The Anchoress

First off, let me confirm for an emailer who asked if I’d tried the Irish Cream coffee from Mystic Monks (see their ad at my right sidebar): yes, hellyes, the Mystic Monk Irish Cream coffee is delicious - very smooth. I bought some as a St. Patrick’s Day gift and of course had to get some for myself, and I’m enjoying a cup right now.

I’m not a big fan of flavored coffees (except Hazelnut as an “after supper”) but this is very tasty stuff, indeed. I don’t know what the deal is with these monks, but the coffee has no bitterness at all.

Having given up sugar in my coffee and tea for Lent, it almost feels like I’m cheating with this stuff, because it’s so smooth I don’t miss the sweetening at all.

Meanwhile, Pal Shana has directed me to this family-run toffee maker and this stuff looks…just teeth-rottingly good. If you like buttery toffee, I am assured this gang has a world-class recipe, and of course I must do the research for you, mustn’t I? This article on the stuff sounds promising.

I guess my in-law’s Easter basket, which was going to contain just coffee and my homemade Easter bread, just got a little heavier!

A while back, we talked about patronizing various monastic houses at Christmas, gifting others with their candies, jellies, cakes, beers, soaps and more.

It occurs to me that Easter is coming and you may be making baskets for family and friends. If you do, you might want to consider adding to it some coffees.

I admit I am a sucker for good photography and a well-designed web-site, and those things attracted me to the monks, but I was still leery. Then Lent came and I decided to give up adding sugar to my coffee or tea (a heavy sacrifice, believe me), and I began to truly suffer through every cup of coffee, no matter what brand or blend, whether I milled the beans myself or not. What didn’t taste bitter seemed muddy, and my beloved daily coffee was becoming a real penance.

All of that induced me to try some sample packs of Mystic Monk Coffee, from the Carmelite Monks of Wyoming. I’m glad I did. This coffee has helped! These Carmelites seem to take an almost unmonastic pride (I tease) in their product, which they call The best coffee this side of heaven!”, but they do so with good reason. As I write I am enjoying a cup of “Mystic Monk Blend” which is very smooth and only lightly nutty but not at all bitter, and I’ve also come away very happy with the Hazelnut coffee and the Decaf Columbian. I’m looking forward to trying the Dark Roast Columbian, the Cowboy Blend and the Ethiopian next, and will very likely be ordering either the Irish Cream or Chocolate Mint for a neighbor of mine who has a St. Patrick’s Day birthday coming up! (I think a bag of each in a basket with the monks two-handled mug would make a very nice gift, indeed.) And they do have gift sets for Easter.

My husband wonders about the Royal Rum Pecan…maybe down the road!

If you’re looking for organic fair trade coffee, they’ve got that too.

I’m considering a subscription, and meanwhile I am highly recommending this monk coffee to you! And I’m suggesting to the monks that they might want to sell some of their wonderful photographs as posters or tee shirts. I find them both beautiful and amusing.

Related: Two more ideas for Easter gifts: Rosary Bracelets and Nun Soap.

Surprising and Slightly O/T: Cuba invites monks to establish monastery

UPDATE: I am liking this coffee so much I have become an associate! Clicking the Mystic Monk Coffee banner over on the right sidebar will bring you to the land of plenty, and it helps generate some cash to keep the site going, too! Thanks!

Sweet Girlfriend, the beloved of Elder Son, tipped me off to this very interesting Holiday Gift/Charity idea, Give One, Get One Laptop Giving:

Since November 12th, OLPC has been offering a limited-time Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During Give One Get One, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.

Here is how it works:

From now through December 31, 2007, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. This is the first time the revolutionary XO laptop has been made available to the general public. For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving).

This sounds great to me.

Also, a friend of Buster’s turned him on to this rice bowl-filling vocabulary builder: answer the questions correctly, and people eat, and hopefully public discourse improves, as well!

A while back I linked to some monastic gift ideas, chocolates, beer, soaps and rosaries you can you purchase which help support a community and round out your gift list. Then I pointed to cookies and bracelets.

