Author: Jennifer Fitz

Lent Day 19: Is it Pink Yet?

My deep thought for the weekend: I wish it were Laetare Sunday.

Nope.  Not yet.  But it is the feast of St. Joseph, so I was practically obliged to have some of that Lenten cheesecake.

Also, I wore my pink sweater to Mass in solidarity with all the people who think it would be nice if we sprung forward a week.  Which led to me to thinking, during Mass, that sometime we should organize a practical joke in which everyone shows up wearing the color associated with a holiday that is not on that day.  Red on a week that is not Pentecost.  Green on July 4th.  Something like that.

Someone do it and report back, please.

Also: I should be paying better attention during Mass and not thinking up practical jokes.  Even if they are related to liturgical or saint-themed colors.

Brown and grey-black floppy-eared rabbit. File:Mini lop.jpg

If the rabbit sees his shadow, four more weeks of Lent. Photo by Franie Frou Frou [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Lent Day 18: Catholic Childhood Memories

From St. Patrick’s Day:

Child climbs in car, we’re driving to the Catholic homeschooling co-op for drama class.  Late and having rushed out the door, as per usual. “Mom, are you wearing green today?”

“Yes I am.  I have my green sweater on.”

“Shoot.  I’d better find something green.”

Mother, feeling resourceful: “Want to borrow my green scapular?”

“Um.  No thanks.  I’ll clip this green hand-sanitizer holder to my belt loop.  That’ll work.”

 

More St. Patrick’s Day:

Same child, having solved the green problem and moving on: “St. Patrick was supposed to come last night and leave us candy.”

Skeptical mother: “Oh was he, now?”

“Or green toys or something.  Or a leprechaun comes.”

Mother, still skeptical: “Oh I see.”

“It’s okay.  He can come tonight instead.”

 

Then, Saturday morning . . .

“Mom. St. Patrick forgot to come last night.”

Mother: “St. Patrick doesn’t come to our house.”

“Or a leprechaun.  All my friends get candy from the leprechaun on St. Patrick’s day.”

“All your friends, eh?  What are the names of those friends?”

Hems and haws for a moment, then clarifies that it’s actually her sister’s friends.  “All of A’s friends at St. Urban’s get candy.”

“Oh do they?  What are the names of those friends?”

“Um. Well there’s Benedicta.”

Mother is not surprised.  Benedicta’s mother is like that.  “Anyone else?”

“And Assumptua.”

“Isn’t she Benedicta’s sister?”

“Well, yes.  But they both got candy. The leprechaun comes to their house.”

“The leprechaun doesn’t come to our house. Good try.”

 

Good problems, Catholic School edition:  When your child is sobbing and begging to be allowed to go to school, and swears she really isn’t that sick.

 

Weird problems, Saint Books edition:  

Bored child: “Mom, do we have any of those little saint books but that aren’t about  someone who becomes a monk or a nun and all they do is pray?”

Mother chooses not to argue, though there may have been a slight eye roll.  “Um.  Let’s go look.”  Thumbing through the shelf that contains middle-grades saint books, Mother pounces on St. Isaac Jogues, who was neither a monk nor a nun.  “How about this one?”

Child frowns and shakes head.  “No.  I want one of these saint books.”

Ah.  Well.  In that case . . . “How about this one?”

“Is it boring? What did he do?”

“He got tortured by Indians.”

“Okay.”

Saint Isaac and the IndiansSaint Isaac Jogues -- With Burning Heart

For all your tortured-by-Indians needs, book covers courtesy of Ignatius Press and Pauline Media.

Lent Day 17: Cultural Propitiation

Next best thing to selling indulgences* is writing this:

Begging here – if anyone is looking for an alternate penance so you can have your corned beef for St. Patrick’s day, I’ve got you covered . . .

Sure is handy living in a dispensed-with-conditions diocese, when you’re in a pinch for nursery workers.

