Sex is about lovers, not about sex

People need to hear this more.  Will Duquette (are you reading Will Duquette?  You should be!) says

It is true that the first stages of Eros are like shooting the rapids on a river: exciting and scary, and great fun, especially if you’re an adrenalin junky. But mature Eros is that like that same river, downstream: wide and deep, flowing strongly, deeply peaceful but in no way static or stagnant.

Oh, yes: and sometimes there’s sex involved, and it gets better over time, especially when you get over the need for thrills. No, really. The sex is supposed to be about the two of you, not about the sex, and it’s difficult to get there if you’re focussed on the thrills.

Read the rest (it’s short!).  Lots to ponder here.

 

Mother to one, mother to all

In-between shifts, social worker breastfeeds babies in Zamboanga evac center

MANILA – For literally giving all she can, Evalinda Jimeno, a social worker of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), has earned the admiration of evacuees sheltered at the Joaquin F. Enriquez Sports Complex in Zamboanga City.

According to the DSWD, Jimeno was hailed by the refugees evacuated from the chaos and violence wrought by an ongoing standoff between the military and a faction of the Moro National Liberation Front, when she breastfed a hungry baby of one of the evacuees.

Over the past week, she has breastfed far more than one child, and far more than her own. Jimeno, a social worker of Zamboanga Sibugay has been breastfeeding in-between her official hours tasked with registering evacuees for the family access card.

(read more)

Once you become a mother,  you become everybody’s mother.  Where have I seen that happen before?  Ah yes –

For more images of Mary nursing baby (or toddler!) Jesus, see here.

GAH!!!!!!

Uh, I mean, uh, um, OHHHHH, how beautiful is the body of woman in all her mystery!  Ovulation filmed in close-up for the first time (this is in 2008).

BTW, this would totally be me, in the middle of having surgery to have my uterus removed, and still squeezing out another egg just in case, because you never, never know.

I am so tired.

He’s #1! *sob* He’s #1!!

Wellity, wellity, wellity.

Look who’s the number one bestseller in Catholicism (and a number of other categories) on Amazon with Saints and Social Justice:  A Guide to Changing the World.  BRANDON VOGT, the young upstart!  And all because

(a) he had the wonderful idea of putting together a book about what Catholic social justice really means, and the saints who lived it; and
(b) he’s introducing the e-book for only $3.19.

Brandon says on his blog:

[A]s a Protestant college-student bent on changing the world, I discovered these teachings [about Catholic social teaching] and they blew me away. I read the relevant encyclicals, studied the principles, and saw them lived out in people like Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and Dorothy Day. They ended up playing a crucial role in my conversion to Catholicism.

Yet since becoming Catholic, I’ve discovered just how controversial Catholic social teaching can be. Whenever I express excitement about these teachings I’m often met with nervous glances or heavy sighs. Thanks to years of distortion and confusion, many Catholics literally cringe at their mention.

Oh, yes.

The book aims to reclaim Catholic social teaching and unveil it through the lives of the saints. It’s framed using the seven major themes of Catholic social teaching, as defined by the U.S. bishops, and for each theme I highlight two saints who especially embodied it.

The resulting book is a narrative packed with stories, from those saints and others in the sidebars, of people putting these teachings into action.

My hope is that the book imitates stained glass windows throughout the world, using the saints as conduits of light, allowing these brilliant social teachings to shine through them with new vividness, splendor, and truth.

Brandon Vogt has a special talent for putting his finger right on the question that people are asking right now, and answering it in a clear, profound, accessible way.

I wants one. I will be the first to admit that I am confused about what social justice really means, and I definitely need an upgrade on my education on the saints, beyond what I learned in 57 Saints for Girls and Boys. You can pre-order the e-book for a limited time for $3.19.  Before long, you will have to pay a normal old reasonable price of $9.99.  My goodness, you have $3.19.  Get it while it’s crazy cheap!

 

My interview with Ignitum Today

Great interview with Bonnie Engstrom of Ignitum Today is up today.  An excerpt:

You talk a lot about how you and Damien have grown and overcome a lot of the struggles you had early on in your marriage. Was here a specific turning point for you? A moment where you said, “Aha! So this is what God wants me to do/say/understand!” If so, when was that moment, and what precipitated it?

No one specific moment, no.  There were several “believe so that you may understand” moments, though — when we just decided we were going to grit our teeth and do our best to live with impossible situations . . .  and then they cleared up in unexpected ways.  It was a lot easier to see God’s gentleness and mercy after we had decided to bow to His law.

We also constantly work on making the shift from “my needs vs. your needs” to “what’s best for our marriage and family?”

I think that even when people do have startling, revolutionary epiphanies in their lives, they usually still have to follow up with a long, gradual process of putting that epiphany into practice.

Read the rest here.

What does the Apostolic Nuncio’s letter about Medjugorje signify?

