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Friday, October 24, 2003 ( 12:11 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Three cheers for Fr. David Mullen, pastor of St. Brendan's in Bellingham MA, for refusing to implement the "Talking About Touching" sex-abuse prevention program. Read the Wanderer article to find out more about Fr. Mullen's strenuous objections to the program on the score of the violence done to children's innocence and peace of mind through the violation of their period of sexual latency with explicit and upsetting images and discussions. Although he very properly addressed his letter of trenchant criticism to Archbishop O'Malley, in the second Wanderer article (link, supra), in the October 23 edition, Fr. Mullen indicates that the archbishop was not responsible for the choice of this program, or for the decision to make it mandatory and to forbid parents to opt their children out of it. The decisions seem to have been made by a chancery official - why am I not surprised? - during the period when the Archdiocese of Boston was under an administrator, following Cardinal Law's resignation. I emailed Fr. Mullen when I read the first article in the October 16 Wanderer, to offer my respects and encouragement, and to mention that my maternal grandmother was a Mullen of Brooklyn NY before her marriage. He replied with very cordial thanks, and observed that all Mullens are connected in some way. Hm. Father Mullen doesn't sound just right, somehow. I think Bishop Mullen has a real ring to it, don't you? # Thursday, October 23, 2003 ( 10:56 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle! My sansevieria is putting up flower buds. It's very potbound and has been on the front porch since March; I wonder if those facts have anything to do with it. My mother had a sansevieria (a.k.a. snake plant) that lived on the dryer in our basement for twenty years. It got a little morning sunlight reflected off the house next door, and about twice a year somebody remembered to water it. It's probably unnecessary to say that it flourished wondrously under this treatment, and dashed nearly perished when she decided to take it upstairs and cosset it. There's a moral about human nature in there somewhere, but I haven't quite winkled it out yet. # ( 9:52 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Yippee! Thanks to my third son, I now know how to bloglink. Look for new links every time I find another blogger who shoots from the hip and takes no prisoners. # ( 8:57 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Cacciadelia's glasses have arrived, and it just isn't fair. She looks even better with them than she did before! Cacc is away, and he'll go crazy when he sees them. She's been walking around all afternoon reading signs, and tipping her glasses up and down to see the difference between Then and Now. I'm so pleased! # Tuesday, October 21, 2003 ( 10:30 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Boo hoo. Andrew Sullivan's feewings are hurt. Every time he passes a Catholic church, he says, he bursts into tears. This would attract more notice in other places, but big city folk are accustomed to passersby doing all sorts of odd things in public, and indulging in a mild fit of hysterics is probably among the less alarming of these manifestations. It would be laughably easy to demonstrate the hollowness and self-service of this egregious example of special pleading by going through it and replacing every reference to sex and homosexuality with equivalent terms bearing on some other sin, like theft or murder. But that would be too easy, so instead I'll refute his claims in order, and seriously. Last week, something quite banal happened at St. Benedict's Church in the Bronx. A gay couple were told they could no longer sing in the church choir. Their sin was to have gotten a civil marriage license in Canada. One man had sung in the choir for 32 years; the other had joined the church 25 years ago. Both had received certificates from the church commending them for ``noteworthy participation.'' But their marriage had gained publicity; it was even announced in The New York Times. This ``scandal'' led to their expulsion. The archbishop's spokesman explained that the priest had ``an obligation'' to exclude them. Flagrant public sin gives what is known as scandal. The Church's countenancing flagrant public sin would also give scandal, only in a worse degree. You can read all about it in any handbook on moral theology. In the grand scheme of things, this is a very small event. But it is a vivid example of why this last year has made the once difficult lives of gay Catholics close to impossible. The church has gone beyond its doctrinal opposition to emotional or sexual relationships between gay men and lesbians to an outspoken and increasingly shrill campaign against them. Gay relationships were described by the Vatican earlier this year as ``evil.'' No, you're wrong about this. The "relationship" isn't evil, in that a chaste, generous, and loyal affection between persons is never evil, be they whom they will. Neither is the predisposition of the person in question toward homosexual sins of unchastity evil. What's evil is the act of sexual congress outside of a valid marriage, and that doctrine applies to all, man or woman, married or single, homosexual or heterosexual. When I consider the pains the Church has taken to emphasize this distinction, it's hard to believe that any intelligent person's misstatement of the fact is the result of genuine mistake, and not a self-serving wish to confuse the issue. Gay couples who bring up children were described as committing the equivalent of ``violence'' against their own offspring. Gay men are being deterred from applying to seminaries and may soon be declared unfit for the priesthood, even though they commit to celibacy. Where I went to college, Andrew, they call this "cognitive dissonance". It means that you don't integrate information into your understanding in a whole and rational way. In this case, you deplore priestly pederasty, but then your mind grinds its gears and you deplore the exclusion of homosexuals from the priesthood, "even though they commit