Three kids and I depart tomorrow today for the big trip. I am not a person who packs light. I was pretty pleased that two girls and I were able to get more or less all our stuff, carry-on excepted, into one (large) suitcase. My big packing question is: Would I be annoyed that I had to buy this in France?
For some things I prefer not to pack our own. Most of our toiletries we’ll purchase on arrival, because I do not need some child’s shampoo saturating everything we own. That’ll be fine on the return trip, but I am hoping to not see the inside of a French laundromat for a good week or so. They can bring home the dregs of a bottle of shampoo for a souvenir.
What is killing us on luggage is that the boy is going to camp. He wanted to see Alps. After doing all the investigating — and I was this close to taking up learning German — the best option for giving him Maximum Alpine Experience was to send to him to a week of summer camp down in Chamonix. Everything about that choice is good except the packing list. The camp people want the kids to bring clothes and spare clothes and more clothes for every day. Of course they do — who wants to be liable for a dozen freezing-naked underpacked children?
Also, I would be mildly irritated to have to buy a fresh set of camping gear in Europe, and I’m very not interested in having a gear crisis the day camp begins. Unfortunately, my imagination does not look at a tiny-font packing list and accurately gauge how many cubic feet that will all turn into. Thus we have a mountain of luggage despite my extremely uncharacteristic efforts to go semi-minimalist otherwise.
Two hippos and a rabbit have wormed their way onto the passenger list.
Weirdest thing about this trip: I am having a hard time believing it is real. That’s odd because I don’t just know lots of people who travel all the time, but also I’ve done this before. I’ve lived in France twice. I’m not going someplace exotic to me. I think it’s that I’ve been so firmly planted in the stay-at-home life for the past two decades, and also that doing this was so completely impossible until so recently; until it actually happens, I don’t think my brain can be fully persuaded that it can happen.
Last night we had a mini bon voyage party, which involved getting bitten by all the mosquitos and then coming home from the river to find my friend surprising me with an icon of St. Raphael. She didn’t have time to get it blessed on her local orthodox altar, so she proposed that I might want to get it blessed in France. That would be a serious stretch outside my comfort zone, giving me a double-hit on areas of maximal shyness, but friends do that to you.
St. Raphael is the ignored angel in my life (Gabriel and Michael get all the attention, and Gabriel would tell you he’s the overlooked tag-along in that pair), but here’s what my friend pointed out: St. Raphael is the patron of both wayfarers and of healing.
Apt enough, and then if you add in the part about how I need to cram all that luggage into our otherwise right-sized too-small rental car, there’s this: He’s particularly the patron of I Can’t Believe This Is Happening To Me, and also of people launching into big adventures with a terrifying stack of baggage. At least for once he’s being invoked for good crises and not bad ones.
This spring, #3 and I have been volunteering about three times a month at either the shower-in-laundry place or the homeless-people clothing closet. At S&L we move laundry through the machines, clean showers between users, keep track of who’s in line for a shower next, and make sure the supplies are in order. At the HPCC, we’re back-end. Elderly ladies with a firm disposition for taking no nonsense deal directly with the client; we naive pushovers sort through donations, take a look at the current inventory and decide what to send on to outlying ministries, and get the rest logged in and put away.
This is enjoyable work for many reasons.
It is relaxing. You set aside all your other worries and just focus for a couple hours on getting a useful and manageable task accomplished.
It is companionable. The other volunteers and the clients are interesting, fun people to be with. For my daughter and me, it’s something we can do together, and we end up working more and more as a team.
It is satisfying. You never wonder, “Did that guy really need a shower?” Yes. He needed a shower. You made it possible for him to have one. Done. Likewise, no one comes and asks someone else’s grandmother to pick out second-hand shoes and clothes for them unless they really, truly, need some shoes and clothes.
