Could there be Beauty -

I'm reading a marvelous book, Captivating, by John and Staci Eldredge. Staci is a former/lapsed Catholic; she and John write for an Evangelical press. I have actually read this book once before; last year, going to Raleigh to sing with the Master Chorale, I went into Barnes & Noble one afternoon and read this book over a latte grande... and journalled like a fiend - This month, when I had a bit of money to spare, I had to buy it for myself.

This idea that each woman is created as a Beauty is disconcerting to me. You see, all my life, I have believed that I ranged from Plain to Mostly Ugly. No, I couldn't play dress-up, my mother told me; I was too rough, too careless, too clumsy; I would tear or break or dirty.... Every compliment about my prettiness was always responded to with a disapproving look and "Pretty is as Pretty does." I was rough, clumsy, etc., so obviously I could not be pretty. The message was even more firmly packed into my mind during my first marriage; homosexual men don't particularly care about the beauty or worthiness of a woman, except as how it might reflect on them.

So - I'll be fifty years old in a month, and all these years I've thought of myself as "plain." All for the simple reason that I didn't deserve any better.

I don't know who some of the readers of this blog are - there are some locations that I recognize (Linda, God love you for your loyalty!) and some that make me wonder... despite the possible risk of being discovered, I want to tell a story about myself, a story that reading Captivating has caused me to relive, vividly, this evening.

It was nearly two years ago. I had met a fellow Catholic at Chorale, had quickly come to admire him in that way that is dangerous for a woman like me - that fervent admiration for a man's character, intellect, accomplishments, and in this case, his Faith. I longed for every opportunity to be in his presence, to engage in conversation with him, because somehow, in his company, I did not dislike myself so very much, because he awakened good and noble things in me that I had lost along the years.

We attended Mass together one Sunday after one of our concerts. He followed me to the parish with the late Mass, and I waited as he rummaged in the back of his vehicle for the umbrella, as it was a grey, drizzly evening. He opened the umbrella and held it over my head -

and I had one thought: either I am going to walk half in and half out from under this thing, or "the girls" are going to keep bumping into him. Terribly embarrassing thought, that! and without deliberating, I reached up and took his arm to steady myself against the probable awkwardness of ... ahem. cough. (shhh - boob assault)

He looked down at me and smiled the gentle smile that I love, and he snugged his arm, with my hand in it, against his side, and I was starkly aware for the first time what a strong, sophisticated, and virile man he is.

We walked into Church, talking until we reached the entryway to the Church - he had me proceed him down the aisle, he motioned me into the pew ahead of him. He lowered the kneeler before I could hook my foot over it and draw it down (my mindless habit) - We prayed side by side, worshipped Christ in the Holy Eucharist; at Communion, he motioned me to precede him in the reception line - After Mass he held my cape and gently draped it across my shoulders....

I've never felt this way, before or since - for one hour, in the presence of a strong and good man, I felt myself to be sweeter and gentler, more womanly, than I have ever known myself to be. The unremitting necessity of self-sufficiency was for a sweet hour lifted from me - I felt shy, a stranger to myself.

And it was only an hour - but its effect on me has never fully dissipated. I read this book, and I relive the rush of awareness, the sensibility of parts of myself I'd never been awakened to before...

And I am grateful that I have been allowed this even-fleeting touch of such strength and goodness in a man that opened my soul to this other, repressed Laura - whom I want to know better and to give full development to.

I almost doubt her existence; perhaps it was just a strange but predictable combination of hormones and chemicals in the air that gave me that glorious hour - and therefore it cannot have been an ontological self awakened, at all -

The struggle with weight - no, there has been no struggle, because until tonight I have left unquestioned and unchallenged the certainty of my own ugliness - my core, fundamental, ontological ugliness.
The struggle to keep house, to bring order and beauty to my intimate dwelling place - a reflection of my perennial condemnation to not being good enough, not being worthy of anything good...

But I remember the twinkle in his eyes as I took his arm that afternoon - and I remember the way he held my high school portrait and studied it - studied it! not just casting a careless polite glance at something so outdated and irrelevent! - and the smile that played about his lips as he looked at the girl I used to be and said, "I think I know this girl."

And tonight I am compelled to question my own self-doubt and self-loathing.

Because of the strength and influence of a good man.

