Tag: hope

What’s for supper? Vol. 472: In which I (Persephone) have high hopes

Happy Friday! I hope spring is being good to you. We’re supposed to get down into the 30’s the next couple of nights, but HIGH thirties, so I’m just gonna throw some blankets around in my garden and hope for the best. I had a wonderfully outdoor week and got tons of yard work done, and took a bunch of things too personally, and made some very good food, and some that was just okay, and now I’m gonna tell you all about it. 

SATURDAY
Pancakes, sausage, OJ

Saturday after shopping, I went to pick up one of those gliding benches that someone was giving away. It needs work (new seat slats, sanding, and painting), but nothing hard or expensive. 

Will I ever get around to this? Impossible to say. But I might! I think it will be great down by the stream. 

Damien drove over to go fishing with Moe and got back late, and I took the opportunity to make breakfast for dinner. We used to go through an entire box of pancake mix for our family, but our family is so teeny tiny these days, I figured we’d only need half. Then I realized pancake mix boxes have also gotten teeny tiny, oops. So an entire box was just barely enough! It’s also possible I ate more raw batter than I realized. I am truly a freak for raw batter, and nothing that can be done about this. 

SUNDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets

The shopping kid chose pizza pockets for her fun food to supplement the sad leftovers, which was a tactical error because part of the leftovers included last Saturday’s pizza pockets.

But somehow we survived, and right after supper I badgered everyone into driving to Westmoreland, where there was going to be a free summer event of some kind. The details were a little skimpy, so I tried to keep expectations low. 

But even if I had hyped everyone up, I don’t think we would have been prepared for . . . EL PULPO MAGNIFICO.

As you can see, it is a giant flaming octopus! It’s tentacles, eyes, and mouth move, and the man inside the octopus manipulates the flames (which also come out of the top of its head) in time to the music he was playing. It. was. tremendous. I loved it so much. Here are some pics of the evening,

 

and I also shared a few videos on Facebook and Instagram.  One of the videos got — let’s see, 46,000 views on Instagram, and I got a bunch of followers who . .. . might have the wrong idea about what kind of account this usually is (ducklings).  

MONDAY
Hamburgers, potato salad, con on the cob, chips; strawberry rhubarb crisp

Monday was, of course, Memorial Day, so we had the day off school. I have been desperately in need of more exercise. I can feel my joints rusting together day by day. But my stupid arm just won’t get better, so I can’t really do yoga or weights or any of my regular things. So I resorted to taking a WALK, like a CHUMP. 

It actually turned out really nice.

Of course it did. Walking is nice, and I live in a nice place. This hill is up behind my house, so I didn’t have to go anywhere to get there. Got home and discovered that it was exactly one mile, half uphill, so a pretty perfect workout. I decided I would start every day this way, with a pleasant, invigorating walk.

Then I didn’t do that even one more time. But I might! 

New Hampshire is it is full of mossy stone walls meandering through woods. You might wonder why they bothered to build walls between trees, but of course they did not. A hundred years ago, they had felled all the tree, and this was all pasture — mostly for sheep. There were way more sheep than people, and NH exported fleece and wool all over the world. Then someone figured out how to mass produce cotton, and that was pretty much the end of the wool boom. The trees grew back in the pastures, the farms fell down, and all that is left is the stone walls. On my walk, I did spot some stone foundations left from the houses that used to stand off the road. Sometimes you will also spot daffodils in the middle of the woods, and that is a sign that some human once lived there. 

Anyway, the weather was wonderful all week. We have started putting the baby ducks outside during the day. They’re big enough that they don’t need their heat lamp all the time, and they love marching around in the grass, fighting with buttercups, and struggling in and out of the little wading pool. And they still like being whistled too. 

 

Then it was parade time! Our town was founded in 1776, so we’re having a big anniversary along with the country itself. I mean, relatively big. This is the biggest memorial day parade I’ve ever seen here. Also the cutest. 

Only Benny and Corrie and I wanted to go, and we were rewarded with free ice cream afterward. (Again, quite an exceptional thing for this little town!) 

Got home and made some potato salad. The last few times, I made a version that seemed extremely yummy to me, but the kids felt very different indeed! It’s not like I put raisins in it or something, or capers or something, sheesh. Anyway, I made the dressing with mayo and cider vinegar, a little olive oil, salt and pepper, celery, and hard boiled eggs. 

