Made for Friendship

Now that Lucy, Jeff and I have got you all riled up, I will calm you down with some soothing thoughts borrowed from Saint Edith Stein.

By the way, thank you very much to those readers who have written in to say that they have responded to my nagging and actually read Saint Edith Stein's essays on women. One of you mentioned feeling a bit mental because of wanting to talk about her with somebody, and I now recommend throwing a "Brainy Evening" party in which everyone invited has to read the Stein essay you send them and then talk about it during the party. Of course not all the guests will actually read it, so write key quotes on cue cards and hand them out with the drinks.

Suffice it to say, Saint Edith would neither write "I blame men" nor agree to a thesis that "American [or German or Wrocławian, in her case] women lack charm." What Stein did do was examine masculinity and femininity in light of Scripture and philosophy, observing the gifts of each and the ways in which both had been warped slightly by original sin.

Stein thought that both masculinity and femininity brought necessary gifts to all of human life, including the factory floor, and emphasized that both men and women are made in the image and likeness of God. Humanity is a unity of two. And this is where it gets interesting.

Stein was not that interested in the subject of marriage, per se. When she thought of marriage, she thought in more general terms, of Man being wedded to Woman in the species called Human. Much more important to her than the husband-wife bond was the mother-child bond. In fact, she speculated that it was something erotic in the Adam-Eve relationship that brought about the Fall, which gave her posthumous orthodox editors a few seizures.

Saint Edith holds up Mary, Mother of God (and of us all) as the great model for women. And she sees that women have two choices in regards to our not inconsiderable influence on men: we can be sexy Eve and seriously mess them up, or we can be motherly Mary and lead them to Christ. Obviously she thinks we should be Mary, exercising either our biological or spiritual motherhood to help men--and other women--flourish.

This emphasis on motherhood is, I think, a very good corrective when men and women see each other as nothing more than erotic turn-ons and turn-offs. Very few of us would want to marry Jeff. Okay, but what can we do for Jeff? Jeff is a human being, our brother in Christ, a fellow Catholic, a fellow TRAD Catholic for some of us. What can we do for him?

We cannot do much, really, as long as Jeff is fixated on whether American Catholic women are worth marrying or not. One might want to ask Jeff if American Catholic women are worth befriending. After all, that is what Christian life is all about: "I call you friends," said the Lord. Friendship between men and women who are not related by ties of blood or marriage is part of the first century Christian revolution.

(I am suddenly reminded of a Jesuit classmate who met a Muslim acquaintance, a fellow student, on the streets of Toronto and made the "mistake" of addressing the Muslim student's wife, demurely tucked behind him. The Jesuit classmate felt badly for being so insensitive. He was glad the Muslim student had just pretended it hadn't happened. Auntie's snarled response to her Jesuit classmate: "This is TORONTO." She might have also said, "We are Christians.")

I hope Jeff has female friends, women who like him without feeling an overwhelming erotic attraction, for perhaps they will sit down with him, like the spiritual mothers they are, and explain why he is unlikely to attract any adult American women with his views.** If he understands that they truly desire his good, and he is grown up enough not to sulk that they don't desire him, then he might learn something and thus become more attractive to his fellow Americans.

Before I read the work of Edith Stein, which was not that long ago, I used to say that I didn't have many men friends. I would mention about B.A.'s friends, which caused some hilarity among B.A.'s friends, who are actually, although in a different way, my friends, too. (And reading this blog even though they know perfectly well it is for girls.)

I had a much narrower view of friendship than Saint Edith's, for my idea of friendship of necessity included a certain kind of emotional intimacy. But Saint Edith's thoughts on spiritual motherhood made me think about that again. It is possible to care for many men without becoming too attached to them or expecting them to behave like female friends or scandalizing anyone or annoying your husband, if you have one.

In other words, men are not just the caffeine in the coffee of life. And this reminds me of one of my men friends who occasionally addresses me as "Hen."

"Hen" is the Scottish, or maybe just Edinburgh, working-class term of endearment for neighbouring women. It is like American "honey" or "hon." Local wifies (women) address each other as "hen," and local men address local wifies as "hen" if they think they won't get into trouble. Apparently it is now a bit politically incorrect for men to call women "hen", although I can't imagine why. I certainly like being called "hen" better than "pal", which is how working-class Scottish men address each other.

Anyway, I thought for a long time how to respond to my friend's cries of "Hello, hen" or "How are you doing, hen?" because they are usually outbreaks of banter and the laws of banter demand the ability to banter back. So I listened very hard for how local women address local men and finally found a near equivalent for "hen".

"How are you doing, hen?" asked Friend, age 50.

"I'm doing fine, son," I replied.

**UPDATE: Sciencegirl brings up a good objection, so I will emphasize "the spiritual mothers they are"[already]. Spiritual motherhood is not some external-to-you spiritual-mother-costume you put on. And it is not sounding like Marmee in Little Woman or Jo in Little Men. If you're me, Spiritual Motherhood can sound like what I write here (although I don't talk to men like this). If you're Jeff's female friend, Spiritual Motherhood might indeed sound like, "Hey, Jeff, how are those Polish lessons going?"

Update 2: Erased two updates. Dear me. How exhausting. Sometimes when men leave comments I coldly rub them out. But sometimes when men leave comments I get really angry, but then feel badly later for getting really angry when this is supposed to be a friendly blog.

Tea Lady

It was like something in a Lucy Maud Montgomery book, poppets! Yours truly was asked to help serve tea after church. I felt as if I had definitely arrived.

In Canada (and, I think, Britain) before the Second World War, being asked to pour the tea at a tea party or any other social gathering was seen as an honour. And we are nothing if not anachronistic in my little Extraordinary Form of the Mass parish community. Not that there is anything anachronistic about the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, which transcends time. No, it's just that we tend to go in for tweed, mantillas, bicycles and old-fashioned courtesy.

I remember being rather confused, for the first 38 years of my life, whether the altar was more of an altar or more of a table. Since I went to ordinary post-Vatican II Catholic school, there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on "table" and "gathering around the table" when, in fact, the altar didn't really look like a table. No matter what, it looked like an altar. No matter how many people stood around it, what was going on did not look like a dinner party but like an intensely serious ritual.

But now this has all been cleared up for me, and I am strongly convinced that an altar is an altar and not a table, save in the the most analogical sense. However, I can see why people would want the altar to be a table. And to such people, who badly want their Sunday worship to be about people being in solidarity with other people, not about each person worshipping God, I strongly suggest they go to or found an after-Mass tea.

Mass is Mass, and tea is tea. At Mass you have a priest, an altar and some altar servers. At tea you have the tea lady, the table, and some table servers. Simples. From my neo-Tridentine point of view, men serve at the altar, and women serve at the tea. And, heaven knows, tea must be very important, since so many people want Mass to be tea: handshaking and fellowship and maximum participation and whatnot.

The Cup of Tea of Peace, as I like to call it, is usually presided over by the most senior women of the parish, although the eldest prefers just to wait until it is almost done and then help with the washing and sweeping up. But if some are away, then they ask younger ladies to help. This week, two were away, so the ladies who presided were one senior lady, me, and the eldest lady at the end. I got the teapot because it is heavy.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" I carolled again and again, and thus had the great pleasure of talking to everyone in the parish who wanted a cuppa. And it struck me that for a Single person this would a very good thing indeed. You can get involved in all kinds of parish activities, but the one job that guarantees you getting to know and becoming known by every sociable person in the parish is pouring out the after-Mass tea.

As a tea lady, you would have a built-in excuse to speak to even the most handsome and bachelory of the handsome bachelors and your lovely smile might inspire the more scheming of the ladies to drag their sons/grandsons/proteges to their Mass for the purpose of meeting you afterwards. Just don't dress like a mouse out of Beatrix Potter.

I suppose it is terrible to look immediately at the earthly benefits of serving at the tea table as opposed to the joy and peace inherent in service. And actually I did think a lot about Saint Edith Stein yesterday as I poured out tea and ran the ancient carpet-sweeper over the floor. Edith Stein would have agreed with me that a female theologian who is too grand to pour tea, wipe cups and push the carpet-sweeper is no theologian at all.

But this is, after all, a blog for Single ladies, so in case you haven't thought of it yet: say yes if you are asked to volunteer to serve tea or coffee after Mass, or after any other respectable gathering.

Update: Ooh la la! Just passed 10,000 hits for the month. I've never noticed that before.

The Great Give-Away

My first lecture at the "Brave Women" retreat in Kraków next month is on St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, otherwise known as Edith Stein. Edith Stein was born in Wrocław (then Breslau) and died in Auschwitz, which is not far from Kraków.

Edith Stein was one of those mindbogglingly brilliant women born before the Second World War who was impeded in her career first by being female and second by being Jewish. ("Jewish" was considered an ethnic group or racial type, so converting to Christianity did not make a Jew not-Jewish in the eyes of wider society.) Stein was keenly interested in the "Woman Question" and her writings were very influential to the thought of a certain Karol Wojtyła and so, in time, to a papal encyclical called Mulieris Dignitatem.

I have often thought about readers who write to me saying that they long to "give themselves to a man" and thus find Single life an incredible burden and premarital sex a terrible temptation. (By the way, I pray for all my readers every Sunday at the Elevation of the Chalice.) So I was electrified when I read this passage in Stein's "The Ethos of Women's Professions":

It is the deepest desire of a woman’s heart to surrender itself lovingly to another, to be wholly his and to possess him wholly. This is at the root of her tendency towards the personal and the whole, which seems to us the specifically feminine characteristic. Where this total surrender is made to human being, it is a perverted self-surrender that enslaves her, and implies at the same time an unjustified demand which no human being can fulfil. Only God can receive the complete surrender of a person and in such a way that she will not lose, but gain her soul. And only God can give Himself to a human being in such a way that He will fulfil its whole being while losing nothing of His own. Hence the total surrender which is the principle of the religious life, is at the same time the only possible adequate fulfilment of women’s desire.
…
…What practical consquence follows from this? It certainly does not follow that all women who would fulfil their vocation should not become nuns. But it does follow that the fallen and perverted feminine nature [NB Stein has earlier explained the effects of the fall on both the feminine and masculine natures] can be restored to its purity and led to the heights of the vocational ethos such as the pure feminine nature represents, only if it is totally surrendered to God. Whether she lives as a mother in her home, in the limelight of public life or behind the silent walls of a convent, she must everywhere be a ‘handmaid of the Lord’, as the Mother of God had been in all the circumstances of her life, whether she was living as a virgin in the sacred precincts of the Temple, silently kept house at Bethlehem and Nazareth or guided the apostles and the first Christian community after the death of her Son. If every woman were an image of the Mother of God, a spouse of Christ and an apostle of the divine Heart, she woul fulfil her feminine vocation no matter in what circumstances she lived and what her external activities might be.

