You can always come back

One Sunday afternoon, I posted on Facebook:

“Reasons the Fishers left their pew this morning:
Had to go to the bathroom.
Also had to go to the bathroom.
Had to check ketones and bolus.
Had to go to the bathroom after all.
Had to take migraine meds.
Had to get to work.
Had to leave the building entirely because, while the four-year-old could behave herself, her puppy Crystal could not.
BUT WE ALL CAME BACK EVENTUALLY.”

I’m not sure how the other parishioners feel, but I have no problem with this level of traffic during Mass. We’d rather keep a lighter grip on the reins, and let the kids do what they need to do, as long as they always come back. And we do always come back.

When I was a teenager, I also didn’t sit in the pew. I did come to Mass with my parents, because they expected it, but I never made it as far as the pew. I would lurk sulkily in the back of the church, glowering at the little red votive candles as they flickered in their cups. Sometimes I would sit on the steps to the choir loft, my head between my knees, hating every moment of it. I never prayed, I never went to confession. I chose the path of misery for years, rather than sit in the pew.

And you know, I eventually came back. Look at me now! I’m so Catholic, the Jehovah’s Witnesses barely even try. I’m sure my parents were worried when I started to stray as a teenager, but they knew they were playing the long game. They kept a pretty loose grip on the reins, and I think that’s a good principle.

Almost as if to illustrate this principle: During that same Mass I described above, where my family spent most of the hour coming and going and to-ing and fro-ing, the pastor made an announcement: An elderly couple in the parish would have their marriage convalidated. They’d been in a civil marriage for many years but had recently come back to the Church . . .

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Public Domain

A cautious PSA about PANDAS and rapid onset OCD and anxiety in kids

‘Tis the season of strep throat and norovirus and other infections, and that is bad enough. But some researchers and doctors believe that infections can occasionally trigger a misdirected autoimmune response, especially in children, that causes sudden, alarming psychiatric symptoms: extreme anxiety, OCD, intrusive thoughts including suicidal ideation, tics, sudden difficulty with math and handwriting, and sensory problems.

The illness is called PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections) or PANS (Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome). A child who’s otherwise healthy develops these symptoms literally overnight, and while the infection that triggered them can be cured, no treatment seems to alleviate the psychiatric symptoms.

I know that not all medical professionals accept PANS/PANDAS as a legitimate diagnosis, and that a lot of very nutty people have latched onto it. I am not a doctor or a scientist. I’m simply a mom passing along information about something that has helped other parents, and that is the entirety of what I know about it. I know three moms — sensible, educated people who accept modern, western medicine, not gullible, fearful, or prone to woo — who had run out of other explanations for their kids’ sudden change in behavior, and got no relief from the normal treatment (therapy, SSRIs). They talked to their doctors about PANS/PANDAS and then gave their kids n-acetyl l-cysteine (NAC), which you can get over the counter. NAC is normally used to prevent asthma attacks and treat rashes, but it truly seems to have cured these kids of their psychological symptoms. 

I am not making any claims about this hypothesized illness or this hypothesized treatment, as I’m not qualified in any way to do so (and I’m certainly not getting any kind of kickback or payment, other than what I normally earn from page views of this site). I’m just passing along what I have heard, because I know how it feels to see a kid suffering and to not know how to help. This is just one more thing to consider.

So if your kid develops anxiety or other inexplicable psychiatric disorders, please don’t immediately assume it’s PANDAS, and please don’t try to treat it without professional help. We have a few kids who suffer with severe anxiety, and it’s not PANDAS. Lots and lots of things can cause psychological symptoms, and sometimes there is more than one cause. But if you and your doctor have tried all kinds of other treatments and nothing is helping, and the kid did have an infection before a very sudden onset of the symptoms, this is something to consider. 

Image: Sherif Salama via Flickr (Creative Commons)

 

What are you looking forward to?

“What do you look forward to every day?”

Someone asked this on Facebook the other day. At first it seemed like one of those untaxing “get to know ya” questions. But when I went to reach for the easy answer, I discovered to my horror that I couldn’t think of anything.

It was absurd that I couldn’t. My life is full of pleasant and joyful things. I have 10 lovable, fascinating children and a remarkably good husband. I like my job; I like my house and garden. I have friends and family I enjoy being with. I have leisure time every day. My life is studded with pleasures large and small.

