SIMCHA FISHER

You know that guy who is so amazing and so accomplished and so intimidating that you absolutely, without fail, are going to say something completely moronic in front of him? The Dalai Lama is that guy. Here’s the latest edition, from Bret Baier of Fox:

h/t Gawker 

Okay, that was dumb. BUT IT GETS DUMBER. Check out this clip from 2011, when an Australian interviewer, apparently under the thrall of some irresistible urge, tells a joke that has zero percent chance of landing:

The poor man just wants to escape the neverending cycle of clueless news anchors so he can go back to his hotel room and order a little Nirvana in peace.

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Image by Christopher Michel via Flickr (license)

There are fifty people dead. There is lots to be angry about.

One thing doesn’t belong on this list, though, and that’s the rules about gay men donating blood. In several places on social media, folks are outraged at the FDA, because the FDA says that men who have had sex with other men within the last year cannot donate blood. “It’s just bigotry!” they say. “It’s just another way of making gay men be ‘the other.’ Gay men have as much right to donate blood as anyone else.”

Let’s untangle these objections. . .

Read the rest at the Register.

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image by By Staff Sgt. Stephanie Rubi, U.S. Air Force [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Fifty years ago today, Pope Paul VI abandoned the notorious Index of Prohibited Books — or, rather, he issued a notification that it “no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties.”

The Index was established to warn the faithful against books that could harm their faith or morals. Catholics were forbidden to read these books without permission, under pain of mortal sin. Twenty different versions of the Index were promulgated, the first in 1559 and the last in 1948, and they included works of science, philosophy, and mathematics, as well as fiction and certain translations of the Bible that were considered unreliable. A good many of the books that appeared on the Index are now considered foundational scholarly works, and are taught in Catholic schools.

When Pope Paul VI made the Index into a guide, rather than a prohibitive law, the titles on it were not suddenly declared blameless and worthy of reading. The Church simply told the laity that it was now their responsibility to figure out which books they should and should not read. Pope Paul VI said that the Index “remains morally binding, in light of the demands of natural law, in so far as it admonishes the conscience of Christians to be on guard for those writings that can endanger faith and morals.”

A few things you might not know about the Index:

–The Divine Mercy diaries of Sister Faustina were, at one point, placed on the Index (at least in part because there were some unreliable translations circulating), but were later taken off.

–Catholic authors were given the chance to correct, edit, or defend their works if they didn’t want their books to be on the list.

—The Church was not the only entity to maintain a list of forbidden books:

In France it was French officials who decided what books were banned^[48] and the Church’s Index was not recognized.^[49] Spain had its own Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which corresponded largely to the Church’s,^[50] but also included a list of books that were allowed once the forbidden part (sometimes a single sentence) was removed or “expurgated.”^[51]

…

In the Holy Roman Empire book censorship, which preceded publication of the Index, came under control of the Jesuits at the end of the 16th century, but had little effect, since the German princes within the empire set up their own systems.^[48]

Retroactive outrage over the Index is similar to when modern progressives are shocked, shocked at the brutality of the Israelites in the Old Testament — as if the Babylonians or Assyrians were tolerant and peaceable, and it was only those awful Ten Commandment types who got hung up on sex and religion and war. Maintaining an index of forbidden books was a fairly terrible idea, but it wasn’t nearly as shocking to contemporaneous people as it sounds to 21st-century readers.

One final thought: We love to guffaw at the cowering sheeple of the Church, so oppressed and fearful that they would let their intellects be hobbled with such brutal censorship. Imagine, letting someone tell you what you can and cannot read! Imagine, being so fearful of words on the page that you’d refuse to even lift the cover, for fear that what was written inside would taint or warp your moral standards and your intellect.

Imagine being too prejudiced and intellectually blinded to read Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, or even something called I Dared to Call Him Father. Imagine passionately arguing that an entire class of writers should be rejected.

Nah, that would never happen. Nowadays, we think for ourselves! We’re open minded! We’re not afraid of books anymore.

[img attachment=”107768″ size=”thumbnail” alt=”Benny skeptical” align=”aligncenter”]

Image by Christos Loufopoulos via Flickr (license)

Once again, the hashtag “#dontpray” is trending after a tragedy.