Then I started prepping dessert. My beloved rhubarb plant is having a wonderful year, although I have concluded that I have an evergreen rhubarb, and it’s just not going to turn red. Some of them are like that. Slightly disappointing, although the flavor and texture are great. I more or less followed the Smitten Kitchen recipe. Here it is before I put the topping on:

I baked it right before supper, so it would still be warm when we ate it. 

Elijah came over, Damien cooked hamburgers and corn on the cob on the grill, and we had a lovely, chill dinner. 

After supper, I whipped up some heavy cream, and dessert was lovely. 

If I had one rhubarb-related wish other than for redder rhubarb, it would be that I could get my crumble topping to brown up better. It always turns out pale, for some reason, and I don’t know why. Anyway, it tasted good! 

I think I will cut up a bunch of rhubarb and freeze it, so I can make a compote or something at some point. That seems like the kind of thing I would be happy to suddenly remember I have in a few months. 

That evening, I started a big pork shoulder brining with a cup of salt and a cup of sugar. 

TUESDAY
Bo ssam, lettuce, rice, pineapple

Tuesday was chock-a-block full of appointments and whatnot, which is why I planned bo ssam, which is very hands-off. I was up early and cut up some pineapples. Then I got a little sidetracked, because I keep seeing reels about propagating pineapples at home. You’re supposed to twist the tops off and then peel off the bottom leaves to expose the root nodes. I had no idea these were under there! Here is one unpeeled, and one peeled:

Look at those root nodes!

I had no idea. Anyway, I trimmed the rest of the fruit off and set the tops in water, and now we’re waiting for roots to develop. 

Dreaming about the day when, a mere four or five years from now, I might get another, very small pineapple or two from these tops.

Then I remembered I was actually really busy, oops, so I got started on stuff I actually had to do. Threw the pork in the oven around 12:30, and then had some appointments, and when I got home, I got my pumpkin seeds into the ground in my hugelkultur bed, and then made a spot for cucumbers and dill next to it. I dragged a torn trampoline mat over to keep the weeds down, then filled eight pots with compost and set them up in front of Damien’s trailer office. 

Then I planted a dozen sprouting potatoes in one bed, and then weeded and composted another bed and got most of my corn in! 

SATISFYIN’.  I think Tuesday was the day I cut things so close, I didn’t have time to take a shower before going out, so I just washed my hands feet and put on a long skirt to hide my grubbiness. By the time I got home, I just had to start some rice cooking in the Instant Pot, and then put a little extra sauce on the pork for the last ten minutes or so. I finally made up a recipe card for my cheater’s version of bo ssam, so here’s that: 

Jump to Recipe

The pork came out gorgeous and tender, juicy and wonderful, as always. 

Probably could have left it in the oven a little longer to crisp up the top some more, but I was HONGRY. 

Tasty meal, productive day. This “being outside” thing is great. 

The older I get, the more pronounced becomes the difference between winter me and summer me. I love New Hampshire, I love the ice and snow and those brilliant, glittering winter skies, and I’m deeply wedded to the idea that having real, distinct seasons is existentially important, and spring and summer are all the sweeter because of how fleeting they are. 

At the same time, phew, I am SO much happier when it’s warm out. Here is a real question, specifically for people who have moved from a cold climate to a warm climate. Does the euphoria of being able to be outside all the time wear off? Or do you get used to it, and stop appreciating the sunshine after a while? I never though I’d even consider living anywhere besides New England, but the idea is creeping in, and the Persephone thing is getting kind of old. It does help to take vitamin D and get exercise throughout the winter, but it’s a struggle still. Winters are really getting hard, and we just kind of shut down. I don’t know. 

Well, on Tuesday Damien had to go cover some kind of event, and he was gone all afternoon and evening, boo. After clean-up, I sat the kids down and started reading the new encyclical to them, so there. On Tuesday, we read the introduction, and I liked it, and they did not. 

WEDNESDAY
Not sure what to call it but wow it was good

Wednesday the plan was some kind of bi bim bap situation. But I utterly succumbed to Being Outside, and just did that all day. I must have been doing gardening and yard work, but I was so wrapped up in it that I didn’t even take pictures; so just imagine a lot of green, green, green. I think I mostly did weeding and organizing, because I was getting mad at myself for working so hard on growing beautiful flowers, and then having my own view ruined by tubs of garden tools, old tarps tumbled and flapping around, heaps of scrap wood, chairs on their sides, etc. My phone says I walked over two miles just trotting back and forth in my yard making things look better, so that tells you how much crap was lying around!

