Category: The Catholic Weekly

Finally! Religious liberty for (white) Americans

American Catholics were jubilant recently over a new religious freedom guidance issued by the Trump administration.

Some of it is fine, as far as I can see. I can think of instances where people were bullied or harassed for openly expressing their faith in the workplace, and where they were made to feel inferior for being religious.

Some people have taken the Establishment Clause of the Constitution to mean that to mean that religious expression is sort of vaguely illegal, and should be quashed. So this new guidance says federal employees are allowed to have Bibles and crosses and so on in the workplace. (It’s notable that all the examples it gives are either Christian or Jewish, explicitly mentioning tefillin and rosary beads, for example, but it avoids any mention of Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu practices of faith. Which is a clear violation of the Establishment clause. Note this. Note. This.)

Some of the guidance makes me extremely nervous. You can click through and read it for yourself if you don’t trust me to summarize—it’s just five pages—but it essentially says that federal employers and employees can display signs of their religious faith, pray and organise prayer groups in the workplace, and talk about and argue for their faith with others in the workplace, as long as they’re not aggressive about it and respect requests to stop.

Here is what I promise will happen: Decent people will adhere to the guidelines, and indecent people will not. People who are good Christians will quietly wear a cross and pray sincerely at lunch and be welcoming and inviting to others; and people who are bad Christians will bully and harass and intimidate people they don’t approve of, and they will point to these guidelines and say they’re entitled to do it.

This is not just a Christian thing; it’s a human nature thing. If people think they can get away with bullying other people, they’ll do it.

I just wanted to establish that the guidelines are absolutely guaranteed to be abused. They were deliberately written to give cover to people who will abuse them. That is how this administration functions, on every level, and it is what we have come to expect from them.

But let’s assume for a minute that it’s all been done in good faith. Let’s pretend that all they want is for Christians and a few docile Jews to be able to keep worshipping God all day long, and not have the government forcibly stripping away their religious convictions and expression.

It sure sounds like that’s what they’re calling for. The first paragraph says:

“The Founders established a Nation in which people were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.” President Trump is committed to reaffirming “America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty,” including by directing “the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law.”

And the fourth paragraph says:

“The First Amendment to the US Constitution robustly protects expressions of religious faith by all Americans—including Federal employees. The US Supreme Court has clarified that the Free Exercise Clause “protects not only the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly,” but also “protect[s] the ability of those who hold religious beliefs of all kinds to live out their faiths in daily life.” Indeed, “[r]espect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic[.]”

That’s what they say.

What are they actually doing? … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Raising teens? Raising ducks? Here’s what you need to know

We have four adolescent ducks who have grown out of their brooder box and it’s warm enough outside that they can play in the yard during the day.  

They’re getting along well with the older ducks, and it’s great to see them having a bit more freedom, growing bolder, and discovering the wonders of the wider world.  

Also, last night my husband ended up wading through the still-frigid stream to rescue these same imbeciles, who somehow managed to cross to the other shore by themselves but couldn’t cross back.  

They got back indoors, wet, upset, and decidedly lacking in affectionate feelings. Back in the box they went, with fresh cedar shavings and a nice heat lamp to take the chill off, a bowl of their special food, and a little tub of water, which they immediately stomped through and pooped in. 

I don’t know if we would have been better parents if we had tried to raise ducks first, but I do know we’re better duck handlers because we’ve raised so many kids. Here are a few of the things we’ve learned, that could apply to raising young’un in both the family anatidae or the family hominidae.  

Don’t go it alone. Ask for help from people with more experience, or at least listen in while they talk to each other. There’s no reason to assume you just naturally know how to do this. Why would you?  

But also, there’s no reason to feel bad for not knowing how to do this. There definitely some wrong ways to do this, but there are lots and lots of different kind of right ways. …. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Before the world ends, plant a tree

What would you do if you knew the world would end tomorrow?  

Some people would probably go the “orgy of worldly pleasures” route. Loot the stores, max out all the credit cards, drink yourself blind, and bed anyone you can, because tomorrow we die. I hope nobody reading this finds that even vaguely appealing.

Some people would probably say it’s best to head to the church, go to confession, receive Communion, and then spend your final hours in penance and fasting, using up your last chance to stave off God’s just punishments. I can’t really argue with this, but I also can’t claim this is what I would do (except for the confession part. Always go to confession!).

So what would I do?

The other day I read a post on social media that said: “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.” This is a paraphrase of a quote often attributed to Martin Luther, but there’s not really any evidence he said it, and it doesn’t really sound like him to me.

What it did sound like is the kind of whimsical, glitter-tossing sentiment that generally makes me roll my eyes. Something along the lines of “Dance like nobody’s watching” or “Angels are just teddy bears with wings” (an actual bumper sticker I saw one time, which still haunts and baffles me).

But the more I thought about it, the better I think it is. Possibly the best possible answer to the question, “What would you do?”

Don’t think of it as a statement of brainless optimism, sassily tra-la-laing in the face of reality because you are a magical being that dances like nobody’s watching and then posts about it on Instagram before everything goes black, and we are supposed to find this in some way beautiful.

Don’t take it that way. Think of it instead as doing your Father’s work.

I actually have planted a lot of trees in my life, and there is something about planting a tree, and always has been….Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Detail of  “Christ Appears to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (‘Noli Me Tangere’),” ca. 1603 National Library of Wales via Wikimedia Commons

Pope Leo may not have a list. But I DO.

Pope Leo, God bless him, seems to be making a big effort to resist a “Francis vs Leo” narrative, and appears to be making intentional gestures of respect toward his predecessor, emphasising unity and continuity.  

If he has grievances, he’s not airing them, and if he has disappointments, he’s not letting them control his behavior. This is clearly the right thing to do. Everything he says and does has huge, universal ramifications. He needs to be very wise, and the last thing we need is more division in the church.  

That being said, it does seem like he has a list. It’s early days, still, but in the first month of his papacy, he’s brought about several things that can’t have been spur-of-the-moment decisions. It’s hard not to feel like he had been thinking quietly to himself over the last several years, “Boy, if I ever find myself in that chair, here’s what I’m gonna do.”  

So now he is, and here are some little things he has done: He reinstated the bonuses for the staff that served during the Conclave. The Vatican website abruptly shed its adorably insane parchment background and now looks like it belongs to this century. And the scandalous, hollow-eyed spooks of Marko Rupnik have vanished from the Vatican media.  

Little things! Not huge changes. But that is how wise leaders do things: Not by storming in and wrecking up the place, but gradually and thoughtfully doing what needs to be done, as he and everyone else get used to the new regime. So far I’m really impressed by his thoughtful and deliberate but clear and direct approach. I’m trying to imitate him and focus on good works without being a jerk about it.   

But yes, I have a list…. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

A hymn for the conclave

Come Holy Ghost, Creator Blest,
And in our hearts take up Thy rest;
Come with Thy grace and heav’nly aid,
To fill the hearts which Thou hast made,
To fill the hearts which Thou hast made.

[DEEP BREATH. MAKE SURE DOOR IS LOCKED AND CARDINALS CAN’T HEAR. DOUBLE CHECK THE DOOR. TURN ON WHITE NOISE MACHINE.]

O Comforter. You know the deal
No man is worthy to wear that seal.
Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ
That’s a big deal, any way it’s sliced.
That’s a big deal, any way it’s sliced.

O Comforter, to Thee we cry,
We need a pope who is just the right guy.
One who is wise, and not insane,
And always naps when he’s on a plane
And always naps when he’s on a plane.

Come Holy Ghost. We’ve been so lucky
John Paul was great and Ben 16 was ducky
Francis’ church….. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Holy heroism doesn’t come out of nowhere

During Lent, I have been reading my family The Hiding Place, the account of how Corrie Ten Boom’s family hid Jews in their home, were discovered, and got sent to a concentration camp.

Four of the Ten Booms died—the number of Jews they saved is something like 800.

I last read this book as a teenager, and the dramatic scenes of great cruelty met with great holiness made a huge impression on me.

I remember the miraculously multiplying vitamin drops that kept the prisoners alive; I remember the scene where Corrie’s sister was thanking God for everything they had, including a horrendous infestation of fleas.

Corrie was horrified that her sister wanted her to thank God even for the fleas, but her sister insisted. Later, it turned out these vermin were a kind of protective army for the prisoners—the guards didn’t want to come into the infested barracks, and so the prisoners were allowed to continue the prayer and scripture readings that kept them from despair.

I also remember reading an account of Corrie Ten Boom, many decades later, meeting one of the very guards who imprisoned and tortured her family, and how she took his hand and forgave him.

The flea story very often comes to mind, and I use it as shorthand for when I’m stymied by something in my life and I can’t think of any way to deal with it rationally. So I just go, “Okay, God, thanks for the fleas, I guess.”

I can’t really relate to Ten Booms’ heroic level of trust in God’s goodness, and in fact I tend to crumble under some extremely light burdens. I don’t think I’d be one of the ones organizing prayer sessions in a prison barracks.

But I understand the general concept of what they were doing. I can break off a little piece of this story for myself and carry it around for when things get hairy, by my standards.

As for the other story, the story of supernatural forgiveness of a sadistic murderer—I remember it, but it goes way over my head. It’s something beyond my experience and beyond my imagination, and all I can do is stand in my low place and behold it, like a fiery sign in the sky.

But they are both part of the account of how the Ten Booms lived, and how they died; and the entire book is hitting me very different, this time around. The parts that are standing out to me are not so much the brilliant acts of holy heroism by this family, or even the more relatable inspiring examples they set. Instead, I’m noting all the little things that got them there.

The book doesn’t begin in the concentration camp….Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: A group of German Wehrmacht soldiers in a village via Picryl (Public Domain)

The princess and the fig tree

Halfway through Lent, we heard the Gospel reading where Jesus tells his disciples twice, in fairly stark and violent terms: If you do not repent, you will perish.

Then he tells them a story: “There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ‘For three years now, I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’

He said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not, you can cut it down.’”

If the fig tree (you and me) isn’t just failing to bear fruit; it’s exhausting the soil around it. It’s hurting the other trees and crops nearby by taking without giving back. It should be destroyed, says the owner of the garden.

The gardener (Jesus) agrees that the fig tree shouldn’t be allowed to go on this way. It must bear fruit—repent—or it should perish. But note something extremely important: he doesn’t just insist that it should repent. He doesn’t even just give it extra time to repent. He comes and helps it. He gives it what it needs so it can, if it will, turn things around before it’s too late.

This reading dovetails so nicely with a short book I recently re-read: The Lost Princess by George MacDonald. It’s not as well-known as his excellent longer “princess” books, the two Curdie books or The Light Princess, but I think it deserves more attention than it gets.

To summarize without spoilers: Two young girls are raised by disastrously indulgent parents. One girl, Rosamond, is a princess, who has become monstrously selfish and capricious, terrorising the whole household. The king and queen are at their wits’ end with their daughter’s violent temper, so they summon a wise woman to help them. She abducts Rosamond and takes her on a brutal journey of self-knowledge and self-control, with many trials and many failures.

Then we are introduced to the second girl, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife, who isn’t openly monstrous, but she is so profoundly self-satisfied, she doesn’t really believe anyone else is real. She, too, is taken in by the wise woman for cultivation, and at some point, the shepherd girl and the princess switch roles, with varying consequences. At the end, both girls are returned to their homes to live the lives they have chosen.