It is refreshing. After you’ve waded through enough sophisticated blather over the years from non-homeless people, it’s nice to be around people who have no particular social skills. They just want a shower and some shoes, done. We don’t ask you to listen to a talk about Higher Things or make a promise that you’ll never drink and you’ll always work really hard. We just tell you when the shower’s ready.
It is edifying. Here are friends joking together, family members proud of each other, worried about each other, looking after each other, telling stories about each other — all this beautiful humanity in front of your face. Everyone has a story of home, even when home is outside.
All these things I love. But there’s something that keeps moving me most, week after week: The generosity of total strangers.
This week we had to stop off at St. Urban’s on the way to S&L. “Oh, by the way, tell them down there we’ve got a pile of stuff the Sodality of Mary collected.” #3 & I took a look at the pile, determined it would fit in our freshly-emptied front seat, and brought it ourselves.
This whole stack of things was exactly what S&L needed. Late in the afternoon, after the waiting area had emptied, we sorted through the stuff to put away. You have toothbrushes or lotion or shampoo, and you go to put it away, and discover the amount on the counter is the right amount to fill the gap on the supply shelves. Here’s something we almost ran out of, but church ladies took up a collection and now we have it, just when we need it.
***
Every week when we’re pouring detergent or spraying disinfectant or setting a few more miniature bars of soap in the bin by the towels, we’re holding someone else’s generosity. None of that stuff comes from grants or government-supply. It’s all collected a piece at a time by people all over the city who’ve gone through the trouble of gathering supplies together and getting them delivered.
Imagine having the job of opening and delivering 500 hundred Valentines a week. Then imagine that they weren’t love letters between boyfriend and girlfriend or parent and child, but rather each one said:
Dear Person Who Matters to Me,
I’ve never met you, I know your life sucks and people don’t want to be around you and some of it might even be your own fault, but I’m glad you’re here in my town with me. I care about you, and I want to make your life a little bit better, and I want you to know you are not alone.
Love,
Your Secret Friend.
If you got to catalog and count and deliver box after box of that sort of love?
I wish to thank everyone who has shared my crowd-sourcing post, and those who have given many helpful responses. Every clue is a good clue.
Meanwhile, this is what relapsing-remitting chronic illness is like:
After six months of being a completely normal person for the first time in years, I get whammed with the Return of the Thing early last week. It arrived disguised as a week or two of feeling not-quite-right, and then a bit of a cough when I woke up Tuesday and then Pow! Done.
So I get through the bare-minimum on the schedule (a schedule written for normal people, because I was a normal person a week ago), but not the whole thing. Thank you caffeine I had a super day Friday, and went to bed excited about Saturday, only to, you know, sleep through Saturday. Oops.
Sunday morning pain is down and I’m excited about Sunday, but, whoops, remember that thing where talking makes you lightheaded? Yeah, I haven’t had that in six months. Sure I mic’d up the other week to talk to a room full of eight people, but that was erring on the side of caution, mostly, though okay yes I know that talking loudly is not a great idea even with the Normal Self.
Anyhow, come Sunday talking was right out. Even lip-syncing was a no-go. Worst case of light-headed-while-talking I’ve had in years. Wicked enough I was glad I had a student-driver to do the driving home from church after Mass. I did some talking to some people anyway, because I am not nearly the recluse people like me say that I am, then went home after Mass and slept that off. Went to a friends’ birthday party, sat around listening to people and avoiding talking (mostly), and had a wonderful couple hours and then went home and slept that off.
Tip: If you do something that makes you feel faint, that might make you tired after a while. Even if you enjoy the activity! It’s like your brain doesn’t consider that sustainable behavior.
So I wake up for the third time Sunday and it’s still Sunday, and I’ve been judiciously avoiding junk food this past week despite the fact that it’s Easter and only heretics avoid junk food during Easter, and since I do make an honest effort to keep the commandments, I was practically obliged to have part of one these with dinner:
For you uncultured heathens, that would be beer with coffee in it.