Please remember that the people who use that hashtag are as scared and angry as anyone, and feeling helpless makes it worse. Why not blame religion for massacres? If the only religious people I knew were politicians who use God as a tasty bit of voter bait, I’d be angry at them, too. If the only religious people I knew were verse-quoters whose lips constantly moved in prayer as they stockpiled ammo, I’d be angry at them, too.  If the only religious people I knew were the ones who say that Starbucks hates Jesus, and who then call for assassination, I’d be angry at religious people, too. If the only religious people I knew were people who said that God told them to kill, I’d be angry at religion, too.

If people like this were God’s true spokesmen, then I’d be saying “don’t pray” with the rest of them.

But I know that these are not God’s true spokesmen. And I do believe that it’s always time to pray, always.

So let’s acknowledge this one more time: no, prayer doesn’t “fix” things – not directly or obviously, not most of the time, and not right now. When we pray, we don’t expect God to prick His ears up and go, “Yessir! I’ll make the gun violence and terrorism stop ASAP. Gosh, I thought you’d never ask.” If “God isn’t fixing this” — well, He never said He would, not yet. He gave us free will, which we may use for good or for ill. He gave us free will, and He Himself personally suffered because of it.

God won’t “fix” gun violence or terrorism by fiat. If we expected that, we could also reasonably expect that He’d fix Zika and starvation and weevils in my vegetable garden. But we do tolerate many kinds of evil, large and small, because we understand that it is humans who bring it into the world voluntarily. If we believe that God gave us genuine free will, we have to accept that people are free to abuse it.

But isn’t it true that we shouldn’t be content to just pray? That we should take action of some kind?

Of course it is. “Ora et labora,” wise St. Benedict told his monks: “Pray and work.” We have the duty to work and we have the duty to pray, neglecting neither one.

What does “work” look like in the face of a massacre, though? That’s the real question. Many of those who are now “prayer shaming” think that the only meaningful work or action at this moment is gun control. I think it’s reasonable to restrict the legal sale of the kind of gun that makes it very easy to slaughter 50 people in minutes. Beyond that, I’m not sure how to strike the balance between freedom and safety. I see a grotesque fixation on guns in some quarters, and I see an equally grotesque trust in the power of government in other quarters, and both fixations lead to their own kind of murderous disaster. I don’t know what the legislative solution is. Neither presidential candidate has a solution, I know that.

So what other kind of work or action can we take, besides legislative action?

When someone asked Mother Teresa what we can do to promote world peace, she said, “Go home and love your family.” This from a woman who left her own home, who emptied herself out for people who had no home, who suffered monstrous attacks on her character all during and even after her life’s work. This from a woman who did promote world peace in a tangible way, working with John Paul II to bring down Communism. She was not given to speaking in platitudes.

So how will it help to go home and love our families? How will that prevent gun violence or terrorism?

Again: not by fiat. It is true that people who were raised with love are less likely to fit the profile of mass murderers, who have in common a burning desire for stability and meaning in their lives. It is true that people from stable, loving families are more likely to have the strength of character and confidence to sacrifice themselves for other people, both victims and perpetrators. People who are fluent in love do sometimes disarm the violent, talking them down from harming anyone, or using their own bodies as shields, as some of the LBGT clubbers in Orlando did. These are actions that can only come from love. There is no evolutionary reason to behave this way.

But also again: free will. People can come from the stablest, lovingest family in the world and still succumb to mental illness, or they can be perfectly sane and simply choose evil. People do this every day and then some.

And every day and then some, my job is the same as it was yesterday and the same as it will be tomorrow: to go home and love my family. If we go home and love our families, we will be doing what we can in our small, personal worlds, in our “inner rooms,” for the sake of the world as a whole. The only sensible way to behave is to go home and teach love. Increase love. Model love for your children. Pray for love. This is the only thing we can do. This is the one thing we must do.

A family praying together is like the marrow deep inside a bone, working away to produce red and white blood cells. It may seem like the hands and the brain and the muscles are doing all the work, but there in the marrow – there is where the necessary work is done.

Prayer  gives us the courage to act in the face of panic. Pray gives us the wisdom to stay calm in the face of fear. Prayer gives us the strength to love in the face of evil.  Prayer binds us to Christ so that, no matter if we live or die, we will find our way to Him, and to our true home in the end.

This is why we pray in the face of massacre.  Not because God will fix things, but because we are asking God to fix us.

If you encounter someone who angrily rejects your prayers, then go pray in your inner room, where your Father, who is unseen, will hear you. Prayer that insists on being heard by other humans isn’t prayer at all, it’s just using God’s name to boost your signal.

