spend some time in the car with my son, though I missed my daughter's basketball game - but that was the fault of the potluck, not my writing.