Because this came in the mail to my local Catholic bookstore today. (Whom I love even more. And not only because they e-mail me little pictures like this. And not only because they helped edit my manuscript. And not only because . . . _insert 10,000 other reasons here_.)
Why yes, I am wildly excited.
Now returning to the long list of work-items people are hoping I’ll finish soon.
Mid-May update:
Latin Happiness. At CatholicMom.com: In which I explain how I went over to the dark side and paid for flashcards, AND monkey-themed Latin-Lite videos. Also found some other digital person to teach grown-up Latin to the boy and I, and no surprise, all are happier for it.
Shiny happy feeling inside this author: The reprint is at Catholic Lane. (Yay!)
A well-licked baby rat is a happy baby rat. SuperHusband & I have been taking Family Honor’s summer course on Catholic Sex-Ed. (It’s not called that. “Cultural Implications” or something like that.) Astute observers would have predicted: I’m really enjoying the class, whenever I set aside my natural dread of deadlines and obligations, and sit down to do the work.
Double-enjoying it once I realized I didn’t have to sit still and listen to the lectures, because hey, long stretchy headphone cords . . . I can workout while I listen. Score one for online courses.
Right now I’m reading this, of which you can download the executive summary at no charge:
Encouragement for those of us who sometimes doubt whether all this parenting effort is going to have any effect in the long run.
Forming Intentional Questions. The other reason I’m hiding from the internet is to churn out a set of discussion questions for Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples. Because I’m going to be part of a book club. And so are you. Bwahahaha . . . more news soon. Questions are written, and now need to be purged of typos.
Have a great week.
It’s BADD time again, May 1. Of course I forgot, again, even though I knew it was coming up. But look, over at New Evangelizers, I reviewed Theology of the Body for Everybody. Which hits on exactly this topic. The whole living-in-a-body experience we human persons get to enjoy. Go look.
***
And now you’re back, and here is my annual BADD comment, 2013 Edition:
People don’t want to be treated like dirt.
Profound, I know. (Hence Leah Perrault’s whole book on the topic. See “book review” above.)
When you read around at crotchety disability-rights sites, there’s a lot of conversation about how to think about disability. Something that confuses bystanders is the insistence that it’s not about the medical condition.
Which puzzles, for several reasons. The first is the happy-sad problem. Given the choice between hearing and not-hearing, seeing and not-seeing, walking and not-walking, everything else equal, we go for the ability every time.
Now someone might say, “I’m so glad I had this stroke, because it caused me to learn so much about __{insert profound revelation here}__.” And what they mean is typically not, “I always wanted to know what it was like to slur my speech!”
Rather, the “I’m so glad” is usually code for, “I discovered there was this whole part of my life I’d been ignoring, and now I’ve grown in ways that matter far more than any physical ability, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” People say that, and they mean it. For good reason. But still, if they could have the spiritual growth and the ability to remember words on command, yeah, they’d take both. Nothing wrong with being able to talk. We know this, instinctively.
But here’s the other thing we know instinctively: Humans deserve to be treated with respect. And the disrespect of disablism falls into two big lumps:
1. Can’t be bothered to have you around. Too much work. So terribly haaaaaarrrd to put in a ramp. So coooooomplicated trying to have one Mass, anywhere in the diocese, ever, with an ASL interpreter. So very, very overwhelming, having to change the seating arrangement, or modify the assignment, or find one more volunteer to assist the kid who needs assistance.
The message is pretty clear: It’s not that we don’t love you. We just don’t love you enough to go through any inconvenience for you.
2. Your kind of suffering is not my kind of suffering. This is straight out of the eugenics playbook. It’s no surprise that the recent fashion for killing off disabled children before they see light of day is always couched in terms of “avoiding suffering”. Better to be dead than to be you.
The feeling may well be mutual, but that’s no solution. The solution is to quit being such a wimp. To quit dividing the Fates of Man into a two-part list, labeled Normal Problems and Pitiful Freaks. This isn’t 1930. Get over that nasty notion that you must be ranked among The Fit in order to deserve life and respect.