to celibacy", when you assert below that denying homosexual persons access to sexual intercourse "slowly destroys people". Try to be more consistent. The American Catholic church has endorsed a constitutional amendment that would strip gay couples of any civil benefits of any kind in the United States. For the first time in my own life, I find myself unable to go to Mass. During the most heated bouts of rhetoric coming from the Vatican this summer, I felt tears of grief and anger welling up where once I had been able to contain them. Faith beyond resentment began to seem unreachable. What you mean is that you began to despair of getting the Church to alter its consistent teaching on homosexual intercourse to suit your opinions and wishes. For some, the answer is as easy as it always has been. Leave, they say. The gay world looks at gay Catholics with a mixture of contempt and pity. The Catholic world looks at us as if we want to destroy an institution we simply want to belong to. So why not leave? In some ways, I suppose, I have. What was for almost 40 years a weekly church habit dried up this past year to close to nothing. Every time I walked into a church or close to one, the anger and hurt overwhelmed me. It was as if a dam of intellectual resistance to emotional distress finally burst. But there was no comfort in this, no relief, no resolution. There is no ultimate meaning for me outside the Gospels, however hard I try to imagine it; no true solace but the Eucharist; no divine love outside of Christ and the church he guides. In that case, stay. You cannot possibly do better than to receive the Sacraments worthily, and I know you'll find them a mighty support and strength to anyone striving to live a virtuous life and to resist the pull of an habitual sin. But nobody, not even you, gets to change the rules so that the sins he wants to commit aren't sins after all. A thief can't compel the Church to accept stealing as a way of life some people are simply born into; I don't get to twist the Church's arm into agreeing that pride is an ineradicable part of my identity, and that God loves my pridefulness as much as He loves my neighbor's humility; and you, Andrew, will not be allowed to reclassify your besetting sin so that it isn't a sin anymore. That's the bottom line, brother, and you and I and the thief can like it or lump it. In that sense, I have not left the church because I cannot leave the church, no more than I can leave my family. Like many other gay Catholics, I love this church; for me, there is and never will be any other. But I realize I cannot participate in it any longer either. It would be an act of dishonesty to enable an institution that is now a major force for the obliteration of gay lives and loves; that covered up for so long the sexual abuse of children but uses the word ``evil'' for two gay people wanting to commit to each other for life. Now, how is this? In your book on the subject, you unmistakably suggested that a homosexual understanding of marriage would not by any means necessarily include a requirement of exclusive sexual fidelity. Have you changed your position on that point, or are you leaving out that information because it would alienate public sympathy for the cause of same-sex marriage? I know what I am inside. I do not believe that my orientation is on a par with others' lapses into lust when they also have an option for sexual and emotional life that is blessed and celebrated by the church. No, obviously you don't. Equally obvious is that we don't have the power to write ourselves a free pass entitling us to exempt our pet sins from moral scrutiny. I don't suppose JFK thought there was anything so desperately wrong about humping every woman who came within ten yards of him; similarly, Carlo Gambino, who lived a life of almost ascetical simplicity, with his wife of many decades, in the Brooklyn precinct where my father was a police lieutenant, regarded prostitution and drugs and murder-for-hire as perfectly neutral matters of business, and nothing that should put him in bad odor with the Church. Try to grasp this - if you're a believing Catholic, you believe in the teaching authority of the Church, even when the teachings are hard, even when the sin in question has acquired such a grip on your life that it seems impossible to tear it out and begin afresh. There is no way around this fact; believe it and be Catholic, or disbelieve it and pretend to be Catholic. This is where the rubber meets the road. I do not believe I am intrinsically sick or disordered, as the hierarchy teaches, although I am a sinner in many, many ways. I do not believe that the gift of human sexuality is always and everywhere evil outside of procreation. (Many heterosexual Catholics, of course, agree with me, but they can hide and pass in ways that gay Catholics cannot.) Of course sexual intercourse isn't evil "outside of procreation". The act of marriage is as chaste and beautiful in a married couple afflicted with incurable infertility, or a married couple past the age of childbearing, as it is in a married couple able to conceive. Where sex becomes disordered and sinful is where it occurs outside a valid marriage, or where illicit steps are taken to render the act sterile. Married couples who use artificial contraception are every bit as much in sin as persons committing homosexual acts. It doesn't matter that they can "hide and pass" - their spiritual situation is just as grave whether people know they're sinning or not. I believe that denying gay people any outlet for their deepest emotional needs is wrong. I think it slowly destroys people, hollows them out, alienates them finally from their very selves. No, you're mixing that up. It's sin that destroys people and alienates them from their very selves. And, if I may say so, shilling for sin doesn't do a whole heck of a lot for one's intellectual powers, either. You would never write in this whiny, inconsistent, self-pitying strain, nor commit all these errors of fact and solipsistic reasoning, if you were writing about national defense, tax reform, or immigration policy. But I must also finally concede that this will not change as a matter of doctrine. That