Hickem, Catherine. (2012). Heaven in Her Arms: Why God Chose Mary to Raise His Son and What It Means for You. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. ISBN 978-1-4002-0036-8.
What do we know of Mary?
What we know of Mary’s family is that she is of the house of David; it is from her lineage Jesus fulfilled the prophecy. Given the archeological ruins of the various places thought to have been living quarters for their family, it is likely the home was a room out from which sleeping quarters (cells) branched. As Mary and her mother Anne would be busy maintaining the household, with young Mary working at her mother’s command, it is likely Anne would be nearby or in the same room during the Annunciation. Thus Mary would not have had a scandalous secret to later share with her parents but, rather, a miraculous supernatural experience, the salvific meaning of which her Holy parents would understand and possibly even witnessed.
Mary and Joseph were betrothed, not engaged. They were already married, likely in the form of a marriage contract, but the marriage had not yet been “consummated”. This is why he was going to divorce her when he learned of the pregnancy. If it were a mere engagement, he would have broken it off without too much scandal.
Married but not yet joined with her husband, her mother would prepare her by teaching her all that she needed to know. This is further reason to assume that Mary would be working diligently under her mother’s eye when the Annunciation took place.
We know that her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy was kept in secret for five months, and not made known until the sixth month when the Angel Gabriel proclaimed it to Mary. We know Mary then rushed to be at her elderly cousin’s side for three months (the remaining duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy), and that this rushing appeared to be in response to Elizabeth’s pregnancy (to congratulate her), not an attempt to hide Mary’s pregnancy. Note how all of this is connected to Elizabeth’s pregnancy rather than Mary’s circumstances. As Mary was married to Joseph, he likely would have been informed of the trip. Had the intent been to hide Mary, she would have remained with Elizabeth until Jesus was born, not returned to her family after the first trimester, which is just about the time that her pregnancy was visible and obvious.
So we these misconceptions clarified, we can put Mary’s example within an even deeper context and more fully relate to her experience. We can imagine living in a faith-filled family who raises their child in strict accordance of God’s word. The extended family members may not understand, and certainly their community will not, so Mary, Anne and Joachim, and Joseph face extreme scandal as well as possible action from Jewish authorities. But they faced this together steep in conversation with God, providing a model for today’s family.
Although sometimes scriptural interpretations are flavored with modern-day eye, overall this book will be more than just a quick read for a young mother (or new bride, or teen aspiring to overcome the challenges of American culture, or single parent losing her mind). It is a heartwarming reflection with many examples that open up conversation with God. As an experienced psychotherapist, the author’s examples are spot on and easy to relate to. We do not need to have had the same experiences to empathize, reflect, and pursue meaning; we see it around us in everyday life. As such, a reflective look upon these examples can help one overcome an impasse in their own relationship with God and also open the reader up to self-knowledge as Hi
From an interview with author Cassandra Clare at cynsations:
If you could go back to your apprentice writer self, what would you tell her?
"Don't be so hard on yourself," I guess. I thought everything had to be perfect before I could show it to anyone, which means I never got any feedback on anything, and without feedback I couldn't work on improving. It was a vicious cycle. Eventually, I learned to share work with people even when it was in its rough stages without worrying that they'd be filled with scorn and hatred. After all, I can read their rough work without turning on them like a wildebeest."
First of all, I love her answer. Second, I still
am an apprentice writer. Always will be. Third, if I had to answer that question, I would say:
Get comfortable with NOT KNOWING. Not knowing where you are going. Not knowing if you will succeed or not. Not knowing if "it will all be worth it."
When I was younger, the thing I wanted most was TO KNOW. I loved books where a character was given her Destiny, or her Quest, and then the adventure began! I thought it mightily unfair that no one ever appeared to me and told me what my Mission was.
I had no idea that not knowing is actually a physical state that you can put yourself it, keep yourself in. That it is a place to seek out, not to avoid. When you DO NOT KNOW, you are headed out on your mission, your destiny, your quest. Otherwise, writing would just be a trip to the grocery store.
For a good post about teaching kids to be comfortable in the not knowing zone, see this one,
Chase the Challenge, from the blog,
Unwrapping the Gifted (part of Teacher Magazine's online content.)
Evergreen (the open source ILS software) gives me hope, and I see more “greening” of LibraryLand. So as I shake and shiver through this nasty brain-sucking cold (it’s hard to get creative when I wake up sounding like a vacuum cleaner), here’s yet more link love today!
This is not to say that Koha doesn’t give me hope — LibLime just signed WALDO, a consortium of small academics in Westchester County — but from the perspective of a state where the catalogs are as big as heffalumps, I’m looking for hope on a larger scale.
Caution to FRL readers: this gets a little geeky. If your eyes glaze over after the second sentence, just skip it.
A year ago in Techsource I wrote a series about the problems with OPACs, and in the course of it wrote about relevance ranking. I said, quite accurately, that TF/IDF was a technology used for relevance ranking, and if I say so myself, I explained TF/IDF pretty darn well:
TF, for term frequency, measures the importance of the term in the item you’re retrieving, whether you’re searching a full-text book in Google or a catalog record. The more the term million shows up in the document—think of a catalog record for the book Million Little Pieces—the more important the term million is to the document.
