The £11 Hamburger, or Keeping Institutions Alive

Benedict Ambrose and I have been worried about our local Latin American restaurant. It has excellent steaks at affordable prices and dulce de leche cheesecake. Before lockdown it was busy on weekends but usually rather quiet during the week. After lockdown it was deserted, of course.

Now that lockdown has been greatly eased, we decided to abandon parsimony for an evening and have a meal at the steakhouse. B.A. put on his tweed jacket, and I put on my Sala Stampa dress, and off we went. To our surprise, the restaurant was rather busy.

The new femme maitre d' was cheerful behind her plastic visor and informed us that the restaurant has been popular since it reopened. We professed ourselves happy to hear this and ordered supper. B.A. reacted with exaggerated expressions of shock when I ordered a hamburger instead of a steak. It was delicious. Replete and satisfied that the restaurant would survive if we didn't have dessert, we decided not to have the dulce de leche cheesecake. Instead we went home to sleep as well as we could, given the entire bottle of Montanes we drank. I woke up at 5 AM.

(An aside: what is the point of eating beef and drinking red wine at 7 PM - 9 PM at night? Wouldn't it make more sense to have these things at lunchtime, so as to tackle the rest of the day with vim?  Or at least to have them for supper only if a night of dancing or some other vigorous activity is planned?)

I have finished reading Kwasniewski's Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Tradition, and in it he asks the reader to invite as many people as possible to the Traditional Latin Mass, so that they too can worship God in this beautiful and fitting way. He begs us to be nice to the people who arrive with purple hair or black fingernails, suggesting that they will get the hang of correct dress in time.

(Another aside: whereas purple hair strikes me as banal, I don't mind black fingernails myself, even on men. If a tall Goth-like chap in a long black trench coat and shiny black nails turns up at Mass, I will certainly buzz up to him in the carpark afterwards and invite him into the parish hall for a cup of tea.)

I agree with Kwasniewski's pleas, and one of my proudest accomplishments is evangelising people with my blog. One would-be convert, shocked by her local Mass, went online to find out about Latin Masses and found my blog. She was inspired by my  descriptions of the TLM it to seek out her local Oratorians. The Oratorians take would-be converts very seriously, and so today this lovely girl is a Catholic.

However, I feel that I must add somewhere that a TLM can be incredibly off-putting for the first-timer.

TLMers can also be incredibly off-putting, too. Thirty years ago (!) I was surprised at Mass in the ordinary form when a party of pro-lifers I knew suddenly knelt beside me while I was standing. I had stood at that part of the Mass all my little life. If I remember correctly, one of the pro-lifers my age tugged at my hem so I would kneel too. She explained later that the Mass itself was wrong, and I thought she was off her rocker. She explained about there being an Old Mass and that the Old Mass was the Right Mass, but I still thought she had gone over the edge into the Extreme.

However, I was curious enough about the Old Mass to go to one in my incredibly ugly and banal parish church. My childhood parish used to have a beautiful cruciform church on the principal street of our city. It was built around 1949. The land it was on, unfortunately, was worth millions by the 1980s, and so it was sold and a squat new church complex was built for us on a side street. Its only architectural connection with the old church is the stained glass windows. I'm very fond of those windows, and I learned about the Seven Sacraments from them before I could read.*

My pastor was, I now realise, a crypto-trad, and he had arranged (or allowed) for what was then called the Indult Mass to be said in his church once in awhile on Sunday afternoon. So one day I went, and it was the most boring thing ever. There were no instructions to be found. If I remember correctly, there was no sheet of paper with the readings. I didn't know such things as TLM missals existed. The church, being hideous, didn't raise my mind to heaven. I was disappointed and, what's more, didn't see the point. I didn't set foot in a TLM for the next 18 years.

The only reason why I went back to the TLM at all was because I went on holiday to Scotland and my host, who was about to be received into the Church, was a TLM enthusiast. I found everything very strange, and even rather frustrating, but I was very impressed by the intense silence. Everyone there seemed to be intently focussed on what was happening at all times. Having been liturgically brought up to focus on the community, I was very impressed by the piety of this community. Then I married my host, so good-bye to Bugnini.

Peter Kwasniewski thinks the Catholic Church is doomed without the TLM, and I suspect it will certainly be doomed in the West without the TLM. I will one-up Kwasniewski and say I think the West is doomed without the TLM because the TLM provides the spiritual foundation for parents bringing their children up in the classical tradition.

If there's anything we should have learned from the ecclesiastical debacle of the 1960s and 1970s, it's that a culture cannot survive having its foundations removed.  B.A. and I want our neighbourhood to thrive, and so we spend our money in local businesses. Wanting our Church to survive (and souls to thrive, we support the TLM.

*Nobody should underestimate how much theology children pick up from church art and architecture. My parents unintentionally went to the most lefty church in town when I was an infant and the wooden stations of the cross are carved into my brain. The 1970s baldacchino--a large ring set with light bulbs hanging from the ceiling--reinforced my impression that whatever was happening at the altar was very important.

The Last Mass

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Joseph. I made traditional Italian zeppole di San Giuseppe before getting down to work. I began work early, for I had obtained permission to knock off at five to go to Mass. It would be the last public Traditional Latin Mass approved by the Archdiocese, for the Scottish bishops have now suspended all public Masses because of the coronavirus.

Fortunately for my state of mind, I had just finished writing an article about Trump's announcement of the use of the malaria remedy hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19.  I was feeling hopeful and even took Benedict Ambrose's announcement that the 17:20 train had been cancelled in stride. 

"Call a taxi," I said and arrayed myself in, more or less, the blue outfit I wore to Polish Pretend Son's 2018 wedding. Not the hat. It was too cold for a straw hat. Instead I wore my "Russian" bearskin (teddy bearskin, really) hat, the one that makes me five inches taller. And I also wore my late friend Angela's pearls. I'm so glad Angela was not sick in the time of coronavirus. 

I dabbed on rose perfume, put on my "outdoor" gloves and got into the taxicab before B.A. The driver, who had been at home with his wife all day, was garrulous. The taxicab smelled of bleach. Business is terrible, we were assured, which is why our driver had been at home, waiting to be called out instead of looking for fares that simply aren't there. He had just bought his taxicab, so this is a bit of a worry, but he was more grateful than worried, having bought the least expensive car he could. He told an amusing story against Uber: apparently a young lady was recently kicked out of an Uber car after she sneezed and had to take a proper cab after all. 

The fare was £25, which is a lot for poor Mr. and Mrs. B.A., but we enjoyed the seeing the sun set over the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art One and also, as B.A. pointed out, its Neon announcement that "Everything is going to be alright." Then we kept a metre's distance from our fellow TLM devotees as we exchanged remarks about the pandemic going into the church. 