And then I felt like going for a walk, which I figured would be short, and I grabbed my rosary, which I figured I would end up not praying because one of the comorbidities of feeling light-headed while talking is losing the ability to keep track of prayers silently either, but you never know so I took it.
I thought I’d be dragging myself home in two minutes, and I was wrong.
My head had been cured by the coffee-beer. (Or something.) I prayed the whole dang thing including the extra litany of intentions (you could be on there) I try to add at the end, and that was impressive because when I am flopping around the house uselessly exhausted, Rosary and housework are the first things to go, because trying to keep the commandments and actually keeping them are two different things.
The coffee-beer didn’t even taste as good as it should have. But it effected the cure.
Temporarily. The thing is back now. Sheesh.
Did you know that there exist certain neurological disorders whose symptoms are best improved by alcohol? Neither did I, until I read about one of them this weekend, I can’t remember which. Unfortunately, coffee-beer is, like nearly all the other pharmaceuticals used to treat unpleasant brain problems, loaded with potential for untoward side effects, so you can’t just have it all the time. And you really wouldn’t want to, I hope.
#1 Fr. Gonzo finishes strong.I probably shouldn’t call him that, it might encourage him. The man who gave me this thing forty-something days ago decided to launch, his words, the “Mother of All Easter Vigils.” If that man left out even a single speck or jot of an option, as found or legitimately inferred in ye olde Roman Missal, please, not a word. Also next year, I’m having a nap and a cup of coffee before the vigil. Or else just doing like last year and going to the Sunday evening Easter Mass, which was quite nice and ought to be offered more widely.
#2 There was a bacon accident. Sometimes people are like, “Oh you’re a homeschooler? Could you make me a craft and a casserole?” These are the very same people who would squirm if I said, “Oh you work in an office? Could you make me a 1040x and a manuscript proposal?” So anyway, I tried making bacon in the oven Sunday morning, and I did it by following the directions on the package. More or less.
The difficulty is that it came out perfect.
Perfect bacon is cooked to the point of extreme crispiness, just short — but nearly to the point — of crumbing at an untoward glance.
Sadly, the man I married and many of our offspring are under the impression that bacon is meant to be sort of chewy and moist. I’m okay with that. All bacon is good to me. I will totally put on my inner St. Therese and eat wet bacon. No problem. Canonize me now.
But I accidentally cooked the bacon too long, and it was extremely, very, astonishingly good. The difficulty is that there wasn’t any spare bacon to undercook for the other people, and that was kind of sad. I’m open to continuing practice on this art until I nail it. Eight weeks of Easter calling my name.
#3 First child trained in the ways of the IRS! It’s pleasant having Easter after the taxes go in. I literally dropped off four envelopes at the post office on the way over to the Vigil. Mr. Boy got A Real Job last summer, which means he had a real tax return (two – one federal, one state) this spring. I had him do the process step by step on his own, and then I’d check it and show him what he did wrong (if anything — a 1040EZ isn’t that hard, even if it’s more complicated than it used to be), and he’d fix it, and we’d move on to the next thing.
It is well worthwhile to start doing your taxes on your own right from the beginning, and to keep with it year after year as things slowly get more complicated. Pays off in the long run.
#4 Fedex is a wondrous thing. It’ll be three kids and I on the big trip this summer, and I ordered those three some useful books to prep for the trip and work on their French.
FYI of all the suppliers I found, Decitre.Fr had the best deal on international shipping if you’re looking at many low-budget books rather than one expensive book. Each kid received a book on the Mass. The boy received two history books and an atlas. The girls each received a coloring book on Alsace (primary destination), a second coloring book on a relevant topic (history for one, all-things-Christian-faith for the other — between the two, they’ll have encountered most museum, historical site, and art-related vocab), and a book of personal interest for motivating the reading practice (cats or rabbits).
