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Prayer reminder! ACTS covers your bases

Last night, we got up to the chapter about fortitude in our current catechism read-aloud, How To Be a Hero: Train With the Saints.

Sometimes we decide to make a change in our lives,

it says,

like giving up sweets for Lent or making a New Year’s resolution to keep our bedroom neat. At first, we are able to keep our resolution out of excitement and because it is something new. Eventually, though, it becomes more difficult to wake up each morning and make the bed, or turn down an offer of candy from a friend.

And is said, “SHUT UP, BOOK! YOU DON’T KNOW ME!” Ha ha, just kidding. We had just barely recovered from a conversation about whether it was, in fact, fartitude we needed to cultivate in our house (answer: No.), so I wasn’t going to derail Edification Hour again. But I thunk it.

One of my resolves for Lent was to reinvigorate my prayer life. It . . . has not been going well. I wish I could say it’s due to the mid-Lent doldrums, but it actually petered out almost immediately.

Happily, this morning I suddenly remembered a strategy for daily prayer that even I can manage. You cover ACTS:

Adoration,
Contrition,
Thanksgiving,
Supplication.

Or, as I used to tell my kids, it’s telling God:

You are great!
I’m sorry.
Thank you!
Please?

What else is there to say? If you can make the sign of the cross and thoughtfully make a personal expression of each of these things to God in the morning, then son, you have reinvigorated your prayer life. Fortitude!

(I purposely left the image at the top nice and big, in case you want to click on it and print it out for your wall. Obviously I just something I threw together with a marker, which you can easily replicate and do a better job with, but maybe you can’t find a marker.)

Valhalla Rising, cavemen farting, Terry Pratchett giving it a shot, and me running(!)

 

I’m watching . . .

Originalos (and Valhalla Rising)

Let’s say you’ve picked out a swell movie to watch, and everyone’s ready and snuggled up on the couch, except that one kid is still washing the dishes. Still. So what do you do? You watch a few episodes of Originalos. Here’s a representative sample:

Look, I’m not proud of it. In my defense, if you saw Irene laughing that long and hard at a farting caveman, you’d probably let her watch more, too. These 3-minute episodes are streaming on Amazon Prime.

We also watched Valhalla Rising (2009, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed Drive, which we loved) last night, and we’ll have a lot to say about it on this week’s podcast! (To join my super secret, super fun podcast club, see my Patreon page.) Here’s the trailer for Valhalla Rising:

Reading . . . 

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Behind the curve as ever, I’m just now getting into Terry Pratchett, who played with words, and with ideas of futility, heroism, absurdity and hope, throughout 41 novels about Discworld. He died in 2015.

I did read Going Postal a few years ago, and was charmed and moved by the characters and dialogue but very confused by the plot. Guards! Guards! was much easier to follow, and very winsome and entertaining, as well as touching in parts. Looking forward to hanging around with Captain Vimes more, as well as that very, very interesting Patrician.

Guards! Guards! summary: In the human-all-too-human city of Ankh-Morpork, the canny leader of a secret society realizes that he’ll have the citizens in the palm of his hand if only he can find a champion to conquer the terrible dragon. Only there is no dragon, except for small, mostly-harmless pets. So he summons a big one. Things do not go as planned! The focus of the story is on The Watch, the ones you call when things go wrong, but you don’t really expect them to do anything. In fact, you count on them having no intention of doing something. Well, this time, they do something.

As far as I can see, this is a typical Pratchett theme: Everything has gone to hell, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. Still, for whatever reason, the one guy who knows better decides to give it a shot anyway, and make a stand for what he decides to believe is the right thing to do. (Pratchett fans, do I have that right?)

Listening to . . .

The Black Keys

Also not a new find, but I’ve rediscovered the Black Keys as excellent running music. Yarr, my husband and I are doing Couch to 5K. We’re on week three, when you have to run for three minutes at a time. This is only possible if I hide the fact that I’m running from as many of my senses as possible (especially since we’re celebrating spring with hail and slippery freezing rain; and, not wanting to die, we are running inside).

Here are a few Black Keys songs with a good beat for a slow, steady run:

“Gold On the Ceiling”:

“Tighten Up”:

“Fever” is a little brisker:

“Howlin’ For You” (which comes along with a satirical sexploitation revenge fantasy movie trailer that made me laugh so hard, I almost fell off the treadmill) (warning: stupid, but R-rated):

I welcome other suggestions for running music! I’m putting together a list, because I hear there is more running coming up in this fershlugginer program.