Well, what can I say about Mass? It was the Feast of St. Joseph, our priest wore white and gold. There were three young-man servers as well as John the Middle-Aged M.C. Silent Stuart, who is always the thurifer, was thurifer to the bitter end. There were Euan and Sam. They came out of the sacristy, processed down the Epistle side of the church and then up the central aisle. Mark (the Other Mark) sang the choir parts, and at one point his wife Annabel (a brilliant soprano) added assistance. 

There were none of the missals (left to us in Fra Freddie's will) or a Whyte Sheete for St. Joseph's Day, so if we didn't have our missals (I think I left mine in Father's house chapel) we had to rely on our Latin. My Latin is generally good enough for the Gospel, if not the Epistle. There were between 35 (my count) and 38 (Mark's count) of us altogether. Only eight of us were women; we seemed to be mostly young men--and a hitherto unknown dog. The dog sat by the back doors and occasionally complained.

In his homily, Father struck a cheerful note, assuring us that he would continue to say Mass and that he would pray for us as always. We could be confident that we would still receive all the graces that we would have had, had we continued going to Mass. However, I still though longingly of the 18th century, when at least the laity could have sneaked out into the countryside and found Mass awaiting us in the heather. (Possibly some delightfully fanatical Polish priest will row up the Firth of Forth and there will again be Mass in the heather.) 

After Mass, we all prayed the "Prayer in Times of Epidemics" from a new Whyte Sheete Father asked us to take home.  Then Other Mark began to sing a hymn to St. Joseph, which he (and at least one other young man) read from his smartphone. The chorus, which eventually we all learned to sing, is as follows:

Dear St. Joseph, spouse of Mary

blest above all saints on high,

When the death shades round us gather, 

teach, O teach us how to die, 

teach, O teach us how to die.

Apropos, no? I felt a bit sad again and had to remind myself of splendid hydroxychloroquine, second cousin, surely, to the good old Gin & Tonic. Also, the way to die, if you can manage it, is probably cheerfully, giving as little trouble to those around you as you can: very C.S. Lewis/G.K. Chesterton/the Queen. Or so I said to B.A. as we walked towards the dreaded bus stop in the gloom.

Some outraged local readers may wonder why they didn't know there was a 18:15 TLM for St. Joseph at the church yesterday.  One answer is that I found out through Facebook from Other Mark, so if you don't use Facebook you were out of luck. I was so burdened with cares that when I was thinking of people who ought to know, I thought only of an Austrian physicist--possibly because I knew he could walk there and would not be tempted to take a germy bus.  UPDATE: Another answer is that it was on the FSSP website, which too few of us read.) 

I am now fanatically anti-bus and got on a double-decker one last night only because, like B.A., I couldn't bear the thought of another £25 taxicab ride. A man four rows down coughed shallowly into his coat at intervals. For awhile I thought it was the young Pole beside his wife/girlfriend three rows back and looked with horror at his reflection in the window as he greeted an equally Polish pal, shook his hand, and the pal immediately put his shaken hand on a bus pole. Teach, O teach us how to die. But it was the chap behind him, after all.

"Trzymaj się," the maligned Pole said to his friend when latter went downstairs to alight in Portobello. Take care.

"Trzymaj się!"

Take care, everyone. My gloves, as per my sister-in-law's instructions, are going back into a 9:1 water-bleach solution.  

What Trads are Like

I have a bad cold, so here I am at home instead of going from one gym class to the next. As I don't feel like moving from this chair, I have perused Twitter, and I see that Dawn Eden made a Twitter attack on Catholics who go to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (aka Trads). Dr Shaw of the Latin Mass Society has responded.

I'm saddened by Dawn's attack on Trads in part because I met Dawn years ago at the Edith Stein Project at Notre Dame, and I was impressed by her energy and friendliness. I was glad to hear that she had thrown herself into theological studies and was impressed when she got her doctorate. As she became an authority on St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body, I was surprised that she has remained intensely loyal to Pope Francis. Naturally, it is normal for Catholics to be pugnacious in the defence of our pope, but normal does not describe this papacy.    

Anyway, Dawn has retweeted a Patheos blogger's belief that anti-Semitism has found a "cozy home" among Trads, and Dr Shaw has pointed out that this is libel. And I too think it is libel.

I have heard more anti-Semitic remarks from Catholics who go to the Ordinary Form (5) than I have from Catholics who prefer the Extraordinary Form (2), and they have been so few and far between that I remember them all. Anti-Jewish remarks are (or were) such a taboo where I come from that every one burns itself on my brain.

People who go to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass are not really a sub-culture, you know. We are just Catholics who go to the Extraordinary From of the Mass. There are sub-cultures among us, of course. There are, for example, young men whose guide to life is Brideshead Revisited. Then there are young homeschooling families. There are the wheelchair-bound and their families. There are also elderly ladies whose lives are given over to good works.

In Britain there are librarians and solicitors and carpenters and the occasional aristocrat. There are people who go to the EF every day, and there are those who go only on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. There are people who are very interested in every detail of a Missa Cantata, and there are those who prefer a nice quiet Low Mass. There are people who go to FSSP Masses exclusively, and people who go to SSPX Masses exclusively, and people who will daringly go to both.

One suggestion about people who go to the EF that I am willing to entertain is that there is a noticeable number of ideological non-conformists among them. First of all, there are fewer of us, so non-conformists are more noticeable. Second, going to the EF at all is a non-conformist activity. If you are the kind of person who worries about what people think of you, you're not going to go to the Extraordinary Form--unless, of course, your friends and family all do.

Anti-Semitism does not strike me as a pressing issue among Catholics who go to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. What is a pressing issue is Catholics who go to the Novus Ordo being nasty about and to Catholics who go to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. Since I've already mentioned it on Twitter, I will repeat that a local EF-goer was recently refused a cup of water by a local NO-goer who was standing at the sink of the parish hall.

"You can have a cup of water after your Mass," she apparently said.

Dear heavens. I have heard some stories about local anti-EF feeling, but really takes the cake.

It may be true that individual people who prefer the Extraordinary Form make personal remarks about people because they prefer the Ordinary Form, but I haven't heard any. (EF people occasionally do complain about the OF itself, e.g. "a fabrication, a banal product of the moment".)

But I have heard people who prefer the Ordinary Form make snide remarks about people who attend the Extraordinary Form on more than one occasion--including in church, after the OF Mass, blissfully unconcerned about making detractions before the Blessed Sacrament.

My theory is that Catholic tribalism doesn't know what to do with itself now that age-old resentment of Protestants is totally unacceptable and banned, and so those Catholics who feel it most keenly vent it on Catholics who won't just get with the liturgical program.  However, that strikes me as spiritually destructive, and I think I will post that deep thought to Twitter.

More Cheerful about Chartres

A doctor has poked my tick bite and made a cheerful prognosis, so I will not worry for now and meanwhile just put her prescribed cream on my rashy ankles. This means I am mentally free to write my LSN article about the actual Chartres Pilgrimage, not about the tick.

