Chaos...

 ... is the enemy of the poor. 

I'll expand on this eventually. At the moment, I'm working.

Bambi Ate My Peas

When B.A. and I got home from Ely on Tuesday, I went at once to the garden to see how my plants were. Pauline (the blackcurrant) had flourished in our absence, so I was really very pleased. Paul (the other blackcurrant) was his quickly growing, sturdy self. The herb garden is coming along, without any sign yet of the chives, however. The broad beans in the veggie trug were looking a bit chewed; I should co-plant some marigolds, I believe, but fortunately the beans are far enough along not to mind bugs too much. The peas had sprouted but---at least two were missing, and there was an actual hole where they should have been.

The hole was odd, for the trug is high enough off the ground that cats can't get into it with a giant leap, and that would mean landing in plastic netting. It was also rather a large but shallow hole. The easiest explanation was a naughty squirrel. However, we learned the truth yesterday when B.A. was out in the garden and our downstairs neighbour called him to her kitchen door. 

Our downstairs neighbour showed B.A. photos on her phone--of a young male deer, but for his horns, barely a fawn. He had somehow found himself in our neighbour's back garden and then, after she had taken a number of photos, he squeezed through the gap between fences to our back garden. Our neighbour watched from her window as he wandered over to my veggie trug and helped himself. Sadly, she did not take a photo of that. 

The news is bad and good. On the one hand, a marauding deer has snacked on my peas! But on the other hand, we live in an area with so much greenery that fawns appearing in the garden are an actual possibility.  

I have never read Silent Spring*, but it was mentioned--along with a number of other interesting books--in Steel's Sitopia. I'm delighted to report that spring is silent neither in Scotland nor in Ely. In Ely the blackbirds were loudly yakking to each other, and the ring-necked doves were positively mooing. This morning I went for a walk and enjoyed all the real-life tweets and twittering. 

If you are interested in conservationism, eating and food, I highly recommend Sitopia. It is not a Christian book--the ending chapters on human mortality make that clear--but it has a goodly amount of Classical Stoicism which makes it at least mostly compatible with Christian reading. It speaks well of traditional meals and mealtimes, and as I mention every Lent, I think our ancestors in faith really knew what they were doing when they banned meat, milk, eggs and oil for six weeks and tightened their belts. (They often did this in Advent, too, which is why traditional Christmas Eve dishes are pescatarian.) 

Personally, I object to feeling helpless about matters that affect me and the society I live in, so I have taken a few radical steps to cut down on my own use of plastics, for example. The most dramatic one was stopping my contact lens subscription--throwing out the little single-use plastic packets every morning and the little one-day plastic lenses every night. My coarse hair, it turns out, has always hated shampoo (a product first invented in the 1930s), so I no longer buy that. Bath soap is still available in bar form, thank goodness, and I can live without shower gel (1865) and its plastic, disgusting shower puff.  My annual makeup splurge--over. Hair dye--never started.

As for the grocery shopping--it's a work in progress. I loved Bea Johnson's Zero Waste Home, and I was sad that our household of two produces more than a quart of rubbish and recycling every few days, let alone a year, until I reflected that cutting down that dramatically takes time and also, to a certain extent, relies on the nearby shops. Pre-Covid, Tesco promised to minimise its carbon footprint by 60% by 2025. Well, let's see. 

*Silent Spring was very influential, but it is quite controversial today. The late Kathy Shaidle frequently accused its author Rachel Carson of being responsible for the malaria deaths of millions. Others defend her.

Writing Joy

I was going to write something today about sustainable living--and how much I enjoyed Caroline Steele's Sitopia, which is about sustainable eating, one of my favourite topics--but the first thing I came across this morning, via Facebook, was Steve Skojec's cri-de-coeur expressing his disappointment in the Church. 

Long pause while you read Skojec's broadside against the Una Vera Fides. Maybe make yourself a cup of coffee first. 