But what do I look forward to? What do I spend time longing for every day? I can clearly remember being a child, and always looking forward to something: For the end of math class, for the beginning of summer, for my turn on the swing, for my birthday, for Lent to end so I could eat the cherry sours I unwisely bought ahead of time. My mother used to sing (rather flippantly, I thought, in the face of my anguish): “Enjoy yourself! Enjoy yourself! It’s later than you think.” Her point was that it’s foolish to set all our store in some potential future bliss. All we really have is the present, and if we waste it with various yearnings and worries, we’ll soon be out of time.

So, yes, I used to look forward to things when I was young, but not in a way I want to replicate now. That kind of longing — the kind that robs the present of its charms — is no way to spend a life. I recall the story of the man who was given a spool of string, and every time he tugged on the end, he could skip past some unpleasant part of his life. He kept tugging and tugging, giving himself permission to skip over more and more, until oops! he was dead. He skipped it all. If all we ever do is look forward to some better time in the future, then we’ll miss every joy the present can offer.

But it’s also possible to be so caught up in reacting to the present that we never fully receive it. This is the trap I’ve fallen into.

I think mostly about how I’m going to get through the unpleasant and unavoidable things that plague my day: How will I get myself to wake up enough to do the morning drive? How can I get dinner prepped in time so we won’t eat too late? How can I express the news that it’s time to leave the playground so my four-year-old won’t flip out? I think a lot about how I’m going to manage difficult things, but hardly at all about how I’m going to enjoy the good — even though there is plenty of good. And so the pleasures flit through my arms and are gone again, and off I hustle, arranging myself to deal with the next trial, tugging on that string to get through my day, my year, my life.

Well, that’s no good.

So, determined to realign my life, I set myself to look forward to things I can reasonably expect to enjoy.

And I didn’t have much luck.

I tried to tell myself I can look forward to putting dinner on the table each night, because it’s the culmination of hard work, and I should be glad and grateful to be able to offer hot, nourishing food to my children.

That didn’t go well. I blame the kids, who are terrible.

Then I thought I could look forward to the day itself. Normally, I hear my alarm and groan with dread at the thought of emerging from my cozy cocoon. Instead, I proposed to myself, I could reframe the morning as something to look forward to, and maybe it would help propel me joyfully out into the cold morning air.

That didn’t go well, either. Because I’m not a psychopath.

But then I hit on something else . . . 

Read the rest of my latest at The Catholic Weekly. 

Image by Darrel Birkett via Flickr (Creative Commons)

A hymn to household saints

For all the saints
Who’ve lost their arms and head;
For those whose poor legs
Are now duct tape instead;
For those long gone
Beneath my bad kid’s bed:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For all the saints
Whose words are super true,
Who labored hard
To preach to me and you:
Please try again,
Until your face is blue:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For all the saints
Whose names our babies bear,
Please take their hands
(And maybe brush their hair).
We’re working hard,
Not getting anywhere.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For all the saints
Up on those dusty shelves.
You see the pits
The human spirit delves.
Ask God for mercy.
We can’t save ourselves.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For all our saints,
This day is just for you.
You’re with God now.
You need something to do?
Then pray for us!
We’re leaning hard on you.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Totally doable Halloween treats for your kid’s party

I’m having some kind of domestic spasm, so I’ll be making treats for Halloween parties tomorrow. If you’re still scrambling for ideas, here are some low-skill treats we’ve done in the past:

SCARY MOUTHS!
Photo by Jim Hammer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hammer51012/14457177985 (Creative Commons)

Very easy, if somewhat time consuming, and the kids loved them.  Apple slices, peanut butter, mini marshmallows. You can also use Nutella for the sticky part, and you can use almonds for the teeth. If you have to go nut-free, you could use pink icing for the gums, but you’ll want to dry the apples thoroughly so it sticks. 

You could also use two almond slivers in between marshmallow teeth for a sort of vampire effect. The apples brown a tiny bit but the kids don’t care. If you care, you could dip them in lemon juice after cutting. 