However, I will leave some extra baggage here because one of the best things I did for myself three years ago was write a blogpost of advice for people going on future Chartres Pilgrimages.

My caveat is that les Etrangers (foreigners) are NOT supposed to bring personal tents anymore. There is simply not enough space in the foreigners' section for those who rebel against sleeping in the communal tents, packed like pickled onions. If you cannot steel yourself to sleeping 2 inches away from people you've just met (women with women, men with men), then the Chartres Pilgrimage is not currently for you. (Perhaps in future there will be more space in the communal tents.)

Three Years On: Additional Advice 

1. There are ticks. Bring and apply insect repellant as soon as you reach the first park on the outskirts of Paris. Pack a super-light groundsheet as well as your sit-upon and shake it before putting it back on your bag. Every night take 5 minutes before you go to sleep every night of the pilgrimage to examine your body thoroughly with a flashlight. Bring tweezers as well as antiseptic wipes.

2. You have no time in the morning for coffee, so prepare.  Happily, I knew this and so made instant coffee-laced breakfast bars on Friday morning. Yes, I planned to literally rub coffee into my gums. I ate these coffee bars during the beginning of each day's march (6 AM) and at about coffee time (4 PM). No caffeine withdrawal: it was awesome.

3. There is bottled water at every campsite. I mention this because on Saturday, I carried a litre of water all afternoon so I was assured of cooling my feet in the evening. This was stupid, but for some reason I could not let go of that heavy bottle. When you are walking 20+ miles, every ounce of weight drags you down. On Sunday I did not make this mistake.

4. You can buy collapsible washtubs. Because large suitcases are really horrible to drag through Paris, Chartres and the campsites, I took a backpack this time. My ordinary washtub didn't fit, so I found a collapsible one online. It is totally worth the money and any trouble.

5. Assume that anything that can leak will leak. When I arrived at my Paris hotel room shortly before 11 PM (flight delayed 1.5 hours, couchemar), I discovered that my little bottle of liquid soap had emptied over everything in my first aid kit bag. I also discovered that my talcum powder had similarly opened itself in the side pocket of my backpack. After rinsing and drying everything of soap (I didn't mind the talcum powder that leaked onto my tent bag), I took the two flat packets of liquid soap conveniently offered by the hotel. I used these to wash my feet on Saturday and Sunday. I dealt with the rest of me with biodegradable wipes from the privacy of my clandestine tent. (I didn't discover it was banned until Saturday.)  Therefore:

6. Save and bring 2 hotel liquid soap sachets for your collapsible washtub.

7. Really, really ponder if you should bring a computer. I meant to write about the Pilgrimage on Tuesday morning, which was overly optimistic. You will be too tired on Tuesday to use your brain for anything much. You get max 6 hours of sleep a night every night of the Pilgrimage, and even if you get 8 or 9 on Monday night, you still will not be fully functioning. Therefore, it is best not to bring the computer, and to inform your workplace that you will not be checking in until Wednesday.

(My computer, by the way, was kindly driven to Chartres by a very busy French official, whom I wasted a great deal of time trying to find in Chartres, and who finally left it at my hotel.)

8. Never assume anyone French, even a young person, speaks English. As a matter of fact, I did not do so badly with my French, even though really it is appalling for a Canadian and someone who has five family members who are completely fluent in la belle langue. Were I to go on the Chartres Pentecost Pilgrimage again (which is not certain, as there is the 'communal tents only' issue), I would not only start practising walking long distances sometime during Lent, I would start doing some French review.  

9. If you decide to go last minute to the Chartres Pilgrimage, you will suffer more than if you decide in advance. "Only Christians would deliberately make themselves suffer," I thought in a somewhat exasperated fashion. "This is not a yoga retreat." If you'd rather suffer less than more, you need to prepare well in advance: practice walking long distances well in advance so you do less damage to yourself. The Knights of Malta first aiders (bless them!) refuse to treat blisters because EVERYBODY gets blisters. Another problem with signing up at the last minute is that there might not be enough room for your foreign self in the communal tent assigned to your chapter. The president of the Pilgrimage said, I think on Sunday before Mass, that the Pilgrimage was more and more difficult to plan every year, in part because of the huge increase in foreign pilgrims. Your humble correspondent won smiles from other women in our Chapter when I gave up my space in the communal tent, erected my illegal 2-man shelter, and said, "Good news, girls, you're getting a tent mate who is a lot thinner than me!"

This was a beautifully elegant Australian who decided to come almost at the last minute and walked for two days in flat leather sandals, a straight knee-length skirt and a very French-looking scarf around her head. On the third day I noticed she had trainers (runners) instead, and no wonder. At any rate, I admired her ability to look so amazing for two days of the Chartres Pilgrimage and I was proud to give her my place in the communal tent. That said, on Sunday night there was no longer any room in the communal tent, and she had to go and sleep in one of the North American tents.

10. When your feet are wet, contemplate the feet of the others around you. My interior life was not fabulous for the first two days of the Pilgrimage, but I made a breakthrough on Whitmonday. Part of this was meditating on the feet of those around me. Because I thought about how wet and painful their feet were, my feet bore me more easily. Also pain, like hunger, comes in waves when you are on a forced march. You just walk through it.

11. Always carry dry socks in your day bag. Not doing so is quite the rookie error.

12. Do not put your cute Chartres dinner outfit in your computer bag, if you bring your computer and a French official drives it to Chartres for you. Because my computer bag and I were not reunited until after 11 PM,  I went to dinner in the black long-sleeved T-shirt I used as my inner pyjamas and my now very dirty Indestructible Blue Denim Maxi-skirt of Feminine Traddery. I wished very much that I had just squished it into my main backpack, which was driven to campsite to campsite and then to Chartres by truck and left in a specific place.

13. 60€-70€ is about right for carrying-around money. I brought 50€. I left a 10€ tip at each hotel (Paris and Chartres) and spent 30€ on Monday supper. However, I did need a little extra for Tuesday, and so had to walk a bit to find a bank machine. A simple breakfast at Le Serpente (coffee, juice, croissant, bread, butter, jam) costs 9 €.

14. Don't let your sunglasses fall out of your pocket and pile your baggage/sleep on top of them or they will break.

15. The Pilgrimage now provides hand sanitiser, but either make sure you use one that does not dry out your cuticles, or put balm on them at night. My fingers are still sore, alas, and it seemed like an age before I could get home to my friendly bathroom jar of coconut oil. 

16. If you have a clandestine tent, make sure you dry it ASAP, which might be overnight in your Chartres hotel room (if you remember), but will probably be the night of your return home.

Now to write my piece for LSN.

Notre Dame de Paris

Watching Notre Dame de Paris burn down over my computer was not at all like watching the Twin Towers fall across library television screens on 9/11.

I was saddened rather than horrified. Nobody died in the Notre Dame conflagration whereas while the Twin Towers fell viewers thought over ten thousand people were in them.  9/11 was the Hindenburg disaster x 1000 + terrorists.

