Holy Souls Novena, Day 7

Darwin's father was a planetarium lecturer, and often he was cornered after his lectures by hobbyists who fancied themselves misunderstood scientific geniuses. Each had some crackpot explanation for life, the universe, and everything, prefaced invariably with, "And it's so simple!" So simple, and so wrong.

Here's something that's actually so simple and right: "Offer it up," as your mom used to say. All it takes is paying attention to the least thing. When we pick up the huge bucket of Legos poured on the floor, we offer each Lego for a particular person, or for the souls. Get out of bed, which you have to do anyway: offer it for someone. Bend over to put on your shoes: offer it for someone. Turn off the computer: offer it. Breathe: do it for the love of God. You have to do this stuff anyway. Just offer it up, maybe for the holy souls in Purgatory. So little for you, so much for them.

And it's so simple!

***

(Act of Faith:) My God, I believe in You, because You are Truth itself; I firmly believe the truths revealed to the Church.
(Act of Hope:) My God, I hope in You, because You are infinitely good.
(Act of Love:) My God, I love You with all my heart, and above all things, because You are infinitely perfect; and I love my neighbor as myself, for the love of You.

MEDITATION FOR THE SEVENTH DAY, THURS. OCT 31
THE MERCY OF PRAYER
What food is to a starving man…What drink is to the parched sailor riding the tropic seas on a raft…What light is to the man long blind…What restored health is to the patient invalid…What freedom is to the prisoner…All this and far, far more is release from Purgatory to a holy soul.  And when food…light…health…freedom come suddenly, unexpectedly, the human heart leaps and bounds, and the soul knows the sharp ecstasy of joy.  So it is with each prayer that we say for the beseeching souls in Purgatory.  Our prayer is bread and water and light and health; it is a reprieve and a release and freedom and home-coming.  It is the cutting of bonds, the lessening of weary waiting, the termination of exile, the sudden glorious lift that picks them up and seems almost to shoot them toward the center of their joy, God Himself.  For us that prayer is an almost careless gesture.  For us, a routine act of charity…prayer, an alms, a bit of fasting, a good deed done…forgotten in the doing.  For them, something beyond price and measure.  Christ our Light, multiply our poor efforts as You did the loaves and the fishes as we pray:


DE PROFUNDIS (Ps. 130)
Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice!
Let Your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication:

If You, O Lord, mark iniquities,
Lord, who can stand?
But with You is forgiveness,
that You may be revered.

I trust in the Lord;
my soul trusts in His word.
My soul waits for the Lord
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.

More than sentinels wait for the dawn,
let Israel wait for the Lord.
For with the Lord is kindness,
and with Him is plenteous redemption;
And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.


DIVINE MERCY PRAYER
You expired, Jesus, but the source of life gushed forth for souls and the ocean of mercy opened up for the whole world.  O Fount of Life, unfathomable Divine Mercy, envelop the souls in Purgatory and empty Yourself out upon them. Amen.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed for whom we offer this novena, rest in peace. Amen.

Holy Souls Novena, Day 6

"My soul waits for the Lord
more than sentinels wait for the dawn."

I got out of bed this morning.

Darwin has gotten up extra early this week so that he can get home early, and I've gotten up with him. Normally I stay in bed if he has to leave early, but during this novena, I've been exercising my power to choose to get up with him instead of stay cozy in bed. Once I'm up, it's not bad -- we have quiet time to chat, and actually run the risk of him leaving late because it's hard to stop talking. But the first action of getting up is the hardest part.

Still, I get to make that choice, to perfect my will a bit, and to offer it for the holy souls in Purgatory. They can't participate in perfecting their will. Everything in them is bent toward God, and they cannot hasten their arrival into his presence. Like the sentinels waiting for the dawn, they are powerless to bring about the thing they long for.

I am not powerless. I can move toward God any moment I choose to. I can draw nearer to him just by willing it, by longing for it. This is unfathomable power. St. Paul says, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church" (Col. 1:24). Every soul, even the souls in Purgatory, can offer their sufferings for others, but on earth we can offer them for ourselves as well, "in my flesh".

That's worth getting out of bed for.

***


(Act of Faith:) My God, I believe in You, because You are Truth itself; I firmly believe the truths revealed to the Church.
(Act of Hope:) My God, I hope in You, because You are infinitely good.
(Act of Love:) My God, I love You with all my heart, and above all things, because You are infinitely perfect; and I love my neighbor as myself, for the love of You.

