Tag: america magazine

More than many potatoes

My garden, if I may say so, is doing great this year. I added many native perennials to my flower beds, but my pride and joy is the food I am growing. My peaches, apples and grapes are bounteous, my pumpkins are unstoppable, carrots are coming in strong, my sweet corn is putting out tassels ahead of schedule, and my various basils, eggplants, garlic, cucumbers and dill are doing yeoman’s work. Even my rhubarb, strawberries and asparagus are still producing a bit, well past their allotted season. 

But for a real thrill, I go and gaze at my potato plants, which are dying. This is good. This is what you want to see at this time of year. A few weeks ago, the stems were sturdy, and the leaves were thick and lush, and when I watered them, they danced and bounced under the shower. But after briefly flowering, the blossoms are now gone, and the leaves are taking on a dusty look, drooping and tired. Soon the leaves will start to fray and dry up, and then they will go brown. That’s how I will know it is time to harvest.

And getting to the point where it is time to harvest is the whole point of growing potatoes. The trick is not to get overly attached to the intermediary stages.

The other trick is understanding that all stages are intermediary stages. 

Booing AI is a good start. What’s next?

Here is a sentence I never thought I would write: I am kind of looking forward to this year’s graduation ceremonies. As parents of 10 children, my husband and I have attended a lot of these events, and they are almost uniformly tedious, clichéd and very close to pointless.

But this year, a theme is emerging: Commencement speakers are talking about artificial intelligence changing the world—and the graduates are booing them. I guess it is perverse, but part of me hopes we catch some of the action. Those boos give me hope for the future. 

In one clip, the vice president of a tech company is thoroughly taken aback to discover that young adults graduating from the University of Central Florida are not super excited to welcome the approaching tsunami of A.I. “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution,” she says, and the graduates respond with an unmistakably hostile roar. “Oh! What happened? I struck a chord! May I finish?,” she responds, giggling nervously. They do not let her finish; they interrupt her repeatedly as she gets more and more flustered but sticks to her script. 

At another ceremony, Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google, seems more prepared for the boos that greet his praise of A.I., but he ascribes the crowd’s hostility entirely to fear. He offers his often-repeated advice: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” When the graduates don’t seem to like that, he appears irritated, even contemptuous.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Photo Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Can you de-monetize that?

I still cringe when I remember this one conversation from years ago. A friend was showing me photos of some of the incredible cakes she had made—gorgeous cakes with exuberant, witty designs, skillfully executed. She made them for family and friends, and she loved the work and loved making them happy.

You know, you could sell those, I said. You could sell them and also make a book about it and sell that, too! She was polite and listened to all my ideas. But as far as I know, she is still giving her cakes away.

I wasn’t wrong, of course. But my friend did not pursue my ideas because she was already doing what she wanted to do and wasn’t looking for advice about how to monetize her talent.

At the time, the idea of simply creating things for pleasure didn’t even occur to me. Instead, figuring out how to monetize skills was a constant habit. This was necessary because my family was broke and even a little bit more cash made a big difference.

Christianity isn’t a MAGA thing

When Walter Ciszek was a young Jesuit, he got his wish to go to Russia to minister to the spiritually starved people there suffering under an atheist communist regime. But when he was imprisoned on false charges of being a Vatican spy in 1941, he got a rude awakening. Some people desperately wanted to receive the sacraments and were glad he was there, but a lot more hated him on sight, just because he was a priest. Decades of propaganda had taught them that priests were parasites, oppressors and perverts. 

It was, of course, the government that had taught the Russian people to think this way. That is how oppressive governments often work: They don’t just openly present themselves as the enemy whose goal it is to make the masses miserable. What they do is much more effective and harder to undo: They make the masses complicit. They get people to spy on each other; they get people to mistrust each other. They tell disgusting lies about large groups of people, and they get them to wish evil upon each other. 

You probably think I am talking about the Trump administration. Well, I am, because they have managed to get a lot of American citizens to become complicit in our own country’s degradation. People in my generation grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which ends “with liberty and justice for all,” but now half the people I went to school with gleefully wave the flag over developments like beating and arresting peaceful protestors, threatening the free press and forcing the church underground. The Bill of Rights? What’s that?

