The weekly “little of this, little of that” feature here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!
(This will all look and work better if you click on the actual post and do not remain on the main page.)
Visiting Portland, Oregon, last week was a joy. These two ladies — Cary on the left and Heidi on the right, showed me so much love and hospitality!
So many wonderful people, such a big homeschooling group, such an impressive parish (Holy Rosary — checking all my boxes with a beautiful church, tabernacle in the center, Mass ad orientem, and Holy Communion at the altar rail!), and a fun little foray into the city.
There, some sweet readers who took me around and chit-chatted a bit with me before my talk introduced me to Powell Books. I splurged on some used books: a great version of the King Arthur story and four copies of The Leopard, the book our family is reading for our big vacation-get-together in August. (Last time we read Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede.) (affiliate links)
It was a real honor to speak to such a welcoming (and large!) group of people and to meet so many readers way across the country. The evening was set up as a reception with a tasty repast, and I kept hearing people exclaim how good the wine was. That is not usual, in my experience — who puts out good wine for 100 random people coming to hear a talk? (NB: It makes the talk go much better… )
Turns out that a member of the parish is a vintner, and I was offered a bottle to bring home, but alas I travel with carry-on only. I didn't want the TSA to end up with my bottle, so I took this picture of the labels to try to find this much-admired wine here — have you ever had it? Seriously, the reviews were great.
Here is a recording of my talk, Living the Liturgical Year in the Home, including the Q & A afterwards. Although I do speak on this topic a lot, even if you have listened before, I think you will find I have a bit of a different approach to it here (it being Lent and all).
I hope you enjoy! I'll post it on my Podcasts and Interviews page as well!
And then when I got home, we did work in the garden a little — even planted peas!
We need to repair beds and do so much cleanup. Ah, spring…
And today there's snow…
On to our links!
- “On a September day in 2008, a Catholic father paid the ultimate price to save his son with Down syndrome from drowning in an accident on the family farm. Now, 11 years later, Thomas Vander Woude’s self-sacrifice continues to save and improve the lives of people with the chromosomal condition through a research fund established in his honor.”
- Unmasking the College-Admissions Fraud: “The real scam has less to do with the wealthy cheaters who got caught than with the university system itself… None of this could have happened if higher education had not itself become a corrupt institution… One easy solution to the college-debt crisis would be to stop encouraging so many people to go to college in the first place… Colleges should return to their true function: passing on, from one generation to the next, the inheritance of Western civilization.”
- Fr. Schall: On the Divine “Plan”: “The nature of friendship, divine or human, means that it cannot be forced.”
- Some interesting commentary on the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe from David Clayton — I had never noticed the detail of the dark “rays” around her! The interpretation David gives this detail fits with what I try to convey in my Portland talk (linked above) about the reality of the purgative way and our need to be willing to go through it in order to ascend to union with God.
- On the plane I really enjoyed listening to the podcast of Dr. Suzanne Baars, daughter of the great Catholic psychologist Conrad Baars, speaking on the subject of masculinity and the priesthood. It's a wide-ranging interview that touches on many important points. She explains very well, from a Thomistic point of view, the psychological necessity of not trying to eradicate the emotions of anger and hatred. I find that many, many Christian parents do not understand this concept. (Many non-Christian parents don't understand it either, don't get me wrong. But Christians should grasp that man has a nature, and this nature involves emotions that must be harnessed for good, not obliterated.)
From the archives:
- A reader recently wrote and asked me what I think of spring cleaning. I think that life gets complicated and a thorough deep clean of the whole house might not happen (or maybe it's just that my house is wicked big). But I'm a believer in deep-cleaning one area at a time. Here is an example.
Today is the feast of St. Turibio de Mogrovejo and Our Lady of Victory!
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Logan says
In the last question you answered in your talk I think you were really differentiating between cultivating a childish faith vs a child-like faith. The creche inspires the humble child-like wonder that we must not ever grow out of. As opposed to the selfish immaturity cultivated in the watered down tripe we offer to children in place of faith. (Can you water down tripe?)
This was made so evident to me a few years ago when we had a spectacular opportunity to go to Rome with our six children. The oldest was 8. Our children drank in the beauty of the art and our Church’s history. You could see how moving it was to them and how it captured their imaginations. Then we returned home and the next week our kids attended a Catholic VBS program where they were literally taught that God’s love is like “cave snot” (you know, it sticks). The Sistine chapel to. . . Cave snot. What are we doing?
Melisa says
So glad to see you mention Dr. Suzanne Baars. A dear friend of mine introduced me to Conrad Baars’ books, and I’m a fan!
God bless!
Melisa
Angelique says
I love In This House of Brede! It’s one of my favorite books!
I really liked the article you linked on silence, as well. Dr. Kwasnieski is on the short list of public figures I would love to have to dinner. A monthly TLM just started up locally and I was sohappy that over 400 people came to the first one. But one of the most amazing parts was the silence. I have never been in such a large group of people all silent like that (except the kid noises, but those don’t bother me). I actually felt really close to everyone there knowing that we were all focused on the same Person.
Cristina Reintjes says
I loved the piece on socialism. I just finished listening to Secondhand Time which is a very moving/disturbing compilation of interviews from Russians during the years after the fall of the USSR. It should be required reading for anyone who finds themselves thinking socialism might be the answer. It shows not only the horrific things average people of our own time are capable of doing, especially when separated from any faith, but also what happens when we allow ourselves to succumb to mobs.
Mary says
The wines were great because they are from Washington state. 🙂
Elizabeth says
I find the use of the word ‘socialism’ in the US a bit complicated. Everything that happened in the Soviet Union from 1917 till 1989 is called communism in Europe, which most people (outside of Russia) know was horrendous. The horrors of communism are part of every history curriculum.
Socialism is not the same as communism in Europe.
At the same time, political parties governing most of Europe are called ‘socialist’ by Americans. They’re not. At most, there will be several political parties in a government, one of which could be a socialist party. These socialist parties have been struggling in the past decade. These are NOT communists and they wouldn’t want to be associated with communism. There used to be communist parties in Western-Europe, but they died out quickly after 1989.
Most European governments swung to the right in the past decade, even within the multiple party system that we have, right wing parties are doing consistently better.
Cristina Reintjes says
I just want to state for the record that I do know the difference between socialism and communism 🙂
I think in America the terms are certainly conflated, but in general people who say they are worried about the country becoming socialist or communist are mostly concerned with the slide towards it and not the exact fulfillment of the definition of either word. I will say though, that I made it through school without learning anything at all of the horrors of communism and only had the vaguest sense that communism was bad because democracy was good. I learned the particulars through my own readings as an adult.
Elizabeth Marie says
You were in Portland! Greetings from Canada.
I am an Orthodox Christian from Portland, Oregon. My husband is from B.C. Neither one of us had ever lived outside of our hometown’s metro area before we got married (he did a lot of driving while we dated).
I am a new reader and very much enjoying your homemaking posts, as well as learning about the commonalities we share across traditions in striving to live liturgically.