Category: The Catholic Weekly

The people you meet when you run

My husband and I go running together several times a week. We’re not fast and we’re not agile, but we do keep going. Over the years, we’ve come to recognize the various people you meet when you run. They’re not always the exact same people, but there are a few familiar types:

Don’t Worry, He’s Harmless

This is an earnest dog lover who has to shout above the sound of her slavering, snarling ragebeast who is expressing his harmlessness by opening his mouth so wide, you can see inside his tail. Don’t worry! Why would we worry! Why should you even consider putting such an animal on a leash, when really it’s the rest of the world that is being silly and mean by worrying! Coincidentally, on days when we meet Don’t Worry He’s Harmless, we always make the best time.

O to be young!

A deeply tanned, deeply wrinkled woman in baggy jeans and a sassy t-shirt who spends her mornings toddling through the dappled sunlight, beaming at trees. When she comes within hailing distance, she stops, throws her head back and her arms out, and croaks, “O to be young!” Then stands there with her mouth open and an expectant smile on her face. I have no idea what to say to this, so I usually say, “Oh ho ho, ha ha!” and keep running. One time she didn’t say it, and I felt so old…

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 

Sublimate your anger, $5 at a time

I won’t say who it is, because I don’t want to embarrass her, but someone recently told me about a new policy she developed for herself during the pandemic. Every time she started to get mad at someone for being selfish and irresponsible, and she wanted to righteously lash out and put them in their place , she would send a few dollars to the food pantry, instead.

At first I thought this was a sweet and good but somewhat random gesture: Instead of doing the bad thing (being mad), she was going to do the good thing (feeding the hungry). But I actually think there was actually something more interesting and meaningful going on: Something called sublimation.

Sublimation is when you take some undesirable urge and redirect the energy of it into something worthwhile and commendable. It is not repression, because you’re not denying that the urge is there, and you’re not pretending it doesn’t affect you. Instead, you’re acknowledging that the urge is powerful and forceful, and that you can’t make it just go away; so instead, you make it work for you.

The person in question felt an understandable rage and frustration when someone would rudely refuse to wear a mask, or would spread lies about vaccines, or would harass other people for complying with safety protocols. (Yes, these are all things that happen regularly.)

I think this anger qualifies as righteous anger, because these actions hurt vulnerable people the most. But she knew that following her heart by cussing them out or smacking them would just make things worse for everybody. So instead, she balled up her anger and used it to help vulnerable people. Thus the donation to the food pantry.

So it wasn’t just “do good instead of bad.” She took anger over someone hurting people, and used it to help people. The food pantry is great for this kind of thing, because there will always be poor people, and poor people will always need food (or even better, money so they can decide what kind of food to buy).

The thing about sublimation is not just that it makes good things come about, and it’s not just that it steers you away from crashing on the rocks of sin. It actually changes you. Here is where I recall one of the first really useful things I learned from my therapist years ago…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
 
Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash

We were all out of ideas, so we tried the rosary

My husband and I agreed: It’s not that it’s magic, or anything. It’s definitely not magic. But it’s unmistakable: Saying a decade of the rosary together every day is changing our lives. Not drastically. Just a little bit. But undeniably.

We are not the kind of couple you’d look at and say, “Oh yeah, they’re big into the rosary.”

I never liked the rosary. I was never sure if I was supposed to be focusing on the mystery, or the prayer, or my intentions, or some combination. It was what you did as a penance, or because your parents made you. I never knew if I was supposed to be coming up with some brilliant new insight into the life of Mary, or finding some kind of spiritual comfort in the familiarity of the *lack* of brilliant new insight, or what. And darn it, I always lose track and end up saying either nine or eleven Hail Marys.

But more and more often, dealing with the problems that naturally come with full lives, we found ourselves saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just don’t know what to do.” And while there is some relief that comes with realizing your own limitations, sometimes we really did have to do something, and we were just at sea. We do both know how to work our way through a set of beads, though, so at very least it seemed like a rosary couldn’t hurt.

