Tag: The Catholic Weekly

The secret life of Barbie and other cartel wives

Remember the sweet pretend games we used to play when we were kids? Remember baby dolls, and house, and school, and When Will My Husband Return From The War, and Tie Those Ropes Up Tighter, She’s Trying To Get Away?

No? Well, maybe you don’t want to let your kids play with mine, then.

Let me back up.

Maybe you remember when Barbie dolls were the toy that bad parents let their kids play with. I definitely do. Lipsticked, high-heeled Barbie, with her extreme bodily proportions and her cheap, trampy attire, was the wicked, modernist plaything that trained little girls in the ways of eating disorders and prostitution, according to the paranoid lore of the time.

I’m not really sure if my mother believed this, or if she only thought it might possibly be true; or possibly she just didn’t have the budget to buy us Barbies; but we definitely didn’t have any Barbies when I was growing up. And then when I grew up and had my own first several kids, who were all girls, I kept Barbies out of the house, because I was nervous about what would influence their ideas of the world and themselves.

The “Barbie is the devil” argument is extreme, but there’s some truth in it. Kids do internalize what they see, and if they’re constantly told that beauty looks like an impossibly tall, spindly waif who’s 90 percent hair and eyelashes, it certainly could contribute to feelings of inadequacy, and the desire to be thinner.

But it’s harder to make that argument against Barbie today, when today’s Barbies look downright wholesome compared to the vicious faces on so many of the other doll lines out there, which I can only describe as baby sex demons.

Barbie’s expression is a bit vacuous and her legs are still too damn long, but other than that, it’s hard to object. Even the clothes are made better than they used to be; and my kids would just as soon make their own doll gowns out of tissues and duct tape anyway. Anyway, one way or the other, we got worn down, and found less and less energy for worrying about certain things, and now we have eight daughters and something like 700 Barbies.

And this particular doll company really has been doing good things in the field of inclusiveness. Rather than denying the charge that kids are learning from their dolls, they’re embracing it, and a few years ago began producing a line of stylish dolls that sport prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs, hearing aids, and braces, and have bald heads or uneven skin tone, or otherwise appear in ways that would have scared me off when I was a kid, whether I saw these things on a doll or on a person — largely because I just didn’t have much exposure to it.

Kids learn to emotionally manage ideas through play, and playing with dolls who look different from them helps them become comfortable with people who look different from them. At least that’s the idea.

But the Mattel company has larger claims than that. They funded a study that says that doll play in general (not just dolls with disabilities or body differences) builds empathy (or at least, more empathy than playing games on a tablet). And this, too, seems like common sense to me.

In the study, they found that, when children spend time playing with dolls, together and singly, it activates regions of the brain associated with social activity, with behavioral control, and processing rewarding events.

The researchers concluded that pretend play —  at least, more so than tablet play — supports social processing and empathic reasoning. Even when kids played with dolls solo, rather than with other children, it “allows the rehearsal of social interactions and social perspective taking [and] provides a unique outlet for practicing social and empathic skills.” In other words, playing with dolls teaches kids how to act with each other.

And I believe it. Really, I do. I just wonder where my particular kids fit in.

My kids never once, to my knowledge, acted out a happy domestic scene. If there was a mother with some children, she was always dashing around looking for someone to take the little brats off her hands so she could go out partying with her boyfriend, the crazed leader of a Mexican drug cartel.

Sometimes the father was involved, but he was usually a mute and grief-stricken warrior dealing with the affects of having been betrayed by his own men in the war. Or sometimes the children themselves would be wicked, and would invite each other over for picnics, only to lure their innocent playmates onto what turned out to be sacrificial altars, where they were quickly tied up and disemboweled, their squeaky cries rising up into the night air, their blood running in rivers as a libation for the hungry gods.

Who wants to come study my children? Who wants to figure out what, exactly they are learning with this rehearsal of social interactions? I’m having a hard time classifying it as “practicing empathetic skills” when the end result is that the Midge doll has been snatched bald after a particularly vicious cat fight with Anna of Arendelle, who is meaner than she looks, especially when someone gets between her and her man. And never mind that her man is Luke Skywalker, who is once again naked. Oh Luke.

I don’t know, maybe they really are learning empathy through this kind of play. Maybe if it weren’t for doll play, they’d be even less empathetic than they are now. Maybe the bitter feud that’s been raging between Ariel the mermaid and Princess Organa is all that’s been standing between my daughters and world domination. One never knows.

The moral of this story is, you can worry all you want about what’s going to happen to your kids; and you can do all the studies you like about what’s going to happen to your kids. But in the end, all children are a little bit insane, and many children are almost completely insane.