doctrine - never elaborated by Jesus - True - like the Trinity, the Assumption of our Lady, and a number of other established doctrines of our Church. was constructed when gay people as we understand them today were not even known to exist; but its authority will not change just because gay people now have the courage to explain who they are and how they feel. In fact, it seems as if the emergence of gay people into the light of the world has only intensified the church's resistance. Well, you've got me there, Andrew. It's quite true that only comparatively recently has the Church been dogged by persons wishing it to reverse its doctrine that sexual intercourse is the exclusive privelege of a husband and a wife in a valid marriage, and to bless acts of homosexual sodomy. Previous attacks on Church teaching on the the nature of marriage and sex have mostly been carried out in the hope of gaining concessions in matters of heterosexual fornication. But the Church, although sometimes slow to act, is equal to any challenge. That shift in the last few years from passive silence to active hostility is what makes the Vatican's current stance so distressing. Terrified of their own knowledge of the wide presence of closeted gay men in the priesthood, concerned that the sexual doctrines required of heterosexuals are under threat, the hierarchy has decided to draw the line at homosexuals. We have become the unwilling instruments of their need to reassert control. I don't know where you've been since 1967. The Church has been every bit as adamant about the serious disorderliness and grave sinfulness of artificial contraception as it has been about the immorality of homosexual acts. It seems to me that with you it's strictly a matter of whose ox is being gored. Have a look at the huge pastoral and theological literature prompted by Humanae Vitae, and you'll see that what I'm saying is true. In an appeal to the growing fundamentalism of the developing world, this is a shrewd strategy. In this analysis I've tried to stick to the argument and avoid mere gibes, but I can't here refrain from pointing out that I used to argue in much the same way about artificial contraception - when I was fifteen. The Church isn't in this to bump up recruitment by aping the prejudices of the predominantly Islamic third world, or it would be telling me to walk two paces behind my husband and to cover my hair, arms, and legs in public. Do be reasonable. In the global context, gays are easily expendable. But it is also a strikingly inhumane one. The current pope is obviously a deep and holy man; but that makes his hostility even more painful. He will send emissaries to terrorists, he will meet with a man who tried to assassinate him. But he has not and will not meet with openly gay Catholics. They are, to him, beneath dialogue. His message is unmistakable. Well, now we're getting somewhere. The message is unmistakable, and it's final, and it's this: the Church and its Sacraments are open to all who will faithfully hear and accept its teaching, and will dedicate themselves to leading lives of virtue, and to repentance and a sincere effort at amendment when they fail. It is absolutely not available for custom-tailoring a Sunday-morning routine and a moral game plan that fit into your lifestyle. Do you understand now? Sheesh. Gay people are the last of the untouchables. We can exist in the church only by silence, by bearing false witness to who we are. I was once more hopeful. I saw within the church's doctrines room for a humane view of homosexuality, a genuinely Catholic approach to including all nonprocreative people - the old, the infertile, the gay - in God's church. Observe the shell game: my 53-year-old married sister, and my validly-married friends who have never been able to conceive, are just variations on a theme of "nonprocreative" sex that includes homosexual relations. I'll say this again, and this time pay attention: what makes the difference between a sex act that is virtuous and a sex act that is intrinsically disordered and sinful is NOT whether or not it results in pregnancy, nor even whether or not it is at all likely to result in pregnancy, but whether or not it a) takes place in the context of a valid marriage, and b) is deliberately rendered infertile by a positive action. But I can see now that the dialogue is finally shutting down. Perhaps a new pope will change things. But the odds are that hostility will get even worse. There never has been, and never can be "dialogue" about the objective sinfulness of a sinful act. About the proper direction of pastoral care, about the availability of teaching materials and spiritual direction to help those struggling against the predilection toward a particular sin, we can dialogue till the cows come home, and welcome. But sin is sin, and there can be no dialogue which results in the Church's deciding that it isn't. I revere those who can keep the struggle up within the channels of the church. I respect those who have left. But I am somewhere in between now. There are moments in a spiritual life when the heart simply breaks. Some time in the last year, mine did. I can only pray that in some distant future, some other gay people not yet born will be able to come back to the church, to sing in the choir, and know that the only true scandal in the world is the scandal of God's love for his creation, all of it, all of us, in a church that may one day, finally, become home to us all. You can come home today, Andrew, and on exactly the same terms as any other lonely soul hungry for the love and consolation of the Church. The conditions are easily explained, if not so easy (when was the Christian life ever easy?) to carry out - quit trying to distort the Church's teaching, make a good Confession if necessary (I neither claim to know nor wish to know your private spiritual condition), and form a sincere intention to live in accordance with God's law as taught to us by the Church. It's as simple as that, and the next move is yours. October 20, 2003, New York Times. copyright © 2003, 2003 Andrew Sullivan # Monday, October 20, 2003 ( 2:08 PM ) Elinor Dashwood These internet abbreviations mystify me. It took us a while