MEDITATION FOR THE SIXTH DAY, WED. OCT 30
COMPASSION AND INTERCESSION
The family bonds forged by oneness in Christ are not broken by death.  The whole Church, living and dead, is still one in Him.  So those who have gone before us remain connected to us in the profoundest way possible.  By virtue of this fact, we can still love and have compassion on our dearly departed.  “And they turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out…In doing this he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection….if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought.  Therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.” (2Macc12:42-45)  Through our oneness in Christ, we have enormous influence in the lives of one another.  It is a profound act of love to use that influence to aid our brothers and sisters in Purgatory—to hasten their purification and speed their entry into the joys of Heaven.  “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects.” (James5:16)  Loving God, take our act of prayer and apply it to the benefit of our loved ones in Purgatory as we pray:


DE PROFUNDIS (Ps. 130)
Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice!
Let Your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication:

If You, O Lord, mark iniquities,
Lord, who can stand?
But with You is forgiveness,
that You may be revered.

I trust in the Lord;
my soul trusts in His word.
My soul waits for the Lord
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.

More than sentinels wait for the dawn,
let Israel wait for the Lord.
For with the Lord is kindness,
and with Him is plenteous redemption;
And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.


DIVINE MERCY PRAYER
Eternal Father, we offer Thee the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, of Thy dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.  For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the holy souls in Purgatory.  Amen.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed for whom we offer this novena, rest in peace. Amen.

All Souls Novena, Day 5

(Act of Faith:) My God, I believe in You, because You are Truth itself; I firmly believe the truths revealed to the Church.
(Act of Hope:) My God, I hope in You, because You are infinitely good.
(Act of Love:) My God, I love You with all my heart, and above all things, because You are infinitely perfect; and I love my neighbor as myself, for the love of You.

MEDITATION FOR THE FIFTH DAY, TUE. OCT 29
DURATION OF PURGATORY
God does not measure time as man does.  “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2Peter3:8)  The People of God waited thousands of years for the promised Savior.  Dare we assume that Purgatory is somehow short by human standards? How swiftly the memories of the living fade away.  The rush of the days and the cares of the world fill the minds and hands of those still on earth.  In her wisdom, the Church yearly reminds her flock of the beloved deceased.  With the feast of All Souls, our hearts and our love and our generosity are expanded again to include even those we can no longer see with our eyes.  Jesus Christ, Savior of the World, out of compassion for those who have no one to love and pray for them, we pray:


DE PROFUNDIS (Ps. 130)
Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice!
Let Your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication:

If You, O Lord, mark iniquities,
Lord, who can stand?
But with You is forgiveness,
that You may be revered.

I trust in the Lord;
my soul trusts in His word.
My soul waits for the Lord
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.

More than sentinels wait for the dawn,
let Israel wait for the Lord.
For with the Lord is kindness,
and with Him is plenteous redemption;
And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.


DIVINE MERCY PRAYER
Eternal God--in Whom mercy is endless, and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible--look kindly upon us, and increase Your mercy in us, so that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your Holy Will, which is love and mercy itself. Amen.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed for whom we offer this novena, rest in peace. Amen.

All Souls Novena, Day Four

A friend put together a group to pray the All Souls Novena, to end on Nov. 2, for the souls in Purgatory. And since it's never too late to start, I thought you'd like to pray it with me. Here are the meditations for the first three days.

There is a place for the purification of souls which, after death, are yet stained with venial sins, or have not yet entirely satisfied for their pardoned sins. By the light of the flames of Purgatory, I understand better Your holiness, Your justice, Your mercy, O my God! "Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord? Or who shall stand in His Holy Place? The innocent in hands, and clean of heart." (Ps. 24) "There shall not enter into Heaven anything defiled." (Rev. 21:27) Oh my God, You are all holy and perfect purity. No sin can enter Your presence without destruction. Purgatory is the chamber of Your mercy where all sin is finally eradicated from the soul in preparation to see You face to face. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction." (2 Cor. 1:3-4) 

Just as it is on earth, so too after death, the burning away of selfishness and attachment to sin is painful.  And in Purgatory there is nothing to distract from the terrible pain of purification, as there so readily is on earth.  Scripture compares the purification of the soul to the burning of fire.  “For You, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried…we went through fire and water; yet You have brought us forth to a place of abundance.” (Ps.66:10-12)  “Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.” (Is.48:10)  So too, after death: “Each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.  If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.  If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” (1Cor.3:13-15 

The darkening of the intellect that came with the Fall casts a fog over our human perceptions.  In our weakness and selfishness, we choose lesser goods over the greater.  We choose ourselves over others.  We choose things over God who is Everything.  “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully.” (1Cor13:12)  In the clear light of Purgatory, the soul can finally see the countless times he exchanged gold for dung, chose dust over diamonds.  So many opportunities lost, so many chances rejected.  Pointlessness chosen over acts of eternal significance.  And the pain of regret is excruciating.  “I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me.” (Ps.50:5) 

I've been chewing on this theme of the powerlessness of Purgatory.