The things kids do when they’re in a lab and someone is listening in with a microphone and a clipboard is one thing; the things they do when they’re alone in their bedroom with a teeming host of plastic dolls, a head full of nonsense, and no rules whatsoever . . . well, that’s another story entirely. There’s probably nothing you can do about it, so you might as well enjoy the ride.

A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on June 6, 2022.

Photo by form PxHere

 

The cross is meant to be co-opted

When Rod Dreher announced he and his wife were divorcing, the first thing I should have done was pray for them. Instead, I braced myself for the nasty comments that I knew would follow his announcement. And they did follow, as Dreher himself predicted they would.

Dreher has plenty of ill-wishers, and not undeservedly. Despite his large audience and capable mind, he’s not a careful man, and tends to bounce from panic to panic, often resting only in exasperating self-indulgence that’s frustrating even to people who agree with some of his views. And some of the things he believes are appalling.

Still, I guess my corner of the internet is somewhat sheltered, because I wasn’t prepared for the avalanche of delight that followed the news. This wasn’t a case of just desserts, like a bad boss getting fired himself, or a thief having his own possessions stolen. It was a man whose ideas people disagreed with announcing that he had been struggling for nine years to save his marriage, and had finally failed, and it was partially his fault. To respond to such news with glee is to pull hell down on your head. 

One comment in particular stood out, because it presented itself as correcting his christianity. A woman jeered at him for using an image from The Passion as the header image for the essay where he briefly describes his suffering. Dreher was, in fact, in Jerusalem as he wrote that column, and had been praying at Golgotha during Holy Week, so it would be almost unnatural if an image of the crucifixion hadn’t suggested itself to him as a natural illustration for intense personal pain. But this commenter excoriated him for comparing himself to Jesus. She said it was typical self-aggrandizement for him to co-opt the imagery of the cross for his own suffering.

But that is the point of the cross. 

That is why the execution of our savior was public. That is why it was done in the middle of the day, in front of crowd, on top of the hill: So everyone could see, and so everyone would know that Jesus wept and bled and lost the strength of his limbs just like us.  Just like anyone who had ever suffered until that day, and just like anyone who ever would suffer. That’s the point. The cross is meant to be co-opted. That’s what it’s for. 

I think that the woman who scoffed at Rod Dreher probably didn’t have a lot of theological thoughts in her head, and mainly just didn’t like Rod Dreher, and wouldn’t have sympathy for anything he did or said. It is, perhaps, fairly common to think of christianity mainly as a sort of overarching philosophy that describes social services that should be available to other people, and it doesn’t even occur to many that it’s ever meant to be personal to each of us.

In any case, it’s quite common for people who are more fair-minded, and who don’t reflexively kick people who are already down, to do a sort of defensive gate-keeping when it comes to suffering: To say that this or that isn’t real suffering, or that it isn’t authentic or worthy or profound enough to call itself actual suffering. That it’s something lesser, something we should be embarrassed to admit we struggle with.

Well, there is suffering, and there is suffering. I remember hearing how a friend of the family was sitting by the bedside of her dying husband. She had spent the last few months increasingly at his bedside in between her own jobs, wondering how she would care for their many children if he didn’t pull through. His roommate had the TV on, tuned to a televangelist channel, and the notorious Tammy Faye was on screen, weeping into the camera as usual, her gummy mascara bleeding into the neck of her expensive silk blouse as she begged for money for Jesus. A nurse came into the room and brushed past the widow-to-be, looked dolefully up at the TV, and asked the family plaintively, “Aww, why’s Tammy crying?” 

So there is suffering, and there is suffering. This is true. There is such a thing as taking an impartial look at another human’s life and saying, “No, it’s not that bad.” Not as bad as what happened to Jesus. 

And I remember some thoughtful, painful conversations around the painting “Mama,” which shows a Pieta where the dead Jesus closely resembles George Floyd. The artist, Kelly Latimore, told the NYT that he “always responds ‘yes’ when asked whether the painting depicts Jesus or Floyd.”

The artist goes on to say:

“It’s not an either-or scenario. Is it George Floyd? Yes. Is it Jesus? Yes. There’s sacredness in every person.”

I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. There is suffering, and there is suffering, and it’s worth having respectful conversations about just how firmly to draw the line between our suffering and Jesus’. It is one thing to say that he is like us, and another to say that we are like him. 

What I do know is that Jesus is like is in all things but sin, but for many of us, this never feels real until we suffer. That’s where we meet Jesus, and know him, and recognize him, and feel his aid: In suffering. Sometimes that’s the only place we meet him.

