Regina Doman's Blog: Regina Doman's Updates

Starting on Substack

On the occasion, of my son Joshua's birthday this year, I’ve decided to turn my blog into a Substack. First, because I’ve become a voracious reader of Substacks, much as I used to be a voracious blog reader. I pretty much followed Rod Dreher over here and then discovered N.S. Lyons and Michael Warren Davis, and when I saw my friend Mary Ellen Barrett had jumped on board, I felt an invitation of the sort I hadn’t felt since high school. You know, when the older students are doing something amazing and you’re kind of hanging out and watching in an admixture of admiration and envy, and then one of them turns around, and with a shock you recognize her as someone who knows you, and she says, “Hey! Come on! You can do this too!”

So here I am.

Having teenagers of my own and moving into teaching high school pretty much full time kind of killed my writing. I’ve always enjoyed teens, ever since I found myself the oldest of a large family whose younger members kind of thought I was cool. Being eight years younger than me or more, they hadn’t been to high school with me, so they didn’t know how awkward and so uncool I had been, but by the time they were teens, I was graduated from college, and I found I could still speak their language. This ability continued even though I got married and had kids of my own. I wrote young adult novels, taught other novelists how to write YA novels and had a cool gig as an editor, first at Sophia Institute Press and then at my own Chesterton Press. I even recorded a video series on how to teach teens to write novels, but when the publisher who had requested the series backed out, I never finished it, and it languishes on a hard drive awaiting the final edit.

On the personal side, I made the professional move to teaching English in our local hybrid high school and am going on my seventh year there, still talking to teens about literature and life. It feels like extremely meaningful work and now I understand at last why people teach, but I admit that takes a lot of my energy. Oh, and I did I mention I have ten kids? I am no supermom, but my children are lovely people who get even more interesting the older they get, and so far they have married interesting people too.

Aside from life, Facebook and social media drained my blogging, as it did for many of us. It’s so much more fun to discuss other people’s writings than to write yourself, as many of us know. I liked that on Facebook I could post something from my blog and reach hundreds of people. But it bothered me that Facebook had ballooned to a population larger than any country. And I saw how much time Facebook stole from my workday, but I was in denial until the 2020 election year and the sudden revelation of how much Meta-manipulation there was on social media, and I knew I had to bail. So I did. Losing my loudspeaker kind of killed my blog. It’s tough to write without an audience.

I have been trying to find my way back to writing regularly ever since.

Two projects have obsessed me. One is a new series of novels I have been working on for fifteen years which I am committed to finishing before I die, but about which I must remain coy. It’s unconnected to any of my previous novels (so sorry, my fans), so if I finish it, I will have to basically reinvent my audience. I am trusting in the Lord to take care of this, if I ever finish it. (Insert silent prayers for grace.)

Secondly has been what I call the Culture Recovery Journals. This is a sort of wholistic vision of how to live as a Catholic in this particular juncture in time. I write about Catholics because I am one, and as our culture rapidly falls apart, I feel the need to snatch things from the wreckage that I want my children and I to hold onto. This is what I decided to make into my Substack project.

It is not a culture warrior endeavor. I’m not down on culture war: being in the pro-life movement has taught me respect for the culture warriors, but this blog is more about the war of the microcosm of my own twisted heart. Christ told us not to fear those who kill the body but fear him who has the power to cast into hell. I can choose hell by my own selfish will, so I have learned to fear the treachery of my own heart. I will speak about that war.

I am not a man, and thus this project of culture recovery is not the least bit philosophical in the grand sense. I don’t have a sort of large scale plan for how to order the lives of other people, let alone how to run a government. But I am a woman, and I can think about how to order my own life, and what to teach my children, so I’m starting there. John Paul II called women culture creators, so this is my contribution to creating culture, although honestly it’s more like arranging artifacts created by others into a home-like structure, which is what housekeeping sort of is, if you think about it. In my 29 years of housekeeping, I may have once created a table from scratch, but like most of us, I work with furniture—and clothing, and housewares— created by others. But there is certainly an art to arrangement of artifacts to make a homely house, and so these journals are more about that.

When I began these journals privately in 2016 or so, I was hampered by the thought that others would object to this project as a call to “head for the hills.” Well, the times, they have certainly changed. The creek is rising fast and washing away so much of what we assumed could be counted on. The question before us all, Catholic or not, is not whether to preserve culture but how.

So if you're interested in this topic, please subscribe to my Substack. I hope to keep it free always and for everyone, but if you like what I write and want to support me, you have the option of donating by a paid subscription. And I always appreciate your sharing what I write on social media or just among your friends. 

As always, thank you for reading, and God bless you. Please pray for me!

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Retrospective at 53

For a long time I've been silent. There have been many reasons, which can generally be categorized by the tiresome category of aging. I am older, past fifty, and while I never particularly wanted to stay young - my youth was incredibly happy, especially by comparison with the lives of so many others - I do miss having energy and focus. But largely my growing-up years were punctuated by small miseries of emptiness and frustration, miseries which largely dissipated with the freedom that comes from being an adult. I am grateful for youth: I am happy to let it pass down the stream, having gone through it and seen it pass by. I don't really wish it to return. But it is worthwhile to take a look back.

Unlike so many Gen Xers, as a youth, I became aware of the major sins of the age without participating in any of them. I never smoked a joint, sneaked a drink, or tried to figure out how much I could "get away with" without crossing "the line," as Catholics used to say. You may think I was insufferably good or tame, but I wasn't particularly. I was too lazy and self-absorbed to be good. And I don't think I was tame. From childhood I wrote and staged plays and shows for my family and friends; as a teenager, I wore what would now be called vintage fashion without shame; I laughed long and hard with friends, planned and executed elaborate practical jokes, jumped in city fountains, sang Broadway songs in public places, and overall had far more fun than should have been allowed without straying into those dark and sinister clouds hovering over the young at the close of the twentieth century. My friends and I used to say we couldn't afford to drink: we were crazy enough while sober. 

I was, however, always a bit of the hard-nosed Pharisee. One aspect of the Pharisees which most of us forget is that they were mostly correct in their lifestyle choices: they were just incredibly proud of being right, and lost their souls because of it. If you are graced enough to not have fallen into the habitual sins of the age, not being a Pharisee is a good life goal to have. I am a reformed one, and must always be wary of sinking back into that danger.

As a child, I was devout without being pious: I didn't particularly like rote prayers or kneeling or little devotions, but I loved God expansively and much preferred the quiet of empty church buildings, the smell of worn pages of a Bible, and the resonance of hymns shouted to the sky to the cheap plastic toys, rock n' roll, lipstick, motorcycles, or the desaturated despair of movies in the 70s.  The 1970s was a horrible time to be an artistic child. Frizzy hair, deliberately shoddy fashions, screaming, and artistic sloppiness in everything from art in museums to poorly printed children's books to the creaking animation of Hanna Barbera's Saturday morning cartoons. Even Disney, one of the few bright lights of joy and wonder, was going through their pencil-scribble animation phase which made their pictures jitter in an anxious way. Everything seemed ugly to me, and I hated it without knowing why. The glimpses I caught of the "top" works of the age - the horrible Clockwork Orange, Stephen King's oeuvre, the exaggerated Satanism of KISS and the Bee Gees' minor key whining, hit movies like Saturday Night Fever, The Godfather - reinforced the sense that life was dangerous, chaotic, demonic, and despairing. I came to have an irrational fear of the large wooden television set in the living room that brought these images to my imagination. To these, there was no answer.

Where was the contrast? Ironically, I found it in my 1970s parish church. My parents had joined our parish's charismatic prayer group which met in the basement church after hours (my parish had an upper and a lower church, the lower church being less ornate). I begged to go to these prayer meetings where I would happily sing, listen, and draw on my art pad to my heart's content. There I could draw what was not scary: animals, houses, trees, and the intricate image of the Holy Spirit, each of His feathers fanned out as He brought down fire upon the earth. That image I copied again and again from a felt banner that hung in the sanctuary, one with rare beauty crafted by some truly talented artisan who cut each felt piece expertly and picked out the details in curling thin gold braid. 

Our neoclassical parish basement church had been whitewashed by some enthusiastic pastor in the 60s, but our new pastor reintroduced judicious color, a strong yellow gold, and put in simple golden stained glass which had a dazzling effect upon my very young imagination. I absorbed the lesson: something sinister had come along to erase tradition and destroy anything true, good, and beautiful, but some of us were quietly and silently fighting back, at night and in the dark where no one noticed. To me, the prayer meetings had the thrill of resistance meetings, but happier and more hopeful, full of a careless joy in Christ. I have always preferred that to the gritted teeth and hardened resolution of other counter-cultural movements of the time, such as conservatism and traditionalist Catholicism, movements which I over time I have entered into strategic alliance and friendship with.

Mine was not an intellectual faith but a sensual one, in the child's sense: I felt safe and at home with God, and scared and nervous when I wasn't. Looking back, I'm not inclined to see it as a virtue, but as a very real gift. If there was any virtue involved, it was the virtue of my parents. They had come to a renewed Catholic faith as a couple around the time I was born and were taking those serious steps that seem small at the time but chart a course for a lifetime. 

One key decision, which I didn't learn about until years later, was the flap of a trash can. Through soul-searching and grace, they had realized that Pope Paul VI was right and all their fashionably intellectual Catholic friends were wrong regarding birth control. Their decision to toss the diaphragm in the trash and commit the size of their family to God sent silent reverberations of joyful adventure throughout my childhood. I never remember my parents even discussing contraception with anyone, let alone me or my siblings. They didn't need to.

That crucial Catholic dissent against Humanae Vitae, that rebellion which poisoned and enfeebled pastoral authority, made parish life dishonest, split neighbors, families, and every Catholic institution from grade schools to youth groups, from retreat houses to religious orders was just a small hairline crack at that point. The weeds were snaking their way in with feathery tentacles, but most of us did not notice them. My parents, their silent joint decision uniting them like a rock, always did. Their spiritual clarity throughout the storms rolling in against the Church during those years is remarkable.   