This degradation has also affected American Christianity. One of my kids recently told me that when she sees someone wearing a cross, her first thought is “Oh, no,” because in 2025 America, the bigger the fuss you make about being a Christian in public (especially on TV or online), the more likely you are to be cruel. This is the experience she had going to Catholic school: Many of the kids who came from those wholesome, upstanding families that were the backbone of the community were often the same ones who doodled swastikas, mocked people with foreign accents and yapped about women being servants and incubators. Some of the teachers pushed back, but some of them didn’t. The Beatitudes? What’s that? 

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image: Detail of photo by Heute (Creative Commons)

Doing one thing at the same time

You might remember a song from the ’90s called “Lucky Night,” by Björk’s unserious pre-solo band, the Sugarcubes. It starts, “I’ve tried a lot, and most things excite me; but what tops it all is doing two things at a time.” Björk and Einar then take turns listing possible pairings that she describes as “charming.”

Einar just sing-songs pairs of nouns:

Life and death, Glass and water
Rock and roll, wash and dirty
Christ and Jesus, time and hours… 

But Björk describes activities. You think maybe she is going to say something sexy and transgressive, but actually it’s very normal activities that apparently thrill her: 

To drive a car and listen to music.
To read a book and ride a train…

Sugarcubes’ songs are not designed to be analyzed, so I won’t do that. But for some reason, this one stuck in my head, and I can’t help thinking about how it wouldn’t just be a trifling little song today; it would be nonsensical. I never do only one thing at a time. It is always something—plus a phone. 

To drive a car and be on your phone
To listen to music and be on your phone
To ride a train and be on your phone
To fall in love and be on your phone
To not sleep and and be on your phone
To watch TV and be on your phone
To cuddle and be on your phone

Or in Einar’s mode:

Watch and phone
God and phone
Hammer and phone
Babies and phone

It is not something I try to do so as to make one plus one equal three, as the song promises; it is just how it is. I have my phone with me in the bathroom, in the car, while I’m cooking, while I’m eating, while I’m cleaning, when I’m working, while I am allegedly sleeping. When I am at church, I do turn my phone’s ringer off, but I sure don’t leave it at home. I would never.

Obviously, my phone isn’t all bad. I use it to listen to music, to identify birds and flowers, to be in touch with my kids in an emergency, to chat with my friends and my husband, to find recipes and instructions and helpful advice, and to take photos and videos of wonderful things that other people enjoy seeing. But overall, “Life and Phone” has not been an improvement, to put it mildly.

My phone’s omnipresence sucks the life out of whatever else I am doing. It always drains something from the other thing, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It is like a needy infant that requires constant heightened attention, even when it is asleep; but unlike an infant, it never stops being hungry, and unlike an infant, it offers so very little compared to what it snatches away. 

That is what my phone does to me, a middle-aged mom from New England who is at least trying to be good and not waste my life. We don’t have to imagine what it does to foolish young men who are hungry for meaning, hungry for praise, hungry for clout, and who have their phones with them all the time, pouring poison into their faces morning, noon and night, sucking away their power to see humanity. We know what young men plus phones adds up to, more and more often. There is no non-dramatic way to put it: It tells them to kill, and to etch little phrases from memes on the bullet casings. Expect to see more of this.

The anonymous communion of saints

Facebook has only recently started allowing anonymous posts and comments, and several groups I’m a member of are taking it hard. Is it good or bad for the group to let people post without revealing their true names? Not everyone agrees.

The benefits are pretty obvious, especially if it’s the kind of group meant for support and advice. For reference, I’m in groups for mothers of large families, women using natural family planning, Catholic women in perimenopause, women trying to exercise more, parents of diabetic kids and people with backyard ducks. People who post anonymously will frequently open by saying why they’re doing it: because friends or family are in the group, and their situation is private, or often because there’s something they really need to know, but they’re embarrassed to ask. There is a situation they need some insight on, but they’re ashamed that this is their life right now. Or they just need a prayer.