I am Yours, O Lord -

My dreams, my desires, the yearnings of my heart -
I place in Thy Hands, O Lord.
Do with me as Thou wilt -
with my life, my abilities, my ambitions -
(not that I have many ambitions, but what I have are Yours)-
My affections, my hopes,
All things belong to Thee.
I will follow You where You call me -
only let Your voice come clearly to my inner ear
so that I might not confuse it with other noise of my ego's wants.

Be glorifed, dear Lord - in and through and even,
when we must be blunt about it -
In spite of me.
amen.

So God said "No - "

... to whatever it was you were begging Him for. Maybe it was that job, or the miracle to save your marriage, or the life of your child -

And you did everything you were told you are supposed to do -
You prayed the novenas, you fasted, you made other sacrifices, you were careful not to step on cracks and you stood on your head...

And, oh, your faith was immense -

And God still said, "No."

We are told - by well-meaning people who can't bear to tell us the truth, by popular movements, by our "authority figures" - that if we just play the game right, God will honor the desires of our heart -

Actually, what we're often told is that, if we just follow this particular formula, God has obligated Himself to do what we wish.

That's a pagan idea, worse than a heresy; God does not subject Himself to our whims and wills -

But we, in our utter desparation, believe, we cling to every bit of flotsam within reach, because we are desparate to receive what we want.

When God says "No," it doesn't mean that we failed. Oh! how we can beat ourselves up over that! - I must have done something wrong, I must have spoken the words (the incantation?) out of order, I must have failed in some capacity - my faith must not have been strong enough -

No. God is only exercising His Divine Right as the Almighty Creator of the Cosmos - His omniscience that there are greater fruits ahead.

When I saw the mom's fevered prayer request for the life of her son, back last fall, I knew that he would die, and I feared for the woman, because her prayer request was worded in such a way that I knew she had bought into this neopagan notion that God can be bought. Sure enough, the boy died a couple of weeks ago, and I have gotten word that she - who was absolutely defiant in the face of his failing health: "Mary will do what I ask her to do!" - has reached a bad place, a bleak and miserable place.

With the very certainty that I foresaw the boy's death, I also saw that his death would be the catalyst to bring many souls into the Kingdom of God. Sometimes we can do more for Our Lord when we are denied what we want - and this is going to be such a case. I believe it with all my being.

Pray for this family, please -
and don't doubt God's mercy, or His power, just because He won't play our games.

Okay. More than two months since my last post. I think one of the things I dislike about blogging is that it isn't interactive enough. My life isn't exciting enough, and my thoughts and insights are not profound enough, to justify sitting here putting them out into blogland as if the fate of the Nation rested on my shoulders.

I enjoy feedback, dialogue. I like being told something I said in a website was smart, or outrageously funny... heck, I even get a kick out of a good fight once in a while!

That just doesn't happen in a blog. It's a monologue that gets thrown out into cyberspace in a perennial echo... and for all I can tell doesn't make a spit bit of difference anywhere, to anyone.

So - what is happening in my life the past two months?

Early August, I fell getting out of the bathtub. My left foot hit the linoleum and just k-e-p-t o-n g-o-w-i-n-g.... Honey, I couldn't do splits as a preschooler! Let's just say it wasn't a pretty sight - and for the life of me, I couldn't get my right foot off the floor of the bathtub! The scary thing was when I felt something rip (and heard it too - that is ONE GROSS SOUND) and I realized the phone was half way down the other end of the house and I was completely and totally alone. But I was able to eventually pull my right foot out of the tub, stand up and hobble off to bed. Then I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, got an ice pack out of the freezer, too the last of my post-oral-surgery hydrocodone and went back to bed. I was able to sleep, and a friend helped me look up on the internet and verify that I had a pulled hamstring...

The next day, Saturday, I went to housesit for friends going out of town. Steps going in to the house from every door. Steps up to the showers and bedrooms. My knees took a beating, compensating for the hamstring injury. I'm still recovering from that.

I have a couple of photos from the Eucharistic Congress in Charlotte, which was this past weekend. That was a real treat - I sang with the combined choir on Friday night, had a solo in the dona nobis pacem of the Mozart Coronation Mass - a very nice experience overall.

Got to see and meet Father Benedict Groeschel - he was the Friday night speaker, talked about Eucharistic Adoration. When I download his photo I'll post more about his talk.