I went with cheap books because I wanted them physically light and compact, and intellectually not too intimidating. That also allowed for a slight overflow on the order, so duds could be culled and everyone still get good books. –> Not true duds, but a couple of the books that looked nice on the internet turned out to be either too little-kid or else too difficult for a beginning student of the language; I set those aside for me.
Anyhow, on international orders there’s not an option (with Decitre) to have books sent in sub-packages, and I knew a few of the books would take a couple weeks to be ready to ship. So when I got the shipping notice Spy Wednesday, I figured it would be a late Easter? Nope. Packaged Wednesday morning, queued at CDG by Wednesday evening, onto a plane and into my local Fedex office Thursday morning. I went out for a walk Thursday morning, and as I was coming back to my yard at 9AM the Fedex mini-van showed up with a package for me to sign.
You didn’t used to be able to get foreign books this easily. I like the modern world.
#5 Journaling Bibles. So that left one child with no books in her basket, because: Poor planning. The Easter Bunny was pretty pleased she’d gotten to Aldi to pick up Not-Slave-Labor chocolate, thanks. So then the bunny remembered this argument from a month earlier. The girl is in the FCA at school, and apparently all her friends have “journaling” or “notetaking” Bibles. These are Bibles with wide margins or other white space where you can essentially illuminate your own manuscript.
Could she have one for Confirmation please? And how about right now, so the Holy Spirit can get to work ASAP?
The difficulty is this: Apparently Catholics have given up on illuminating, or else we just don’t publish trend-Bibles — I’m sure our publishers are full of good excuses for the lapse. The situation is bad enough that Catholic Icing has a great tutorial about how to convert your Catholic Bible into a journaling Bible by covering up the footnotes with bits of paper.
A girl I know does not want to cover up footnotes with bits of paper
Thus in the spirit of Easter is For Heretics, Too, I caved. On the way home from Costco with all the Easter food, I did check my local Catholic bookstore to see if there was something, anything, that I could pass off as a journaling Bible, but no dice. (There are lots of great Catholic Bibles out there, by the way. Just not ones for coloring in.) But after that, into the breach: Walmart for Bible-shopping it would be.
[Sheesh, guys, I’m buying some unapproved-translation, books-missing Bible for coloring in, I’m not shelling out a lot of money on this, really??]
Walmart is smarter than a Catholic publisher. They carry a mass-market, paperback version the HCSB Illustrator’s Notetaking Bible, and it’s easy to find if you go to the book section — shelved both with Bibles and with adult coloring books, since it’s both a Bible and a coloring book. The inside looks like this:
My child wasn’t looking for one that was pre-illustrated, but we both secretly like it. Some of the illustrations are very apropos, such as the image of Christ Crucified in the margins next to Isaiah’s Suffering Servant prophecy. I could do without Mary With Rosy Cheeks, but Catholics have done far worse to the Blessed Mother and somehow the Church still stands.
My teenager spent her afternoon working on her Bible. Her younger sister said, “We should have brought these to that retreat last month!” I think I can work with this trend.
Easter Egg Wreath by #3. Leaving a child alone with a hot glue gun has its advantages. For more on the cost of becoming a Pinterest Parent, see here. Okay, I see the photos aren’t loading anymore. I’ll fix that and update. [Update: Okay – all fixed now, I hope!] The text explains the less-pretty parts of the crafting life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SuperHusband prays morning and night prayer per iBreviary, and when I’m around I pray along with him. Usually he does the bulk of the reading and I get the responses, but this morning he is hoarse with a wicked sore throat, so I was the reader.
It’s a different experience. When he reads, I get to sit back and listen and my thoughts can range over the psalms as they come my way. As the person responsible for pronouncing all the words, in contrast, there’s no time for anything but quick thoughts. Unlike lectoring, especially for a big event, where you take time ahead to pray over the readings and practice them a bit, morning prayer is dashed off on the spot. Unlike praying one of the hours by yourself in silence, when there’s someone else waiting on you, you can’t just stop and ponder at will.