Discuss.

Puppy Love in the Cold War

Once upon a time, my little chickadees, two great powers divided much of the world. These powers were called NATO and the USSR, which is to say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Both powers were rather worried that one would attack the other, and they both pointed nuclear warheads in each other's direction.

My mother spent her childhood under the shadow of the Bomb, and so did I. My mother's primary school welcomed refugee Germans, and my primary school welcomed refugee Yugoslavs, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians, Vietnamese and others who had managed to escape the confines of life under Communism. A Polish priest, two steps ahead of the SB, appeared in my parish. A Hungarian priest, recently released from captivity, recovered in the Hungarian parish around the corner, down the street.

We thought in terms of "Evil Empire" and "Iron Curtain". My brother bought a single called "Russians," in which Sting hopes "the Russians love their children, too." There were hit songs about nuclear war: "99 Red Balloons" and "Forever Young" were just two of many. It was widely known that the Iron Curtain was difficult to get through, and photos of poor Eastern Germans who had been shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall appeared in Time magazine.

Occasionally, though, people could get temporary visas to visit either side of the Iron Curtain. When I was about six, a Polish couple and one or two of their children came to Canada to visit their brother, my father's friend. They all came to visit my family at the cottage we had rented or borrowed beside Georgian Bay, a famous beauty spot in Ontario. The eldest son of this Polish family was about five years old, spoke absolutely no English and was struck by a passion for little me. Being without guile, he threw his arms around me at once, and seemed glued to my side for the duration of his visit.

I was rather astonished by this, and there exists a photo of my six year old self caught in something between a hug and a headlock smiling weakly at the camera. Small Canadian boys of my acquaintance did not act like that, especially not towards me. However, even at six I knew that inspiring this kind of regard in a boy was what a great many people thought life was all about. So when my admirer went home, I inquired of my mother where that was, and that is how I realized that real people lived behind the Iron Curtain. I had some shy notion of sending him one of my toys, but my mother said people behind the Iron Curtain did not need toys but basic things like soap and medicine. She impressed upon me that they were all tremendously poor and hard to see, and I was unlikely ever to see my admirer again.

All this seemed very unfair, and in those days I was easily discouraged. It did not even occur to me to suggest we send over a nice box of soap and medicine, then. Instead I treasured the fact, so important in the decadent West, that I had once had an admirer, and it was some comfort in the horrible years ahead when that became the primary measure of one's worth in the schoolyard. It was even, I blush to admit, balm to a recent graze to my ego when a Polish parishioner mentioned (yet again) the superior beauty of Polish girls in general. I informed him that I, at any rate, had been up to Polish standards when I was six.

This set a train of thought in motion, and it slowly chugged its way across the maps laid out after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody had expected the Wall to fall--on reruns of Star Trek Pavel Chekhov still nattered on about cossacks and Leningrad--but it did, shattering the Iron Curtain between thriving us and impoverished them. And what is more, and possibly even more staggering, is that it is now possible to find almost anybody alive through the internet. So I found my first admirer on Facebook.

Dear me. I fear that like Tosca I live for art and love, and not necessarily in that order. At any rate, it was the work of moments to find my father's friend, to click on the page of the son of his old age, to swiftly scroll down the list of his friends to his presumed cousin and click on his name. And there he was. I recognized him at once, and my heart flipped over. He now lives in Canada.

My mother skyped later with his name, written decades ago in her old phone book, but I had remembered his Christian name and the shape of his surname, so this was only confirmation of what I had discovered already. And I was already feeling embarrassed by my sudden curiosity, since it is perhaps not fitting for married ladies to look up complete strangers, also married, they met briefly when they were six.

However, I think the moral of all this story is that history is astonishing. When I was a child, people were so physically and politically divided that, not only was it unlikely to stay friends with Polish children after their short Western holiday, we were not sure if any of us would make it to the next century. When I was 17, we were watching horror films about the coming nuclear apocalypse, and when I was 19, we were suddenly watching Germans streaming over the shattered Wall to embrace long-lost members of their families. The Cold War was over.

My American father once said that the fact that despite our best efforts World War III never happened is solid evidence that there really is a God who loves us. And as I search my brain for a reason I should have written this post, it occurs to me that it is, after all, American Thanksgiving. So I would like to give thanks for the fall of the Wall and also for the technological miracle that helps people find people in seconds.

***
By the way, American readers should sign up in the combox below if they want to play "Points" with other American readers. In short, you count up how many times Thanksgiving guests (or hosts) mention your Single status. In the morning, report in tomorrow's combox. Sisters can all get a point each if the mention is collective, e.g. "Why aren't ANY of you girls married off yet? What is with boys today?"

Auntie Seraphic & Stopping Someone Else from Sex

This was one of those emails that made me ponder the usefulness of being a married lady. Married ladies can talk about sex as if they know something about it without anyone thinking, "Hey! How come she knows so much?"

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

A not-especially-close friend of mine recently asked for my help in coming back to the faith. She was raised Catholic, but hasn't been practicing recently. Now she wants to return to the Church, and I'm excited for her.

The problem is that she has been dating an agnostic for about three years, and they are sexually active (although I hate using that phrase). She recognizes that coming back to the Church would mean not having sex with her boyfriend any more, which I think is a good first step. The problem is that she, as a recent revert, is struggling with how to explain to him their need to stop; she isn't too familiar with Catholic teachings on these sorts of things. In the meantime, he doesn't seem to perceive any problem with the situation, and wants to continue sleeping with her. Apparently, he has also said that he wants to marry her someday, and I think this is making it harder for her to stop.

My question is twofold: how should I approach the topic with her, and are there any good resources to which I could direct her?

Thank you!

Sincerely yours,

Reversion Resource Guide

Dear Reversion Resource Guide,

I'm going radically revise my initial reponse to be even less dismissive of the agnostic boyfriend. Somehow my teenage-era horror of agnostic boyfriends who talk their girlfriends into having sex with them clouded the sun of my middle-aged married lady charity. Men who enjoy having consensual sex with their girlfriends of three years are not actually the scum of the earth. They are just ordinary guys. A guy who tries to go out and bed a new woman every night is doing it for a cheap and nasty thrill. A guy who cuddles up to the same woman for three years is doing it to feel loved and to express love. So I'm going to rewrite my response to take into consideration that Mr Agnostic is most likely not a douche bag but a guy who loves his girlfriend and will feel really hurt if she turns off the sex tap.

Okay, it's nice that this girl wishes to become a more authentic Catholic. Although her serious sins have cut her off from Grace, she never really left the Church, of course, unless she publicly repudiated her. I don't quite understand why she needs your help, however. Are there no priests around? She needs to talk to a priest.

She needs to talk to a priest because a priest is going to understand a lot more about where she and her boyfriend are coming from than a Nice Catholic Girl who thinks the first step to becoming a better Catholic is to stop having sex. Yes, pre-marital sex is pretty bad. It is a serious sin. But Christianity does not begin and end with sexual purity but with the Blessed Trinity. Christianity is not a set of rules but a relationship with Almighty God in His three Persons. Christianity is a relationship with God in light of His revelatory Incarnation, Mission, Death and Resurrection. Frankly, I'd start with prayer. Does she pray? Does she read Scripture? Does she think about, read about and talk to Jesus of Nazareth?

The problem isn't that this girl is having sex. The problem is that this girl is having sex with someone to whom she isn't married. The solution to the problem has absolutely nothing to do with you. The solution is for her to say to her boyfriend, "Look. I believe in and love Almighty God, and Almighty God wants me to be fully committed to the man with whom I share my bed. It's time we got married, baby."

This may very well surprise Mr. Agnostic Boyfriend if your acquaintance has hitherto shown absolutely no reluctance in the past three years to sleep with him outside of marriage. And Mr. Agnostic Boyfriend, upon hearing that his girlfriend wishes now to become a better Catholic, might be afraid that this means she wants to dump him. She should assure him that she doesn't want to dump him, she just wants to please Almighty God.

Of course--and forgive me for my cynicism here--it may be that she is bored with her boyfriend and wants an excuse to stop sleeping with him. If this is so, you need to be so far from the situation, you will be in another zip code entirely.

This girl didn't write to me. You did. And, therefore, you are my first concern. You sound like a very nice girl, and I know very well that it is thrilling and flattering to feel like the Holy Spirit is using you to bring about the salvation of another. However, I suspect (and this is in no way shameful, really, considering your age and state in life) that you don't understand how sexual relationships between men and women work. You don't seem to understand that even very nice (if disobedient-to-God) women like to have sex and aren't just tricked into it (especially after the first year) by vague promises of marriage.

It is absolutely impossible for you to convince another woman not to have sex when she wants to have sex. Three years of sex is a hard habit to break, and frankly, only falling in love with another man (or simply falling out of love with this one) is likely to make this girl break it. That man may very well be Our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, it should be. If she does love her boyfriend, only knowing and loving Our Lord better than she does now will make her choose His will over her current set-up.

One of the most important things we were told in ministry school was that, when we were out of our depth,we acknowledge it and refer our friend/client/sheep (whoever)to someone better informed. When an undergrad under my care told me of his/her Sister Faustina-like visions, I sent him/her straight to a famous priest-professor of spiritual direction.