***
And since BADD is the annual day for airing our pet peeves, I’ll share one with you: If you never really appreciated your kid-job-marriage-finger-toe-brain until it was gone . . . could you keep it to yourself? Or just let everyone know you have a gratitude-deficiency-disorder. I guess I could cultivate some compassion for that.
See all the BADD entries, which are by no means Catholic nor genteel, here.
If you’d gotten the impression I’ve spent the last two weeks with no other thoughts than bacon . . . that would be a reasonable guess. Since it’s Friday, I’ll be sociable and make a list of seven.
1. At AmazingCatechists.com, I wrote yesterday about how to evaluate your Christian Formation situation using the Great Commandment. It’s a fleshing-out of this comment I left at William O’Leary‘s combox:
Couldn’t agree more. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your *mind*, and all your strength.
Which means the more your mind is capable of, the more it needs to study the faith. If you don’t love Jesus, you’ll love something else. If you don’t worship Him, you’ll worship something else. If you don’t work for Him, you’ll work for something else. –> And if you don’t use your powers of reason to know and understand Him . . . that blank space in your brain will be filled with something else.
We’re made to know God, and know Him fully. No other way to be happy.
-me.
2. At CWG today, I tossed up a couple links on writing competence and the new evangelization. Something we struggle with at the writer’s guild is that fine line between “encouragement” and “enabling”. If we had a narrower focus, like “only literary fiction”, or “only professional authors with trade-published credentials”, it wouldn’t be so difficult. But since we represent all faithful-to-the-Magesterium Catholic writers, from aspiring amateurs on up, every genre . . . it’s a bumbly boat.
I like the bumbly boat, of course, since it’s the only one that’ll let me in.
3. Is it a cult, or just weird and stupid? Fr. L. posted an excellent article on the traits that characterize cult-like behaviors.
Readers here will be assured, having reviewed the criteria, that I am in no danger of becoming a cult leader. Whew.
4. Sometimes I wonder whether what I wrote somewhere else is really of interest to readers here, and whether I should post a link. The other month when some people were freaking out because Pope Francis Is Not Pope Benedict, I posted some thought at AC. Naturally I linked it all back to catechesis, since I didn’t want Lisa M. kicking me off her blog. And because it was relevant.
I re-read my post and thought it wasn’t that bad. So you could go look, if you wanted.
5. A non-bacon recipe: Venison stroganoff. So good you can eat the leftovers cold for breakfast. What to do:
6. I know. It’s not deer season. Too bad. Ask your friends to open up their freezer to you.
7. I had a long train of thought (hanging out laundry), and ended up with this thought: If there one thing — and only one thing — I could ask bishops and priests to do over the next year towards the reform of the Church, it would be this:
Make the Catholic Faith the Non-Negotiable Minimum Standard for Those in Ministry
People freak out when you do this.
So I completely get that it’s an unpleasant task, and clergy want to be all pastoral, and all that. And to be clear: I want the pews packed — packed — with tax-collectors and other sinners. That’s what not what I’m talking about. I’m speaking only to those in ministry. The DRE who tells the confirmandi that gay marriage is AOK. (Didn’t happen at my parish, whew.) That kind of stuff.
And that’s something only those in authority can actually enforce. We lay folk can do all kinds of helpful things to make up for a pastor who can’t read a contract, or doesn’t know how to hire a good plumber, or whose fingers freeze when it comes to dialing 9-1-1 . . . but we the laity can’t really do a whole lot when the hierarchy decides to be indifferent to the practice and teaching of the faith.
So that’s my new one thing. I figured out it’s the source of my chronic grumpiness about these or those other little hot-button topics. So I’m resolving to at least keep my temper-tantrums focused on the real issue.
Meanwhile, since what comes around goes around . . . What do you think is the one thing clergy wish laypeople would do?
. . . Nothing says “solemnity” like bacon on a Friday.