Anyone who's given birth knows the agony of transition, that point when your body is preparing to push the baby out. It is miserable, and there's nothing you can do -- you shake, you are racked with pain, your guts are being ripped out, and there's no stopping anything at that point. You cannot help or hinder the process. All you can do is endure. You are not changing -- you are being changed.

A more universal example is losing a tooth. Not long ago, my son came into my bedroom moaning, because his molar was at that stage where it was twisting and hanging on by a thread, but it was going to hurt even more to just pull it and get it over with. It had been years since I'd remembered the waiting pain of losing a tooth, but I could feel my own molars throbbing sympathetically.

Purgatory is transitional. We are being remade, through fire. Everything that is not God is being burned away. And we cannot change. The change is done for us. That happens on Earth, certainly, but here in life we can take an active part in our changing, hastening, hindering. In Purgatory it is done to us. How much better to transition now, while we're still alive and can actively participate in our own purification.

Because let me tell you, ain't much worse than the pain of transition, and I'd rather only go through it in this life.

All Souls Novena, Day 4

(Act of Faith:) My God, I believe in You, because You are Truth itself; I firmly believe the truths revealed to the Church.
(Act of Hope:) My God, I hope in You, because You are infinitely good.
(Act of Love:) My God, I love You with all my heart, and above all things, because You are infinitely perfect; and I love my neighbor as myself, for the love of You.

MEDITATION FOR THE FOURTH DAY, MON. OCT 28
THE PAIN OF LONGING
Nothing else is humanly harder to bear than painful waiting.  All the souls in Purgatory are sure one day to reach Heaven.  They know how wonderful Heaven is and how desirable is God.  “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.” (1Cor2:9)  But they cannot follow the violent impulse that drives them toward their happiness.  One can hear their anxious eagerness echoed in the words of the Psalmist: “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me for ever? How long will You hide Your face from me?  How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all the day?” (Ps.13:1-2)  They must hunger for God and still be withheld from the possession of Him.  So in Purgatory there is hope and certainty and love and eagerness—and long periods of waiting…waiting…  Father of Mercy, out of love for our departed loved ones, we pray:


DE PROFUNDIS (Ps. 130)
Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice!
Let Your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication:

If You, O Lord, mark iniquities,
Lord, who can stand?
But with You is forgiveness,
that You may be revered.

I trust in the Lord;
my soul trusts in His word.
My soul waits for the Lord
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.

More than sentinels wait for the dawn,
let Israel wait for the Lord.
For with the Lord is kindness,
and with Him is plenteous redemption;
And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.


DIVINE MERCY PRAYER
O Greatly Merciful God, Infinite Goodness, today all mankind calls out from the abyss of its misery to Your mercy, to Your compassion, O God; and it is with a mighty voice of misery that it cries out. Gracious God, do not reject the prayer of this earth’s exiles! O Lord, Goodness beyond our understanding, Who are acquainted with our misery through and through and know that by our own power we cannot ascend to You, we implore You: fill us and the souls in Purgatory with Your grace and keep on increasing Your mercy in us. Let the omnipotence of Your mercy bless our dearly departed.  Amen.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed for whom we offer this novena, rest in peace. Amen.

The Eye of the Piggy

Our skittish guinea pig, Hilda, took a flying leap from my daughter's arms into her cage, and scratched her eye. We've patted the bars of the cage, looking for any sharp spot or protrusion, without luck, but there it is -- poor piggy's eye is punctured and cloudy. Per the vet, we're giving her eyedrops three times a day, and painkiller twice.

Last night, as I was trying to drop the medicine into her squinty eye, Darwin said, "You know, I think her eye is shrinking."

And you guys, it is shrinking. I'd thought she was just squinting a lot, but no, her eyeball is getting smaller day by day. It fills me with a kind of horror to think about it. The vet had warned us that she might lose her eye, but I hadn't thought of seeing it happen bit by bit. We go back to the vet tomorrow for a follow-up. I don't think we need to take heroic measures to save her eye, even if such a thing is possible at this point. But we'll try to keep her as comfortable as possible as she heals.

It's not anyone's fault -- piggy has to be taken out of her cage so it can be cleaned; she is just a small fluffy pig who can't help being jumpy; what on earth did she bang herself on anyway? -- but it is sad to think that this small thing in our care is going to be maimed. Granted, her life is pretty sedate otherwise. She goes around her cage with her daughter Ruby. She sits in her house. Sometimes, if she is feeling feisty, she even flips her house, and then squeaks for someone to turn it back over. All these things can be done and done well with one eye. And other than her panic when we pick her up for her medicine, she doesn't seem to be suffering, as best we can tell.