Spirit Daily has posted the following letter:

I was seeing confusion and varying interpretations about what this letter actually signifies or implies. Scott P.Richert of  About.com’s Catholicism page gave me this background explanation:

[A] bishop (singular) initially thought that there was something to the apparitions, but as he investigated it more deeply, he came to see otherwise. Since then, the bishops with the authority to investigate and determine the validity of the apparitions have all said, as the letter itself states, that “On the basis of the research that has been done, it is not possible to state that there were apparitions or supernatural revelations.” As a consequence, those bishops have forbidden pilgrimages, etc., to the site of the alleged apparitions.

Yes, the letter is a specific warning addressed to the bishops of the United States. But the substance of the warning is that clerics and faithful should not participate in these events in the United States for the same reason that they should not participate in them in Medjugorje.

Scott has written this article to clarify what the bishops have said in the past, and how the process of evaluating a purported vision actually proceeds:  An Exorcist Looks at Medjugorje.

 

The principled consumer?

This is why I consider commercial boycotts to be largely a spiritual and symbolic exercise, at least at the personal level.  I refuse to buy anything with “Nestle” written on it, for instance, because of their repulsive treatment of third world babies; but I know the only difference it will make is if I consciously offer up the (miniscule) sacrifice that involves.

Anyway, I usually buy store brands of food — but aren’t those often made by the same corporations, and just packaged more cheaply?  Blah.  Education is a good thing; but I think we are fooling ourselves if we think we can keep our shopping baskets ritually pure.  If we avoid all taint as consumers, we will quickly starve.  When large groups of people band together and exert pressure on corporations, they can affect real change.  But it does not follow that a single, harried shopper who grabs a bag of Laffy Taffy is committing a sin against third world babies.

What makes sense to me is this:  pick a few causes that you feel really strongly about.  Make a firm decision to make the sacrifice so you can avoid supporting those particular evils. Stick to it.  And then just chill about the rest.

What do you think?  How do you handle being a principled consumer when your choices are not real choices?

Myzzled by phonics

Ha- this is funny.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz stumbles into the people-who-read-too-much mispronunciation of “misled”:

I recently ran into this myself, when I was recording my audiobook last weekend.  It seems that I use kind of a lot of words that I am not 100% sure how to pronounce.  (John Herried called this “Homeschooler’s Syndrome.”  Oh lawsy, there she goes again, attacking homeschoolers!!!1!)  It happened a few times, but the one I really struggled with was “minutiae.”   I asked the producer, and he didn’t know, either.  I think I ended up saying “my-NOO-shee-aye.”  I did my best to make it sound authoritative.

My kids all learned to read pretty early, and although I flogged them with phonics, they definitely got in some skimming habits.  One child who shall remain nameless was recently heard to make reference to “filling a lamp with kernose.”  My grandmother told me she once met a guy who thought “fatigued” was pronounced “fatty-gayed.”  He’d surely heard the word pronounced, but I guess he just somehow assumed all his life that there were two separate words, which both meant “tired.”

I just love it when little fissures of naivete are introduced into the professional world like this.  We’re all faking it, at one level or another.

 

Calling someone “angel”

Very interesting stuff from Tammy Ruiz, who has worked in perinatal NICU and hospice centers for most of her career, and who recently and unexpectedly lost her husband.  She has witnessed many crises, much grief, and many people behaving with compassion and selflessness She says it’s not only theoloically inaccurate to call someone an “angel” when they demonstrate what seems like heroic virtue, but it can provide us with an excuse to avoid even trying to do the right thing.  Calling someone an “angel” implies that they have superhuman abilities — that they are a different type of being altogether — and we can’t even hope to imitate them. Instead, here is what she has seen:

When I worked for a hospice, one of the most amazing parts of the job was watching the evolution of the caregivers who often went from “I could never ever _____ even if my parent needed me to” to “this is really hard but I’m sort of doing it” finally to “it was really hard to care for my dying parent but I did it and I am proud of myself.” Properly caring for the dying takes everybody working together, not just waiting for the “angel” hospice nurse to arrive.

A great reminder, which draws out a useful distinction:  It’s very common, lately, for people to urge each other to just take small steps, and to be content with trying.  But this misses the mark.  We take small steps because we’re weak and limited — but the small steps will make us stronger, so that we eventually can achieve more.  We’re not creatures of superhuman virtue; but neither should we be content with our limitations. Read the rest here.

One of the great injustices of the 21st century . . .

is that my sister, Abby Tardiff, does not have a blog.  We have to content ourselves with checking her Facebook page, where you will always find things like this story, about the two planes that collided in  midair and burst into flames

and sent their passengers hurtling through the air

but it was okay, because they were all professional skydivers . . .

juxtaposed with this:

from Fables by the master, Arnold Lobel.