As the oldest child, I felt very close to my parents and inevitably found myself on the same side of the table as them on any issue. My parents were just a little too old and married just a little too young to really be part of the "baby boomer" ethos. I retained their feeling of being on the margins, with the corresponding felt freedom to pick a different path from everyone else in society with no guilt or shame over being the odd one out. (And I've continued on that hybrid trail: my husband is technically a Boomer and we married young compared to our peers, so that unique vantage point continues.) 

I loved my parents: my dad was a Vietnam vet who loved us kids more than anything else except his lovely wife and God. And my mom, brilliant, articulate, and stylish, was always too tough and on task to bother with feminism. Both of them were in science: my dad was a components engineer and my mom was an adjunct in higher math, but they loved the arts and books and their Catholic faith. They filled my childhood home with brothers and sisters and relatives and lots of adopted family. They collected stray people like others collect stray animals: singles far from home, the lonely elderly, single moms, handicapped or sick parishioners, young families struggling to make ends meet, artists, musicians: anyone they met whose disability or temperament or circumstances had pushed them out of the mainstream usually ended up at our kitchen or dining room table. 

Oddly enough, I emerged into the world and consciousness with some things settled: I knew I was an artist, of uncertain talent, but that was my vocation which I needed to follow, and that I was meant to find someone to marry. I was sluggish and socially awkward, slow to make friends, and fairly self-absorbed. To this day, I seldom struggle with guilt or doubt and have the ability to compartmentalize fairly well. Moving forward is my natural bent, and I rarely look back or notice the past. You can imagine this makes me difficult to live with. Fortunately, my younger siblings had strong objections to living with someone like me, so I learned, like most members of large families do, to become more self-aware, to be humiliated into stopping bad habits, to protect myself by becoming less clueless (this was a dangerous time to be a kid, let alone someone with their head in the clouds), and to occasionally pay attention to the brother or sister shouting in my face that I was burning dinner. 

Now that I am past fifty, I ponder nostalgia. I don't really miss my childhood home, although it was happy. I thought most of the houses I visited were unpleasant and never really wanted to own any of them, although I loved the people who lived in them. What I really wanted was a palace or a thatched cottage in Narnia, but I was sensible enough to recognize I would be lost without indoor plumbing. I still think it a stroke of brilliance on Tolkien's part that Frodo's cottage at Crick Hollow anachronistically contained a magnificent set of bathing tubs.

But from the point of view of interior decorating, I resented the ugly shoddiness of almost everything I encountered. I grew up near Philadelphia, and when my parent's habit of collecting people eventually brought us into contact with people who had more disposable income, I sometimes saw glimpses of truly good architecture, but even then, something was always wrong. The color, or the landscaping, or the positioning of the buildings was awkward and bothered me. In my high school years, it was discovering the neighborhoods of Philadelphia's Main Line that brought peace to my soul: houses of stone and wood, well-proportioned and welcoming, nearly mythopoeic in their atmosphere. Not just the neighborhoods of the incredibly wealthy, either. Some of my happiest memories were of walking through middle-class neighborhoods of original Arts and Crafts houses, my heart singing with happiness as I edged down narrow cracked concrete sidewalks between lines of awkwardly parked cars, admiring rough brickwork, golden plaster, expansive porches, well-trimmed rooflines. It's interesting that my first love of buildings happened in the city. 

Now I live in a place I actually love - Virginia - in a home I actually love, the Black Cat Inn at Shirefeld, as we have dubbed it. It was originally a railway worker's home turned farmhouse, and my husband and I renovated it back when we had youth, energy, and more children. All that's best in life meets me there, including the perennial seduction of reading books (or articles on my phone) by the fire in the woodstove with a hot pot of tea always at hand. Like Bilbo at Rivendell, I would snooze there forever, never finishing writing my stories, though always with the best of intentions. 

When a child goes on a journey adventure, he selects a few things - a teddy bear, a bag of chips, an apple, a sword, and holds onto them fiercely. They grow larger and more central for the selection. So I will select a few things for this adventure going forward, and will enumerate them thusly. I have emerged into the second half of my life still holding on to my treasure trove: my faith. The man I love. My family. Now, my home. 

I recognize that my life has been easier for the clinging to God, and for the ordering of my life under religion. It was wise of me, though I did not recognize it at the time, that I should have set out with my faith at the foremost of my choices. Following the laws of God, as difficult as that is for the artist and the rebel in me, has brought me the blessings of God in the very fabric of my life. I mean those small almost insignificant moments of prayer or obedience that over time multiplied by the thousands translate into the habit of a peaceful mind, friendships, affection from others, the prospering of the work of one's hands. I have no broken windows in my soul to constantly tape over, no skewed perspectives to mentally correct, none of the horrific losses of divorce or estrangement or the nagging guilt of papered-over sins. It wasn't wisdom on my part: simply obedience and for that, I have to point to grace I didn't deserve. I pray it continues, and that I can be faithful. 

Setting out to wait for a Catholic husband to show up with all the vehemence of forging forth into a forest was the second of the right choices I blundered into. I prayed for a man who was more devout than I was, because I didn't want to be the pious wife haranguing her husband into prayer. And God sent me one, in His good time. Clinging to my husband through the storms of tragedy and loss of children was the third incredibly wise choice I was blind enough to make. How he has put up with me and my faults I will never understand. He has everything I love best in a man: irascible teasing, logic balanced with passion, strength and devotion to Christ, and an industriousness that balances my laziness and a practical foresight that astonishes me with its simplicity. Plus he's still pretty easy on the eyes. One doesn't expect to find a handsome husband when one is a bookish and religious fraulein, and in that regard, God has been good to me indeed. 

Having children with the easy generosity learned from my parents and in-laws, which cut against my natural selfishness, was the next wise thing. If one has a house, one should fill it with as many children as possible. What else does one do with a house? Dust it?  Use silver, and you won't have to polish it. Fill up a house with children, and they'll keep the dust airborne for you on most days. 

I do love my children. Like my own mother, I was never a woman who needed or hungered for children, and I very seldom have felt motherly, and seldom felt guilty about not feeling it. But kids are great. I have learned to love people and my children are people I love, and they have been interesting and entertaining and so much fun to have around. 

I will mention that my husband and I have always been rather artistically poor and really could not afford to have any of our children. Especially my oldest, who was born when we were literally living in a garret apartment with a part-time income of five dollars an hour. My last babies were born when we were in danger of losing our house since our respective incomes had dropped so steeply. Each of the ten was brought into the world in the midst of some sort of financial burden or catastrophe: no insurance, no ability to pay the midwife or the hospital, struggling with medical bills for an existing child, or living in a half-built house with no insulation. But the children came, and as Anna Hatke used to tell me the Italians said, each baby came with a loaf of bread under each arm. The job or the raise or the money to pay the bills or the construction help appeared. We would have been foolish to have traded a little fleeting financial stability for this precious and irretrievable time with these incredible immortal souls of our ten children. There may be reasons for putting off pregnancy, but we haven't found them yet. Because we didn't wait, we were able to give our children our youth, our energy, our time to make mistakes and figure out parenting, and our passionate enjoyment. 

And each one became more precious. I remember feeling burdened by my first babies as I carried them around in slings and backpacks, itching to put them down so I could use both hands again.  But when I had my last child at the age of 46 after several miscarriages, I could not put her down! I carried her everywhere, a bouquet of sweet-smelling baby I could not stop nuzzling. "Is this your first?" kind strangers would enquire. "Thank you: I must look young," I would say. "It's my tenth."

When I was a younger woman, I admit that although I was fine with giving children room in my body, I used to fret about the mental space my children would take up in my mind and heart, and visualized being always worrying and fearful over them. I admit that losing a child did not make these worries or fears less. But now I do find a freedom of mind, a resignation to suffering, and a meaningfulness in that mother's suffering which is tinged with a subtle and mysterious sweetness. I have done and am doing my part in continuing the human race. I have made the man I love a father. I have brought forth children. That's not nothing.    

What I don't really quite know if I've managed to bring with me into the second part of my life is my art. My raging artistic fire has cooled: I no longer pant and thirst for beauty, no longer wake sleepless because of the visions coursing through my brain. I should like to find it again, as inconvenient as it makes life. Am I too afraid of the pain? The risk? To plunge naked into the freezing torrent of humiliation and emptiness and fear? Mathematics is a young man's game: all the old can do is teach. Is that all I'm good for now? Teaching? You can sense the same sneer on my lip that I wore as a child when asked to play school. I never wanted to be the teacher: I would always "play" the bad child in the back of the class, since I couldn't in real life. 

Have I got what it takes? Now that I'm a pudgy older woman, of the sort that populates parishes, the very backbone of the church, I find myself part of the crowd, more of the average, not the odd teenager attending daily Mass amidst a sea of gray hair. I am part of the contingent of the infamous church ladies now, and my presence at Mass is not so unusual. 

I notice with humor the changed attitude of my pastors: my approach used to startle and worry priests. What did this girl/teenager/young adult/young married person want? Does she have a vocation? Has she seen a vision? Is her marriage in trouble? Why is she even here? Hasn't she gotten the memo that Gen X doesn't do church? Is she a saint? Now I see the eyes of the dear men glaze over when I come up: Oh, it's just another one of them. So odd that women become religious with age. Perhaps I should put her in charge of something.  

One of my small human indulgences is to shock: alas, now that I am older, the shock is gone. I am an acceptable and worrisome part of the construction of the church visible, a dependable stone, either obstacle or building block, depending on where I happen to be dallying at the moment.

But this is not bad, I have come to see. It is good to be part of something, to be useful, to help others more easily and with less effort. When one is a child, helping others is hard: you can only do so much and quickly empty your resources. But right now I am at the top of the slope. Going down, I will descend into another childhood: more effort, less easily, and knowing one can only do so much in the end.

What do I have to bring, going forward? And how much time is left for me?

I began writing this reflection on the day I helped bury a talented and lovely artist who died at the age of 41 of leukemia. I was privileged to know her a bit, and have lost no time praying for her, now that I have collected (I hope) another friend in high places. When people die, I have developed the habit of telling them everything I can about myself, now that they have a fuller perspective on me. I am positively frantic about filling in the gaps for them: here's what you never knew about me but which must be obvious to you now, dear dead departed friend... It's so absolutely comforting for someone like me who naturally treasures friends more than family. 