You get one shot at the reading, cold, no stops.
Another difference is that when an idea strikes you, it strikes and sticks and there’s no considering just how apt it is, because you’ve got to keep moving. But the imagery can be quite vivid. For example: Chickens.
The verse that got me was this:
Though the wicked spring up like grass and all who do evil thrive:
they are doomed to be eternally destroyed.
Our Lent down South takes place during true spring. Plum trees are in blossom, azaleas are working on it, the camellias of winter are fading away and the daffodils are long since awakened. The early grasses are bright and vigorous and lush, though they’ll give way in a few months to the stubbornly invasive weed-grasses of summer. All year long, the various grasses take their turns at conquest.
But they cannot withstand the ravages of the chicken.
If a chicken decides she wants a square of dirt, that square of dirt she will have, and everything in it. The chicken does not care what your plans are. The chicken landscapes as she will, and if you wish to make her cooperate with your plans, you’d best set firm boundaries delineating which earth is hers and which is yours.
And so, reading this morning, I could not help, of course, to imagine the Avenging Angel as a chicken. They’re both winged. They are both, to their prey, a fearsome specter. If ever a great chicken comes to destroy you, be afraid.
Chicken prison. Because she may not have my strawberries.
A friend and I have been meaning to get together to chat for a few weeks now. This morning over breakfast I pulled out the calendar and added her to my to-do list for March, then headed over to Facebook to message her ASAP before I forgot:
Hey – do you have an opening coming up for a cup of coffee or tea or something?
Or something. Dagnabbit I have no idea what you gave up for Lent, girl! It could be coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate, lunch dates . . . no clue.
The Forty Days of Complicated Socializing begins.
Image by New York Tribune, circa 1919 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
So the reason I vanished from the internet like I’d been kidnapped in broad daylight is that I had to quick plan a massive trip to Europe. (I know!) A different day, I will write more about the how-to’s of pulling off that feat; for now just know that yes, it consumed my every free minute from the moment the opportunity opened up until the transport, lodging, and insurance were firmly established.
You understand, because you, too, have something you want to do that, if you were suddenly given the chance, you’d drop everything and make it happen. I want to talk about what it takes to make that thing happen for you.
The One Big Thing
I think “bucket lists” are nonsense. Life isn’t like that. My list of priorities looks like this:
God.
My vocation as a wife and mother.
Everything else.
#1 and #2 are inseparably intertwined — doing one means doing the other, always. #3 is composed of all the other things that might be important, but that when push comes to shove you can pout all you want, I’m not available to do that thing you think I should be doing, if it interferes with #1 and #2.
Still, there’s a pile of good stuff behind door #3, including a long list of, “It would sure be nice if . . .” items. It would sure be nice to have a bigger, prettier house. It would sure be nice to visit New England. It would sure be nice to take the kids to Mount Vernon (God-willing, that’s next summer). The One Big Thing also sits behind door #3, but in a different corner of the Everything Else room.
We have a friend whose One Big Thing was to invest in a large, well-appointed home for his eventual wife and children. It was so important to him that he started saving up for that house while he was still in college. It’s not that he would have felt like he’d failed in life, or “missed out,” or that his happiness depended on having that house. It was just important enough to him that he was willing to sacrifice a lot of other good things in order to make it happen if he could. (And he did.)
You have some things like that. Things that maybe are achievable or maybe they aren’t, but if you do get the chance, you’d be willing to set aside a lot of other good stuff in order to make your One Big Thing happen.
The Things We Set Aside
So I’ve been thinking about taking my kids on this trip since I was sixteen years old.
(Yes, that’s right: I wasn’t dating anybody, I hadn’t yet met the man I’d eventually marry, it would be another decade before the first child was even born. I was sixteen years old and walking along a misty tree-lined alley leading up to a historic French chateau, and I knew that one day I wanted to share that moment’s experience with my future children.)