Some people are still searching for their sons and brothers, hoping against hope that that endlessly ringing cell phone just got left in a taxi, and isn’t in the pocket of a shattered corpse. That’s where we’re at right now.

My friend Liz Schleicher calls us to ask ourselves:

Is my first action to pray for the living and the dead, and mourn the fact that FIFTY souls that God loved and died for are no longer on this Earth? Or is my first action to make a big figurative pile of the dead, lumping them together and standing on top of them so I have a better platform for broadcasting my pet political and religious issue? One of these is exactly how the terrorist treated people. One is not.

Truly, if you consider yourself a praying person, yet the death of 50 people is your cue to start crowing about your pet cause, whatever it is, then I have to agree: #dontpray.

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This post includes portions of an essay that first ran in December of 2015.
Image adapted from Praying Hands by George Hodan 

[img attachment=”98244″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”whats for supper aleteia” /]

You may have noticed I didn’t put a food post up last Friday, and I haven’t blogged a lot this week. This is because, right in the middle of the end-of-school frenzy, Corrie got a terrible, horrible stomach bug that landed her in the ER twice, so nobody got any sleep and nobody got anything done. (She’s much better, thank goodness.)

I don’t even remember if this is what we actually ate last week, but here’s what I wrote on the menu:

Grilled pizza sandwiches
Hamburgers and chips
Greek pasta salad with chicken
Hot dogs, corn chips, beans
Pancakes and eggs
Korean tuna and rice
Spiedies; potato salad; corn on the cob

Maybe we even had a vegetable at some point, who can say? I’m sure I would have made up some nonsense, but the only thing really worth talking about was the spiedies. We used pork, and o my brothers and o my sisters, it tasted almost like steak. Amazing.

Because I’ve never had spiedies before, I used this recipe from the NYT (I know, I know. If they ran a recipe for Corn Flakes and milk, it would involve a Gruyère crema with arugula chiffonade. (Those are all real words; I checked.) But it turned out so well, I’m willing to live with my elitism.

Confession: the main reason I like cooking is because you get to play mad scientist with the marinades, like when we were little and my mother would let us make “experiments” with anything in her pantry. (If you’re looking for a weird, funny kid’s book that begins with a kitchen experiment like this, check out William Steig’s Gorky Rises.)

Here’s my magical concoction:

[img attachment=”107141″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”marinade” /]

How could something extraordinary fail to follow? So I marinated the pork chunks overnight, and then stuck them on skewers for Mr. Husband to cook on the grill. We had about six pounds of meat, so there were dozens and dozens of skewers.

You guys, this did not taste like 99-cent pork. It was fantastic.

[img attachment=”107144″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”spiedies” /]

Served with corn on the cob and potato salad that my daughter made.

We also decided to make a strawberry rhubarb pie, but we didn’t have enough fruit for two pies; so I made one big one in a square pan (and discovered why people don’t usually make pie in square pans, even though pi r squared, har har har). The kids used cookie cutters to make dough flowers, which we tossed on top. Kind of a 70s nonskid bathtub effect, but who are we trying to impress?

[img attachment=”107147″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”strawberry tart” /]

Served with whipped cream. No complaints!

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Here’s what we had this past week:

MONDAY

Chili and corn muffins. 

The recipe really isn’t worth sharing. Just your basic meat, various beans, spicy spices, peppers, onions, tomatoes, whatever. Hardly anyone ate it, which is great because I made enough to fill Trevi Fountain in memoriam of all the martyrs of Mexico. Aw, boo, was that in bad taste? I can’t help it, I’m sick.

Yep, the terrible, horrible stomach bug found me next. Just as Corrie was starting to turn the corner a little bit, but still needing lots of extra attention and wanting to nurse all day to replace the fluids she had lost, I was knocked flat. I could not even believe how sick I was. Fever dreams about Shinzō Abe and everything. On the good moments, I felt like a sock in a puddle on the side of the highway. On the bad moments, I found myself thinking, “I must be at least 9 cm by now!” But no.

Thank goodness we had all that chili.

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TUESDAY

I have no memory of Tuesday. I think chicken nuggets. Husband stayed home from work and made supper.

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WEDNESDAY

Kielbasa, sauerkraut, pierogies

This is where the whole meal plan advantage breaks down in a spectacular way. You buy food that sounds good on Saturday, and then Wednesday comes, and you’re just barely strong enough to move your jaws up on down to make a little headway on a Saltine. You drag your eyelids open at 5 PM, vaguely aware that people will want to eat dinner, and there’s a big, bad kielbasa staring you in the face with obvious malice.