In your case, unless you do have an understanding of what it means to be in a long-term sexually active relationship (which I doubt), I think you are out of your depth. Think of the best, smartest priest you know and suggest your friend and her boyfriend talk to him.

Yes, the boyfriend. He, too, has an immortal soul. He is not just the potential roadblock to the reversion of your non-practising Catholic pal. He is a real person with feelings and a soul Christ died to save.

If you include the boyfriend in your suggestions, and she recoils, that may mean that she doesn't want to include him in her journey and a growing relationship with Christ and, therefore, that she doesn't love him anymore. And if this is the case, once again you need to distance yourself from a seriously toxic situation that has nothing to do with you. If she doesn't love the man, she should dump him. If she loves him and he is otherwise a man of character, then she should marry him. End of story.

End of THEIR story. It's not your story. Say "Why don't you get married?", maybe give the girl a copy of "Mulieris Dignitatem" and something on marriage, refer her to a good priest and pray for her. But for heaven's sake do not get involved in the psychodrama of Her and Him and God.

I hope this is helpful.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Don't Be a Doormat

I loathe the phrase "female empowerment" because it is so often used as an excuse to do something anti-social, like wear grossly inappropriate clothing in public, treat a man like a sex toy or punch people in the face. The word "empowerment" merely cloaks a cheap and nasty thrill. I've even heard it seriously used to justify taking all one's clothes off on stage in a sleazy strip joint. The Empress not only has no clothes, she has no empowerment, either.

So let us dispense with that stupid phrase. Let's talk about dignity instead. Or if you don't like the word dignity, let's use the word self-worth. How much do you think you're worth?

This question may confuse you, for we tend to confuse worth with price. Flipping through a British literary magazine, I came across an article that reduced the human body to its chemical ingredients and then estimated their selling price. Goodness me, who knew that the dollar (or rupee) value of Mother Teresa, for example, was so little?

I hope I haven't ruined your morning with that soggy little materialist-extremist anecdote. I will cheer you up by pointing to the Christian economic metaphor at the heart of most of your lives: that Christ paid for you with His own blood. That's how much you're worth.

And if you can't quite get your mind around Christ's love for you (a love symbolized and celebrated as the Sacred Heart), you might be able to get your mind around your family's or friends' love for you. Perhaps even today your mother, if she still lives, or your old auntie might shove her own body between you and a speeding truck. If you cast your mind back over your life, you may notice many sacrifices someone has made on your behalf. My grandmothers and parents, for example, put aside their grief over my uncle's untimely Advent death to make sure the children of the family had a happy Christmas.

Now that I have hopefully convinced you of your worth to God and some of your fellow creatures, I would like to point out that it would be churlish to put a lower value on yourself than they do. You might think that effacing yourself is appropriately humble and simply good manners. And, yes, it is good manners to give up your seat on the bus to an old or pregnant lady, and to offer someone else the bigger slice of cake. But it is neither appropriate or good manners to allow someone to treat you like crap.

I want to proceed carefully, for I witnessed a disgusting brawl on an Edinburgh bus the other day. Two drunken women about my age, who possibly thought getting drunk "like men" and being loud "like men" was empowering, stumbled up to the upper deck and began to harass the passengers "like men". As we ignored and then upbraided them, it occurred to the two harpies that they were being treated like crap. This they could not allow and so one began to beat a much younger woman, and when another young woman tried to restrain her, along came the other old harpy to protect her pal with violence.

Thus, when I talk about people treating you like crap, I mean people actually doing sober, well-behaved you real harm. Real harm includes behaving inappropriately, leaving you miserable. It includes taking advantage of your generous nature while giving you nothing in return. It includes being friendly to you one moment, and then turning on you the next.

If you laugh along in misery when people make cruel fun of you in the hopes that this will make them relent, you are complicit in your own abuse. If you return constantly to people who are mean or indifferent to you in the hope of winning them over, you are complicit in your own abuse. If you lay out your time, money and/or body to an attractive man expecting nothing in return, you are complicit in your own abuse. You are behaving, in fact, like a doormat.

"Welcome" says the doormat. "Walk on me."

Allowing people to walk on you like that is not a virtue. It is a sin. However, if you don't know that, don't beat yourself up. You didn't know any better, and for a sin to be dead serious, you have to have known it was a sin. But from now on, the next time you let a man or false friend walk all over you, to confession you go.

Would you allow someone to deliberately spill the Precious Blood on the floor, or spit on the Holy Eucharist? No, you would not. And yet Christ allowed His Body to be spat on, and His Precious Blood to be spilled for you. I hope that makes you think about your value to God and how repeatedly allowing yourself to be abused and/or used is thus a form of sacrilege.

But Don't Worry So Much

I had an interesting conversation with a Single the other day about determining God's plan for you. It struck me that if you beg God over and over again to reveal His plan, you might not being giving Him a chance to get a word in edgewise. By asking so many questions, you won't be open to hearing answers. I know it might be difficult to ask your questions and then sit in absolute, empty-headed, trusting silence in front of the tabernacle or crucifix, but why not try?

Trinity Sunday has just passed, and the worst Trinity Sunday homily I ever heard included a bold declaration that the Trinity was not an unplumbable Mystery. But, actually, yes, the Trinity is an unplumbable mystery. (Where did he get his theology degree, I wonder. Out of a Cracker Jack box?) There is a lot of mystery in Christianity, simply because our reason is just not big enough to take in the ways of God. This is very difficult for those who have broken the first commandment and enshrined limited human reason as a god before Him, but it should not be difficult for us Christians.

God's plan is a mystery, and goodness knows how much of it we ever get to see, let alone understand. Usually we can do it only through hindsight and theological speculation. The liturgies and Gospels show evidence of the apostles, who lived through such mind-blowing events, grasping at ways to explain what just happened in a way that their initially Jewish and then pagan audiences could understand.

Whether or not is a good idea to look back and see what God was doing with your life is an open question. I have received a great deal of comfort from a hypothesis about the point of my PhD program. That was an awful time, and it resulted in illness, dropping out of the program and falling out of love with academic Catholic theology.

Because I was an A student, prayed a lot before I entered the program, felt rock solid and happy that academic theology was what God was calling me to do, and it all went wrong anyway, what was God's point?

Over the years, it occurred to me that God's point was not the PhD program itself, but for me to meet my housemate Ted (who is in My Book), who got me interested in blogging. I started a blog, and because I started a blog, I had a book published, made some friends, met my husband and helped a lot of people.

From an economic point of of view, this is pretty nutty. If I had completed the PhD and gotten an academic post (as grads of my program generally did), I would now be pulling down thousands of dollars, called by a title, getting one of the best seats in the syna--at the theological table, and a whole lot of other nice stuff. Instead, five years of ministerial and theological study ended up in a blog, for which I am paid exactly nothing.

However, I'm not starving to death because first my family and now my husband makes sure I don't. I'm doing more than okay. And, as I constantly remember, St. Ignatius of Loyola told the first Jesuits that they were not allowed to charge for their work. I got my theological education from the Jesuits. Jesuit institutions, understandably, now charge for their work. But it makes me think about how truly valuable is unpaid work.

Anyway, we do worry that we will somehow mess up God's plan for us by making the wrong decision. But I say not to worry about that. God writes straight with crooked lines, as we are often told. Our Lord said "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God." Thus, if you do your best to obey His commandments, no matter what bad things happen or what good things do happen, somehow God's plan will unfold without interference from you. It will also happen in His own time, not yours, which is maddening, but He knows best.

The best gauge of what you should do, when it comes to state in life, volunteer work, friends and career, is what you want to do. We all struggle to do the right thing, but we very often know, deep down, what that right thing is. And the right thing is usually what we really do want. For example, there are girls who are tempted to sleep with the boyfriends they are in love with, even though deep down what they really want is to get married to men who are also in love with them, without committing mortal sins along the way. Sadly, a spirit of worry and pessimism tells them that this is hardly likely, if not impossible and "naive". The important battle is to fight off this spirit and all sinful desires so as to hear and protect the good desires central to our hearts.

We rip ourselves off all the time. I ripped myself off this morning by having only a cup of coffee for breakfast. (I'd better go now and eat something nutritious.) My unsolicited advice is not to rip yourselves off by settling for a sinful second best but to be faithful to Christ and the teachings of the Church. Do that and stop worrying about the future. When you're in the right place, doing the right job, friends with the right people, and in love with the right man or religious order, you'll know. You'll know because you'll feel very relaxed and happy and everything, for once, will seem easy.

Drop the "All Mothers Stand" Ritual

It's June, not May, so it's a little late in the year to be writing about this. However, it came up in the combox yesterday, and it occurred to me that I haven't done my massive denunciation recently.

When the Christian community gathers in churches on Sunday, she is there to worship God. She is not there to be entertained. She is not there to be applauded. She is not there to affirm the choir, or the children, or the priest in their musical, ontological or homiletic talents, such as they are. She is there to worship.

The world is a noisy place. The Eastern traditions, the Roman Catholic tradition, and the Anglo-Catholic tradition draw a line around the space where the world is left behind. The visual art, the gestures, the music, the silence all aid in creating the meditative atmosphere in which we worship. We bring our prayers locked within us, and we release them in the holy temple.

Some of those prayers are sad. If you read the Psalms attentively, you see that the Psalmist expresses a myriad of human emotions, not just joy. There is so much suffering in the world, not just in "the Global South" but in our own lives, however privileged they may seem.

The world is uncomfortable with suffering, and either exploits it for its own ends or covers it up. In Catholic churches, the crucifix and stations of the cross present suffering as something truly terrible yet something that can be healed and that is even potentially redemptive. Above all, we are not alone in our suffering; God through the Son suffered, too. So did Our Lady, and there is comfort in that because, as they say, misery loves company.

I will never forget one homily in which the priest, an enthusiastic speaker, declared that he wanted to take the parish statue of Our Lady of Sorrows and paint a smile on her face. For him there was no place for a doleful Mary; she didn't reflect the joy of the Resurrection.