The drawbacks of anonymity are harder to define. Most of the groups I’m in don’t have a problem with people being overtly nasty or threatening while hiding behind anonymity, but the use of anonymity, even for more polite conversation, is still not popular with everybody. Why?

One woman explained it is because people still post asking for support, advice, clarity and prayer, but you never get to know them. You get little snippets of their lives and little fragments of their stories, generally in a time of crisis—and that’s it. Even if there is a follow-up, it won’t include the kind of details about their lives that help us bond with one another. You never get to enjoy one of those indisputably real online friendships that lasts years and years as you learn more and more about each other, and you certainly never win that cherished prize of the internet age: meeting online friends in person. One woman who was arguing that the moderators of one group should disable anonymous commenting said that it is preventing her from building community. The group had the potential to become a band of friends, but it was staying a loosely associated bundle of anonymous problems.

It is an understandable complaint! It is hard to spend the intellectual and emotional energy answering someone’s question when you know the relationship, such as it is, is not going to go anywhere. Interaction with other human beings takes something out of us, and it is normal and human to be more invested when you get something in return—not anything sinister or grasping, just wholesome goods like friendship and camaraderie.

But if you are going to be a member of a group—especially a group that explicitly calls itself Catholic—I think it is good spiritual practice to humbly accept other people’s anonymity, if that’s what they choose. It dovetails very nicely with our doctrine of the Communion of Saints: We are all bound together and responsible for one another, even in situations where there is no obvious or immediate reciprocity. Think of it as social asceticism: praying for the intentions of someone whose name you’ll never know; praying for an intention whose details will never be fleshed out, simply because praying is good and we want to be good.

More than that: I think it is good spiritual practice to accept the idea that, even as we are all bound together as brothers and sisters in Christ, we are all, to one degree or another, strangers to each other. … Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image via PxHere (public domain)

The wealth we all have

Worried about money? Me too! So is everybody I know. Everything that was already expensive, which is everything, is getting more expensive and is poised to get even more expensive. It’s hard to find even one glimmer of hope for the financial future. Taxes? Horrendous. Retirement savings? Dust in the wind. Treats for vacation? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve already warned the kids we’re going to have an Imagination Summer, and possibly an Imagination Christmas, because I’m the one who tends the budget in our house, and the writing on the wall spells out B-R-O-K-E.

That phrase “Imagination Christmas” is from “The Simpsons,” in the episode where the eye-wateringly wholesome Flanders family is broke because they spent all their money charitably sending Bart and Homer to Hawaii to have their fake leprosy treated. The Flanders family is there as a foil to their dreadful neighbors, but they’re also undeniably happy. And they are very clear-eyed about what is important in life.

I mention this because what I am going to say next may come across as unbearably Flanders-like in its optimism. But I can’t help it. The truth is, our family, broke as it is, is doing great. We are incredibly wealthy, and the more I look for it, the more evidence I find of our wealth. It just doesn’t happen to come in the form of money.

I told the kids: “Look, everything is expensive right now, and we probably won’t get to buy a lot of cool stuff this summer. But it’s O.K., because we already know how to be poor.” And they more or less agreed. There are so many things you can enjoy when you are poor—and some, it seems, that are easier to enjoy when you’re poor because you cannot lean on the crutches and the shortcuts that litter the path of the rich.

Let’s start with that line from “The Simpsons,” which our family quotes frequently. If you have running jokes in your family or friend set, do you know what a gift that is? It sounds like a little thing, but think about how bereft and impoverished you feel when someone has an inside joke that you’re not in on. Running jokes are gold. It is evidence that you’re so wealthy you live among a group of people who reliably laugh with you and also understand you completely when you say two or three words in a certain tone of voice. What a gift! Security, community, laughter, and it’s all free.