***
Now your turn! What are you watching, reading, and listening to?

***

Pratchett graffiti image by David Skinner via Flickr (Creative Commons)

The Medicaid work requirement will destroy families

That dermatologist should have won a prize for heroic patience. He was snipping off a slew of skin tags that had overtaken my eyelids during pregnancy. It’s finicky job in normal circumstances; but I made it dicier by asking him to snip as I held my squalling newborn in my arms. It was not my favorite way to spend an afternoon, trying to hush her, trying to stay perfectly still while my eyelids were trimmed.
I was in that ridiculous situation because I had to get the thing done ASAP, while I still had postpartum Medicaid coverage. My husband couldn’t afford to take time off work, and someone was babysitting my other kids, but wouldn’t take the newborn. At the time, my state only covered health care for adults who were elderly, disabled, or pregnant. Once you were done being pregnant, you got booted back off the rolls, and good luck scheduling all the appointments you needed in the thirty days after giving birth.
Lucky for me, I was young and healthy at the time, and excessive skin tags were my most pressing medical issue; so I was able to choose to homeschool and to stay home with my newborn daughter and take my chances with having no health insurance. Lucky for me, it wasn’t until after my state chose to expand Medicaid that I developed nodules on my thyroid and lymph nodes, plus debilitating anxiety.

Lucky for me, I’ve had those conditions treated under state subsidized Medicaid, and now I can go back to living my life, caring for my children, doing my job.

We are, by conservative standards, a model family. We aren’t lazy. We aren’t unemployed. We aren’t promiscuous or godless or druggies or perverts. We love our country. We volunteer. We give to charity. We vote. I’m a dedicated mother, married to a dedicated father who works full time. I work from home so I can care for my kids. We are a heterosexual, married, monogamous couple raising our children to work hard and follow the ten commandments.  Our kids study hard and have jobs after school. They volunteer. They go to pro-life marches. They’re all college-bound.
We are a Republican’s dream come true. But we can’t afford to buy health insurance. But we are insured, for now.
THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. People should be able to go to the doctor when they are sick, even if they are poor. Women should be able to spend some time recovering from childbirth without immediately propelling themselves out of the home and back to work. Women should be able to consider the possibility of staying home with their newborn babies. People ought to be able to live a modest life — such as the kind you find yourself living if you work hard but just can’t inch above the poverty line despite decades of effort — and still be able to go to the doctor when they are sick.
But the newest addition to the new healthcare laws would, among other changes, require Medicaid recipients to work.

A work requirement for Medicaid says: Don’t you dare be poor and homeschool. Don’t you dare be poor and consider caring for your preschoolers at home. Don’t you dare be poor and give birth to a disabled child who needs round-the-clock care. Don’t you dare be poor and find yourself caring for a disabled family member.
It’s not always laziness that makes people poor. It’s not always laziness that keeps people from earning a paycheck. Life is complicated. Caring for each other is complicated. People can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to have enough money. But Congress could wake up in the morning and decide to give states enough money to pay for healthcare for everyone. God knows they find enough money for the things they do want: endless wars, beautiful walls, you name it. The money is there when they want it to be.
I have friends with severely disabled children. These parents don’t work for a paycheck. Instead, they do the work of spending their entire day, and often much of the night, keeping their kids alive, with the help of state-subsidized Medicaid. Parents like these, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, should be grateful for the work mandate, which will be “restorative to people’s self-worth, sense of themselves.” Under the proposed law, that Medicaid that pays for life-saving care would be yanked as a penalty for the parents’ “refusal” to work.

People are going to die.

I’m starting to think that, right there, is the actual Republican’s dream come true.

***
Image by David Kessler via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Happy birthday, Chico Marx! I’m going out to arrange your bail.

Today is Chico Marx’s birthday. Born in 1887(!), top height 5’6″, greatest phony Italian accent ever mysteriously assumed by a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

By most accounts, he was as breezy and confident in real life as he was in the films. Christened Leonard, the oldest of the five Marx brothers, he picked up the 1920’s slang nickname “Chicko” (pronounced “chick-o”) because of his penchant for “chicken chasing,” meaning pretty much what you see in the movies: He liked to chase-a da wimmin.

If you’d rather preserve your impression of Chico as a loveable scamp, please do not Google “Chico Marx Tallulah Bankhead.” Someone once asked his first wife why she put up with all his outrageous philandering for so many years, and she answered that she shouldn’t; but when he would walk in the room and turn those brown eyes on her, she went weak in the knees every time.