I was horrified. Not too far from that church was a contemporary sculpture honouring men who had been badly hurt or killed in the steel trade; it was the figure of a man whose head had been caved in. It was a powerful, sorrowful and apt reminder of the hardships the townspeople had lived through and still lived through. Paint a smile on Our Lady of Sorrows, and of whom would widows, orphans and bereaved parents of fallen steelworkers ask intercession?

Unfortunately, our prayerful environments are often interrupted by worldly customs. I will mention only the habit of applauding people, as if Mass were a performance or a meeting in the town hall. I have no problem with "affirming the community", but I think this is better done afterwards in the parish hall. Mass is a time when the grieving seek solace, and worldly applause falls harshly on grieving ears.

Motherhood is not given as much respect as it was in the Victorian era. It is argued that motherhood was not given as much respect as it was in the Victorian era BEFORE the Victorian era. The Victorians were obsessed with motherhood, and one might argue that the first half of the 20th century was in rebellion against this. The 1950s interest in domesticity is often put down to servicemen returning to their professions, consumerism and, perhaps, replacing the millions who were lost in the war. And there was, again, a reaction against this, which turned into a frank devaluation of motherhood, thanks to widespread contraception and abortion. How many people do not give up their seats on the bus to expectant mothers now, inwardly sneering, "Well, that was her choice"?

Mothers, therefore, do need a renewal of respect and care. But I posit they need real respect and care throughout the year, not a round of applause during Mass on Mother's Day. Mother's Day is the one day mothers can expect a show of respect and care, normally from their own families. Meanwhile, it is a day fraught with pain and suffering for those who had or have terrible relationships with their own mothers and, of course, for women who have either never had, or who have lost, their children. We bring our pain with us to Mass, hoping to leave it at the foot of the Cross.

Most celibate priests said good-bye to any hope of biological fatherhood when they became priests. But there is a big, BIG difference between intentionally choosing to be childless and NOT choosing to be childless, but remaining childless anyway, just as there is a big, BIG difference between choosing to remain Single and finding yourself Single at 35. (I am always astonished by stories of elderly priests who muse over whether, if it were suddenly allowed, they'd choose to marry. They always assume someone would have them.) And, therefore, it never seems to occur to the priests who direct "the Mothers" to stand and be "affirmed" by "the community", that the women who must stay seated are crying inside.

It is a horrific pastoral blunder, and it is nowhere in the rubrics.

I was not happy with the parish priest for wanting to slap a fake painted smile on Our Lady of Sorrows. But I will give him this: every Mother's Day he directed the ushers to give flowers to every adult woman entering the church, he preached on "spiritual motherhood", and he had every woman stand to be applauded.

Well, you know what I think about applause in church. But at least this priest didn't separate the women into the fertile sheep and the barren goats. For that, whether they know it or not, is what the liturgically-innovative priests' "All Mothers Stand" ritual does.

Say the black, do the red, and nobody will get hurt.

A Day to Pray for Priests

Today is Holy Thursday. Two years ago, I gave an RCIA class a lecture on the Triduum. Actually sitting down and researching the Triduum made me a problematic RCIA lecturer because what I learned flew right in the face of the liturgies planned in that parish. The most obvious one was the significance of the washing of the feet. That women are invited (or pressured, as I once was) to have our feet washed seems like no big deal until you understand the meaning of the rite.

Here is the post I blogged in 2009. The principal difference between Holy Thursday 2009 and Holy Thursday 2011 is that I will be at a Holy Thursday Mass celebrated by an FSSP priest in Edinburgh, so everything will be done according to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

Oh, and I should add that the Eucharist is not yet the Eucharist without the Sacrifice of Good Friday. This was never, ever explained to me in theology school, and I still cannot explain it properly.

****

A Day to Pray for Priests

Today is Holy Thursday, and on this day we commemorate the founding of two sacraments: the Eucharist and the Priesthood.

Here are some remarks I gave to an RCIA class:

The rubrics of the liturgical foot-washing, or Mandatum, specify that priests should wash the feet of 12 men. (Before 1970, the men were clerics or poor men.) The priest would ritually wash the 12 men's feet, wipe them dry and kiss them. Today parishes, in a self-directed attempt to be "inclusive", ask women to be among the "twelve". It think this undercuts the sense of the Twelve's priesthood, or the sense that the foot washing is, in a way, something that priests do, and do for each other.

That said, Jesus' example is for all in this way: that all friends of Christ are called to serve others, even in ways that we think beneath our dignity. Mauriac writes, "[Jesus'] washing of the feet prefigured all the works of charity which would change the face of the world...Two families will spring up among the friends of Christ, [contemplative orders and active apostolates]." Contemplative orders meditate upon the Passion of Christ and watch with Him in the Garden all their lives long; active apostolates serve Him in the poor, the sick, the young, and the otherwise marginal. I know well-educated Jesuits who scrubbed the floors of AIDS hospices.

But not only are we asked to serve those with less power than ourselves. This, in a way, can be easy: one is in a position of strength. On Holy Thursday, Jesus said "A new commandment I give to you--that you love one another. By this will all men know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another." And this means to me that I have to love not only the poor but men and women of my own social circumstances. I have to, to be blunt, love theologians who disagree with my theology and do things I consider awful to the Mass. And I admit that I struggle to be fair to... Well, there it is. And if a priest has to wash the feet of twelve other priests---Well, let's just say I bet that is harder, and more to the point, than washing the feet of random parishioners.

Sometimes priests give other priests a hard time. And sometimes I give priests a hard time. Goodness knows, I have got into loud arguments with at least two parish priests and objected loudly to the habits of two more. I have counselled a friend to blow the whistle on the much older priest whose crush on her made her feel uncomfortable. I advise that again in a heartbeat to someone I knew to be truthful and sane*, but I have been impatient with priests when I should have been more patient, and I have complained about priests when I should have been silent. (One cannot be silent, however, on priests who abuse their power or make advances. One talks, however, to the priest's superior, not to the papers.) But one thing that sets me apart from anti-Catholics (including "Catholic" anti-Catholics) is that I don't hate priests for being priests.

Many in the world hate priests for being priests. At its mildest and most pitiable, the hatred comes from women who feel rejected because they can't become priests themselves. Some people, hating God, hate priests because they see them as representatives of God. Some people, hating the Roman Catholic Church, hate priests because they see them as the agents of that Church. A dear priest I know, a good, good man, was once spat on in the streets of Toronto because he was in clericals.

Priests are men apart, and in some ways we need to treat them as such. Cradle Catholics like myself have strong mental reservations about getting too friendly with priests. When a good theology school buddy of mine got ordained, I stopped hugging him. Later, though, I resumed ye olde fraternal hugs because it occured to me that A) my buddy had enough loneliness in his life and B) there was exactly zero chance of my endangering his vocation. Although we have to remember to be modest around priests, we shouldn't shut them out of our friendship with pious masks.

I'm privileged to know and work with some really great priests. Some of them are my friends, and some of them I will always consider to be my dear teachers. Of course, there are other priests that I simply can't stand. However, in a pinch, I would hide them in my basement or--since I am moving into a historical house anyway--construct a comfortable priest hole simply because they are priests.

Have there been times when it has been harder to be a priest? Yes: we can be thankful that, in the West at least, priests are not being rounded up, tortured and killed. But now the West loves to mock celibacy, self-abdegnation, fasting, obedience, careful observation of ritual, and everything else that feeds the priestly life and helps it to flourish. Therefore, our priests today need our prayers and friendship more than ever before to help them become and remain happier and better priests.

So tonight at Mass, I'm going to pray for priests. The priestly significance of the footwashing ritual will, unfortunately, be shoved aside, for at my parish it will include non-priests doing the washing and, as is more and more common, people who can never become priests (women) receiving the washing. If the ritual were just about service (and indeed that is very important and holy in itself) and if the employment of non-priests and women were permitted by the 1970 Missal, I would have no problem with the adapted rite. However, we are in danger of forgetting that priests are special and taking away from their just dignity by sharing their special role with non-priests.

Update: I have been reminded that sometimes people, whether because they are unstable or manifestly wicked, make false accusations against priests. One famous case was that of the gay man who accused Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago. The man recanted his slander.


---Seraphic Meets Bridezilla, 2009
*****

I hope you all have a blessed Holy Thursday. Special greetings to all priests who read this blog, if you have time to read it today!

Update: It may amuse you to know that at least one of the RCIA students was entirely freaked out by my presentation. (Hindsight being 20/20, I'm sorry about that.) She was horrified by the thought that a priest might kiss her feet, and the RCIA admin had to assure her that nobody would kiss her feet.

This points, of course, to something we'd rather ignore: handling and washing someone else's body is a very physical, intimate act, normally reserved (outside Finland, anyway) to the family or professional carers. Parents wash their young children, adult children wash their aged parents, and spouses occasionally wash each other for fun.

It is difficult to get ourselves into the mindset of the 1st century Mediterranean, where slaves washed feet, and people expected it. It may even be difficult to get ourselves into the mindset of a nurse, who washes people as part of her (or his) routine, or of a patient, who is resigned to it. I'll tell you this, though: I'd rather be washed by a female nurse than by a male nurse.

I'm assuming that priests as part of their priestly charism can get beyond all that kind of thing and simply wash each others feet. But I don't think we should force priests to set aside their natural modesty to handle women's feet, or women to set aside theirs to have their feet handled. I mean, really.

Update 2: Possibly finding it a teachable moment, one of the women who washed feet that evening in 2009 told me how very moving she found it. Tears sprang to her eyes, etc. Two years later, I finally know what the answer is to that, which is that our own subjective feelings of pleasure in doing those things that properly belong to priests mean squat. For all she knows, a little boy who was beginning to hear the Call saw her that night and thought, "Oh, so women do that too" and---wham. Ears shut to Call. One fewer priest in 2025 than we might have had.