The Church has been a disappointment to Steve from beginning (or by the time he was 14) to end (or very recently when an easily-recognised priest denied baptism to his youngest child). Steve writes that he is angry, which will not be a surprise to any of Steve's long-time readers. Steve has been angry for as long as I remember reading his tweets, and the mischievous have inspired Steve to new paroxyms of online rage for months, if not years, now. As you know if you read the article, Steve has reason to be angry, and he has the right to be angry---and yet I'm sorry that he's writing angry because I don't think it will help him become happy. 

The internet loves anger, mind you. I don't think I realised what an addictive drug online rage is until I started reading Mundabor. (Vox Cantoris to me in Toronto: "People admit to reading Mundabor now?") Eventually--after I met her, in fact--I even starting reading Ann Barnhardt. Yowza! Even spicer than Mundabor!

 If I were interested in building up a readership for readership's sake (or to get Substack subscriptions), I'd start a blog called "Reasons I'm Angry" and let rip every day. Although it might be good for our bank account, it would be very bad for me. When I was writing the "Seraphic Singles" blogs, I was often angry and depressed, but obviously I couldn't sound that way when I was calling myself "Seraphic Single", for heaven's sake. Therefore, I summoned joy into my brain and wrote cheerfully--or at worst just solemnly--about aspects of Single life.  Blogging was often the best part of my day, and it wasn't just because I was distracting myself or thinking about other people. It was because I was writing happy. 

My wellness journal has a daily space for writing out what I feel grateful for. When I'm in a rush, I skip it, but sometimes I take the time to write things like "B.A./parents both well/mortgage overpayment/Pauline [the blackcurrant bush] improving.'' It's a really good idea. And it's also a good pastoral practise. Once when I disclosed my pain about an unfortunate confession by my ex-therapist, a Jesuit friend asked me if she had helped me. That stopped my complaints short, for I had to admit that, yes, she really had. Was she a saint? No. Had she helped? Yes. I never felt as badly about her massive screw-up again, and so not only was I reminded to be grateful for her good work, I was grateful to my Jesuit friend.

This reminds me the the messiness of life is not all bad, for I sustain joy and gratitude for all kinds of disparate things and people. I'm grateful I can go to the Traditional Latin Mass every week, and I'm grateful that I had an enriching, happy time at a Jesuit theology school. I'm grateful that there are Benedictine monks celebrating the Old Mass in Norcia, and I'm grateful that there are Benedictine nuns singing the old Latin Office in Ryde (even if only the New Mass is celebrated in their chapel). One of my best friends is a leftie-lib agnostic feminist, and another is a devoutly Catholic traditional mother of five. One of my old mentors is such a fan of Pope Francis, he clearly isn't comfortable meeting with me anymore, and I remember to pray for his late parents every Sunday because--despite his religious beliefs--I am terribly grateful for his kindness to me years ago. 

Agonized by scandal after scandal, Catholics ask ourselves how our faith can survive all this. I think of my thirteen or fourteen year old self, in our beautiful old parish church (sold soon afterwards because the land under it was worth millions), wondering what martyrdom might look like in my lifetime. I thought it might involve being shot by Soviet invaders for sneaking off to church. Now I wonder if it doesn't simply mean hanging onto the mast, singing snatches of childhood hymns or even psalms set to tunes in the Bad Old Days, i.e. the 1960s and 70s, while the barque fills with sewage.

The funny thing about being a Catholic trad who grew up in mainstream Novus Ordo Catholicism is that I have a lot of 1970s and 1980s hymns stored permanently in my memory banks, and if I were languishing in prison, I'd be singing "And I will RAY-AY-se you UH-UP on the LA-AST day!" Yes, I have terrible taste, but that's what I've got, and I'm grateful for it and my elementary school music teacher. (Weirdly, he also taught us "Hava Nagila" in kindergarten, so technically I knew some Hebrew before even French.)

But my point is--in case you are wondering--is that the way through all this mess--the disappointing priests and the wrong-headed bishops and the usherettes in jogging pants gesturing at you to receive  Holy Communion--is to remember everything you love or have loved about your Catholic life (if you are Catholic). I shall now write a short list to prompt you to your own:

Catholic Book of Worship II.