We already go running together most days, so we decided to make a decade of the rosary part of the routine. Since we’ve made it a daily practice, literally come rain or shine . . . well, things have been better.

Surely, part of the improvement is attributable to human psychology: When you decide to commit to doing something to make your life better, that in itself helps. By making an effort, you’re signaling to yourself that you’re worthy of effort and worth taking care of; and this is a thought that, repeated often enough, is very likely to improve your outlook on life. It’s a self-fulfilling self-help routine.

But that doesn’t explain everything.Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image via Maxpixel (Creative Commons)

 

Frog and Toad at Cana

Not long before he died, I was complaining to my father I couldn’t persuade any of my kids to go to a Catholic college. I said I knew they were getting decent educations at the places they chose, but still, I was sure my plan was better than theirs. Half jokingly, half dead serious, I groaned,  “How will they ever find a nice Catholic to marry?”

My father said, “Well, I found one at Brooklyn Public College!” He was half joking, half serious, too: the joke being that, when he met my mother, they were both about as far from Catholic as anyone could be.

They had both been raised as non-practicing Jews, met at college when they were both cutting class, got married in secret in a hurry, had a second public ceremony to appease the parents, dabbled in Buddhism, moved to a kibbutz in Israel, came home, briefly joined a cult, found the Lord, and then eventually became Catholic — my mother and older sister first, and my father and the rest of us a year later, when they had already been married for about 20 years. They ended up as a happy old married Catholic couple, but they certainly didn’t start that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and God’s will and who belongs together and how and why marriages work… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 
Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay

Does it matter if a priest makes up his own sermon?

Would it bother you if your priest delivered ready-made sermons, written by someone else? A lot of Catholics say they wouldn’t mind in the slightest — especially if the alternative is sermons that are bland and uninspired, or rambling and incoherent, or heretical, or just plain weird.

I always felt sorry for parish priests who must, in addition to their insanely busy schedule, set aside time to come up with a sermon that is coherent, likely to speak to the congregation as he knows them, and is also tied into the readings we just heard or the day on the liturgical calendar. And some priests have great ideas to impart, but they’re just not good writers or speakers; and some aren’t fluent in the language their congregation speaks.

There are services and publications designed to solve this very problem, either offering full-blown homilies or helpful prompts; and there are public priests whose sermons are available online, making it easy for less-famous priests to borrow liberally or simply repeat the whole thing. It seems like a no-brainer: If you’re a priest who’s already pulled in a thousand directions and running dry creatively, it just makes sense to take this one thing off your plate.

That’s why I was a little surprised to learn how many priests have a visceral aversion to delivering a sermon written by someone else (even with attribution). When I asked on Twitter whether priests ever do this, only a few said they did… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

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On being less zen about suffering

I forget what it was I was offering up, but I told the Lord, “I’m offering this up to you, and I’ll try to be zen about it.”

Then I heard what I said. So what? So I hadn’t had any coffee yet, and I momentarily forgot what religion I am. I only wish it were the dumbest thing He’s ever heard me say.

It made me stop and think, though, and I realized I had to do a little recalibrating of what I meant by “offering it up.” It’s fairly easy to start thinking of it in pop psychology terms: Something is bothering me and weighing me down, so I’m going to just mentally release it. Imagine it like a bright red balloon that sails up, up, up into the sky until it’s just a little pinpoint, and now — poof! — it’s gone, and no longer my problem.

This is . . . okay. It may very well be the most emotionally healthy thing to do at some particular moment. But it’s not precisely offering it up to God, for a couple of reasons. For one reason, God is not the wide blue sky. He is not an amorphous, impersonal, placid largeness whose function is to swallow up small things until they don’t matter anymore. (That’s not even what the sky is, either, but never mind that now.)

