PIC annunciation
From John Herreid, here’s a painting I’ve never seen before:
The Annunciation by Master of the Retable of the Reyes Católicos (15th century)
Here is a detail, showing the Word of God proceeding from the mouth of the Father:
Cross already in hands. Oh, Mary.
And a short interview with my daughter, who is almost 5. I am not sure why the conversation started with a discussion of her rabbit Daffodil’s eating habits; and YES I fluffed at least two opportunities to clear up theological misunderstandings. But around 2:53, she says something that never occurred to me before, but I bet she’s right:
After the angel told her she would have a child, and He would be Son of the Most High, she said . . . “Thank you.”
I love converts. Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been Catholic, you will learn something by witnessing someone discover the beautiful truths of our faith. Check out this blog I recently discovered, Mackerel Snapper, by Matthew Tyson, who is a young husband and father, a convert with a conservative fundamentalist background, and a man on fire to share what he now knows about the Catholic Church.
From “Who is that guy? He looks like a vampire!” to “Fulton Sheen brought my dead son back to life.” Here is my interview with the delightful Bonnie Engstrom of A Knotted Life.
Not gonna write about frozen garbage today, just little green shoots in a cold world.
PIC split tree bound back together
Every day, I bless a merciful God that there was no internet to speak of when I was younger. This means there are no insanely humiliating photos of me in a crop top and acid wash harem pants. It also means that I never published an article like this one in Catholic Exchange: Marriage Is Work.
In this piece, which I absolutely would have written as a newlywed, the earnest, not-yet-married Emma Smith hears her secular coworkers lamenting the way their ex-husbands had cheated on them
“There’s so much of that out there!” my boss exclaimed. “I know one of my girlfriends who is cheating on her husband and I know a couple of other people where both of them are cheating. I guess you’re lucky if it doesn’t happen to you.”
Smith goes on to explain to the reader that she knows that her soon-to-be husband will never cheat on her. She knows this. She knows for a fact that it simply will not happen.
Marriage isn’t a drawing of the straws, where if your spouse cheats on you, well, “sorry, you just drew the short straw. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent it!” It’s not an institution where if you are a strong, happy, and healthy couple you’re just “the lucky ones.”
And she knows, she says, that people will think she’s just young and naive for knowing that her husband will always be faithful.
And yet, I can say that. I can say that because I have a faith and a God who stand behind me in that statement. And I can say that because the love my fiancé and I share is not human, it is divine. We love each other because we love God and we have discovered that in loving one another, we get to love God more fully. Moreover, the love that we have for one another is divine in origin. God gave it to us at our baptism and it had a full 15-20ish years to grow and mature so that when we met, it blossomed.
Well, let’s start with all the ways that Smith is right. She says that “marriage is something you work on … marriage is a calling.” And she is right. She says:
Our faith allows us to make these promises [of faithfulness] because He who gave us love was faithful in His love until the end. … We as Catholics are granted the same strength of faithfulness to the end when we return our love to the one who is love. When we participate in making our love a sacrament, when we make a way for God’s grace to enter the world every day, when we demonstrate outwardly our inner devotion, we can say with full knowledge and confidence that we are not in a game of luck.
Yes indeed. A strong marriage doesn’t just spring into being on its own. If we translate our love of God into love for our spouses, and when we let our love for our spouses nourish our love for God, then we will be fulfilling our vocation.
But that’s it: we’ll be fulfilling our vocation, period. That is all we can depend on: that God will be faithful to us. Beyond that, things can get very messy. When Catholics fulfill their vocation of marriage, it can turn out looking like an awful lot of things, and that includes ugly, painful things that may or may not ever get resolved in this lifetime.
Because here’s the deal: you aren’t marrying God. You’re marrying another human being. Your spouse is marrying you, and you are a human being.
And what do we know about human beings? They sin. They sin, and they sin, and they sin. Sometimes they enter into a valid marriage and then they cheat. Sometimes they understand fully what they are supposed to do, and they just don’t feel like doing it. Sometimes calamity strikes, and they crumple under the blow. Sometimes they let their own sorrows and weaknesses and selfishness overcome the love that is offered to them. Sometimes — no, my friends, always — they are a tangled ball of good intentions and bad habits, unhealed wounds and unfounded desires.