And so it’s a very serious thing when fellow Christians want to take that commonality away, on the grounds that we’re not worthy to count ourselves that close to Christ, or to feel that we have so much in common with him. 

Because that, too, is the point: We’re not worthy. That’s why he came for us. Our unworthiness to have anything in common with God is the very reason why we need a savior. 

There is suffering, and there is suffering, but there is only one man who suffered for the purpose of public consumption, as it were. No, not as it were: Literally. Catholics, at very least, should be used to this idea. 

Jesus’ suffering is universal; it is for everyone. And at the same time, it is personal. It is for each of us as individuals, and it means what it must in our specific lives. The cross is for us to use, to co-opt, to identify with, to look to, to cling to, to use however we can so we do not fall into the netherworld. That is what it’s for. As long as it is sincere, it is fair game. 

The suffering of other people, though — yes, even the suffering of pundits we don’t like — is not for us to judge, and certainly not for us to use, certainly not for our own amusement or for clout on Twitter. Be careful, friends. As much as the cross is there for us to use, other people’s suffering is very much not for us to use. Very much not. 

 

**
A version of this essay was first published at The Catholic Weekly on May 10, 2022.

We were made for hope

The morning news is rarely uplifting. Even less so, the morning news that includes an interview with the man who recently headed the government agency on biomedical and public health research.  But not too long ago I heard just such an interview, and quite unexpectedly, it gladdened my heart.

The man is Francis Collins, and until recently, he headed the National Institute of Health, one of the agencies tasked with combating COVID in the US. He is also, as the public radio host pointed out in her introduction, a Christian.

I guess I’ve been hiding under a rock for several years, because I haven’t been aware that an evangelical Christian who used to be an atheist has been head of this agency for the last 12 years. Now, this isn’t a tidy story. He has apparently been a thorn in the side of the “haven’t we outlawed this religion nonsense yet” crowd, but at the same time, under his leadership, the NIH has gone full steam ahead on some grossly unethical research. 

His personal faith is not really what this essay is about, though; although it was pleasant to hear a man so humbly describing his conversion story, and a public radio host listening so respectfully. If you haven’t heard it, here is how he told it to the host, Rachel Martin:

“It was medical school. It was that third year of medical school, where you’re not in the classroom anymore. You’re on the hospital wards. You’re sitting at the bedside of good North Carolina people whose lives are coming to an end, sometimes with a great deal of pain and suffering. And you’re realizing your medical tools are inadequate to actually help them very much.

And I had a moment where a patient of mine, who I’d gotten kind of attached to – an elderly woman kind of like my grandmother – who shared her faith with me and then turned to me one afternoon and said, you know, Doctor, I’ve told you about my beliefs, and you haven’t said anything. What do you believe? What do you believe? Nobody ever quite asked me that question. And, Rachel, at that moment, I realized, I have no idea. I have settled on atheism because it was the answer I was most comfortable with, and it meant I didn’t really have to look into this. But I’m a scientist. I’m not supposed to make big decisions without looking at evidence. I’ve got to look into it.”


What he did next was to ask a pastor friend some challenging questions, and the man directed him toward the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which led him to understand that science is meant to answer one kind of question, and religion is meant to answer another. You don’t have to choose one or the other, despite what so many on both sides of our deeply divided society believe, or want to believe.

The host asked him about that divide, and about how he finds hope. He responded that he finds it in his faith. Then he said:

“I also have hope that human nature, despite all of its foibles, is basically put together in a way that over time we find a way to do the right thing, even after making a lot of mistakes along the way.”

This struck me as a message from Heaven. And this is the part I really want to focus on.

Here is a man who believes that God made us. And how did God make us? To be good. Maybe not all the time, and maybe not perfectly, and maybe not right away, but eventually, stumblingly, partially, or even just as a race: That’s what we do. That’s what the human race is: It is good. I guess I had forgotten that!

It’s become commonplace, in these dreadful, exhausting times, to look backward through history and to see plainly the fruitless cycles we seem doomed to walk through, over and over again. We struggle, we gain ground, we flourish, and then we come to ruin, over and over and over again. This is the story of mankind, on every continent, in every age, sooner or later, in big ways and in small. It seems like a story of constant, inescapable ruin. Fruitless, pointless.

But here is a man who saw this cycle as a story not of repeated failure, but of repeated hope. He is 71 years old, and he still thinks that people are basically put together in such a way that they are oriented toward the good, at least to try. This is a thing he’s saying in the beginning of the year 2022, after leading the fight he leaded, and after seeing what he’s seen.