I’ll probably skip the St. Patrick’s Beast-plate myself.  Reason?  Compared to cheese pizza for dinner, the other prospects for penance are more annoying and less convenient. But it’s nice to have a meat-card in the pocket just in case.
File:Ballinasloe St. Michael's Church South Aisle Fifth Window Sts Patrick and Rose of Lima by Harry Clarke Detail Patrick Preaching to His Disciples 2010 09 15.jpg

If ever there were a day for Catholics to complain about “cultural appropriation” it would be today.  Okay and also Christmas, Easter,  St. Valentines, and Rosaries-as-Gang-Signs, but St. Patrick’s is right up there on the list of Catholic Things People Have Distorted Beyond Recognition.  Hey, guys, a saint!  Who nearly starved to death in slavery!  Who risked his life to evangelize the people who wanted to kill him!  Let’s get drunk on bad beer, that’ll show our love!

Not that Catholics are above that sort of thing, you know  — weirdly slipping into mortal sin just when they meant to be doing something right for a change — but still.  The word saint is right there in the title of the holiday, there’s no real hiding the part about this being a Catholic feast day.

But you know what Catholics don’t do?

We don’t go around saying, “Hey!  Are you actually the slacker child of a late Roman-era British patrician Christian family, who was kidnapped by barbarians, had a conversion experience, escaped with divine aid, went to Gaul to be ordained, and returned to Ireland to fight fire with fire in overcoming the persuasive power of the druids?  No? You’re not??  THEN NO GREEN BEER FOR YOU.”

Okay, so not all of us love the green beer.   What is even in the green beer?  Don’t drink that.  But here’s how Catholics feel about our vast collection of holidays and customs and cultural traditions:  The more the merrier.

That’s a doctrine.

It’s our job as Catholics not to hoard our faith but to share it with prodigious generosity.

Well, yes, if you insist on keeping the feast by breaking the faith, we’re going to have a few words about how to clean up your act.  But we aren’t going to tell you to keep your grimy hands off our religion; instead, we’ll show you where the washroom is.

We don’t keep our faith by carefully guarding it for the pleasure of the select few.  We keep our faith by giving it away.  What we have is so good and so big and so explosively powerful that a trillion-billion people could all be in on it, and it would only be more authentic, not less.

 

File:St Patrick Purgatory.jpgFile:Heidelberg cpg 144 Elsässische Legenda Aurea 338r St. Patricks Fegefeuer.jpg

Here are some pictures of purgatory.  That’s what people used to draw when the topic of St. Patrick came up.  It’s because of this place, which is the pit where we throw all the people who serve bad beer with creepy fake Irish accents.  

Artwork in this post:

*PS: I don’t approve of selling indulgences and neither does the Church.  That was joking.

Lent Day 16: Less Saintly

From this morning’s readings:

Thus says the LORD:
Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings,
who seeks his strength in flesh,
whose heart turns away from the LORD.
He is like a barren bush in the desert
that enjoys no change of season,
But stands in a lava waste,
a salt and empty earth.

Ho yeah, we’ve got that here.  Two weeks into Lent-o-rama it is.  Cat Hodge writes about the second-week lull here, and Scott Reeves writes about it here.

Ashes have worn off, can’t remember where my sackcloth got to, and I’m now in that phase of Lent where even ordinary-time decent behavior seems to have scooted off and left Wretched Sinner to reign.

Lent will do this to you.  There’s nothing like trying to be a better person to make it clear how much worse things are than you’d been lulled into believing.

I am fortunate because, by complete accident of state-of-life and no smart planning ahead on my part, I picked an intermittent personal penance.  You know the type — get to Adoration once a week, or say a Chaplet on Fridays, or some extra odd or end that you couldn’t do every day if you wanted to, because your life is like that, but which you could manage once a week or on certain days.

Serendipitous help: When that day of the week comes around, you’ve got a built-in ‘reset’ button.   If you’ve fallen into Apathetic Christian Mode, the ridiculousness of performing some superlative act when you can’t even hold together normal Christian life will, perhaps, slap a little remorse and repentance into you.

Lenten Implosion Syndrome is not a bug, it’s a feature.  Lent prepares us for Easter, and Easter is not the day when we saved ourselves.

Franciscan Monastery, Peru. Stone building lit up against black night sky. Complejo San Francisco, Arequipa, Perú.
Photo by Diego Delso, of course.  Guessed that as soon as I saw it on Image of the Day. [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.  Click through and scroll down for the brief but enlightening description + implicit exhortation.