I'm not singing with the Master Chorale this season, but decided to try to cultivate a local social outlet so am singing with our local county choral society. The music is not nearly of the same calibre (that will be another post - I had to pick a horrible year NOT to sing with the NCMC) - but again, it's a local group and will give me an opportunity to meet people in my own community. I need that.

Okay - Josh, if you pop back in, I'm back LOL - God bless you, dear friend! and bless you in your seminary studies.

There must be more than one moral to this story...

I ought not to laugh, but I can't help it - it's just too........
http://www.wral.com/news/strange/story/1604949/

Maybe people who have neglected repairs to houses, left them vacant too long, not kept up wiht mowing... ? What do you think?

He's done it now -

Oh, that Bubba has really gone and done it now. Woke me up at 6:30, "talking" to me a mile a minutes - then starts making the most disgusting noise...
The damned cat had brought a half-eaten rat up onto my bed. Absolutely disgusting! Nasty! Revolting! GROSS!

When God says "I Love You"

It often doesn't come with trumpet blasts and verifiable miracles. Sometimes it comes with the bluebird perched on a branch of the dogwood right outside the living room window - or the vivid blue of the spiderwort in the roadside bank.

Returning from my evening walk, just a few minutes ago, a bit of movement from the other side of my house caught my eye; it was three deer. I'm sorry that I did not have my camera with me, and they were too far away to have gotten a decent photo anyway. They stood, frozen in their suspicious awareness of me. By the time I reached the back door, they were bounding toward the woods at the back of the field.

I often see deer tracks cutting into the sand in my yard, but it is not as common as I would enjoy to see them so close to the house in broad daylight. It was truly a great treat, and it felt as if God were sending me a brief love letter.

Prayers for Tammy Faye -

Tammy Faye Messner, former wife of shamed and ousted televangelist Jim Bakker, is dying of cancer, according to her son, Jay.

What I find even more shocking than Jim Bakker's grievous and scandalous misconduct, back in the day, is the revelation that Jay Bakker is connected to the gay cult, the Metropolitan Community Church, according to the article linked, above.

May God have mercy on Tammy Faye, grant her a peaceful death and eternal salvation, and deliver her and her family from all evil.

Go, Father Z, Go!

Father Z demonstrates how our dear Papa Bennie is making all the right people mad these days -
Pray for the health and safety of our dear Papa! And pray for the health of the Church Universal.

Having introduced you to Bubba....

I thought you might like to see what Precious looks like. She's a small cat, only about ten pounds, max? but she'll stand down a big old dog like Tucker, who weighs probably close to 80 lbs.

I'm going to start a new cuss word -

CHIGGERS!
Yep. Sounds absolutely scandalous, doesn't it?

It should. I'm house- and pet-sitting for friends this week, lovely home about eight miles from my home. I spend nights there and come home to my place to work in the mornings. I bring Tucker, the dog, with me.

Tucker, if you are interested, is a sharpei-golden retriever mix.

On Tuesday, I decided that what I really wanted to do, while the weather was so nice and moderate and dry, was to spray the poison ivy that's threatening to take over my yard again. So I mixed up Round-Up (the only time I use this stuff is on poison ivy) and headed outdoors. A stroll along the driveway led to a stroll around the back yard, which led to a stroll in the woods...

Tucker has come back with ticks (so much for the value of Frontline) and I, my friends, am covered in chigger bites. My waist, arms, legs...

Yep - definitely worthy of becoming a cuss word. Forget those words alluding to bodily functions - let a new generation of profanity arise, founded in disgust over objects not wholly-enough separate from ourselves: CHIGGERS.

Next new cussword: tobacco hornworms!

Happy Fourth of July

We are experiencing very mind weather here this year - it was in the low 60s this morning and only mid-80s now. I picked tobacco hornworms off the tomato plants, tried to mow the yard (mower choked out and so I'll have to try after it - and I - "rest" a bit). After while, I'm going to check where I can take Tucker and see some FIREWORKS.

and I splurged and had a bowl, a big bowl, of chocolate ice cream!

Y'all have fun, stay cool, try to behave, now.

How will your obituary read?

Once again, the obituary read, "She was an avid golfer...." Down here in golf country, that's not surprising - most people move here from other parts of the country for the golf, when they retire.