We are not the most doting pet owners by any means, but we try to do well by these creatures in our house. The two old cats are sometimes frustrating, and the older one, at 19, seems well-nigh immortal, but we are responsible for them. Even when they pee on random fabric items on my floor, we don't hurl them outside. We buy them the expensive cat food because they don't throw it up. We even moved the litter box downstairs, to the far back corner of the kitchen by the washing machine, so that they'd stop pooping on the floor because they didn't want go up to the attic. It horrifies me to have a litter box in my kitchen, by my laundry. It drives me crazy to live in a house that sometimes smells like cat pee. When these cats die, we are done with cats. Done. But for now we have them, and we have to take care of them.

Lately, though, I've felt that I will indeed be judged on how I've treated our pets. Not on the amount of money we've spent on them, which is pretty negligible by pet-owner standards. Not for how often I've taken them to the vet, because they never go in unless they are in obvious distress. No, I feel like I will be judged on throwing the cat in the middle of the night because it's on my pillow, or for pushing it away when it stood on my puzzle trying to get me to scratch its head, or for the times I've called it stupid. Not because these are big things, but because they are little things, the littlest of the little, of no consequence to anyone or anything but my soul. The cats are God's creation too, and how I respond to them reflects upon me. I don't think I need to pamper them, but I need to at least respond to them as something that God thinks is good.

By the back door, there's a spider who's made its home in the old trellis on the porch. In days past I would have brushed the web away and smashed the spider if I could get it. But it's not harming me. It has a little hidey hole woven down into a corner of the trellis, and sometimes when we come out the back door it hides, and sometimes it sits out. I nod to it as I go past. Maybe it's catching bugs. Maybe it's just living, and as long as it's not in the house who cares? The back porch looks rather sloppy with the triangular web by the door, but it's of a piece with the rest of the place. God made it, and saw that it was good, and that's good enough for me.

The Individual Grief of Miscarriage

October 15 is Pregnancy Loss Awareness Day, as proclaimed by -- I'm not sure really; I don't know who has jurisdiction to just proclaim a day and make it so. Simcha Fisher has written a lovely reflection on grieving a miscarriage and seeking physical reminders of a loss that leaves barely any physical remains.

I want to write about a different way to grieve, because there is no one right way.

I had a miscarriage at about 12 weeks, over the Triduum of 2005, a few months before we started this blog. I don't remember the dates without looking it up, but I discovered I was bleeding on Good Friday, at church. A friend took my almost 3yo and my 18mo home for the night, and all night long I bled and feared.

All day Saturday I bled and grieved, a process made more complicated by Darwin being so miserably sick that I had to drive him to the urgent care. I sat in the office and rocked myself in labor pains and cried into tissues while the doctor proclaimed that he had a double ear infection and bronchitis. She looked at my pile of tissues with trepidation. "I'm not contagious," I moaned. "I'm having a miscarriage."

"Okay?" she said, and backed out of the room without fulfilling my fantasy of prescribing me industrial-strength painkillers.

Darwin was barely conscious, so I had to drive him to the pharmacy to pick up his prescriptions. Focusing on the road was a nightmare of concentration and pain. Every stop light was a misery of waiting. When we got to the store, he had to go in, sick as he was, because I couldn't stand up without blood dripping down my leg. And while I was sitting there crying, the phone rang -- the lab confirming that I had indeed lost my baby.

Then I realized that the pain was subsiding, had stopped, and I stopped crying, and the grief died with the pain.

On Easter morning we went to mass alone, as the girls were still in the care in friends, and when we came home I passed the baby, painlessly, silently. We were able to open the sac and see and hold the perfect tiny body. Fingers, toes, little bottom, little nose, and a huge blue eye. We buried it under the rose bush in the back yard.

Friends told me to name the baby. Friends told me that I would be sad for a while, that I might cry at random times. I did none of those things. God knows the child's name, and one day so will I. Six weeks later I got pregnant with my daughter (now a beautiful, disciplined, ferociously effective 13yo) and I did not grieve my miscarriage any more. The next time, and the last time, I cried about it was a few years later, as I sat with a friend who'd just had her own miscarriage, and my grief was more for her than for myself.

It's not that I never think about Baby. I have, in the pocket of my bathrobe, a plastic model of a twelve-week fetus. It's a bit larger than my child, but it's very accurate to the little baby I held, except that some child has chewed up the plastic toes. Whenever I walk down the hall to the shower, I hold the baby in my pocket and remember, and pray for my child and all babies just beginning life in the womb. Sometimes the kids get out the plastic baby and talk about it. And I feel no pang.

It's okay to mourn a miscarriage for a long time. And it's okay not to mourn a miscarriage for a long time. There's no correct way to grieve, and no one should tell you how to feel. Every loss is individual. Baby's brief existence is a joy to me, unalloyed by grief, and there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't make me a cold, hard person. It simply is what it is. I have my memories of a tiny body, and an immense blue eye looking up at me, and they are good and sweet.