Sunday Mass (either Form) on a very sunny morning, especially Easter.

The 1960s wooden Stations-of-the-Cross at St. Left-wing.

The 1940s stained glass windows at St. Right-wing.

Fr C and Fr L (crypto-trads, the both of them, I later discovered).

Heroines of God by Fr. Lovasik.

My First Communion dress and veil.

My mother cutting up my First Communion veil to make my wedding veil.

Doughnuts after Mass. 

Parish youth group.

Parish youth group dances.

All-girls Catholic school.

Catholic school dances at the all-boys Catholic schools. 

My-grade-going-on-retreat

That time I helped served tea to the priests who had just heard up to 900 teenage girls' confessions, and the air was blue with cigarette smoke.

That time I ran away from an awkward social situation to get to Midnight Mass. 

That time the archbishop was coming at last, and so every Trad from here to Glasgow filled the pews. 

That time my husband was in surgery, and I went to the [Church of Scotland] chapel to argue with God, and the Lord was there with me. 

Those times friends walked with me on my pilgrimages to the local saint, interred five miles away.

That time our priest came to my husband's hospital room to give him Final Unction, and B.A. struggled to sit up and began beating his emaciated breast. 

That time my Protestant friend died of cancer and I went to the Cathedral to cry. 

That time during Covid we were so worried about our priest being sick and then there he was in the carpark, wan but alive. 

This morning's Polish class--live from Krakow--when my teacher explained why in Poland Whitmonday is dedicated to Mary.

Update: Dr. Edward Feser knocks it out of the park. 
 

The Vocation to Wait

A thoroughly depressing pair of articles about Single Life in Crisis this week.  In the debate about whether or not Single Life is a "vocation", the articles are firmly on the "NO" side. 

Back in 2006 when I began to blog about Single Life, I was sure Single Life had to be a vocation because priests said it was. When vocations directors gave us extra homilies about vocations after Mass, they always mentioned the vocation to the Single Life in passing. Naturally they were not particularly interested in the Single Life, for they were there  primarily to try to drum up vocations to the priesthood. Sometimes they would do this against a backdrop of pony-tailed altar girls, which is funny in a sardonic way, as the presence of girls on the altar discourages altar boys and therefore, 15-20 years later, new priests.  

This paragraph in the most recent Crisis article caught my attention for what it did not include:  

Prolonged singleness, for those who desire a spouse and believe they are called to marriage, is a painful trial. This is not a vocation to singleness as some folks now mistakenly say. It is a condition brought on by the actions of others, as stated by Jesus. It may also include one’s response to the sin perpetrated against him or her or it could be the culture of the society the person is living in. All these variables, plus others, can merge to keep a person single. 

The actions of others? Yes, of course. But let us admit it--and rejoice, actually, for who want to feel that helpless?--our own actions are also to blame. Naturally you don't want to hear about that when you are Single and feeling miserable about it. You need to be in a better place before you can take stock, examining your pattern of (choose one) carelessly flirtatious behaviour; drunkenness; conversation-hogging; aggressive man-chasing; treating dates as free therapy; treating dates as confessionals; shrieking; expecting reality to conform to your fantasies; and then choosing a more prudent path. 

"Shut up," I hear you shriek (watch out with the shrieking). "You smug married you! You've been married for 12 years!"

Yes, I have, and it's rather miraculous, really. I often think it was because as soon as I got to the U.K. and met Benedict Ambrose in person, God struck me down with a terrible cold so that I wouldn't talk too much. I sat around sounding exotically Canadian when I did talk, looking elegant in a blue silk and pearls, and above all looking like B.A.'s favourite singer, only 25 years younger. Men are visual, I looked right for the part, and B.A. is now trapped--ha ha ha HAAAAAA!