To my complete astonishment, SuperHusband liked this recipe so much he suggested I write it down for posterity. Here’re the notes from the spreadsheet where I store such inventions:
| Bacon Parsnip Topping |
| Makes a savory-sweet bruschetta-style topping for salad or toast. |
| Ingredients I used: |
| Bacon – fresh from package in deli section, thick-cut |
| Parnsips – whole |
| Radishes |
| (Sample portions: 1/2 package bacon, two parsnips, six small radishes.) |
| Heat pan on high / medium high |
| Dice bacon, into pan, cook while prepping parsnips |
| peel and dice parsnips, into pan, toss. |
| clean & dice radishes, into pan, toss. (radishes may be optional.) |
| Toss ingredients, cook uncovered. Lower heat so that it cooks steadily, but doesn’t splatter or burn. |
| Cook until parsnips are soft and carmelizing to the point of sweetness. |
| Can keep warm on very low heat until ready serve, only gets better. At our house: 6pm dinner time delayed until 8pm because certain children were still finishing homework. Perfect. |
| Prep green salad, fresh vinagrette. |
| Suggested toppings for salad: carrot slivers, optional cheese or nuts, other vegetables / fruits to taste. SuperHusband had his plain green with the tiniest bit of gorgonzola, I added a fistful of carrot slivers to mine. Romaine tonight, but any decent green would do. |
| Salad into bowl, then bacon-topping, then small amount of dressing (recall: Vinaigrette. Ours is real vinegar, olive oil, soy sauce, miscellaneous other.) |
| Serve with fresh buns / bread / toast, warmed. We had ancient Aldi-brand ciabbatta buns salvaged from the back of the garage refrigerator, not far from where the dissected frog awaits further inspection on the shelf below. Revives well — yay Aldi. Can use topping on toast, bruschetta-style. |
Either you believe in women’s liberation or you don’t. Do you believe that mentally competent, grown women are capable of making their own purchases?
Then require employers to pay us a living wage, and let us make our own purchases.
Women don’t need men at the office, men in Congress, or men at the HHS to force us to spend our wages on this pill or that surgery. And we don’t need Mama making us buy stuff either.
We’re grown-ups. Pay us fairly, and we’ll pick our own health insurance, thank you very much.
Over at the borg, we’ve been instructed to explain why the borg is best why we believe as we do. After much deleting to get it nearly inside the 200-word limit, I posted mine at the Happy Catholic Bookshelf.
We’ll do the even more abridged version here: Because it’s true.
And with that, I wish you a lovely Triduum, and I’m going to slowly unplug and start getting ready for a few days of peaceful silence family time observing the holy days.
My monthly column at New Evangelizers is up this morning. FTR: I’m absolutely no good at telling whether my daughters’ pants are too tight, and their skirts too short. So if you read my column, and you get this vision of me as one of those people whose daughters are always dressed with perfect modesty, and then you meet my kids and you think, Wow, that’s an amazingly sleazy outfit that child is wearing . . . It’s okay to voice your vote. Because yep. To quote myself:
” . . . we ladies don’t instinctively understand modesty — we’re no more aroused at the sight of a bare shoulder than at the sight of a naked Golden Retriever.”
In the past 48 hours I’ve been guilty, more than once, of uttering crude expressions of impatience concerning select clergy. Not publicly, and not out of ill-will, just a general, “Will this guy get with it for a change!”
Lots of us are guilty. We want all these guys we call “Father” — the one we grew up with, or without, and the ones in our Church — we want them to be wonderful. We want them to be holy, and kind, and wise, and good. And we want them to know what to do. To know how to fix things.
But they’re just these guys. They wear funny clothes. They have strange taste in music. They are too indulgent with that child, and too severe with the other one. They didn’t do Christmas / Thanksgiving / Birthdays / Math Homework / Yard Maintenance / The Easter Triduum just the way we think they should. They work too long, or retire too early, or both.
They stink at interior decorating. And most of them snore.