Of course, the Twin Towers themselves were just modernist monstrosities, even if symbolic of the growing wealth of nations, whereas Notre Dame de Paris is a, if not the, symbol of Western Civilisation itself.

I have been to Notre Dame de Paris twice: once in 1999--and I don't remember much about that--and once three years ago or so, when I went on the Chartres Pilgrimage. I lost the Scottish pilgrim group outside the great cathedral, and so I wiggled in through the doors to find them. Once I was in, I soon gave up and just knelt by a group of French Girl Guides. The stone was cold and grey, Mass was very long, and the homily and speeches a reproof to my ill-maintained Canadian high school French. I had arrived late at night,  had had very little sleep, and had made myself a terrible breakfast in my hotel room.

It turns out my group wasn't in the Cathedral at all. There were so many Chartres pilgrims that thousands of them had to hear the Mass outside. The Scots had been, instead, allocated space in Chartres Cathedral at the end of the pilgrimage. Naturally I now think that was a very fortunate mistake on my part. Although my abiding memory of Notre Dame was discomfort, at least I worshipped there when it was whole.

It astonishes me that Notre Dame de Paris has lasted this long. But it is also amazing that it survived 1944 and not 2015. Watching Notre Dame burn, I kept thinking "410: the Burning and Sacking of Rome."  (This was a mantra I invented as a teenager to remember my parents' license plate number; after the trauma of Grade 10 Math I became next-door to numerically illiterate.)

The Burning and Sacking of Rome was worse than Notre Dame burning down, as horrible things happened to the Romans, not just the buildings. However, it ushered in the era in which Western Civilisation came its closest to collapsing, and watching Notre Dame burn was like seeing the physical manifestation of cultural trends I read and write about all day.

However, Rod Dreher's ultimates thoughts on the topic are more hopeful and happy than mine, so off you go to American Conservative to read them. Meanwhile, the only foolproof way to preserve Western Civilisation, which is to say Christendom in its Sunday best, is not in fragile buildings but in ourselves and our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, pupils and students.

Update: Here, also, is Michael Brendan Dougherty writing about the Repair Notre Dame fundraising campaign in 2017.

Mystery of Galaretka Solved!

Once I was a mighty blogger... Oh well!

Devoted readers will have divined that I am very, very, very busy with a series of news article for work. The house is a mess, my Polish lessons have been put to the side (mostly), my snail mail correspondence goes neglected ...

Somehow, though, I will drag myself back to my normal schedule--the one that involves dusting, hoovering, studying Polish for an hour, and studying German for 20 minutes. Today my Polish tutor came by, and I was still able to hold a comprehensible conversation, so that's good news.

Another bit of good news is that someone on Facebook linked to this excellent, informative blog. The woman makes her own pączki; I am amazed.  The linker linked to this, however, as an example of food that should never be eaten. Naturally the linker is wrong: it looks absolutely delicious. And now I understand what karp w galarecie means. It is a phrase from Polish in 4 Weeks Part 2 that I never bothered looking up. Clearly it is "carp in aspic", which I will not be making, for nobody, not even a Pole, really likes carp.

Looking at "Polish Your Kitchen" makes me long for Easter. I love making Polish Easter Breakfast; if you're reading this because you hate my LSN coverage, perhaps that will humanise me a bit in your eyes. Is there anything more revolutionary than sausage soup and jam tart for breakfast? Well--maybe chicken Jello for supper! Woo hoo!

Benedict Ambrose and I prepared for Lent on Pancake Tuesday by going to an Argentine restaurant for steaks and Malbec instead.  He had French fries with his; I had fried onions. We split some sort of Argentinian almond tart for pudding; dulche de leche featured. It was all glorious. We will return on Easter Monday.

The next day we went to Ash Wednesday Mass according the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite and afterwards broke our fast with cheese-and-onion pasties from the train station. There was a goodly quantity of diced potatoes mixed in with the cheese and onion, and it was positively the definition of British Lenten food: stodgy carbohydrates.

This should be the most humbling time of the year for Latin Rite Catholics. The Islamic Ramadan Fast is based on the Lenten Fast of 6th/7th century Christians, which shows how far we've fallen since then. The Greek Catholics--or at least their priests, monks and women, not to mention the Greek and every other kind of Orthodox--or at least their priests, monks and women--leave us Latins in the dust.  When they mock us, we should admit that they are just and weep tears of sorrow and repentance.

It was very embarrassing to see, on a TRAD Facebook page, Trad Catholics encouraging each other to eat great cuts of meat on the Thursday between Ash Wednesday and Friday.  Well, it was not so embarrassing that I wouldn't mention it on my blog. I write about  Catholics scandals all day long, so here's one about us Trads. No feast without a fast, people (unless you're under 18, pregnant, ill or have or had eating disorders).

The Radical Feminism of John Paul II

This was first published in the Toronto Catholic Register in 2012. I was looking for it today. As cynical politicians and others depend on our shortened memories, it is important to witness to events and people one remembers. I believe it is going to be very, very important for devout Catholics to remember whatever they can of Saint John Paul 2, the good and the bad, study his works, and fight for his "Gospel of Life" legacy. Here's what I wrote about his respect for the dignity of women.

The Radical Feminism of John Paul II 

I’ve been invited to give four talks to Polish women on retreat at the Redemptorists’ retreat centre in Krakow. One of my topics is “John Paul II and Mulieris Dignitatem,” and if you are wondering if the thought of giving a talk—in English—in Polish women in Krakow about Blessed John Paul II is intimidating, the answer is “Yes.”

Canadian Catholics know how beloved John Paul was and is to his fellow Poles. What we might not remember is how much respect he had for women. When I was a child—and a teenager—and a young adult—I constantly heard muttering of how John Paul II didn’t like women. Even Catholic women complained about the Pope’s lack of concern for women:  this usually meant the Pope’s refusal to magically declare that it was now okay to ordain women priests. Thus, when I finally got around to reading John Paul II’s theology of women, I was blown away by how radical it really is. 

The major sources for John Paul II’s theology of women are Love and Responsibility, Mulieris Dignitatem (“On the Dignity of Women”) and his 1993 “Letter to Women.”  Love and Responsibility is associated more with sex and marriage and, of course, has touched off a huge “Theology of the Body” industry.  As such, it does not interest me as much as Mulieris Dignitatem and “Letter to Women,” which are more about women in ourselves. The key to John Paul’s theology of woman can be found in his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows that his motto “Totus Tuus” (“All Yours”) refers to her. And it is not a surprise, either, that someone who lost his earthly mother at the age of eight might adopt our Lady so totally as his mother and guide.  And it is significant, of course, that Mulieris Dignitatem was published on the Feast of the Assumption during a Marian year. 