Many, many times, the grace of the sacrament helps us to avoid serious sin. Sometimes, though, the grace of the sacrament helps us to forgive each other when we sin. Sometimes it helps us to survive when our spouses refuse to repent.
So the confident if untried Emma Smith is right in sighing over the fatalistic modern view of marriage — right in condemning the idea that some people just get lucky, and there’s no way of improving your odds. But she is disastrously, innocently, offensively wrong when she thinks that we can somehow guarantee that things will turn out well, just because we intend to work hard.
Ever heard of Hosea’s wife? Ever heard of Israel? Ever heard of the entire human race? God knows that this is what happens when you enter into a marriage with another human being: one way or another, sooner or later, your love will be rewarded with pain. And I know this because I love my husband — my faithful, loving husband — and I’ve hurt him.
I pray to God, and I hurt my husband.
I understand marriage, I believe in marriage, I have spent years upon years working on my marriage, and I hurt my husband. And He forgives me, just as I forgive him.
I am glad that Smith understands so well that the grace of marriage is something that must be actively pursued, consciously acted upon. And I hope that her confidence in her husband is rewarded with unbroken faithfulness and love, and that she will not be shattered when she discovers that he does have flaws. I hope that people read her piece and realize that it makes sense to look hard for a spouse who is trustworthy.
But I hope to God she is never involved in any kind of marriage ministry — not with the childish understanding of marriage that she has now. What will she say to the woman whose husband is cheating? Or to the man whose wife won’t stay sober, or won’t stop gambling, or won’t stop browbeating him in public? What will she say to the spouses who do work hard, and have found themselves sinned against? Maybe “Let’s put our heads together and figure out how you could have worked harder to prevent this. Good marriages aren’t just a matter of luck, you know.”
And what will she say to herself when she finds herself sinning against her husband? Maybe she will not cheat, but oh, she will hurt him. She will. This isn’t a warning about your husband-to-be, dear confident, untried brides. It’s a warning about you.
The other day, I was amazed and delighted to hear that I had won second prize in Catholic Vote’s contest. First prize was a trip for two two Rome for the upcoming beatifications, which would have been niiiice, but I am beyond thrilled at what I did win, as top referrer: a spiffy new iPad Mini!
PIC iPad “At first I was going to give it to someone, and then I thought I would raffle it for a good cause, then I thought it would make a great prize, and then I realized I WANT THIS.”
I understand its microwhatever is roughly as powerful as the International Space Station and that the touchscreen can, by analyzing the electrolyte content in my fingertips, predict the very moment of my death; but I mostly want to use it to read books and play music and movies.
My first plan is to load it up with free or very cheap books, preferably good read-aloud books. I can’t tell you how many books we’ve gotten 3/4 of the way through, only to lose track of them and never find out if Curdie rescued the Princess, if Pip’s sister ever found out who took the meat pie, and of course what the heck that Trinity thing is about. Seriously, one of the main reasons we quit homeschooling was because we just plain lost all the books all the time.
So, help me get started, eh? What’s cheap or free and great?
A few weeks ago, a mom of my acquaintance got The Three Little Bears from the library, but was irritated to discover that the story had been bowdlerized for 21st century sensitivities. Gone were the heteronormative Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear. Instead, we just had three genderinoffensive bears, one big, one medium, and one small. What. A. Crock.
PIC three bears Galdone
But when she posted a picture, I thought, Wait, that’s got to be Paul Galdone, who has been illustrating for a lo-o-o-ong time. I looked it up, and sure enough, this version of The Three Bears came out in 1972. Definitely post sexual revolution, but hardly an era when devious children’s illustrators were stretching the definition of family — at least not in mainstream children’s books.
Following a hunch, I did some quick research, and discovered that the “Three Bears” story was first written down by Robert Southey in 1837, and — lo and behold, the original version was about three male bears. I don’t think they were some kind of transgressive, tradition-flouting bears shacking up in the woodsy version of Castro Street. They were just three bears trying to deal with porridge in the way that they thought best.
PIC three bears Southey
Now, I don’t blame the original mom for thinking there was something hinky going on. We really do have to be on constant alert for hidden and not-so-hidden agendas driven by people we wouldn’t trust to boil an egg for us, much less teach our kids what is normal and what is not. At the same time, being on constant alert can make us a little nutty, and we begin to see bogeymen in every corner,
PIC Francis afraid
when sometimes it’s really just your chair with a robe hanging on it in a sinister way.
When I read books that are 25 years old or more, I play a little game: I scan the illustrations and text to see if anything would jump out at the typical concerned mom if it were written today. Look for it, and you’ll find quite a lot! I’m not even talking about deliberate naughty easter eggs that they’re assuming most people will miss, like what the obviously drunk animators snuck into the backgrounds of ancient Bugs Bunny cartoons
PIC Looney Tunes with porno poster
I’m just talking about things that people didn’t used to flip out about, because there wasn’t any real threat of a concerted, deliberate effort to change children’s ideas of what is normal (or the threat was in its earliest stages). Lots of topless people, bottomless people, guys who may or may not be super gay, and so on. These things pepper old kid’s books for decades, and no one batted an eye. People simply didn’t used to be on high alert at all times.
All that being said, I’m not sure what to make of a strange and hilarious book we just found: Monsters by Russell Hoban (who, speaking of a chair with a robe on it, did the wonderful Frances books) and illustrated by Quentin Blake.
It’s a funny little story about a boy — maybe eight years old — who likes to draw monsters (and oh my gosh, the illustrations are perfect-o):
His mother asks him whether he wouldn’t like to draw other things — “houses, trees, birds, and animals” — but he is only interested in drawing monsters.
All of John’s monsters were violent. They fought with passing strangers and random spacecraft and they fought with one another, and if they found themselves alone they made threatening noises to themselves while waiting for somebody ugly to turn up.
‘GNGGHHHHH!’ they said, “NNARRRGH!” and “XURRRVVV!”
He reassures his worried parents that he is fine, getting along with his teachers fine, getting along with the other kids fine. One day he begins to draw a monster that is really big — in fact, he can only get parts of its huge, bristly monstrous tail on a sheet of paper. This one “somehow seems more serious than the others.” The parents are worried, but the art teacher reassures them that “Boys are naturally a little monstrous.” They go to the doctor, who prescribes a pill, and tells them to come back if the drawings keep coming. Which they do.
I won’t give away the end, but the doctor gets what he’s got coming, and the boy ends up feeling much better.
Now, if this book had come out in 2014, Russell Hoban would be served with a lawsuit from Gloria Allred, his cause would irritably championed by Camille Paglia, and Tony Esolen would be offering him a home cooked meal drenched in a gravy of tears of rage and sorrow, and Matt Walsh would be saying something that is sorta kinda true, but making it sound so baboonishly false that you want to disown yourself for even halfway agreeing with him.
It would have been a thing, you see, a big thing about how boys are treated, how their natural masculinity is medicated into oblivion, and what monstrous things will eventually happen when boys are not allowed to be boys, or what it is that we are saying to girls by not saying that they are naturally a little monstrous, and so on. But the book is from 1991, when we were still teetering on the brink of Always Being Hysterical All the Time About Everything Especially, ESPECIALLY, What We Are Teaching Our Children.
Uphhh, I’m just so tired. So tired of having to figure out what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate, what’s sending the wrong message, what’s playing into the whole “sending the wrong message” nonsense, and so on. It’s almost a relief to know that kids tend to remember things you weren’t even aware of telling them, and they forget the things you all but tattooed into the inside of their eyelids.
Anyway, I really like Paul Galdone, because he always draws pictures of what is actually going on in the story; and I really like Russell Hoban, because he really remembers what it’s like to be a kid. Thus endeth my analysis. I’m gonna go draw some monsters.
I bet your husband doesn’t make a recording of it, like mine does.