I think I also potted a bunch of stuff in the front yard — a big, deep purple lupine, some double impatiens, a clump of dahlia tubers, and two holy basil plants to frame the door. Last year I planted some cinnamon basil in my herb garden and I kept pinching the flowers off and the plants got huge and bushy. Then discovered I don’t like the taste at all, so I demoted them to a decoration and moved them to the front door. Every time we went in or out, we got a little whiff, which was very nice (I like the smell, just not the taste)! So I hope they will do as well this year. The ferns and hostas are thriving, and the daisies and alliums I put in are blooming just as the tulips and daffodils die off, so I’m pleased. 

It’s still a baby garden, but I have high hopes. 

By supper time I was tired and starving and sweaty, and truly did not want to cook. So I just cut up a watermelon I meant to serve on memorial day, and some broccoli I meant to roast on Tuesday, and then I found some leftover rice and leftover pineapple, and I cut up the leftover bo ssam real thin. And it looked very promising. 

I served everything cold. I put my plate together and then threw some bottled yum yum sauce on top, and then sprinkled some furikake over that, and went outside to devour it like a goblin. 

My heavens, it tasted like the best food possible. Just wonderful.  I may serve this exact combination of foods on purpose next time. 

After supper, I noticed that my biggest lupine is blooming! This is from the plant I dug out of Millie’s garden last year. 

As it turns out, this is the one year-anniversary of the day she died. Say a prayer for dear Millie! She would be very proud of me for my garden this year. There are actually lupine seedlings all over the place this year, front and back of the house. I don’t know if they’re from the plants I put in, or if it’s just a lupinous kind of year, but I’m not mad! 

Damien had another long dumb event to cover, and he was gone most of the day again, alas. Wednesday evening, we sat down and started to read chapter one of the encyclical, and then I basically quit mid-word. I thought it would be a good project because I know they care about AI, and the pope is no nice and whatnot, but phew, it just wasn’t landing.

Then I mildly horrified the kids by getting a little emotional while I explained my struggles in getting them educated as adults in the faith, and we ended up agreeing that I will open a new Word document and they will be added as editors, so they can anonymously contribute questions or complaints about religion, and we can start from there. WHAT CAN ONE DO. I was gonna say I am doing my best, but I don’t know if that’s true. Anyway, I’m trying somewhat, sometimes. What can one do. Tricky times. 

THURSDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, salad

Thursday I had nothhhhhhhing on my calendar. I actually did some writing for once, and then back outside I went. I cut down a bunch of saplings from the woods and got some twine and a staple gun, and made a trellis for the cucumbers to climb up. 

I also planted some dill seed in each pot. They are supposed to be good companion plants for cucumbers, and by the time the cucumbers grow, the garlic should be ready to harvest. Corrie and I plan to make pickles! 

Then I did this and that, and dumped out some old pots of soil and repotted a few things and weeded and whatnot, and, feeling competent and optimistic, I decided to finally start prepping the hill behind the patio for a big wildflower garden. I knew some wild blackberries had popped up again, and I was feeling a little grim about that, but I knew I could deal with it.

THEN
I
FOUND
SOME
BITTERSWEET. 

In my backyard, which is supposed to be my little haven. My deal (with who, I don’t know) was that bittersweet can be a menace in the front yard, and I will fight it and stay vigilant, but I will accept that it will always be with us. But this was in the back.

 
I didn’t cry, but I felt like my insides had turned to clay. Oh bad. Bad bad bad. I sat for a while, and then complained to Damien for a while, and then I found my Round Up and gloves and clippers and did what I could. I need something with a higher concentration of glyphosate, but it’s a start, anyway. BOO INVASIVES. Very boo. 

Obviously I couldn’t do any more gardening in that spot, because the herbicide was still fresh. So I showered good and made supper, which was grilled ham and cheese and salad.

I was a little nervous about serving sandwiches without chips or fries, which is pretty de rigueur around here, but nobody said anything.

I ate outside, and had the wonderful consolation of realizing that my peach tree, which yielded something like eleven peaches last year, is absolutely LOADED with tiny little fruitsies this year. 

I was hoping that would happen! Big year, little year, that’s how it goes. But I didn’t want to count on it. But yeah, we’re off to a fine start!

At some point during the day, I went to Home Depot and got some long, flexible PVC pipes, which I intend to use for grape arbors in some way. The details in my mind are still foggy, but PVC is cheap. Maybe I will paint it green or something, maybe not. I have some tall T posts and some zip ties, and all the clearance grapes from Walmart that I shoved in the ground are putting out leaves already, so I don’t see how this can fail. The vision is a tunnel of leaves at the entrance to the boardwalk over the marsh. I’m trying not to slip into “maybe they will accidentally lobotomize me at the end of the summer, but at least I will leave a grape arbor as my legacy” thinking, but it’s possible some of that has been happening, who can say. Anyway, PVC is cheap.

