There's something off about how we speak to girls about their futures in the Church.

We say "The world needs what women are" but it is women themselves who shoot down other women.

We say "Women need to be part of the decision making process in the Church" but the questions about which decisions, exactly, go quietly unanswered.

We say "Women play a vital role in the life and hands of the Church" but are we treating the formation of our future Catholic women as vital or is it more of an afterthought?

I see this in many parishes manifesting as a lack of strong formation, or even social, programs specifically for girls. Vocations discernment programs largely being aimed at future priests, not future nuns or sisters.
Girls get the message - I am on my own here.

But we try and catch them later! We see adult women struggling to find their place in the Church, to fulfill their vocation, to understand their faith heritage. We try to offer studies, groups, lectures, events.
Yet we do it poorly so much of the time.

I don't know about my fellow women, but I am so weary of a Catholic women's spirituality that desires to do Theology Lite. A spirituality that says "We will have the work of your hands, just don't ask questions of your mind." These groups are meant for encouragement so you can "keep on keeping on", but are not really a launching point for change and difference.
This is a pressure within the Church, from women to other women. We give this to ourselves, and this is the world we are showing our daughters in faith.

When I look around at what my 4 year old daughter can age into through parish life, I don't see many opportunities to grow her connections with other Catholic girls. That's a shame. Girls will be asked many more hard, pressing, questions, and at a younger age, than their male peers. She will need those connections. She will need that knowledge base, and the experience of growing with other faithful girls.

I am a faithful Catholic woman, and I will remain so, but to do that well I need to be Church. This needs to be a community that pushes each other to be better. To know Jesus better and to love each other better.

The Church is in crisis right now. Frankly, it's probably going to be in crisis for a while. A long while. This isn't going to go away.
Now, more than ever, we need to see and identify those places where the Catholic community is weak and lax. Those places that have been left for later. Ignored and even belittled.

My fellow Catholic women, let's learn! Let's tackle learning those parts of the faith that we have never ironed out in our minds. Let's make space for our daughters to grow. Let us be a community of faith AND works. A community that sees that women are not just the fuel for the parish machine, but a beautiful, vital, distinct, and visible part of the Church.

How do you see places the Catholic Church could better serve girls? What places do you see needing to be addressed in the wider Church? In your own specific area?

Ember Day Plans - Fall 2018

The Fall Ember Days begin tomorrow! (Can you tell I'm excited?!) I love these quarterly days of fasting and prayer.  To give you some ideas of how to observe, I thought I would share my plans for this Ember Week!

Physical

Preparing my heart for the work of a new season means tackling the physical spaces I would rather ignore, or have already procrastinated on handling. This week it's prepping the library for painting, and cleaning out the grease trap over the stove.

I also do a lot of the less frequent type of cleaning this week: vacuuming the porch, cleaning out the car, doing a quick purge in each room, switching over clothes for the new season, etc. 

Realistically, not everything I try to do will happen, but I will have forced myself to do what is asked of me and that is a valuable practice in and of itself.

Spiritual

Confession is always the number one practice for spiritual clean out that I try to make happen during the Ember Days. 

This season I'm also re-committing to praying the Liturgy of the Hours for the readings, morning, and evening prayers. During a parish town hall this past weekend on the abuse crisis, our pastor said something that made me pause. He noted that most priests who became abusers started neglecting their promise to pray this common prayer of the Church first. Being negligent in small things was the first step down that evil road. For the healing and intentions of abuse survivors, I am dedicating these prayers that should have been faithfully prayed in the first place.

Fasting

I'm a fan of the two prong fasting approach. On these Ember Days I will be following a traditional fast (nothing but liquids during the day) and fasting from social media scrolling. 

To do the spiritual and physical clean out, I need time. When I looked at my time spent, my greatest amount of truly wasted time was scrolling on social media. The amount of that that turned into legitimate connection and communication with others was tiny, and could have been easily found without the scrolling.

Connection

Living through, and within, this crisis in the Church has made it very clear to me that this is also a crisis of community. Of connection. Of remembering to care about others as loved Children of God. These Ember Days I am making a special effort to connection with my children, with my spouse, with members of my parish, Catholics beyond my parish, and others I may have met but have not gotten to know yet. 

I don't know exactly what that's going to look like, but I've found that making a conscious effort to be open to the Holy Spirit tends to create what needs to be.

How are you observing these Ember Days? Will this be your first time?

Where I've Been Lately

This has been one of my longest writing breaks in a good while. I think it's time to level with y'all and let you know where I've been lately.