Also, when you get to be a parent of a certain age, you look back and do the math, and realize just how young your father was, way back when, when you as a child thought he was so old. When you thought he knew everything, because you were six? He was barely into adulthood. When you thought he knew nothing, because you were sixteen? He was still just cutting his teeth on the What Do I Do With This Teenager of Mine problem. And when he’s eighty, he’s being eighty for the first time in his life. He’s just improvising.
He’s guessing. That’s what fathers do.
I’ve lost my patience with the Francisco-Obsessing. He’s just this guy. He dresses funny. Guys dress funny. It’s what they do.
I know the Holy Father, and your bishop, and your parish priest, and your dad, they all do certain symbolic actions that send important messages. But you know how there’s all those NFP instructors who make that smarmy admonition that husbands should do the charting, as if the measure of a man’s worth could all be summed up in one glorious epitaph, “He Recorded Her Mucus Faithfully”?
A man is not a symbol. He’s a person. If he doesn’t chart, but he does do his best to earn a living, and help rear the children, and say nice things to you now and again, and maybe even change your oil, doesn’t that count for something? You can be the dad that tells bedtime stories, or the one who reads the Bible at breakfast, or the one who plays ball on Sunday afternoon, or the one who takes a kid along when he goes to the hardware store . . . and you don’t have to be all of them. Being one guy is enough.
Guys who cheat on their wives, or abandon their children, or refuse to support the family, or commit any number of gross abuses of their responsibility? They deserve the harsh words that come their way. Guys who don’t discipline their children, ever, or can’t be bothered to see they get a decent education, or don’t listen and take action when the kids come to them with problems? They need a serious talking to. They need to put on their Man Pants and step up to the plate.
But the guy who dresses funny and dines at all the wrong restaurants? Whatever. He’s not a better dad because he’s so dapper, or so frugal. He’s not a worse dad because he wants Thanksgiving served on heirloom china, or on paper plates.
And you can’t know what it all means, not really. If he surrounds himself with elegant things, he’ll be accused of being self-indulgent, or pompous, and also of being erudite and cultured. If he wears the same pair of jeans for fifteen years straight, he’ll be accused of being slovenly and lazy, and also a “man of the people” who “doesn’t get caught up in appearances”. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.
Maybe he’s just this guy.
Francisco’d better appoint good bishops. He’d better elevate good cardinals. He ought to direct the curia deftly, pay attention to necessary reforms, and teach clearly and accurately. He needs to cultivate his own spiritual life lest he fall into greater sins than the one he commits already (whatever they are, I have no idea what they might be), and in the hopes that he might yet grow further in wisdom and holiness.
Lord willing, he’ll do all this, and do it well.
And if he does, I pretty much don’t care where he lives. I don’t care what he eats. I don’t care about the car he drives, the shoes he wears, or the kind of music he listens to at night. Not so long as none of it’s immoral, and none of it prevents him from doing his real Dad Jobs.
And if he screws it up? He’s accountable for that, too. It’s a false piety to think that “Honor Your Father” means “Pretend Sin Is Not Sin”. Francisco has serious responsibilities. Heresy and dissent are rife within the Church. Corruption, crime, and immorality among the clergy and laity have got to be addressed. What is true and good — whether it comes in more formal or more humble trappings — needs to be encouraged and promoted. No amount of visiting prisoners or chatting with the help gets a pope excused from doing his (other) fatherly duties.
But any man who’s doing his Dad Jobs gets a free pass to dress as goofy as he wants, sit in his favorite comfy chair, and stock his beverage cooler with whatever the heck he wants. He’s a father. Call him to task on his Manly Responsibilities, if indeed he neglects them. You don’t have drink his Pabst Blue Ribbon, or his Glenfiddich, if turns your stomach. More for him. So be it.
Holy Thursday’s tomorrow. Pray for priests.
(There’s a book review coming at the bottom of this, but I need to lay out some preliminary matter first. And this is a post concerning sex. Not for children.)