to figure out KWIM? ("Know What I Mean?"), and now I can't think what AP signifies, although I'm pretty sure it isn't Associated Press in this context. It comes up in a discussion of the Family Bed on Moss Place. Many people enjoy having the whole clan bunk down together, but I've never liked having children in bed with me. We've always been authoritarians on the subject of sleep. (Cacciaguida will laugh here, because our daughter has mastered the Bungee Bedtime, whereby she's sent to bed, and keeps bobbing back to say goodnight at intervals for the next hour. Yes, but she isn't bugging me, and that's the factor that has always driven bedtimes in our house. Our eldest figured this out at an early point: one night when he was about fifteen months old, he stayed up with us by the simple expedient of sitting quietly on the sofa and looking at a book. We never noticed he was there until after ten.) I can't say I ever cared much if the baby slept during his nap, as long as he was clean, fed, safe, and out of my hair for two hours. As for nighttime, the system was bath, pajamas, singing, feeding, burping, BED, and then bye-bye till the morning unless you're very, very sick. We did have one situation in which the 18-month-old screamed furiously every night for several days running, until it occurred to me that he might be lonely. I put him in with his next-oldest brother in the other room, and the two of them curled up like puppies and went to sleep. Cacciadelia had a habit of climbing in with us in the early mornings a year or two ago, but we managed to stop it; she then took to bedding down on the carpet next to my side of the bed, and soon resumed spending the whole night in her own bed. Some suggestions for getting children to sleep: When you settle down to feed the baby before bedtime, put a WARM - NOT HOT - water bottle in the place where you'll set him down. Pull the covers up over it, so that they get deliciously warm, too. I learned this when I worked as a nanny, and the baby's mother couldn't figure out why he would shriek the minute she put him in the crib. What would you do if you were all warm and relaxed, and somebody put you into icy-cold sheets in Connecticut in November? When it's time to put the baby down, shift the warm water bottle toward where his feet will be, and settle him in the warm spot. See if a routine will help. Bath, Goodnight Moon, feed, bed, or pajamas, rocking chair, bed, are some possible variations. Remember, children are natural conservatives: they don't like a lot of change and uncertainty, especially in ritual actions like going to sleep. # Sunday, October 19, 2003 ( 7:56 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Renee Fleming is singing the National Anthem? (By the way, I'm not watching the World Series. Both teams in whose fortunes I was somewhat invested have been eliminated, and a contest between a Florida team and the Y-----s is of no interest to me.) I've never been a Fleming fan. In the first place, sopranos have no appeal for me. In the second place, she turns up on the cover of Opera News about five times a month, generally posed in some would-be alluring posture which falls completely flat because she has the range of emotional expression of an amphibian. (In looking up a link to illustrate my point, I see that she has recorded a CD with Bryn Terfel, and appears to have caught enough of his abundant vitality to make her look quite awake.) I must admit that she's extremely pretty, but a lot more animation would improve her immensely. One of my sisters, for instance, wasn't more than nice-enough-looking (I never got even that far), but so full of energy and wit and charm that she was positively persecuted with admirers. I'll say this for the National Anthem: it puts pop singers in their place. It's a bear to sing, with a huge range and demanding particular spirit just where it's hardest, and the sigh-into-the-microphone contingent can't cope with it at all. And I'll say this for Renee Fleming - she can sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with one vocal chord tied behind her back. # ( 7:47 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Ooooggh. I like scrapple, but scrapple doesn't like me. This Pennsylvania specialty, occasionally known chez Cacciaguida as gefiltepig, is made of the ends and bits of pork during hog-butchering time. The meat is simmered until it's very soft and sieved until it's very smooth, then combined with cornmeal and seasonings, cooked some more, and pressed into loaves. The loaves are then sliced and prepared like sausage patties. It's very good. The trouble is that every few years I remember how tasty it is and forget how it affects my insides, and indulge in it. That's what happened this morning, so I've just bypassed all of a very nice Sunday dinner except the broccoli. Better tomorrow, no doubt. # Saturday, October 18, 2003 ( 12:21 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Long pants, long sleeves. It's Fall, all right. Cacciadelia also came downstairs today well warded against the chill, in a navy turtleneck and grey leggings, saying, "Look, dark clothes - I could be a spy!" I couldn't resist. I replied, "Ah, well, yes, a spy. But you see, if I ring up the Central Intelligence Agency and tell them I have an eight-year-old schoolgirl who wants to be a spy, the first question they'll ask me is not going to be, 'Does she have her own dark clothes?' " # Thursday, October 16, 2003 ( 11:59 PM ) Elinor Dashwood From Fr. Bryce comes a link to the Razanne doll, a sort of Muslim fashion play doll to substitute for Barbie. I am no fan of Barbie - she's NOKD - and this seems to be a modest and innocent-looking doll. To the commenter who asked why we don't produce such a doll here in America, we do: the American Girls dolls. They're decently dressed (the historical dolls, certainly), they aren't anorexic (rather sturdily built, if anything), they work hard in school, they learn to tell the truth and do their duty, and they love their families. What's not to like? And about the array of Razannes pictured on Fr. Bryce's blog, which seem to be nice dolls except for being Paynim: How come they're all blue-eyed devils? # ( 9:43 