Personal Influence

Everyone knows the shock of catching oneself on video, a charming exercise that combines the seeming objectivity of seeing yourself from the outside with the subjectivity of nitpicking your own presentation for flaws. I had this informative experience this weekend at the cast party for our show, as we watched last year's show and kibbitzed. I can't tell you anything about my performance, because all I saw was that although I'd thought at the time that I was standing straight, the video showed every leaden ounce of the ten extra pounds I was carrying then, weighing on the base of neck, pressing my head out in a cruel slump.

This is why it's crucial to live in community and relationship. Left to myself, I see a photo or a video and immediately pinpoint what I see as the flaws. Look at my chunky legs, my strange posture, my shapeless face, my hair laying the wrong way. Who else would I judge so harshly, by appearance only? Which of my friends would I categorize by appearance, except as a delightful reminder of the personality within? Indeed, the only lasting effect we have on other people is the effect of personal influence, the witness of the totality of our life and convictions on those around us. And we will be heard and believed in proportion to our devotion, however quiet and unimpressive it may seem externally, to the Truth.

The newly ordained St. John Henry Newman spoke of personal influence as the unsurpassed, and indeed, the principal means of evanglization and of the transmission of divine Truth:

Such views of the nature and history of Divine Truth are calculated to make us contented and resigned in our generation, whatever be the peculiar character or the power of the errors of our own times. For Christ never will reign visibly upon earth; but in each age, as it comes, we shall read of tumult and heresy, and hear the complaint of good men marvelling at what they conceive to be the especial wickedness of their own times. 

37. Moreover, such considerations lead us to be satisfied with the humblest and most obscure lot; by showing us, not only that we may be the instruments of much good in it, but that (strictly speaking) we could scarcely in any situation be direct instruments of good to any besides those who personally know us, who ever must form a small circle; and as to the indirect good we may do in a more exalted station (which is by no means to be lightly esteemed), still we are not absolutely precluded from it in a lower place in the Church. Nay, it has happened before now, that comparatively retired posts have been filled by those who have exerted the most extensive influences over the destinies of Religion in the times following them; as in the arts and pursuits of this world, the great benefactors of mankind are frequently unknown. 

38. Let all those, then, who acknowledge the voice of God speaking within them, and urging them heaven-ward, wait patiently for the End, exercising themselves, and diligently working, with a view to that day when the books shall be opened, and all the disorder of human affairs reviewed and set right; when "the last shall be first, and the first last;" when "all things that offend, and they which do iniquity," shall be gathered out and removed; when "the righteous shall shine forth as the sun," and Faith shall see her God; when "they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars, for ever and ever."

I read these words yesterday with stinging eyes, as I reflected on a recent interaction. A wonderful lady I know asked me where I went to church. She wanted her family to join a church and start going regularly, but she hadn't decided where.

"I go to St. Mary's," I said.

"I was raised Catholic," she said, "but I want to find something non-denominational."

And instead of suggesting that she look into Catholicism again, or try RCIA, or offering to join her at mass, I mentioned the names of several local non-denominational congregations to which other friends belong.

Now I believe in the truths that the Catholic Church professes, with my whole heart. I believe it possesses the fullness of truth, as we can understand it here on earth. I would die for the faith, and I hope I would suffer for it. But how do I know what history my friend had with the Church? How do I know what past influences may have made her want something else? How do I know what burdens she's had to bear that may have been made worse by particular Catholics?

How, for that matter, do I know whether I'm a good personal model for someone looking for a church? Do I come across as someone who makes the faith attractive, or (as has been implied to me before) a goody two-shoes whose life has little to offer to people in difficult circumstances? That happy marriage, all those nice kids -- what does MrsDarwin know about my broken background, my current suffering? What can her faith have to offer me?

What I did know was that she asked a question, and I listened, and answered to the best of my ability, and that St. Newman might agree that that kind of personal interaction is a better witness than all reasoning or eloquence. And I think he would agree that we cannot know the force of our personal influence, for good or for ill. How can we know the totality of ourselves? How can we truly have an objective view of what we look like to others? All that matters is that God works through our weakness to show forth his love and beauty and truth to the world, as Cardinal Newman says in his last paragraph above:

Let all those, then, who acknowledge the voice of God speaking within them, and urging them heaven-ward, wait patiently for the End, exercising themselves, and diligently working, with a view to that day when the books shall be opened, and all the disorder of human affairs reviewed and set right; when "the last shall be first, and the first last;" when "all things that offend, and they which do iniquity," shall be gathered out and removed; when "the righteous shall shine forth as the sun," and Faith shall see her God; when "they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars, for ever and ever."