I also giggled an awful lot on that first visit because I felt very, very happy. My number one advice to any Single woman who is unhappy being Single is to find the joy in it--and everything else--as soon as she can. Men are attracted to happy people. Heck, people are attracted to happy people. Happiness, I am happy to say, is on you. You can do things to make yourself happy. Whatever they are, are unique to you--although Eat to Beat Disease suggests that regular consumption of dark chocolate has something to do with it. That's more good news. 

Meanwhile, becoming a man trap is a learned skill, one which some women I know have or have had in an enormous degree although this did not always solve their singleness problem, as they couldn't choose just one man. Committing to the one man must be super-tough when you are used to having many men dance around you like bees around a lilac bush. However, although the presence of a wedding ring may make them all buzz off, they often return anyway, perhaps a little relieved that you have now been rendered "safe". Buzz, buzz, buzz. 

The way to discover how women attract men is to watch how your most popular girlfriends do it. These must be girlfriends you actually respect. And I can almost guarantee that your popular yet respectable girlfriends never, ever talk about how they used to be boxers. It took me some years to learn to stop doing that. 

Anyway, I have to get to my exercise bike, but I just thought I would sprinkle some hope on the Singleness question. It is not all on other people, their sins, society's sins: there are actually some things you can do about it. I wrote a whole blog about this. Two, in fact. 

Oh, and let us not forget God's role in this. Let us entertain a theological hypothesis that, even if you don't believe there is a "Vocation to Single Life" (and to be consistent, as a trad Catholic, you can't believe in a so-called "Vocation" to Married Life either), you can believe that God has saddled you with the cross of Singleness for some mysterious purpose of His own. It could be to teach you something, like how to learn to make your own happiness. It could be to prepare you for proper gratitude in getting a spouse. It could be because God wants you to marry someone in Moscow, and you haven't learned Russian yet, but you will begin next year after God guides your steps to a Tarkowsky film. Mysterious are the ways of the Most High. 

When I was 36, I discerned that my "vocation" was to wait and see. So I did that, and two years later I was married, which still astonishes me, but there you are. I did not become a raving beauty overnight (which I always used to think was THE trick to pull off if I could manage it); all I had to do was meet the man who thought I was a raving beauty because I looked enough like Dame Emma Kirby to be her niece. I'm not even much of a singer, so--ha ha!

Childhood Details

Last night I was thinking about my childhood home and was suddenly seized by panic because it was so far away and I couldn't get back to it. In this context, childhood home was a time as much as a place, and that time was about 1980, to which there is no return. 

Fortunately, although the house is gone, the street, the trees and many of the neighbours' homes remain, so I can recapture childhood a little just by walking down it. Although I am objectively short in stature, I always feel like a giant when I do. Walking around the neighbourhood now takes me no time at all. The thought that I can at least do that helped me get to sleep. This morning I ponder that 1980 rests safely in God, and that presumably in heaven, we will be able to "go home again" if God so wills and it is necessary for our happiness. 

I am also very lucky in that both my parents and all my siblings are still alive. At least three of them, perhaps four, remember the little white house with the red front door, the green side door, and the roses climbing up the west side of the house. Three will remember my beloved cat; I hope the fourth one does, too. It was believed in his infancy that he and the cat were in league with each other, the cat distracting my mother with various antics while my brother pushed toothbrushes down the bathroom sink. 

The cat--a beautiful, friendly orange-and-white creature--was eventually killed by a car, and my sister Tertia asked me if cats went to heaven. As an adult I know that the theologically correct answer is that they will be in heaven if they are necessary for our happiness. At the time I believe I cited Lucy Maud Montgomery (the authoress of the Anne and Emily books), who said they were. LMM was not theologically sound, but what a lovely surprise should my dear cat come purring up to me in heaven. 

The funny thing about this nostalgia is that as a child in Toronto I was already nostalgic. Having found myself in England at age 3, I wanted to return, and I spun out long, complicated daydreams about my romantic, adventurous life in London, a city I had seen only two days of my short life and knew mostly from Miroslav Sasek's This is London picture book, first published in 1959.  As a matter of fact, we lived in Cambridge, in an award-winning low-rise house/apartment complex that is still there although--like my childhood street--it is much smaller. The enormous field behind the deep woods has shrunk to a grassy strip and the woods are not so deep. 