PRETZEL ROD WANDS OR GHOSTS

Pretzel rods dipped in candy coating or melted chocolate can be ghost sticks or magic wands. I can’t seem to find a pic of the ghost ones, but here’s the basic idea. You dip pretzel rods in melted white candy melts, or else melt white chocolate and stir in a little melted shortening to make it smoother and harden better. While they’re wet, add mini chocolate chips or raisins or whatever else edible you can find to make faces; or let them dry and pipe face on with dark icing that hardens, such as royal icing. 

For magic wands, dip the pretzel rods in various colors of melted candy coating (white, orange, purple, and green are Halloweeny) and melted chocolate with a bit of melted shortening stirred in. While it’s wet, sprinkle on whatever fancy decorations you can find, including sugars, sprinkles, candy eyeballs, candy corn, etc. Kids absolutely love these, especially if you present a lot of different kinds to choose from. 

SKULL COOKIES with or without glowing eyeballs

Use this foolproof no-need-to-chill sugar cookie recipe and cut out a bunch of skulls. Frost in white, easy peasy. My kids made these one year entirely on their own. I thought the frosting job they did was terrifying. 

OR, you could get a little fancier and fill the eyes with crushed hard candies before baking, so they glowwww spoooooookily. But YOU MUST USE PARCHMENT PAPER TO LINE THE PAN.

GINGERBREAD SKELETONS

If you can’t find a skull cookie cutter, but you can find your gingerbread cookie cutter, you make make skeletons. Here’s a picture from someone who went all out with several layers of icing:

https://www.maxpixel.net/Pastry-Skeletons-Love-Cookies-Festival-Dead-2220291 (public domain)

but if you use a dark dough, like gingerbread, and pipe the white bones directly onto the cookie. Or you could make regular sugar cookie dough and mix some food coloring in. Pipe the bones on with white and you have cute pastel skeleton guys.

THROWING UP PUMPKIN

And one year, I’m not proud of this, but we did make the incredibly classy throwing up jack-o’-lantern, with a mini pumpkin and guacamole. You could also use queso instead of guac. Again, I cannot find the picture, but I think I even sprang for the fancy purple corn chips. 

How about you?  Did you make any rash promises?  Any disasters to report?

50 poems to print and hang on the wall

Every so often, I get a bee in my bonnet about poetry. When we homeschooled, we read and sometimes memorized poems. We’ve since moved on to other kinds of schooling, and it’s been a good choice, overall. But to my everlasting chagrin, so many teachers teach my kids that poetry is a kind of catch basin for emotion.

Prose, they learn, is for when you have orderly thoughts to express with precision; but poetry is the place to open the floodgates and wallow, and nobody can possibly say you’re doing it wrong, because there are no rules.

And this is true, as long as the poetry is utter garbage. 

This utter garbage approach to poetry accounts for why so many young people love to write but hate to read poetry. Wallowing feels great when you’re in the middle of it (when you’re in the mood), but no healthy person likes to flail around in someone else’s muck. 

A good poem works in the opposite way: The writer does all the work, and the reader — well, the reader has to do some work, too, but if he’s willing, he’ll be rewarded with something of great and lasting value. Have you seen an uncut, unpolished diamond? It doesn’t look like much. Most of its beauty is in its potential, and it’s not until it’s carefully, skillfully cut and polished that it sparkles and reflects the light.

The same is true with the ideas and passions that animate poetry. In a formless stream-of-consciousness poem that’s allowed to spill itself thoughtlessly onto the page, the ideas and passions that animate it may be present, but they won’t do much for the reader until they’re brought out by skillful, time-consuming word smithing, and ruthless editing.

Of course, you can make perhaps the opposite mistake, and approach a well-crafted poem the way a dealer approaches a precious jewel, and think only of what it can deliver. This is what Billy Collins protested against in his poem, Introduction to Poetry. He pleads with his students to listen to, to live with a poem; to encounter it on its own terms, to experience it. To hear the sounds it makes and be open to the various things they might suggest.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope 
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose 
to find out what it really means.

People who teach poetry this way should be sent to work in the salt mines. They can meet up with the wallowers once a week and think about what they’ve done wrong.

Anyway, as I mentioned, every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet and start printing out poetry and tacking it up on the walls of my house. I pin up a new batch every year or so, and once they become tattered enough, I tell myself they’ve probably been read by somebody. I’m far too tired and busy to lead any seminars, but at least it’s something.