IDF, for inverse document frequency, measures the importance of the word in the database you’re searching. The fewer times the term million shows up in the entire database, the more important, or unique, it is.
However, if I could revisit that article today, I would emphasize that “ranking,” done well in the Most Moderne Fashion, is a complex soup dependent on far more than TF/IDF, and I would include the opinions of people who believe — in some cases, based on real-world testing — that TF/IDF doesn’t work that well for ILS record sets, due in part to the inherent nature of citation records, which unlike full text are…hmmm… I am not sure how to put it, but citation records aren’t mini-representations of full text; they are a unique form of data. It can be dismaying to turn on relevance ranking in an ILS and discover that your results are close to nonsense — though it’s worth asking how much more nonsensical than OPACs that order items “last in first out.”
(At My Former Place Of Work Minus One, we tested a fancy search engine that had this really really kewl method for producing dynamic facets… why is it when vendors say “dynamic,” I start to twitch? Anyway, we turned it on and had to laugh. The kewl technology was based on word pairings that made some sense in full text, but for a citation index created nonsensical facets from phrases such as “includes bibliography.”)
Furthermore, record sets are not consistent within themselves. Cataloging practices change over time; practices even differ among catalogers or between formats. (Oh oh… did I just reveal a little secret?)
However, given that we don’t have full-text for records in most cases (though yes, I do think it would be great if we had that content to leverage), and given that TF/IDF is a useful technology, I would hazard — a good word in this case, since I don’t have any way to prove this — that some of the weaknesses of TF/IDF and ILS record sets could be at least partially remediated if record sets were broken up (or perhaps, marked up) along these lines of difference.
Most current-generation search engines (the Siderean/FAST/Endeca/i411/Dieselpoint set, to name five similar products; and I suspect Aquabrowser belongs here as well) can — unless I am greatly mistaken– provide a variety of ranking optimization. That’s a huge plus if you’re streaming together radically different indices. So an ILS record set could be broken up (not necessarily literally) along chronological and format lines, and each section indexed for its optimal needs, and then reassembled within the index. That, plus including other ranking methods — such as popularity — could go a long way. (I can imagine that it would be possible to do some processing on the fly, but that sounds expensive CPU-wise. There’s a reason we all hate federated search…)
(Speaking of popularity… a little caution, also based on experience: if you’re incorporating a “popularity” function in your OPAC, and you’re basing it on circulation… and you have a large e-book collection… see where I’m going? E-books don’t circ, so they don’t even get included in that metric. You may want to change that label to “most checked out,” change its value to represent “most browsed,” or skip it entirely.)
Of course, it would help if we didn’t have something quite as odd as a “record” to contend with… how slavish to convention, that a Thing has a Record… but that’s a whole ‘nother line of thought I have pondered since working with record sets a year or so ago.
Oh, and if you’re looking at Google Appliance for improving search functionality in your catalog… why? Google’s approach is almost vehemently anti-metadatical (is it redundant to say “that’s a new neologism?”); they worship at the cult of full text. Library data may be expensive to produce and annoying to work with, but you might as well look at tools that leverage all that structure.
Gee, that was fun to write! Geek out. I may move on to “why SRW depresses me…”
I have to say when I hit “publish” for my Techsource post about post-Deweyfication last night I had no idea it would have 8 comments by this morning. I attribute that to Jessamyn’s link love, and thanks, gal.
As Dorothea over at Caveat Lector notes, the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the post-Deweyfication of the Perry Branch at the Maricopa County Library District was spot-on. I always feel a little weird about praising an article that quotes me… “My name is Karen, and I approve this message.” Jessamyn is so better about this… I know none of you think of me as shy, but I need to learn from her.
My Techsource post writes about two parallel innovations: the Perry project, and using bookstore headings (BISAC) in an online catalog at the Phoenix Public Library. (I started to write “BISAC in an OPAC,” then thought, get thee away, acronyms!). I find it a reflection of the feudal nature of libraries that two systems in the same county could be working in parallel on eerily similar projects and not know it.
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I did find the fairy tell word in your name. :)
This makes me think of this from Rilke, which I had to go look up, though I've practically committed it to memory:
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
My apprentice self needed to hear that today.
Great post (and the one you linked to, as well)! Thanks.
Thanks, you guys. I love an interesting question, and this certainly was thought-provoking. I guess I was one of those bouncy kids who loved answering questions and had my hand stuck up in the air all the time. :)
MR: I love that you have a wall of writing.
And Jules, I'm using that Rilke quote in my presentation now that you've reminded me of it. Thank you! TadMack, I'll have to figure out how to work in Being in the Wind, also. So appropriate for the breezy weather we've been having.
I loved that Cassandra Clare interview, too. I wish I were better at the Not Knowing. One of my art professors in college once said (not to me, but to the class) "Do not be afraid to step into the void." That's one of my favorite bits of advice ever.