My Take on Concupiscence

There are a number of definitions for concupiscence. My first professor of moral theology (which our school called Christian Ethics) did not like concupiscence to be reduced to sexual desire, or eros, with which he had no problem. He was very pro-eros, a word he expanded to mean our desire to get outside ourselves, to reach out to the rest of creation. He would probably deem a healthy interest in field grass erotic. An interest in field grass that consumed your life and soul, however (like killing people for their collections of rare field grasses) he would find an example of concupiscence.

Anyway, he took a Thomist attitude towards concupiscence, and although my notes are in a closet across the ocean, I suspect he said something like what I am going to write now, which is that concupiscence is wanting more than your fair share of something.

Having said that, I will hasten to say that very often people do not get their fair share, and so they have to fight for justice and get their fair share. But just as often, we are given something God has allocated, enough for our flourishing, and then we want more.

The image that comes to mind is a mother cutting up a chocolate cake for her children. The biggest, oldest child gets the biggest piece because he has the biggest appetite. The smallest child gets the smallest piece. The child with a slight allergy to strawberries does not get a piece with a strawberry on it. The child who has to wait an hour after digesting dinner before eating chocolate will get his cake later than the others, and so on.

Now, in a perfect world, the children would sit quietly at the table, trusting in their mother's ability to know what is best for them and to serve them their special piece of cake in due time. However, in my image, the children do not live in a perfect world but are infected with concupiscence and so long to fall upon the cake as soon as their mother's back is turned, and start munching away in great, greedy handfuls, even before they have finished their dinner.

To extend this analogy, I suppose the mother sometimes decides to pretend not to see this mad orgy of cake-eating, and allows her children to suffer the ill-effects of their own concupiscence. Sin, as Sister Wilfreda said back in Gr. 9 Religion, has its own built-in consequences. So the children become terribly ill, and we hope they have learned their lesson and do not increase their miseries by searching the larder for another cake to devour, hoping rather irrationally for a better outcome.

It is a very strange thing in human nature that we always want more. I was first struck by this as a teenager when a man I worked with described all the things he had bought and all the things he wanted to buy. I pointed out that he had a lot of stuff already, and he said, eyes twinkling and yet dead serious, "But I want MORE!"

When I was much younger, I was not satisfied with being admired by only one young man. I wanted lots and lots of young men to admire me, at least three. This is now, thank heavens, not such a concern. As long as my husband admires me, that is enough, and if other men do, too, then that is a nice bonus. It helps to be forty.

However, there are still other things that I want more and more of, definitely more than my fair share. Chocolate cream pie, for example. If I make a chocolate cream pie for a dinner party, I am usually left with half of it afterwards, and so I eat rather more of it than I should for breakfast and lunch. This is supremely irrational behaviour, so why do I do it?

I also enjoy more than my fair share of sleep, coffee, reading blogs and resting from housework. Also irrational. I blame concupiscence.

One thing I notice about some readers who write in is that they are positively longing to start romantic relationships with young men before the young men have given the obvious sign that they would like to be in a romantic relationship. I suffered from this myself for a decade or three, so I find it very interesting. Also interesting are the many excuses readers come up with to continue pursuing a man who has no obvious interest in them. I did that, too, and I wonder what that is all about. Is it like being determined to eat the wrong piece of cake?

You can guess where I'm going here. Could it be that, by chasing men, particularly those men who show not a whit of interest in them, really, women are manifesting a form of concupiscence? And could it be that, by lazily not bothering to get to know real women, but instead messing around with internet porn or solely-internet relationships, men are manifesting another (and worse) form of concupiscence? Both situations show irrational desire and the desire for more that one's allocated share of something.

Seraphic Goes to Notre Dame

Going to Notre Dame was awesome. It was awesomely awesome. This morning I wrote an article saying how awesome it was. Then I wrote to my Canadian publisher and PR girl saying how awesome it was. Then I wrote to my American PR girl saying how awesome it was. And now I am telling you.

The only non-awesome part was that I had to get up at 4:10 on Friday morning to get my flight to Chicago. Personally, I thought getting up at 6 would have been good enough to get through check-in and security for my 8:00 AM flight, but my dad said 4:00, and when I was nowhere around at 4:00, he came to wake me up.

Off we went to the airport, and I was through everything by 6:15 AM, so I sat by my gate for over an hour, reading Amy Lavender Harris's Imagining Toronto, so it wasn't so bad. And I had breakfast in Chicago's O'Hare airport, so that wasn't so bad. And when I got to South Bend airport, Holly appeared and drove me straight to Notre Dame and the coffee urn, so that was awesome.

Holly reads my blog, and it turns out that a whole lot of women and some men at Notre Dame also read my blog. And I know this because beautiful young person after beautiful young person (including Tess--hello, Tess!) appeared before me saying, "Hi! Um, I just want to say that I love your blog." And this was even more awesome than the coffee. I mean, usually my readers are invisible. I kind of know you are out there, but I can't see you. And now I know you are beautiful. (All young, enthusiastic people are beautiful to people over 35. That's why way-too-old-for-you men hit on you, when you are thinking "Bleck! He's so OLD!")

Okay, so discovering that I am a leetle bit famous at Our Lady's University was extremely cool, and Wendy Shalit's presentation was also extremely cool. Wendy Shalit wrote A Return to Modesty just after she graduated from Williamson; it started as her senior thesis. She started her talk with a clip of Oprah and Suze Orman bullying poor Octomom, but I didn't recognize her, so at first it just looked like Oprah and Suze--whom Wendy called two of the most powerful women in the world--bullying some poor young lady with a lot of kids, no money, and great eyelashes. And even when I realized who she was, I couldn't understand why this woman was being told she was the most hated woman in America by two of the most beloved. It was a very effective beginning for Wendy's talk on femininity and modesty.

Afterwards, I approached Wendy to buy a copy of her book and, to my amazement, she told me that she has read a post on my blog. And I was, like, "EEE! Wendy Shalit read my blog!" Look, in Edinburgh, I am so totally Mrs. B.A. I love being Mrs. B.A., but it was a really nice culture shock to be reminded that I am also Seraphic, Self-Appointed Auntie to the Singles of the World.

Then I went to John Cavadini's talk, and I was impressed because I went to theology school, and he is a big name in solid, orthodox Catholic theology. And then there was Mass for the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes in the basilica (ND has its own basilica), celebrated by Bishop D'Arcy, the bishop who wrote that most sensible and humble letter about the Obama-at-Notre-Dame crisis. From his homily, I could see why Notre Dame students I talked to love him so much. It was the first Ordinary Form Mass I've been to in months, but I didn't pass out or freak out or become inwardly cranky. Mass was celebrated very beautifully, and receiving the Eucharist on the tongue was no problem, although I did't have the guts to kneel.

After Mass was pizza and Bishop D'Arcy's talk about how the priesthood of the laity fosters the priesthood of the clergy and vice versa. It was very, very moving. And then the fact that I got up at 4:10 AM tapped its foot and said ahem, so I found Holly and asked her to drive me to the convent where I was staying. There we were met by a lovely nun in Franciscan habit and shown to my room. And next to my room was Dawn Eden, standing in her doorway chatting enthusiastically with a Nashville Dominican. This was more awesomeness because I started reading Dawn's stuff years ago and we've sent emails back and forth, but we never met. And there she was. I told her what Wendy Shalit said at her talk, and then I went to my room and passed out in the nice, clean single bed.

In the morning, Kelly (not Holly) came to get me and drove me back to Notre Dame where I immediately drank two cups of coffee. There followed a day of really great lectures. I went to Tess's sister Lilian's talk on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Pauline's talk on "The Geography of Vocation". Then I went to Dawn Eden's high-energy talk, although I was sad that Fr. Neil Roy's talk "Vocation and Sacramental Life" was on at the same time. Next I went to Professor O'Connor's lecture on how men see women, which included some thoughtful criticism of some trends in the theology of the body. His accent and generally weatherbeaten quality reminded me of the star of a old western movie, a John Wayne with a Ph.D. He is all for young marriage, which worried me a bit, so I made a note to address that in my speech.

I took a break from lectures when I realized I was nervous about my upcoming talk, but I got it together during Dr. Pakaluk's talk about Edith Stein, what women really want, and about putting your marriage and family ahead of your career. And then it was my turn and eeee!

The Conference Centre has a huge podium with a big impressive Notre Dame crest on the front. It is as far away from the audience as it can possibly be, and looks like it was built for the Tallest, Fattest and Most Important Man Ever to Be President of Our Lady's Own University. I knew nobody would be able to see me behind it, so I asked for a much smaller podium (or a music stand) to be placed as close to the audience as possible. And such is the power and the glory of the University of Notre Dame that I got it. After some fussing with the microphone, I was underway. When I was nervous, I looked at a row of long-term blog readers, and then I didn't feel nervous anymore. Tess, for example, has a smile that could light up the mines of Moria.

My speech was divided into
1. Why Speaking at Notre Dame is a Big, Family, Deal for me.
2. How I became Seraphic Single.
3. The History of Single Life in Christianity
4. Bernard Lonergan and Vocation as a Falling in Love.

(There was no way I was going to come to Notre Dame and not talk about Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan!)

5. How not to Drive Yourself Crazy as a Single Person.
6. How to Make Yourself More Comfortable as a Single Person.

Afterwards, your fellow blogreaders started the questions, and I was so happy my speech went well, my adrenaline hit levels not seen since my boxing days, and I almost forgot that I was supposed to sell and sign my books. So I rushed out of the auditorium, bleating and shouting instructions, and sat at the table to sell and sign books. I sold and signed books until I was dragged away for dinner, and I felt like a Popular Girl, most unlike when I was in elementary school.

