coffee clicks

Long time no curate, faithful readers. I hope everyone is headed into a spectacular weekend of still-Easter proportions. We have a “birthday party” planned for our freshly-minted 6-year-old (read: a trip to the indoor trampoline park with his brother and two cousins which might as well be Disneyland in his mind) and then a party for my mama on Sunday. I also have big plans to, um, go to sleep before 11pm tonight.

We’ve been working on our budget big time this month, and so I’m writing this from my one and only trip to a coffee shop in all of April. That might seem impressive to you or it might seem sad, depending on how good you are at self denial. Me? I’m a pretty miserable nickel and dimer and known for rewarding my own “good behavior” by frittering away $4 here and there on designer coffee, so having gone 20 whole days without succumbing to the siren call of the green mermaid feels pretty great. It’s also immensely satisfying to see so little activity on our checking account when I log into our online banking system. I’m also really, really enjoying this decaf mocha that I did not prepare for myself, because a treat is much nicer than a boring old routine entitlement. (Even nicer? Being out of debt a little sooner because I’m not being an idiot and spending $$$ on flavored milk and mediocre coffee.)

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A really gorgeous reflection by Msgr. Charles Pope on why God keeps the Church so close to the cross. This section in particular really moved me:

“At the foot of the cross we must suffer with the Lord for the sake of the Church. Now is a time to multiply our prayers by being more faithful to the Rosary and adding the Divine Mercy Chaplet. The Lord may be calling us to fasting and abstinence beyond the mere requirements of Lent. Perhaps He is calling us to Eucharistic adoration, increased visits to our church, or attendance at daily Mass. In addition, we must attend to our own sins more seriously. Perhaps there is one sin or sinful attitude that we can curb by God’s grace.”

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Another case of horrifying government overreach in the UK, and another sweet baby boy being sped along on his way to the grave because the adults in charge (not, oddly enough, his parents) insist they know what is best for him. Alfie’s father made a desperate plea to Pope Francis on Wednesday of this past week, begging the Holy Father to intervene and asking permission that his baby boy be transferred to Bambino Gesu hospital in Rome where he could perhaps undergo experimental treatment not offered in Britain:

After the Supreme Court decision, Alfie’s parents issued a statement saying: “Our son’s life is not futile. We love him. We value him. There are people willing to treat him and we have the state saying ‘it’s not worth giving him the chance.”‘

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A thoughtful piece on social media – Facebook in particular – in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, inviting us as to do some soul searching about the nature of online sharing and the concept of privacy, both our own and our neighbors’.

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The connection between Satan and … porn? You’ll definitely want to read this.

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“The sign of the cross is our badge.” I appreciated the Pope’s encouragement to “teach your children” to unabashedly cross themselves before prayer. We’ve been working on our little savages at mealtimes to slow down and actually physically make the sign of the cross before launching into the world’s fastest and least sincere rendition of blessusolordandthesethygifts on record, but it’s a work in progress, especially for Luke who is generally 2 fists deep into his pasta before we get to “Amen.” But it’s important. So, we’ll keep trying.

Wishing you a beautiful weekend of warm weather and springlike festivities. Over here we’ve got a mixed rain and snow vibe headed our way so I’m trying to summon some kind of warm feelings for this November-esque weather on the cusp of May. If only pumpkin spice anything were still readily available to keep the flame alive.

Happy Thanksgiving Friday. We’re having an ironically woke Black Friday over here, where I run around nesting with the energy of a thousand forrest creatures and invite – nay, compel – my earthside offspring to bag up and give away books/toys/clothes they’ve outgrown or tired of. If that doesn’t kick consumerism in the teeth, I don’t know what does. (Okay, I did buy a single pair of maternity leggings. $12 bucks! Motherhood is not my favorite retailer, but for the price of 3 coffees, I’ll take a fully clothed home stretch.)

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Speaking of keeping one’s wits about them as the Christmas shopping season officially kicks off, this thoughtful piece on resisting the nastier side of shopping is worth the read.