To be known by the saints and by the church suffering was something that I ironically learned when I lost my son Joshua. At the age of almost five, I have no doubt that he soared immediately to heaven. And he has continued to make his presence known in our family through surprise acts of kindness. I suppose I should explain. 

My great-grandmother had a devotion to St. Anthony, that finder of lost things, and I have picked it up where she left off. Anthony is my friend, and I love him for his devotion to the Scriptures and his desire to remain in the background. I treasure his vision of the Christ Child Who is said to have embraced him, thanking Anthony for preaching about Him so well. Here is one sign that assists my faith: since he died, Joshua seems to be hanging out with St. Anthony, so much so that his particular gift to our family and friends is finding their lost objects. In our home, we tell children who have lost their shoes or their books or a part of some tool or toy to "ask Joshua," and inevitably he comes through for them.

Now I must tell one of the dozens of Joshua stories. I was on the phone with a friend, who, when she married, Joshua had been her ring-bearer. She confided to me that her house was in disarray because she could not find her checkbook, after looking for it for days. I suggested we pray together, and I asked Joshua to help her, since she had always been kind to him when he was alive. We prayed. In Jesus' name, Amen. And my friend said, as soon as we finished, "You won't believe this, but the checkbook is on the bookshelf and I'm literally looking at it while I'm talking to you."

And then there was the late evening I was crossing the parking lot where Joshua had died just after it had finished raining. A strange family passing through town was walking around the lot, looking for something. It turned out that they had lost their keys, and the darkness combined with the shining pavement under the streetlight's glare was making their task difficult. I stopped and helped them, to no avail. Walking away, I said aloud, "Oh Joshua, please help them." Just then one of them pointed and said, "Wow, here they are!" They all looked at me. "Who is Joshua?"  

I told them his story, and they were profoundly moved. As I walked away, I smiled up at the sky and whispered, "Show off!" 

To me, this is a small reminder that Heaven is real and that its life can permeate our broken and dismal life, if only we let it. When we bought our house, I painted on the steps to the upstairs these lines from a medieval poem: "No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven."

Perhaps that is why I'm not nostalgic. The best is yet to come, if only we make it there. As they say, adventure awaits and is ongoing. 

Maybe, for me, it actually will involve writing another book.

Another Way to a Wedding Dress

Years ago, I made my own wedding dress. Ever the optimist, I was determined to do it, since it was the 90s and dresses were pricey and hideous, and at that time in my life, I had little appreciation for the vintage. I modeled it on a dress worn by Marie Antoinette since I loved the style, but I had to make it out of polyester since silk chiffon was impossible to find in retail outlets accessible via mall. 

Not so for my daughter, a child born in the very last of the nineties and coming of age in the Internet Era. The entire global universe of fabric was spread before her, so much so that the choices were paralyzing. I was invited on the adventure of sewing her wedding dress, and just as optimistic as I was two decades before, I encouraged her and we pulled out our sewing machines and plunged in.

It had to be silk, of course, with a massively full skirt. But also not pricey, because all the wedding money was allocated elsewhere. So we made the skirts of china silk scarves purchased from our favorite online outlet, Dharma Trading, where many good things come from. Two half-circle silk shawls and a silk sarong cut in half made the more-than-a-full-circle shirt. Beneath it she wore another more-than-full-circle skirt of a white embroidered cotton I had bought for the flower girls which she fell in love with and asked for. For a blouse, she purchased an inexpensive simple dress of silk from a designer in Japan who custom-made it when she found out it was for a wedding. 

But the pièce de résistance was her corset. My daughter, inspired by reenactments, had made several corsets over the years and had become enamored at how efficient and comfortable a garment they are. She carefully made the lining and fitted it to herself. Then she bought exquisite white silk damask and worried over it for weeks before she dared to cut it. Carefully she fused it to lining to cut it, and for "something old" she lined it with a cotton canvas we inherited in a fabric stash from my grandparents. Laces had to be tea-dyed to match and boning made from zip ties (which she prefers over the ready-made sort) was carefully fitted into the sleeves. 

It took weeks and countless fittings, but she finally executed it nearly flawlessly-- the only flaws being the ones only the artist knows of. And we were all delighted when she agreed to wear her first impulsive purchase: an embroidered overskirt of iridescent polyester fabric (not silk, le sigh) which, though not visible from the front when she walked down the aisle, brought a riot of wildflowers into her train. The blue ribbon sash for Our Lady she took from our family Maypole.  Since the blues didn't quite match, a little careful artistry with a teal permanent marker altered flower petals and butterfly wings nicely. 

She wore beaded shoes from India and chose a silk chiffon scarf for a simple veil, wore my friend's freshwater pearl necklace with a shell cross from the Holy Land. Bridesmaid dresses of embroidered cotton - so comfortable and inexpensively found on Etsy - outfitted the female members of the wedding party. And flowers from my garden provided the bouquets.

In the end, a wedding day is just a day: the marriage is the thing which sails forth in hope to last a lifetime. And yet, in the Catholic sensibility, it all matters: each stitch of the bridal gown is a prayer for fidelity, each ripped seam and re-sewn piece a plea for forgiveness, each adornment an aspiration for virtue. I am proud of my daughter for her choice of a husband, and I was delighted to be part of the long journey of preparation for the sacrament.  Although my wedding dress and hers are vastly different, they share the same spirit of culture creation, of not settling for the convention, and of choosing the adventure of orthodoxy. As my husband said in his speech at the wedding feast, quoting Chesterton: "Marriage is a great adventure, like going to war.... so now, to war! Live the adventure!"

How to Tell Them Apart: a Poem

 

Recapturing Worship (published Spring 1994)

When I was in Catholic grade school, I was taught to kneel during the consecration of the Host and the Wine. I was in one of those schools still run by fierce little nuns who had very strict ideas of Good Behavior and Sacrilege. For instance, Good Behavior meant girls walking in straight lines up the hill to our parish church, wearing their blue felt beanies or, if they were lucky, a lace veil. Dannielle Deleo's mother gave her a pretty light blue circle of lace that Sister pinned to the top of her long brown hair before each school Mass. The rest of us had the beanies, which I thought were stiff, uncomfortable, and liable to fall off if you ran or if the wind was blowing. It was a year before someone told me that the circle of cardboard inside the beanie was meant to be taken out, not worn while you were wearing the hat.

I was a very small girl, the same size as the others, and the pews in Church came up to our chins. That meant that you had to watch Mass with your head tilted slightly upwards. This meant, too, that if you were looking at your shoes or at a secret note during Mass, Sister was sure to notice. Certainly I was terrified of the consequences of sin or Sacrilege, but I was far from living in fear of humiliation. In fact, I remember first grade as tranquil most of the time.

As part of First Communion preparation we were given a tour of the Church, which seemed huge as a cathedral from a second-grader's point of view. We were allowed to enter the sanctuary, and tiptoed on the thick blue carpet steps, past the white marble altar, to the sacristy. We were allowed to see the places where the priests dressed, where the instruments for Mass were kept, and quizzed on the names of each implement. The tour was given in the afternoon, and the lights were off, so the Church was full of shadow. A sense of holy importance hung heavy in our whispered tour. The tabernacle was pointed out to us, but we were not allowed to touch it. I remembered the Bible story about the man who touched the Ark, who was struck dead for his unmeant violation, and kept my little hands firmly in my pockets as I gazed on the little golden box. Sister told us that the inside was hung with cloth, just as the Holy of Holies was veiled in the Jewish Temple. First Communion was a very big thing, even if it was only a wafer that didn't taste anything like a Nilla wafer. When I was about to receive, my primary concern was terror over stepping forward in the wrong place, but at the last moment I wondered if it would taste salty, like blood did on skin, and felt nauseous. But the host the priest slipped on my tongue was bland and light as a bit of air. It dissolved on my tongue easily -- it did not get stuck on the roof of my mouth as I feared it might (Sister said if that happened, just keep your mouth shut until it dissolved -- under no circumstances were you to scrape it off with your fingers) -- and tasted the way I thought once that manna might have tasted. I thought to myself as I walked back to my pew (flustered in joy at having for once stepped forward in the right place) that if the Israelites had lived on manna for months, I wasn't surprised that they complained. It made tedious eating.

There was another side to my education as a Catholic -- the clandestine-seeming prayer meetings held in the lower Church on Friday nights. My parents were prayer-group regulars, and brought me to the charismatic gatherings, and, yes, the charismatic Masses. "Will everyone please join me around the altar?" the priest would ask after the offertory, and up we would go, mixed with eagerness and tension. On Friday nights, the barriers were down -- the lower Church was a House where I could run up and down the aisles and slide (oh joy!) down the sleek shiny smoothness of the pews -- run and slide. And the altar was fair game, too, during Mass. I remember curiously and hesitantly exploring the hangings on the altar with my fingertips during one Mass. All this was done furtively, because my parents did not want me fooling around during Mass. For me, though, letting down the barriers did not dispel the mystery. The altar did not become "only a table," nor the sanctuary "only a box." This can be seen in that I don't think I ever ventured into the sanctuary on my own, not unless bidden to by the priest. And although I think I might have been bold enough to touch the tabernacle once, I never did it again. I feel an innate sacredness which would be broken by casual handling, a taboo that is enormously helpful in strengthening the religious impulse. Taboos are primitive, we are told, a childish "Do Not Touch" sign; but for me, I did not get rid of my taboos, even when I was older, independent, and could have done away with them if I chose. Instead, I kept them there.

Recently, I was in a monastery with my ten-year-old younger sister and re-experienced the taboos through her eyes. The jolly young friar who was our guide offered us a tour of the Church and led my sister right up to the altar itself to explain the elaborate statues and structure of the high altar.

"Brother Patrick," she said hesitantly, "can I touch that?" She pointed to the tabernacle, "I've just always wanted to," she explained lamely.

"Certainly you can, so long as you do it reverently," said the friar, and Maria reached out a finger and traced the gold rim of the door. I wondered if she were thinking of the story of the man who touched the Ark, too, daring to see if touching the precious gold would electrocute the sacrilegious or not. Her curiosity seemed to stop there, as mine had. Now, as an adult, I needed to not touch the tabernacle or the altar, with the same passion that I needed to touch them as a child. Because I know that my mind is more arrogant and more prone to minimize: I am inclined to be a wise fool. We are protective of our mysteries.