What do we mean when we say “offer it up?” Sometimes people will distort the concept, and use the phrase as shorthand for “suck it up” or “shut up.” People will say “offer it up” when what they really mean is, “I’m going to remind you that the spiritual thing to do is to quit whining about your stupid problems.”

That, as they say, ain’t it. We have the option to offer suffering up to God precisely because even our small suffering IS real suffering, and God knows this, and even (in a way that makes more or less sense to me at various times) suffers along with us. It’s not that we’re not supposed to minimize our troubles. It’s that suffering doesn’t have to be a dead end. It doesn’t have to stay entirely with us.

People sometimes say that Catholics are obsessed with suffering, or that we have an unhealthy fascination with death and pain. And sure, anything can be overdone or twisted or made unhealthy. But Catholics (when they’re not being crazy) don’t seek out suffering; they just do a good job of acknowledging that it exists. And they offer at least the possibility of a plan for what to do with it.

At its core, the Catholic understanding of suffering has two components… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Mary Magdalen at the foot of the cross, 1420 – 1430, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain

Some vaccine incentives that would work on me

Here in the US, more than half the population is fully vaccinated against Covid.  In my state, it’s even higher. But in some regions, people are resisting getting the vaccine for a variety of reasons that range from understandable to supremely bogus.

I’ve read a few chin-stroking articles dedicated to teaching people how to overcome vaccine resistance, but a few state governments are cutting out the middle man and appealing to that most American of traits: Naked greed. It goes beyond the odd free donut here and car wash discount there. One state, for instance, is entering all vaccinated citizens into a lottery with a cash prize of a million dollars.

But these are strange times, and so many of our old values have been upended. Why not roll with that? If I hadn’t already signed up to get vaccinated within minutes of the announcement that I could, here are a few things that might get me off my keister and into the clinic line:

Flash your vaccine card, people have to wink at you. I may be the only one who would value this particular incentive, but I think winking is hilarious. It’s such an unnatural thing for most people to do with their faces, and it would keep me entertained through the darkest day.

The opportunity to access local birth records and fix the spelling of my kids’ friends’ names. I’m sorry. I know it’s insensitive and elitist. Blame the 5G chip. But still, phonics exists. Letters have meaning. It would benefit the entire community if no one was ever exposed to a Caedynne or a Jessieighkah every again.  Or a Rachael. I said what I said… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 
Image: Tim Chambers, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Failing harder, drawing better

Over spring vacation, we did a family screen detox. We all just spend too much time staring at screens, sometimes more than one screen at once, ugh, and we all needed to back way the heck off and re-learn how to do other things with our time and minds and attention. The kids astutely pointed out that actual detox in real life doesn’t even work, to which we astutely responded, “Too bad; we’re doing it anyway.”

So we did, and it was good. We spent a lot of time together, we read and crafted more, and I absolutely did not miss the bleak numbness that comes with constant, obsessive doom scrolling. One kid, who formerly spent most of his free time drawing and animating on his tablet, pulled out his old sketch pads and started drawing with pencils and ink again. He’s quite good, and I love seeing him draw either way, but I was excited to see the return of the paper and pencil. I asked him how that went.

He said that it was hard, but good. He described what a different sensation it is to feel the texture of the paper under the tool, rather than to work directly with your fingertip on a screen. He said he’d like to develop both skills, because they’re each useful and valuable in their own ways.

Then he said something I hadn’t thought of: That drawing on paper was scarier, because you can’t just disappear your mistakes. When you make a mistake on a tablet, you can just tap it twice (or whatever; I forget exactly what the gesture is) and you revert back to the previous version. But on paper, you can either try to erase a mistake, or you can try to work with it, but you can’t just make it like it never happened.