Why is he Italian? No one is really sure. Reportedly, he always had a knack for accents, which he used as camouflage to keep various ethnic gangs from beating him up.

Here is one of the greatest monologues of all time in any medium in all of history. I won’t set it up, because the only context is: This is Chico Marx.

He would have been 130 years old today! God rest his soul.

**
Image by Insomnia Cured Here via Flickr (Creative Commons)

It was a beautiful confession

On Saturday, we went to confession. Mine was a pretty standard operation: “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last confession. I did that thing I always do, and that other thing I always do. I also did that other thing I always do, except more so than usual. And I stopped doing that thing I usually do, but then I started again.  And I was mean on the internet. For these and all my sins, I am truly sorry.”

And the priest said what this particular priest always says: “Thank you for that beautiful confession.” He says this when I have a long and sordid list, or a short and sordid list, or when he can barely understand me because my nose is running from the sordidness of it all. The point is, I am not aware of ever having made a confession that any normal human being would consider “beautiful.”

But the confessional is not a normal place. It’s the one place that no one would ever go for normal, worldly reasons. No penitent goes to confession to get ahead in life, or to make money, or to get a full belly, or to impress anyone; and no priest goes to confession to be amused or entertained. It’s where we go to unload our miseries, to show our wounds and our infections, to take off the disguises that make us appear palatable to each other.

So, not beautiful. No, not especially.

Or is it? If the ugliness, the squalor, the sordidness, and the running nose were all that happened inside a confessional, then it really would be an ugly place — just a latrine, a ditch, a sewer. But of course, the part where we lay out our sins is only the first part.

What happens afterward is more obviously beautiful. The priest reaches out and picks up the ugly little load you’ve laid in front of him. And right then and there, he pours the living water over it until the parts that are worth saving are healthy and whole again, and the parts that cannot be salvaged have been washed away entirely. What is useless is gone; what was dead is alive again.

This is beautiful!

And the beauty of absolution does one of those neat Catholic tricks where eternal things reach back in time and impart beauty wherever they want, regardless of chronology. The beauty of absolution makes the confession itself beautiful. Even though my sins are ugly, the very fact that I’m bringing them into the confessional has something beautiful in it: the beauty of trust that I will be forgiven; the beauty of believing that something real and life-changing will happen; the beauty of being willing to accept forgiveness even though I know that I don’t deserve it; and the beauty of knowing that, whoever’s turn it is to sit behind the screen, it is really Christ who is waiting to meet me.

If that isn’t beautiful, then nothing is.

***
This post originally ran in the National Catholic Register in 2014.

That’s no doppel, that’s my gänger!

Smithsonian Magazine is always up to something interesting. This month, they’re putting together an exhibit of modern people and their 2000-year-old doppelgänger using facial recognition software which

analyzes your face and scans through 123 facial comparison points, such as the bridge of your nose and the shape of your mouth, before matching you with one of 60 Greco-Roman and Egyptian sculptures dating back some 2,000 years.

You can submit your own photo and see what it turns up.

Spotting doppelgängers has been my hobby forever. Sometimes the resemblance is circumstantial, but still compelling:

Sometimes it takes your breath away:

Sometimes you just have to roll with it:

Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper:

And then sometimes you dig deep and then feel bad for going that low:

And sometimes it clarifies a thing or two

as when you realize that your two-year-old daughter actually is Hermes, the god of mischief.

Of course the easiest way to find your doppelgänger is just to grow one yourself:

Oh, what’s that? You want to know who the Smithsonian thinks looks just like me? I’m so glad you asked:

And that’s why I always get pulled out of lines at airports.

HOW TO BE A HERO: TRAIN WITH THE SAINTS is fresh, clear, and useful

When Julia Harrell’s new book, How To Be a Hero: Train With the Saints (Pauline Kids, 2017) arrived in the mail, my shoulders slumped for a minute. I just didn’t expect much from it, based on the cover.

Happily, my first impressions were way off!

It’s a manual on the virtues for kids age 9-11 (although I think older kids would benefit from it, as well). In each chapter, Harrell defines a cardinal, theological, or little virtue, gives a short biography of a saint who exemplified that virtue, and ends with a short prayer and a list of questions to elicit further thought about how to apply the virtue to our own lives.