If I were to touch the tabernacle often, casually, I would be tempted to believe the lie of my senses, which would tell me that it is only a metal box surrounding flakes of bread in a canister. But if I do not touch it, I find it easier to believe what it really is: Christ, beneath the appearances of bread and wine. Luckily I am a layperson and likely to remain one, and so can go without having to fight off the complacency the clergy face of taking the Holy One for granted, since He can be so casually handled, locked up, unlocked, distributed and disposed of. They have to face the challenge of Divine Humility in becoming passive Bread. I can adore the Divine Majesty from the pews in the ignorance of the loyal peasant.

That is why the laity are often so grieved, shocked, and angered at the abuse of the Holy Presence. They are still free to encounter Christ briefly, romantically, and freely. They are not bound to Him by marriage to the Church. When you are married to someone, romance has a great possibility of dying fast and hard. I think of one priest in the parish where I go to daily Mass who hustles through the Eucharistic Prayers brusquely and irritably, whose gestures are flurried as butterflies, and whose passion goes into sermons on social justice delivered with black accusing eyes. He seems bitter and impatient with the whole ritual, and I am inclined to judge him daily. But, thinking about it, he is spouse of the Church (though he seems to be seeking a divorce at times), and I really can't judge him.

Another sadness is the altar boys at my parish, who slouch all over the sanctuary, and handle the Chalice and Cyborium like dumbbells. Compare this with the deferential treatment of the eucharistic ministers (who are mostly female) and I can see why some people think they have a case for altar girls and women's ordination. My mother used to counter this with, "Of course women are more reverent than men. They've always been that way! But that's precisely why men are called to be priests and women are not, because men have a lot of catching up to do!"

It is certainly harder to teach little boys to be orderly and quiet and to not charge into the sanctuary as if it were a football field than it would be to teach little girls like my younger sister. But God always sees more in us than we see in ourselves, and He is determined to get more mileage out of the males than we females would think possible. The perennial temptation of women is to do the man's job for him, and the perennial temptation of man is to let her do it. But men should lay down their lives for their wives and children and become fathers. That is the call upon men -- to be fathers, physically or spiritually. And the call upon women is to support them in doing this. Neither should try to do away with the other. It is another sort of taboo.

I am trying to remember how I acquired my sense of the sacred, and I think that the term I would give this inborn, bodily, earthy piety is Jewishness. For both the Catholic and the Jewish religions are sacramental, and Catholicism borrows many of its practices freely from the Jewish religion. As I have had limited contacts with real Jewish families, I have to pause to ask the reader to excuse any ignorance in my statements.

From time to time I feel it -- something very Jewish, very much in the gut. There is a feeling in your tongue after you recite Scripture in a ritual prayer, a stillness that comes from staring for a long time at a burning candle -- you can feel the faith within you. My family was a big fan of prayers: Christian Passover meals, Polish Christmas ceremonies, Advent and Lenten prayers, Sabbath rituals for Sunday, and the Divine Office were taken up and used again and again in the seasons of my childhood. There is nothing like continuous affirmation of faith to change your soul. Participating in the ritual of faith in God, according to the seasons, changes you according to the turn of the wheel, links your self to the rises and falls of nature.

That is how we humans sense eternity, participating in the ritual, returning again and again to this place where we have been before, to say words aloud we have said before, to re-gouge the grooves in our subconscious. As in the daily prayer of the Hebrew children, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone." There is a thrill like a ram's horn blast running through these words. The very illogic of them excites and mystifies: you know that the Jew saying them could hardly say them loud enough for all of Israel to hear, yet he or she would was preaching to the Israel who did hear: themselves. As though where one Jew was, was Israel.

I do not like to pass over too quickly the heritage that was our blessed Mother's and our Savior's. There must have been a reason for all those times Christ went to the synagogue and the Mother of God recited the Shema. "The conditions must be fulfilled." That quiet respect for tradition. What I love about Zeffirelli's masterpiece, Jesus of Nazareth (I am willing to admit that perhaps it justifies the whole existence of the celluloid technology) is its tender Jewishness. The image of Jesus in a prayer shawl -- He was a Jew. How could we ever forget? Why would we want to? That sense of being part of a people, a people set apart.

Family ceremonies -- with candlelight and long prayers -- I moaned through them as a child, but looking back they seem to have been one long chain of candles, of ritual, harmonious as Gregorian chant. For us, our faith had to be more than just the Sunday Mass, and so we pulled on a wealth of Christian prayers to supplement our faith life. We held a Christian Seder meal on Holy Thursday and brought out the Advent wreath before Christmas -- we prayed a shortened form of the Office mornings, on and off according to my mother's bursts of determination that we would pray together every day. And, my favorite, we practiced the Lord's Day celebration, a simple service on Saturday evening to begin Sunday, analogous to the First Evening Prayers of the Office. We made Saturday dinner a festive meal, and began it with long prayers and the sharing of bread and wine. And although it was a casual extended grace, it had its degrees of solemnity.

In my mind, I never confused it with the Eucharist, although I did confuse it with the Seder. The Eucharist was Mass, where we knelt and worshipped the Bread: Lord's Day bread was simply bread, to be buttered and stuffed in your mouth and eaten (and if you ate too much, you lost your appetite for supper).

Now that I am older, I have strange longings. I long at times for a mass, where the priest and people are conscious of the ritual: where we can kneel and worship openly and together, raising our voices. I'm no fan of silent Masses. Nor of chatty Masses where the priest tries desperately to make everyone feel comfortable.

There is a priest at a Catholic university who frustrates me to tears by his polite request that the congregation stand for the Eucharistic prayer. The last few times he asked at a Mass I attended, I quietly knelt, crying inside of being robbed of our chance to worship. In a world where we stand up when the President comes into the room, where we stand to greet the Principal, where we stand to salute the flag and hear the Hallelujahchorus, the very act of kneeling acquires a sacred significance. If the "new theology" will not allow me to prostrate myself before the God of the Universe, my body feels as though it has lost its God. Certainly I can worship him with my mind, but for the Jew, and for the Catholic, that can never be enough.

I think, at times, that a happy medium between the twin Masses of my childhood: the charismatic and the solemn can be reached. This summer, I went to Rome, and was done over in wonder by so much that I saw. Our guide was a Swiss nun, a resident of Rome, who gave us "insiders access" with exclusive and excellent tours of the churches in Rome.

Going down the darkening streets after a day of touring, Sister suddenly pulled at my arm (it must be a Germanic thing to hold onto people's arms, I think, but no one can hold mine without reminding me of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland) and began to lead me towards a little church in the square -- a pillared and Mediterranean but unremarkable looking church. "I want you to see this," she whispered in my ears, and led me inside.

The church was full of darkness and light, space and closeness, noise and music, as rows and rows of black-haired young people stood squeezed into wooden pews, with clouds of incense rising over their heads, clouding the ancient ceiling. Their voices rose in unison in an unbearably beautiful chant. It was not complex (except that it was in Italian) but it strummed all of the strings of the heart in a single, vibrant melody. I had the experience of listening and watching with such forgetfulness that it was three minutes before I realized that tears were running down my face.

It was a Byzantine rite community at Evening Prayer, and those five minutes in a crowded church have edged out and superseded all of the memories arranged in my photographs and journals. I have no picture of it but the one in my head, and I cannot forget it.

And I wonder if that life will ever infuse our Catholic liturgies, which are aching with the weariness of revival without relief. It is possible. I think I could even stand during a liturgy with that music (I am told that the European Catholics stand) if I was allowed to sing music with that grandeur.

So I wonder, and pray, and gnaw at the edges of my nails as I type, and think. Of ways to recapture worship, that elusive spirit of liturgy. It must be possible.

If not, we are in more trouble than we imagine.

Christianity, Please -- Hold the Church! (republished from Dec. 1, 2003)

A Journal Entry for Dec. 1, 2003 for the webmag After Eden

One of the more aggravating books on the best-seller list today is a potboiler called The Da Vinci Code. The key twist in this "historical investigative thriller" is the discovery that the "truth" about Jesus has been hidden for centuries: He (GASP!) was married. This piece of information is supposedly too terrible for Christians to contemplate, so it has been fictionally hidden by a secret society for millennia...

Well, I, as a Roman Catholic, already believe that Christ was married. Is married, actually. Not to Mary Magdalene, as the book breathlessly postulates, but to His Church, in a passionate, indissoluble union. And this, as St. Paul says, is a mystery. And a largely misunderstood and unappreciated mystery, particularly today.

The union between Christ and the Church is so profoundly deep that St. Paul goes so far as to refer to the Church as Christ's Body, citing Genesis: "a man shall ... cleave to his wife and the two shall become one body." In fact, human marriage is a pale reflection of this ultimate marriage, created when Christ laid down His life for His bride.

But just as many people have come to accept divorce, many truly prefer to take Christ without dealing with His Wife. In a sense, they prefer to see Christ as a single Guy -- just the Heroic Savior, not a Holy Husband.

Why is this? Well, I can understand it. Despite the fact that He said and did all sorts of things we might find unsettling, Jesus Christ is a really great guy. Most people find Him attractive on some level. If you can overlook the embarrassing episode of the Crucifixion, Christ was the winner, the victorious savior, never making any mistakes or committing any sins, triumphantly rising from the dead and opening the gates of heaven. The Church, on the other hand, is a whole other ball of wax. Now, I'm not talking about the fuzzy invisible Church, which is sort of like a secret club where only God knows the membership list. I'm talking about the institutional Church -- yes, the one with a building, down on the local street corner -- and the pastors and bureaucrats who pay the heating bills and keep the books: the Church, that historical thing that's been around for a couple hundred -- well, make that a couple thousand -- years. It's that body of believers who include the non-heroic, the non-victorious -- okay, the losers. Not to mention the sinful, the incompetent, the lax, and even the criminal. Kind of like those unsavory and unimaginative characters Jesus made a habit of hanging around with when He walked the roads of Israel.