Also “Simpsons”-related: At age 50, I have calmed down, and I no longer torment myself over how thoroughly pop culture has saturated my family’s psyche. There was a time I would have rent my garments to think of how often we communicate via lines from TV shows, but I’ve let it go. We live in the time we live in, and we’re not hermits, and my kids have screens. That has not all been good, but it certainly hasn’t all been bad, either. We talk often about when it’s important to buck the trends and be uncool, and my kids seem to be willing to do that; so I don’t need to feel like a failure just because they are not cultural aliens. So that is another sign of my wealth: I look at my life and see that I’ve gotten a little wiser, and I can see that my kids are reasonably wise, too, according to their age. That is incredibly valuable, and definitely not something you can buy.

A big one: The great outdoors. I don’t even mean white water rafting or tent camping or knowing how to thrive for six weeks in the wilderness; I just mean going outside for a bit and knowing how to enjoy it. Not everyone knows how.

Our family is extraordinarily lucky to have a huge backyard with a little pine grove, a babbling brook to wade in and rich soil where just about any seed will thrive. But even when we lived in a dense neighborhood with only a little scrap of yard, we still had the sky. We had treetops that waved in the wind. We had birdsong and tenacious weeds finding a place to root in sidewalk cracks. It is a skill, learning to seek out emissaries from the natural world wherever you are, but like any skill, it can be learned.

Here’s how to learn it, even if you’re very busy: If you’re driving, slow down to get a closer look at passing wildlife. Occasionally, take the long way home, so you can coast through a side street where the trees are especially lovely in the fall. Think about fog, and notice how the light passes through it; roll the windows down and listen for moving water. See what you can smell on the wind when you pass by a forest or field. If your neighborhood is bright at night, spend an occasional evening staying up late to drive out to a spot where it’s dark, and go see what the stars are up to.

It is all free, and once you start becoming aware of the vast riches that surround us, it is hard to stop looking for more.

This may seem like a random list, but that’s kind of the point….Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

If you’re doing the work, why give credit to God?

Humans of New York is a deservedly popular photoblog featuring people on the street, along with excerpts from conversations about their lives. The other day, it featured a young woman who looks frankly at the camera and packs a tremendous amount of life into her statement.

She begins, “I was feeling frustrated.” She had been volunteering at a food pantry and hated how they were “meeting people’s physical needs, but not their relational needs.” Because she is pro-life, she prayed about what to do, and she and a friend started a group for new moms at her church.

“That first night nobody showed up, but by then I was convinced that God wanted me to do this,” she said.

So she kept promoting it, and before long a pregnant mother with two toddlers needed help desperately, so her group stepped up and helped her through the birth and beyond.

“She later told me that she’d never experienced that sort of unconditional love. And that’s exactly what we wanted. To create a place where people could feel known and loved,” she said.

The group grew in strength and size, meeting weekly and continuing to have intense conversations in the parking lot after the group closed for the night.

She says: “We’d been meeting for about eighteen months when I had my miscarriage…. I remember how much I was looking forward to the next meeting, because I knew that people were going to, like—love me…. I remember thinking: ‘Wow. I’m not sure what I would do without this group.’”

This extraordinary witness garnered the standard things people say when someone calls themselves “pro-life.” Pro-lifers loved her and said that they knew lots of people like her. Some pro-choicers admired her work and praised her consistency. A few pro-choicers snarkily tapped out because the phrase “pro-life” gave them an insurmountable ick.

But there were also several iterations of a different comment that worried me: They liked her work, but criticized her for giving credit to God. Here’s a typical example:

She’s amazing. But something that gives me pause about this post is that this woman cares deeply for her community and was inspired to help them through her humanity, but chalks it up to God wanting her to do it. Like, no. Celebrate your ability to feel empathy and act on it. It has nothing to do with God. It’s so ingrained in religious communities to think so poorly of yourself that you can’t recognize your own successes as your own.

I reread the passage a few times, thinking I had missed some uncomfortably fanatical passage where the woman in the photo says she is a mere worm or nothing but a useless vessel through which God works. But all she said was that she was convinced God wanted her to do it.

She barely even mentioned anything spiritual or divine. Her whole statement was about understanding that it is her duty to build human relationships because that’s what people need. She was elbow-deep in the nitty-gritty human end of her faith from day one, and by the end of her remarkable short witness, she showed how her work, meant to benefit other people, ended up serving and saving her, as well. She doesn’t “think poorly of herself” at all, that I can see. She does, however, recognize that there is more going on in her life than, well, her.