Graham Greene once said or wrote that childhood was the "credit balance of the novelist", which is something I have tried to impress upon my writing students, who have the fortune of still being children. I seem to be always telling the youngest generation to keep detailed notes, but it might not be necessary, as the details of childhood stay with us longest. This has been awful for European survivors of World War 2 concentration camps, but will be nice for me, as long as I remember home, not school and not my piano lessons. Greene must have meant the sights, sounds, smells, sensations and tastes of childhood, though, for   I don't recall much plot. Plot is driven by misfortune, so it is just as well. 

The greatest misfortune of my childhood was that my only uncle died when he wasn't much older than 40, which plunged my brother Nulli and I into such great grief, I don't recall anything like it since. I have felt grimy, complicated grief for my own mistakes, gambles and sins, but the shock of the police-at-the-door Advent bereavement was incredible, in the sense that we could hardly believe it. We were too young to comfort our parents or be as conscious of their own sorrow although the memory of a long-closed bedroom door is firmly fixed in my mind. My father's mother wept at Christmas Mass that year, I remember. But, as I wrote for a Toronto Catholic paper many years later, my good parents and grandmothers did their utmost to make sure we children had a happy Christmas despite everything. Forty years later, I marvel at their emotional generosity.  

I have often wondered if my uncle knew how much he was loved by two small children up in Toronto. Well, presumably he knows now. It's a thought that makes me, the second-eldest aunt of a 10 year old, a little more careful in crossing the street and keeping my weight down. 

B.A. has wonderful stories about his very different childhood in Dundee, and he is determined to pump his uncle for more information about his colourful great-grandmother--who wore an orange turban with a fake jewel and was something of a neighbourhood celebrity. His childhood was a lot more chaotic than mine, but happily he was born with the resilience of a rubber ball and has always bounced back, smiling. 

Dating Advice from 1938

Never mind the prissy intro to this set of excellent 1938 American dating advice. It all stands. I would have added "Express happiness about your life, and don't complain about anything." Listen up, whippersnappers! If there's anything I've learned in this life, it's that men prefer happy women. For some reason, young women often prefer brooding poet types with horrible shadows under their eyes. That way madness lies, though. My dear husband sleeps for at least 9 hours at a stretch. 

The curious thing is that "dating" was on its way out in the 1990s--when young people "hung out" until they magically paired off--but came roaring back with the internet. At that point, the number one rule of dating was to meet in a public place. I think that by 2005 dating was seen as such an emotionally dangerous enterprise that it was best to start from absolute scratch--with strangers picked from a screen--than to risk the emotional and social pitfalls of going to dinner with someone you actually knew.  

One of the very nice things about being married, as all married people say when contemplating the subject, is that you don't have to go on dates anymore. The search is over: you can settle in and grow your relationship tree. After a year or so, you can be very firm about what you don't want for Christmas, and after about ten years you can agree to dispense with Valentine's Day trinkets (though I strongly recommend continuing with the cards). The interesting thing is, if you get sufficiently old and unglamorous and your husband doesn't mind, you can still go out for coffee with young men and listen to their problems. There is a type of young man who gravitates towards mother figures--although I cannot imagine that real mothers have time to have coffees with young men. 

The essential thing here, of course, is to continue to  prefer your husband to any other man in the universe, which reminds me of the time B.A. arrived at an afternoon swing-dancing workshop to say hello but did not stay to dance. I can still feel the disappointment. What a heart-breaker. (The chap I stopped dancing with the second B.A. arrived looked confused and cross.) There is really no point to swing dancing as a married lady if your husband won't dance with you. 

Meanwhile, I am reminded of foreign young male religious at theology school being spiritually adopted by married female students of late middle age, and the young male religious saying fond things like, "She's my second mother" or "She's my Canadian mother" which at the time I thought was a bit weird but sixteen years laters sounds perfectly reasonable. 

