That’s all I have to say, because this story makes me happy. Hooray!
Author: simchajfisher
Food and Longing
Just heard the most fascinating short interview on NPR’s Morning Edition. Anya von Bremzen grew up in Soviet Russia, where she shared a huge warehouse apartment with eighteen other families.
Behind each door there’s a comedy, a tragedy, alcoholism. You know, there were lunatic old ladies. Next to us there was the family of a black marketeer, an underground millionaire, who ate unspeakable delicacies. And everyone came together in the kitchen. The kitchen was like the public square of this apartment.
When one ancient neighbor died, they decided to illegally tear down the walls of her tiny apartment and enlarge the kitchen.
[I]n the middle of the night, in complete secrecy, they broke down the walls, they sanded down the floors. When people woke up in the morning, suddenly the kitchen was six meters larger. It was just an amazing feat. … And then the housing manager from the housing committee comes with a new tenant. And the neighbors said, ‘What room? There is no room.’
To celebrate their triumph, the tenants came together to make a feast, including a special potato salad with such costly treats as mayonnaise and canned peas.
Bremzen describes the experience of moving to America, to Philadelphia. Her mother was overjoyed at the abundance of cheap food. But Bremzen, who had fantasized so long about living in the West, says,
I fantasized about having 64 varieties of salami. But when you see it? And suddenly it’s seeped of political meaning, of pathos, of social prestige, of all these multiple, multiple functions and resonances that food carried for Soviet citizens.”
When I heard this line, I was skeptical. People are very fond of ruminating about the mystical power of food to convey meaning and memory, ala Proust, but I wondered if a young person could actually be capable of perceiving any of that. But then she said (and I’m paraphrasing, because the transcript doesn’t reproduce exactly what was on the air)
What’s the point of eating a banana, if just anyone can have a banana?
Most people I know are a little weird about food, but this struck me as so terribly sad. And isn’t this true of so many of our longings? We think we want the thing itself, but maybe we just want to be the one who has something.
Anyway, you can hear the whole interview. I will definitely be reading Bremzen’s memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, where she describes coming together with her mother to cook her way through the joys and pathos of three generations of Russian cooking.
Time for Married Priests?
I’m sharing this essay once again because, in the teeth of the ongoing abuse and cover-up scandal, people are saying we could easily fix so many problems if we’d just allow married priests.
The issue of celibacy is a thorny one, as I rediscovered from the passionate response to my Twitter post about the topic. In this essay, I’m not attempting to disentangle celibacy from the culture of silence that surrounds it. I’m just thinking through what would happen if we introduced married priests with kids into a tradition that doesn’t already have a culture and support system accustomed to the idea.
Since I wrote this essay, the Church established the Ordinariate so Anglican priests, many of whom have families, can become Catholic priests. That, too, comes with complications of its own. See the story we broke about Fr. Luke Reese and the Ordinariate’s response to his arrest for brutally beating his wife inside the church.
I don’t have any profound understanding of the metaphysical significance of celibacy. But I do know something about human nature, and I can imagine what would happen if the Church began to ordain married men. Here is a post I wrote back in January of 2011.
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Why doesn’t the Latin Rite Church just start ordaining married men again? If men can’t or won’t embrace celibacy, then why force the issue? Well, I peeked into the future, when married priests are commonplace, and this is what I heard in the pews:
“Well! I see the pastor’s wife is pregnant again! What is she trying to prove? Must be nice to pop ‘em out year after year, while the parish has to support all those brats.”
or:
“Well! I see another year has gone by and the pastor’s wife still isn’t pregnant. A fine example they’re setting! I won’t have them teaching my children CCD, since his own wife is clearly on the Pill.”
and:
“I went to the rectory the other day to talk to Father about my divorce, and those damn kids of his wouldn’t shut up for a minute. Sounded like a herd of elephants running around up there — I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight. How can he give me advice about my family when he can’t even control his own?”
or:
“I have to talk to someone about my kids, but I would never go to Father — his kids are so well-behaved, he could never understand what I’m going through. I swear, his wife must drug them or something — something ain’t right there.”
and:
“I see the pastor’s kids are taking tennis lessons! I guess they’re doing pretty well– no need for me to leave anything in the basket this week, when we’re barely getting by.”
or:
“I see the pastor’s kids are wearing such ratty shoes. What a terrible example he sets! No one’s going to want to join a church that encourages you to have more kids than you can care for.”
and:
“I wanted to meet with Father to talk about the new brochures for the pro-life committee, and his secretary said he was busy — but on the drive home, I saw him at the McDonald’s playground, just fooling around with his kids! I guess I know where I stand in this parish! Harumph.”
or:
“Everyone thinks it’s so great that Father started all these holy hours and processions and prayer groups, but I saw two of his little ones sitting all alone, just looking so sad and neglected. It’s a shame that any children should grow up that way, without proper attention from their parents. Harumph.”