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

I really really need to finish up some essays I started, but I want to be outside! Wah! Boo! I actually already got a considerable amount of writing done this week. But I also have a bunch of mystery bags of gladiolus bulbs I bought for a song at the town garden club sale, and it occurs to me that a long line of glads in front of the house would be gorgeous. Possibly not enough to make up for the fact that the kids saw a bunch of paper bags on the table and thought someone had brought pastries, but still, very pretty. 

This Sunday, we’re expecting a visit from an enterprising young man who went door to door letting people know he hauls junk. What it was that brought him to our door, in particular, it’s impossible to say; but I’m hoping that (a) he’ll give us a quote that’s about the same amount as the money I’m expecting to get from the guy who’s going to haul the Yukon away as soon as we get the replacement title, and (b) I have the emotional fortitude to tell him to haul away ALL the junk, and that I won’t be a crazy little freak and try to hold onto a bunch of it because it might come in handy.

Damien has to cover RFK Jr. coming to NH and talking about Lyme disease. I am crossing my fingers that a giant tick comes and eats him live on camera, but I would settle for . .. . well, I’ll settle for whatever I can get, I guess. Ain’t that the way. 

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bare bones bo ssam

If you really want to knock people's socks off, look up My Korean Kitchen bo ssam, and make all the sauces and sides. This is a pared-down version, and I use this meat in many ways. Mostly, I just serve it with lettuce and rice and some kind of simple fruit of vegetable for a side, and it's fabulous. Start it the night before, let it cook all day, and you get maximum flavor for minimum effort.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1 cup salt
  • big pork shoulder, preferably with a a bone and a nice fat cap
  • 7 Tbso brown sugar
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 2 tsp cider vinegar

Instructions

  1. Mix together the cup of sugar and cup of salt, and rub it all over the pork. Let this brine at least six hours. I usually do it overnight, and put it in a ziplock bag in a bowl in the fridge.

  2. Turn the oven to 300. Put a double layer of tin foil over a pan, to make clean-up much easier. Set the pork on the pan, fat side up, and cook it, uncovered, for about six hours.

  3. Combine the brown sugar, cider vinegar, and Tbsp of salt. In the last ten minutes of cooking, crank the oven up to 500, take the pork out, and spread the brown sugar mixture on top. Put it back in the oven and cook it until it's got a glistening crust.

  4. Serve with lettuce and rice to make little wraps.

What does it really mean to be a pilgrim of hope?

What does it really mean to be a pilgrim of hope? We all know what hope is, more or less. The Gospels call Christians to hope countless times, and Pope Francis, planning ahead, invited Catholics to “gain new strength and certainty” by becoming pilgrims of hope in the Jubilee Year of 2025, which concludes on Jan. 6, 2026. Some of my Catholic friends made a pilgrimage to Rome, and some took advantage of the chance to visit pilgrimage sites here in the United States.

But some of them made an involuntary pilgrimage, walking not through Holy Doors but through terrible trials of grief and loss—and in the process, they gained a more profound understanding of the theological virtue of hope. It is, they learned, more than optimism, more than desire, and more, even, than a belief that everything will work out someday in heaven. Hope is a force that orders their lives on earth as they walk toward heaven.

Pope Leo recently said, “We know that, even in the darkness of trial, God’s love sustains us and ripens the fruit of eternal life in us.” Here are three stories of Catholics who did find sustenance from God in times that felt hopeless.

Danielle McLellan-Bujnak knows about that darkness. She saw her home, her cozy neighborhood and her entire town vaporized in the Palisades fire at the beginning of this year. It burned at 2,000 degrees for 20 hours. The soil was poisoned, and the ocean went black. … Read my feature story for America Magazine.

Photo courtesy of Danielle McClellan-Bujnak

Look up!

One day, I was pushing my then-toddler on a swing while we waited for her big sister to get out of school. One of the dads was doing the same thing, idly pushing a swing and waiting for the bell to ring. As he pushed, he looked up at the sky.

“Look at the clouds,” he said. “They’re so cool! I never really looked at clouds before.”

I didn’t know such a thing was possible, to never look at clouds.