The theory is that it’s possible to ruin a wonderful poem by torturing a message or moral out of it, and it’s possible to miss out on the power and import of a good poem by skimming over the surface of it and not stopping to consider why it’s made the way it is; but at least with the second error, you’ve had a moment of pleasure. And if the thing is hanging around long enough and the poem is good enough, you’re bound to let it inside your head, where it may colonize.

Here are some lists of poems I’ve hung in the past, in no particular order. Most of them are short enough to print out on a single page.

“The Tyger” William Blake
“Still, Citizen Sparrow” Richard Wilbur
“Dust of Snow”  Robert Frost
“Spring and Fall” G.M. Hopkins
“Love (III)” George Herbert
“Thirteen Ways of Looking At a  Blackbird” Wallace Stevens
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” (from A Shropshire Lad) A. E. Housman
“Epistemology” Richard Wilbur
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” William Butler Yeats
“The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” Dylan Thomas
“maggie and milly and molly and may” e. e. cummings
“The Walrus and the Carpenter” Lewis Carroll
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” Robert Frost
“Mock On,  Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau” William Blake
“At the Sea-Side” Robert Lewis Stevenson
“Marginalia” Richard Wilbur
“I Knew a Woman” Theodore Roethke
“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” William Wordsworth
“Where Did You Come From, Baby Dear?” by George MacDonald
“As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden
“Intimations of Immortality” (excerpt – the stanza with “trailing clouds of glory do we come”) by Wordsworth
“Inversnaid”by G. M. Hopkins
“Macavity the Mystery Cat” by T.S. Eliot
“The Beautiful Changes” by Richard Wilbur”
“Acquainted With the Night” by Robert Frost
“God’s Grandeur” by G. M. Hopkins
“April 5, 1974” by Richard Wilbur
“The Garden” by Ezra Pound
“Cold Are the Crabs” by Edward Lear
“Domination of Black “by Wallace Stevens
“A Hero” by Robert Service
“Having Misidentified a Wildflower”by Richard Wilbur
“The Lanyard” by Billy Collins
“Sonnet CXLIII” by Shakespeare
“Sea Calm” by Langston Hughes
“A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns
“Trolling for blues “by Richard Wilbur
“Examination at the womb door ” by Ted Hughes
“The Great Figure” by William Carlos Williams
“End of Summer” by Stanley Kunitz
“Faith” by Maria Terrone
“Gazebos” by Roger McGough
“Eulogie” by Sherman Alexie
“Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas
“Walking West” by William E. Stafford
“The Gift” by Louise Gluck
“The Lesson of the Moth” by Don Marquis
“There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings” by Donald Justice
“No Time “by Billy Collins
“The End and the Beginning” by Wisława Szymborska

If you love poetry, what would you add?

photo credit: emileechristine Bejeweled via photopin (license)

A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly in October of 2019.

The battles you can actually win

Fr. Jacob Boddicker, SJ wrote this on Facebook yesterday. I kept reading it over and over. I’m sharing here with his permission. 

I know a lot of my brothers and sisters are worried and frustrated at things that are happening in the Church recently. But I wanted to tell you that just within the limited realm of my influence:

Two people who had not been to confession in many, many years finally came to our Lord’s mercy this weekend.

Six young people–five from my parish and one from out of town–will be confirmed by me this coming weekend.

I know a young woman who is recovering from surgery who cried when the Eucharist was brought to her today (she could not attend Mass because of said recovery).

Around twenty youth from different religious backgrounds came to my parish hall to learn a little about Jesus tonight. No one made them; they came because they wanted to. It is a cooperative event put together by myself and three pastors from other denominations, and I was able to show a video I made about young saints. They were struck by St .Joan of Arc especially, and St. Jose Sanchez del Rio.

These are little flowers I cultivated in my garden today; little victories granted here on my small patch of the Lord’s campaign against Hell. Is what goes on in Rome and elsewhere important? Yes. But brothers and sisters we are just infantrymen in a vast battle against Satan; if we run to the hilltops to try and take in the vastness of the war in order to determine what way it is going, we will not only inevitably be frustrated and discouraged, but the battles placed immediately before us will go unfought and potentially be lost. You will look abroad and see chaos because you cannot hear the commands of the generals or know their strategies, and likewise it is far easier to see a column of smoke or flame from afar than it is to see a flag of victory. Yet if you mind what the Lord puts immediately before you, things are far more clear and far more hopeful.