John Paul begins his reflections with a meditation on the Annunciation.  A woman was asked to be the means through which God would send his Son to redeem the world—but not just as means, but as a mother. And thus, of all the human race, it is a woman who “attains a union with God that exceeds all the expectations of the human spirit.” As a human being, Mary represents the humanity that belongs to all human beings, men and women.  And she is a model for both men and women because she said “Yes” to God. As her Son would later identify himself as a servant, so Mary during the Annunciation also calls herself the “maidservant of the Lord.” It is the dignity of both women and men to serve. 

Service to God and others is fundamental to John Paul II’s theology of what it means to be a human being in union with God. And he notes, both in Mulieris Dignitatem and in his “Letter to Women”, that women seem to have both a special genius for receiving the Word of the Lord and in serving others. Following the work of Saint Edith Stein, he asserts that all women, not just women with children, are called to be mothers. It involves “a special readiness to be poured out for the sake of those who come within one’s range of activity.” It involves being open to each and every person. And this is not proscriptive, incidentally, but descriptive.  John Paul is well aware of the many ways in which women have always poured themselves out for others, ways that have not always been as respected as they should be.

And that’s where things get radical.  Moving beyond St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Edith Stein, who both believed that woman was made for man, to be the companion of man, John Paul asserts that woman was made for herself, as the human being—male and female--was the only creature made for himself. Woman is called to be the companion of man, but man is also called to be the companion of woman. All humanity is thus “a unity in two.” Again and again John Paul repeats that men and women are equal in dignity. Masculinity is no more important than femininity.  He lists and deplores the way in which discrimination has hurt women since the Fall.  He interprets Saint Paul’s thoughts about married life as a call, not for wives to be subjugated to their husbands, but for “mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ.”

John Paul offers our Lord Jesus Christ as a model for how men should treat women. He notes that our Lord behaved in a counter-cultural way by how he spoke with women, healed women, included women amongst his followers and friends. The Gospels are full of stories of women of age and condition, all of whom our Lord treated with kindness and respect. Men who do not treat women with kindness and respect sin both women’s dignity and their own.   

The Quiet of Good and the Glamour of Evil

I have been in bed with either the flu or food poisoning for two days. Too wretched for most of Monday to do anything but sleep or  stare at the horrible lampshade on the ceiling (which came with the flat) by evening I felt briefly well enough to watch something on Netflix.

Netflix is a morass of evil dressed up as entertainment, I concluded after B.A. and I watched Anthony Bourdain drag himself around the world to hang out with local chefs, curse and eat too much. In the end, Bourdain committed suicide offscreen, and it might have been the flu talking, but I concluded it was the show itself that was to blame. Apparently Bourdain was exhausted, so why didn't he just lock the door and sleep for three days? Or check himself into the hospital? But I suppose a production company can't sue a dead man.

Anyway, sick in bed but feeling somewhat (if temporarily) better, I scrolled through Netflix moaning, "Why isn't there anything Catholic?" At last I found Moonstruck, which is the Christmas go-to film for many of the women of my family. We can quote from it extensively ("Chrissy, bring me the KNIFE!"), but I hadn't see it for a while.

It started off well, and as B.A. was now home from work, I nudged him whenever a holy picture, pinned up in several Italian-owned Brooklyn shops, was in shot. I got quite teary eyed over that. The weak part of the film is, of course, the scene-chewing of Nicholas Cage ("HUH, sweetie?") and the evil part is Cage telling Cher (e.g. Loretta Castorini, surely a heroine for single/widowed women aged 37) that he doesn't care if she goes to hell as long as she gets into his bed.

Cage, as Ronnie Cammareri, makes an odd little speech including the idea that we aren't on the earth to love "the right people": "We are here to love the wrong people, to break our hearts, and die." That is a dangerous and stupid philosophy, and ridiculous in this context as Ronnie is clearly not at all the "wrong person" for Loretta for several reasons. She even knows his family, for heaven's sake, although, yes, it's inconvenient that she's engaged to his brother.*

The film ends well for the Castorini and Cammareri families. I, however, was suddenly and violently and disgustingly ill, so I stayed in bed another day and eventually binge-watched Sherlock.

The contemporary Sherlock is cleverly photographed, written, and acted, and if Sherlock is to be believed the best and most love-worthy women are high-class hookers and paid assassins. The sweet pathologist with her heart on her sleeve is a loser, and the respectable-looking landlady is a retired stripper. Yes, I see that it is good TV to overturn viewers' expectations, but the endless nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "everybody's bent" message is worst than wearisome, it's wicked.

I was frankly relieved to find myself having an instant message conversation with two theologate classmates, a priest and a married mum of four. The priest (who was eating supper) dropped out soon, but the mum kept on and thanked me for the work I do for LSN. This was quite heartening because it is actually very difficult to wade through the sludge every work day, scooping for the most harmful pieces of sludge, so I can say to the reading public, "Look, here's the sludge you really need to worry about."

And families really do need to worry about the sludge, as this column by Rod Dreher illustrates. The sludge is waiting to come into every house via the television or the computer or the radio or the child's homework assignment. Some Catholic families still have little stoups of holy water. The original idea was to ward off any demons who might leap onto you after you leave your holy Christian house and expel any demons who clung to you when you came back in. Whereas I do believe in real, take-possession-of-foolhardy-people demons, I think the average person is much more in danger of tracking, or inviting, really bad ideas into the house.

And the horror of the really bad ideas is that they cause mass suffering. Compared to the 19th century, for the western world, or to 1980, for everywhere outside the western world, we are all so materially rich, and yet there is so much unhappiness. White American men are committing suicide in droves, for example, apparently thanks to the sexual revolution. And yet insane numbers of girls have decided to have their breasts cut off and become white American men. What?!

All this evil and all this unhappiness is terribly exciting, but the truth is that happiness, like goodness, is rather quiet. The other day I had the good fortune to eat lunch with a traditional Catholic family. This is Scotland, so the fact that they live in an Arts-and-Craft neo-mediaeval cottage is not particularly notable, except that it added to a very timeless scene: a young mother and father and their many children of different sizes all gathered around a stone hearth, watching the flames after a good lunch. Apart from the fact that everyone was healthy and clean and the mother's and my skirts ended mid-calf, it could have been any year after the invention of the standard chimney (in northern Europe, 11th or 12th century, apparently).

There was a Disney cartoon playing in a different room, and the children drifted in and out, apparently torn between the video and interest in what the adults were doing, which was not very much: just talking, holding or feeding the baby, and looking at the fire. And I was struck by how very peaceful, happy and good this all was, and how very rich in all the important ways this family was.

Gainfully employed man + patient woman + healthy children + roof + hearth = happiness.

The children are homeschooled, by the way; the sludge I wade through for work and entertainment is kept well away from the beautiful A&C doors and windows. I really am not sure of how much of a chance other parents have of passing on such a quiet, happy and good life to their children without homeschooling and keeping the internet, trash-music and trash-TV out of their homes. However, I suppose everything I write these days has the potential of inspiring one more parent to say, "Enough. We're homeschooling from now on" or "Enough. We're not going to allow Netflix to turn our kids into zombies."