Clouds are some of my favorite things in the whole world to look at and think about. I sometimes tell my kids that God could have come up with so many ways of making the world function, but he seems to have chosen the beautiful and interesting and dramatic way, over and over and over again. He could have designed some other mechanism to move water up and down and around the water cycle — something dull or unchanging or even invisible — but he chose to design this system that’s so elegant, beguiling, ever-changing and recklessly beautiful. Clouds! And all we have to do is look up.

The same is true for so much of the natural world: the way seeds turn from tightly closed secret chambers into brave, tender little beings standing on their own; the way rocks and soil are ceaselessly churned up through the relentless jaws of continental plates. Heck, God could have made the world colorless. Soundless. Scentless. He could have organized the food chain so that birds are not necessary, but he chose to fill the world with strange, beautiful, sometimes nutty and hilarious creatures who not only hop and fly and swoop around, they make music as they go. Are you kidding me? And all we have to do is look up!

And that’s just the stuff we know about! That’s just the stuff we can see with a quick glance around us as we hustle from the car to wherever our next appointment is. There is also an immense natural world that is hidden from us, unfathomably busy with its own designs, that we don’t even know about: things working under the surface of the ground, things too small for us to see, things hidden within our own cells; secret signals between trees, arcane signs passed from species to species and generation to generation. Fungal kingdoms, pheromones, neural memories. Things under the sea; things under the ice; things beyond our atmosphere. The sheer liveliness of the world is too much to comprehend.

I’m lucky that both my parents taught me it was normal and rational to look at the natural world with fascination and delight, because it is fascinating and delightful. To have been raised this way is a gift, and for a moment, on the playground that day, I was crushed by the thought this man had been denied that gift for decades. In maybe 40 years, no one had taught him to look up.

But then I thought: How wonderful that it’s not too late. …Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

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

You, on a gondola

This is me, slowly unpacking from our recent trip to a little island off the coast of Maine.

This is me, sheepishly putting away the seven (seven!) books I hoped to read on the beach, and then barely touched all week.

This is me, dolefully discovering that the “all ages” board game I ordered specially for the trip is still in its shrink wrap, after we spent zero evenings moving little plastic pieces around the table in raucous and wholesome family togetherness.

This is me closing the tabs with recipes for seafood dinners that I convinced myself we would not only cook, but also possibly harvest ourselves from the sea; and this is also me, cleaning all the cheeseburger wrappers out of the car.

The kites I packed didn’t even make it out of the trunk.

This is not me complaining about having been on vacation! It was lovely, and we’re lucky we were able to make it happen. We did swim and wade, clamber around on rocks, and eat ice cream. We came home tired and more or less happy, with pink shoulders and sand in our shoes.

And yes, I came home a little bit disappointed. I can’t help it: I have insanely high hopes every time I plan anything at all. I am who I am, and I know this; but I’m also perpetually disappointed when I don’t turn into someone else.

Right before we left, I saw an old video from Saturday Night Live, where Adam Sandler plays Joe Romano of Romano Tours.

He tells the audience, “Here at Romano Tours, we always remind our customers: If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”

He warns us:

“We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Riviera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say, ‘Whee’ and mean it.”

I laughed at the video, and then I went right ahead and told myself that, when we got to the island, everything would be different. Through the sheer magic of dipping ourselves in salt water, we’d become joyful, energetic, screen-free types who love spending all our time together. And that did not happen. We had the week we had, because we are the people we are. And it was good! But it was not magically, instantaneously transformative. Of course, it wasn’t.

Like Joe Romano says, “[I]f you don’t like how you look back home, it’s not gonna get any better on a gondola.”

This is not only true for going on vacation: It’s true for everything.

Are you getting ready for a new year of school? Even if you’re enrolling somewhere different or trying a whole fresh program, you’re still going to be who you are as a parent, and your kids are still going to be who they are as kids.

Are you starting a new job? Even if it’s an entirely different situation, you’re still going to be you, doing that job.

Are you perhaps new to the Catholic faith? Welcome, and we’re so glad you’re here! Your life has a very good chance of being transformed, one way or another.

But not magically. Not instantaneously. And not without you deliberately, consciously deciding to make that happen, taking advantage of what the Church has to offer, and putting it into practice day by day, minute by minute.

And also, paradoxically, not without you letting go of control and letting grace work with who you are.

I watched the SNL skit again, and I laughed even harder. It’s not only brilliant and insightful, it’s hopeful, not discouraging…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

 

Sometimes the secret ingredient is time

It’s one of my favorite stories, so I’m glad it’s apparently true. The Vienna Beef company makes a certain kind of hot dog that is bright red, and it has a particular smoky flavor and a particular snap when you bite into it. It was very popular, so they made it in exactly the same way year after year, decade after decade.