Immediate Prayer Request

Friends, requesting your prayers for a Cincinnati friend looking desperately for immediate help for a late-term, high-risk pregnancy. Please say a quick St. Thérèse prayer or Infant of Prague novena for this life-and-death situation. She says:

"My once-trusted obstetrician has a terrible office, and they dropped the ball on numerous important things. As I approach the end of pregnancy, everything they missed is coming to light and gathering into a pretty fraught situation here at 36 weeks.

The first issue is that I have tested extremely close to the diagnostic cutoff for a condition called intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP), which carries up to a 15% stillbirth risk. The only way to save babies whose moms have ICP is delivery at 37 weeks. I should have been allowed to speak to my doctor about this, but his office has prevented me from direct contact with him for over a month now.

The second issue is that I was not given the standard tests for anemia at all during this pregnancy, which allowed me to become severely anemic and affected my heart rhythm to the degree that I ended up in the ER—and also helps explain why I was basically unable to function all summer. I have been told over a week ago that I require immediate iron infusions at the hospital to help prevent hemorrhage during my c-section, but to this day, the obstetrician's office has not successfully put in the order for them despite repeat requests from both me and the hospital.

These little bureaucratic dysfunctions are adding up to serious consequences for me and my baby. I still have no c-section date scheduled, let alone one that takes into account the potential for ICP. I have attempted to transfer my care to well-respected high-risk obstetricians at nearby hospital groups and been told that their cutoff for new patients is 36 weeks.

As for the loop monitor drama, in case you're wondering—I finally got that successfully ordered and covered by insurance, and then had to cancel it days before due to all of these complications."

Darwiniana: Gripe Session

Next week we return to our regularly scheduled programming. This week we didn't have the flu, but at a certain point I thought we did, and believe me, everything else went by the wayside. It's the sinus thingie with fever (confirmed by urgent care), and it's a week-long event, but that week has been staggered throughout seven children who are getting cabin fever. Bonus: the house has been thoroughly disinfected, and the urgent care doc told me that all OTC sleep aids are basically benedryl, so if you have children with feverish insomnia, take this to heart. 

Also this week: the big van died in the middle of our street. Haha, two alternators in two different cars in just over two weeks! We'll have it back after the weekend, I hope, and thank goodness that we're now a three-car family, but oof.

Also oof: the plumbing job to make our low-pressure shower run more smoothly initially had an estimate of $600. What was supposed to be a one-day job ran into complications, cost 50% more than estimated, and has left us with a hole in the bathroom wall, a shower with the water shut off, and a further estimate of $1200 to finish the work. NB: this is not the bathroom with the hole in the ceiling, where the shower works just fine.

Speaking of the bathroom with the hole in the ceiling: the living room ceiling under that shower has started to bulge. We are familiar with bulging ceilings, which means plaster that must be replaced. Fortunately, the bulging plaster is held in place by paper, which we suspect that previous homeowners put up to hide previous water damage to the plaster. Cost to repair: unknown as yet, because I'm turning a blind eye to it until other things are paid for.

Ah, fall! Time to bake some bread! That is, if you have a functioning oven. But this past Saturday, while the girls and I were at the theater, while Darwin was doing some baking, he noticed a bright flash in the oven. Opening it, he saw a spark, like the flare from a welder's torch, moving along the bottom heating element. As it traced its way along the wire, the wire seemed to melt. Very interesting. Also now very unfunctional. We are told that this is an easy part to DIY, which is good financially but disappointing from the standpoint of having bought this thing as a placeholder for the good gas stove we'd like to get one day, and it's not dead enough to replace yet.

None of these things are insurmountable, and most of them are predictable, especially the old moneypit problems. In the grand scheme of things, none of them are really terrible. Most of them can be solved with money and time, both of which we have. Yet it does feel oppressing to have them all come at once, and in a show week, natch. But it's been lots of little opportunities to die to self, and that's better than no opportunities to die to self.

A Waffle Making Dad

This was one of those very parental mornings. The little kids had been passing around one of those viruses all week that manifested itself in fevers at night and no detectable symptoms during the day -- the sort of thing you can't take to the doctor with any satisfaction and which doesn't even slow them down much during the day. Last night the malady made the jump to the older kids as they came back from the first performance of their show with MrsDarwin. Thus there were calls and visits from various people during the night. At few times were there less than two small to medium children wedged into our bed with us. MrsDarwin dealt with much of this. Through long years of being a single income family we've fallen into a routine where I wake up easily to my alarm and to strange noises during the night, while she wakes up to sounds of children. This fits with the fact that I get up early and head off to work, while the kids tend to sleep till 7:30 or 8:00 and thus allow her to get another hour or two of rest.