Naturally I was a little sad that my home doesn't have a fireplace, let alone any children, in it. My generation was told in a million ways that being a stay-at-home mother was the waste of a life and that homeschooling was a sure sign of "religious mania." Now, of course, I can think of no vocation for women more important than that of the homeschooling married mother--unless, of course, it is the prayers of cloistered nuns keeping the end of the world at bay.

*Since I haven't mentioned this for some time, I will repeat that the whole point of the story of Romeo and Juliet was that the only reason their marriage would have been inadmissible to their families was their fathers' dumb feud. They shared the same religious faith, the same culture, the same class, and even the same town. Shakespeare's point was not that there is "unity in diversity," but that personal feuds are harmful to society. My own philosophy of marriage is that if husband and wife share the same core values (which may not be shared ethnic and religious identities, but very often are), then they will probably be happy.

Trim the Hearth and Set the Table!

After Mass today a parishioner mentioned that I had written many articles for LSN this week, which surprised him. He thought that perhaps we would slow down towards Christmas. Ho, ho, ho, as Santa Claus would say.

I don't remember what I wrote earlier this week, but I turned in three stories on Thursday and two stories on Friday, and then I danced a little Friday-at-7:15-PM jig and rushed off to the kitchen to make 3 dozen pierogi.

It is the Fourth Sunday in Advent, and your humble correspondent has been preparing for Christmas as much as I can, given my full-time job. I turned to Facebook to ask job-working mothers how on earth they do it, and they said (in sum) that they do what they can when they can do it. One suggested prioritising, e.g. writing Christmas cards instead of vacuuming.

I didn't feel I could give up vacuuming, and I prioritised pierogi over getting to the post office, so the Christmas cards didn't go out until yesterday. However (and more importantly), the big parcel of presents for my family in Canada has arrived intact. That was at the very top of my To-Do list, once B.A. and I discovered we wouldn't be going to Canada for Christmas ourselves.

We are going to our friends' place in the countryside of Fife for Christmas Lunch. But tomorrow we are having a Polish Wigilia (Christmas Vigil) supper, and I have enjoyed myself immensely making as many Wigilia dishes as I can ahead of time.

No matter which region in Poland you are from (and as PPS's Pretend Mother, I culturally appropriate from  Lwów), pierogis are crucial at Christmas time. They are tricky to make. Because I haven't made them in awhile, I asked my Polish tutor to come over and give me a refresher course. Frankly, the best advice I can give any non-Pole about pierogi making is to get a nice Polish woman to come over and make them for you. Even if she is only 20, she will have had 15 years experience in making pierogis with her grandmother aka My Babcia.

"This reminds me of making pierogi with My Babcia," enthused 20-something Anna on Thursday morning at 9:45ish, and then I thought about my own Scottish-Canadian grandmother off and on all day, even though I strongly doubt she ever ate a pieróg in her life, much less made one.

I was going to write a step-by-step guide to making pierogi, but I am too sleepy. Instead I recommend that you find a good tutorial on YouTube. Anna's favourite recipe is here, and it is a good one. (Paste it into Google Translate.)  It made the easiest-to-handle pierogi dough I've ever met.  Meanwhile, I will pass along some of Anna's tips, which were:

1. Don't put too much filling in the middle.
2. Wet the edges of every pieróg circle with warm water, using your finger.
3. Mash down the edges with a fork, and then flip over and mash the edges down with a fork again.

As a result of Anna's recipe and good advice, none of my uszki (soup pierogi) and only two of my pierogi leaked in the boiling water. I have made pierogi with cheese and potatoes and pierogi with mushroom and cabbage. They are now in the freezer. In addition to these, I have made kompot (stewed fruit) and kompot (juice from the stewed fruit) and kutia, which is a poppyseed pudding eaten from Warsaw to Moscow, I imagine, and in the households of those who were booted out of Eastern Poland when the borders changed in 1945.  I have also made two sweet little jam jars of herring salads, and at a certain point I realised that even though I promised B.A. I would not make the traditional twelve dishes for Wigilia, I am probably going to do it by accident.

So I confessed to B.A. and he said he didn't mind if I made all 12 as long as I didn't make myself miserable. And I won't be miserable, especially as he is going to make the salmon dish.

I have already made the cake to go into my British-Canadian trifle... and this is where I realise I probably sound a bit mad. But you have to understand that my mother makes hundreds of cookies of a dozen different kinds every Christmas before she makes all our traditional Christmas Day foodstuffs. Both my mother and I (and probably my youngest sister) both really enjoy Christmas baking, and it was a moment of great disappointment when I realised I just do not have the time to bake any more cookies before Christmas Day. Weep, weep.

As for the tree... Every year we put off getting the tree until the 23rd or so because, traditionalists to the bone, we don't like decorating for Christmas before Christmas Eve. Because Scots start buying their trees on December 1, there has always been a risk that B.A. and I wouldn't be able to find a tree on the 23rd. Today was that day. However, I said a prayer and lo: there were two small trees-in-pots in Aldi for £4.99. So now we have a small tree-in-pot, and apparently B.A. is going to decorate it tomorrow.

I will now respond to a few comments. Work has been so busy, I really haven't had the time to read comments, let alone write on the blog.

Advent 1

It's Advent, so I am in the mood for purple. I have ordered a purple tablecloth and purple candles. I have even recoloured my blog, as you can see. 

The music was extra-splendid at the Edinburgh Missa Cantata this morning. There was lots of singing in which the humble people in the pews were allowed to take part. We had the Advent Prose ("Rorate  caeli"), the Hymn of the Advent Office ("Conditor alme siderum") and the Advent hymn to Our Lady ("Alma redemptoris mater"). 

Is "Christe, redemptor omnium" for Advent, Christmas or Epiphany? Whichever one it is, I hope we get Monteverdi's this year. 

I love Advent music. When B.A. and I got home from Mass, I found a long album of Advent carols on youtube and began to wrap Christmas presents. Wrapping presents on December 2 is my all-time record for earliness. It's partly because I have to send the parcel to Canada sooner rather than later, and it's partly because I feel badly I didn't make the Christmas cake two-to-four weeks ago. I was hoping B.A. would be allowed to travel to Canada, and I didn't want to jinx it by making the cake.  Thus, there will be no proper Christmas cake this year.  I will bake every traditional thing else. 

Although the homily had nothing to do with martyrdom, I worried a lot about Audrey's assisted suicide. I read Lord of the World: I know what happens next. What happens next is that Catholics are called cruel for standing in the way of easy, painless deaths and not allowing them in our hospitals.  Then, just as I had to turn down offers of IVF almost every time I talked to doctors about my chances of having a baby, many of us are likely to be offered "medically assisted death" when we are at our weakest, most painful ebb. 