Now the Dominican Nuns at Moniales have - just in time for Christmas - added soaps to their Cloister Gift Shoppe. I am a sucker for homemade soaps and tonight will be ordering stocking stuffers: the Trade Winds Trio for my hubby’s travel kit, the gents scents for Buster, and a few other varieties.

Another great gift idea - particularly if you have a lover of fine art (and fine photography) on your list: Gerald at Closed Cafeteria, who has been traveling far and wide and taking some gorgeous photographs along the way, is now - for a very reasonable fee - making his photographs available for purchase in a DVD format. He promises prints will be available shortly, but I’m looking forward to the DVD’s, and being able to use them for changeable wallpaper for my computer, or quiet background imagery while I’m knitting. That’s one of his photos at top, there.

Also, Gerald has a Cafepress site where he sells his pictures as note cards and calendars, etc.

We’ve talked earlier about some gift ideas I’ve gleaned from readers ordering from Amazon. The Steel-Cut Oatmeal has become a big favorite in this house.

And we’re going to be donating to this very effective group this year.

Reader Pianogirl, who has a lot of great gift ideas (and is very generous to the troops) clued me in to this emergency radio/light/phone charger which I like a lot for my Elder Son.

Of course, if you have someone who is just impossible to buy for, there is always this idea.

If you’re looking for ideas, here are some other things that we and other friends will good ideas will be giving out this year. Not that we’ve purchased all of it from Amazon, but that’s the only place I know how to link to that gives good product info. As ever, though, if you do order Amazon products via this site, a percentage of each quarters earnings is donated to the hospice that helped our family:

I’m willing to bet that - as far as religion/politics blogs go - this blog writes about great Ukulele performances and other uke fun more than any other. This is not my fault. I have eccentric children.

Since my eccentric children do not ask for normal things at Christmastime - and they ask for little enough - I have been traipsing around the ukulele culture of the internet and stumbled upon this site which sends Ukes to Troops in the Middle East. In the pics the troops look pretty amused. I think it’s very hard to have a uke in your possession and not be happy, and apparently you can send one to a soldier (with a songbook) for $25.00. I’m considering doing it - sounds great! Coverage in the Boston Globe here. News about Ukes in Fallujah here.

Meanwhile Operation Gratitude has sent almost 300,000 packages to troops, and they’d probably appreciate some holiday green as well!

You’ll note there is an ad on the right sidebar for St. Hubert’s Rosary Bracelets, which I’ve talked about elsewhere. I really can’t say enough about how comfortable and pretty these bracelets are (their pictures really don’t do them justice). I wear mine all the time, which is unusual because I’ve never liked bracelets; because I always have it on, I find myself using it for prayer while waiting in a doctor’s office or at the post office, etc. So, I’m praying more, which can only be a good thing, right?

We’re scaling back Christmas in these parts - it’s gotten so out of hand that it’s become too much like work and not enough like joy. I find that I am serious about buying my gifts from monasteries and cottage industry-type entreprenuers and staying away from the malls, and this book and this one will also be handed out!

And there are always Clarissa’s Cookies, which supports the Capuchin Poor Clares.

Meanwhile, on these bracelets - what makes them so particularly attractive to me (aside from the fact that they’re light and pretty) is that they have nothing dangling from them to get caught on things; it’s simply a great common-sense design. I’ve just ordered the garnet/freshwater pearl bracelets as Christmas gifts for my MIL and sister, and a nice black one for one of my sons. My neighbor, quite taken with mine, is getting one of her own. Really, I highly recommend them!

Some others seem to be on the same “buy homemade” wavelength. Feminine Genius linked to this post with more ideas.

Every cent raised for Project Valour-IT goes directly to the purchase and shipment of laptops for severely wounded service members. As of October 2007, Valour-IT has distributed over 1500 laptops to severely wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines across the country.