At dinner, I sat with Margo B and Jennifer B and two other women whose names I have forgotten (being so excited at the time) and some Nashville Dominicans, including Sr. Elinor who studied philosophy at B.C. It was great fun, and then Lauren came and whisked me away for the cocktail she long ago promised to buy me if I ever came to South Bend. Sadly, I drank coffee at dinner, so when Lauren brought me back to the convent, I couldn't sleep. And--this is the tragic part--I had had the most awesomely awesome day and I couldn't tell B.A. about it. No phone. No computer. No B.A. Wah! Let me tell you, it was a good thing that was a single bed, because if there had been any room in it for B.A., I would have been miserable with missing-B.A.ness. But as it was I was able to lump it and just be grateful for the awesomeness of Notre Dame students in general and my readers in particular.

The next day Holly came for me and took me to Trid Mass, for, lo, there is Trid Mass at Notre Dame on Sundays, in a chapel under Alumni Hall, and there was no White Sheet, so after reading the readings in Latin, the priest read them in English. And the Men's Schola was just one man named John, who sang very well and looked very fetching in choir dress, and now I think my own Men's Schola should wear choir dress, too. Then after Mass Rocco told me that one of my audience members (perhaps not a reader) told him she wasn't going to take advice from a Scot, which hopefully her great-great-grandfather didn't say to Andrew Carnegie. At any rate, it is the first time in my life I have been referred to as a Scot, so I am grateful to her although I am puzzled over her disdain for Scottish advice. Scots are very canny, and some of them are said to be psychic, so really, Scottish advice should be right up there in the hierarchy of advice.

Then we trooped off for brunch in the South Dining Hall, where my fellow Trids elected to sit at the High Table. I wrote down witty things the students said for my CR column, and the South Dining Hall flowed with food and drink. Then Holly drove me and another speaker to the airport and bid us good-bye.

But that was not the end. Behold the brilliance of Holly: my Dad, who loves to read plane and weather forecasts, discovered that my flight from Chicago to Toronto was cancelled. He called Holly, but I was already in the passenger lounge. So Holly gave him the phone number of the other speaker, who naturally had been sitting beside me chatting merrily, and lo, my dad called her cellphone and left a message, which she found and played for me. I am not sure I would have been as quick-witted as Holly, and if I am ever rich and famous, or at least well-paid enough by somebody to have a permanent Personal Assistant, I want one like her.

So that was my Notre Dame adventure, and here I am in Toronto, where I feel much less famous but very happy that I met so many readers and had such a good time. If you can get to next year's Edith Stein Project, I really recommend that you do. It was such a good mix of talks, both formal and fun, and there were tons of good food and crowds of nice people.

Heartfelt thanks to Rebecca and Holly and her sister Jennifer and Tess and everyone else at Notre Dame--or who drove to Notre Dame--who made me feel so welcome.

UPDATE: More thanks to Holly for the photo!

Vocation and Valentines

And how are you spending the night of Valentine's Day? If you are a Single woman, I hope you have a nice indoor plan--meeting with Single friends or renting a good movie and buying yourself a yummy treat. Just as long as its something to look forward to at the end of a red-pink-and-white day, when all about you are having roses delivered to their desks. If you are a Single man, I suggest you pop into a fancy restaurant and notice how high the prices have been jacked up for that night. Valentine's Day is a restauranteur's license to steal.

I will be spending Valentine's Day all by my little self. Well, no. I suppose I'll be at home with Mum and Dad, unless Mum and Dad go out for Valentine's Day dinner. Maybe I'll watch Moonstruck again. Of course, I now have it memorized, so maybe I will recite Moonstruck. The thing is, I will be in North America, and my husband will still be in Britain. I have the Notre Dame conference on February 11 and 12th, and when I fly north on February 13th, it will be to Toronto, not Glasgow. My husband, meanwhile, has a very busy month in February. He makes most of our money; he cannot go junketing off with me.

"Cry me a river," I hear someone say. "At least you have a husband."

Very true, and that is why I am going to spend V-Day all by my little self. There's no point in going to a Valentine's Day Singles' Solidarity Supper when I cannot fully participate in Singles' Solidarity. Sure, I could hang with girls who say, "Oh, how sad that you are so far from your husband on Valentine's Day," but the words "At least you have a husband" would bounce above us all in an invisible thought balloon, so forget it. I can't even hang with widows. Maybe I could find other women on business trips.

"It's not a business trip," said a cantankerous woman at church on Sunday. "It's a holiday, and you're abandoning your husband."

Yes, I'm afraid that even at my beautiful Traditional Latin Mass there are cantankerous types reminding us all that perfect happiness is only possible in heaven. And I suppose in a way she was right: first I decided I would go to Canada to see my family and friends, and then I hinted broadly that I ought to be invited to Notre Dame. Still, only a non-Canadian could call three weeks in a Canadian February a "holiday."

Actually, my life in Scotland feels like a holiday. It's going to Canada that feels like work because my husband, whom I didn't get to meet until I was 37, won't be there. I don't function well without him these days. The last time I went on a trip without him, I broke down within 24 hours and cried like a little girl.

"I'm so looking forward to going home," I said on my last trip to Canada. "I haven't seen my husband in weeks."

This was at a wedding, to a woman I know slightly. We were in a queue for the roast pig. She looked at me severely.

"I haven't spent a night apart from my husband in nearly thirty years," she said.

I thought that was marvellous. It's like Paul and Linda McCartney, who before Linda's death spent a night apart only because Paul was briefly jailed for marijuana possession. I hoped B.A. and I would be like that, too, but I am a writer, and these days what sells writing is appearances. So occasionally I make appearances in places where my husband is not.

Vocation is a falling in love. I am stealing the phrase "falling in love" from Bernard Lonergan, S.J., who rightly said that religious conversion was a "falling in love." But vocation is, too. In state-of-life vocation, you fall in love with a life of prayerful Singleness, either with the community you have fallen in love with (the Dominicans, perhaps, or L'Arche) or alone, or you fall in love with a person, or you fall in love with priesthood and say, "Here I am, Lord." But there are other kinds of vocation, too: you decide to do missionary work in Gambia, and you fall in love with Gambia. You pick up a crayon, and you fall in love with visual art. You feel an urge to write about the Single Life, and you end up writing a speech to give at Notre Dame in mid-February, thereby sacrificing your Valentine's Day.

I don't really mind sacrificing Valentine's Day, since what I really mind is leaving my husband for three weeks. It is the absence that will annoy me; the disapproving clucks of other married women are just silly. For most of his career, my father has gone on at least two business trips a year, and I would be flabbergasted to discover that some stalwart of the Knights of Columbus upbraided him for it:

"Australia for two months? That's not a business trip, that's a holiday, and you're abandoning your wife and kids!"

And even if you take the business part out of it, my father has on occasion headed south to his native U.S. to visit aging relatives while my mother held the fort at home. The idea of never spending a night apart from your beloved spouse is a beautiful one, but life doesn't work out like that for everyone.

No, the hard part is the separation, but although being married to B.A. is my numero uno vocation, I have been called to speak and write to Singles, too. It's ironic. It's a mystery. But it is true.

The Trid Social Scene

And today something a little different. Does everybody know by now that B.A. and I go to Traditional Latin Mass on Sundays? If you read my other blog, you probably do. If you read my column in the Prairie Messenger, you definitely do, because Traditional Latin Mass stuff is all I write about in the Prairie Messenger.

"It's like a party," I said to B.A., who may have had a minor heart attack, because "Mass as party" is an idea TLM lovers don't like very much. However, what can I say? I love the Traditional Latin Mass, and I try to get to every Missa Cantata going, and I love to see who else is there. It's like a party.

Okay, now to get to the letter. Yes, there's a letter. I found it in my combox this morning. (My internet was down all yesterday; I almost died when I found a troll's comment had sneaked in.)

Hi, Seraphic. Great post, as usual.

I have a question: I've started to attend a TLM parish and, like you already stated, most of its members are twenty-something men. Nothing against that, au contraire!

But I don't know how to behave amongst these young, conservative NCB. All my life I went to a charismatic parish and it's a whole different world.

I would like to make friends with them and, well, I've never had male friends - I'm a girl's girl and, honestly, I'm not very experienced. They are so nice, giving me flyers and explaining the liturgy, but I barely know them and I would not like to send any mixed signals. It's a very small parish and I don't want to be "the flirt".

This girl's girl was totally anonymous, which is just wrong, so I've given her a name which is New Trid Girl.

So much to say. First, the Traditional Latin Mass attracts men (not mostly twenty-something men in my parish, though) because it is serious. It is entirely lacking in the "Jesus is My Boyfriend" music and sentiments of charismatic worship. It holds linguistic challenges, and as it underscores the serious and special nature of the priesthood, it also underscores the serious and special nature of masculinity. (Masculinity is indeed serious and special to men, and only traditional religious rituals these days seems willing to acknowledge that fact in healthy ways.) It certainly underscores the serious and special nature of the Blessed Sacrament. Nobody touches the Blessed Sacrament with unconsecrated hands, and you can bet that any TLM priest takes his duties towards the Blessed Sacrament very seriously indeed.

If you ask me, men are just less likely to 'get' all the nuances of banquet/community gathering/sacrifice/community sing-song involved in the Novus Ordo as it is said today. The TLM, in contrast, is quite obviously a sacrifice. The Holy Eucharist is unequivocally Christ's body, blood, soul and divinity. The congregation falls to its knees. There is none of this o-but-everyone-stood-in-the-first-century nonsense that completely ignores Scripture references to Christ Himself and St. Paul praying on their knees.

Traditional worship gives men something firm to hang onto, and not only is it worship worthy of God, insofar as the human person is able to make something worthy of God (and the theological discussions here regarding priest-as-alter-Christus could be endless), it is worship worthy of men's own little selves to perform. Women are endlessly tolerant. Men, not so much. Not Trid Men, anyway. As you will discover.

Now, as yet there are not a lot of people who can get to the Traditional Latin Mass, and there are not as yet a lot of Traditional Latin Masses to go to. And this means that Traditional Latin Mass communities are small, tightly knit and delighted when new people come along, as long as the new people don't try to change anything or get up everyone's nose. The great thing about this is that you don't have to do anything but show up, take the handouts, pray, and hang around afterwards hoping someone nice will talk to you. They will. If in doubt, ask someone in the tea-and-coffee queue a question about the liturgy.