Lent Days 10-15: No Silence

Monday evening SuperHusband walks in the door and he’s got a business call, important.  The children know what that means.  Time for quiet in the house.

They are finishing up the evening clean-up, but thoughtfully withdraw from the kitchen so their dear father won’t be disturbed by the clatter of dishes being washed.  Two children, surveying the mess in their bedroom, decide the old sheets of bubble wrap need to be tossed.  Immediately.  Which means bubbles need to be popped, immediately.

Well aware their father is on the phone, they cross the hall to the bathroom, shut the door, and start jumping on those bubbles.

Children never cleaned so vigorously.

I knock and open and thank them for their consideration, but explain that one mustn’t pop bubble wrap at all while someone is taking an important phone call just meters away.

***

And that summarizes the State of Lent, Days 10-15.  FYI the reason for the radio silence here was not a fit of holiness but a significant computer problem which required the services of Senior IT Guy, who was out of town.  Seems to be fixed now and we are back on track.  Perhaps Lent is likewise. We’ll see.

Trappist monk, back to the photographer, sitting at his desk attending to spiritual reading.

Photo by Daniel Tibi (Own work) [CC BY 2.0 de], via Wikimedia Commons.  If you enter the search term “Trappist” in Wikimedia, most of the results are for beer.

Lent Day 9: Eternal Rest Grant Unto Him . .

UPDATE: Simcha Fisher has the details on how you can help Anthony’s family — and him as well.

+ Please pray for the repose of the soul of Francisco Antonio Gallegos, and the consolation of his heartbroken family. +

Soldiers at dinner in Base Hospital No. 9, A.E.F. -from a history of the work of the New York hospital unit during two years of active service in France.

Photo by Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons. From the accompanying text: “. . .the petty trials and difficulties are now fading from the memory, and in their place stand out the big things that really counted and made our adventure . . . worth while.”

Lent Day 8: Can’t Go Wrong Saint Books

PSA because the question came up today: If you want a good readable saint book, you won’t go wrong with Pauline Media’s “Encounter the Saints” series.  They are written for about 5th – 6th grade, but I thoroughly enjoy them and find them edifying for myself.  It takes about an hour for an adult left alone to read one book in silence. There’s usually a glossary at the back for any Catholic vocabulary words that you might not know.

I am unclear on why I only own about a dozen of these.  Need to rectify that.

 

Saint Teresa of KolkataSaint Catherine Labouré and Our LadySaint Gianna Beretta Molla: The Gift of Life

Saint Damien of Molokai -- Hero of HawaiiSaint Maximilian Kolbe -- Marys KnightSaint Isaac Jogues -- With Burning Heart

Artwork courtesy of Pauline Media.

 

Lent Day 7: Evangelizing Key Chains

I have a guest membership at the local Baptist mega-church’s gym.  Before you get scandalized, a “guest” membership means you are not a member of the church.  It lets you use the gym, walking track, and exercise classes, and lets your child attend certain activities that require a gym membership.  It costs $10 the first year and $5 thereafter.

The extra $5 the first year is because you receive a bar code membership tag to put on your key chain, which you check in with when you arrive.  The YMCA has a similar system.  So do grocery stories: You use the loyalty-program membership card to earn rewards either for yourself or the school of your choice, depending on the grocery store.

Last week when I handed over my keys to the oil change guys, there flashed Local Mega Baptist Church.

My gym membership card doesn’t specify what kind of member I am — I suppose if I became a proper member of the congregation, I’d keep my card and just upgrade my status.  (I won’t though — not going to forsake my birthright for unlimited access to the weight room.)

Today when I stopped at the downtown specialty grocery store after dropping off the 5th grader at St. Urban’s, I again handed over my keys in order get my store loyalty-points.  Once again: LM Baptist.

I feel a little bad about this, because sometime I am impatient and cranky at the oil change place.  Sometimes I am not the picture of extroverted cheerfulness at the grocery store.   It makes the Baptists look bad.  I’m sorry, Baptists.  Thank you for letting me use your gym anyway.

File:Ehrenstetten - Ölbergkapelle6.jpg - Small, picturesque chapel among the hills of vinyards in either southwestern Germany or northeastern France, depending on which unreliable image-description you believe.