I do believe, as we should all believe as Catholics, that there will eventually come an end to the world. There will not just be endless cycles to human life. Human history as we know it will someday cease, and a new age will begin, and we don’t know what that will look like. But I think that, right up until that time (which, Jesus insists, we do not know), it’s our job to keep turning and turning over the soil to find the next harvest.

It’s been a deeply discouraging few years, for countless, cascading reasons. We may have allowed ourselves to half believe that we’re just plain run out of goodness, as a human race.

But that’s not how we’re made.

What do you believe? What do you believe? I believe we were made by God to be good. We were made by God for constant conversion. There’s always the possibility of conversion, always the chance to try again to do good. If an atheist doctor can decide to ask hard questions about existence, then I, who already know about God, can decide to look for Him in my fellow fooling fumbling humans. We can ask God for help, and we can find that goodness, one more time. 

 

Photo by Kumaraguru via Pixahive 
A version of this essay was originally published on March 8, 2022 in The Catholic Weekly.

The news is important. Try turning it off.

I wrote the following essay shortly before the Roe v Wade leak happened, and now this is all truer than ever. 

When I was young, I liked listening to the news just because I liked hearing different accents from around the world. And this is one of the reasons I will often play the news on the radio when my kids are around.

But it’s a risky choice. We may end up hearing a neat, entertaining story like this one about long-lost wax cylinders, which we all enjoyed on the way to school.; or at very least, they may be passively gleaning some awareness of the world around them, which is a good thing.

But of course current events are mostly not kid-friendly, and pretty often I have to quickly change the channel because there’s a story about something kids don’t need to know about — or it’s presented in a way that is antithetical to our worldview, but it’s too hard to give a cogent counterargument while we’re driving along making five different stops.

And then sometimes the news is just . . . too real. It’s too real to be entertainment, and I have to admit that that’s how I’m using it. I’m using a flow of information about the lives (and often the deaths) of real people as a kind of auditory wallpaper to make a pleasing background for our own life, and we chatter over it as we will, no matter what kind of thing is being reported. This is something to think twice about — not only when I’m choosing what to expose my kids to, but when I’m choosing what I listen to, myself.

News isn’t entertainment. When we treat it like it is — keeping it on constantly, having it on when we’re not really attending to it, hearing the same stories repeated endlessly throughout the day — we run the risk of trivializing the things that are being reported. It’s almost inevitable. We’re training ourselves to hear words like “mass shootings” and “atrocities” and “famine” and “sexual assault” and not blink an eye, but just continue buttering our toast or flipping through Twitter or updating our spreadsheets.

It has a second effect, too, because we can’t tune it out entirely: Even if we don’t listen to some hyperpartisan purveyor of shock headlines, but instead choose some mainstream, middle-of-the-road objective reporting source, some of the emotional content of the news will filter into our consciousness. And it will make us feel bad.

It will feed our anxiety, our dread, our sense of helplessness and rage and doom. It will give us the sensation that the enemy is outside the walls, and we will always hear its muffled roar as we go about our day. How could that fail to affect our mental and emotional state? 

So we’re crafting ourselves the worst of both worlds: We’re simultaneously deadening our sense of empathy, and heightening our sense of personal grievance. No wonder people are at each other’s throats when they actually meet in person. We feel like we’re in constant danger, and we feel like no one else is completely human. A guaranteed recipe for conflict, if not outright violence.

There is a lot amiss in the world, but one thing we can easily change right away is to change how we consume the news. If we want to know what’s going on in the world — and we should! It’s important — we can find that out deliberately, in a limited, controlled fashion: say, once or twice or three times a day.

It won’t be easy. We’re very used to the idea that the news is just on, all the time. It’s everywhere, in waiting rooms and lobbies and on all of our phones and computers and social media feeds, always. It’s hard to get away from. But we may be more in control of it than we realize. We may be able to limit it, and be more deliberate about when we consume it, than we want to admit.

We may have internalized the idea that we have a duty to keep up, to stay current, to the minute, with the news. That there’s some virtue in retweeting a headline first. Who do you suppose gives us that idea? Clearly, it’s the people who make money by keeping us tuned in. They have a vested interest in making us feel like we’re actually doing something wrong and irresponsible by turning the news off. And in turn, they feel the pressure to amp up the novelty and shock value in what we hear, whether there’s actually something new and important and shocking happening or not. It’s an almost entirely artificial cycle, fueled by money.

But once we recognize it for what it is, we can opt out of it. Decide how much news we really need, and then otherwise, simply opt out. Don’t retweet it. Don’t chase down every headline. Don’t have the radio or TV on in the background all day. Just opt out. 