The story, being Victorian, is pretty openly preachy. The narrator frequently delivers little lessons about life directly to the reader, which was the style at the time. But if you think of it as a sermon with a compelling and entertaining story, rather than a story that preaches at you, it’s wonderful, and harrowing in the best way—and don’t get me wrong; the fiction stands up on its own and isn’t solely a vehicle for a message. It has some scenes and some imagery that have stayed with me for 40 years or longer, and that have not lost any of their power when I read again it last week.

One such scene … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Detail of painting by Julie Le Brun (1780–1819) Looking in a Mirror (1787) via Rawpixel (Creative Commons) 

Wonderful and ridiculous

Can you stand to hear a story that’s probably a little too personal for these august pages? Because I have one! And I do have a reason for telling it.

I’m 50 years old. I have 10 children, and the youngest one just turned 10. I have grey hair and wrinkles and a little arthritis, and I spend more time hunting for my reading glasses than I spend on almost any other activity. The other day, I couldn’t remember the word “fork.”

I also have a body that stubbornly continues to keep popping out ova every month, right on schedule. As far as I can tell, I could probably get pregnant again if I wanted to, which I most adamantly do not. I know the chances of carrying a healthy baby to term at my age are (unlike myself) much slimmer than they used to be, but they certainly aren’t zero. I look at my family history and I think, nah, I’m not taking any chances.

I really like walking past the diaper aisle without buying anything! I like being able to take medicine without freaking out about possible birth defects. I prefer to spend my days in agonizing worry over the 10 children I already have, thank you very much. I really don’t want another baby.

Well, maybe a little bit. I do like babies. I actually love babies. If we had another baby, I would adore him from the very first second I knew he existed, and it would be incredible. It would be amazing. It would be preposterous. It would be insane. It would be so nice.

These are the thoughts that run through my head every month.

So the other morning, I groaned as I dragged my sorry self out of bed to do what I not-very-funnily call “my chemistry experiment,” to see if I was fertile that day or not. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in my schlumpy old pajamas and thought how absurd it was that I still have to DO this. I’m so old! It’s so ridiculous! I am HALF A CENTURY OLD.

Then I thought, and how ridiculous would it be to show up at the OB/GYN with my grey hair and wrinkles and arthritis and a big ol’ pregnant belly? So I sighed, and did my dang fertility test.

I was chatting about this with some Catholic women my age, about how ridiculous it would be; and one of them said that, if I were pregnant, it wouldn’t be ridiculous. It would be beautiful!

Ladies and gentlemen, it would be both.

Two things can be true at the same time. In fact, most true things are at least two things at the same time. When we get ourselves into trouble is when we expect some human experience to be pure, unmixed, and clearly labelled as one thing or another.

Let me give you some more examples…. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image by Matthew McPherrin via Flickr (Creative Commons)

A Lent for this specific year

Lent is one of those seasons when the “Both/And” nature of the Catholic Church really asserts itself.  

The practices and purposes of Lent are ancient, timeless, universal. It’s a season when we’re invited to step into an ancient, continuous tradition of fasting, praying, self-denial that would not be completely foreign to Catholics who lived centuries ago. 

It’s also a time when we’re supposed to ask ourselves, “What am I in particular, in this specific year, at this specific time in my life, supposed to do so that I can come closer to God?” 

I have some ideas! Here are my suggestions for how to spend Lent in the year 2025. 

Refuse to dehumanize. Not even a little bit.

Undeniably, there are evil people in the world doing evil things.  These people are our brothers and sisters in Christ, with no exceptions at all. They are not trash, not termites, not scum, not excrement, not parasites, not a waste of skin.  

Dehumanization paves the way to oppression, every time. We must not participate, even for the sake of rhetoric, or our hearts will follow the lead of our lips.  

It is becoming more and more socially acceptable to refer to our opponents as less than human, because we see them behaving so abominably, and because they’re calling us even worse names. But as Christians, this should impel us to work harder to recall their humanity, not to give in. Christ did not despise us, and we’re obligated to pass that mercy on.  