The language is plain and frank, and the ideas are much more challenging than you normally see in a religion book for kids. The saints included are:

Pope Saint John Paul II (prudence)
Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati (justice)
Saints Peter Yu Tae-chol and Agatha Yi (fortitude)
Ven. Matt Talbot (fortitude)

The Children of Fatima (faith)
St. Josephine Bakhita (hope)
B. Chiara Badano (love)

St. Joan of Arc (humility)
Bl. Dina Belanger (obedience)
St. Monica (patience)
St. Charbel Makhlouf (gentleness)

Nice list, right? And not the most obvious match-ups, either (maybe you’d expect to see St. Joan with fortitude, for instance.)

I think the book could have done just as well without the premise that virtues are superpowers that we must master to become heroes, or saints; and the drawn illustrations are lackluster. It does include plenty of black-and-white photographs of the saints, though, and overall, the presentation is brisk and accessible. Here, you can leaf through the book page by page and get an idea of how the content is presented.

We’re taking a break from The How-To Book of the Mass, which we’ve been working our way through verrrrry slowly, and reading a section of How To Be a Hero in the evening now. (I firmly believe it’s better to do even five minutes of reading very often, than to work harder and burn out faster.) I’m dragging in all the kids, including the five teenagers, because the subject matter is presented simply, but it’s not childish.

Very pleased with this book so far. It would make a good Easter gift.

 

Meanwhile, at The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous . . .

Let me give you a little background.

One time, my mother opened the front door to let in a guest. My father darted through the house, opened a window in the back, and jumped out. This qualified as a brilliantly successful social situation, because he did not have to talk to the person he didn’t want to talk to.

One time, they brought a fruit salad to a potluck dinner, but they decided to try some new recipe that included a sort of eggy custard. They said it tasted good, but it looked a lot like someone had just thrown up in a bowl and then added a ladle. No one ate it. Rather than own up to being the ones who brought a basin of puke to the potluck, they just abandoned it and slunk away. It was a nice ladle, too.

So that was how I was raised. When in doubt, run, slink, hide, just get away! And then you can go sit in the bathroom for a while by yourself until you feel better, and then maybe have lunch.

One time, my husband and I went to a wake, and I was eight months pregnant. The widow greeted us at the door and, clasped us warmly by the hands and, in hushed tones, thanked us so much for being there with her on this difficult day. So I responded in un-hushed tones, “I just need to find a bathroom!”

Why did I say this? I do not know. For some reason, my brain reads any kind of social interaction as ULTRA EMERGENCY PANIC TIME, and responds by shooing intense spurts of electrons toward the Inappropriate Response Center, and my mouth opens, and the wrong damn thing comes out, but loud.

It’s not always a catastrophe. Sometimes, I find myself in a social situation and I manage to escape unscathed, and only have to eat a few sandwiches before I’m ready to breathe normally again. Here are a few of my recent social triumphs:

While shopping, spotted another mom from school browsing through produce section; shoved past an old lady who looked like she was planning to pay in nickels, scored that red-headed bagger who does not mess around with eye contact, and was able to scoot away and rocket out of there before other mom even noticed me.

Came face-to-face with that guy who is named either Rick or Rich, and I definitely can’t ask which it is, because I already did that a few months ago, and I can’t remember what he said. So I got right out in front of it and shouted, “HEY, how’s Wendy?” Which was a not-inappropriate thing to say. Wendy is his wife. They just got divorced, actually, come to think of it. Or possibly I just feel like they ought to get divorced. Or possibly Wendy is his dog. But she does still exist, and is absolutely affiliated with Rih in some way, so it was totally normal to ask how she was. High five, Rih.

Ordered food at restaurant and was unexpectedly asked to make choice about salad dressing. Answered in appropriate fashion without stammering, freezing up, or laughing inappropriately. Ended up with very unpleasant salad dressing, but still, the waitress didn’t back away looking nervous and come back with a burly manager for back-up.

Went to party; didn’t cry until was in car.

Went to other restaurant. Waitress said, “Enjoy your food!” Was able to prevent self from responding, “You too!” Did say, “Meh heh heh heh!” like a goat for some reason, but oh well.

Got pulled out of line and received next-level pat down from TSA agent because I was very suspiciously sweating and trembling and my eyes were darting around like someone with explosives strapped to him or herself. Was able to persuade a very skeptical Janiqua that this is just how I am when I have to stand next to people, and if anything was going to explode, it was going to be my bladder because I was too shy to ask anyone where the bathroom was. But, I did not fall down.

Call it a victory and pass the fruit salad.

***

Image: Werwin15 via Flickr (Creative Commons)