- Feb 5, 2002
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I enjoy washing dishes. Not as much as most other things, but a little. I like seeing the pile of dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter turn into clean dishes arranged neatly in the drain rack. But I hate washing pots with stuff like fried egg caked on the bottom.
Not burned on, that’s OK; that I’ll scrub off. But the soft rubbery stuff, yuck. I really hate seeing the food get all caught up in the scrubber.
Much of our personalities and, perhaps, even characters are given to us. We do not make ourselves nearly as much as we think we do. And as preachers, self-help writers, social commenters and other people who tell us what we should do with ourselves think we do. We need to think about this more. It matters to our life together.
To enjoy washing dishes may strike you as a little weird, and I won’t argue. My wife would agree. She doesn’t like washing dishes, but — and this strikes me as really weird –she doesn’t mind cleaning the pans with stuff caked on the bottom. She doesn’t understand my aversion.
Who knows where her and my feelings about washing dishes come from? It’s pre-rational, but it’s fixed. How much of our other responses, reactions, dislikes, attractions and the like come from equally mysterious and apparently irrational places? I mean the things that seem natural to us, obvious, self-evident, just the way things are when they’re done right.
Continued below.
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Not burned on, that’s OK; that I’ll scrub off. But the soft rubbery stuff, yuck. I really hate seeing the food get all caught up in the scrubber.
Much of our personalities and, perhaps, even characters are given to us. We do not make ourselves nearly as much as we think we do. And as preachers, self-help writers, social commenters and other people who tell us what we should do with ourselves think we do. We need to think about this more. It matters to our life together.
To enjoy washing dishes may strike you as a little weird, and I won’t argue. My wife would agree. She doesn’t like washing dishes, but — and this strikes me as really weird –she doesn’t mind cleaning the pans with stuff caked on the bottom. She doesn’t understand my aversion.
Who knows where her and my feelings about washing dishes come from? It’s pre-rational, but it’s fixed. How much of our other responses, reactions, dislikes, attractions and the like come from equally mysterious and apparently irrational places? I mean the things that seem natural to us, obvious, self-evident, just the way things are when they’re done right.
Continued below.
Why serious Catholics disagree so much
Columnist David Mills explores why Catholics — even Catholics of goodwill — can argue themselves in circles over topics that are multi-layered. To help explain this, Mills looks to the 20th-century theologian Friedrich von Hügel, who divided minds into two types: “There’s no conclusive way to...
www.oursundayvisitor.com