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I loved this interview. It’s everything I’d like to say to the culture and then some, but 100 times more eloquent. Eberstadt is definitely near the top of my happy hour dream guest bucket list.

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“A Seal Breaks Open.” What exactly is going on with this bizarre zeitgeist we find driving the present news cycle, and why is it that so many of the proffered so-called “solutions” are essentially gutless and ineffective? Could it be that we don’t truly understand why things have gotten so bad, and that sexual morality cannot simply be distilled to a watery lesson in consent?

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There are few things more frustrating to me then getting a few chapters deep into a new (and often well-recommended) read only to be blindsided by what is more or less (but generally more, depending upon the recency of publishing date) eye-popping print pornography. I spent a few hours last week compiling a list of the books I read in 2017 that I would actually recommend to a friend. You’re welcome.

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“No one needs nuns in order to get contraceptives, and no one needs these guys reigniting the last administration’s divisive and unnecessary culture war,” said Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at Becket Law and lead attorney for the Little Sisters.

Yeaaaaah, it’d be great if we could stop suing nuns over birth control. Particularly sisters (read: consecrated celibate women) whose entire mission is humble service to the elderly poor (read: post-menopausal). When I think about the money and energy and resources this circus has consumed over the past several years, it makes me sick to think of how much good could have been done. Instead, millions of dollars in legal fees and ridiculous mission creep of the first degree. Let.them.serve.

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America – and the universal Church – has a brand new Blessed. If you aren’t already familiar with Solanus Casey, prepare to fall in love. He was beatified last week in Detroit and peep his red frames – I’m pretty sure he was the original Catholic hipster.

Hope your post-turkey coma is mild and your weekend is long.

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I wrote up the following for a facebook post. A little tongue in cheek, maybe, but not terribly far into the cheek:

Alternative headline possibilities for this gem of a story:

“Jewish student group at Yeshiva University faces campus tribunal for reading Torah; Holy Book deemed ‘hate speech’”

“Muslim freshman reprimanded by Cambridge Muslim College after reports surface on social media of praying 5x/day facing Mecca”

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I was born in Marin county, not far from wine country, and it has pained me to see the beautiful, rolling hills of northern California decimated by horrifyingly destructive wildfires. If there were anything that you’d pray could get the government’s attention (like we’ve seen in Houston and all over Florida, for example) and convince them to set aside their little pet projects and petty partisanship, you’d hope it would be catastrophic loss of life and property. You would think that, but in California, where the government has officially abdicated the throne of reason, you’d be wrong.

Alex, I’ll take obtuse for 182,000 acres.

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Does it sometimes seem like the tide of LBGTQ+++++ has rolled wholesale at an alarming and seemingly artificially inflated pace across, well, pretty much all of Western Civilization? I mean, sure, the internet. But as any “influencer” on Instagram could tell you, exposure and building a following at breakneck speed doesn’t come cheap. If you’ve ever scratched your head and wondered why hollywood and the media seem just a tad more “progressive” than most anyone you’ve actually met in real life, it might just be because someone – or rather, a lot of well-heeled someones – is putting up big money toward the goal of “punishing the wicked” and swaying public opinion and policy into the camp of insanity. As Ryan T. Anderson astutely observes: “Not every disagreement is discrimination. And our law shouldn’t suppose otherwise.”

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My dad texted me last night that he and my mom were “Pumba crying” (which I guessed to be a Lion King reference?) after reading my little sib-trib from yesterday. Mission favorite child: accomplished.

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This is perhaps a little basic, but it’s also basically brilliant. (Plus, my usual favorite annual link to “Decorative Gourd Season” over at McSweeney’s is a little too hot for some to handle.)

Have a lovely fall weekend!

What a week. I’ll cut to the chase and get right down to assigned reading.

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I was curating a more somber list and then this gem popped into my newsfeed and HOO BOY. Now, if the government could go ahead and get it across the goal line by broadening the exemption to include non-religious entities too, that’d be great. You don’t have to believe in God to understand good science.