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Cacciadelia needs glasses. We noticed a few weeks ago that she wasn't seeing things well beyond a very short distance, and the doctor confirmed this when he checked her eyes. (I told Cacciaguida that the nurse had checked her eyes, that is, after she failed to read any single line on the chart including the huge E at the top, the nurse came up close and checked that she had eyes.) Today she went to the optometrist and got her prescription, and as soon as Daddy gets home (he's gone a-Yaling), we'll pick out her frames. I'm not wound up about this at all, I'm happy to say. I've worn glasses since I was nine, and probably ought to have had them sooner. I remember my sister's noticing that I was squinting, and giving me her glasses to try. It was like the world made new, or the startling into life of a hitherto-dormant part of my nervous system; I can still see the way every flower on Mrs. Peterson's azaleas leaped from the pink blur and formed itself into a trumpet of color and distinctness and fresh perception. I look forward to taking part in Cacciadelia's first days of discovery. In addition, there are much nicer frames available for little girls now than when I was young. Thirty-five years ago you were pretty much stuck with either the oval horn-rims, or the equally ugly cat's-eye style in pink, blue, or red, with rhinestones in the upper corners. These days the choice isn't nearly as punishing, and Cacciaguida is determined to get her the prettiest ones available. It may be a good thing, too, to interpose some slight filter between Cacciadelia and an unsuspecting world. She has this way of looking deep into a person's eyes and suddenly smiling, that conquers the hardiest. I've seen it happen time and again - she strikes up a conversation with somebody, skipping and bouncing from one foot to the other as little girls do, and then she laughs and gives him the look, and he is sandbagged, overpowered, annexed. It's all very sweet, but it can't go on, or she'll become a menace as she moves into her teens. The most exasperating part is that, in a certain sense, those horrid people who used to tell me "Reading again? Go out and play, you'll ruin your eyes!" were actually right. Much reading, the eye doctor told me, doesn't exactly ruin the eyes, but it trains them for short focus rather than for long focus. Still, it's better to be a reader than to have 20/20 vision: we can correct her myopia, but we couldn't take her to the optician and have a love of books and learning implanted if she lacked it. All things considered, I'm very happy about it. # Wednesday, October 15, 2003 ( 11:11 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Here I go being a cold heartless beast again. I was bloghopping and found a discussion board for women who aborted children because they (the mothers) had something called Hyperemesis Gravidus. I did some more checking round, and I found out that - can you believe this? - I had HG in my fourth pregnancy, and never knew it! I was horribly nauseated, unable to eat, vomiting constantly, weak and exhausted, extremely sensitive to sights, smells, repetitive noises (one day I had to ask my beloved father-in-law to stop singing "Old McDonald Had a Farm" to the boys, lest it prove a case of Old McDonald Lost his Lunch), and sudden movements, the works. And guess what? It never, ever occurred to me to kill the baby because the pregnancy was making me feel sick. Now he's thirteen and still driving me nuts, but even when I felt like I was dying I didn't dream of killing him. You know what makes me sick now? Reading about all these self-indulgent whiny airheads who ran to the abortion clinic because they didn't feel good. They all say that they "just did what they felt they had to do to survive". Give me a break - you killed your baby because you didn't want to put up with the downside of pregnancy. Try Benadryl and B-6 instead of murder next time, or even - I know this sounds radical - try thinking about right and wrong, and about how soon nine months pass before you have your child torn to shreds and washed down the sink. # ( 9:28 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Last year I gave Cacciaguida a laugh by saying of "Joe Millionaire" that this was one of those times when I wished that my standards weren't so high. Now that they're doing it again, this time with a bunch of European women, I'm almost tempted to decide that my standards aren't as high as I thought they were. I won't watch, because with Fox you can't be sure what will pop up on the screen next (the commercials are bad enough), but I'll certainly read all about it in the paper, and laugh myself limp. # ( 8:07 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Pansy is concerned about the recent CBS programs hinting darkly that homeschoolers are sociopaths who keep their children home so that nobody can see how they're beaten and starved. I can perhaps set CBS's sensitive conscience at rest on some points: 1) My children are taken to the doctor regularly. 2) They've always belonged to sports teams, gone to the library, and been encouraged to converse with grownups outside the family. 3) Nearly everyone who meets them is bowled over by their manners, speech, and poise. 4) The three oldest have jobs at a local restaurant, where they're held in high esteem as the most capable, respectful, and reliable teenagers in the place. At the 20th reunion of my Yale class, other adults (most of whom were proud parents in their own right) kept taking me aside and marvelling that "Your children - they're so different, so mature, so articulate, so considerate, so kind to their sister," and so on and on, until I just about perished of gratification. MY answer to all this hand-wringing about homeschoolers? "You bet they're different, chum, just have a chat with my children and you'll see how different they are." # Tuesday, October 14, 2003 ( 2:50 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Peony here expresses one of the perennial difficulties of serious Catholic parents, especially homeschoolers, how to rear a Catholic family decently without conveying the impression to the children that "Catholic=No Fun and Always Being Weird". I have certainly been acquainted with some strict cultural isolationists, and it seems to me that there are certain advantages as well as disadvantages to this approach. I don't worry about evangelizing other people, being strongly of the opinion that if (most) other people dried up it would be all right with me. Leaving that to one side, however, one key aspect of the objectionable popular culture, which it would be a kindness to keep from your family, is that everything has to be fun for children. This omnipresent notion neglects an important element of character development. It isn't popular to point this out, but an unavoidable part of adulthood is that sometimes you just have to do things you don't want to do, and to do them without grousing or making yourself out to be a hero. It really annoys me that schoolwork, Mass, chores, catechesis, and everything else is supposed to be fun, which encourages the clear inference that anything they're expected to do that isn't made fun is an unwarranted infringement of their priveleges. And you may take it from me, there is no better guarantee of unhappiness than a sense of entitlement. For all that, holidays and entertainments are good things, and it would be a mistake to disallow Halloween without putting something enjoyable in its place. We've usually been able to take the children to an All Saints party. These, by the way, can be very simple and inexpensive to organize, especially on the cooperative plan, and need only crepe paper streamers, a few jugs of apple juice or cider, a big bowl of popcorn, and well-filled goodie bags. At the first of these we attended, when my eldest was three or four, the guests were supposed to try to guess which saint each child represented. I had found an old dark-red plush bathrobe of Cacciaguida's, long since outgrown, and refashioned it into a Tudor-style scholar's gown. A belt, black tights, Sunday shoes, and a bit of black felt cut and stapled into a rough approximation of a flat four-pointed cap completed the costume, and made him the very image of St. Thomas More as depicted in the Holbein portrait. That was huge fun, for both of us, and of course no one had any trouble figuring out who he was. Other notable costumes have been St. Dominic Savio, always popular because it only requires borrowing a set of altar boy vestments, and the Holy Father, which is basically any white robe-type garment (angel costume from the Christmas play is good here) topped off with a white mitre (two big triangles of felt or cardboard overlapped at the sides and stitched or stapled together) with inexpensive gold braid glued or sewn on in the form of a cross in front and back. Little girls in New York State, of course, love to be St. Kateri Tekakwitha and dress up as an Indian girl. I really wouldn't worry that the children would think it weird that others do Halloween while they do All Saints. In the first place, children - especially homeschooled children - have a tendency to assume that what their family does is normal, and that it's what other people do that's different. In the second place, the bottom line in the child's mind is a) dressing up and b) getting candy. Provide those two treats, and they'll be as happy as clams. Where there is absolutely no chance of putting together an All Saints party, it probably won't do any harm, at least to small children, to take them out on Halloween, so long as they get to dress like a saint and know to tell kindly inquirers that they're Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton or Saint Christopher or whatever. The worst mistake, I think, was the one an acquaintance of ours made. She was a dyed-in-the-wool isolationist, and also very concerned about pure food and sustainable agriculture, so - you can see where this is leading - her contribution to the All Saints festivities was holy cards, and peculiarly tough little cupcakes made of soy milk, whole grain flour, and powdered eggs. She also dressed her daughters in many layers of shapeless blouses and ankle-length skirts, and used to pull other mothers aside to give them little lectures about wifely submission and modesty in dress. Eventually her husband went out of his gourd and turned violent, and I for one wasn't surprised. I couldn't have stuck it out for a week, and he had twenty years of her. # Monday, October 13, 2003 ( 10:10 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Ahem. With regard to Cacciaguida's post about Sammy Sosa: I never say "kids". I did a word search on the blog, and the only two times it occurs were in the middle of quotes from other people. # ( 12:58 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Much discussion over at Moss Place about house decoration, and the defalcations of landlords and former owners in this respect. The previous owner of this house mainly left her mark in a regrettable penchant for wallpaper, although I was quite staggered by the vivid dark pine green in which our room was painted. The kitchen was decorated above the chair rail with a disagreeably busy pattern of wreaths and stripes in what are known as "country" colors, a term which appears to be a euphemism meaning a little gray added to everything. Below the rail the wall was painted a startling shade of heavy watermelon pink that almost, but not quite, matched the flower in the wallpaper. It was very difficult to get the paper off, as it was of a substantial weight and, apparently, rather expensive. (Imagine spending all that money and trouble to achieve such a deplorable result.) I managed it at last, however, and the kitchen is now blue below and white above. The dining room wallpaper is somewhat florid, but it isn't so bad, now that it's no longer striving with the Country Colors in the adjacent kitchen. The wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom was the real stunner: I couldn't figure out what precisely was wrong with it, since the pattern was modest and the colors not unpleasing, until I realized that some of the sheets had been applied upside down. All she did to the living room (what she called the "family room") was to stencil a very moderate design of ivy leaves in the upper