The fund drive for Project Valor is still going on - it will continue until November 11, Veteran’s Day, and if you have not had a chance to pass a few bucks into their worthy cup, please consider doing so. Your civic group can also work to “adopt” a soldier in need of a laptop. Beth at MVRWC shows how all four branches of the military are doing so far.

If you have a few dollars more, Instapundit points out that Michael Yon is - thanks to reader donations - making his reports available in German and other languages. Doing his bit to help disseminate the unfiltered story of the Iraq stage of the War on Terror. You can help out here. Yes, I’ve donated to both within the past week.

If you’re in a voting mood on this voting day, please take part in the Pajamas Media Straw Poll. Right now I show a vote for Huckabee and one for Richardson…and that’s all. Let me opine, while we’re on the subject, that there will never be a president of the US by the name of Huckabee.

And now, if I haven’t totally exhausted your good will and you have a second, please don’t forget that I’m nominated in the Best Individual Blogger category and would appreciate your votes, thanks!

Thanks to Kim from Musing Minds for the neat graphic/link thingy above. And damn, that tomato bisque recipe she has up at her site looks like the very thing on this cold and wet day!

Someone emailed me asking for the link to the candy-making Trappistine nuns (affectionately nicknamed “Our Lady of the Incredible Candy”) - but when I try to reply the email doesn’t work. The link is here if you are still interested.

May I suggest, if you have an office full of people to buy gifts for this Christmas, or teachers, school bus drivers, beauticians, etc…these candies are simply scrumptious and your purchase helps keep these ladies in their praying habits.

UPDATE: Reader KIA has a great gift idea that some of you might like - for Christmas (or whatever) why not put together a basket of “goodies” that come from religious communities or (in one case) a home-schooling mother of 9?

Some sources: - those marked with an asterisk I’ve actually purchased, myself.
Bourbon Fudge* (No one uses bourbon as splendidly as a Trappist monk.)
Mystic Monk Coffee (Carmelite Monks. Been meaning to try it, myself.)
Trappist Preserves* (Best I’ve ever had.)
Monastic Cheese* (Mmmmm, good.)
Rosary Bracelets* (Beautifully made, light and comfortable)
Fruitcake (I still say fruitcake is an abomination before God, but this is supposed to be the best.)
Handmade Rosaries* (Carmelite Sisters - they repair your old ones, too.)
Incense and Vestments (Benedictine Nuns)
Soaps and Candles* (Benedictine Nuns, lovely stuff)
Wine by Trappist Monks (Abbey of New Clairvaux, California - Some wine with that retreat?)
Beer (Trappists in Belgium who purportedly make what is arguably the world’s best and you probably can’t get it.)

Cannot write long today - the back is better but the schedule is full and guests are on the horizon, so that’s where my focus is.

But I wanted to just link you to this story, because it’s something to think about.

A walking stick is the unlikely center of a debate about political protocol, theological precision and news-marketing as a corporal work of mercy.

President Bush gave the odd, carved walking stick to Pope Benedict XVI on June 9 on a visit to Rome. In some quarters, the gift became a laughingstock.

As a post on one Catholic blog put it, “You go all the way to Rome and you give the Pope a stick! Mr. Bush, has America nothing better to offer?”

But stick supporters point out that the staff, inscribed with the Ten Commandments, was one of several gifts of state the president presented to Pope Benedict that day. And the fact that the president gave it to the Pope may have kept a former homeless man and his wife off the streets and in their rented apartment.

You can go read the case “for” and “against” the stick. To me the story is about much more than whether President Bush has “har-har screwed up again.” It’s about how one receives a thing.

I’ve asked before - how do you receive a good? If someone gives you a gift that they’ve spent a good deal of time selecting for you, even if it is not to your taste, do you accept it and ask for the receipt so you can return it? Or do you accept it and then shove it away in a drawer? Or do you keep it nearby and consider it, use it, and try to figure out just what it was about the gift that made someone select it for you? Sometimes there is some self-discovery in doing that. You learn what you show to other people, for one thing.