When you are gone, other parishioners will discuss you and wonder where you are from and watch to see if you come back the next week. They will probably be delighted to see you again. And, in the natural span of time, people will befriend you. Just keep showing up and look friendly and approachable. Don't worry about mixed signals. Just say "yes" to those invitations that you welcome, and "no" to those invitations that you don't.

I haven't the least idea where you are from. If you are in Britain, than you know better than I do the social rules for Britain of 1962, which is more or less what I think I am obeying these days. Sending thank-you notes or making thank-you phone calls to hostesses is big. I imagine that most Trids (or, as people are more likely to call us, Trads) in Canada and the USA also put a lot of stock in old-fashioned good manners.

As a woman, you are in luck, for TLM people are nothing if not traditional, and traditionally women do not try to make friends with men. Men try to make friends with you. Meanwhile, a girl's girl who hasn't dated much and goes to the TLM is, I suspect, many a Trid man's idea of the perfect woman, so congratulations.* Just make sure you keep up with your girlfriends. Don't get too bedazzled by all the twenty-something Trid men.

The great thing about being a girl's girl is that you don't take men too seriously or fall into masculine patterns of speech and behaviour to be "one of the boys", which personally I think is romantic death. So wear a fashionable but modest dress or skirt to Mass, nice shoes and your lovely new white mantilla. Smile at everyone in the community after Mass, and be particularly attentive to the elderly. Don't just tag along to after-Mass events, but keep your ear sharp and attentive for personal or general invitations.

Incidentally, I hope you and the priest have already exchanged introductions. If not, introduce yourself and tell him that you are new to the Old Rite. Don't be put off if he seems shy. Many TLM priests (and indeed parishioners) have suffered a lot because of their love for the TLM, and some need to get to know a new person a lot better before they risk sharing their opinions and friendship.

As far as I know, no young woman in my community has ever been labelled "the flirt" or anything unpleasant. But at least some of us always notice what young women and newcomers wear. As people often disapprovingly point out, we care a lot about "externals." And, as we might counter, "externals" certainly do influence "internals", which is why we love the TLM so much in the first place.

*Update: I just remembered that that last woman who married a bachelor of my TLM community was divorced-and-annulled little me. Many a Trid man's perfect woman could be a mysterious rich widow or a world-weary German aristocrat in a black leather jacket. You can never tell with men. In the meantime, girl's girl who hasn't dated much is a perennial favourite of men all over, bless their little hearts.

The Most Pelagian Day of the Year

Happy New Year all my little Singles and sympathetic non-Singles! I am back from Mass, and well primed with champagne. Time to harangue you and generally get up your nose and say things your mother is too nice or too afraid to say.

The first thing I want you girls to do is to cross "Get a boyfriend/husband" off your resolution list. Shame on you for trying to pre-determine the fate of other people. Shame shame shame. Why not just cook up a love potion, shove it in a box of chocolates and randomly hand the box around? It's the extreme of what you are plotting on your little list. Getting a boyfriend/spouse is not something that you do but something that happens. You can lose (or try to lose) ten pounds, or increase your earnings, or quit smoking, or learn French, but you cannot make a man fall in love with you. You can only be pleased or distressed when one does.

And because, like Nature, I unashamedly have a double-standard, I am hoping that men-not-called-to-Single life have themselves made a resolution to get to know more girls with an eye to perhaps future courtship. However, I will remind that you too can not make people fall in love with you, although women are often impressed and flattered by a real effort.

There is a limit, though. If a girl says, "Just friends," drop her flat and try someone else. Don't waste your time on piddly little friendships with girls who want to be "just friends." Let the sudden drying up of your attentions teach them what happens when they say "Just friends" to perfectly eligible bachelors like yourself.

Pelagius, in case you haven't yet supplemented the sub-standard religious education common to most Catholic schools, was the great theological rival of St. Augustine and therefore a superstar among heretics. Pelagius, who was British, thought you could become good without prevenient Grace; in short he thought everyone should just pull himself up by his own moral bootstraps. He did not think you needed God's help to do this. And like all super-duper heresies, this attitude has never gone away. You cannot be good without God's help, and you cannot get married without His help, either.

As I like to say, the primary reason why Searching Singles are not yet married is that God has not willed it. Therefore, when wondering why you are still Single, the person to talk to is God, because He is primarily responsible. He has not yet brought the handsome or pretty stranger into your life, and why not, eh? Only He knows, but it must be for a good reason. Possibly your future spouse (if you have one) isn't ready for you yet. Goodness knows, my own spouse wasn't ready for me until two or three days after I met him in person, which is when he was received into the Church.

So if you have made a resolution to get engaged this year to someone you haven't even met yet or, worse, someone who isn't at all in love with you, then cross it off your list and write "Meet more friendly people." That you can do. Try to meet people of all ages. Grown-ups don't hang out only with people born the same year as themselves, and they often know other people your age, e.g. their lovely daughters, handsome sons, witty grandchildren.

Under that write "Be happier and more confident." That, too, is up to you. Pray for the grace to accept what life throws at you more cheerfully and for confidence. Happiness and confidence make you more attractive than any cosmetic surgery known to man.

Under that write "Try to be more pleasant in public." Letting it all hang out is not, actually, the cardinal virtue opposed to the sin of hypocrisy. It is sloppiness, and generally a bad idea except among your very best friends of the same (THE SAME) sex. Even married people should do their best to keep up appearances before their poor old spouses, who cannot escape. Personally, I have resolved to stop using bad words in front of dear B.A. Women should endeavour not to use bad words before men, and I would have eighteen thousand fits if BA used bad words before me.

So although women cannot in fact "Get a boyfriend/spouse" and men usually cannot make the Queen Bee of their set want to snog them and them alone, there are things that you can do to make yourself more attractive to other Searching Singles. Just remember that you can't control other people, and that God is the boss.

Parallel Universe?

I passed a betting shop this afternoon and noticed that there weren't any women in it. And my sister, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, perhaps not, upbraided me for having dropped in for tea with two bachelor flatmates.

"I was with you," I said crossly. "Anyway, I'm a respectable early-middle-aged married woman."

The year that ends tonight is 2010. It seemed very odd, in 2010, to be walking home with my shopping, declaring myself to be a respectable early-middle-aged married woman who therefore can drop in on bachelors for innocent cups of tea. I have led communion services, for heaven's sake. I once gave the reflection at a college reconciliation service. I earned the first diploma in Lonergan Studies ever awarded by my college. I have frightened lefty priests into fits. I was the first woman boxer at my boxing gym. I was a pioneer---or so one of the only women on the theological faculty told me, little realizing how much the idea of being a pioneer repelled me by then. Do I have to obsess over the fine shades of propriety like a Georgette Heyer heroine?

I pondered the sea, and the past week, a week of church (mostly men, as Trid congregations seem to be mostly men), pub (mostly men), football (mostly men) and last's night Hogmanay fiddle concert in Edinburgh, of which B.A. said during the intermission, "It could be 1956." The comedian's jokes were of an ancient, gentle order, not so much family-friendly as old-fashioned-lady-friendly. When we got home, B.A. did imitations of the Edinburgh ladies the jokes were chosen for.

Sometimes I wonder if I haven't fallen into a parallel universe where people in 1960 took a look at the future and firmly said, "No, thank you." Obviously history still went on, but in a different way from everywhere else.

But surely this cannot be geographical. Although the male/female divide is sometimes astonishing, Edinburgh is not Brigadoon, and it is a world capital. It must be as post-modern and post-Christian as any other city in Europe (excluding, of course, those of Poland and Slovakia). So why is it that I seem to live in a society where the women do these things and not those, and the men go here but not there, and my old theology school, where we took Elizabeth Johnson and Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza seriously, seems a million miles away?

And, believe me, I know I am myself a willing participant in something that strikes me as decidedly old-fashioned. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis's distinction between Albion and Britain, or Tolkien's Faerie alongside the ordinary world, or Aelfheim beyond Midgard, or J.K. Rowling's Wizard community hidden in what its natives call "the U.K."

We've been hearing a lot about "parallel societies" in Europe, although usually these parallel societies are not Christian, but Muslim to some degree or another. The epitomic figure of a parallel society is the rural Turkish or Pakistani woman who lives in Berlin or London and cannot speak a word of German or English. However, I imagine only a tiny number of Muslim women live this way. Surely the rest drift from society to society, group to group, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, creating their own hybrid, slightly solipsistic, Berlin or London.

And I wonder today if this is not what is happening to Catholics--by whom I mean Catholics who actually think about being in a state of grace and therefore don't miss Sunday Mass--these days. Mainstream society and Catholicism seem to have parted ways forever and Catholics, always considered slightly odd by the majority in English-speaking countries, now find themselves more out of step than ever with cultural mores.

Society believes in women swallowing pills to make ourselves infertile 24/7. Catholics don't. Society believes that women should be able to kill their children for any reason whatsoever--even for just being a twin or female--as long as they haven't been born yet. Catholics don't. Society believes that choosing not to have any children is moral and virtuous. Catholics think it is rather sad. Society believes certain kinds of sexual partnership are equivalent to marriage. Catholics do not. And in all those respects we are like most people of our countries in 1960.

"In the world but not of the world"--I was taught as a child that this is the place of the Christian. Our true home is heaven. But what is our place in society, then? There used to be something called Christendom. Have we relinquished it, or is it just underground?

Feel free to chime in in the combox. Perhaps living in a parallel society is the ultimate form of post-modernism. At any rate, there are some among us with apocalypic ideas that we'll have to go underground one day. But my question is, are we already halfway there?

Truth and Joy

The Truth will set us free, we are told, and Christians take this metaphorically to mean that Christ, who is Truth, has set us free. But we can move (somewhat) beyond metaphor because Aquinas writes "The truth is what is." Now that which is is being, and all being derives from God, whose existence is His essence, and therefore is Being.