And that made me think about that lady in the Catholic religious articles shop in the US--and if you don't know the story, please don't look for it, for it is the most ghastly, grotesque, and horrid American atrocity story I've read in months, if not years. To make a horrible story short, a brave Catholic wife-and-mother looked down the barrel of a gun and decided she'd rather be shot than do what the gunman told her to do.  I hope and pray I would have her guts. 

But it might be even harder to say no to a caring nurse with the merciful needle than to a villain with a gun, which led me to my next thought: how does one train oneself to say no to the needle?

I suppose the way forward may be to not only to fast periodically so as to actually feel hungry as pain but to confront other kinds of pain, like getting up at 5 AM, doing one too many pushups every day, or learning how to do one's own outrageously complicated taxes. 

St. Ignatius of Loyola was very down on the idea of his Society overdoing it on penances, but it strikes me that penance might be a kind of training and as long as you don't do yourself a damage, it may bear fruit later. 

I have almost finished reading Peter Kwasniewski's Tradition & Sanity: Conversations & Dialogues of a Postconciliar Exile, so keep an eye out for my review. It should appear this week. 

Polish Pretend Son's Wedding Mass

Polish Pretend Son loves the Traditional Mass so much, he hopes this video of his and Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law's wedding helps to spread devotion to the Rite.

If you watch carefully, you may even see me under an enormous blue hat. (Hint: I am not the pretty Welsh blonde who is also wearing a large blue hat.)

I will have more to post and much more to say about the wedding. Isn't the bride beautiful?

Caveat: There is not a word of English in this video. When it is not Latin, it is Polish. But it is so gorgeous, that shouldn't matter.

Caveat 2: The groom also has fond memories of his years in the UK, so there are some unusually British elements at this Mass. First, Polish women tend not to wear fancy hats to weddings; female guests were specifically asked to wear them. Second, the groom's attire is very Saville Row-ish, if not, as I fear it may be, actually from Saville Row. Third, the entrance antiphon sounds very British indeed.

The bride and groom arriving together to Mass is, however, the normal Polish custom.  The groom has already bribed the bridesmaids at the bride's door, and the bridal pair have been blessed by their parents.

Burying the Cake

Memoir can be a face-squinchingly embarrassing practice. One runs the risk of looking pathetic and banal. However, human beings are--let us face it--pathetic and banal compared to the animals, let along the angels, and yet God loves us. And sometimes there is beauty in the pathos--or at least a salutary lesson.

For example, yesterday I buried our wedding cake. In old-fashioned British-Canadian tradition, a bridal couple saves the top tier of their wedding cake for the child's baptism. This, traditionally, is fruitcake, and a proper fruitcake is edible for years, let alone nine or ten months after it is made. The Christmas cakes you will purchase in December may very well have been made last winter, and it is no big deal.

Since I was determined to follow whichever old-fashioned British-Canadian traditions would not shock our guests, I certainly kept the top of our wedding cake. Alas, we never had a child, so this cake has hung around in an old ice-cream container for almost a decade. My mother says we should have served it at our fifth anniversary, but I hadn't given up on the baby yet and, anyway, it was starting to dawn on me that nobody really wants to eat old fruitcake. The fruitcake had become a symbol, really, like when I didn't move out of the choir loft for years because my plan was to leave when the baby arrived. Leaving before the baby came meant giving up on the baby.

Now it's understandable that this is all very sad. The question is, Is it socially acceptable to write about?

I wonder because after I buried the wedding cake yesterday morning, there was a minor crisis when the movers took off with a bag of things I actually wanted to keep, and I burst into tears. As an Ikea bag of wooden hangers and a shoe rack is not really worth crying about, the issue was clearly the cake. The only things to do to get over it, I thought, was to have a good cry in the bathtub (as close to sound-proof as anywhere in the new flat) and then write about it.

However, it was now 11 AM and time for work, so instead of writing about it on my blog, I wrote about it for LifeSiteNews, adding some trenchant thoughts on the evils of IVF.  I fear the readers of LSN are going to think I'm a real moaner, given that my LSN blog pieces tend to be about such domestic catastrophes as "My husband has a brain tumour." But I also feared someone--a non-fan--would write it, "Being childless is your own fault for having got married so old, you stupid woman. Why don't you adopt? Oh, you can't afford it? Well, that's your own fault too, isn't it? Stop whining."

The non-fans of my imagination are really mean.

The slings and arrows of outrageous non-fans are risks I'm willing to run in order to say what I want to say in print. The question of fitness may concern the motive: unhealthy self-absorption ("Everyone must feel my pain!) or solidarity with other childless people? Or a warning to young married couples that if they leave child-having too late, they will never have children?

Personally, I thought that there was a certain grandeur in a middle-aged woman (any middle-aged woman) burying the cake she hoped to eat (or at least look at) at her first child's christening. It was certainly more respectful to the concept of motherhood than throwing it in the bin.

Update: So far one "Why didn't you adopt?" type comment and one "That was HER choice. I'm Catholic, I used AID [Artificial Insemination with Donor--I looked it up],  I don't regret it" Oh my. You do have to have a tough skin in this Op/Ed business.

Signs and Wonders

So now it is a year since the morning I prayed all 15 decades of the Rosary on the one-hour commute to my husband's hospital the day after his make-or-break operation.

It was the 100th anniversary of the last apparition of Fatima, and the trad (and mad) continent of the Catholic blogosphere had been rife with rumours that Something Bad would happen. Since my future now hinged on how brain-damaged B.A. was going to be, it did not seem at all megalomanic to ask Our Lady that the day's Great Event be instead that B.A. have a complete recovery.

I  did not know if B.A. would recognise me ever again, so it was a great relief when I arrived beside his bed in Intensive Care and it was clear that he did. He couldn't speak, however, as he had a ghastly breathing apparatus down his throat, and eventually his nurse, and then several nurses and doctors had much ado preventing him from tearing at it.

While the battle raged, I was sent out of Intensive Care, only to be called in again because after the machine was removed B.A. started screaming and carrying on, and they thought I could calm him down.

Like many delirious people, he thought he was dying, but B.A. also wanted Mass said for him while he did, so as soon as he laid eyes on me he yelled, "Darling, darling, call Father E, I'm dying ---and her Immaculate Heart will triumph!"

B.A.'s brain surgeon was tremendously pleased that B.A. could breathe on his own and was in such feisty spirits although you can bet that soon after I left (about 8 hours later) B.A. was pumped full of sedatives. He was not so feisty when I saw him the next morning, let me tell you.

For three days he repeated that Our Lady's Immaculate Heart would triumph. The first day he yelled this over and over. The next day, his yells weren't so loud and the repetitions were less frequent. The third day, he just mentioned this inevitable triumph from time to time in a conversational tone of voice.

B.A. had no permanent brain damage from the operation, and when we saw the surgeon a few months later, he stared at B.A.'s face to see if any of the muscles were sagging, and they weren't.

