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What’s for supper? Vol. 49: Some women just want to watch the meatloaf burn

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Okay! This week seems like a good time to resurrect the original purpose of this series, which was to help each other plan meals, discover new recipes, avoid hideous disasters, and so on. I’d absolutely love to hear you meal ideas — one recipe, or a whole week’s worth of dishes. What’s for supper at your house? Share in the comments; or, if you have a blog, you can add a link to this post by using the blue frog button at the bottom of the page. If it’s not showing up, please let me know so I can kill myself.

Here’s what we had this week:

SATURDAY
Bagel, egg, sausage, and cheese sandwiches

This is the easiest meal in the world. Toast a bunch of bagels, fry up a bunch of eggs, cook a bunch of sausage, and serve platters of everything with cheese. It’s so easy that I like to challenge myself a bit, by seeing how many platters of bagels I can ruin. Then, after I figure that out (it’s two, by the way. That’s twelve bagels turned into charcoal), I decide that this time, I’m gonna set the timer, so I don’t burn the next batch. So I do, and guess what? I set the timer for two minutes too long, and burned the next twelve bagels, too. But this time, it was intentional!

I also burned the sausages. The eggs were okay.

***

SUNDAY
Meatloaf, Hobbit bread, salad

I cook a fine meatloaf, if I do say so myself.

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I had seven pounds of beef and used the basic Fanny Farmer recipe (not in a buttered loaf pan, though! Blech. I shape the loaves on top of a broiler pan so the fat can drain off a bit). I went a little heavy on the Worcestershire sauce, and I also spread some ketchup around the outside before baking. Gorgeous and savory, if a little charred in spots.

My current favorite daughter volunteered to make her famous Hobbit Bread, which is a woven-topped loaf (or three) stuffed with mushrooms, onions, and cheese (recipe found in An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery). She used storebought balls of pizza dough.

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I did set the timer for too long and they got a little burnt, so I was forced to only throw eleven pieces of this down my gullet.

And we had salad, because I am your mother and wish you to suffer.

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***

MONDAY
Baked ziti with sausage; salad

Ziti, crumbled sausage meat, jarred sauce, and a ton of fresh basil. Nobody really likes this meal, so I made enough to fill one of Arizona’s smaller and less famous but equally enchanting canyons. I dutifully ate it for lunch for two days, and then threw the rest out.

***

TUESDAY
Pulled pork sandwiches, red onions, potato puffs

One hunk of pork, one can of Narragansett beer, lots of salt and pepper. Cover loosely with tinfoil, cook at 200 for several hours; shred with forks and fingers, mix with bottled BBQ sauce, serve with red onions.

I remembered to set aside pulled pork for my husband and daughter, who were working late. I didn’t remember to put it away. I didn’t realize the dog was watching me not put it away.

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My husband and daughter found an empty tray on the floor and ordered pizza. I cried.

At least I didn’t burn anything this time.

***

WEDNESDAY
Chicken burgers, chips, carrots with hummus

Nothing to report, except that I like my chicken burgers with some horseradish sauce. Fawncy!

***

THURSDAY
Tacos, tortilla chips and salsa

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I cooked the meat earlier in the day, then refrigerated it, then heated it up in the microwave, and then microwaved my individual taco. What would life even be like without these modern time-saving appliances?

***

FRIDAY
Gochujang tuna with sesame seeds; white rice

Today is a very special day, for today we will try a new brand of gochujang (Korean fermented pepper paste).

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You just mix it up with whatever you want and put some toasted sesame seeds on top and feel so dang smart.

***

Here it is: the blue frog button! It should say, “Click to view and add your links!” Or just click on whatever’s there. I’m making my list early, so hoping to be inspired with your menus!

 

 

Greek tragedy mask photo credit: Tragoedia via photopin (license)

Mother Teresa’s unofficial bonus miracle: a fair shake from NPR

NPR ran a delightfully clear and positive story yesterday about the upcoming canonization of Mother Teresa, and they included a short overview of the Church’s miracle requirement when a cause for sainthood is advanced. The secular media notoriously seeks out liberal, dissenting, or flat-out ignorant sources when it wants to explain something about Catholicism (and if they describe someone as a “devout Catholic,” it’s always either a pro-abortion politician or a porn star, or both).

Well, not this time! Fr. Robert Barron was their primary source, and he did his usual snappy, articulate job. I was also pleasantly surprised to see this little tidbit about the canonization process:

A group advocating sainthood for Marguerite d’Youville, a nun who lived in 18th century Canada, for example, sought an alternative explanation for the sudden recovery of a woman with incurable leukemia who had prayed to the nun 200 years after the nun’s death. The assignment went to Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a hematologist at Queen’s University in Ontario.

Duffin agreed to do the investigation, but only after warning the group that she was not herself a believer.

“I revealed my atheism to them,” Duffin says. “I told them my husband was a Jew, and I wasn’t sure if they’d still want me. And they were delighted!”

The group reasoned that if Duffin, as an atheist, found there was no scientific reason the woman should have recovered, who could doubt it was a miracle? In fact, after her investigation of the woman’s recovery, Duffin agreed that the woman’s healing was — for lack of a better word — miraculous.

Intrigued by the experience, Duffin investigated hundreds of other miracle stories chronicled in the Vatican archives in Rome. She came away convinced that “miracles” do indeed happen.

Christopher Hitchens and other critics of Mother Teresa have somehow come away with the impression that the Church is busily throwing sand in people’s eyes and brushing inconvenient facts under the carpet, so as to bulk-canonize as many awful people as possible (motivation unclear).

The opposite is actually true. When researching the topic for Catholic Digest a few years ago, I discovered that, although the canonization process is less cumbersome than it used to be, it’s still really, really cumbersome, long, and complicated — by design.

The Church works hard to find a reason why someone should not be canonized, and it tries to remove every obstacle to discovering the truth about a candidate. Hundreds and hundreds of people are interviewed, and investigators are sworn to secrecy, so that anyone with unpleasant information will feel secure in coming forward. Investigators spend countless hours questioning everyone who could possibly be considered to be involved with the candidate; and when a devout person claims a miracle has occurred, there are countless reviews of every possible angle, including numerous physicians and theologians. There is even an investigation of the spiritual life and habits of the person who claims to have received miraculous intercession from the proposed saint. Tens of thousands of documents are prepared and reviewed at every level of the investigation. Strange behavior indeed from a church who wishes to deceive.

Speaking of strange behavior, the late Christopher Hitchens unstintingly devoted years of his life in service of trashing Mother Teresa, essentially for being a Catholic nun, rather than a billionaire doctor; for rescuing dying people from a miserable death in the streets, and for making sense of suffering rather than just crabbing about it. Hitchens seemed especially incensed that, in what Mother Teresa called her “Houses for the Dying,” people died. Died!

Now that her canonization is imminent, we’re told that, through her intercession, some people went ahead and didn’t die. You’d think her critics would be thrilled at the news (Horrible Nun Reverses Position, Now Opposes Death), but they are still complaining, for some reason. I supposed some mysteries are unplumbable.

(For a thorough response to the numerous, often self-contradictory criticisms against Mother Teresa, see this essay in First Things.)

Anyway, the Church truly is fussy when it investigates these matters, which is a great thing. If they left it up to me, I’d see miracles everywhere — including the one I came across just yesterday, when NPR made a positive and accurate report about the Catholic Church.

***

More reading: Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble’s 5 Responses to the Ridiculous Rancor of Some Toward Mother Teresa

Image: India7 Network via Flickr (licensed)

 

Naked vs. Nude: Do you have issues with ESPN’s Body Issue?

An artist once told me he was sitting there, deep in a sketch of a woman who was posing nude, when he found himself idly wondering whether she had any tattoos. Then he realized: she’s posing nude. If she had any tattoos, he would already know.

But he wasn’t thinking of her body parts. He was thinking of the lines and shadows and textures and angles of her loveliness, using the part of his brain that accepts beauty for what it is, rather than running her through the mincing machine of lust.

I thought of that artist (full interview here) when I saw Catholic social media has discovered ESPN’s annual “Body Issue,” which came out in July and which features photos and videos of nude athletes. Before you click over, I should warn you: this collection of photos of naked people is a collection of photos of naked people.

Or is it?

When I spent a college semester in Rome, one of the first things our professors asked us to ponder was the difference between “naked” and “nude.”

When we are naked, the primary thing about us is that we are lacking something; we have had something stripped away from us. When we are nude, we just . . . are what we are, and then some. We are not so much exposed as revealed. We are not isolated; we are in our element. These distinctions account for how much skin you can see if you look up at the Sistene Chapel.

Naked vs. nude. Think on this: A healthy young man at the beach sees a woman frolic through the waves in a skimpy bikini, and what does he do? He skips over her bared flesh and stares only at the very small parts of her that are covered with cloth. What a gentleman! Heh heh. But you see, that’s the point: nakedness, or near-nakedness, is intended to titillate (and can we just take a moment and praise the god of linguistics that there is such a word?) by making us focus on bits and parts. Nakedness is a gimmick, and it works very well, because we are fallen.

Nudity, on the other hand, like any good work of art, takes our eyes for a ride, and doesn’t allow us the easy comfort of landing on one thing and saying, “Oh, that’s what this is a picture of.” In the visual arts, a good composition doesn’t force the eye to zoom in on The Main Part, The End. In good composition, one part of the work does its work by leading you to another part, because of how they’re put together, how they’re balanced, how the individual parts relate to each other, how they echo and answer each other. Light, texture, the flow of the lines, the interruption of the flow of the lines — all of these things ought to be dynamic, not static, and it ought to be unimaginable that they be in any other spot than where they are. That’s what good art looks like, including good art that depicts the unclothed human form.

In a bad piece of art, as in a photograph meant to show nakedness, all that matters is that The Thing — you know, That Thing you like to look at — is somewhere you can see it.

The Body Issue achieves the goal of showing nudity, not nakedness. It is decent (albeit not high) art, and not gimmickry. When I look at the naked athletes’ bodies in the photos, I don’t have much trouble helping my childish eye get past the naughty bits, because they’re presented in such a way that they’re indisputably part of a whole — part of the whole body, which is a thing of harmony and dynamism; and they’re also part of the whole composition of the photo, including the lighting, the background, and so on.

Did ESPN have purely artistic motives in putting out The Body Issue, or was it attempting to affirm an incarnational view of the world? N-nnno. They’re not going to say, “Before you buy this magazine, please ask yourself if you might be inclined to objectify the human form. If so, we’d rather not have your money.” Nope. They called the 2016 collection “The Bodies We Want,” probably aiming for a mild pun: we want to have these bodies as our own, and maybe we also want to have these bodies for our own use. Either way: fifteen bucks, please.

Can we look at The Body Issue and lust after the unclothed people in it? Sure. People who are prone to lust and objectification shouldn’t look, because it’s not worth it. There are other forms of beauty to enjoy, thank God. (It’s also worth noting that people who are prisoners of lust will lust after anything. They’ll lust after an exposed ankle or a pair of lips, if that’s all that shows.)

Whatever ESPN’s motivations, and whatever its readers’ responses, The Body Issue is completely different in character from Sports Illustrated‘s annual “Swimsuit Issue,” which I will not link to, because it is pornography. The “Swimsuit Issue” does something terrible, to its models and to us: it tells us, “Here’s a person, sure, but she’s made out of parts. Look at those parts. Here’s one where she doesn’t even have a head, just parts!”  It takes the human person out of context of her surroundings, and takes her bits and pieces out of the context of the rest of her body.  This is what nakedness does: it narrows our vision.

Nudity, on the other hand, broadens our vision, and helps us see something we hadn’t seen before. It helps us past seeing just parts, and (whether it knows it or not) it helps restore us to something like what Adam and Eve experienced before the Fall, before they knew they were naked. When we successfully present the human form as something to be admired, and not consumed, then we have won back a little piece of Eden. It’s not simply allowable despite our fallen natures, it’s a correction to our fallenness.

Did ESPN mean to make a pun when it chose the name “The Body Issue?” I have no idea; but boy, do we have issues with the human body. But, as John Paul II pleaded with us to understand, we won’t get past those issues by fleeing from them. We’ll never repair the harm that was done through original sin if we shun, shame, fear, and loathe our bodies. That’s not chastity; that’s just another form of dysfunction.

***

Image: By Michelangelo, Public Domain,  one of twenty “ignudi” shamelessly scattered about the Sistene Chapel ceiling

Gene Wilder gave roles his all, but shared the stage

Rest in peace, Gene Wilder, the blurry-featured, flossy-haired, heavy-eyed man who shrieked, ranted, muttered, and mugged through so many of Mel Brooks’ movies — with, if you pay attention, an incredible amount of classical stage discipline and skill. By all accounts, he lived for the attention he got through acting, but always shared the stage.

He’s told the story in several interviews of how he came to fall in love with acting: When he was a young boy, his mother had a heart attack. She came back home fragile and was put to bed, and the doctor pulled the little boy aside and said that he should never get angry at her, because it could kill her. But he should always try to make her laugh. And so he did.

It almost sounds too tidily melodramatic to be true, but it would explain why Wilder was willing to pour so much of himself into his films. In his memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger, he tells the story of how he persuaded Mel Brooks not to scrap the “Puttin’ On the Ritz” scene in Young Frankenstein:

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Wilder was irreplaceable in Mel Brooks’ broad, outlandish comedies-with-a-heart, where he fleshed out what could have been one-dimensional comic book characters into real, if bizarre people, usually in the midst of some kind of painful transformation: Viktor Frankenstein, the brilliant, rational surgeon and professor being stalked by destiny; in Blazing Saddles, the dissipated Waco Kid haunted by his past and eager to die, perfectly placed for one last deed of greatness; and of course Leo Bloom, the neurotically timid accountant who accidentally stumbles on an almost-brilliant idea. None of these characters would have worked if Wilder hadn’t believed them with his whole heart.

Here are my favorite Gene Wilder scenes, many of which are the source of Fisher household catchphrases:

From Blazing Saddles, when the new sheriff meets the town drunk: “Need any help?” — “Oh . . . all I can get.” (This phrase turns up a lot during the dinner prep hour):

In Young Frankenstein, while the good doctor still strains to divorce his name from his nefarious ancestors, he protests that he is not interested in death! Look at those hooded eyes, how he slides them around him and bats his lids like a silent movie actor:

 

Wilder has a wonderful maniacal shout, but his quiet mutter is sublime. “Nice hopping,” and “Give him an extra dollar” are both standards in our household.

And of course the fabled “Puttin’ On the Ritz” song and dance, where Dr. Frankenstein seeks to win over the hearts and minds of a suspicious community by showing them the fearful monster’s lovable show biz side:

Great example of how he refuses to steal the stage, in service of the show.

From The Producers (the real version, not the other one):
“I’m in pain. I’m wet. And I’m still hysterical!”

Ah, well. Prayers for comfort for his widow, a non-celebrity who was married to Wilder for 25 years and who nursed him through his final illness; and prayers for Wilder. May his soul rest in peace.

In which I get Jesus Juked by Jesus

The parable that Jesus tells in yesterday’s Gospel — the one about the party guests, and about exalting the lowly and casting down the exalted? It bugs me.

I get and appreciate the general principle, and I’ve seen it in action; but I’m not sure I completely approve of Jesus’ methods. He seems to be appealing to such a low motivation: Don’t try to elevate yourself, because think how embarrassing it will be when you get knocked back down where you belong! Bubbeleh, why would you do that to yourself? Think how much nicer it would be act all humble, and the host will be all, “Hey, what are you doing down there? Come on up, you old so-and-so!” right in front of all your friends. Ha!

So, that’s odd enough in itself. I sit in my pew and I think, “Boy, Lord, give us some credit! We do have other stuff besides self-interest going on here. Maybe urge us to transcend earthly concerns, abnegate ourselves in service of higher things, seek the better part, eh, eh?”

But instead, He does more or less what I do to my little kids: He bribes them. I know I’m not going to get a three-year-old to be patient at the DMV by reminding him that my children owe me obedience and respect as part of the natural order of things, and that he ought to control himself because he understands that it’s good for the entire family if Mama can get her license renewed before the deadline. That never works. But I may get the little spaz to behave himself if I promise him a Slurpee when we get out. Not edifying, but effective. The kid is only three, and we can’t expect much more from him.

Well, the second part of the parable isn’t very edifying, either. After telling the guests that they’ll get a treat if they stifle their natural impulses, Jesus also bribes the hosts, telling them that if they invite people who can’t possibly repay them with reciprocal invitations, then they’ll get a treat at the resurrection.

Sheesh. If Jesus had consulted me, I probably would have suggested that He say something like, “For in the faces of the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, you will see the very face of God, who is a still, small voice in the very last place you expect to see Him, so be like unto the mountain climber who, upon falling into a crevasse, fights every natural instinct he has and does the thing he hates most, climbing down into the darkness, and thus will he find salvation and, more importantly, enlightenment.” Instead, He basically says, “If you invite the poor people to your party, I’ll get you a Slurpee later.”

So I’m sitting in my pew, trying to imagine what this banquet would actually look like: the uggos scrambling for the worst seats, giggling to themselves over how awesome it was going to be when the host calls them up front, and then the host making like an exasperated math teacher, begging “Guys, you all need to move up. It turns out I didn’t invite anyone cool at all, so there are all these empty seats up front, so if you could all just move up, then I can collect my reward after I die, which is going to be soon if we don’t get this show on the road.”

Well, that just doesn’t make a lick of sense. What kind of party is that? I think that if Jesus had just checked with me, I could have written the parable a lot better, and the whole thing could have been more profound and more enlightening for everyone. Look, I don’t mean to get ahead of myself, or exalt myself, or put myself in a higher position than I . . .

. . . don’t mean to  . . .

Huh. I think I just got Jesus juked by Jesus.

Okay, message received, Lord. It’s your party, not mine. Your gospel, not mine. Your plan of salvation, not mine. And I am yours, not mine. If you think I need to be bribed, then maybe, just maybe, you know me better than I know myself. I’ll try to behave myself now, and wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Slurpee, amen.

***

photo credit: The Bait via photopin (license)

What’s for supper? Vol. 48: Got any duck food?

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It’s that ambitious time of year again, when people want to SORT THEIR LIVES OUT. We are all making plans, solid plans.

So, if you’re working on sorting your life out, would it help if I started using a link-up system again? It never really caught on, but I’d be happy to try again. I loved seeing what other families had for dinner. The original idea was not only to post pictures of my pork chops (I mean, who starts out with that for an original plan? People just fall into this kind of thing, all right? You have a camera, you have an empty corner in the garage, and someone says, “Hey, you know, here’s what you could do. . . ” Next thing you know, it’s a business model and you’re thinking of upgrading your drapes), but to give everyone a leg up in that lonely, lonely business of making a weekly meal plan.

Eh? Eh? Link-up, or just a reminder to share your menu for the week? Or just keep on posting pictures of my chops? I’m flexible.

Here’s what we had this week:

SATURDAY
Pizza hut pizza

On Saturday, we went to the ZOO! This is the first time we’ve been there when it wasn’t free day and thus packed to the gills with a gazillion other broke families. I was delighted to see that there is a whole lion in this zoo, and not just the top of a tuft of hair of the lion, which is what we’ve been able to see in other years through the crush of people. They also have entire giraffes, not just trees swishing with invisible giraffes inside them; and there is a whole gorilla, not just a fleeting gorilla butt.

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Paying admission! Who’d-a thunk it. Next you’ll be telling me some people pay more than $12.88 for a pair of shoes.

My husband’s wonderful sister from California was in town, so we dragged her along with us to the zoo, and then we dragged her to one of our region’s distinctive culinary showcases: Pizza Hut. Of course we just had to sample that classic New England specialty: Two Pepperoni And Two Olive. My husband ordered Coke, and the waitress asked if Pepsi was okay, and he said “yes.” And that’s how I knew it had been a long day.

***

SUNDAY
Blueberry Chicken Salad again

This was so yummy, and chicken was so on sale, I put it on the menu again while it’s still blueberry season.

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Still yummy! Here’s the recipe. I used bleu cheese instead of feta this time, and it was a much better match.

***

MONDAY
Hamburgers, chips

Nothing to report. Kids made supper while I was on the radio.

Oh, by the way, that was my next-to-last radio show with Mark Shea. Over a month ago, I had to regretfully let Mark know that when school started up, I wouldn’t be able to co-host anymore, because we’re just too crunched for time. So this coming Monday will be my last show (at least for now). You can still find podcasts of all of Mark’s previous shows, including the Mondays when I co-hosted. Also, the show is now available for Kindle, which should make it much easier to listen! And you can become a friend of the show, to help keep Breadbox Media on the air. Mark is such an enormously knowledgeable, articulate, and funny guy who is willing to talk about anything with anyone. Definitely worth your support.

On my last show this coming Monday, I will make a third and final attempt to tell the “got any duck food?” joke. It will be horrible.

***

TUESDAY
Copycat Wendy’s Power Mediterranean Chicken Salad

We have fast food once a week on our fabled shopping turn. A trip to Wendy’s is not as exciting for me as it is for the little guys, so I usually get a half salad, and I bring a can of seltzer from home. Wendy’s salads are actually quite good, fresh and interesting, not the limp, wizened, uninspired food you’d expect from a fast food place. My favorite is the Power Mediterranean Chicken Salad. Silly name, but a very tasty and filling meal.

I didn’t copy it exactly, but my version was:

Chopped kale,
spinach,
baby arugula,
grape tomatoes,
feta cheese,
black olives,
chick peas,
white beans,
roasted sunflower seeds,
chopped sweet peppers,
and chunks of grilled chicken.

I did buy some quinoa, which I happen to like, humph; but it felt too hot to cook anything else, so I skipped it, thus making the salad slightly less powerful. The Wendy’s version also includes hummus, which I put on the table but forgot to eat.

Normally, I serve meals like this in separate dishes, so people can pick and choose, but I was not feeling terribly accommodating on Tuesday, so I chunked it all into a giant bowl together.*

[img attachment=”117335″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”blueberry salad mixed” /]

I only kept the olives sequestered, in deference to my husband’s intense olive aversion; but he got home really late after a frustrating day of trying to squeeze some verifiable information out of a guy who spends a lot of time making amazing deals with classic car aficionados and also, as a side hobby, corresponding with the Better Business Bureau. I sort of mumblingly mentioned that there was lots of salad left over, with lots of nice things in it, such as nice chick peas. He said he was too tired to eat salad, and made some burgers instead. Fair enough.

*If you look closely, you’ll notice that this is actually a picture of Saturday’s blueberry salad, and not a copycat power mediterranean chicken salad at all. This is because I lost my iPad again, so my son took pictures with his phone, but then the rotten kid went to school. If I can reach him in time, I’ll add more pics in later, but I don’t have high hopes.

***

WEDNESDAY
Pork ribs, mashed potatoes, peas

Is there anything lovelier than a nicely-roasted pork rib reclining elegantly upon a plate? I argue that there is not.

[img attachment=”117343″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”pork dinner” /]

Notice the delicate breath of frost upon the peas. It was still hot, and I still didn’t feel like cooking anything. I did, however, take the peas out of the bag.

***

THURSDAY
Four large pizzas, carrots with hummus

My teenage son saw that I was having a stressful week, so he offered to try hummus. So now he has officially tried hummus. I think it made him tired. I appreciated the gesture.

***

FRIDAY
Pasta?

Okay, don’t forget to let me know your vote about future food posts! Link-up, or just a reminder to share menus in the comments, or just more pictures of my meaty thighs? I live to serve.

15 ways to make a morning offering

One thing I know: Christ is a gentleman, and will only come in where He is invited. He’s not fussy, and won’t hold back even if the invitation is brief, clumsy, distracted, cranky, dopey, sullen, or weird. But He does wait for the invitation; so there is no better way to start your day than by inviting Him into your day with a morning offering.

It’s worth praying a quick morning offering even if it’s the only prayer you say that day. I’ve written a few times about my lifelong struggle with depression, which was especially deep and dark in my teens and early 20s. I’ve mentioned that Catholics should seek help for psychological distress beyond just trying to “pray it away”; and I’ve written about how therapy (even secular therapy) can be life-changing, and so can anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs, and how help like this can bring you closer to God.

Nevertheless! During that deeply dark time, there was one short period when prayer, just simple prayer, made a difference, albeit a small one. I started saying, “Lord, I offer this day up to you” every morning. That’s it. And what happened?

I remember this time as being a sort of medium-gray, psychologically, as opposed to the usual inky black. If I had kept it up, who knows how much more darkness may have been driven away? Maybe I would have had the guts to ask for help from someone then, and I might have climbed out of that pit years sooner. As it was, I stopped making a morning offering after a while (because I’m an idiot), and down came the darkness again.

Lesson learned, eventually. I now make a morning offering whether I intend to follow up with more prayer or if I know I’m going to be too lazy or bratty or busy to do more. I make a morning offering if I wake up feeling great, or if I wake up feeling like breathing is pointless. I make a morning offering even if I’m not in a state of grace, because it may help me to accept the grace I need to accept the grace I need to get back in a state of grace. (Nope, not a typo.)

Sometimes I pray my favorite “let’s do this” prayer from the Psalms; sometimes it’s just a simple, “Lord, I offer this day up to you.” And sometimes I forget to do it in the morning, so I say it later in the day, as long as there’s some day left.

The beginning of the school year is a wonderful time to establish the habit of making a morning offering. You can do it with your kids, or you can just remind them to do it privately (this is what my kids said they would prefer). You can write it on a piece of paper and tape it to the front door, so it’s the last thing your family members see when they leave the house. You can make time to say the morning prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours. (Daria Sockey keeps you updated; just click on the right sidebar where it says “morning prayer.”)

The only wrong way to do it is to skip it.

I asked my friends on social media to share their favorite morning prayers. Here they are, in no particular order — or you can always just make up your own.

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1. Oh my God, I offer thee this day
All I shall think or do or say,
Uniting it with what was done
On earth by Jesus Christ thy son.

2. Holy Mary, I want to belong to you. I give you my whole self and all the good things I do: at home, at school, in church, on the playground. My mother, I am all yours and all I do belongs to you. Amen.

3. St. Zelie prayed this with her children (including St. Therese):
My God, I give you my heart. Please accept it so that no creature, but you alone, my good Jesus, may possess it.

4. “O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer You all my prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day for all the intentions of Your Sacred Heart, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world, in reparation for all my sins, for the intentions of all my friends and relatives, and in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father.”

5. “Heavenly Father I offer you this day, all that I think and do and say. Uniting it with what was done, by Jesus Christ your only Son. Amen.”

6. “Direct, O Lord, all our actions by Thy holy inspiration and carry them along by Thy gracious assistance, so that every prayer and work of ours may begin in Thee and by Thee be happily ended, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.”

7. On the recommendation of a priest, when life was overwhelming and more and more prayer wasn’t helping: a simple “Please God help me through today” in the morning and “Thank you, Jesus, for the graces that got me through today.”

8. John Paul II’s offering to Our Lady: “I belong to you entirely. All that I possess is yours. I take you into everything that is mine. Give me your heart, Mary.”

9. Jacob Astley’s battlefield prayer: “O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not forget me.”

10. Prayer to St. Joseph:

“Oh, St. Joseph, whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of God. I place in you all my interests and desires. Oh, St. Joseph, do assist me by your powerful intercession, and obtain for me from your divine Son all spiritual blessings, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So that, having engaged here below your heavenly power, I may offer my thanksgiving and homage to the most loving of Fathers.

Oh, St. Joseph, I never weary of contemplating you, and Jesus asleep in your arms; I dare not approach while He reposes near your heart. Press Him in my name and kiss His fine head for me and ask him to return the Kiss when I draw my dying breath. St. Joseph, Patron of departing souls – Pray for me.”

11.Suscipe prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola:

“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.”

12. “Good morning, God. Thank you for today. Bless my work and help me to think of you.”

13. “Hi, God.”

14. The morning prayer of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow:

“O Lord,
grant that I may meet the coming day in peace.
Help me in all things
to rely upon Thy Holy Will.
In every hour of the day,
reveal Thy will to me.
Bless my dealings with all who surround me.
Teach me to treat all that comes to me
throughout the day with peace of soul,
and with the firm conviction that Thy will governs all.
In all my deeds and words,
guide my thoughts and feelings.
In unforeseen events, let me not forget
that all are sent by Thee.
Teach me to act firmly and wisely,
without embittering and embarrassing others.
Give me the strength to bear the fatigue
of the coming day with all that it shall bring.
Direct my will.
Teach me to pray.
Pray Thou Thyself in me.
Amen.

15. From St. Francis de Sales via The Catholic Gentleman:

The act of getting out of bed represents … the profound reality of the resurrection and that gift of life beyond death to which we are ultimately called. To get into the habit of seeing each day as a mini resurrection is to cultivate a thor­oughly Christian attitude toward our earthly existence. Thus, [de Sales] suggests that when we awake:

O dead, arise and come to judgment. (cf. Eph. 5:14)

Or we may say with Job:

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that on the last day I will rise again. My God, grant that this be to eternal glory; this hope rests in my inmost being. (cf. Job 19:25-26)

***

There! That ought to get you started.

Image: Michael McCollough via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Are you ready for back-to-school? A brief quiz

The department stores have been ready since the middle of May. The clothing catalogues have been ready since early June. The teachers have been ready for close to 72 hours now.  How about you, mom? Are you ready for BACK-TO-SCHOOL?

Here’s a quick quiz to find out how much gin to buy:

***

Clothing!

(a) Your school doesn’t require uniforms, but you do. Your children’s outfits for the next three months are chosen, monogrammed, pressed, and shrink-wrapped (with alternates for unexpected nippy weather) in a special digitized wardrobe that automatically yanks garments out of rotation if anyone in (ugh) public school is seen wearing them.

(b) Each kid owns enough clothes to go all week without wearing anything with holes, obvious stains, or beer slogans.

(c) You really need to stop stalling and get the winter clothes sorted and put away.

Lunches!

(a) You spent the summer perfecting the spreadsheets that tell you when to place bulk orders at Whole Foods so that the everyday staple pantry items (quinoa, bulgur, kefir, quingur, bulfir, and kefoa, which is pronounced “feh”) dovetail with the seasonal produce you expect to harvest from your garden, which you water using barrels that collect your hot yoga sweat, which, not to brag, is quite organic.

(b) You have a general idea of what your kids like to eat, and you try to pack it for lunch. If they don’t gobble up every bit of their packed lunch, they can always fill up on PBJ when they get home.

(c) You give yourself a gold star every time the school doesn’t send home a note saying, “Braedonica only had a pickled cocktail onion and a baggie of dog food in her lunch again. Please remember nutrition matters for young brains, sadface!”
By gold star, you mean “martini.”

Transportation!

(a) Yes, there is a bus that will pick up your child and bring her home, but, chérie, yellow is just not her color. So you’ve hired a dedicated Uber driver for the morning and afternoon commute. He only drives an Audi, though, and that’s how it’s going to stay until a certain little offspring nudges that GPA up above 3.8.

(b) You’re going to be the mom waiting at the bus stop in a robe, or occasionally that mom driving frantically to school in a robe. So you’re not morning people, so big deal.

(c) You are seriously considering buying an RV and just living behind the swingset until next June, because you’re really, really, really not morning people.

Homework!

(a) Per the training your child has received since he was at four months’ gestation, he doesn’t even want to play, snack, rest, or goof off until homework is completed, double-checked, initialed by both parents, autoclaved, and stowed away safely in the lightweight titanium binder etched with “For Your Consideration, Magister.”

(b) Your kids know they are expected to keep up with their work. They also know that Mom will forget to ask if they have homework half the time, and they only really have to do it when Daddy comes home before bedtime, because Daddy Always Remembers. Doing a little over half their homework earns them a solid C-, which is their version of the American dream.

(c) You know what we do for homework around here? We endure. That’s what we do for homework. Initial that, pal.

Extracurricular activities!

(a) It’s so hard, isn’t it? You beg and plead for the children to just relax and be kids, or at least choose an after-school club that is just plain fun, but every year it’s the same thing: “Motherrr, we simply can’t turn our backs on our commitment to fostering functional STEM literacy among the unwed pregnant cat population. Be the change you wish to see, Motherrr!” they say.
You worry, but you’re also proud. So proud.

(b) Each kid gets to do one thing, and that’s it. There’s only so much extra driving and extra check-writing you can stand.

(c) Extracurricular? As in besides school? They want us to do a whole other thing? Does weeping quietly in a corner count as extracurricular? Because we can do that.

Traditional Beginning-of-the-year Teacher Gift Ideas!

(a) Wait, what?
(b) Come on.
(c) Kill me.

***

ANSWER KEY:

If you answered mostly (a), you are so ready, it’s already next year, so why not stay home and read back issues of GOOP by the light of your own intense awesomeness?
If you answered mostly (b), you are like 90% of the population, so relax.
If you answered mostly (c), you can hang around with my awful kids, and we’ll all feel better.

***

Image: Bernd Moehle (Flickr: School bus) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Catholic women, what makes or breaks a retreat or conference?

I’m just asking for . . . reasons. I’ve been to a lot of retreats and conferences and mom’s days out, and there are always some things I love, some things I don’t care about, and some things that should be chased away by an angel holding little, pink, pearl-handled revolver and a bottle of Febreze.

So imagine, if you will, a six- to eight-hour event for a group of maybe a hundred or so Catholic women. How would you like to spend your time? What would make you think, “Why did I just pay for this?” What’s something amazing that would turn an okayish event into something you would rave about? How much can you imagine paying for such an event?

Type of food, style of food service, prayers, group activities, talks, sacraments, music, vendors, type of venue, scheduled events, unscheduled time, amenities, giveaways, hammocks and cabana boys — I’d love to hear about anything and everything that would make a difference to you. Tell, tell!

(Photo is of my husband and Corrie at a women’s conference in Syracuse last fall. Pretty safe to say that their favorite part was when Mama finally got off the stage.)

On grace and coincidence and (womp!) Thomas More

About thirty years ago, my parents were terribly worried. Like me and my husband, they had a daughter who was eighteen. They wanted her to get a good college education, preferably at a school that would deepen her Faith. My parents were fairly recent converts, and couldn’t rely on a network of Catholic friends or family (or the internet!) to advise them.

They had heard, though, of this guy, St. Thomas More, and they knew he had bucked society to give his daughters a good classical education; so they figured it couldn’t hurt to pray to him for help. And — this is the way I remember the story, anyway — as they were in the car praying to him, they happened to take the scenic route, and happened to look out the window, and happened to see a modest little mailbox that said “Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts.”

Naturally, they stopped in to see what it was all about. It turned out to be a fledgling Catholic liberal arts college that was eager for new students. My sister ended up going there, and so did my other two older sisters, and so did I. The school has since gone through a few permutations of name, culture, and leadership; but when I was there, it was Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, and the original mailbox was still there on the side of the road.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, this tall guy from Los Angeles was finishing up high school and looking for something completely different to do. He happened upon a list of Catholic colleges that named, among others, Thomas More College. He applied, was accepted, and hopped on a plane to New Hampshire. Which is where he met me. Within two weeks of our first date, we were talking about getting married. Which we did.

Oh, and his middle name is “Thomas,” for Thomas More. Womp!

I’ve always liked Thomas More. I like his face, I like his hat, I like his humor, I like the way he could always explain why he did what he did, as God’s servant first. And of course, what makes him not just likeable but worthy of veneration was his unwavering courage in the face of a hostile government. An ideal patron saint for anyone trying to do God’s will in a bewildering world, which is all of us.

I’m not superstitious. I wince when I hear Amazing Tales of Unbelievable Coincidences which you, too, can get a piece of if you pray this secret magic novena to this one weird saint! That’s not how it works, at all.

I mean, if I had gone to art school as I had originally planned, and if that California guy had joined the Navy like his dad, and if a different marriage had come about, and if different children had been born, or no children at all, I can see that it’s possible I’d be thanking God and the saints for that life, too, however it looked. Some paths are wrong, but many, many paths can be made right. It didn’t have to happen this way, Thomas More or no Thomas More.

At the same time, if my parents hadn’t prayed that prayer to him, and if they hadn’t taken that road, and if they hadn’t read the sign on the mailbox, and if they hadn’t stopped the car, then where would I be? Where would my children be? Nowhere at all, because they wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t married the man who was named for Thomas More. It’s unthinkable.

Here’s how I see it. The gardener, doing his best to make his one small plot of land fertile and gracious, may live and die without ever climbing to the mountaintop to see where, amid millions of acres of land, his little patch of green fits in.

Maybe he plants a tree that feeds a bee that stings a doctor who would, if he had not been allergic to bee stings, have saved a boy who would have grown up to be the president who brings about nuclear annihilation.

Or maybe he plants a tree that becomes the wood of a crucifix that sparks the conversion of that boy, who grows up to become not a tyrant but a pope.

Or maybe the gardener plants a tree that grows a blossom that smells good, and someone praises God, because the world is full of good smells, the end.

It’s not about the tree. It’s all about grace, our openness to it, and our response to it. It’s all about everything except the tree, even though the tree is at the center of it all.

Grace, and guidance from God, is all around us, and it can change our lives immeasurably for the better if we ask for His help, and then act on it. Remember: my parents decided to pray to Thomas More. A small detail at the time, but without it, they would have just kept on driving past that mailbox.

How does the intercession of the saints and the guidance of the Holy Spirit work in a crazy, impractical system like this? I don’t really know. Grace really is weird. The way the Holy Spirit and the saints and the dopey, half-blind Church Militant all function together is mysterious beyond words.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It just means that, sometimes, free will is simultaneously what makes us created in the image of God, and also what makes it hard for us to see where our will ends and God’s begins .

The one thing that we’re truly in control of is being open to God’s grace, and the way we become open is through prayer. I don’t waste time trying to game the system or peer into the future — or I try not to, especially where my children’s future and (eek!) my children’s free will is concerned. I tend my garden, I ask the saints for help, and I try to leave the details up to God.

 

 

Image of winking Thomas More courtesy of Natalie Coombs