Look to your patch of the battlefield and fight the battles the Lord puts before you: the battles you can actually fight and, through fidelity, perseverance, and holiness, you can actually win.

These little victories the Lord granted me today are so small in the grand scheme of things, but consider the fact that an avalanche can destroy an entire town and is made of snowflakes, or that a tsunami can devastate vast regions and is made of drops of water. “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain…” (John 15:16).

What good is it to despair about wooden idols in Rome when there are souls slipping closer to Hell all around you: souls you might actually help? Pray, certainly, but do not despair. Do not waste your ammunition trying to fire long-range when you could use your ammo–your prayers and your every holy effort–to far greater effect at short range! “Pray, hope, and don’t worry,” St. Padre Pio says. Yes, pray for the Lord’s success in those far-away campaigns we read about in blogs and articles, and hear of in podcasts and videos. But do not neglect the battle raging on before you, the very skirmishes entrusted directly to you!

Will our victories be great? No, likely not. But even a small victory over Satan is absolutely crushing to one so proud; the smallest holy victory, the smallest berry of holy fruit and news of it drops like an atomic bomb of humiliation on Hell. It seems to me that if all of Heaven rejoices at the repentance of a single sinner (Luke 15:7, 10), the whole triumph of God over Satan and his cronies Sin and Death will not ultimately be the result of a massive battle that decides everything all at once, but rather the climax of a million small battles that overwhelm the enemy from all sides until, at last, he is absolutely cornered and Our Lord has him right where He wants him.

Image: Detail of Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child With St. Anne via wikipedia (public domain)

What’s for supper? Vol. 190: Beef barley soup! Pumpkin cranberry walnut muffins! And more!

We have hurtled through another week! I did a few site updates, so let’s see if the new “jump to recipe” thing works:

Jump to Recipe

Works? I think it works. Here’s what we had:

SATURDAY
Nachos, pineapple

Easy peasy. Damien cooked the ground beef and added some sort of proprietary blend of seasonings, and I dumped it over some chips and shredded a bunch of cheese over it and slid it in the oven. We had salsa and sour cream and cilantro. 

If you squint, it looks sort of like salad. 

SUNDAY
Roast beef sandwiches, onion rings, veg and dip, strawberry shortcake

I had worked up a wonderful migraine overnight, which turned me into a blob of glup, so I stayed in bed for most of the day while someone covered my faith formation class and Damien took the kids to Mass and made dinner. He seasoned the roasts and sauteéd them in a pan, then put them in the oven to roast slowly. We had the sliced meat on rolls with provolone and horseradish sauce and tomatoes.

I put mine in the oven to toast up. If I were running away from the Visigoths and had a sandwich with me and someone said, “Would you like that toasted?” I would take the extra time to toast it.

My MIL came over with strawberry shortcake. It looked very promising, but my head was just starting to recover by evening, and I didn’t want to jinx it with anything sugary. 

MONDAY
Beef orzo soup, pumpkin cranberry walnut muffins

A much-loved cold weather meal in this house. Jump to Recipe

This was supposed to be beef barley soup, but I forgot to get barley, so I subbed orzo, which was a little disappointing in the texture department. Beef, carrots, onions, tomato, garlic, wine, beef broth, salt and pepper, mushrooms, some kind of grain, and that’s it. Bay leaf if you’re fancy. Always a hit.

I had it for lunch as the week went on, and the orzo got bigger and bigger.

When it becomes one single mighty grain of orzo having within it all soupiness, then it’s time to rinse out the pot and start over. 

The kids have also been clamoring for pumpkin muffins. Jump to RecipeI made 12 regular:

and 12 with dried cranberries and chopped walnuts. I may have gotten a little carried away with the stir-ins.

They turned out more like cranberries and walnuts trifles with a light coating of muffin.

TUESDAY
Pizza

One cheese, one pepperoni, one pepperoni with leftover provolone, one olive, and one mushroom, onion, olive, and provolone. Corrie has been very, very busy in the kitchen this week, and cut up a bunch of mushrooms of her own initiative. Come to think of it, that explains why I discovered an entire garlic clove, still in its wrapper, baked right into the cheese. (Yes, I ate it.)