How do you receive a “good” in the larger world of politics and religion - even, within that sphere, if you’re not sure a thing is good, but you know the intentions are? Do you ever consider the value of a good intention? Not simply that “the road to hell is paved with them,” but that there is power in intention? God created the whole world through it.

How do you receive things from God - or from “the Universe,” if that is how you prefer to think - is it all “blessing” or all “curse?”

How do you receive a person who crosses your path of a day? Do you take in appearance, clothing, affect and assume that you know everything there is to know about that person, making “appropriate” judgment? Or do you try to find Christ in them?

In his Rule, St. Benedict tells us to “receive everyone you meet as Christ come before you.” Benedict began his prologue saying his Rule would lay “nothing harsh or burdensome” upon his monastics, but this particular order - to see Christ in whomever is before you - is a tall one. It takes years and years just to begin to acquiesce to it, even a little - it goes against every instinct. It is all about how one will choose to receive another; in the best way? Or the worst?

A while back a friend teased me and called me “gullible” (which I confess I sometimes am), and in the course of enjoying his joke, I also wrote back, more seriously:

I decided a long time ago that cynicism - to which I was prone - was simply too easy and the refuge of the timid or the hurt. I made a conscious decision to take people at their words unless their behavior warranted differently, even if it did leave me open for some teasing about gullibility. I couldn’t stand myself when I was cynical.

The theme has been resounding with me, lately…I wrote here:

Be intellectually honest enough to admit that in this immigration controversy there are (sadly) some who are using fear to move their agenda, and there are some (only some, but they hurt us all) who reveal bigotry in their rants. You needn’t be offended if you can remember that there are those “somes” in every group; conservatives have no corner of perfection. You actually do have a choice as to how you receive what you hear, see and read, just as you have a choice as to how you receive a good, that is, with “open” or “closed” heart.

How do you choose to receive what is around you? Do you make yourself a little vulnerable by taking a thing for what it appears to be, or do you immediately start to deconstruct a gift, or a compliment, or a speech, wondering about meanings, motives and manipulations?

We live in a mean, cynical age, and it is so easy to fall into the habit of suspicion and sneers. We don’t even realize, sometimes, that we are stuck there.

I believe - because I have no reason to suspect otherwise - that the president gave the pope this stick because it was something that was meaningful to him, and because he believed the meaning was shared. I believe he gave it to Benedict with good and generous intentions. I also believe that Benedict received the thing well, both because he would be a very sorry sort of pope if he allowed his concerns to be as picayune as those of the press, and because he would have no reason to accept it as anything but a good intention.

There will always be those who will look at every circumstance, every story, every speech, every gift, and pick and pick and pick, at what is “wrong” or “imperfect” or “not quite right” with it, losing site of what a gift is, completely…losing site of the intention behind a gift. This is how they receive. It is how they choose to receive a good, and it is joyless and sterile and it grows nothing. I do not see how it leads to receiving “more” good.

It is easy to be generous in our gift-giving; much more difficult to be generous in what we receive, and how we receive. To receive a thing well - with an open heart, and assuming the best of a gift or a person - that carries a bit of risk to it. But as with any risky venture, the rewards are multiplied.

Amusingly, Joe has (as I knew he would) taken my questions to him to be somewhat revealing of myself.

The only thing I was trying to reveal by my questions is that I resist intimacy and never pry too deeply into anyone’s personal life! Arms length is just fine by me.

You can read his answers here.

He also has a new post, which for some reason Blogger won’t allow me to link to, wherein he provides photo-evidence of cruel poverty in America and recounts the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Fire - which was interesting to me because part of my family lore is that a distant cousin was one of the victims of that blaze.

I was struck by the pictures (all of which, I do believe Joe has provided both as an answer to an inquiry made here from a commenter who wondered what “evil” Joe was convinced the GOP wishes to perpetrate on the country, and as some sort of admonishment toward me for being insufficiently ummm…aware…of the awfulness of poverty.)