Still, it’s a good start. And I hope somebody buys the Little Sisters of the Poor a round of mimosas this morning for the hard work and excoriating press coverage they’ve endured.

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I found this piece fascinating and deeply troubling. Let me preface it with a personal story. When I was 15 years old, during my sophomore year of high school, I vividly recall sitting at the usual lunch table my friends and I occupied in the cafeteria, passing back and forth a copy of Seventeen magazine pouring over an article about Bulimia Nervosa. My girlfriend, who I’ll call Sydney, confided in us that she’d started making herself vomit during the past summer break, and that it was really helping her keep her weight down. After we’d all passed around the article and peppered her with questions about how it was done, she offered to take us into the bathroom and give us some pointers in self-gagging.

I took her up on it.

I would spend the next 10+ years of my life battling on and off with bulimia – severe enough to cause medical issues at some points – and I can confidently trace my foray into the clutches of that eating disorder back to that table in the lunchroom. The contagion effect is real, and it jolted me to the core to read the theory applied to the astonishing, pandemic rise in gender confusion we are currently experiencing.

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Did you see this piece on “the digital colosseum” pop up on social media earlier in the week? I thought it was a fascinating, fresh angle on the nature of the kind of pornography we consume as a culture, and what it says about us as consumers. I found the analogy between spectators in a gladiator fight and consumers of violence behind a screen oddly compelling.

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Gun violence. Do we really have the answers? The argument I’ve been having all week isn’t that we shouldn’t be looking for ways to limit access to the more destructive, military-grade firearms that some mass killers avail themselves of, but that the bigger – and often completely neglected – issue we’re facing here is why is this happening in the first place? Why the incredible spike in mass violence of this sort, whether it be a machete-wielding madman, a fertilizer bomb, rifles unloaded into a crowd of schoolmates, a truck plowed into a pedestrian crowd or a hail of semi-automatic machine gun fire over a concert venue?

The argument could be made, I suppose, that ours really no more violent than any other age, that the 20th century, for example, had a particularly bloody footprint of a different nature, that all of human history has been pockmarked by warfare and strife…but this seemingly random killing, the utter banality of the settings chosen, the panic of not feeling safe in a public setting…that seems relatively new.

I think the answer has more to do with an increasing secularization and a wholesale rejection of moral law than it has with any laws or regulations that government could enact in an attempt to legislate away evil. So my 2 cents is not that we shouldn’t discuss regulating certain firearms, but that we’re having entirely the wrong conversation in the first place. It is conversion of hearts that will save our floundering society, and the rebuilding of that most basic of social units: the family.

So sure, let’s have the conversation about how to keep military-grade weapons out of the hands of psychos, but let’s also be clear-eyed and sober in our understanding of the human heart and free will, acknowledging that evil exists, that the technology genie has already been let out of the bottle, and that legislating away the problem isn’t the cultural panacea some of our politicians (and lots of people on social media) believe it to be.

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I really struggle to get in a daily rosary. I’m tired, it’s boring, I’d rather read, I have a million excuses, none of them great. But I always come back to the notion that in all of the approved modern Marian apparitions, it is precisely what Mary asks for: conversion of heart and frequent recitation of the rosary.

She doesn’t ask us to start up a new Bible study small group, to go to Confession once a week, or even to attend daily Mass; it’s the rosary she is continually asking for, and so I figure, if she’s that into it, the devil must really hate it and must be really, really pleased by how many of the faithful struggle with integrating it into their daily prayer lives, whether out of distaste for it, boredom, or an inability to connect with it on an emotional level.

I’m asking for the grace to be more faithful to praying the rosary – really praying it, not just mumbling in carpool line and getting it over with (though that’s better than nothing!).

Have the best weekend. We’re looking at a 75 degree Saturday and then our first shot at snow (eeeeei!) for the season on Monday, so I’ll be scrounging for sunscreen and mittens simultaneously.