Personally, I have come to see the necessity of a concrete relationship with His Bride. And I have come to recognize her manifestations even in the creaky bureaucracy and sometimes poorly executed liturgies of the Church. It made it easier to love Her once I started to recognize the features of an eternal beauty beneath the externals. I can even sense a personality of practicality and dogged persistence.

Christ's Wife has a hidden beauty, but also a concrete presence. In traditional parlance, she is "Mother Kirk" -- the mother of the faithful, raising up sons and daughters for her Spouse. Just as Israel was not a vague idea of nationhood but a real nation on a particular continent with particular inhabitants, so the Church is a real, organized community built by Christ on a particular person, with particular members on earth that include the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But many people don't want any part of a church, particularly not one that could tie them down. There are several reasons. One of the biggest is acceptance of authority. Americans particularly dislike authority, but I suspect all humans are prone to the stiff-necked habits about which the Lord complained in the Israelites.

Talk about submitting yourself to the Church, and you're talking about doing something very scary. Even if you've come around to the idea of submitting yourself to Christ, there's an entirely different quality to submitting to the Church -- just as obeying your father is different than obeying your mother. As I am experiencing first-hand with five kids, it's easier for children to ignore a mother; so maybe that's why it's harder to do what she says.

As near as I can tell, being a Christian without the Church is like dating Christ. He's this guy you see on the weekends. Well, if you're really serious, you make sure you give Him a call every day, just to check in, talk to Him. And to keep that romance alive, every once in a while, you do something special -- you know, go on a retreat.

It's not that there's no commitment -- there is. It's not that there's no true love -- there is. But all the same, there's independence. In a very concrete way, it's accepting religion -- and God -- on your own terms, choosing which of His friends you will accept, which teachings of His speak the most to your life at this particular time. And when your relationship with other Christians cools -- well, you can stay with Christ and still go elsewhere, can't you?

But joining the Church can be like getting married. We're talking about a commitment that's not on your own terms, but on someone else's terms -- a someone who's going to notice if you don't show up for dinner. A someone who's going to have the right to invade your privacy. And once you commit, you're expected to stay -- forever.

This someone -- the institutional Church, the Bride in her working clothes: Mother Church -- is in three dimensions, Her orders and influence stretching out in four directions. She's got House Rules and lists of Things to Do, lists of offenses and punishments; and she offers advice, often when you don't want it. She attaches consequences to your actions. She makes requests from your wallet. She demands love -- love for a lot of people you'd rather not love. And in her human side, she messes up. And that's a problem -- but it doesn't absolve you of your own responsibilities in the relationship.

What responsibilities? Well, marriage is not just keeping your vows, but keeping them well. Raising children, being faithful, sometimes putting up with decisions you don't really like. It means tolerating idiosyncrasies, burnt cooking, leaky pipes, bad credit, illnesses, death, family reunions. It means biting your tongue, speaking the truth, staying up in the night with the sick, bearing with relatives. It means dysfunction and scandals and difficult situations as you journey together to your heavenly destination.

Not surprisingly, the Church is likely to be the most difficult part of practicing one's faith. I've noticed that some Christians who are most enthusiastic about incarnating their faith in their daily lives grow chilly when it comes to contemplating the first, most obvious way of incarnating Christ's mission -- the Church. For them, the Church should remain some dream girl in white linen who's going to appear in the sky at the Second Coming -- not some Woman around here right now from whom we need to take orders.

For far too many followers of Christ, the Church is not a necessity, it's an option: one we've never really gotten around to looking into, like bachelors with girlfriends they're constantly putting off buying a ring for, and proposing to.

So I'll go out on a limb. I believe that those who want to identify with Christ while dissociating themselves from the Church are really dissociating themselves from Christ. Because, you see, Christ was serious when He married the Church. He made her His Body, His physical manifestation of Himself on earth. He's not going to leave her. And those who reject her inevitably end up leaving Him behind.

Christ without the Church is a disembodied Christ. Christ without the Church is a divorced Christ. Neither of these is the real Word made Flesh.

If you want all of Him, you must deal with Her. She's His Body. It's that simple.

Toys, republished from December 1997

 

Published in Nazareth Journal, December 1997

This text is the author's copy and may vary slightly from the publisher's copy.

Every once in a while, I suspect that every parent feels like a hopeless idealist. Some parents feel this way when announcing to secular friends or relatives their intent to follow the Church's teaching on birth control. Others sense their own naiveté when they state that they intend to never own a television set. I feel this way when it comes to toys.

"My children," I say, with all ingenuousness when the topic comes up in discussion, "will never have a lot of toys. I'm a toy reductionist."

"Ah," the older parents say, smiling paternally at me, "we used to feel that way. But the toys just come out of nowhere. We don't buy them -- they just appear. Face it: as a parent, you are doomed to shoveling your way through a living room full of Fisher Price, Loc-Blocs, and Matchbox cars. Believe us. We know."

I don't think they take me seriously.

And they could be right. After all, my husband and I only have two children -- and one is in the womb, and doesn't yet play with toys. Years from now, I could find this article buried beneath a heap of plastic play-food mixed with Tinkertoy heads and laugh cynically at my former aspirations.

But I feel quite strongly about toys. There are several reasons. The strongest reason is that when it comes to toys, my childhood experiences are at my fingertips. I remember vividly what it was like to be a child, in relationship to toys, at least.

To tell the truth, I don't think I ever got over my love for toys. If put in the right environment and given a couple of average-sized kids to entertain, I could fall back into playing with them quite easily. I remember building sand castles and block cities. I remember making my own dollhouses, being perennially dissatisfied with the ready-made ones I found in the stores. The stuffed animals and dolls I loved I can readily picture -- even remember their names and personalities.

I also remember my dislikes. Certain toys I always found ugly, and even repulsive. Not just the horrid plastic monsters and Masters of the Universe grotesques, but certain plastic baby dolls, cheap stuffed creatures, clown dolls. As a child, I was pretty discriminating with what I played with.

I also remember the Clutter. The house I grew up in had a large basement -- a wonderful place that was big enough to ride tricycles in and roller skate in, a perfect stage for plays and puppet shows, a natural site for forts built out of tables, boxes, and blankets. My six-plus siblings and I played there for hours on end.

But I also remember Cleaning the Basement, our standard Saturday chore. I remember wading through the slough of Fisher Price playsets, action figures, puzzle pieces, farm animals, plastic soldiers, dried playdough, torn books, wooden blocks, and various little odds and ends that no one could identify. We had to sort out the toys into various cardboard boxes my mother had covered with contact paper for this express purpose of organization. I remember the endless trips to the toybox and block bin, feeling sour and aggravated by the knowledge that I hadn't even played with half of these things -- my little brother had knocked them off the shelves when he was pretending to be trapped by an earthquake, or my friends had dumped them on the floor just to be mean. Even from a child's perspective, it was easy to see that our family owned too many toys.

What could our family do about it? As the oldest child, and therefore supposedly the most responsible, I quickly arrived at the idea of throwing most of them out. I was always overruled, first by my siblings, which was natural (I only suggested throwing out their toys, of course) but more unreasonably, by my parents, who thought that "your brothers and sisters might want to play with them again some day."So most of the toys remained, until gradually they subsumed into dusty disuse on their basement shelves, simultaneously loved and hated by the children of our family.

This frustration with Toy Clutter has never quite left me. The sight of a living room or bedroom cluttered with a hodgepodge of playthings still arouses in me quite the same emotions. I suspect my brothers and sisters still feel the same way. I know that other parents, who are constantly having to pick up after their offspring, share these feelings. But what's to be done about all this? Is there no end to the modern onslaught of toys?

My husband is also the oldest child in his family (my parents now have ten children, his have eleven) so his emotions on the toy issue are almost identical to mine -- except stronger. "Our children will NOT have a lot of toys!" he was the first to declare emphatically when we discussed the issue during our engagement, and I eagerly agreed. We know what it's like to clean up after other people for oh, eighteen to twenty years straight, and by golly, we weren't going to let our kids have to go through that -- let alone put us through it.

In fact, my husband was even more adamant about reducing Toy Clutter than I was, being a man and a former boy. Little girls do tend to produce more Toy Clutter -- boxes of tiny doll clothes, piles of stuffed animals, shelves of doll collections, horse collections, shell collections, jewelry collections -- and I still have my girlish sympathies. For example, I still have a significant amount of cherished girlhood toys in my cedar chest. Andrew doesn't have anything that he owned as a child, except for a clothes rack and a poncho.

So we had definite ideas on the toy issue before we even conceived our first child. We thought rightly that we had better plan our strategy against the menace of Toy Clutter early, so as not to be caught unprepared.

We came up with an informal list detailing how Toy Clutter begins in the first place, and after each item listed a possible strategy for dealing with it.

How do Toys come into a home?

1. Parents buy them.
Therefore, we resolved to be judicious in our toy-buying as the first line of defense. We would not buy "fad" toys -- Baby-Make-A-Face and other one-use only toys. Generic, traditional toys would be the best buys -- balls, teddy bears, blocks, dump trucks. And we'd have to watch to make sure that we didn't buy toys merely for the sake of buying the child something -- when a snack or a trip to the park would do equally well.

2. Relatives buy them.
This was a potential danger, we thought, particularly from grandparents and godparents. We decided to embark on an "education campaign" to let our parents and siblings know how we felt about toys. Also, we felt it was only fair to give them alternative gift ideas to toys. The alternate gift turned out to be perfect: books. As book addicts and lovers of children's literature, we firmly believe children can't have too many books, provided they aren't cheap ones about syndicated characters. "You can ALWAYS get our children good kid's books," we told everyone, and no one really objected. In fact, I found out that several of my aunts had always felt the same way about toys. (You think you're being so original at times, when you're only living out your family genes)

3. Friends buy them.
Either friends of the family or friends of the children -- e.g.. at birthday parties. This was a bit more difficult to explain, but we thought we'd deal with it on a case-by-case situation. Fortunately, with birthday parties, parents often have the opportunity to suggest gifts to the guests, and we thought we might be able to give some judicious guidance there.