So having slogged through the night, I got up with the alarm to make breakfast. MrsDarwin had to leave to teach religion class by 9:15, and whichever kids were healthy would be going with her. In honor of general civilization, I try to make sure the family gets a hot breakfast at least one day out of each weekend, and usually that day is Sunday. This morning I made waffles and bacon, with the earnest help of the five-year-old who loves to stand on a stool and help add and mix ingredients in any such project.

 Now it's the moment of quiet, where I've got everyone fed, settled the sick ones down to rest, got MrsDarwin out the door (fed, coffeed, with all her stuff) and there's a pause of relative quiet -- "Dad!" Comes a cry from the other room. "I had a spill." -- before I need to get the next set of logistics going to cover mass, errands, getting people to the play, to youth group, making dinner, to bed. So I'm writing. Why not?

Some time ago, I recall another Catholic guy having written something about how one of the benefits of marriage is that it domesticates young men. Given that many within the Catholic blogging world seem to have been trying to catch up on fifty years of previously scorned feminism over the last five years, this inevitably caught him a fair amount of grief. "It seems like you're asking women to pay an awfully high price to teach men to make waffles," quipped one critic.

Well here I am. Waffle making man. It's not always waffles. My breakfast repertoire for feeding all the kids stretches to pancakes, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, homemade bagels, hash, and egg-sausage-bake. If I'm just making a breakfast for MrsDarwin and myself I make an omelet or eggs, but many of the kids don't like eggs, and it's hard to make an omelet big enough for seven kids anyway.

I've read compelling writing by women writers about the emotional labor they do to keep a family going. I wouldn't claim that for my tribe, we waffle making dads. We're not particularly emotional. But we try to do our labor. We make weekend breakfasts and dinner once or twice a week when we're around in time do to the prep. We do the "you'll have to talk to your father when he gets home" conversations, and the careful diffusing conversations with daughters entering their teens who at times decide that their mothers don't understand them at all and Dad is the only person they will listen to. We mow the lawn and take the trash out and get the oil changed more or less on time. We pay the bills and track the finances and deal with a host of practical issues while having the unfortunate tendency to assume that everything is okay in people's emotional lives unless they actually tell us otherwise.

The waffle making dad can seem like a pretty out-dated archetype these days. The up to the moment guy is a sensitive feminist ally who admires kick-ass women and decries male privilege -- a sort of Joss Whedon about the house. Of course, waffle dad replies, the danger there is that he might... turn out to be like Joss Whedon.

I'm not sure how to address that whole set of ideals and concerns, the people who snappily say that women are giving up a lot to teach a young man to make waffles, so I'll just leave that to one side. My words are to the young men of the world. And I'll say: being a waffle making dad is not a bad aspiration. In a world that can't seem to make up its mind what, if anything, it wants from masculinity, many of the archetypes available out there are not great.

There's the "crusading knight of the West" archetype which gets a lot of play in traditional circles. I like my history as much as the next fellow, but let's be honest with ourselves: Constantinople fell some time ago and getting too caught up in the idea of being a knight while in fact working 9-to-5 (or more realistically, 8-to-6) just starts to look like being involved in a roll playing game.  Heaven forbid, you may some day be asked to fight for what you love, but don't stake your sense of self an mission on that possibility.  The small daily struggles are more important than the possibility of huge risks and sacrifices that may never actually come.  Then there's the super-sensitive feminist ally archetype, but if there are any of those that aren't secretly creeps, I'll be the more surprised.

The former archetype endorses a semi-mythic hyper masculinity in search of some sort of great deed to accomplish. The latter attempts to defuse criticism by essentially becoming "one of the girls". Neither of these is doable. What is doable is to work your job and take care of the needs of those you love. Being a stable support to your family and getting things done that add to their security and comfort is something that you can do and that is, in the end, probably close to being the most worthwhile thing you can do with yourself.

I remember my father making pancakes for the family as a weekend breakfast. I remember him patiently letting me help mix them up as a child when it would surely have been easier to do it himself. I knew his patient service to us in that way, as in others, was a sign of his love for us. Those breakfasts were not just breakfasts, they were a symbol of the quiet toil and support with which he cared for us. I don't think there are many better ways to be remembered.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go do the dishes.

History That Wasn't: The United German Republic of 1919

I've been reading Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, a history book dealing with ways in which the collapsed of the empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans and Russia created regional conflicts and tensions that in turn led to WW2. It's a very worth reading book, especially if one's prior exposure to the topic is limited to the summary that often ends up in textbooks claiming that the war guilt clause the reparations were the primary things which played into the rise of the Nazis.