Where am I going with this? Well, I am trying to make an argument that truth is extremely important, much more important than we generally think (and you should read St. Augustine on the subject), and that no matter how many fibs, evasions or lies you offer other people (not that I'm suggesting it), you must never lie to yourself.

Being a Seraphic Single does not include telling yourself lies about yourself and your Singlehood. If you love being Single, and just want to stay Single, either as a nun or monk, a consecrated virgin or priest, or a woman or man living free of any vow but her or his baptismal and confirmation vows, then that is great. That is marvellous. Don't pretend to yourself that you really want to be married. You don't have to. It's okay.

Louisa May Alcott explained her 19th century singleness by saying (apparently, I heard this from a tour guide at her house in Concord, MA) that she'd rather just paddle her own canoe. And, my goodness, what a lot of freedom there is in permanent Singledom. You can be one of the guys forever and ever. If you're not a nun, you make your own money knowing that's all the money you'll have to work with. You organize your own retirement plans. You save up and buy your own house. You never have to ask anyone's permission for any of your choices ever. You never have to figure out or pander to the male (or, if male, female)psyche. Ahhhh....

However, if you hate being Single or like being Single for now, but hope to get married eventually, the one person who absolutely has to know and acknowledge this is you. When you take ownership of this wish it has less power over you and how you act in public. For example, I remember a desperately lonely young man at a wedding getting absolutely smashed at the open bar while bragging, "I'm sure glad it's not me putting my head into a noose!" He didn't fool anyone, and I'm happy to say he's married now. People who simply long to marry but sneer at marriage are extremely annoying.

Of course, you don't have to--and should not--tell the universe. When you are Single and you want to get married, you have to be as peaceable as the dove and as cunning as the serpent. In short, you have to take into consideration the male psyche, if you are a woman, and the female psyche, if you are a man. Women do not naturally think like men, and men do not naturally think like women. I think we should just all accept this right now. This has absolutely nothing to do with Reason. We all participate in Reason. It's just that we function differently, and women who want to get along with men simply have to accept that men are not very logical and plan for it.

The prime example of this is the guy who pursues you and then, when you are hooked, drops you like a hot potato. This stems from the average man's love of a challenge and his illogical yet undeniable disappointment when something turns out to be easier than he thought it would be. It is for this reason that both the infamous Rules and Auntie Seraphic tell you that you are never allowed to talk to the man you are romantically interested in every single day. If you honestly think of him ONLY as a pal (and be honest here), then text him every hour; I don't care. But if you can barely keep yourself from seizing him in your womanly arms, then for heaven's sake don't communicate with him every day. At least don't see him every day. The Rules says you should see him only twice a week.

I just stared at my husband, pondering his psyche. Since we had quite a whirlwind romance, I suspect that the necessary challenge was the whole distance thing, not to mention the difficulties he suspected the U.K. Border Agency might throw in his way. Then there's the whole brass involved in asking a Canadian to live in an old Scottish house with no central heating and limited hot water. (Don't ask.) And it is just possible that the bonds of marriages are cemented by all the challenges, once you are engaged, of getting married: your parents, his parents, the Church, the State, the banquet hall, the florist, the hairdresser, the dress...

Another thing you must do is be open to invitations to meet men (or women), and therefore school your own psyche to be intrigued, not insulted, when people offer to introduce you to them. Yes, it is embarrassing and more than often disappointing. Yes, it would be a million times better if people would ask you first. And it would be a billion times better if married friends invited a sloo of Singles to their parties, instead of just two: you and The Other One. However, married people usually have incredible amnesia about what is most comfortable for Single people, and if you get married, you probably will, too. Bless our little married hearts.

This brings me to the subject of joy. I hope you have some because this is the part of you, if you are Single but wish to marry one day, that you must show to the world as often as you possible can. Healthy people are attracted to happy people. So be happy. When someone asks you how you are, you are not just fine, you are great. When you blog, you blog about what you love and what is great about your life, not about what you hate and what is lousy about your life. Own your sorrows, but share them with only a tolerant few. Own your joys, and trumpet them about.

Be joyful, be confident, and, if you are a woman, ask Single men to help you with stuff so that they know that you are not 100% self-sufficient and that--if they are supremely fortunate and/or hard-working--they might be allowed to add to your joy.

Auntie Seraphic & the Sunday School Teacher

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I'm curious about your thoughts about pushy-if-well-meaning older ladies. Recently I was socializing in the narthex after Mass and one of the venerable older ladies of the parish, whom I'd never properly met but see often at Daily Mass, approached me.

After introducing herself and complaining to me about something over which I have no control (music at the liturgy), she immediately dived into "Are you married?"

"No," said I, a bit apprehensive. I knew what was coming.

"Are you seeing anyone?"

"Not just now," I said softly, wishing to melt through the floor.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-x." (At this point in my life I'm not terrified of my age so I don't think this question was as rude as it could have been had I been four or five years older. Maybe it was rude of her to ask; I don't know. But I digress)

"Well then, you'll have to meet Joe!* My grandson!" she boomed. "He's twenty-six! He'll be home for Christmas and needs a nice girl. And you too would be so lovely together!"

"Ah well, I'll be at my parent's through New Year, sorry," I said, blushing like the sun. She gave me beady glance.

"I'll tell him to look you up online. Mary* [her granddaughter, who is in my religion class] says you're on facebook. And you'll add him back, of course, and then maybe meet when he's home again for Easter!"

And then she turned away and I stood there, head a bit fuzzy, lost for words.

Later I thought about why I was so uncomfortable about the whole exchange. I think it's two-fold. Firstly, and most annoying, this lady doesn't know me at all, other that that I work for the parish and therefore must be a nice Catholic girl. She doesn't know my personality, tastes, interests, or anything. All she knows is that I'm single. I have no problem with being set up by my friends- it's how many of my favorite couples met, actually - but when you're friends with someone you know them, and if they might actually be a good match for another of your friends. I've done this myself in fact; I've thought "Hmm, so-and-so and so-and-so have a lot in common. I bet they would get on well. I'll have to sneakily introduce them at a party" And I do, and off they go. But this lady, even with good intention, seemed to be thinking "Well, she is single and he is single. Clearly they should be together!"

If marriage were just a matter of finding another single person and picking a date to marry, there wouldn't be anyone single in the world over the age of 25, except for priests and religious. But just because I am single and another person is single doesn't guarantee anything! I just found it a bit off-putting that after literally two minutes of conversation (none of which were about me) she felt it appropriate to rather pushily assume I should meet her grandson.

The second reason for my discomfort, perhaps, is that many people, especially older people I meet, tend to categorize me solely based on my singleness. It drives me crazy. The first question a person asks (an older person, not usually a peer unless it's someone I haven't seen in a while) is if I'm seeing someone, as if the whole sum of my personhood is wrapped up in whether or not I'm dating, engaged, or married. When I meet a new person, I very seldom ask if they are dating, married, etc, unless they bring up their spouse or children, because I HATE when people do this to me.

Am I being oversensitive in this? Perhaps I am. Maybe I'm being uncharitable; I'm sure this lady just wants her grandson to be happy. I came away from the discussion with older lady feeling very... I don't know... very shy and a bit sad. I logged on to facebook and checked to ensure my privacy settings were still intact (everything is friends-only; I really really really do not like the idea of sharing too much over the Internet, and online dating gives me the heebie-jeebies). It was. I don't think I'll approve the grandson's friend request if he sends it; I limit my facebook page to people I've actually met in person and consider friends. I never, ever approve friend requests if I don't actually know the person.

What do I do about these pushy older ladies? Is this an instance where I just think, "Bless her kind pushy heart!" and smile placidly?

*Names changed.

Sunday School Teacher

Dear Sunday School Teacher,

Okay, I understand that at the moment this does not seem hilarious. But in five years it will seem hilarious, so save the email for future reference.

It is indeed annoying when married or widowed people stare at Single people with their beady little eyes and wonder why you all are not married and wonder how to get you all married off ASAP. On the one hand, it is annoying because it is not nice to feel that being Single makes you defective in some way. On the other hand, it is annoying also because most Singles do indeed want to get married, but don't want others to rub it in.

But complicating all this is the fact that in some cultures it is the job of older people to pair off the younger ones, and when the older people don't do this, the younger ones sometimes sort of wish they would. I used to complain loudly and bitterly that priests didn't seem to be interested in introducing NCGs and NCBs to each other, unlike rabbis, who apparently introduce NJGs and NJBs to each other all the time. (I wonder if this is really true, though, or just an idea I got from the movies.) I understand that old Ukrainian Catholic ladies work like the dickens to get their own seminarians married off before their ordinations.

Now, you can react to Older Lady in two ways. You can be sad that she sees you as marriage material for her beloved grandson. Or you can be flattered and amused that she sees you as marriage material for her beloved grandson. It's up to you.

Personally, I'd be amused and flattered. It's not that you are Single. It's that you [A] go to Daily Mass and [B] teach her granddaughter in Sunday School. And I am loving this crazy woman who has decided, on the strength of your looks, and the fact that you go to Daily Mass, and (very likely) the good opinion of her tiny granddaughter, that you would make her a fine granddaughter-in-law. And imagine how her grandson must feel. "Grandma, you went up to a complete STRANGER and told her---? How could you?!?!?!?!?"

If, from some miracle, Joe actually does hunt for you on Facebook, and I doubt he will, so embarrassed will he be by his grandmother's loving shenanigans, you almost owe it to him to reply and tell him that his grandma must love him a lot.

Pray for this marvellous, kooky lady who thinks, without much evidence, that you are simply a lovely girl. I would be flattered. Go ahead and be flattered. And, as a matter of fact, she isn't really a stranger. She's a Pillar of your Parish and the grandma of your own wee student Mary. I know it is a scary world, but the good opinion of an outspoken parish grandma is no reason to run frightened to your Facebook settings.

I remember being sad that the nuns I boarded with wanted me to join their order. My spiritual director pointed out that meant they had a high opinion of me, and I should feel happy, not sad. I took his advice, and think you should take mine!

Grace and peace,
Seraphic