4. Children buy them.
This, we reasoned, might be easier to deal with, at least for a while, since parents can monitor what the children bring into the house, or even what they buy. And if we formed our children's tastes correctly, they might not feel the need to spend their money on useless toys. As a child, my favorite store was not the toy store, but the craft store, where I could spend my pennies on materials to make my own toys -- pompom animals, felt dolls, wooden doll furniture. I look forward eagerly to introducing our children to my childhood pastime, although my husband foresees difficulties with Craft Clutter in the future. But that's another issue.

5. They get left in your home by accident
(by neighbor children, visitors, etc.) In that case, we would have to be firm and direct about returning them or passing them on.

6. People give them to you,
in the same way that they pass on used clothing, etc. We would have to be committed to passing such toys on, if we thought they would be Clutter-inducing. One mother told me that it is possible, "so long as you don't let your children play with them first. Once a child plays with a toy, it becomes part of their soul, and you can't remove it without some degree of agony." We would have to be vigilant.

The second line of defense against Toy Clutter would be how to deal with the toys once they were actually in our home and possessed by the children. There are several ways in which toys leave the home, aside from getting lost (either by the child losing them or by the parent conveniently forgetting to find them). Parents have several options for enabling Toys to leave:

1. Throwing them out.
If the toy is broken beyond repair (easy with plastic toys) or if there is a general family revolt against Clutter. These revolts, usually led by older siblings or parents, can be traumatic for younger children and are generally not to be encouraged, as oppression of the strong by the weak. However, in my family and my husband's, throwing toys away (covertly, late at night) was often the only way that Toy Clutter could be combated. We decided we would have to develop and utilize other kinder, gentler strategies against Toy Clutter, once it had actually occurred.

2. Giving toys away (to friends, to St. Nicholas projects, to the Salvation Army) or selling them (e.g.: at garage sales).
As hard as it is, we would have to encourage our children to be generous in sharing their toys with others, even to the extent of giving them away. I know how terribly hard it is to give away something you are attached to. Well, one way to help the children understand this would be for me as a parent to demonstrate such self-sacrificial giving myself. Also, we would have to build up in our children the virtue of hospitality, particularly towards the poor -- to help them see the needy, the stranger, the poor as Christ Himself. Giving away your possessions, even toys, isn't just an exercise in disinterested charity (giving away what you don't need) but is merely restoring to Christ what is His by right. He deserves everything we have. Even if we gave Him our most treasured possession, He wouldn't owe us anything. That virtue of generous, foolish love is perhaps the hardest thing parents have to teach children -- because it is so hard for us. If giving away toys could help teach them that, it might be a useful thing indeed.

This also points out, incidentally, that any strategy against Toy Clutter won't be effective unless it's accompanied by a general attack against Clutter in general -- particularly Parental Clutter. As single people, we'd tried earnestly to simplify our lives, and we would have to continue this often harrowing process of sorting through and giving away throughout our lives. We would have to be neither hypocritical (giving away our kid's toys while hoarding CDs, bric-a-brac, clothing, and grown-up toys for ourselves) nor exempt our children from the discipline we practiced.

3. Packing toys away,
to be given to younger children or, in rare cases, saved for the children's own children. Packing toys away is a useful strategy for helping to de-clutter a house. Once the toys are out of sight and out of the way (hidden in a closet or attic, not simply in a box in the playroom to be used as emergency ammunition in pillow-fights), in some cases the children become less attached to them. They may be willing to give them away, if the toys are truly useless. Maybe not. In any event, the box of toys can be unpacked on special occasions (birthdays, rainy days) to be played with again, and other toys can be packed away in its place.

While packing away may not help children give toys away, it does reduce the amount of toys which are immediately accessible and need to constantly be picked up and put away. And it's a good idea, I think, to encourage the children regularly go through their toys to decide what they no longer play with, what needs to be fixed, and what could be saved for play later on. It's a useful exercise in stewardship, and preparation for adult simplification.

Even with the First and Second lines of defense, my husband and I felt a need to be a bit more selective. After all, how could we determine whether or not a toy was acceptable for our family?

There were obvious moral considerations. For example, playing with toys that were occultic (monsters, witches, etc.) was unacceptable -- although perhaps a token evil person to serve as the Bad Guy in made-up adventures would be allowed. (Growing up, our Fisher-Price people were constantly menaced by an ugly plastic dragon who was forever kidnapping the children or the parents and needed to be resoundingly defeated by the townspeople).

Toys that encouraged violence -- toy machine guns and bombs -- were also obviously out. Also, we felt (I have always felt) that Barbie dolls and their ilk don't really represent the kind of femininity we want our daughters to imitate. The skimpy outfits of many Disney heroines (and heroes) are also unacceptable to us. I remember reading (as a precocious ten-year-old) the Christian psychologist Dr. Dobson on the subject of Barbie dolls. He asked what type of image girls were getting about what their bodies should look like when they become teenagers from the voluptuous curves and flawless complexions of fashion dolls. It's a set-up for low self-esteem as well as grooming the girl to readily conform to the pressures of the media and the fashion industry to fit into a certain model of "beauty." I just don't think that little girls, in their innocence, need to be exposed to those kinds of pressures at this age -- or at any age, actually. Girlhood was meant for better things.

Still, we knew of many parents who censored violent and sex-oriented toys out of their children's possession who were still drowning in Toy Clutter. And somehow, I felt that Fisher Price and PlaySkool toys didn't help to create the kind of environment that I wanted our children to have. Were there further guidelines to use?

The answer for me came in the form of an article in Plain magazine, a magazine put out by a variety of Christians with a tradition of simplicity -- Anabaptist, Amish, and the like. In an issue devoted to children, I came across a short but terribly good article called, "Toys really are Us." It was written by Sarah Martin, founder of the Natural Baby Company. "Children don't really need toys," she concludes, since things from the outdoors and from the home -- like pots -- make wonderful playthings for most children.

However, she admits, "parents like to buy their children toys." This is true. So she makes an effort to find toys for her catalog that are made of natural materials -- wood, wool, cotton, toys that "resonate with the child's spirit." After all, children are alive, so it's only appropriate to give them toys made out of materials that are also alive. Plastic, that staple of children's toys, just isn't on the same level.

Here was a new standard for judging toys -- why not simply limit toys whenever possible to wooden ones over plastic ones? Wooden toys cost more and are hard to find. Therefore, we can't buy as many of them as we can plastic toys. But the toys we do buy will be of greater quality, and since there will be fewer of them, there will be less threat of Toy Clutter. So we decided to pursue this strategy.

So far, it's worked. Although Caleb hasn't reached his second birthday, I think I can say he has a reasonable amount of toys. But he does spend more time playing with pots and pans and cardboard boxes my husband brings home from work than with his wooden trucks. And he has a lot of good books, which he enjoys looking at. He's even stopped tearing pages (for the most part).

I do have a tendency to pick up what I call "intelligent looking stuffed animals" at thrift store and garage sales. But I've deliberately limited myself to tiny ones. Large stuffed animals tend to be overwhelming in numbers, and collect dust. Small ones can be slipped in a pocket to come to Mass or on a trip to the store, and while easily lost, can be easily replaced. Caleb's favorite first birthday present was a tiny bear with jointed legs, intended as a Christmas ornament, given to him by an elderly lady in a nursing home. Small Bear came with us everywhere for quite a while before losing himself in a mysterious manner.

But I wonder how our family will be able to stave off the Toy Menace. After all, we're just beginning, and Toy Clutter doesn't generally get underway until Kid Four or Five comes along (although I know some families our size are already snowed under the barrage of Toddler Toys).

Last summer, I met a family who gave me hope. We had the wonderful opportunity to stay with a remarkable Catholic family with six children for a few days. I had the chance to view most of their house and gradually noticed that they had a sensible amount of toys. The young boys had built a block castle in the living room, and the girls' bedroom was dotted with doll homes build in convenient nooks. The older girl had her craft projects spread out on the porch, and the boy's bedroom had a magnificent showcase of Playmobil models -- but that was it. There were no Legos underfoot, no stuffed animals lying in the stairwells or boxes of trucks overflowing in the den. There were toys -- toys that were in constant use, from the look of things, but not in excess. I will also mention that the family had the largest collection of wonderful children's books I have ever seen.

I remarked on this to the mother of the house, and she said, "It's been a lot of work on my part to keep it this way." Explaining her strategy, I found she and her husband had used the same strategies we planned to use, especially giving away toys that were unacceptable. "It's been hard, but I think it's worth it," she said. "Our children really play with the toys they have."

So it can be done. It has been done. So my husband and I sail on in our idealism of Toy Reduction, with our dream of happy, uncluttered children enjoying their playtime, learning to be creative and innovative in their surroundings and to be generous with their possessions.

:

Author's Note: Some places to find good, simple toys

NovaNatural.com offers a small selection of very good baby toys, most of which seem to be enduring favorites of kids. Expensive, but well-made. 

Hearthsong offers toys for older children and babies that are perennial favorites and hard to find in other places. I get lots of ideas from their catalog, although I seldom buy the toys. They sell a lot of craft kits, science tools, as well as old-fashioned balls, skipping ropes, and dollhouses. Call 1-800-325-2502 for a free catalog.

This Country's Toys are all made in America, which may be helpful to parents who are boycotting toys made in China (virtually all mass-produced toys are made there now). This is the company that sells great wooden blocks in a variety of shapes. Call 1-800-359-1233 or email TCTOYS@AOL.COM.

Magic Cabin Dolls sells lovely, simple stuffed dolls as well as less-expensive kits that you can make yourself. They also sell dollmaking books, including Making Dolls by Reinckens, which has patterns for the lovely, simple Waldorf-style dolls sold by the Natural Baby Company. Call 1-888-623-6557 or write P. O. Box 1996, Peoria, IL 61656-3866.

Another good book, long out of print, is The Doll Book, written by people espousing the Waldorf method of teaching toddlers. It has doll patterns, as well as suggestions and guidelines for toys for different ages of children. "It's a great book so long as you don't make it into a god," said the mother who recommended it to me.

For ideas on teaching/entertaining toddlers that don't involve expensive educational toys (which often have long shelf lives), try visiting a Montessori classroom or visit Montessori N'Such or Montessori Services on the web.