We don’t have to become hermits or live in stony silence. We can choose to listen to music. Listen to someone explain music. Listen to podcasts. Listen to stories. Listen to audiobooks. Listen to interviews with interesting, knowledgeable people. Listen to wild birdsong.

If something important happened, it will still be important in a few hours, I promise (and if something life-shattering happened, it will make its way through to you, I promise). But we can make the choice to nourish our humanity, rather than eroding it with a constant stream of news-as-entertainment. Because we really have to acknowledge that that stream is not making us more informed. It is one of the things making us less human.

 

***
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
A version of this essay was first published at The Catholic Weekly on April 8, 2022.

Sing, muse, of the anger of our children

One of the great things about having a big family is that somebody is always mad at you. When I say “great,” I mean that somebody is always mad at you anyway, no matter what you do, so you might as well enjoy it.

It’s hard to explain. I never would have anticipated it, but there is a special kind of exquisite glee that comes with knowing that you’ve revolted your children down to their very souls.  I suppose it’s a small act of defiance, like a conquered people crouching in their cell blocks, grinning at their oppressors as they sing forbidden songs and eat forbidden . . . mouse sandwiches . . . I forget what we were talking about.

Anyway, the point is, I was nearly forty years old before I finally said certain things to my mother about the mistakes she had made in raising me, and it felt very psychologically important to me at the time, and I guess I’m glad I said it; but when I think of her being nearly seventy years old and having to still hear about things she did wrong thirty years ago, I’m kind of amazed she didn’t just smack me. My mother was a good woman, and didn’t do a lot of the smacking she was entitled to.

But this isn’t a heavy essay. I don’t want to talk about all the horrible mistakes one can make with one’s children, the wrong responses, the coldness when there should have been warmth, the weariness when there should have been attention, the sarcasm when there should have been sympathy, the times we forgot to pick them up, the times we got them the wrong present, the times we called them the wrong name, the times we did the wrong thing, and weren’t even sorry, and instead wrote stupid essays about it for clout on the internet.

Instead, I want to tell you about the worst thing my husband and I ever did to our children. They were all unanimously, instantly disgusted with us at the time, and as the years have passed, their revulsion has only deepened.

It has to do with a couch.

Someday, it may come to pass that the Fishers will buy a brand new couch. We’re not there yet, but in the last few years, we have started buying our couches at respectable used furniture stores, and this is quite a step up. We started out our family life acquiring couches by skulking into better neighborhoods at night and seeing what they had dragged out to the curb, that might fit in our minivan, and that seemed fine.

But on this particular day a few years ago, we were still halfway through our evolution from garbage pickers to respectable used furniture buyers, and we had made arrangements to buy a couch from someone online, someone who turned out to be . . . less than respectable.

I seem to have blotted the details out of my memory, but this couch we were going to buy must have been pretty horrible, because we came home without it. But we knew the kids were all waiting in an empty living room, champing at the bit to see the splendid new couch we had found for them. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s disappointing kids. So, I did what any normal mother would do in these circumstances: I said to my husband, “Let’s pretend we got an invisible couch.”

Now, one of my husband’s main jobs in life is to listen to my ideas and say, “No, that’s dumb.” But for some reason, he didn’t do his job on this day. Instead, the two of us parked the rented truck in the driveway, opened the back, and went into an elaborate pantomime of carefully, laboriously unloading first the cushions and then the body of a heavy, unwieldy, slightly wobbly, completely invisible couch.

We shooed the kids out of the way, had some imaginary trouble figuring out how to wedge it through the door and had to back out a few times, scuffed our way through the dining room, slid some furniture out of the way, and set the nothing down, panting, and then asked the kids what they thought.

Well, they thought we were a couple of idiots. And they still do.

I, on the other hand, fall off my actual real couch laughing every time I think about this story. It may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done for no reason at all. Those kids were so profoundly disgusted with us, and for once, we totally deserved it. Somehow, that feels like a some kind of score was evened up.

Let me sing you the song of my people! We’re morons, my husband and I, and there’s nothing our kids can do about it.

***
A version of this essay was originally published on February 22, 2022 in The Catholic Weekly.

Photo by artistmac via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Small ways to make your Triduum more holy (even if you’re busy)

Nobody told me it was Holy Week this week! And so I didn’t know.

I totally did it to myself. I usually feel so terrible about spending Holy Week frantically doing last-minute shopping for frilly dresses and tights and chocolate and candy for the kids, when I ought to be pondering my own mortality. This year, vowing to keep my priorities straight, I did all the shopping and fussing far ahead of time, and filled up my bedroom with bags and parcels of Easter goodies all packed away, ready to be brought out when the season was right.