Eventually the company became successful enough to upgrade to a new facility, where everything was streamlined and efficient and top of the line. But they knew better than to mess with success: The hot dog recipe stayed the same.

Except it didn’t. The hot dogs produced in the new facility weren’t as good. The color was off, the texture was feeble, and the taste just wasn’t the same; and nobody could figure out why. They hadn’t changed anything—not the ingredients, not the process, not the order of operations. It was a hot dog mystery.

They finally solved it by painstakingly recreating how they had done it in the old factory—and it turned out that, at one point, the processed ground meat was slowly trucked from one part of the factory to another, through several rooms, around corridors, and on an elevator. It seems that this arduous process, which everyone assumed was nothing but an inconvenience that ought to be streamlined away, was an essential step. The meat got warmed slowly as it went, gradually steeping in the smoke and moisture of the rooms that it travelled through. When they made the production more efficient, they eliminated this part of the process. And that ruined the hot dogs.

The secret ingredient, it turned out, was time. I thought of this story as I sat chatting with an old friend, someone I’ve known online for over two decades, and we only met in person for the first time last week. When we first got to know each other, we were in the thick of having babies and wrangling toddlers, both fairly starry-eyed about the possibilities of how to build a Catholic marriage and raise a holy family.

Now we both have several adult children, and our “babies” are almost as tall as we are. We talked about what we expected our lives to look like, what we were so sure about, and how differently things have turned out. We talked about our struggles and also our successes, and how we seem to know less and less as time goes on.

And we talked about how sometimes, the secret ingredient is time…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

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When the darkness passes, do not forget the Lord

It was four years ago, at this time of year, that COVID social isolation began in earnest. Remember?

First we started staying home from Mass, then from school, then from everything else. The thing that brought me up short, though, was when it dawned on me we wouldn’t be back to normal in time for Easter. It seemed so terrible not to be present for my favorite day of the liturgical year, such a loss.

Then my father died suddenly, just before Easter, and I had to adjust my views on loss.

It was a strange thing. Instead of planning for my father’s visit, we were planning his funeral. All through the Easter Vigil, live-streamed on a laptop, I was aware that this wasn’t ideal. We should be inside the actual church, actually receiving Christ’s body and blood, and instead we were crammed into our living room watching a tenor singing out “Christ our light” into an empty building.

But I couldn’t stop smiling.

It was a strange thing. The seminarian started to read from Genesis, telling us how the world was empty and void, and then God spoke, and there was light. He told us how God made the water, and fish to swim in it, the land, and creatures to crawl on it, and sun, moon, and stars to rule the day and night, and man. And breath for man, the breath of God. It was a good story, and I wanted to hear more. I was spellbound through the entire Mass, as if it were all new. Out of the void, God made something firm, something real, something for us to stand on. And then he gave us life.

When I got the call that my father was dead, even as I cried, I kept finding little stepping stones of joy. It was like trying to make your way across a dark, formless swamp. No one would dispute that death and grief are dreadful and cold, but there was always something to stand on, something good.

I kept thinking: At least he died at home in his comfy chair, not hooked up to the beeping hospital machines he loathed. At least he was a praying man, and he had been to confession. At least the last thing I told him was that I love him. There was something for my feet to stand on amid the grief.

At least I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. It’s a good story, and I want to hear more. I kept thinking of it at his burial, where my siblings and I stood six feet apart, in an almost comically tragic scene straight out of a Russian novel, with fog and mud and solitary mourners by an open grave; and I smiled then too.

That was the year when one thing after another started to unravel in my life. I kept losing things, precious things, that I thought I utterly depended on; but I also kept finding firm ground under my feet. Not a lot of ground! But enough…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

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Be ye patient, as God is patient

When people start to really hit their stride at adults, they will often laugh at themselves for what gets them excited. “You know you’re really grown up when you’re thrilled to get a new toaster,” they might say, or: “A clear sign of maturity: I can’t wait to tell my friends about these amazing new dryer sheets I discovered.”

Spiritual adulthood is kind of like that, too. The things that you once passed over barely noticing, much less valuing, now rock your world. I remember discovering, for instance, that prudence was actually kind of a big deal.