To be Catholic is to be aware of a long list of my own faults. Let’s review a few of them: I goof off too much (not just on the internet, everywhere). I lack patience for the most trivial of inconveniences. When I’m irritated, I use my verbal powers for evil and not good. I spend way too much money on myself, and far too little on the poor. I procrastinate. On any given day, there’s a decent chance I spent the time I meant to spend praying (not an exorbitant quantity) doing some other more entertaining and entirely optional thing. For those who are familiar with the Little Flower, we could safely describe me as the Little Weed. The anti-Therese.
And that’s just my public sins. For every one you see on the kitchen floor, there’s a hundred more in the walls. If Therese is one of our few Doctors of Church, I’m guaranteed a spot among the vast number of Patients of the Church.
So be it. Some people talk about so-called “Catholic Guilt”, and those people are invariably the ones who missed out — in whole or in part — on the real deal: Catholic Mercy. If I don’t crumble in despair at the state of my soul (and yes, actually despair is one of my sins as well), it’s because there’s hope for me. Not hope that I’m going to wake up one morning suddenly meriting Heaven. But because Someone Else has gone ahead and opened Heaven for me. He loves me with His whole being, and will do anything — anything — to give me an shot at eternal happiness, mine only for the asking. And not just me — He loves everybody that way.
My experience with evangelization is that few of us are converted because we suddenly discover how wretched we are, and thus desire to jump into the cosmic shower. Quite the opposite: We long to know God, and having been drawn to Him, we begin to see, bit by bit, what life in Heaven looks like. And what kind of baggage we’ll be leaving at the door when we get there. Some things we drop like an old stinky garbage bag, in a flash of horrified understanding. Other things we keep stuffed in our pockets, sure they are part of us, or sure that these are little treasures we can sneak through eternal security . . . and it is only late in this life, or at the beginning of the next, that we catch on to the fact that, oops, we’ve been running around with the spiritual equivalent of a moldy rotten banana shoved in that coat pocket.
I’ve got rotten bananas in my pocket. (Usually only spiritually, though there was that one time I waited a month to clean out my tote bag . . . ick.) But if your argument consists of, “Jen, you stink!” my response is, “Um, why yes, I do.”
Hate it. Let me count the ways:
1) Because I know that the people who favor gay marriage do so for entirely understandable reasons.
2) Because I’m not an idiot. I’ve known plenty of folks who favor same-sex unions, and who are, put simply, better people than me. And they’re far and away better people than some of our rotten-to-the-core unrepentant clergy who’ve spent decades hiding despicable offenses.
3) The division concerning gay marriage doesn’t have its roots in questions about homosexuality. For the last fifty years, the going cultural norm has been that whatever I desire, sexually, should be acted upon. That marriage vows are no vow at all. That children and marriage have nothing to do with one another. That children have no particular need to be raised in a home with their mother and father. That any parent-type figure will do just fine.
An aside: People have a hard time accepting that adopted children feel a genuine grief concerning their biological parents. That very illusion — that your parents were unable to care for you, but hey, you have nothing to cry about — feeds into the destruction of marriage. Something my dad said to me very plainly when he remarried after my mother’s death — I knew it, but he was absolutely right to lay it on the table — was, “Your stepmother is not a replacement for your mother.”
It is a beautiful and wonderful thing when some loving person can step in and fill some portion of the blank left by the loss of loved one. But it doesn’t erase the loss. Acknowledging the loss makes it possible to delight in the sheer gift of this new and full and lively relationship, because we can accept it on its own terms, not pretend it is the other gift now gone.
4) A significant portion of the so-called Christian world doesn’t even acknowledge the horror of abortion. An even larger chunk, including many people whose genuine faith in Christ I don’t doubt for a moment, think sterilization and contraception are AOK — desirable even. And I don’t want to contemplate the numbers in the Church who approve or encourage the sin against purity we used to discreetly but emphatically call “self-abuse”. Before you start citing the ancient Jewish law concerning homosexual acts, review the details concerning Onan, eh? Struck dead on the spot? Actions speak louder than words. Disapproved.
5) I know that condemnation is the way of the world. To ask for so-called “mercy” in the wider world is to heap condemnation upon yourself. So I know that for many people dear to me, if I ever say, “Well, actually this one thing you’re doing is wrong,” those people I love will hear my words as code for, “Actually I hate you and I was just faking nice.” Which isn’t true. See my sins above — faking nice is not one of my virtues.