WEDNESDAY
Cheesy chicken chili with bacon, corn bread

This is one of those recipes that has “crack” in the title, and yet doesn’t contain any cocaine at all. I think they mean “bacon, cheese, and ranch flavoring” and I will acknowledge that that is a fine combination, but that is as far as it went. 

Chicken, tomato with chilis, corn, black beans, pieces of bacon, cream cheese, ranch dressing powder, and some seasonings. Dump it all, cook, shred the chicken, and put shredded cheddar on top. I wasn’t expecting it to taste sophisticated, but it definitely looked easy and flavorful. The most labor intensive part was cooking and chopping the bacon. 

This is a crock pot recipe, but it was almost 5:00 before I got started, so I used the Instant Pot. Which would have been fine, except I chose 15 minutes, and that wasn’t quite long enough. So I put it in for another 8. The thing about the Instant Pot is that if you cook something for 8 minutes, that means waiting about 10 minutes for it to come to pressure, then cooking it 8 minutes, then releasing the pressure for another 5 minutes. This is fine, as long as it’s what you’re expecting. It’s less fine if you are winging the recipe and have to go through the process twice so you don’t die of salmonella. 

Of course there was little chance of that happening since not one of the kids even tasted it, even though it had bacon in it. I thought it tasted pretty good. It definitely had that “everyone at the potluck wants my recipe, tee hee hee!” flavor to it. 

I also made corn muffins, for reasons unclear. It used to be that only I was the one who liked corn muffins, but my taste for them has decreased over the years, possibly soured by loneliness and crumbs. It also doesn’t help that every time I say “corn muffins” someone says “OH HONEY YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE SAYING” and I get a long treatise on  pre-industrial revolution corn and how sugar factored in to perceptions of class, and how people who don’t use cast iron corn-shaped molds can just go straight to hell, bless. Just let me make my bad muffins and then throw them away, okay? 

Here are my muffins: 

I like to run a little butter over the top while they’re still hot, so they will be shinier in the garbage. 

THURSDAY
Hot dogs, smiley fries, pomegranates

We had parent teacher conferences, and then I spent the rest of the day driving around like a silly person and then finally getting going on Halloween costumes. This year we have Scooby Doo and Daphne, Star from Star Vs. the Forces of Evil, Naruto and Kakashi or something, and some Dragonball whathaveyou. And I think an Autumn Fairy. I leaned on the kid whose costume was giving me the most trouble, and she made dinner. I also taught one kid how to use the sewing machine! I foresee a whole new generation of lopsided cloaks, puckered curtains, and pillowcases that are a tiny bit too small.

FRIDAY
Boxaroni for the kids. 

We’re going out, because it’s our anniversary! 22 years. A few months ago, I needed some nighttime reading and grabbed Turgenev off the shelf, and this photo was tucked in the pages.

 

1997. (Yes, it looks like we had just had a roll in the hay, but the photo surface is just scratched up. My goodness, you people.) 

A friend remarked that we looked so joyful and innocent, and didn’t I want to kind of warn the people in the picture that life is coming for them?

I responded, “Do you know, I think I was more cynical then. I didn’t know how hard things could be, for sure, but I also had no idea how good things could be.” We have had some really hard and awful times. Some of them were not that long ago. But still, it feels like the joy and innocence we have together are building, not waning. I don’t know if it was dumb luck or if we can take any credit at all for finding and choosing each other, but it was the best thing we ever did.

Well! Here are the recipe cards:

2 from 1 vote
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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

  • olive oil
  • 1 medium onion or red onion, diced
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 3-4 medium carrots, peeled and diced
  • 2-3 lbs beef, cubed
  • 16 oz mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
  • 6 cups beef bouillon
  • 1 cup merlot or other red wine
  • 29 oz canned diced tomatoes (fire roasted is nice) with juice
  • 1 cup uncooked barley
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat the oil in a heavy pot. If using Instant Pot, choose "saute." Add the minced garlic, diced onion, and diced carrot. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions and carrots are softened. 


  2. Add the cubes of beef and cook until slightly browned.

  3. Add the canned tomatoes with their juice, the beef broth, and the merlot, plus 3 cups of water. Stir and add the mushrooms and barley. 

  4. If cooking on stovetop, cover loosely and let simmer for several hours. If using Instant Pot, close top, close valve, and set to high pressure for 30 minutes. 

  5. Before serving, add pepper to taste. Salt if necessary. 

2 from 1 vote
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Pumpkin quick bread or muffins

Makes 2 loaves or 18+ muffins

Ingredients

  • 30 oz canned pumpkin puree
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup veg or canola oil
  • 1.5 cups sugar
  • 3.5 cups flour
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 1.5 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/2 tsp ground cloves
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • oats, wheat germ, turbinado sugar, chopped dates, almonds, raisins, etc. optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter two loaf pans or butter or line 18 muffin tins.

  2. In a large bowl, mix together dry ingredients except for sugar.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix together wet ingredients and sugar. Stir wet mixture into dry mixture and mix just to blend. 

  4. Optional: add toppings or stir-ins of your choice. 

  5. Spoon batter into pans or tins. Bake about 25 minutes for muffins, about 40 minutes for loaves. 

 

 

Hot links!

Super super busy with other writing projects lately, but I don’t want to let the site languish. Here are a bunch of things that caught my eye lately, but that I haven’t had the time to write about:

Fr. Barron’s reflections on our beloved John Paul II.  He really was a hero.

A gently searing reflection on being useful and being sick. Lots to think about. Oh, lots. 

And old but lovely story about a group who helps dying people achieve their last wishes. The woman in the top photo wanted to see Rembrandt one more time. 

Hoop de doo, a Catholic school that is no longer going to let parents claim they can’t vaccinate because they’re Catholic! Because it’s just not Christian to give immunocompromised people the measles for no good reason. 

Something about sex work that I am reading because I need to understand things I don’t understand, and I won’t if I only read things I know I’ll like. It’s long, and I’m not done reading it yet.

A couple of dumbass laws by us, God’s dumbass people: Let’s have no pointy knives, because roast beef is a social construct; and also now how would it be if you can go to jail for calling someone a bitch, even if they totally are a bitch? Because goodness knows we can count on government to only take away a little bit of your free speech, and also the only way to discourage bad behavior is through the legal system YOU DUMB BITCHES.

A printable coloring page of the Trinity, just in case you needs one. 

Bernadette Carstensen is the one who painted that lovely picture of toddler Jesus putting a crown on a doting Mary’s head. I love how she’s at his feet and looking up to him, but also has her arm around his little bum, holding him steady. Raise your hand if you think I need to get in touch with Cerstensen and get my Catholic artist interview series going again.

And then I need to get in touch with this gal at Akathist Art. Eh? Eh?

And finally, back to John Paul II. This stupid video resurfaces every couple of years and I always cry like a dumb bitch when I see it. “Perhaps I love you more!” 

The only thing I will write about the Amazon Synod

Today, some thieves broke into a church, stole some statues, and threw them into the river. Perhaps the perpetrators consider themselves a pack of modern St. Bonifaces, tackling pagan idols head on, plus a little bit of Jesus with a whip, cleansing the temple. 

There are a few problems with this approach. One is that stealing and vandalism are sins, full stop. If your goal is to defend the Church, then you really need to start with defending the ten commandments. 

The second problem is it is by no means clear that the statues they stole and threw away are actually idols. Maybe they were fertility symbols, maybe they were Mary and Elizabeth at the Visitation, maybe they just sorta “represented life.” Maybe they were something in between, and if so, maybe that’s how inculturation is supposed to work; or maybe it’s syncretism, which is definitely not how it’s supposed to work. If the statues were idols, then they don’t belong in the church. If they weren’t, then people who threw them into the river were at very least stealing and destroying property, possibly being racist, and possibly committing some light blasphemy. 

Myself, I err like responsible hunters err: If the light is dim, and that moving object might be a deer or it might be your buddy, don’t shoot. Same with a statue: If it might depict my mother, I’m not going to cheer when someone chucks it into a river of filth.

I don’t especially like what I’ve seen about the Synod. But I try to resist basing my opinions on hinky-looking snippets. As with so many other current events, I assume almost everyone who reports on the Synod (especially people who weren’t there) is either lying or being lied to (and yes, I’m “both sidesing.” Sometimes it’s appropriate.)  A lot of the people who hate it are pretty frankly racist, and simply reject any expression of Christianity that doesn’t look European. A lot of the people who love it are pretty frankly heterodox, and are already fully on board with women priests, contraception for all, etc. Some of the people defending the Synod are coming across as fairly racist and paternalistic. And always, as we know, just because you’re an asshole doesn’t mean you’re wrong. 