Refuse to enjoy being angry.

There’s a lot to be angry about. But when we’re angry at another human being, we should steel ourselves against relishing that rage and delighting in our disgust.  

We can follow the example of Mr Dimble in the final pages of That Hideous Strength, who has just discovered how thoroughly Mark Studdock has given himself over to evil: 

“He seemed to Mark to be looking at him not with anger or contempt but with that degree of loathing which produces in those who feel it a kind of embarrassment—as if he were an obscenity which decent people are forced, for very shame, to pretend that they have not noticed. 

“In this Mark was quite mistaken. In reality his presence was acting on Dimble as a summons to rigid self-control. Dimble was simply trying very hard not to hate, not to despise, above all not to enjoy hating and despising, and he had no idea of the fixed severity which this effort gave to his face.” 

Relatedly:

Give up, or at least cast a critical eye on, doing things that will score us points with our crowd 

That’s one of the worst and most perilous reasons to do or believe something: For applause. Our foundational ideas can so easily shift along with the crowd without us even realizing it, and the crowd tends to demand more and more debasement.  

Times like these are a wonderful opportunity to halt, assess what our core values are, and ask ourselves: Why am I doing this? Why am I saying this? Why am I speaking to or about this person this way?  Just check in and see if anything has shifted in your heart since last year, or since a few years ago; and, if it has, consider whether our new personal standards make us a better witness to the Gospel, or worse. 

Swear off hate-socialising…

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

God loves me, full stop.

Follow my story as I pondered a great and baffling mystery, and then solved it—and then discovered a whole new mystery.

I was having some strange, inexplicable symptoms. I was sluggish and lacked energy. I wasn’t moving well, and I had lots of reflux. But mostly, and most strangely, my pants felt a little tight. What could it all mean?

I thought about it for a while, analyzed the content of the past several weeks, assembled and studied the facts at my disposal, and after a while, I arrived at the conclusion: Me eat too much food, and so me get little bit fat.

That’s it. That’s all that was going on. I had been super busy and distracted, so I stopped paying attention to what I was eating. That’s what happened.

Perhaps you are wondering why this whole situation was in any way a puzzle me. Most people, when faced with a clue like “tight pants” would pretty quickly arrive at the answer “more belly.” Most of my life, I would have done the same thing. So why didn’t I figure it out?

Because one thing was missing: The crushing shame and self-loathing that has always come along with a little bit of weight gain, my entire life. I was just a little bit bigger, and it was because I was eating a little bit more. There wasn’t any “YOU USELESS VERMIN” about it; but without that special ingredient of self castigation, I genuinely didn’t recognise what was going on.

A similar thing happened to me a few years ago. I had to get up and do something, but there was something wrong with my arms and legs. They hurt and felt weak and sore and unready. I didn’t understand what was happening to me for several minutes, but eventually it dawned on me: I was tired.

Same story as the weight gain: I didn’t recognize what was going on, because I wasn’t dragging myself through that familiar wretched landscape of second-guessing and guilt, where I accused myself of being lazy and interrogated myself about why I was so unwilling to do such an easy thing. Without this extra burden of self-loathing, I literally could not identify what I was feeling as simple tiredness. I was very, very used to being tired; I was completely unfamiliar with being tired and just accepting that as an objective fact, without tarting it up in an ugly disguise of self-blame.

If you had asked me, “Is it the worst sin in the world to eat cookies for snacks several days in a row?” or “Should a working mother of ten feel ashamed for being tired?” I would have answered: “What? No! Goodness, of course not!”

But deep down, I believed it. I didn’t even know I believed it for years, until I suddenly stopped believing it.

I’m telling you about my particular brand of crazy because I think most of us are like this, in one way or another…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Mosaic of the creation of Eve, Monreale Cathedral (public domain)