What I think would surprised Joe very much would be a look at my family scrapbook, the ramshackle Coney Island cold-water flats my family lived in, the “best clothes” they wore which looked remarkably like rags. Both sides of the family were hardscrabble and under-educated because all able bodies had to leave school and go out and find work - any sort of honest work - to put the bread and milk on the table.

When people look at my family scrapbook, they usually gasp at the very obvious poverty, the ugliness of the hovel in which they lived, the lack of wherewithall. Shanty Irish, for sure. Greaseball Italian, absolutely. And yet, if you ask them, my family will say, “we never thought of ourselves as poor…this is what life was, you went out and got a job, you worked as a family unit to get by, and on Friday nights, you had a drink (beer for the Irish, wine for the Italians) and you sang a few songs and told a few stories, and on Saturday you washed and went to confession, and on Sunday you went to mass, and sometimes it would be the only day that week you might eat meat. But we didn’t think we were poor. We never felt as poor as these pictures make us look. There was a lot of joy.”

I have been poor, myself. When I lived on my own, in NYC, at a low-paying job, with rents skyrocketing, I lived through the weeks of mac and cheese and a purse that held only subway tokens, a few dimes and a bottle of clear nail polish I would use to try to make hose last longer. Was it easy? No. Did I go hungry once in a while? Yep. Was I miserable? Not at all. I had no resentment of the rest - I’ve never been a class-warrior. My situation was the situation I had. I knew it would get better, because I knew my own ability to work hard.

The poverty is not what makes misery. Hopelessness is what makes misery. My people were poor, but they didn’t think of themselves as poor, because they had family, they had hope, they had a belief in the future, and in grace. I was poor, but I never thought of myself as poor, or even as wanting. I suppose if someone had come along and told me I was poor, and that this was a terrible injustice, that must be changed, etc…I might have listened and been swayed. Or I might have wondered why this person would presume to know anything about me and my own mind, or how I felt about my situation.

And remember, at this time, I was a liberal and a Democrat. I didn’t think of my status as lowly…I did not think of myself as oppressed. I thought of myself as lucky to be employed and to have a place to live. I did not think of myself as a victim. I thought of myself as, “as good as anyone else.”

And I wouldn’t trade those days for anything.

Christ said “the poor will always be among you,” and he was right. And He wasn’t being cavalier about it - suggesting that nothing should be done to help them. Quite the contrary. But he does recognise that poverty will always be a part of the human condition. Our response to it must be one part almsgiving, but also one part uplifting. It is not enough to toss a guy a buck. Tomorrow he needs another buck. Give him some dignity, a chance to hope about something, and he’ll go find a way to make his own buck.

I don’t worry about the materially poor folk half as much as I worry about the spiritually impovished folks - the people who think because a heterosexual actress speaks of her life experience from her own perspective they are somehow “disincluded.” THOSE people worry me. The people who have spent a lifetime never hearing the word “NO” and who attend a school of privilege, but who waste their time on such idiocy - all the while looking down upon someone like me, for what they IMAGINE me to be - (Greedyrepublicannazihaterintolerantinsensitve) they worry me. The people who look at Terri Schiavo, or the Pope and say, “get rid of ‘em, already!” THEY worry me.

The poor folk don’t worry me. They usually have their heads on right.

I talked to a priest last week, who works in Jamaica among the poorest people in this hemisphere, second in poverty only to Haiti. He came looking for funding, to build houses, educate and help feed these folks, and they’re doing terrific work. I was inspired and moved, and pledged not only money but other help as well, which I’d rather not expand on. He told me a story that says a great deal about poverty and the poor. It seems the older ladies of the mission spend two days a week working on the bags that the mission rice comes in. They spend 7 hours one day carefully unwinding every strand from the bag, into long strings. Then they spend 6 hours the next day taking that string and winding it into rope. The rope is sold in Kingston for 50 cents. Each rope, 13 hours of work, for 50 cents.