Here’s the part that got my attention … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Photo by Andrey Novik on Unsplash

Our pandemic precautions were worth it — but yes, we have been harmed

With most of our family fully vaccinated and the rest getting there as soon as we can, we’ve been talking over what we can restore to our daily lives: Where we can go, what we can do, who we can get close to. Like so many people, we gave up a lot over the past year, and we’re now cautiously figuring out what we can start taking back.

I’m finding it fairly easy to assess activities and behaviors. We’re still leaning toward the cautious end (my most medically at-risk kids are either partially vaccinated or still unvaccinated), but we’ve pieced together what seems like a rational way to assess risk; and the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter by the week, making it easier to wait patiently for the things that aren’t back to normal yet.

But I’m finding it harder to re-adjust my mental attitudes. I feel like parts of me have been permanently crippled by the psychological grind of what we had to do. I don’t have any regrets. But I’m facing the reality that what happened to us caused real harm.. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image by Ivan Radic via Flickr (Creative Commons)

In which we obtain culture

Gather ’round, friends, and I’ll tell you the story of the day the Fishers went out to get some culture, for a treat.

This is the week we decided we were pulling the plug on the internet. Not entirely, of course. Some of us need it to work, and some of us need it for school, and some of us need it to manage diabetes, and some of us . . . well, we just need it okay? But we all use it too much. So we spent this past week, vacation week, with hardly any internet at all, and we parents tried our best to fill up all that reclaimed time with something worthwhile.

Well, we tried. We went to the dump a lot, and I paid a kid to clean another kid’s room. I’m pretty sure we went to Walmart, and one time I went to see what the kids were all doing, and they were sitting on the floor, looking at the cat. Also it’s tick season, and that’s always exciting in itself. This becomes important later.

The week was wrapping up, and most honest people would probably describe it as a real smorgasbord of thrilling activities and beguiling recreation of all kinds (did I mention we went to the dump?); but I was really looking forward to this day: A trip to the art museum.

Maybe your kids don’t like art museums, but mine do. Or at least, some of them do. Or at least, they go when I make them go. This particular museum is an hour and a half away, but very kid-friendly (scavenger hunts and so on), and it’s full of cool armour and weapons, and last time we went there, the kids found any number of statues with their butts showing. Basically a dream come true for any child. And we sweetened the deal by promising dinner on the way home in an actual restaurant (one with a giant tent for outdoor seating, since most of us still aren’t vaccinated).

The first thing we needed to do was get our vaccines. Yes, in my wisdom, I bought tickets for the museum on the same day that we were getting our second covid vaccines, banking on the promise that any side effects wouldn’t kick in until we had driven to the city, scooped up some culture, and were safely back home again.

My husband and I sat in our car in the parking lot, waiting for the medic to make her way to our spot with her little tray of needles. It was overcast with a random sprinkle or two, which only served to made the buds and flowers stand out more prettily against the grey sky. “Nice weather for driving,” I said to my husband, who responded, as I recall, “Mmmphh.” The old bear, he just doesn’t see the bright side of anything.

So we got our shots, grinned in relief, and zipped home to collect the kids and pile them into the car, for art was waiting! No time to lose! Well, first I had to go on Facebook for a little bit and take care of a couple of things that struck me as vital at the time, but soon and very soon, a mere half hour behind schedule, we were ready to go. My husband would take the middle school girls in his car, and I’d get the big ones and the little ones in my SUV.

The sprinkle had turned to real rain at this point, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was the third row seat in my car was stuck in a “down” position, whence we had put it yesterday in order to haul a year’s worth of junk to the dump. I struggled with the seat, and then I called my husband and he wrestled with it, we kicked it, we lubricated it, we jiggled it, we implored it, but that seat did not want to sit up, so there weren’t enough seats.

And, my husband reported, the back of the car was crawling with ticks from the junk we hauled to the dump. I decided not to know that right now, and did some quick calculations. Right: We could still do this. The trip could still go on, as long as one person stayed home.
My teenage son heroically volunteered. They say young people just aren’t virtuous anymore, and yet there it is.Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.