I had once considered it sort of a loser’s virtue, something that you practice if you don’t have the imagination to excel at anything more interesting. But then my circumstances changed, my life got rearranged, and I realized that not only was prudence really hard, but the steady practice of it could yield beautiful things. And that’s why it’s one of the cardinal virtues! Turns out the church knows what it’s talking about; how about that.

This year’s revelation: Patience. Patience is technically a secular virtue, and not one of the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) or one of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude), or even one of the gifts of the holy spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord). But when you imbue a secular virtue with faith, then it becomes something sacred.

Patience, like prudence, maybe doesn’t sound very impressive. It sounds like not doing something, and since when is that something to get excited about? Patience also gets a bad rap because there are all kinds of harmful or thoughtless or cowardly ways to be patient.

You could patiently wait for someone to stop hurting you or your family, even as they give no indication they are trying to change. This is bad for your family, bad for you, and bad for the perpetrator, as it just gives them more opportunities to sin.

Or you could be endlessly patient with yourself while you do the exact same stupid or harmful things over and over and over again, without ever jamming a wedge in those spinning wheels and taking a closer look at what is making them keep turning.

Or you could be patient with a bad situation because you think, consciously or unconsciously, that it’s exactly the crappy kind of thing that a crappy person like you deserves, and why would you even dare to hope for something better, like decent people get?

Or you could be outwardly patient, “keeping sweet” and putting on a mask of unperturbed tranquillity, while under the surface you’re plotting how to get even in subtle ways; or maybe telling yourself that you just need to sit tight until God swoops down and avenges you, humiliating and crushing your enemies, which is something you will enjoy heartily.

You could certainly call these things patience, because you’re quietly waiting without fussing or fighting while something undesirable continues. That is secular patience. But sacred patience is something very different.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

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Frog and Toad at Cana

Not long before he died, I was complaining to my father I couldn’t persuade any of my kids to go to a Catholic college. I said I knew they were getting decent educations at the places they chose, but still, I was sure my plan was better than theirs. Half jokingly, half dead serious, I groaned,  “How will they ever find a nice Catholic to marry?”

My father said, “Well, I found one at Brooklyn Public College!” He was half joking, half serious, too: the joke being that, when he met my mother, they were both about as far from Catholic as anyone could be.

They had both been raised as non-practicing Jews, met at college when they were both cutting class, got married in secret in a hurry, had a second public ceremony to appease the parents, dabbled in Buddhism, moved to a kibbutz in Israel, came home, briefly joined a cult, found the Lord, and then eventually became Catholic — my mother and older sister first, and my father and the rest of us a year later, when they had already been married for about 20 years. They ended up as a happy old married Catholic couple, but they certainly didn’t start that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and God’s will and who belongs together and how and why marriages work. It is very true that it’s smart to do a thorough investigation of your own understanding of marriage and of your spouse’s expectations before you take the leap. But it really is a leap. You can’t guarantee that doing everything the smart way will result in a strong or happy marriage, and you can’t guarantee that a strong and happy marriage will stay that way. Sacramental grace is mysterious and unpredictable, and so is human nature. It’s a leap.

My parents made each other truly miserable sometimes. We kids saw a lot of that. You probably could have made the case that they didn’t belong together.  But by the end of my parents’ lives, I could think of all sorts of ways that God’s will had indisputably been carried out in their marriage.

Even my mother’s dementia seems to have worked some kind of transformation on my father, and the last years of their lives together did something mysterious but important to him. They weren’t even really together; he just visited her in the nursing home every day, fed her, prayed with her, and was delighted when she would occasionally mumble “amen.” By the time he died, he was a happy man; happier than I ever remember seeing him. And then, her final work done, my mother died too.

Does this mean they were made for each other? Yes and no. They eventually became made for each other, I know that. I know couples who seem so incredibly well suited for each other, it’s hard to imagine them living any other life other than with each other. And I know couples who are monstrously incompatible, and seem to belong with each other even if they don’t make each other very happy. There are all kinds of successful marriages. Marriage is strange. Life is strange.

The other day, we prayed the second luminous mystery of the rosary, which is the Wedding at Cana.

“When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you,’” we read.

Jesus hadn’t yet done any public miracles, and apparently didn’t think it was the right time to start yet; but Mary was apparently focused on saving a young couple just starting out from the embarrassment of not being able to serve their guests. We’re all familiar with the somewhat amusing account of mother and son having a little spat, and the mother confidently assuming he’ll do what she says. But it occurred to me for the first time: They are both sinless. This means that neither one of them could have wanted to do something that was against God’s will. And yet they disagreed about what was best to do! What does this mean?