One of the fascinating things that he covers is that in 1918-1919 as the Austrian and German successor states were being put together primarily under the leadership of Social Democratic parties (in the climate of the place and times, think of social democrats as being the stable middle ground between communists on the left who wanted actual revolution and the imperial/military right which in many cases didn't want parliamentary democracy at all) many social democrats in both Germany and Austria were pushing for a union of the two countries into a single German-speaking nation. This seemed to be in keeping with Wilson's 14 Points, and it would have both provided Germany with something to focus on other than its territorial losses to Poland and Austria a way to continue to exist as a stable country after being stripped of its primary agricultural and industrial areas through the dissolution of the empire. Austria in the winter of 1918-19 was a rump state with a third of its population in Vienna and not nearly enough agricultural land to feed its starving people.

The allies did not want to allow the unification of Germany and Austria even if it seemed in keeping with the principle of national self determination, because it seemed impossible to explain how they had fought and died to defeat German militarism only to green light the creation of a larger and more unified German state than they had faced in 1914. And yet, it's possible to imagine that if the Social Democrats had been able to deliver a united German Republic as a channel for national aspirations, this would have given them the credibility to stabilize and lead the country into a better future.

With unification definitively denied, uniting the countries became an aspiration of the far right and another example of how democratic government could never provide a path to the national greatness for which many people yearned in a period of defeat.

Action Movie Nationalism

The long leg of my flight back from France was nine hours, and although I spent a lot of that reading, as the time zones slip by and the hours stretch out, I don't have the stamina to read that entire time. Eventually I turned to my seat-back video screen and the selection of movies to choose from. There wasn't much on the list that I was eager to see, but one title jumped out at me as something that I'd read about when it came out, a Chinese action movie called Wolf Warrior 2. Sitting on a plane for nine hours is dead time anyway, so I sacrificed two hours to Wolf Warrior.

It's not unusual for action movies to present a good deal of a country's idea of itself.

Independence Day famously has the US leading the entire world in freeing itself from alien invasion on the 4th of July, with the fighter pilot president giving a world-wide speech about how today will now mark independence for all. The movie conveys a strong sense of America as symbol of world leadership, can-do spirit, and freedom.

Numerous cold war era movies from the Rambo franchise to Top Gun conveyed a sense of how Americans saw themselves in the world and in contrast to their enemies.

Wolf Warrior is a sort of funhouse mirror version of this effect, as it is a product of the artistic imagination of the Chinese Government (currently celebrating seventy years of dictatorship over the world's most populous country.)

 Set in Africa, the movie follows Leng Feng, a former member of an elite commando unit of the Chinese People's Liberation Army called the Wolf Warriors. Kicked out of the army after beating up a crowd of construction workers and their sniveling boss, who was seeking to demolish the home of a fallen Wolf Warrior, Feng is now working as a freelancer in Africa. There, his friends among the workers in Chinese built and managed factories and in a Doctors Without Borders style medical mission come under threat from a bloodthirsty group of revolutionaries struggling for control of the unnamed African country where the action takes place. Behind these revolutionaries lurk (perhaps predictably) the core villain, an even more bloodthirsty group of American and European military contractors who seek to rule the country and get control of a deadly virus and the vaccine for it which has been discovered by a Chinese doctor working at the medical mission.

Massive action scenes ensue, with Feng getting together with an American doctor love interest who seeks peace and speaks fluent Chinese, a grizzled fellow veteran of the People's Liberation Army, and a spoiled but earnest young Chinese man eager to hear the sounds of AK-47s in the morning to lead a mostly nameless and faceless group of African characters in fighting off massive numbers of revolutionaries and mercenaries. A brave Chinese ambassador and a stick-to-the-rules Chinese navy commander fill out other keys roles in the cast and plot. They're eager to rescue Feng and the Africans he's taken under his protection, but only if they can do so with the full authority of the UN, where we are reminded multiple times China is a member of the security council.

What's fascinating here is seeing how the movie (which with $847M in Chinese domestic box office was one of the largest grossing movies of 2017 despite getting virtually no play beyond China) portrays China: as a brave people willing to stand up for themselves against a bloodthirsty West, tough and proud, but also generous in bringing medicine and technology to the developing world while rigorously obeying international law.

There are clearly a good many contradictions between that image and the Chinese regime which not only killed millions of its own people in the 1960s, but even today is known for using political prisoners for slave labor and organ harvesting, while silencing political opposition on the streets of Hong Kong and through some of the world's most effective internet censorship. But given that the Chinese film industry is under direct government guidance, what we definitely see in a movie like this is the image of China which the government would like to project to its people and to audiences abroad. Not, primarily, in the US and the rest of the developed world, but in the developing world in which China would like to position itself as a leader and protector against the existing international players.  And that image is clearly one of a global superpower which would like to edge out the existing ones, particularly in regards to the developing world.