It’s that time of year again. The pumpkin spice errything is flowing, the temperatures are dropping (well, in theory. And only at night around here. 81 sizzling degrees for the projected high today.) I’m doing my best to limp across the second trimester finish line still utilizing as much of my non-maternity wardrobe as possible, and have finally embraced the wonder of the belly band + pretty much any bottoms that I can still shimmy into. I’m wearing maternity jeans and shorts 24/7, but I can still, at 25+ weeks, get away with surprisingly most of my non-maternity tops by using that little black stretchy band of magic, which may not sound impressive to you, but given my 5 foot 4 stature and the pertinent detail of this being my 5th pregnancy in 7 years, I’m pretty pleased with myself.

(Plus, Target’s current maternity offerings are hideous and Old Navy has stopped selling in stores.) After 2 near-misses trying my hand shopping online, I’ve pretty much given up and am resigning myself to friend’s hand-me-downs (she lent met her Blanqi! True love!) and am planning to spend all of December in Dave’s t-shirts, which should look lovely in our Christmas photos.

Before I launch you into this week’s list of assigned reading, please accept my most heartfelt thanks for the overwhelming support you poured out online (and in my inbox) after my most recent post. I’ve been so humbled reading your stories, and I’m so grateful that so many people are feeling more freedom – and finding more support – in speaking out about mental illness. I know I have some new readers as a result of how enthusiastically it has been shared, so I want to welcome you guys and invite you to scroll through the archives, especially the tab at the top of my homepage labeled “PPD,” for more resources and information.

So, without further ado, the list:

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First up is this amazing story about Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, the Salesian priest who was captured during an horrific ISIS raid more than a year ago in a nursing home facility run by the Missionaries of Charity in Yemen. 16 people were brutally murdered that day, including several religious sisters and innocent elderly residents. You may remember hearing threats back during the spring before last that Fr. Tom was going to be crucified on Good Friday in a barbaric act of terrorism which, thankfully, proved to be so much social media bluster. I dare you to read Elise Harris’ emotional recounting of Fr. Tom’s meeting with the Pope upon his release last week and not weep.

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I just finished reading Jodi Picoult’s novel, “Small Great Things” and while it was a deeply disturbing read (probably even more so for a pregnant woman) I couldn’t quite turn away, and ended up tearing through it in 3 nights. It contained a decent amount of propaganda that had me rolling my eyes in places, but it also contained some profound and hard-hitting truths that were uncomfortable and necessary for me to confront as a white person raised in the “post-racial” west.  Reading this piece just a day after finishing Picoult’s book was eye-opening and uncomfortable.

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When I read about so much happening now, in 2017, about eugenics and gene editing and euthanasia, I’m always blown away by how quickly we’ve lost our collective grasp on the historical memory of what actually happened during WWII. It’s easy enough to demonize Nazis because they’ve become synonymous with an evil we can still, even in this vastly divided condition, agree upon, but many people seem unwilling to acknowledge the similarities in ethical practices and world views that many moderns share. It’s not politically correct to say so, but read this and try not to squirm when thinking about the various medical “advancements” and various pieces of so-called compassionate legislation which are gaining traction.

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Speaking of euthanasia. Sigh. This is why we can’t have nice things. The lay advisory board of this religious order is like the idiot older brother who gets busted by dad smoking pot and makes a dramatic scene in the living room before storming off because “you can’t tell me how to live my life, old man” before heading down to the 7-11 parking lot with his buddies to roll another joint.

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Remember those persecuted Christians in the Middle East? Yeah, me neither, most of the time. It’s hard to keep all the competing narratives of doom straight amidst the constant stream of noisy, curated news narrowly focused on, well, us and our issues. Meanwhile, a genocide is underway, and barely gets mentioned even in global news coverage.

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At the risk of ending on too dreary of a note, please peep this sweet write up of one of my favorite professional athletes, Philip Rivers, and his creative solution to the decision between a long commute versus uprooting his family of 10. (And try not to blanch at the price tag; remember, that’s coffee money to most NFL stars.)