And so on, and so on. I’m sure you can think of more. Imagine if his wife had a job? Or imagine if she didn’t have a job? Imagine if his wife wore jeans? Imagine if she wore a veil? Imagine if he got an annulment? Would the parishioners pay for child support? Imagine if the priest could have gotten married, but was still single? Does that mean he’s gay, or impotent? Sure, he can’t get married now that he’s a priest, but am I imagining it, or is he hitting on me? Is he hitting on my daughter? Does he regret not marrying before he was ordained?
I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember a pathetic prayer uttered by the semi-fictional Don Camillo: “Please, merciful Lord, if I have to blow my nose while I’m up at the altar, let me do it in a way that doesn’t offend anyone.”
And it wouldn’t just be a matter of doing the right thing and shrugging off unjust gossip. It would be so hard to know what is the right thing to do. I see how my husband struggles to work hard at his job, make enough money, and strategize for the future, because we’re all depending on him — and then comes home and puts it all aside to become the sympathetic and appreciative husband and the strong but playful dad. And he only has one family.
It’s hard enough for men to balance family and career. What if, as priests, they had to balance their biological family with a spiritual family of parishioners? Whose needs come first? It might work in a small, very close-knit community with a long tradition of married priests; but most parishes in the United States are not like that.
And did I mention? The average American Catholic diocesan priest makes between$15-30,000 a year.
I’m not saying it’s unworkable; I’m just saying it’s not the no-brainer heal-all for anemic numbers in the seminaries.
All the hypothetical nasty comments above are things that people say about decent, hard-working, lay Catholic couples with private lives. Other people have no business judging them — and yet they do, all the time. How much worse would this gossip (and the attendant protest via empty collections basket and empty pews) be if the couple in question had much less claim to a private life?
Parishioners tend to feel like they “own” their pastors. This can take the form of befriending and loving him, making him meals, and praying for him — but it can also take some uglier forms. I cannot imagine enduring such scrutiny as a pastor’s wife or child, especially without the graces of Holy Orders that help a priest survive his daily ordeal.
It can be done. But it’s ludicrous to suggest, as so many have, that it’s a no-brainer that would do away with abuse and solve the vocations crisis all in one fell swoop.
In Catholic Digest: 12 Questions to Ask before Giving Money to Charity
Many thanks to Kiernan O’Connor of the Donor Motivation Program of Houston for a great interview. It incorporates advice that will be equally useful for large investors and for widow’s mite types, and also includes some investing tips.
I don’t think the article is available online yet at Catholic Digest, but I did want to highlight a few of the charities that I recommended in the article:
Save a Family Plan
A top notch international NGO run by Catholics, serving poor Indian families of every caste and religion, and fully in allegiance with the Church. Donors partner with needy families or communities and help them invest so they can become self-sufficient.
Reece’s Rainbow
An adoption ministry with many programs to help families fund the very expensive adoption of children with special needs, many of whom are barely surviving substandard care in orphanages.
Save the Storks
Deploys vans equipped with sonogram equipment to abortion clinics, where they do not protest, but gently offer to show pregnant women an ultrasound of their babies. Many of these women choose life after seeing the child they are carrying.
L’Arche USA
Fosters mutually beneficial relationships between people with and without developmental disabilities. Called by John Paul II a “providential seed of the civilization of love.”
Goods of Conscience (founded by Kiernan O’Connor’s brother, Fr. Andrew O’Connor)
Employs Mayan Indian weavers in Guatemala and underemployed sewers in the Bronx to produce a line of chic, upscale clothing that is environmentally sustainable and preserves a traditional form of weaving.
Chemo Angels
Simply organizes volunteers to commit to sending cards, letters, and the occasional small gift to support and encourage patients going through chemotherapy.
And Then There Were None
Abby Johnson’s ministry to provide financial, emotional, spiritual and legal support to anyone wishing to leave the abortion industry.
Catholic Digest: Pro-life Even at the End of Life
Oops, just realized I have a second article in the latest edition of Catholic Digest. Do get your hands on this one if you can! The strength and clarity of the people I interviewed is just astonishing. I wish I had had enough space to include all of what they had to say about making end-of-life decisions for the people they love.
I wrote about the experience of tackling this harrowing subject in a post called “Bright Wings.” I’m just going to reprint it here (it ran first in the Register on Jan. 17, 2013), because it dovetails so nicely with Thursday’s Bigger on the Inside post.
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I’m writing an article for Catholic Digest about end-of-life issues. To be more precise, I’m finally writing this article. I was putting it off because (a) I’m lazy, (b) it involved conducting interviews, and I get very nervous talking on the phone, (c) it seemed like a depressing topic, (d) I was petrified of getting some detail wrong, leading readers astray, and causing the needless deaths of countless helpless grandmas, and most of all because (e) I was scared. Scared of finding out exactly what the Church actually teaches.
I knew the secular ideas of Church teaching were wrong. I knew that the Church is not cruel or heartless, and I knew that her teachings are derived from hundreds of years of rigorous scholarship, and are guided by the Holy Spirit. I knew that sometimes people suffer needlessly because people misunderstand Church teaching.
But I also knew, without even realizing I was thinking this way, that what God wanted from us was awful. Or, in the older sense, awe-ful. Scary, hard, intractable, too much to bear. Without realizing I was thinking this way, I thought I’d have to massage the facts into something more palatable for the general public, so as not to scare people away from fidelity to the Church.
Yep, I thought God would need my help.
I did five interviews in three days, I read the catechism, I looked up the relevant documents, and I got some clarification from Rich Doerflinger. I did my research with the same internal posture as I take on externally when I’m watching a horror movie that everybody says is really, really good and I shouldn’t miss: I was tense, defensive, ready to cover my eyes as the hero slo-o-o-o-owly opens the door to see what’s inside the creepy old shack in the woods.
So, I opened the door. I found out what the Church really says about end-of-life issues — how to make the decisions, how to care for people, how to do your best to strike the balance between letting technology do its job and letting nature take its course.
Guess what the Church teaches? God loves you. He loves life. He has life to share, and He shares the light of His eternal life by sending the Church as a support when we are weak. He sends the Holy Spirit into the ICU and the NICU with the respirators and dialysis machines, into the womb that holds the anencephalic child, into the hospice room with the 80-pound man who no longer wants or needs to eat.
And because He is a God who loves, He is a God who grieves — not only for the sick and the dying, but for the living, who have to carry the burden of their decisions after sitting up night after night without sleeping, without a change of clothes, without knowing clearly if they are causing pain or bringing relief to the ones they love. That every life is valuable, and that includes the lives of caregivers. He enlightens the minds of nurses. He strengthens the hearts of parents. He brings clarity to grown children. And He grieves.
What I learned is that the Church teaches, “God loves you, God loves you, God loves you.” Always and forever, in the darkness of doubt, and in the light of the truth. This is what is at the heart of all the teachings of the Church; this is what we will always see when we force ourselves to uncover our eyes and watch the story as it unfolds:
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Holy Cats, Mr. Science! Do you mean to say that population is made out of people?
Op ed in the NYT saying what I’ve been saying since forever: Gosheroodie, have you noticed that the history of man is, overall, the history of increasing productivity? And who figured out how to increase productivity? Individual people — you know, part of the population.
Someone’s gotta be having the babies. We all need it. Spend less time and effort sterilizing poor people, and spend more time and effort figuring out how to help everyone live well.
There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity. We are nothing at all like bacteria in a petri dish.
Why is it that highly trained natural scientists don’t understand this? My experience is likely to be illustrative. Trained as a biologist, I learned the classic mathematics of population growth — that populations must have their limits and must ultimately reach a balance with their environments. Not to think so would be to misunderstand physics: there is only one earth, of course!
It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the point where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologists’s blinders. Unable to explain how populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the antidote to the demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth tends to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity explained the data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do. While remaining an ecologist, I became a fellow traveler with those who directly study long-term human-environment relationships — archaeologists, geographers, environmental historians and agricultural economists.
Very happy with that phrase “I became a fellow traveler.” He means that he learned along with people who knew more than he did. And that’s what’s called for here. I am sick to death of rich white westerners leaning back in their sustainable bamboo chairs and telling everyone else to breathe less. Treating humanity itself like the enemy — what could be sicker?
This guy gets it. It’s not about numbers; it’s about people:
The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.
Two hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement.
Gangster Meatballs
We recently rewatched Goodfellas, and, what can I say? We’re older and fatter, so what we took away from it was: we have to make those meatballs.
Okay, so we didn’t do this. But we did go out in the rain with flashlights to harvest some fresh basil. So hardcore!
We are having family over tomorrow, and are making a quadruple recipe. They are the meatballs of happiness and delight. You must make them now. Here is the recipe. You can thank me later when you recover from your meat delight coma.
Extra cool!
.. . . as my son used to say repeatedly as he launched himself off the couch repeatedly. But this really is:
They’ve discovered that a common kind of insect hops with the aid of gears:
There was a tiny row of bumps on the inside of each leg where it met the insect’s body. The bumps looked just like the teeth of gears. And when the planthopper jumped, they acted like gears too — as teeth meshed, the legs turned in synchrony. Sutton says his finding, published this week in Science, is the first mechanical gear system ever observed in nature.
Somehow, this makes me feel a little bit better about bugs.
Hoo boy, Mark Twain
Such great stuff here. I laughed my head off at the Jane Austen one:
I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
and this:
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.
and this:
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Especially funny to me because this morning, I woke up and opened a 4,000-word draft I had written late at night. Editing, I come across this passage: “A gift is given freely; and freedom always leaves room for fuck-ups – otherwise, it would not be free. Otherwise, it would not be a gift.” My husband said it sounded like something Randy would say.
But this one hit too close to home:
The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Dammit, Mark Twain.
I repent of my early support for the Iraq War
I wish I had listened to John Paul II at the time, and I have learned my lesson.
Pia de Solenni explains why we’re praying and fasting today, and includes links to an Italian/Latin booklet so you can follow along with the Pope as he leads a prayer vigiltoday (Eastern Time 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.) for peace.