Maria Montessori, a Catholic educator, believed that children learn best when they "work" at play -- learning to do things that are useful as well as fun. For example, children learn how to pour by pouring beans from one small glass pitcher into another one (an exercise I recently introduced to Caleb, which engrossed him for an hour). Other activities include spooning walnuts from one basket to another with a spoon or a pair of pinchers; twisting thick strands of yarn into a braid; stacking boxes from largest to smallest and colored sticks from shortest to longest. While some of the Montessori classroom equipment is sophisticated, some of it can be made at home, and other "lessons" use materials most of us have in our homes already (such as beans, baskets, etc.). The Montessori method would be of interest to any parent planning on homeschooling, since it helps to lay groundwork for "school" learning.

Check out books in the library on the Montessori method, such as Basic Montessori by David Gettman and Teaching Montessori in the Home (Elizabeth G. Hainstock). Another good resource is the Montessori Catholic Council for more information about Montessori's Catholicity.

My Family, the Church: a Big, Rowdy Family

 

Originally published in the Spring 1993 edition of  Caelum et Terra magazine.

Author's note: this in some ways is probably the most popular article I've ever written. I have certainly had people refer to it and request it over the years. The problem has been that it was written in the pre-internet days when I was working on an Apple Macintosh, and the electronic copy is on a tiny plastic disk deep in my long-term storage. I've finally been moved to type it out at last, since an old friend sent me her print copy. It makes an author feel old to realize that nearly 27 years have passed since the fervent and passionate college graduate wrote these words while immersed in the world of late 90s Catholicism in New York City. Yet it's also cathartic to recognize that, by the grace of God, I believe in what I wrote just as firmly. By the grace of God! Blessed Christmas 2020 to you all.

In the days when everyone complains of conformity and the squelching of individualism (the chronic American complain) and the epic search for One's Own Self, I find myself, fresh out in the world, in quest of a group of people with whom I can identify. 

It is, in large part, an unconscious search. I grew up in a family of ten children, and I have to admit that I don't feel like myself unless I am speaking from the midst of a crowd. I long to start my sentences with that precious word, "We..."

Others have rebelled against their families and broken out into freedom. I have rebelled against my freedom and desire closure: the intermingling of one uncomfortable life with another, those constant jostles and elbows and crampings into small corners that assures you that you are affecting and being affected by others. Some might feel claustrophobic in a van with ten screaming kids: I feel at home. I am probably the only commuter who feels a stab of nostalgia while riding the crowded subways of New York City. 

Identity, I feel, is not so much who you are as who you're with. Even the word "Christian" conveys the sense of "one of Christ's." Catholics, I have been told, are the ones with the most understanding of the word "we." Of course, the speaker added, one couldn't really see that in American Catholicism: apparently we are too influenced by Protestant individualism. 

This longing for community is essential if you're facing an impossible task, such as living a highly moral life in today's "death culture." When I was a teenager, I aspired to such a task. Whenever I thought, "The whole world is against me," I felt almost suicidal. But give me even the minority of one other person who shared the same ideals, and the phrase, "The whole world is against us" suddenly had the thrill of romance, the stirring of a call to martyrdom.

I can't tell you how much the Holy Father's call to youth meant to me when I was a teenager. He really seemed to think we could do something. He always spoke to the collective: "the Youth of the World." In a world of specialization, I suspect we were craving the inattention of the collective.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have never desired to be one of a regiment of identical soldiers, or a statistic, or a Benetton model. When I picture group, I visualize family. I don't know of any family, save a family of identical twins, that is wholly homogenous. I find when you mix a bunch of people, quite often you end up with diversity, as people begin to define themselves in relationship to one another.

And the thing I love about the Catholic Church is its incredible diversity. Despite the amazingly vast output of Catholic schools, grown-up Catholics manage never to look like the rows of little uniformed tykes they were in grade school. In fact, the deeper you get involved with Catholics (and with Christians in general), the less likely you are to find two who think alike. I'll give you another example from my college career.

Attending the Franciscan University of Steubenville, an orthodox Catholic school that likes to call itself a "family" university, was an experience of the vast Catholic menagerie of spiritualities that the Church, like a ringmistress, valiantly strives to herd together under one tent. At Steubenville, there were kids from the charismatic prayer groups and kids from the "liberal" youth groups and kids from the staid traditional Catholic homes. There were wonderfully passionate kids who swore they'd never go anywhere but the blessed University of Steubenville, and kids of other passions whose parents didn't dare send them anywhere else by Steubenville. There were ex-drug addicts and recovering alcholics and folks recovering from all sorts of psychological ills. There were white-bread kids and small-town kids, the progeny of middle-class nobodies and big-name somebodies.

As can be imagined, each type had its version of What Was Wrong with the school. There were intellectuals who were appalled at the "unacademic" atmoshpere and big-city kids who moaned that there was nothing to do but study. There were wild-fire charismatics who grumbled at the stodginess of the administration and traditionalists who lamented the untamed Spirit of Vatican II which had demonically possessed the faculty. There were converts from Bible schools amazed at the lack of curfews and remnants from hedonism who wailed at the strictness of the visiting hours. 

It was a worldwide mix. There were students from the Midwest and from Japan and from Canada and from the Carribean. There were twelve tiny black nuns from Nigeria. There was a whole contingent of Latino Catholics who clapped noisily at their Spanish Masses and seemed to want to dedicate everything to "La Virgen Maria." There were those in the pursuit of the religious life and those obviously in search of a spouse. There were fraternity brothers drinking beer and academics sipping wine and ascetics drinking water all atop the same hill, almost from the same cafeteria glasses.

And of course, there were the disputes. There were liberals accusing conservatives of being ultra-conservatives and conservatives accusing the liberals of heresy. There were heartfelt pleas for more peace and tranquility side by side with crowing denunciations of apathy and sloth. There was a small segment who claimed to ignore everybody because they just wanted to be "detached." There were factions and societies and splits and splinterings, gossip and hearsay and misinformation and partial slander and outright lies--enough tempests to rock the teapot of the campus and keep the campus ministers on their knees praying for strength.  

People used to bewail the fact that so many people who all believed the same doctrines could fight so much. I, however, was in a constant state of shock at the fact that they got along as well as they did.

My mother, in raising her ten children, always used to say she was housing a flock of chiefs with no Indians, and since childhood I've been surrounded with the voices of controversy. I always took it as a given that wherever there are people, there are disagreements. And the Church, if it has anything, has lots of people. 

It was very seldom that my family agreed en masse about anything, except maybe eating. Whenever we did agree, it was an almost terrifying consensus. I tend to be afraid of too much sameness, of too much agreement without checks and balances. Because none of us is omniscient, if no one has reservations about a course of action, I think it is more likely that the group is missing everything rather than missing nothing.  If we are all facing the same direction, no one will notice the enemy sneaking up behind. I know many times a plan or a group has been saved by the one person who thought to look the other way and noticed Immient Disaster approaching. So, in a paradoxical way, I tend to hear the voices of disagreement as a sign of harmony. However, in our fallen world, paradox is a creature friendly with the divine.

And at Steubenville, it was a comfortable disagreement. We might have torn out each other's throats on the question of standing or kneeling during the "Great Amen," but none of us doubted the Real Presence. We might shout oceans of rhetoric over the validity of Operation Rescue, but we all agreed abortion was wrong. The campus was a gem of orthodoxy in a sea of unbelief, and, by outside standards, fanatically close-minded and unified. We on the inside knew better. There was no typical Steubenvillite. If you are a Catholic, try and define a typical Catholic and you'll see what I mean. Just as a stained-glass window seen from the outside seems to be a panel of murky darkness, so Christians (and Catholics) appear to be a homogenous mass of humanity as seen by the unbeliever. It's only from the inside of the Church that you can best see the startling contrasts, the sharp delineations, the harmony, and fleetingly, the beauty.

You notice that the only people who are good at satirizing Catholicism are those who are Catholic. It's only the veteran of a Catholic school who can make us howl with laughter over an insightful bite on how all nuns did such and such. Put the same irreverent banter about nuns and popes in the lips of a scornful atheist or a hardened fundamentalist (or an Irish rock singer) and watch how the images flatten into stereotypes that no one can believe or enjoy. From the inside, you can understand the oddness while respecting the reality. From the outside, Catholicism is as humorous as a surrealistic play, too strange to be funny.

In order for two people to have a really good fighting argument, they should at least agree on a few principles. There must be at least one common factor: at least a common language, if they are ever going to get around to slinging mud at each other and making noise. In fact, the more that they have in common, the more violently they will disagree. That principle can be seen at work in Catholicism among those who are supposed to be allies. Among those who believe in black and white, there are few grays.

The more Catholics I meet, the more I'm amazed that Christ is able to shelter us all. The more members I meet, the more I begin to see that the gift of unity is truly a gift, and that the Church is no minor miracle for remaining "one body" for 2000 years. My dad always said the biggest case against the Protestants is not that they are less doctrinally exact or less morally holy than Catholics, but the fact that they can't stick together. As if they are victims of a hereditary disease, the bodies of Christians outside of the Church keep diving and diving, always losing that craved "unity which has the Spirit as its origin and peace as its binding force." (Ephesians 4:2) Some of them have come to the conclusion that Christ never meant for Christians to be together in one Church, accepting separatism as the law of the Spirit. 

Which is a pity, because right across the street from the Baptist church is a Church whose members quarrel violently among themselves but all take communion at the same table. Catholics all recite the same Creed, but on just about everything else that they are allowed to disagree on, they voice their opinions loudly and adamantly. The spats over the validity of this or that Marian apparition are just one example. Another is the gamnut of religious orders: militaristic Jesuits, intellectual Augustinians, teaching and preaching Dominicans, contemplative Carmelites, orders ministerial, spiritual, social, eremetical, and questionable. Even the typical Franciscan is enigmatically difficult to classify: is he or she of the First, Second, or Third order?  Reformed, Cappuchin, or Reformed Cappuchin? Conventual, cloistered, itinerant? "Traditional," "liberal," "moderate," or "charismatic?" And yet all of them answer to the name Catholic.