corners, and the library (similarly called the "living room", where the best furniture was kept and nobody was allowed to sit down) she painted in an extremely pale shade of a handsome sage green, for which I'm thankful. It might have been a great deal worse. # Wednesday, October 08, 2003 ( 12:37 PM ) Elinor Dashwood And by the way, I don't want to hear from any denizens of the Left Coast about what a great state California is. You just elected Ahhnold, and it will take a long, long time to live that down. # ( 11:15 AM ) Elinor Dashwood I'm a whammy. At any rate, I seem to be a postseason whammy. For those who aren't baseball fans, a whammy is a jinx. I don't really believe in such things, of course, and if I were much fonder of baseball I'd insist on staying to watch the games, but I don't object to playing along. I'm from a large family of Mets fans (my next-oldest sister married a Yankees fan - I'm so ashamed), so my sympathies are Mets first, National League generally next, and whoever's playing the Yankees on every occasion. I also have a strong affection for underdogs, a bias toward long-established teams (although I greatly rejoiced when the Diamondbacks skelped the Yankees in 2001), and a general principle that things Californian and Floridian ought to be put down when possible, so insofar as I have a team at all in this postseason, it's the Cubs. (They scored four runs while I was out picking up my second son after his game last night, which adds color to the whammy theory, I'm afraid.) Boston over the Yankees, certainly (see Rule Three, supra), although they shouldn't have taken Tom Seaver and tried to pitch him against the Mets in the '86 Series. I had just then become a devotee of Ste. Therese, so I was praying frantically in the sixth game, when Boston was one out from winning the Series, that she should do something to help the Mets, and seconds later Bill Buckner lost sight of the ball coming down the first base line, and the Mets were in it again. (Mookie Wilson, one of baseball's great base runners, has always maintained that he would have been safe at first even if Buckner hadn't foozled the play, and having since viewed the videotapes I'm inclined to think he's right. Still, there's nobody, for me, like Ste. Therese.) So I'm getting a good deal of reading and needlework done these evenings, out of range of the television. # Monday, October 06, 2003 ( 9:15 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Erik's miffed because I told him that it was nonsense to call food articles he doesn't like "evil" (that's a quote) and a run-of-the-mill supermarket "Satanway" (that is, too). I leave to one side the interesting question of why it's "evil" to put salt solution, duly marked on the label, into pork, but not wrong at all to torture a bull to death, in spite of a Judaeo-Christian emphasis, thousands of years old, on slaughtering food animals without unnecessary pain. Likewise I brush over the sufficiently obvious folly of lecturing a homeschooling mother of five about the family dinner table. The main trouble with his argument is the creeping tide of what might be called Catholic Fascism in all this hoohah about the awfulness of mass-produced food. Peony can't find unbrined pork in her local supermarket - not that she carries on and on about it - which is unfortunate. I can't find oxtail and mutton chops and pig's trotters in mine, which is also regrettable. And why can't we? Because there isn't enough demand for these commodities in the stores where she and I generally shop to justify the manager's ordering them regularly. If I wished I could buy them all, probably not so very far from my home, but I can't expect the manager of this particular emporium to cater to my individual tastes when the main focus of the store is to provide groceries at the lowest possible prices. None of the complaints I often hear about mass-produced food are meant to be elitist, but they aren't thought through. In fact the partisans of Small Is Beautiful generally want the poor to be able to have chevre instead of Velveeta and organic mesclun instead of Iceberg in a plastic wrapper. But the fact of the matter is that Small Is Also Expensive, and you're not going to make it less so by restricting the production of wholesome but undistinguished items of grocery store fare. Small Is Pricey because wages in production jobs rose steadily through the 20th century, because agricultural land is farmed more intensively, and because people who have the opportunity to decide what they wish to buy with their own money aren't demanding it in nearly sufficient quantities to have a big effect on supply and thus on price. Cooking decent food is certainly a part of an authentically Catholic understanding of the union of the spiritual and material aspects of God's creation, but it's the skill rather than the choiceness of the ingredients that really makes the difference between good and bad cooking. And while the family dinner table is an important part of an authentically Catholic family life, I assure you, as one who has been doing this job for twenty years, that it's the conversation much more than the food that brings the idea to life. # Saturday, October 04, 2003 ( 9:34 AM ) Elinor Dashwood According to a Washington Post article about the National Zoo's vermin problems, there are mice in the Elephant House. EEEEEEEEEK! # Friday, October 03, 2003 ( 9:47 AM ) Elinor Dashwood My computer is on the fritz, so I am borrowing Cacciaguida's laptop while he's away. We saw X-Men the other night. My eldest was concerned that having both his parents watching it at once might fatally drain all the cool out of it; I hope this was not so, not because I care a fig for coolness, but because it would be ungrateful to dorkify someone's movie when he has been kind enough to share it with us. I can't say I mined as much meaning from it as others have, but it wasn't altogether bad. The effects were well done, and some of the characters were interesting. Wolverine is a classic anti-hero, James Dean with hectic hair instead of a windbreaker. (Speaking of hair, Charles Xavier was clearly the only one in the Secret Hideout who didn't spend two hours a day on it. I'm a little