Why do we have trouble believing people who say they do something because God called them to do it? When a star athlete says he owes his victory to his grandma, who always believed in him, nobody complains. When a groundbreaking researcher credits an elementary school librarian who said he could do great things one day, that is universally considered nice and good and heartwarming. But when a Christian says, “I did this because God wanted me to,” then suddenly it is psychologically unhealthy or a sign of poor self-esteem. Why?

The obvious reason is that people don’t believe in God. So hearing “God wanted me to do it” comes across as, “I did it because The Octopus King, mighty are his suckered arms, hath willed it.” It sounds nuts.

But I think it also points to something possibly even sadder than not believing in God: They don’t realize that what we are supposed to have with God is a relationship. A real, literal relationship, something with give and take and affection and humor, sacrifice and insight and gratitude, something that any normal human being would recognize as a relationship. This is what we are supposed to have with God.

And yes, sometimes he asks us to do things. Very often, the things he asks us to do end up being the things we ourselves need.

Why do so many non-Christians fail to see this? Partly because of the hypocritical example of famous Christians. There’s no doubt about that: If you’re on TV and you make a point of saying you’re Christian, there is a chance you are about to do something vicious and cruel. That doesn’t help.

But the other reason is that Christians also don’t see it.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image source (public domain)

Epiphany, continued

No matter how you calculate the length of the Christmas season, Epiphany has inarguably come and gone. But this year, it struck me for the first time that the feast we celebrate is actually composed of several epiphanies—and that comes as something of a relief.

The central epiphany we celebrate is, of course, the epiphany, the showing forth, the manifestation of the savior of the world to the wise men, who were apparently the first gentiles to recognize him for who he was; that was the beginning of the revelation that this was to be a savior for everybody.

But that was not the only thing made manifest to them. The rest of it happened before that day, and after.

First, it became evident to them—through prophecy or Scripture or tradition or maybe through revelation—that a king was going to be born in a certain time and place. So they set out to find him.

As our pastor pointed out in his Epiphany sermon, it probably was not a straightforward journey. In fact, it seems likely they probably got lost at some point because when they beheld the star, they were “overjoyed”—implying that, sometime after they began their journey, they lost track of their goal and then found it again.

That might be a second epiphany: finding their way again. They started out on the right track with the best intentions, then lost their way and then were able to get back on track and locate their guide.

Then came the event we think of as actual Epiphany: They beheld the child himself, with his mother. Matthew’s Gospel does not say that they were surprised to see that the new king was just a wrinkly, little Jewish baby born to a poor family; it just says that they knelt down, did him homage and gave him royal gifts. One way or another, they saw who he was and did what they came to do.

Finally, when they left him, they had what you might consider a fourth epiphany: They realized, with the help of a dream, that Herod had bad intentions and should not be trusted with the information about Jesus’ whereabouts; so they changed their plans and made their way home by a different route.

All of these things are what we call Epiphany. But there’s more.

I can easily imagine that they continued to have small epiphanies on their way home; and continued to do so after they got home.

Maybe they discussed different things that had struck them about the Holy Family and had to work on reconciling what they expected with what they found. Maybe they had some epiphanies about what God is really like.

Maybe, once they saw the child, they continued to walk in the light that had been revealed to them in that house, and everywhere they went from that day on, they saw people who reminded them of Jesus. Maybe they found out the whole world, past, present and future, is full of Jesus.

Maybe they told everyone they knew about the messiah they had met and were astonished to find that not everyone believed them or cared. The way the story is told, the wise men always strike me as a tiny bit naïve, assuming Herod will want to worship the new king. When they discovered he didn’t, maybe that was just the first in a long string of disillusionments about how open other people are to goodness and truth.

Or maybe they told people who did believe them, and the epiphany rippled outward. Maybe they began somewhat cynical, and their world continued from that day to open up and become more joyful and radiant, and they shared the good and great news they had received.

