When I was a Spider

I went looking for emails related to my spider role and was pleased to discover I wrote it up for the Scottish Catholic Observer in 2017. The Guides have now grown up and our TLM demographics have shifted even more, so posting this is really an exercise in nostalgia.  

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Catholic lady without children must be in want of a Brownie troop. So my friend Julienne, the co-founder of the Guides of Saint Joseph, apparently believes. She brings up the possibility at the end of Committee meetings, and I am invited to Guide events. Sometimes Claire, the Guide Leader, just needs an extra adult around, but I suspect that a plot to overcome my reluctance to found the Brownies is afoot. 

When I first came to Scotland, I wondered at Mass where all the young women were. It was a strange quirk of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter’s Mass then that men outnumbered women 3:1. The choir were all men. The servers were (and are) all men. Young university men came on Sundays bleary-eyed from the night before. There were no other single women aged between 25 and 40; my husband-to-be proposed marriage within ten days of meeting me. This was quite nice, and I befriended the single women who appeared later, but there didn’t seem much for us to do. I couldn’t believe my eyes the Sunday a band of girls in navy berets and homemade Guide uniforms came marching up the aisle.  

The mothers had organized something! In my excitement, I suggested to the foundress that the Guides come to my house for tea. Ann, mother of four, smiled craftily and added me to her mental Rolodex. Before I knew it, there were eight Guides camping in our dining-room and two twenty-something leaders in possession of my study. I gave them lectures about Courageous Catholic Women, we fed them dinner on the front lawn, and we showed them the first half of Quo Vadis through a projector on the wall. The next morning, the leaders had the Guides up to do calisthenics and marched us all off to Mass.

The next step was to add me to the Committee. Thoroughly charmed by the girls and their leaders, I agreed to join. I was asked for the first time if I would like to become the future Brownie leader and was invited to go to the Guides’ weekend camp. 

The Guides of Saint Joseph are mad about camping. In the summer they camp for two weeks straight. They camp in all weathers. At this first weekend camp, I ended up on my knees, praying five decades of the Rosary in the mud. Since their French leaders belong to the Scouts and Guides of Riaumont, traditional Catholic devotions are at the heart of the Guides’ activities. 

The girls’ natural piety really warms the heart of an old Canadian Girl Guide like me. When I was a Girl Guide thirty-odd years ago, camping involved passing a copy of The Thorn Birds around a tent. When I helped out with the Guides of Saint Joseph’s summer camp, I overheard two dish-washers discussing the liturgy. I don’t think they know about The Thorn Birds, and they’d be horrified if I told them.   

The Guides had made a kitchen out of sticks, complete with space for the washbasins. By the end of the first week, they had a flagpole, a parade ground with benches, a kitchen, a latrine, showers, and three separate camps, one per patrol and one for the leaders. Their days began and ended with prayer. The campfires—which included songs, skits and dramatic presentations—involved an astonishing level of creativity. I thought the leaders’ play—in which Claire played Robert the Bruce and I played the famous spider---was clever, but the Guides put us to shame. Needless to say, Scottish history and citizenship is also very important to the Guides of Saint Joseph, who gather from all over Scotland.  

What kind of girls do we want to raise? I don’t have children myself, but as a resident of Scotland and a Catholic, I feel I have a stake in this question. If you are what you consume, and if girls consume nothing but pop culture, we may be in for a nation of wannabe glamour models and reality TV stars. Organisations like the Girl Guides of Saint Joseph offer a world apart from the smartphone; indeed they offer a world of camping, woodcraft, history, citizenship, creativity, sisterhood and living faith. They offer an antidote to adolescent angst and boredom. When they last got together, four of the teenaged Guides spent their Saturday dressed up in costumes playing whist, running around outdoors, and then acting out the French Revolution. 

“Did the aristos die well or screaming?” I asked.

“Oh, very well,” said their executioner. “They sang Aves.”

We never did found the Brownies.  Well, never say never, I suppose!