Everybody has a different financial picture, so this isn’t a talk about how if you just do what I do you can have your big thing. But I want to make it clear that there’s a long list of good, worthwhile things we’re forgoing to make the One Big Thing happen. On that list:
All superfluous purchases. I was going to bring home flowers for Valentine’s day, but I need that $2.99 to be in the bank this summer.
A laptop that works. My trusty Surface Pro has given it up, and thus one of the reasons I don’t write as much lately is that I don’t have a computer I can take to another room when the family’s all home, and I do have to jockey for time on the shared machines. So basically I’ve made the decision that something I really love, writing, is just not going to happen as much as I’d like, for a while.
A new-used car. Our minivan has 170,000 miles on it. The doors either don’t lock or don’t open or sometimes both. The paint job is Green and Black Cheetah because we’ve filled in with primer where the original finish is rusting out. There is no interior carpet anymore, just bare metal with strategically-placed rubber mats. We’d been planning to upgrade to something conceived this millennium, but my mechanical engineer tells me we can get that baby to 200K, no problem. So that’s what we’ll be doing.
Living room furniture. When we updated the circa-1985 paint in the living room and hallways this Christmas, we donated our couch and recliner, from the same era and in the same general condition, to other worthy recipients. What’s there instead? Lawn chairs. Really nice ones, yes: They’re the ones we got from Lowe’s on clearance and had previously been using to kit the screen porch. They just got promoted to a full-time, permanent gig as Chief Living Room Furniture.
More house space. Eventually that minivan is going to need to be replaced. Good thing we just painted, because this family of six is going to be squeezed into the three-bedroom ranch for a long time to come.
I mention that last one not because it’s a big deal (I know larger families living in smaller houses), but because to a lot of people, a spacious home is their One Big Thing.
You just have to know yourself and know what trade-offs fit the kind of person you are. No matter how rich you are, you can’t have everything you’re able to want. We all have to prioritize, and give up some good things in order to have other good things that are more important to us.
Seizing the Day
I’m not omnipotent nor omniscient, and neither are you. There’s no telling what will happen between now and the end of June. Perhaps our plans all come to naught. One of the ways you know you’ve hit your One Big Thing is because you can honestly say to yourself: Even if this doesn’t work out, I have to try it, because I will always regret not having taken my chance when it came.
[Tip: If you are making a significant financial investment in anything, get that investment insured. You can insure a house, a car, a boat, a musical instrument, and yes, even a trip.]
In our case, what happened is that we were thinking about taking a much more reasonable, but still-ambitious, stateside family trip. That was another thing we’ve always wanted to do and here we were: The kids were at the ideal age, my health was finally decent again, there was a slot when we could take the time off and make it happen.
So we talked about a variety of other, much more sane choices. Then one day I came to my senses. I told my husband: I would rather not go anywhere this summer, and save up for as long as it takes to make my One Big Thing happen.
And he briefly set aside all reason and scruples and determined that he really, really loves me, and that maybe we should talk about this. I pointed out that I’ve been talking about doing this trip since as long as he’s known me, and also there has not been a single time in the past decade when I was physically able to make it happen. Our son graduates high school next year. If I wanted to do it, now was literally the only time.
So I did it. Trip is booked.
This is where we’re going. Photo by Fr_Antunes (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons. And no I won’t be live-blogging it, because: I don’t have a working laptop. That’s fine. My One Big Thing wasn’t “taking the internet on this trip,” it was, “taking my kids on this trip.” I don’t recall ever giving birth to a computer, thanks.
If you don’t already know who it is, go to the Saint’s Name Generator and let some holy soul pick you for 2017.
The first year I tried this, I got St. John Bosco. It was an obvious.
The next year, St. Matthew. The need was clear, though I’m not convinced I kept up my end of things.
Last year, St. Andrew. He works in obscurity, but work he does.
And then there’s this year, 2017.
So about that Rosary thing . . .