But it's sad, too, that a life that has ended, a soul sent on its way to God for the Final Judgment, should be celebrated and remembered for something so superficial as chasing a little ball around and trying to hit it into a little hole in the ground.

When I die, I want my obituary to read of my conversion, my love of God and His Church, my eagerness to share the Faith... I don't know that it would, since my survivors are hardly likely themselves to care about such things. But it's what I aspire to.

How should we live, in order to merit a more substantial memorial than "she was an avid golfer"?

Bubba

THIS
is
the
cat
-

That caught the rat
That joined the mouse
Brought out of the rain
And laid in the hall
(Both dead)
That woke me up at 4:30 a.m.
Meowing to announce his prowess
and Scared me to pieces -
All in the house that Laura built!

Happy Saturday!

I went across the creek to a produce stand this a.m. to pick up a cantalope for breakfast (I am determined to TRY to "do it right" in this weight-loss business, and that means eating three meals a day - so I have to learn to eat breakfast of some description, right?) -

I love this time of year! Even with flies and other bugs (I did put a fresh fly strip up in the kitchen this a.m. - flies will slip in the open windows and door especially in the face of a weather front) - I love the way everything smells, and the way I feel.

The produce had just come out of the cooler. I wish they'd leave it out, but it would go overripe in no time if they did that. We need to develop a better marketing system for fresh produce, you know? - anyway, the cantalope was warm enough to have a light perfume to it and a nice firm texture, so I bought it, and in a few minutes I'll go into the kitchen, cut it up and eat it with a 1/2-cup of cottage cheese. Wonderful flavor combinations!

and I bought a small basket of peaches. Six peaches in a basket for $2.50 - that's a little more than $.40 per peach! ridiculous! but we're lucky to have any peaches at all after the hard freeze, Easter weekend.

And then - the Lamberts have just started carrying flowers this year - I found the sweetest flower. Have you ever heard of - Indian feathers, I think it's called? It's sweeping grassy stems with the most deliciously pale, delicate pink blossoms. I just had to have one - at $4.00 for a little plant.

I got the first squash out of my garden yesterday, both yellow and zucchini. I picked the little squash while they were still tiny enough the blossoms were still attached. Later on today I'm going to try a squash blossom omelet from the book French Women Don't Get Fat. the squash themselves, I sauteed last night in butter and olive oil - they were crisp but light and had the most wonderful flavor!

I've struggled all these years with self-image, not knowing what to do with my womanhood - all those "feminine gifts" seeming so alien to me. I feel as if the blockage is being shifted, and bit by bit, in trickles and sometimes gushes, like water escaping a dammed-in pond, I'm discovering what a delight it is to be a woman, and to live as a child of God, revelling in His many gifts of beauty and sweetness.

Happy Summer Saturday, y'all!

Gee, Angela - give a gal a chance to recover -

from a trip to the dentist's!
I thought the tooth was going to have to come out; instead my favorite "Caters to Cowards" (yep! that's me!) dentist - Mark Thompson - actually was able to do a gorgemous composite filling. My chipped incisor looks like new, and my poor old molar looks good enough to move around to the front of my mouth!

but I do need a nap. Badly.

Hello Again, Naturally -

Back in... March, was it? I announced my intentions to drop off the face of the earth where Catholic Match is concerned. Well, it wasn't as easy as I thought.

One of the reasons these sites are so popular is that the fora are entertaining. CM offers the options of on-site emails and brief messages they call "emotes" - a charming easy way to exchange brief messages between members. It's fun.

And for a gal living with two cats, it's an easy and mostly-pleasing distraction.

Okay - I'll make a public confession: I also had a little bit of a "following" over there - a group of women ranging in age from their late teens to their 60s, who thought (or at least said) I am wise and witty and simply wonderful...

Not wonderful enough to stay in touch with now that I've actually pulled the plug and removed my profile, mind you... ah, the public are such a fickle bunch! LOL -

But certainly wonderful enough to gush to me and generally feed my ego in a major way.