So to discuss gay marriage, at all, is to be accused of hatred. I can discuss contraception, and people just think I’m a little daft. I don’t mind that. But I dislike the fact that to open this topic is to have a number of people I respect, admire, and count as friends, be tempted to assume the worst about me. Well, the worst about me lies elsewhere.
[For the record: People hate you just as much if you talk about modesty in any specific terms. Which I will be doing at NewEvangelizers.com in a couple weeks. I’m racking up the voodoo rays this month.]
On to the Book Review
Getting the Marriage Conversation Right: A Guide for Effective Dialogue by William B. May is a short, readable booklet, written for a Catholic audience who wants to defend the sacrament of marriage, but suffer from poor rhetoric. The assumption is that you the reader agree with the Catholic teaching, but perhaps you articulate it poorly. You may even be currently basing your arguments on any number of details that simply aren’t Catholic.
Or you may be a Catholic who wants to follow Church teaching, but doesn’t understand why the bishops are so adamant about not allowing civil unions as a peaceful live-and-let-live alternative.
There is a single refrain that explains the disconnect between reality and popular culture. The going definition of marriage in our society is this:
“Marriage is the public recognition of a committed relationship between two adults for their fulfillment”.
And let me observe right now: If this is your definition, it is logical to accept gay marriage. Trouble being, that’s not what marriage is. It is what civil marriage has become. But it’s not what it is supposed to be. Here’s the Real Ale definition of marriage, the one the Church is trying to defend, too little too late:
“Marriage unites a man and a woman with each other and any children born from their union.”
This is the radical reality that animates the entirety of Christian thought on marriage and sexuality. Each child has a need to be raised by his mother and father.
Sometimes bad things happen — death, or serious sins such as an abusive parent, or a rapist father — that make this need impossible to fulfill. When that happens, we have no choice but to go with the next best thing, whether it be single parenting, or remarriage, or adoption. The next best thing, in the context of a response to tragedy, becomes the very picture of self-giving love. Anyone who steps into fill the void for a child who is unable to be reared by both his mother and his father? A true hero.
We live in a fallen world, and marriage faces countless obstacles. Getting the Marriage Conversation Right addresses each of these difficulties in turn, and explains how we are to understand a proper response to _______ problem. The book repeatedly admonishes us to avoid the temptation to condemnation, and maintains a thoroughly Catholic — that is, merciful — response to the many problems that individuals may face.
No hate-spewing. No tsk-tsking. No “they deserve what they get”. None of that.
The audience is those who accept, or wish to more fully accept, Catholic teaching on the sanctity of marriage. If you aren’t interested in being convinced, you won’t find this book convincing. It’s a book of explanations for why the Church teaches as she does, and how to effectively communicate that teaching to others.
The reading level is all-adults. The tone is conversational and the word count is short and to-the-point. This is an excellent resource for a parish study group.
If you are in favor of same-sex unions, will this book help you understand the other side? A lot depends on your mentality. This is an unabashed defense of the Catholic teaching, written by and for those who want to agree with it. There is no effort to create, within the book, an apologetic geared towards the worthy opponent. Yes, if you read the booklet with a desire to understand, in the spirit of true dialogue, why people oppose same-sex unions, you will in fact learn why people oppose same-sex unions.
But if it’s going to make your blood boil to see anyone lay out a defense of a position you abhor, then yeah, it’s going to make your blood boil. No way around it.
Summary: Good book. Short, readable, gets straight to the heart of the matter. This is the first title I’ve read on this topic, and it does a good job at what it does. For those who oppose same-sex unions, but don’t really know why, or how to explain their position, this book makes a good start.
Boilerplate:This review was written as part of the Catholic book reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Getting the Marriage Conversation Right. The Catholic Company is the best resource for all your seasonal needs such as First Communion gifts as well as ideas and gifts for the special papal Year of Faith.