displeased with these movies in which everybody's hair and makeup are always perfect, even when they're fighting for their lives.) My principal objection is that I'm tired to death of these movies in which ordinary (conservative) narrow-minded (religious) intolerant (straight) people are held to be the real enemy. This is such an accepted assumption in Hollywood that it comes through in every kind of movie, from Field of Dreams to Beauty and the Beast to X-Men. I wasn't pleased with the crusading senator's being called Kelly (Irish and Catholic) and very noticeably flashing his wedding ring (respectable and straight). In fact the whole movie struck me as a rather tiresome parable of homophobia (mutants aren't dangerous, they can make valuable contributions to society if only they aren't shunned!), and as such I'm not impressed with it. I liked Hugh Jackman, however, and Anna Paquin is a very good actress, and getting better. # Tuesday, September 30, 2003 ( 10:22 AM ) Elinor Dashwood I baked two pies yesterday, both pumpkin. (There is never the least use in making one pumpkin pie at our house, and I make four at holidays, plus mince pies and cranberry pies.) I also got four pounds of candied peel. I've adapted a recipe from Fanny Farmer, and our Christmas present to most of my family every year is homemade fruitcake. I didn't like this exquisite confection as a child, when I knew it as a block of sawdust studded with tough chunks of a mysterious leathery substance dyed in radioactive colors. My recipe produces a melange of almonds, pecans, raisins (black and golden), and dried apricots, currants, cherries, and cranberries, just held together with a nice moist brown cake, not too sweet. My first attempts at fruitcake omitted the candied peel entirely, and didn't really taste right, so in the end I broke down and incorporated both the peel and the water used to soak it. I also picked up from Mrs. Beeton the step of setting the cakes to age in powdered sugar. Keeping the cake moist and clean at this stage required stringent measures in the nineteenth century (some people used glass "cake safes" with rubber gaskets and steel spring clamps, like huge square canning jars, other put them in tin boxes and dipped the whole caboodle in hot wax), but zip-top plastic bags do the job now with no trouble. I think I'll make the cakes this week - they improve with age, and as I make so many it's a two-day process, best undertaken well before Christmas. # ( 9:13 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Thanks to Jeanetta of De Fidei Oboedientia for sending me the Donne quote: It's from his collection of sermons, specifically, St, Paul's, Christmas Day in the Evening, 1640. The full quote is: "But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity." Thanks also to Peony and Gregg the Obscure for the same kind assistance. # Monday, September 29, 2003 ( 11:06 AM ) Elinor Dashwood It's 65 degrees F and the sun is shining. I shall bake a pie. Or bread. Or possibly both. I love autumn. By the way, I hope someone can help me with a quotation. Everybody seems to know that John Donne wrote that "In Heaven it is always Autumn", but nobody seems to be able to track down the cite itself. I've tried Google, which turned up some poetess in Maryland who also thinks Donne wrote it, and Bartleby, which preferred no to. Any ideas? # Sunday, September 28, 2003 ( 6:59 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I'd like to make an announcement. I'm forming a new organization, to be called Writing "Um" Seriously Stinks. The purpose of WUSS is to discourage, by training, exhortation, and mockery, the deplorable habit of prefacing written sentences with the syllable "Um . . ." It's an inept and awkward device for conveying uncertainty, surprise, and a number of other reactions for which there exist quite satisfactory means of expression in English. I've seen it used to indicate hesitancy ("Um, is this a bad time to remind people . . ."), a stifled sob ("Um, I don't know why you say that . . ."), and, most offensively of all, the well-mannered person's discomfort in pointing out to the oaf that it was a stupid question ("Um, I did explain that in my previous post . . ."). Cut it out and learn to write, folks. It's worth knowing how to do it properly. # ( 2:17 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I'm getting myself disliked down at our parish, and a good job, too. This morning, finding that we were again to be assaulted with the egregious "Bread of Life" (go here for my objections to this hymn), I deviated from my rule of not complaining to the pastor. Things that merely annoy me, or don't chime with my taste, I won't bother him with (poor Cacciaguida gets to hear about those). When it comes to full-blown blasphemy being repeatedly perpetrated in the very church during the Mass itself, lesser considerations must go to the wall. So I showed Father the page, and pointed out that, if it hadn't been for out (paid) choir inflictor, I'd never have known that I was every bit as good as Our Lord Jesus Christ himself. He hastily disclaimed responsibility and said that I couldn't blame the organist, because the hymn was one of those approved by "the bishops". I retorted that of course I could blame her, that the piece's being permitted didn't mean that it was mandatory. He, looking more unhappy every minute, said, oh no, oh no, as long as "the bishops" approve it, it's all right, and - clearly imagining he'd come up with a clever stroke - suggested I take it up with the bishop presently administering our diocese. I replied that I certainly would, but that I'd wait and address the new bishop. Here's the funny part. I got to Father just as the first communion hymn was finishing (our choir doesn't want us ever, ever to be obliged to meditate, pray or adore on our own and without their invaluable assistance), and he was absolutely saying the very words "The Body of Christ" when the choir shrilled out, "I myself am the Bread of Life". I gave Father the eyebrow and a good long jolt from the eye, which I daresay made my point as well as further argument might have done at that stage. # |
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