The upshot was that, when Holy Week actually arrived, I had no clue. I had deprived myself of the usual cues of furtive guilt and desperation, and there was nothing to replace it. Now it’s almost Good Friday, everything’s ready, and I’m completely disoriented.

Jokes aside, I have been thinking about how to keep Holy Week holy — beyond, of course, the traditional fasting, praying, and giving alms, which I assume you already know about! Very few of us can simply drop out of our everyday routine and focus entirely on spiritual things to prepare for Easter. We have to live our everyday lives while still somehow preparing ourselves for the most holy and solemn and meaningful three days of the entire year. How do we pull that off?

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Loïc LLH, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

A good way to use the adoration chapel

When I was in college, my roommate and I used to hang out in the chapel on campus sometimes. She liked to do her homework there, because it was so quiet and peaceful. Sometimes, if she had the place to herself, she would sing, because the acoustics were so good. I thought both practices were a little weird, and not really the right way to use the chapel, which ought to be used for prayer.

My best friend and I would sometimes hurtle into the chapel and land on our knees to rattle off a few desperate decades of the rosary, begging Mary to help us pass some test we hadn’t studied for, because we had spent the night drinking beer in the woods, instead. I knew some of the upperclassmen (including our big sisters) thought this was a pretty shoddy practice, because the chapel was a spot for quiet, contemplative prayer, not vending machine-style intercessions.

Then there were some tormented evenings throughout my early adulthood when I would turn up in any unlocked church I could find just because it was open and I didn’t know where else to go, and all I could do was sit there and feel terrible because I didn’t know how else to feel. It seemed like at very least it couldn’t possibly hurt to feel that way inside the walls of a chapel.

Then for a long time, after I started my family, I was too busy to go to the chapel. There were years and years where I was barely even physically at Mass on Sundays, because I was always wrestling with a toddler in the foyer, or dragging a screaming baby out of the building, or trotting back and forth to the bathroom with a kindergartener. I looked back on those previous years when the chapel just stood there waiting for me, and I could pop in any time I wanted, and I couldn’t believe how poorly I used that precious time.

There was a good long spell a few years ago when I made wonderful use of the chapel. I had a whole program of prayer worked out, and I made sure I followed through on all of it every time. I prayed every kind of prayer I knew how to do, and I brought a list of people to pray for. I was so busy and so thorough, and did so well. I kept this up for as long as I could, until I got too busy again.

And I’m still busy, sometimes miserably busy, but I decided to sign up anyway. Or I guess because of how busy I am, I decided to sign up. I have started to figure out that the busy-ness doesn’t go away; it just shifts and takes on a different character.

Now when I go to the chapel, I don’t use my time well. I don’t use my time at all. I just sit there. These are strange days, and it seems like there is less and less I am sure of, fewer and fewer things I feel comfortable putting into words, even silently, even in prayer. So mostly I just sit. The time passes slowly.

Sometimes I feel like a rock at the bottom of the ocean, much too heavy to be stirred much by waves moving overhead. Sometimes I fall asleep, and that doesn’t seem so bad.

That’s the good thing about not having an agenda: Even if you can’t manage to stay conscious, you’re not missing anything. All you’re trying to do is be there, and you can do that when you’re asleep. Just be there.

Somebody said that the way to encounter God is to empty oneself, because God cannot bear emptiness, and will fill you with Himself. I can’t say that I have noticed that happening. I have noticed that I have some pity on my past self, though. I no longer look back and think, “Oh, what a fool I was to use the chapel so poorly. I should have known better; I should have done differently.”

Instead, I think, “At least I was there. I was sitting there with the only one in the world who is always glad to see me.” And that’s a good way to use the chapel. Whatever I had at the time, whatever I was, I brought with me, and that’s what I’m doing now, even though it looks a lot like nothing at all. All I do is sit. At least I’m there. I believe it’s a good way to use the chapel.

A version of this essay was first published at The Catholic Weekly on February 16, 2022.

 

Things I learned while DIYing

Lately, I have discovered I have a knack for minor home renovations, and by “minor” I mean “the entire household gets turned upside down for 72 hours,” and by “knack” I mean “nobody stops me.”

It started when I painted the kitchen and put in a new floor and trim and backsplash and ceiling, and then we put in a new bathroom floor (although that was because we had to, due to Sudden Catastrophic Bathroom Collapse; not recommended), and also several new walls and new tiles; and then suddenly the living room ceiling felt intolerable as it was, and so did the dining room ceiling, and then I was like, YOU KNOW WHAT THIS DINING ROOM NEEDS? And because it was afraid of me, it quavered out, “Please give me yellow and white paint and a new black and white floor with stars on it, and install a breakfast nook!” and so I did.