Photo: By Taxiarchos228 (Own work) [FAL], via Wikimedia Commons.  I don’t know if I belong to this church or not.  I was unable to easily get hold of the particulars.  But I might.  I belong to this giant mega church with all these locations spread around the world, nearly every one of them containing people as cranky as I am.

Lent Day 6: Purple Shirts

Yesterday as I came out of Mass, a friend of mine noticed I was all Lenten in my purple shirt.

I died a little death.

I have an irrational dislike of being matchy-matchy with the liturgical season.  (I don’t care what other people wear.  It’s just me I think about — you’ve long suspected that, I’m sure.)

The difficulty is that I got three new purple shirts last fall, and they are my favorite shirts.  If I’m going to wear a shirt that is not stained or faded or both, it’s 50-50 on the odds that shirt might be purple.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  I like my purple shirts as much as I like my black shirts.  They match my purple watch and my purple glasses (which I updated for black glasses, heh) and my purple book and everything.  I like purple.

It is not my fault that the Church likes purple, too.

So I decided Sunday morning that I’d get over my irrational aversion and just wear the purple turtleneck and suck it up.  I was very hoping no one would notice, but obviously someone did.

There is no deep spiritual meaning to any of this.  Some things that happen in Lent have no deep meaning, they just are.

***

PS: My link above to my 2015 discussion of this issue includes some comments on penance on St. Patrick’s day.  As this year’s feast does fall on a Friday, you’ll have to consult your bishop to find out your options.  There’s not one single answer for the whole US, let alone the whole world.

File:Peter Alsop with cat on head.jpg

Photo:By Moose School Productions (http://peteralsop.com/gallery/peters-headshots) [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.  I have no idea whether you should like Peter Alsop or not.  I know that I liked his purple shirt photo best, of all the viable choices on Wikimedia.

Lent Day 5: Cheesecake??

As Scott Reeves explains so well, Lent is more than just a self-help program.  That said, if you aren’t going to gather up the fortitude to reckon with your near occasions of sin during Lent, when will you?

That is the rationale behind our resolution to eliminate extraneous sugar from the family diet.  We theorize, but aren’t certain, that at least one of our children would benefit from a diet with relatively less sugar and relatively more fat, protein, and complex carbohydrates; we suspect that making that transition will improve the mental health of everyone, directly and indirectly; thus it’s a switch that, we think, will make it easier for all of us to become more like the people God created us to be.

That’s the hypothesis.  We’re testing it during Lent because honestly it’s hard to make yourself give up something good, easy, and pleasant when you aren’t even sure it matters.

With that in mind, SuperHusband went to Costco.

“Please don’t bring home more of those yogurt things,” I asked him before he left.  Yogurt in itself is not a problem food, but the individual servings of flavored yogurts the kids devour like starved goatherds come with a piles of extra sugar.

“But [certain child with low appetite] loves them, and they’re mostly healthy,” SuperHusband observed.

“Well, just look at the nutrition information and do the best you can,” I said.

So he and our reluctant eater went off to Costco and came home with . . . cheesecake.

Um, darling?  Lent?

Outside of the penitential seasons, we always get some kind of good treat for Sundays.  But during Advent and Lent I tend to scale back — not a hard and fast rule, mind you, but let’s just say that a giant tray of cheesecake is more Easter-Christmas-Birthday than Sackcloth-and-Ashes.

SuperHusband explained: “I looked at all the nutritional information, and this one had the best fat-to-sugar ratio of just about anything.  A bazillion times better than those yogurts.”

I believe him.  We’d acquired this particular cheesecake a few weeks ago for a birthday party, and it was noticably better than typical, and it was not overly-sweet at all.  Very much in the real-food category of convenience items.

Okay, then.  My goal isn’t to satisfy some preconceived image of what is and is not “penitential” enough to satisfy the St. Joneses.  My goal is to meet the unusual but pressing nutritional needs of one of our children.   Cheesecake to fulfill our Lenten resolution it is.

 

File:Raised slice- 10-18-15.jpg - Picture of a whole cheesecake with one slice removed and being held up by the spatula.
You want to know what penance is? Scrolling through Wikimedia looking for just the right picture of cheesecake . . . and not eating any of your kids’ cake sitting in the fridge. No need for a hair shirt here, thank you.

 By Sirabellas (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons