Can I just tell you that I am considering giving up e-mail for good? I never realized how much time it was eating up, until I gave it up for Lent. The past days have been more restful than I imagined, and the silence experiment of the past days culminated yesterday evening in our first ever “Night of Silence.” Loved it. Absolutely the best.
Our “Night of Silence” was inspired by friends of ours and consists of an evening spent without the use of electricity, except for refrigerator. We turned our phones on silent, turned off all the lights, and put away the computer. Candlelight filled out kitchen as I prepared dinner and presided over our evening meal. It was poetic. We opened the windows because our home was a little stuffy with the AC off, and I was lulled by the sight of fluttering curtains and flickering flame. The silence’s effect on us was palpable, slowing our minds and calming our bodies; we sat after dinner and talked, just talked, for nearly an hour. There was little we could do, with our near darkness, but wash the dishes carefully and get ready for bed. The soft candlelight led us to realize how tired we were, unlike the glaring electric lights that keep us awake well-past a good bedtime. We read a little by candlelight and then feel asleep somewhere between 8:50 and 9:10. I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Thomas Merton wrapped up into one.
This perhaps means that I am not doing enough penance, but I am loving this Lent. And…considering becoming a full-fledged Luddite.
I have always wanted to be a mother who shamelessly used her children as a pro-life lobby. When I was a single girl, I loved seeing families praying together at abortion facilities and looked forward to the day when I would have a family like that.
This week my wish was fulfilled. First, on Tuesday, the boys and I participated in the Two Heartbeats lobby day at the Capitol. Sponsored by Concerned Women of America, the day’s efforts focused on the promotion of a bill affectionately termed the Heartbeat Bill, whose intent is to guarantee that abortion providers offer a woman a view of her child via ultrasound and a chance to hear the child’s heartbeat before the intended abortion; abortionists currently perform ultrasounds to determine the child’s age, so they know how much to charge the woman, but this would extend the viewing to the mother as well.
We enjoyed the rally, with an especially rousing speeche from Attorney General Kirk Abbot, after which each of us was commissioned to lobby our state representative and senator. So, I dolefully traipsed to the offices of Kirk Watson and Mark Strama, both vociferously pro-abortion. I loved the response I received, however, when I entered their offices pushing my humongo stroller carrying the boys. Normally hostile staffers beamed with smiles, proclaiming the boys cute and well-behaved. I used this as an opportunity to speak about the foster-adopt process and express my gratitude that their mother had chosen life for them, because aren’t they beautiful. To which the staffers had no reply–they couldn’t agree with me because then they would be making a value judgment about abortion, which they refuse to do. Touche.
This morning, we had another opportunity to be pro-life lobbyists at the 40 Days for Life kick-off in front of International Women’s Health. I loved the fact that they boys got so much attention from the other people gathered there because…well, I’m just that vain. There was a great turn-out for the event, and I relished the feeling of holding these boys in our arms as a visible witness to the gift of adoption and the beauty of little lives born unwanted. Have you signed up for your 40 Days hour yet? We started today, so sign up soon.
Lent begins today. We are dust, we are reminded, and to dust we shall return.
I confess that I usually approach Lent with dread because I feel like I already live Lent most days; as a new mother, I am so acutely aware of my sinfulness, lack of virtue, and utter weakness. I am daily faced with my total incapacity. So, I was not looking forward to forty days of focusing more on my dust-worthiness.
Our Lord, however, is infinitely kind and has suggested that I spend Lent in a beautiful way this year, by leaving behind the desert of the world and and entering the desert of God. In the desert of the world, there is unassuaged thirst and blinding heat and unceasing toil. In the desert of God, there is silence. Silence and rest and stillness. That is my goal this Lent.
With that in mind, I am going to heavily curtail my time on the Internet and spend it instead on embroidering gifts for a maternity home, as well as reading and resting. That means that I will only be blogging once per week, as well as only checking e-mail once per week. Can I do it? I’m not sure because I have become awfully hooked on those things now that I am home with the boys. I look forward, however, to this enforced silence which will help keep my mind on my present duties, rather than on news from around the country.
So, I’m sorry to leave you all but will do what I can to post at least once per week.
The contributors are all Catholics who converted from Reformed protestantism (plus me). Among them are several seminary graduates, notable Reformed seminaries at that.
I can attest to the group’s sincere desire to have a charitable discussion in the pursuit of Truth, for the sake of our obedience to God’s will. Our aim is to write in a more thoughtful, more carefully edited way than blogs typically allow. This is our small contribution to the pursuit of unity among Christ’s followers, that we may be truly one body, one vine. I believe this to be the end of properly oriented ecumenism.
I like the idea of them writing more methodically and carefully, since blog discussions often very quickly get mired down into tangents and side-streets. I will be following this site with great interest!
I am making a Lenten resolution to only post about uplifting, positive topics (and to avoid posting even constructively critical posts about the many evil, immoral, and unjust actions being committed in our world).
Sundays will enjoy no moratorium from this resolution, as posting about good topics on the day of the week commemorating our Lord’s Resurrection is highly appropriate in any case.
I hope your Lenten fasts, sacrifices, and resolutions all draw you closer to Jesus Christ during this time of preparation for the climax of the Church’s year: the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our Savior!
No one person is smart enough to intelligently spend $1.3 trillion dollars. No one group of people is smart enough either, let alone our country’s politicians, who have been given no special training (even if such existed) in dealing with such enormous sums and such complex matters as our national and world economies.
But aren’t there brilliant economists who advised the politicians? Well, we shouldn’t have to look further than the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, for what passes for a talented and intelligent economist in our country. He made self-admitted careless and avoidable errors on his own tax returns for several years, ultimately owing $50,000 to the IRS, the agency he now is in charge of. Do we trust him and other intelligent economists to spend $1.3 trillion dollars?
Nonetheless, this is how much has been spent in the latest spending bill. Another has been proposed now for a modest $450 billion. It would be one thing if these bills contained only moral, infrastructure projects that would directly help people, but instead they are rife with spending on personal projects of Democrat congressmen and on immoral practices like embryo-destructive stem cell research.
People at my company are smart. Yet it takes 5,000 of us employees working an entire year to earn only $0.8 billion in revenue; our profit from that revenue is of course much less, but imagine the scope of this money we are borrowing at interest from other countries and foreign institutions: It would take using all my (good-sized) company’s revenue for 2,000 years to pay this debt back. To trust our nation’s politicians (whether Democrat or Republican) with such amounts, mortgaged on our backs and our children’s future, is insane. There is little chance that they will spend even a good portion of it in a wise way.
What can “save” our economy? Don’t look first to the government. Let’s look to one another. Let’s work hard, live frugally, help our neighbors out in whatever way we can, strive to live honest and virtuous lives, and treat others as we would have them treat us; in short, follow God’s way of living. No, it won’t turn the economy around in a week or a month or a year, but it will re-lay a solid foundation for our nation to build upon and make our nation and the world more just and a more authentically human place to live.
And may we continue to pray for our Lord’s Kingdom to come.
We have only one hive, but we are hoping to expand to two this year by luring a bee swarm into our empty hive box. If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will.
Bees give off all manner of pheromone for different purposes, and it turns out that a scent very near lemongrass oil (think Lemon Pledge furniture polish) is one that scout bees use to tell the swarm to “follow me to a good-looking hive cavity”. So we put a special slow-release plastic tube of lemongrass oil in an unused hive, and tonight I set the hive out next to our current one.
Bee hives swarm in the spring when they run out of room in their current hive. Typically some portion of the hive, with the old queen, gather together and leave the old hive, landing somewhere in a tree temporarily while scout bees make sorties to try to find a good place for the new hive. The scout bees return, do dances to tell the swarm how their spot looks, and the most vigorous dancer wins (or something like that). The bees all take off and occupy the new hive.
So we may get a swarm or we may not. We’ll see, but it’s fun to try it. The hive on the right is our current one, and the left hive is the swarm bait one:
Soon to be St. Damien! I just read, on Fox News of all places, that Blessed Damien has had a second miracle attributed to his intercession before God and will be canonized this fall.
The movie made of his life is worth watching, starring the actor who played Faramir in the Lord of the Rings. Imagine voluntarily exiling yourself to an island of lepers to serve them and bring them the gospel, knowing that you would most likely contract the horrible disease and die at a young age as well, but still saying Yes to Jesus Christ and going for love of God.
Katie and I are getting (more) serious about our backyard garden this year. To help keep the plants watered, we installed a drip irrigation system last weekend. Today I pruned the berry bushes and grapevines, which hopefully will produce some fruit this year, and we are growing heirloom vegetable and herb seedlings inside under a light.
Seedlings
Pantano Romanesco and Principe Borghese Heirloom Tomatoes
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