As a chronic over-sharer, I generally document my progress on social media, and people kindly say things like. “You have so much energy!” and this is true. It’s not a virtue. I was just born that way, and I choose to channel it into home renovation instead of world domination, because I don’t know what I did with my passport. They also say ,”You are learning how to do so many things!” And this is also true. In a certain sense.

Here is what I have learned about home renovation projects:

If you’re attempting a project you’ve never done before, always start with the most visible part of the room. This way, by the time you’ve actually acquired some technical skill, you’ll have worked your way around to the part that’s behind the box of mismatched roller skates, and no one will ever see the fruits of your great proficiency; but the section that looks like it was done by a baboon with a meth problem will be front and center for you and your guests to behold every day of your life.

Relatedly: If it’s something you already know how to do, always start the project, when you have plenty of energy and enthusiasm, with the big, easy parts, and leave the fiddly, exhausting, trying bits for the end when you are seeing double, the back of your neck is on fire, and your confidence and self-esteem are at rock bottom.

The reasons for these two rules are unclear, but I follow them every single time, no matter what the project, so they must be vital.

Also important to remember: Many of today’s problems have solutions the seeds for which were planted in your brain many years ago. In today’s project, for instance, I accidentally glued the front door shut. I’m not especially eager to have guests anyway, but my husband was on his way home with hamburgers, so it was looking pretty tragic for a minute.

But then I remembered a little something I had learned many years ago in physics class, a little something about inclined planes, and thinking about it made me remember how stupid I used to feel in physics class, because I never knew what was going on, because I never did the homework; and feeling stupid makes me feel mad, and I got so mad that I kicked the door really hard, and it popped open! And then my husband came home with the hamburgers. So you see, physics really works.

It’s not just you: They really have started printing directions smaller and lighter. What helps me is to fetch my reading glasses, turn on my phone’s flashlight, sometimes take a photo with my phone, enlarge it, and THEN ignore it completely and do it however I feel like, and then become baffled and enraged when it turns out horrible, the glue doesn’t stick, the pieces don’t join, the screws strip, the bits fall out, the center does not hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, and also some stray macaroni gets painted right into the windowsill. It’s not just you. It’s a conspiracy.

It’s very easy to lose track of time when you’re immersed in a long project, but you do want to pace yourself. If you’re not sure what time it is and you can’t see a clock, just look at the bit of work in front of you and imagine hitting it with a hammer. If the very notion makes your brain go red with hot, hot desire, the hour is probably Late, and you should probably take a little break. Stand up for a while, stretch your legs, and go lurk by the kitchen sink and eat fistfuls of stale cake and questionable deli meat. This will clear your head until you can admit to yourself that you already hit the thing with the hammer, probably more than once, and you know perfectly well that’s not what “wabi sabi” means.

You can probably cover the smash marks with caulk, though. But you still may want to stop for the day, because the doctor has asked you to try to avoid the redbrain thing if possible.

Finally, don’t forget your yoga. Many of the stretches and poses will come in handy to help you sustain your peace of mind throughout the project. For instance, suddenly climb down from your ladder and assume corpse pose. This not only relieves tension in your whole body, it terrifies the children, and they stop asking stupid questions and run away.

I hope these tips help you in any projects you may undertake. Remember, if you have any questions at all, do not hesitate to reach out and ask, and I’ll be happy to help if I can. My door is always open. Unless I’ve glued it shut again.

 

A version of this essay was originally published in The Catholic Weekly on February 20, 2022.

You’re supposed to fail at Lent

The dew is off the rose, now, Lent-wise.

Whatever sacrifices we embraced or extra devotions we decided to take on, the novelty has worn off, and we have probably found ourselves failing. Maybe we even made a point of saying that this year was going to be different, and yet here it is: Not.

I have some good news for you. You’re supposed to fail at Lent.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: photo by Chris Waits via Flickr (Creative Commons)

The Church you’re building

When St. Francis had a vision of Jesus, he made an honest mistake. The Lord told him to rebuild his church, so St. Francis, with a willing heart, set to work rebuilding the literal, physical church right in front of him. Block by block, he put the chapel of San Damiano back together. 

But of course Christ had bigger plans. He meant for St. Francis to do the much vaster work of renewing and restoring the Church in general, which was in a much sorrier state. 

I have been thinking of this lately when I hear people — myself, included, say something a lot of people have been saying lately: “I’m so tired of the Church.” 

There are a lot of reasons to be tired. There are a lot of reasons to be weary, discouraged, disgusted, fed up, furious, maybe even done with the Church.