When asked why they even bother doing all that work for 50 lousy cents, these grandmothers respond, “this is paying work and honest work and it gives us dignity. You go tell them that we are not sitting around all day, drinking rum punch and smoking ganga. This is our dignity!”

I can’t speak to the reality of Joe Marshall’s life. By American standards he may well be considered “poor,” although truthfully “poor” in America is rich in many parts of the world. But showing me heart-tugging pictures of America 100 or 150 years ago is not going to move me, because I’ve got the pictures of my own family, and their testaments. Lots of people came to America and were poor and worked for corrupt men who exploited the workers - and that’s why unions were necessary.

Unions have long-since outlived their usefulness, though. I have good friends who are teachers, and I don’t wish to anger them, but when I saw - 8 years ago, that my son’s 6th grade teacher made $105,000 per year, while the kids were coming out of that school having spent more time being indoctrinated than educated, I had a problem with it. When I had to take off from work to MEET with that teacher, because his union didn’t allow him to meet after school hours, when it might be more convenient for working parents who did not work 6-hour days, I had a problem with that, too. I support good teachers, and think they should be well-compensated, but their unions are turning them into fastidious little weaklings, more concerned with protecting what they have - and getting more - than with educating our children. It is another sort of greed, and it’s born, this time, not of the corporations, but of the unions.

Is America perfect? No. Are corporations greedy? Sure. So are the stockholders who increasingly come from the middle class, so are the workers who want as much money as they can earn. Is there poverty? Yup, certainly there is. To all of those truths I say: So what? This is the world, as it has ever been, and sitting there crying to me about the injustice of it all is just a way to feel noble about yourself.

Occasionally I drive to Montauk fora day-trip, to take in the breezes. This summer, I could not help but notice that the people snapping up the last of the private beaches and erecting 6 foot walls around their property to keep out the lesser beings all had pro-Kerry or Anti-Bush stickers on their brand new BMW’s and Mercs.

And the darker skinned people who were waved thru the gates with their paint buckets and copper plumbing had Bush stickers on their beat up trucks.

As I said, the poor usually have their heads on right.

One of the things I have learned, as a conservative, is not to make assumptions about what someone else does or does not know. Just as I took real umbrage at a suggestion that my unusually aware and generous sons did not understand what aging in America involved, I do get a bit annoyed when it is suggested to me that I am insufficiently informed on the realities of poverty, or that I am somehow callous or indifferent. I feel no need to put my “Sensitivity CV” out there for the world to judge. I would suggest that - without reference to Joe Marshall, himself - many liberals who cry the crocodile tears for the poor, and shake their fists at the “cold” Republicans, have no idea what the hell they’re talking about, as they drive by in their toney cars. But at least they “care.”

I would also suggest that those who charge the Bush administration and the Republicans with looking to widen the divide between the rich and the poor - or who ludicrously suggest that the poverty of 130 years ago is right around the corner and that it is somehow DESIRED by Bush et al - take a look at how incredibly wrong they’ve been on every turn with regards to this administration. Bush is always wrong, wrong, wrong, and stupid, stupid, stupid, and motivated by evil, evil, evil, and yet things seem to keep breaking exactly as they should…which means, in DU parlance, I guess, that he is merely lucky, lucky, lucky.

Or maybe he’s not lucky. Maybe he simple sees, as Chesterton saw, that if one is only standing in one spot, looking at things from one angle, one may never understand that one lives in a glorious castle. It takes moving about, moving away from the place in which you begin, that helps you to see the totality of a thing.

Everything is in constant flux. Nothing is static except, it seems, the thinking on the left. Things keep moving and changing, but the thinking from the left does not, which is probably why they find themselves with absolutely no ideas to offer on any of the issues of the day, and wait in hope for some spectacular US failure, to give them some weight and momentum.

I suggest that - just as the situation in the Middle East looks very different today than it did even 6 weeks ago - the American economic situation - itself in flux - will look markedly different in 6 years. And all the doomsaying and crying may well have to be bottled up and shipped to some other “issue” for uncorking and continued bellyaching.