Poor Claires

 I have had some seriously interesting thoughts recently. I was happy today to add a little something to a very well known fact by readers. That we already know that it is amazing to be able to touch the depths of people's minds through reading we know. But that we are able to be in touch most intimately by proximity is of new interest to me. Benjamin Franklin was only around yesterday, his genius in our own backyard. 

I read about these kinds of things, you know, even though from time to time I'm engulfed in a sort of passion for all the girly stuff. Today I told myself again that I am a fashion star! Meaning basically that I really love to be the earliest to find the latest trends and on that end am usually right. What can I say? I see on the fashion horizon to prove I am right? This was my intuition about things, based on my latest ideas about fashion. I see that sports fashion is not going out, but will get dressed up. I see colors in complimentary shades being more interesting to people. Soft pink and dark blue. Yellow and powder blue. I see ultra preppy. I mean serious interest in plaid, again. And I personally like a less defined silhouette. That means larger dresses, flowing fabrics, etc. The way this works is that it is as I said, drowning the figure. The way it doesn't work is that it comes in a familiar pattern, the baby doll, the long and drooping tee. No, I mean large sizes of the same regular things, just very, very large, almost and probably a resurrection of the 90s.

This I say to grant myself permission to be very fashion forward. 

But back to Ben Franklin. I was telling my mother that an apple a day keeps the doctor away and she said it was Ben Franklin who said that. I was pretty happy to see she knew that, and glad to know it myself, because I was able to admire his large intellect and then without any pain of remembering, see a host of his invention. He was so smart that it is a rarity, and yet, just a hop skip and a jump away from the here and the now. That excited my mind for some reason. Made me classify it as "new". That I was now able to get up close and personal with a truly legendary intellect, I mean how many of us have become so lucky as to even have seen one? I do not know when the last mega genius came from the United States, nor one who had such a breadth of knowledge and such an impact as the man Benjamin Franklin. 

I did go to book signings by both Dan Quail and Colin Powel. If either of them is a genius, it hasn't been made apparent to me. 

Also, I was considering becoming a nun. This news made my mother tell me that I was not allowed to run away from my problems to become a nun. But no, the reason why is because I read about St. Bede and thought he had an extraordinary life. I wanted to be able to live this extraordinary life like him. I don't at all see this as a problem for me. And I have made it a part of my lent this year to discover if I am truly meant to be a nun. So far, I am not. This is mostly because of my love of clothes, can you believe that? Not that I couldn't give them up, but that I was yet to see myself departing from them in that way. I know that if I led that life I would have to give up all my things. The thing is, I saw something else lovely in this. As I read about the Poor Claire's I saw that they live in almost complete silence, and that they speak only an hour a day, and that the lord comes and speaks to them individually as they work. Today as I was working to clean up my grandmother's house, I saw a picture of Jesus on the wall. We had all been arguing about judgement, so that I was on the side that you can make judgements and the others there said we cannot judge. This particular thing has been a difficult thing for some modern minds to grasp, especially since there is a degree of liberality that has been grossly abused by the masses. I can happily say that I agree with a number of issues that are liberal in the way they are held in the minds of the American public, like freedom to use birth control, women's equality, and I am more than a little interested in the environmental things. But the idea that we cannot be judgmental is not at all correct. As a matter of fact, Jesus probably made very astute judgements calls, and wise people must, to help those who are suffering. 

This is something that people are supposed to know. Sin hurts us. We do not like ourselves or anybody else when we are being wicked. Anyone who tells you differently DOES NOT HAVE CHRISTIAN LOVE IN THEM. But just in case, I looked today at Jesus and you know what I thought? I thought, wow, God sure did make those things Jesus says so clear when he announced that he was his son. If he hadn't done that, I could not ask people to go back and read those things to understand them for real. 

Providentially speaking, he did that well and set that up so that we do have all the answers we need. Also, I think that being bad and saying, "That's okay, Jesus hung on a cross for me," is some kind of blasphemy. I hope I never use thst excuse ever again. I will try my hardest, because that was a terrible thing that happened to him. Sure wouldn't like to believe that I tried to help someone and they turned around and did something really awful because hey, they can depend on me to do right.