I think it speaks to the notion that God’s will is hardly ever one specific action or decision. Sometimes it is certainly clear: Don’t murder, for instance. Don’t do evil. But it’s much more common, when we’re faced with choices, to be torn between a few different possibilities which might be good, but we’re not sure yet how they will turn out. It’s pretty rare that we can just “do whatever he tells us” and know for sure that we’re doing the right thing. Even when one choice seems like the natural, godly, wholesome choice, and the other seems more murky and less desirable, we really can rarely say, “This one is definitely God’s will, and that one is definitely not”.

We have to take a leap, and the leap is important, but even more so is what comes next. It’s rarely the leap that puts us either in or out of God’s will; it’s what we make of where we landed, and what we do with the grace we find there.

I was mulling all this over when a quote popped up in my Twitter feed. It was a line from one of my favorite “Frog and Toad” stories by Arnold Lobel. Toad, after admiring his friend’s garden, wants to start one of his own. So he plants the seeds, but they don’t immediately sprout. Fretting, and increasingly frantic, he spends the next few days exhausting himself with trying to make it happen: He plays music for them, he reads poems to them, but nothing works. Then Frog gives him some advice:

“Leave them alone for a few days. Let the sun shine on them, let the rain fall on them. Then your seeds will start to grow.”

And this, of course, works. The seeds start to grow. Toad has done the work that’s indispensable: He has put the seeds in the ground. Then he wastes a lot of effort and anxiety trying to force things to work out well in the time he expects. Finally, he gives up and while he sleeps, the larger forces at work, the rain, the sun, and time work to achieve the thing he is longing for. The seeds sprout. He has his garden.

And . . . an angry boy in Brooklyn ends up married to a nice Catholic girl who brings him to Jesus and makes him very happy, eventually. A mother has done her best and then tries to sit back and let her adult-ish children make their choices about college and everything else, because they are adults, ish. Let the sun shine on them. Let the rain fall on them. Let people take their leaps, and let the Holy Spirit do what he does when they land. It really is the only way.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I have taken the leap. We’ll see.

***
A version of this essay first appeared in The Catholic Weekly in August of 2021.

This potted plant life: Lessons on prayer for the new year

Let’s talk about prayer. Let’s talk about how January is a wonderful time to start or restart a habit of daily prayer.

But first, let’s talk about winter.

I’m not a big fan of this time of year. There are plenty of unpleasant things about the winter months where I live: The way the coldness makes you cold, the way the darkness is so dark, and the way the dark and the cold make you kind of stupid.

But the thing that really hurts is how all the green goes away. You look outside, and everything is gray and white and brown, and it’s just sad. I need green! This is why, of course, people have houseplants. Nothing livens up a living space like living things. It’s the obvious solution to my green starvation, right?

Not so fast. I’m an absolute plant assassin. I love having plants around, but I’m terrible at keeping them alive. If plants were people, I’d be on an FBI watch list for the sheer number of suspicious disappearances associated with me.

Take, for example, my little fig tree. I had put it outside on the patio over the summer, but then a frost came and I forgot to bring it in. The poor thing turned brown, all the leaves fell off, and it went from a luxurious, broad-leafed beauty to a dry stick in a pot. I was so sad.

But I’m telling you about it because I realized that I’ve actually learned a thing or two in the last several years — and what I’ve learned dovetails very nicely with what I’ve learned about prayer. Just as I suffer when there is no green outside, so too do I suffer when I don’t have a naturally flourishing relationship with God; and just as the solution to green starvation is having houseplants, the solution to spiritual starvation is prayer.

And if this metaphor doesn’t quite work out perfectly, just assume it’s because it’s dark and cold and I’m stupid. Not my fault!

I am the queen of letting plants dry out in between waterings. Then, when I finally do remember to do it, the soil has become so parched that the water goes straight through it and runs out the bottom. Depending on the plant, you can fix this by either flooding it with water from the top down, or putting it in a second pot of water and letting it absorb it from the roots, or you can give it little sips of water very frequently until it softens up and is ready to accept more.

But the point is: There are consequences to letting it get that dry. If you neglect it for long enough, you can’t expect to just leap back in and pick up where you left off. The same is true with prayer. If you’ve been out of touch for a long time, you might be able to reestablish contact by flooding God with your passionate prayers; or maybe you need to sit and quietly meditate for a long time; or maybe you need to start small with short, frequent prayers until your soul softens up and feels ready for more. But there will be a period of adjustment…Read the rest of my latest monthly column for Our Sunday Visitor