Have a lovely weekend, and may your coffee be spiced with all the orangey goodness of autumn’s most desirable gourd.

Happy birthday Mama Mary! I made gluten free blueberry muffins from a paper packet at 9 pm last night and my kids were not disappointed. (Although by “muffin” I mean loaf of crumbly bread-shaped substance. And as the intrepid 5-year-old was quick to point out “Mommy partied already by eating half of it last night.” Touche, son.)

This week has been a whirlwind of stupid, entertaining, and inspiring. Where to begin?

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How about with the always inspirational, courteous, and courageous Archbishop Chaput. I joked on Facebook this morning (over 11k followers as of this week – thanks guys!) that I was going to retire my pen and just resign myself to reposting his essays, because the man is a genius. A humble, courageous genius with a gift for public discourse and an easy, authentic manner which makes him even more enjoyable in real life than in print. This piece is worth a careful, prayerful read. Thank you, Archbishop, for continuing to inspire us to live as authentic Christian witnesses in a culture that couldn’t care less.

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Spawning Yoda memes, custom t-shirts, and an entire internet’s worth of bumper sticker material, be sure to treat yourself to the video content of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Darth Vader moment during a Senate confirmation hearing for federal circuit court judicial nominee and Notre Dame law professor Amy Barrett, a mother of 7 and a practicing Catholic and apparently, an ideal candidate for Jedi training. (Try not to get too distracted/revolted when you get to Feinstein’s self-reference to her reproductive organs. Some ladies and their one-track minds.)

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Bishop Tobin draws a startling and compelling contrast between immigration and abortion, highlighting a personal concern of mine: why do so many Catholics of the more “liberal” persuasion seem able to turn a blind eye to the holocaust of abortion but are so passionately engaged in advocating for the rights of children already born? And why do some further-right believers fail to recognize the humanitarian crisis facing the children of immigrants, when they would gladly stand and fight for those same babies still in the womb? We must hold ourselves as Catholics to a consistent pro-life ethic, resisting the temptation to fall along party lines on these critically important issues. (Note: I don’t agree that ending DACA is itself the problem – The previous administration’s executive overreach is precisely what landed us in this present situation. Our immigration system is broken, and it falls to our legislative branch to address the long-standing dysfunction rather than kicking the can further down the road for some future administration – and a future generation of innocent children – to deal with.)

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An oldie but a goodie from First Things (h/t to Rosie for tweeting it). It’s true, and I’ve seen it becoming more and more true as I become the mother of more and more children. Moms in day-old yoga pants frequently stop me wild-eyed in Costco and pant out a disbelieving Idontknowhowyoudoit while their own 2.1 children are falling out of the double cart in the checkout aisle, wanting to know how on earth and more to the point, how on earth I can have more than a couple kids when it’s so much work. And the answer really is: economies of scale. The more kids we have, the easier it gets. And while I won’t say our grocery bill is being helped, we get a killer tuition discount at school, I don’t really buy many more clothes for 4 kids than I did for 2, and we’re still trundling along in the same old 2004, 160k mile Honda Odyssey that we paid off in 2014. Ironically, these past 3 weeks with my big boys in school all day, the 2 and 3 year old have upped their intensity to a whole new level because NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM, and I actually find myself looking longingly at the clock at 2 pm some afternoons, ready for the big brothers to come home and be entertaining and helpful. (The IKEA experience is infinitely improved with the presence of only 2 kids tho, let the record state.)

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The National Catholic Register has a fascinating piece on sociologist Mark Regnerus’ newest title: Cheap Sex. This excerpt in particular struck me as very Ben-Opy, in the best way:

We keep thinking that somehow we can change this. It cannot be changed under current conditions. Rather, think about how Christian communities, families, relationships and persons ought to live in light of it. They will need the help of each other — social and financial — to thumb their nose at the culture.

Happy weekend to you and yours, and prayers to everyone on the road and battening down the hatches in the face of Irma.