So - I'm back. and frankly, I'm not sure I have an awful lot to say. I wrote four articles for CM/4Marks magazine - you can go to www.4marks.com and click on the magazine link: look for my wit and wisdom (choke!) in January, February, March and May. The March article is trash - literally a rough draft I sent to the editor because he was begging me to send him something - so of course it is the article that has received the most attention. My best article, "Spiritual Warfare," for the May issue, is buried in the Apologetics section while a poem of questionable quality and an over-circulated email text received Headline status.

I want to break into paying markets. That is my career goal for this summer.

and, meantime, it wouldn't hurt to posts in here more often, even pontificating a bit and being a general BORE, right?

I see I get an average of 3 views per day. Angela - how many of those are yours, Dear Heart? Well, here's a crumb. We'll see how long I can sustain this blogging stuff this time.

Love y'all - you're in my prayers.

Holy Week - Triduum

I love the Triduum. The 3-act drama celebrating the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord is my favorite time of the year.

It is grueling, through, particularly for our priests, who have extensive meetings and extra Masses with the Bishops this week (for this is the week we also remember how Christ established the Holy Priesthood) I didn't get to go to a chrism Mass this year, over which I'm rather disappointed.

For me, the work begins this evening, with the Mass of the Lord's Supper. It's a bilingual Triduum, and the combined choirs are splitting off the music between us. The "Anglo" choir is not doing much tonight, but Father did as me to lead the Pange, Lingua and Tantum Ergo.

My friend Stephanie pointed out a couple weeks ago that the Enemy of our souls, Satan, really hates this time of year and works overtime to trip us up and cause us suffering and temptation. I had never thought of it before, but this year it's quite clear she's right.

Could it be in part because this year I'm engaged in a 54-day novena, the first of which ends... on Good Friday?

This means, to me, that we are particularly obligated to hold one another up during this Holy Season. Even when I don't "feel" like it, even when I'm convinced I'm a loser and a dope and when I feel like I'm on the brink of craziness, I will pray for you. God bless and keep you - may He be glorified through us.

Catalinni - Final update

She joked about being voted off the island, but no one wanted to see her leave. God had other plans, though, and yesterday, at about 12:45 Pacific Time, my dear friend Catalinni entered Eternity.

I posted about her almost two years ago, when I was a new blogger - you can find that in the archives.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual Light shine upon her. May her soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace. Amen.

A recent article features a letter written by the brother of Terry Schiavo to Bishop Lynch of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida.

In the letter, Bobby Schindler says:

"The barbarism and nightmare of Terri's two week death by thirst and starvation will be forever seared into my family's memory. It is incomprehensible to us that a nation supposedly built on basic Judeo- Christian principles would allow something so wicked to happen. That is, until one realizes that just as the Culture of Death made a triumphal entry into our nation in 1973, via legalized abortion, without so much as a whimper of protest from those with the God-given authority to stop it, so now our disabled and elderly are being targeted for death. The bottom line is, when apostolic grace and responsibility are abdicated, innocent people die.[emphasis mine]

This whole idea of Christian quietism, or passivism if you will, has been much on my mind of late. We are living in a major cultural crisis: flagrant pornography passed as entertainment, legal rulings outlawing ordinary observations of our Christian heritage, such as the posting of the Ten Commandments in public venues, and a secularization of culture that makes life cheap.

We live in a world gone mad, in fact, gone mad because "good Christian people" have not had the backbone to say, first, "NO!" and even now, "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH."

Education... our educational system is cultivating generations of sheep prime for social engineering, and parents are not concerned what their children are reading and discussing, or not reading and discussing or learning in the classroom. The fundamentals of education - parts of speech, the multiplication tables and other basic math functions - that actually provide early concrete training in rational thinking have been supplanted by the conveniences of modern technologies.

We are at war, but we are also, as the late Keith Green put it, "Asleep in the Light."

We are supposed to be a countercultural people, living in accordance with the customs and traditions of a Heavenly Kingdom, of which we are subjects and heirs.

There is no question, there can be no complacent waiting for the pendulum to begin to swing back toward center of its own accord; we are the force behind the direction of the pendulum. The time is upon us to awaken from our slumber, abandon our comfort zones, and raise the cry for our nation, yea, our very world, to stop the insanities of atheistic secularism and to begin to return to God.

This generation of believers is responsible for this generation of souls, something else Green proclaimed. We are responsible; we are accountable.

Let us put on the full armor of Christ and engage in the Good Fight.

Lord, have mercy on us.