I’m on the record as no blind fan of Pope Francis, especially in his mishandling of the ongoing abuse crisis.  I think he is a sloppy man who tends to speak out of personal animosity, without fully realizing or caring what effect his words have on the whole Church (and on individual people, especially priests). But I have also noticed that, when other people present him with heterodox ideas, he tends to shut them down right away, instinctively. When the synod opened with what sure looked like a pagan ritual, for instance, he discarded his prepared remarks and instead led the crowd in the Our Father. 

And this is why I have hope that, when (which seems more likely than “if”) the synodal committee (or whatever it is) presents him with some kind of garbagey conclusions, he will reject them, as other popes have done in the past. Recall that John XXIII’s Pontifical Commission presented him with the recommendation that the Church accept and bless contraception; and the pope read it and responded: “No. When a bunch of theologians get together and talk about their druthers, of course it’s going to be a bunch of stupid stuff that shouldn’t and couldn’t happen. What’s most likely to happen is that the Vatican, in its lumbering bureaucratic wisdom, will take all the findings and send them to committee, and appoint a blue ribbon commission, and nothing will change. That really is the most likely thing. Or maybe the Pope will issue another amorphous encyclical and people will go blind trying to beat either wisdom or heresy out of it. 

Or maybe we’ll end up with female deacons and some married priests, and I’m really not convinced that would be the end of the world, either. 

But isn’t it possible that we’re really going off the rails this time, and the pope will let Unequivocally Bad Things Happen? Sure. All kinds of things are possible. The world has to end sometime, and maybe it’s starting now. 

But here we arrive at the third problem with cosplaying St. Boniface, posting it to YouTube, and calling it living our faith: No matter what is actually happening at the Synod, and no matter how the Pope will respond, the most useful thing, possibly the only useful thing we can do 

is

to

pray. 

Oh, I’m sorry, did you roll your eyes? Did you really just sigh impatiently at the idea that our response to trials and uncertainty should be to pray? Then that’s your problem right there. That’s a bigger problem for you, personally, than anything that can possibly happen in Rome. If you let yourself think that anything you can do online — signing petitions, sniping on Twitter, gathering screenshots and sharing them on your site — is more important than praying, then you are on a bad road and you need to stop and turn around before you get to the end.

You think Cardinal Kaspar is bad! Wait till you meet the worm who dieth not. 

Everyone wants to imitate Jesus in the one time He showed some temper with the whip in the temple. Dude, you are not Jesus. It’s a much safer bet to imitate Him in the other 99% of the Gospels, like when He preached the good news, when He fed His sheep, when he gave over His body, and when He fixed His eyes firmly on the Father and then told us to do the same. 

Oops, that’s what the Pope did, too. When in doubt, pray an Our Father. 

It’s really easy to imitate outward actions. A saint did this, so I will, too! But let me tell you: The real work that every Christian is compelled to do is interior work. And it’s hard. And it doesn’t get a lot of views on YouTube. But it is what will save your soul. 

We have an obligation to know, love, and serve God, and to teach our children to know, love, and serve God. I can do these things without following everything tagged #amazonsynod. In fact, I can do these things far better without following anything tagged #amazon synod. 

Maybe you’re different from me. Maybe following the news is helping you to grow closer to Christ. I’m not telling you what your own soul is like. But if you do feel that it’s your obligation to publicly take a stand on the news and educate yourself thoroughly about all possible ins and outs, it’s probably a good idea to ask yourself:

How is my response to the news affecting my spiritual life?
Do I find it easier or harder to be good to other people since I started getting involved?
The more time I spend thinking and talking about it, do I find I am growing in faith, hope, and love?
When I follow the news more closely, and get into more conversations about it, am I increasing in personal virtue? If so, which virtues? 

That really is our central responsibility: Our own souls, our own spiritual state. We neglect that responsibility at our eternal peril. If news of the synod is causing you to sin, then pluck it out. 

***
Image is a screenshot from this video.