First, let me be clear. There are people who feel this way, who have truly done their best to seek out the good, true, and beautiful in the institution founded by Christ, but it seems that every Catholic they encounter is on a mission to show them the bad, false, and ugly. I know people who are trying tremendously hard to refocus their hearts and minds on what is essential and eternal about the faith, but they are met, again and again, with Catholics who wound them profoundly. And I will not tell them that they should just work harder to get past it.

I know people who have tried to get away from what is hurting them in the church, and they have found that they can’t, because they’ve already been wounded so deeply. They carry their wounds with them, and when they walk, they bleed. I’m not going to tell people in this state what they ought to do, or where they ought to go. 

But that’s only some people. There are others, who, when they say, “I’m so tired of the Church,” are in a different place entirely. I know, because sometimes this is me.

Sometimes, when I’m in this mode and I say “the Church,” what I really mean is a specific, self-selected group of celebrity Catholics I chose to perseverate on. When I say “the Church,”  I really mean a narrow collection of reliable sources of gross news that I can return to again and again whenever I want to reassure themselves that wicked people are still wicked, and they’re definitely not like me. I mean that I’ve fallen into a perverse habit of seeking out the things that make me feel bad about the faith and about my fellow Catholics, and it works: I do feel bad, all the time. 

Very often, when I say I’m tired of the Church, what I really mean is that I’m tired of the weird, ugly little quasi-church I’ve half-consciously built around myself out of sheer cynicism and snark and self righteousness. It’s a very flimsy, ugly, broke-down church indeed. No wonder I don’t like it there.

But I go there because it scratches some kind of unhealthy psychological itch. It makes me feel like I’m canny and hardened enough to see through façades, and world-weary enough to reject them with disgust — and there’s more relish in this disgust than I like to admit. There’s even an element of belonging to an in-group of people who feel this way. Some part of my psyche gets rewarded for hanging around in the crummy old ruins that I profess to despise, and going back there again and again. 

This is a real phenomenon, too,  just as real, and just as threatening to souls, as the phenomenon of people who’ve been gravely wounded and cannot seem to find a safe home in the church no matter how hard they look.

If you, like me, find yourself complaining often about how tired you are of the Church, it’s worthwhile to look at your habits, and see what state of mind they support. What do they build? 

But here’s the thing. In either case, we’re talking about people who have been wounded, whether those wounds are shallow or deep, or whether they’ve been self-inflicted or not.

In either case, let us think about St. Francis.

He wasn’t actually wrong to start with working on rebuilding the physical chapel of San Damiano. Jesus did mean that he wanted Francis to restore the Church as a whole through the institution of the order of Franciscans. That is what he eventually did, and that is what the Franciscans continue, through their works and prayers, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, to carry out in their continual work of perpetual restoration of the Body of Christ to this day. It wasn’t just about that one little chapel; it was about the whole Church, and still is.

But God was also asking Francis to look around and see where he was, physically, spiritually, personally. He was asking him to start with what he, himself could actually control.

And this is what Jesus asks of everybody, always. 

Sometimes the problem with the Church is something that is very much out of my control — something like how some archbishop is handling the sex abuse crisis, or something like a specific doctrine that I can’t get my head around.

But there are still rebuilding projects I can handle, that have more to do with how I dwell inside the church than I may realize. Habits of prayer; habits of how I allow myself to think about other people. What I prioritize each day. How tightly I hold onto sins. How ardently I seek goodness. How much I really mean to change when I say I’m sorry. How much I’m willing to acknowledge change in others, when it happens. What I do first thing every day; what I do last. 

I always do well when I remember that Francis got his commission at the foot of the cross. 

The chapel of San Damiano wasn’t empty. There was a crucifix on the wall, and it was Jesus crucified who spoke to him, who told him to rebuild. I always do well when I remember this, when I picture this. 

There is a huge difference between “I don’t like or understand or accept this doctrine of the church, so I will spend all my time hanging around with ex-Catholics who tweet snarky hot takes making fun of it” and “I don’t like or understand or accept this doctrine of the church, so I will commit to bringing it to prayer at the foot of the cross over and over again, trying not to have any expectations for what will happen next.” There is a huge difference. You can tell me your experience has been different, and I will believe you, but this has been my experience. 

If you‘re one of the many, many Catholics who looks around at the Church today and sees what a poor state it’s in, you‘re not wrong. But when you‘re done looking around, look up. Are you at the foot of the cross? I will not tell you where you need to end up. But I know this is where you need to start. 

 

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A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on January 7, 2021. 

Image: Detail of photo by Renaud Camus via Flickr (Creative Commons)