Looking at the history of the Catholic Church closely, one can see that the tensions among Christian brethren are far from recent developments. In this discussion, I'm overlooking the heresies, the schisms, and the most obvious instances of discord. There were fistfights at the Council of Nicea among hot-blooded bishops and followers determined to hammer out the doctrine of the Trinity. Peter and Paul disagreed on the manner of initiating Gentile converts. And disagreements weren't always over rights and wrongs in doctrines and practice: among the rank-and-file early believers, there were some who honestly preferred Apollos' teaching style to Paul's. The important thing, as Paul pointed out, is that we are all Christ's.

The Church, like the human race, has always been characterized by diversity of the lion-and-tiger type that seems to do nothing but cause trouble. Why didn't God just create "cats," large and small, and save biologists the trouble of trying to divide and classify? Why not have a Church as the simple evangelical groups visualize it: pristine, holy, all believers in matching white robes, all Greek intellectualism, Jewish culturalism, Gentile worldliness, manly agressiveness, and womanly complexities washed away in Christ?  

Why is it that the human Christian tends to retain all his lumps and knobs, provincialism and opinions, preferences and ingrained loyalties that will send him crashing inevitably into his equally well-meaning and idiosyncratic neighbor? It can't be merely human sinfulness, for St. Thomas Aquinas argues, logically, that even the most holy people will often differ in their approaches to solving the same problem. None of the children my mother bore are twins. No two European countries are alike, and no two African republics. There seems to be a stubborn and virile non-conformity among Catholics that now homilist or liturgist can subdue, save Christ. 

That's the way it's always been, starting with the first collection of twelve mismatched apostles, and I can't believe that it will ever cease to be. In Heaven, all Christian divisions will, thank God, come to an end, but Christian diversity? The name "Catholic" means "universal" and if anyone is shocked at the wide variety of folks in the Church, he or she should remember that it's possible to find just about anything in the universe.  The Lord God made them all. And blessed be His name. 

Locality and Social Media

One struggle in modern life that is clearly our generations’ battle is the advent of social media, in so many ways a joy: in other ways, a distraction that leaves television and video games in the dust as a time suck, at least for this woman writer. With fierce conviction I kept television and screens to a minimum in our house, but my own iPhone appears super-glued to my palm, and I find, to my horror, that like Bilbo Baggins and the Ring of Power, I can’t seem to leave it behind: I keep putting it in my pocket. Insidiously, my problem began as most do, with the corruption of an innocent love. One of the treasures of my life has been dozens of far-flung friends, connections from school and previous homes that are precious pearls. To find them all on social media was thrilling: the chance to share lives with them again, to feel less lonely, to encourage them, to interact again was a delight. But the newness has worn down to a troubling addiction to news feeds and notifications and I find myself a poor model for my own children. Here is where I begin my struggle. Now that the global world is demanding my time, attention, and prayers, how do I prioritize? I believe the poverty of locality is where we begin. Once you begin to look at the matter, you see that Mother Church has been unrelenting on her insistence on geography and proximity. The sacraments must be offered and received face to face. One cannot hear confession by avatar. Parishes are geographical: one must live in a certain area to call a certain church home. Christ said, “Love your neighbor,” meaning love the one who is geographically close to you. He could have said, “Love humanity,” but instead He chose a word that indicates (in the singular) the person proximate to you. I don’t think this is accidental, any more than it was an accident that the sacraments are set up in such a way that none of them could ever be received online. The sacraments, like the love in the greatest commandment, require proximity to be operative. In an online age, Christ and Church emphasis real, face-to-face interaction over the virtual or the avatar.Neighbors are odd things in todays’ society, a stubborn reminder that geography exists. In a world where it’s suddenly become easy to choose friends, we rarely get to choose neighbors, and we mostly resent them, and likewise. But our test of love is how much we love those whose dogs chase our children, whose teenagers leave tire marks on our lawns, whose music and clothing choices we critique from behind our blinds. My parents taught me to be pro-actively cheerful and conciliatory with neighbors: choose to initiate positive interactions with them to offset the unchosen negative interactions with them that are bound to occur. Choosing your neighbors is a circumcised choice. Radical choice—moving to live only with neighbors you have chosen and befriended—seems to rob us of the grace of randomness, of letting the Holy Spirit choose our neighbors. Radical choice often backfires: how often have friends moved to be closer to friends only to quarrel and alienate those very friends? There is a grace in choosing to befriend those you would not choose as friends, but you choose to make them friends because they are proximate to you—just as there is grace in befriending your brother or sister who was chosen for you by birth. I am reminded of Chesterton’s image of a man climbing down a random chimney and trying to get along as best as he can with the people he finds there “because that is what each of us did when we were born.” And certainly, living gracefully with family members is the most certain test of true charity I know: if you can courageously and consistently love those relatives who live with you or near you, you are surely on the path to virtue.There are two ways to make a community: to move to a place where community already exists and join in, which is what many in the intentional community movements of the 70s and 80s did, or to build community around yourself by evangelizing all those around you with an aim to begin a community. One can go as a missionary to a far-off land or one can be a missionary at home, in the terrible chasms that separate family member from family member, gorges deepened by experience, in the mazes of known neighbors. This is how St. Therese of Lisieux could be a missionary in one convent with random relatives and strangers clustered around her: the human heart is as much a labyrinth as the jungles of South America and Asia. So we learn to accept what God has designed for us in birth, genes, environment. My hunch is we are in better shape when we leave the radical choices to God, though He may call us to make them some at times.How much time to I give to my children, my neighbors, my fellow parishioners, the people whose lives intersect with mine, compared to time given to email, Instagram posts, messaging, and the like? If time is a measure of my love, where is my love spent? Again, Mother Church offers us another chance to redeem the time: an hour spent in proximate distance to the Lord of the Universe, Her Bridegroom, under the appearance of lowly bread. Spending time with Bread; the Bread of Life, being His neighbor for at least an hour. As we set out to number our time rightly, to gain wisdom of heart in living our lives, we may as well begin there.

Embracing Locality: the Poverty of Place

I want to say a word here about the theology of locality, a term I coined, a theology which is not yet fully developed and probably needs more of a theologian than myself, who am untrained, to do it. This theology reflects on the fact that there is a sacramentality in physical presence, a sacramentality that cannot be experienced through a medium. The sacraments require physical presence. In a similar way, there is more “grace” in attending to someone who is physically present than attending to someone encountered through a medium. Simple common sense tells us that physical presence is more effective, which is why it is still used by salespeople, politicians, and children for maximum impact. A request made in person is always more persuasive than a request made by letter, phone call, email, or text. Again, against the predominance of the telecommunications media, which has swallowed nearly all human interaction public and private, the Church insists upon the necessity of proximity for sacramental grace and fulfilling Church law. We cannot attend Mass via avatar. We must be physically present to be baptized, to be confirmed, to be married, to be ordained, to be shriven, to be anointed, to receive the Holy Eucharist.
In this age of the electronic, we are called to meditate upon this reality more deeply. The Church teaches we must be present and local to receive grace and encounter God. What does this mean for the other areas of living, if the sacramental is to be central in our lives? Should we not prioritize those aspects which are local, which are proximate? Should we not attend first to what is set in front of us, whether that be food, a problem, a stranger, or a child?
Locality is another aspect of poverty, for it means embracing limitations voluntarily. Locality is similar to the limitation Christ took on when He took on flesh and could no longer “broadcast” Himself invisibly to the entire world as He could do when He was only God and not yet Man. This limitation staggers the mind. For 33 years, the Second Person of the Triune God was limited and bounded to the body of a Jewish male, acting perfectly and powerfully and with full attention and intention only in the limitations of that body. Because of that incredible assent to limitation, He did not see or feel everything: He did not know who had touched Him in a crowd, or that the Apostles were terrified in the storm while He slept in the boat with them. He did not bilocate to China or Saudi Arabia or America: when He wanted to go someplace, He walked there, and occasionally rode a donkey or took a boat. Only once that we know of, He took a divine shortcut by eluding pursuers intent on hurling Him off the cliff or walking across the Sea of Galilee, but usually He remained limited. Contemplating this extraordinary stooping of God is marvelous. In perhaps the most incredible act of locality, He first became microscopic and delicate in the Virgin’s womb, abandoning His power to be nourished by Our Lady, to be her child, that most astounding of limitations. Because of this condescension, as the theologians term it, on the part of God, we too should consider the taking on of voluntary limitations as something to be grasped at. This directly impacts our use of technology.At this point, it might be expected that I should repeat the cant, “Technology is not bad, but neutral,” but I feel this is misleading. Technology is neutral in that using it is not intrinsically evil or intrinsically holy, but using technology is not a simple “neutral” equivalent to face-to-face contact. Something is lost in the translation from face-to-face to electronic, something so crucial that the Church considers that it disables the transmission of sacramental grace.  What is lost in the translation?  What are we losing?  Think of this in the abstract and general, not the specific in order to see what I’m getting at.As Neil Postman puts it, you can’t do philosophy using smoke signals. The medium should be chosen because it does affect the message.  Technology is not a simple neutral substitution. Much could be said here, but I want to point out merely that embracing poverty means embracing limitations, and that means prioritizing the limitations of local and face-to-face interaction whenever possible, as grace is potential there. And we should want as much grace as possible. Poverty may mean staying in the place where you were born, living close to family, renouncing the freedom of mobility for sacrificial stability, putting down roots, and rooting your family culture in a particular place. One struggle in modern life that is clearly our generations’ battle is the advent of social media, in so many ways a joy: in other ways, a distraction that leaves television and video games in the dust as a time suck, at least for this woman writer. With fierce conviction I kept television and screens to a minimum in our house, but my own iPhone appears super-glued to my palm, and I find, to my horror, that like Bilbo Baggins and the Ring of Power, I can’t seem to leave it behind: I keep putting it in my pocket. Insidiously, my problem began as most do, with the corruption of an innocent love. One of the treasures of my life has been dozens of far-flung friends, connections from school and previous homes that are precious pearls. To find them all on social media was thrilling: the chance to share lives with them again, to feel less lonely, to encourage them, to interact again was a delight. But the newness has worn down to a troubling addiction to news feeds and notifications and I find myself a poor model for my own children. Here is where I begin my struggle. Now that the global world is demanding my time, attention, and prayers, how do I prioritize? I believe the poverty of locality is where we begin.