Maybe they realized they needed to change their lives forever and found it extremely hard and discouraging. Or maybe they realized they needed to change their lives forever and were astonished to discover how much meaning and peace there can be in life when Jesus is at the center.

Or maybe they just went back to doing the same old thing. Maybe, once that brilliant night had passed, they discovered that they were the kind of person who sees God and doesn’t change at all …. Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image: Detail of image of Bortle Scale by P. Horálek via Wikimedia Commons

The bio-children of God

We are adopted children of God. What can that mean? 

Let me tell you first about a little apple tree I planted. One year, before it could even blossom, caterpillars came and devoured every leaf. I did my best to rescue it, but it was no good. Too much had been eaten.

But the next spring, to my delight, green shoots came up from the ground in that same spot, and they were raring to go. The tree came back, and I was so proud of its tenacity. It grew fast, leafed out and even made some buds.

And that is when I came to see it was not really the same tree. The tree I planted really did get eaten, and this tree was sprouting from the rootstock to which a graft of a different variety had been added. What I was seeing and caring for was some kind of ancestor resurrected from dormancy, a stubborn bud from a different, heartier rootstock. It is a crab apple, or possibly a plum, obviously very hearty, which is why it was used as a root stock. The tree I planted really is gone.

But it is also not gone; it’s here. There is a tree growing there because I planted a tree there. It’s alive because I tended it, even after it looked like it was dead. Maybe next year it will have fruit. It is not the tree I had planted, but it also is. It is there in its current form because the caterpillars ate it up.

There are a lot of places this story could go next. You are thinking, perhaps, of Advent, and Jesus as the bud on the stump of Jesse that grew in the dead of winter, when half-spent was the night. Or maybe you are thinking that the Lord has his plan all along and in his goodness will bring new green shoots out of adversity.

Those are good thoughts! I am thinking, though, about Pescha-Malke, in Vilnius, 1838.

She is my great-great-great grandmother on my mother’s side, and I just found out she exists. I knew, of course, that I had an ancestor of that generation, because, well, here I am. But I didn’t know a name or a face. But my brother turned up the name together with this photo: A dapper man with a baby on his lap, surrounded by two women, two little girls and a boy. Which one is Pesche-Malke? Maybe the one who looks like my grandmother, with her familiar amused expression, hooded eyes and broad hands. And the little girl by her side looks like two of my sisters and several of my nieces.

In the sibling chat, we speculated about which one was Pescha-Malke, a name that appears to mean “Daughter of G-d; Queen.” Anyone who might know this photo is long dead. It is the internet that has witlessly, obediently connected and preserved these old faces and names; and then my brother searched and brought them to light.

But they weren’t really ever lost; they were in the rootstock, which continues to bud.

We can recognize that little, half-formed family smile; and we recognize the thyroid problems, which still flourish. Genetics is real. Heritage is real. It stays alive under the surface, whether anyone’s keeping track of it or not, until someone brings it to light, in one form or another.

I have been thinking, then, about what it means to be someone’s child, and what it means to be an adopted child. Does genetics matter, or does it not? Is it important, or does it just feel that way?

Adopted children seem to think so. Bodies matter, not only at the moment of conception but in ways that do not manifest themselves for years. As you grow, no matter where you are, you continue to “match” where you came from, biologically. And the synchronicity with your roots continues to assert itself more as you get older. It’s true for everyone, adopted or not.

Not long ago, I looked in the mirror, and there she was: my grandmother. I had no idea the old gal was in there. Who knows what had to fall away or be chewed up, in order for her face to come to light.

God knows the people in my family photo were only a decade or so away from being set upon by a ravening swarm that devoured and destroyed. (You’ll notice my family doesn’t live in Vilnius anymore.) But the rootstock endured. The tree that’s growing now is the same tree that was originally planted.

Well, it is the same tree and it isn’t. It is something new, and it is something very old.

I am talking about everybody, now: Everybody who is an adopted child of God, which is all humankind. We are from the same rootstock as our Father, and we aren’t.

To be an adopted child of God means a lot of things…Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.