"It's pretty miraculous," said the surgeon, and I proceeded to write two newspaper articles on the topic.

It was an awful blow to both of us when we discovered, a few months after that, that B.A.'s brain tumour, which can't be entirely removed, was slowly growing back. Obviously the worst part was that B.A.'s ordeal was not over, and he'd have to have radiotherapy. However, it was also disappointing that our miracle hadn't signalled the end of it all. Perhaps our miracle wasn't a miracle after all?

But I think that it was still a miracle, in the way that the Raising of Lazarus was still a miracle, even though Lazarus died in the end.  B.A. did not have a complete recovery from the tumour , but he did have a complete recovery from the very scary operation that could have left him blind, unable to breathe, immobile or dead. (You name it.) He also helped to promote devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary when he was completely off his head.

Some people, even devout elderly ladies, spout obscenities when they are delirious. Not my B.A.  As a temporarily brain-damaged person, he was really rather sweet. He may even have been heroic because even while he thought he was being murdered, he was proclaiming the message of Fatima in a dourly post-Christian city at the top of his lungs.  

Mantra against Misfortune

I have a new technique against useless retrospection. Every time I begin a thought with "Oh, if only..." or "I wish I had...", I say, "What can I do today to make tomorrow better?" 

This mantra popped into my head--very possibly at Mass---when B.A. and I were living in the New Town this summer. At a certain point after the Deluge drove us from our happy home in the Historical Flat, I began to say such mournful things as "What terrible decisions have I made in my life that have led up to this moment?" 

This was nonsense, of course, as neither of us made decisions that led to the sudden malfunction of the HH's fire extinguishing system. Neither of us was responsible, either, for poor B.A.'s brain tumour deciding to grow again. And neither of us was responsible for the delay in taking possession of our flat, which was caused by some shoddy map-making at some registry office, plus a crack in the concrete around the [redundant] chimney.

As a matter of fact, our life decisions had left us well-off, not only because we had kindly friends with a kindly tenant who allowed us to rent a room, but because we had been working and saving against the evil day we would have to leave the Historical House. So in reality we had made excellent decisions that led up to the joyful moment in August went B.A. took possession of our new home. 

This mantra "What can I do today to make tomorrow better?"is a good dispeller of gloomy thoughts, I have found, especially as making tomorrow better includes digging a few dandelions out of the lawn. It occurred to me this morning that I may never finish digging dandelions out of the lawn, as they keep coming back, but that does not mean I should give up. (Giving up would lead to a brutal dandelion occupation.) The victory is in digging up the dandelions as long as I have breath and strength---which is also true of the struggle against sin. 

Gardening is a very theological activity. 

After reading a simple but persuasive book called Eat, Move Sleep by a pop scientist named Tom Rath, I decided that another thing I could do to make tomorrow better was to start running for 30 minutes a day. Despite my athletic years (ages 25-36), this was a very radical decision--especially as this running will be outdoors instead of in a comfortable gym. 

However, for over a year I have been sitting down for over 8 hours a day,  I have gained a lot of weight, and I have arms that ache from too much typing. It seemed to me that I had better take up cardiovascular exercise NOW, or I will be very sorry SOON.

So this morning I got up at 6:50 AM and ran along the river and back for what turned out to be 24 minutes, and it didn't kill me. Eat, Move, Sleep promises (as have other books I've read) that cardiovascular activity improves learning, too. so that will be useful for my Polish. 

Rose Hip Syrup and Chocolate Cupcakes

Today was a busy day: laundry, going out for a walk with B.A., preparing a reception-and-confirmation party for a Catholic friend's suddenly no-longer-Protestant husband, and making rosehip  syrup!

I'm not sure yet the syrup has worked (it's still hot), but here is the recipe I followed. I made only half a batch, though, as I had only half a kilo of rosehips, harvested from a mild pruning I did on Thursday evening. It is early yet in the season for cooking with rosehips--normally you're not supposed to pick them until after a frost--so I put Thursday's crop in the freezer.

Rosehip syrup depends on added sugar, unfortunately. However, it is also a fantastic source of Vitamin C: "20 times more ... than you find in oranges," claims the recipe.

From clicking around on the "Rosehips FAQ", I see that our roses aren't dog roses after all but "rosa rugosa" or Japanese roses.  Maybe after the first frost, I will gather proper "rosa canina" hips and see if they taste differently.

I am interested in drying rosehips for tea, so that I can get all that lovely Vitamin C without having to consume added sugar, too.

***
My friend's husband became a Catholic according to the Traditional Rite, which involves a very legal sounding enquiry into the soon-to-be-ex-Protestant's beliefs. Our new brother had to declare his belief  specifically in the SEVEN sacraments, in the Bishop of Rome being the Vicar of Christ, and in everything taught by the Roman Catholic Church. Our FSSP chaplain, having been given the authority by the Bishop both to receive our new brother and to confirm him, officially (and in Latin) freed him from the excommunication he had incurred by being in schism--which he presumably has been in since the Sunday after his seventh birthday came and went without him going to the Most Holy and August Sacrifice of the Mass but some Presbyterian jamboree instead.

Afterwards we had gin or champagne, crisps, ham and cheese on Polish rye, cucumber on white, miniature Melton Mowbray pies, carrots with hummus and dip, and chocolate cupcakes with chocolate buttercream icing.

I made these last while answering my friend's questions about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune B.A. and I have suffered since the Deluge drove us from the Historical House. We also discussed the Church Situation. (My friend's husband was having some last minute catechesis top-up in the Modern Art Gallery with his Confirmation Sponsor B.A.) The problem there is that I cannot bake or cook very easily if I have to talk or listen to someone, too. I am not good at multi-tasking, especially not in the kitchen. It drives me absolutely insane if B.A. or any other talkative man is in the kitchen when I have to cook, bake or wash dishes in it. So far the one-and-only exception to this rule is Polish Pretend Son, who doesn't talk as much as harangue, e.g. "THIS isn't keto!"

This was my first attempt at cake with the new oven, and not having time to look up a Canadian recipe, I mostly improvised. The ratios for British cake are super-easy--equal parts butter, sugar and flour--but British cake tends to be a bit flat. Trying to remember how to make a proper Canadian cake batter while talking was terribly difficult, and I am not sure the solution to the texture not looking exactly right was simply to add another egg. However, the cupcakes did rise, and if they were on the more conservative side of sweet (thanks to years of baking cakes with Polish tastes in mind, I tend to skimp on sugar), I made up for that with the icing.

All the same, I very much wish I had a copy of my mother's principal cookbook. For some reason that has never been adequately explained, my mother gave the extra copy to my brother Nulli instead of to me. As I live in a place that has famously been denounced as "a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island", I am sure I need to make Black Midnight Cake and Real Red Devil Cake and all those splendid 1950s-1970s cake a lot more often than Nulli does.

Update: I saw too late that rosa rugosa hips are not ideal for syrup. Sigh. Live and learn.