Right, so this has stopped being about actual dating and gone back to being about me, so I will stop. But I will say that I first heard about B.A. when I was chatting to an influential British Catholic over Skype while simultaneously looking his male Facebook friends and saying "What about him? Ooh, he went to Oxford." The influential British Catholic said, "Would you like to live in a Historical House?" and two years later I was married to B.A. and living in the Historical House. The moral of that story, I think, is to dispense with internet dating and to ask around.

Dream homes can be toxic

Benedict Ambrose and I went for a walk along Edinburgh's Water of Leith yesterday afternoon, and at one stage we climbed back up into the city and toured a very elegant, wealthy neighbourhood. Elegant and wealthy in this context means three-storey (but not gross) houses built in the 1880s, which can be purchased today for a modest £900,000 or so. 

As an aesthetic experience, it was very good. These were the kind of houses I always imagined I would live in one day. But as a psychological experience, it was very bad--for exactly the same reason. Although I argued with myself that it is better to live in a two-bedroom flat in a modest (ahem) but not terribly crime-plagued neighbourhood than to have a massive mortgage on a house in Coltbridge Terrace, my heart did not agree.  

My heart is being dumb, though, for I have done the math, and even if I had begun working as a full-time journalist when I arrived in the UK and saved every penny for 12 years, we would be able to put down less than half of the starting price for the empty Coltbridge Terrace house we looked at yesterday. 

B.A. loves architecture and is a first-generation homeowner, so he can look at beautiful houses and flats all day without wanting to own one. I, however, can't do this indefinitely.  I tell myself that it is so much nicer to be on the outside of a beautiful house, looking at it and all the other beautiful houses, than to be inside one, having done heaven knows what to get there. However, one beautiful house too many--or fatally, hearing that a friend has bought a beautiful house--and I am back on the self-abdegnation treadmill. Why oh why did I not go to law school? Why did I spend so much time in graduate school? Why did I not try harder to find a job sooner? Why didn't I grasp when I was 11 that computers were the ticket to a high-earning profession? It's horrible to feel this way. 

Fortunately we have a big private garden, the apple tree, the veggie trug and a row of pots on the windowsill. I don't know which forward-thinking town official decided that each of the modest flats along our street should have its own garden, but I am grateful to him or her. (It was probably a man, though, as the flats were built in 1930 and first sold to tenants in the Thatcher era. B.A. thinks all the gardens began as a communal field and then, one day, the fences went up.)

Usually only people in big, beautiful, expensive houses have as much private garden space as we do. In wealthy Edinburgh neighbourhoods, flat-dwellers have keys to private communal gardens maintained by gardeners. In less wealthy neighbourhoods, flat-dwellers have--if they are fortunate--drying greens decorated with cigarette butts and dog poop. Therefore, having a two-bedroom upper villa with a big private garden (and productive tree) thrown in for free is nothing to sneeze at. 

Today I was feeling rather low about how far out of reach my Edinburgh Dream House is and probably always will be. Fortunately for my sanity, I had an Italian lesson a short green walk away and that took my mind off the issue. Then, when I got home, I discovered that some of the French beans on the window had sprouted while I was out. Seeing a new sprout has become, since the Corona-crisis began, one of my favourite things. That's really lucky, too, because seeds are about £3 a packet. 

In short, Dream Houses can be very ruinous--indeed toxic--to your happiness whereas an unexpected garden in a modest (not very crime-plagued, if you're not a shopkeeper) neighbourhood is an amazing gift--as is the sprouting of four of my eight French beans, plus one of the rhubarb seeds. 

Originally I was going to call this post "Planning versus Dreaming." My idea was that if you want a House of Dreams you have to have a plan sooner than later so as to Make Your Dream Reality. However, this led to a train of self-incriminating thought, so I decided just to warn against Houses of Dreams and to celebrate beautiful Gardens of Reality. 

"Only the concrete is good," said Fr. Bernard Lonergan, SJ, who may have been quoting or interpreting St. Thomas Aquinas, OP.  At any rate, I hope so, as Bernie was not (ahem) always terribly sound.