If you aren’t already familiar with the story of how I accidentally joined the Legion of Mary, you can read that story here. An excerpt:
I’d never even heard of the Legion of Mary. But this lady was fast. She had my name on those forms in an instant. There’s the x for your signature, here’s a copy of your prayers to say every day, and don’t worry, it’s not a mortal sin if you miss a day, but do keep up with it.
“But I don’t go to this parish,” I told her.
They weren’t picky.
I signed. And then I had to go home and explain this to my poor husband, a protestant who believed in neither the Blessed Sacrament nor prayers to Mary. Oops. Luckily he recognized the swift hand of God in answering my prayers for a better prayer life, and if it made no sense to him personally, who was he to argue with God?
And who am I to argue either?
That was all great until, as I wrote in 2015, things began to get complicated. It is difficult to pray the Rosary (or any other talking-prayer) when you get light-headed when you talk. The hagiographers won’t have any work to do with me, because I’m not one of those saints with heroic perseverance. After a long period of trial and error I finally decided to sub out the Office of Readings if I couldn’t reasonably pray the Rosary, since that’s far easier to pray along with silently. It’s reading. They put the word reading right there in the name of it.
(I thought about making myself a rosary to read. Like a slide show or something. But then I didn’t. I guess I should do that. And yes, I tried apps and things, but nothing suited.)
So then, as I wrote the other day, I got better again! Woohoo! Which means that I transitioned, slightly unaware, from World’s Worst Auxillary Member of the Legion, But She Has an Excuse to WWAML, No Excuse. I had forgot I could do this thing again.
But you know what? God didn’t forget, and neither did this other guy.
Enter Rosary, Stage Left; Saint, Stage Right
Two big things happened in the last weeks of December. I can’t remember which happened first. One was that in the course of cleaning out the house, I came across the stunningly beautiful rosary that a friend had given me as a gift some years ago. I used to pull it out for the Easter and Christmas seasons, but I’ve been slack about keeping up with liturgically-timed theme-changes lately, and honestly I had sort of, I’m mortified to admit this, forgotten it. But it pushed its way in front of my nose before Christmas, you betcha.
Then I forgot it again, because it was still Advent. I know! But it gets worse!
Meanwhile, my boss here at the Conspiracy posts that she got St. Andrew for her 2017 saint. He’s well-used among Conspirators, but still in good shape. So naturally I had to go compulsively find out who my 2017 saint would be, even though it was still firmly 2016, but you know, Facebook. Must click the link.
So I go, and I pray briefly, hit the button, get to the screen which tells you to pray, and I pray again. A Hail Mary this time. Hit the second button:
If you are in the Legion of Mary, you are now laughing manically and thinking about wiping up the coffee you just spewed all over your screen. Sorry about that, maybe you should read the blogs of more reputable members.
The Case of the Unblessed Rosary
So I was officially put on notice. No shirking in 2017, not for me.
Meanwhile, I again discovered that gorgeous rosary I’d re-forgotten, but had cleverly put on a shelf where I’d stumble across it more reliably. The second time, I remembered something else: I’d never gone and gotten that rosary blessed.
There are two reasons for its heretofore unblessed state:
(1) My friend who gave it to me is not a Catholic, she’s just an extremely thoughtful and generous person who had this beautiful thing she knew I’d treasure made for me.
(2) At the time I received it, I had no idea rosary-blessing was even a thing. No one tells you anything when you’re Catholic. You can go years and years not knowing all kinds of stuff “everyone knows.” Problem I might rant about another day, but for now, on to the happy ending.
So I’ve got St. Louis M. breathing down my back, a forlorn rosary dying to be put to its proper use, and hey, the year begins with the feast of Mary, Mother of God.
So yes, even though Father was miserable with a cold today at Mass and it pained me to ask him to say one more thing with that throat of his, I totally hauled that rosary out and had it blessed. And then I went home and used it. 1 down, 364 to go.
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