I remember whimpering and lurching in the direction of the couch while the kids made supper.

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THURSDAY

Pizza

I actually felt well enough to make supper, but then had to go lie down again. That cheese was heavy.

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FRIDAY

Crunchy jalapeño grilled cheese

Again with the ideal food for those very slowly recovering from gastroenteritis. You use Colby Jack, and add sliced jalapeños and broken-up corn chips to the cheese before grilling. I haven’t been this angry at my past self since I woke up with a tattoo of Roy Orbison on my bum.

I haven’t had any coffee since Monday. I’m living on Gatorade and Saltines.

The washing machine broke several days ago and flooded the laundry room floor, which was covered with clothes.

I haven’t had any coffee since Monday.

I cancelled so many appointments. We skipped portfolio night and are bad parents. My daughter’s high school graduation is tonight, and I really, truly want to care.

I haven’t had any coffee since Monday.

I am a wet sock in a puddle by the side of the highway.

But there is still plenty of leftover chili!

Atanacio Rosas, one of the Mexican policeman credited with saving a young man’s life by offering him some tacos, says he “simply treated him as a son.”

The seventeen-year-old was threatening to jump off an overpass, reports Mexico News Daily, saying he “had neither friends nor family there. He had no job, no money and was hungry.” So the policemen who responded offered to take care of at least one problem, and brought him to a nearby taco truck, where he ate five tacos al pastor.

Once the immediate crisis was averted, they were able to bring the young man to a health center to be evaluated and treated for his more complicated problems. And he did not jump.

A few weeks ago, Hallie Lord wrote the following message on Facebook:

Last week when I was up in NYC co-hosting the Jennifer Fulwiler Show on SiriusXM The Catholic Channel, Sister Bethany Madonna, a Sister of Life, said something that has stuck with me ever since. She told us that when a woman walks into their home facing a crisis pregnancy, the first thing they do is ask if she’s hungry and make her some eggs. That’s the starting point.

There is no more perfect starting point. Not because feeding another person is a kind thing to do, or because it shows you care, or because it helps put them at ease — though these are all wonderful, important things — but because it destroys fear.

Did you know that? That scrambled eggs destroy fear? Because they do. Or at least the act of making them does.

When a frightened woman approaches them and they stop everything to feed her, they are pouring love into that moment and since love and fear cannot coexist, the fear immediately begins to dissipate. Once that fear is out of the way, they can start to look for ways to help her. How brilliant and beautiful is that?

Here’s the truth: we’re all a little scared of something. Fearlessness is a myth. We can overcome fear and we can find peace, absolutely, but we’re all a little afraid. And that’s okay, because we’re not helpless and we’re not powerless. We can cooperate with God, we can flood our world with love, and we can force out all the fear. We can scramble some eggs.

Our bodies can be so troublesome to us, so uncooperative and unreliable. But it is a great gift that we have these bodies, along with our appetites, because they are yet another way that God has given us to show love to each other.

Tacos al pastor by Jeffrey Beall (creative commons)

“Consider this your life’s library,” says Good Housekeeping in 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40.

As a worn out, dried up, almost totally useless and indescribably ancient 41-year-old, I always get a little itchy when age 40 is presented as a drop dead lady deadline for anything the world considers useful, meaningful, or good. Here I am, a good 17 months past my expiration date, and yet my brain hasn’t completely fossilized into immobility. Also, I just recently figured out how to use eyeliner. Cut me some slack, jack!

Well, here’s their list, along with my microreviews:

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume

Yeah, I’ve read Judy Blume. She’s not a writer. She’s a third-grade-level word assembler with some masturbation sprinkled on the top. Pass.

“A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan

Never heard of it.

With the last breath in my uncomfortably exposed bosom, I agree wholeheartedly with every last word in this essay from a few years ago in the Huffington Post:

Moms, Put on That Swimsuit. The writer (who, in the picture, is not at all fat! But she feels like she is, and that’s what counts) says:

I refuse to miss my children’s high-pitched, pool-induced giggles because of my insecurities.

I refuse to let other women’s judging eyes at the pool prevent me from exposing my kids’ eyes to the wonder of the sun glittering on the water.

I refuse to let my self-image influence my children’s.

I refuse to sacrifice memories with my children because of a soft tummy.