Talking Off-line

In the Diocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul, the young adults have been leading discussions about the church crisis, developing concrete steps for moving forward, and submitting a letter to the Bishop. I attended the first large discussion with over a hundred other young adults. While I felt like it was a productive conversation at my table, the equal representation of men and women in the room was not reflected in who stood up to address the larger group.

I emailed the organizers about it. Which turned into an invitation to their next planning meeting.
Which turned into getting involved in next steps.
Which turned into being listed as an organizer by the time the letter was released.
All within just a few days.

That meant that more people have been coming up to me wanting to talk about the crisis and what is being done about it in the diocese. I love having those conversations in person! Human connection is so very important for having these hard discussions, and I believe very strongly that we need to feed our community connections now more than ever.
Not every conversation is positive, but I think it is harder for most people to see the subject of their frustration as an object when they are a flesh and bone person standing in front of them.

Writing Online

All of those in person conversations have been enlightening. Plenty of young parents have told me that changes are unnecessary, that the "past should be in the past", or just straight up that the crisis does not concern them.

I wrote a piece for YA Respond, the collection of people who are behind the young adult response in the diocese, addressing that reaction.

Beyond that, I've been on the quiet side online because of....

The Fallout

I knew there would be push back, but I never anticipated how much I would be torn down by other WOMEN. I've gotten hateful emails, messages, comments. One women told me, to my face, that I should "Go home and love your babies instead of talking like this."

It's been a lesson in internalized misogyny, I tell you what.

I appreciate that it's easier for women to be angry at another woman, and to take out their frustrations on someone like me who is sticking her neck out. But just because something is easy does not make it ok. I'm not actually an endless pit that can take all the evil of the world. I'm a human being who isn't always being seen as one right now.

Let's be very clear here - if you have issues with how things are being handled right now, you are invited to get your butt in gear and do something too. I will not allow anyone to continue on harming their own souls by venting their hatred.

Protecting my own mental health has been important because, imagine that, I still have other things going on in my life.

Homeschooling

Like homeschooling. This has been a rocky year.
This year I am schooling 1st grade and preschool. 1st grade seems to be a turning point on when it's ok to be different from your peers. Suddenly I'm getting a lot of push back about learning to read (still on that struggle bus) and doing pretty much anything I ask during the day.
It's very hard when the number of young homeschooling families seems to be plummeting, and all his little friends are in the parish school together or at various other schools.

The preschooler would prefer to do school everyday. She does not believe in this concept of "the weekend". If she could start kindergarten right now, that would be swell by her.

Preschooler has been allowed to start phonics because I just can't keep her from starting any longer. Open to suggestions for a struggling to blend, not even beginning, reader. I've tried most of what I've found online and it's not doing the trick here on week 5.

Bleaching E V E R Y T H I N G

The drama could not stop with the big kids! I brought the baby into the doctor with, what I thought, was a bad yeast diaper rash. It was that, but also Staph. STAPH. Eeeeeeeek!!!

This has been a lesson in how little can actually be done against bacteria, but I am fighting this battle with so. much. bleach.

ALLLLLLL THE BLEACHHHHHH!!

Modern medicine is a marvel, y'all.
Somehow this baby is still pretty cheerful, despite the infection with the awful creatures.

Auditioning

It's been a few weeks of hard, and frankly I needed a win. I did an audition that I *think* went really well!
I'm the kind of Type A actor who keeps an audition log. That way I can record exactly how many times I've thrown myself against this brick wall. (I jest...sort of...) This was my 15th audition. In my "mood coming out" column for this audition I put "nailed it". We'll see what ends up in the "outcome" column.

Amelia Hill House reno

We are attempting to tackle two big areas before the winter sets in: the nursery and the library.

Upon removing the wallpaper in the nursery, and letting it sit, it became apparent that the vintage wallpaper was just not in good enough condition to preserve. The plaster behind it was flaking off the wall, and I called it as a DIY project. For a room intended for a baby the various issues were getting beyond my pay grade.

It's been a few weeks of occasionally having workers here scraping the wall and re-plastering. I don't love parenting and homeschooling with strange men coming in and out all day (who don't speak to me. It's weird.) I keep reminding myself how nice it will be to finally have all the rooms upstairs in usable condition!

We finally won the battle of the rusty nails (...by bringing in a handy man who tackled it in 10 minutes...) so we are now picking colors for the library! We found a local carpenter to build shelves that will be stained to match the dark walnut inlays we have in the floor. I'm going for a 1920's study feel to it, that won't feel too dark in the dead of winter. Ideas welcome!

It does get s t r o n g light in the late afternoon, so I'm thinking red would be a little intense. I like the idea of a dark green, but we have used a lot of green in the house so far.

Linking this little life update with This Ain't the Lyceum for 7 Quick Takes!