I want them to remember twirling in the water with their mom.

I want them to remember splash fights together.

I want them to remember jumping off the edge of the pool into my arms.

I want them to remember that their mom was there, with them.

This attitude resonates with me so much more than all those body positive slogans shrieking: “YES! YOU DEFINITELY HAVE A BIKINI BODY! ADORE YOUR BODY, NO MATTER WHAT! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL BECAUSE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY WOMAN NOT TO BE BEAUTIFUL!”

As one of my friends pointed out, kids actually do kind of notice if you’re fat. They just don’t care, because you are at the beach and the beach is supposed to be fun. So, whatcha gonna do?

More than once last year, I just felt too damn fat to put on a bathing suit. Just couldn’t do it. So I would moodily schlep to the pond, and the kids would beg me to take them in the water and do that swooshing thing, or catch them when they jump off the big rock — and I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a suit on.

They were crushed. It didn’t make any sense to them. Why would you not wear your swimsuit to the beach?

And they were right. Yeah, there are skinny, perky teenagers at the beach. Yeah, there are other moms who are frolicking around with their kids, and they’re wearing the same size bikinis as their toddlers. Not even with stretch marks! How do they even do that? And here I am, weighing more than I did when I was nine months pregnant with the youngest kid, who is now a toddler. How did I even do that?

More to the point, who cares?

This year my motto is: Feel fat? Hide in the water. Unlike when you’re lurking unhappily on the sand, no one will see you, and you can feel light and graceful for once. Why would you deny yourself that?

If you insist on wondering what other people think about how you look, just enjoy feeling gracious and generous about how skinny they feel when they behold the massive twin craters you left behind in the sand when you struggled to your feet to join the cannonball contest. What a nice person you are! You just made their day so much better, bless their size 4 hearts.

But seriously. It’s not about making excuses for not being healthy. It’s not about being mediocre. It’s not about body positivity or normalizing obesity. It’s about letting the beach do what it’s designed to do: reminding you that there’s something bigger than you.

Sitting on the sand getting gritty and trying to tug your shorts and tank top over your flabby bits while the kids beg you to jump in? That is a great way to have a lousy afternoon.  If you want to be attractive, have fun. Laugh and be happy. That’s attractive, even when you’re fat.

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[A version of this post first appeared in 2014]

Last weekend, a dream came true.

We live on an acre and a quarter of land. To the south of our house is a little lawn and the road; to the west is a field and a grove of aspens and pines; to the north is the back yard, garden, swing set, trampoline, and a gorgeous little stream. And to the east, really really close to our living room windows, is a big ol’ apartment house.

It blocks out the sky, and it’s kind of weird that it’s jammed up so close to our property. I don’t really mind seeing it right out the window, even though their porch is peeling like crazy, there are miscellaneous broken toys, barrels, and scraps of cardboard strewn around the grass, and a mildewed couch is hulking in the weeds. Hey, live free or die. As I’ve mentioned, we ourselves haven’t graced the cover of House Beautiful lately.

However, we have this dog.

[img attachment=”105852″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”boomer” /]

This picture was taken three years ago, when he was still a little puppy.

As you can see, he loves our children very, very much. So much. So very much that, whenever our kids are threatened by outrageously dangerous things like a nice lady carrying a baby into her apartment house right outside our living room window, Mr. Protective does his best to murder them to death with the sheer murderforce of his frenzied superbark.

The barking was bad enough; but along with three sweet towheaded children, the neighbors also have a bitsy little dog-like creature of their own, and this foolish creature is bound and determined to go pee in our yard. Because he is just longing to disappear down the gullet of our dog.

The obvious answer is, of course, to put up a big fence. But unless your name is Drumpf and you’re a sociopath, you’ll realize this is prohibitively expensive.

Lo and behold: on Memorial Day, the neighbors did it for us! I’m so happy. So now, when when we look out the living room windows, we see this:

[img attachment=”105837″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 10.23.54 AM” /]

Which might as well be this:

[img attachment=”105845″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”small-easel-with-a-blank-canvas” /]

Oh, the possibilities!

So, hit me with ideas. What do we do with our side of this big, beautiful wall? Plant climbing vines? Paint regrettable murals? Establish beehives? Make a sundial? Start training one of those crazy flat fruit trees? Hire Wile E. Coyote to construct a portal to another world? I’m willing to consider anything, because the only thing cheaper than making the neighbors build a wall is talking about what do to with it.

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Image: public domain