Blessed Brunch

This past Saturday, I was blessed to attend a Blessed Brunch (facilitated through Blessed Is She -- and if you're not signed up for the daily devotionals, you should be!) hosted by the lovely Mary Lenaburg. I have been a reader of Mary's blog for a while, so getting to meet her was a real treat for me. And finding out that we're neighbors was an even bigger treat!

I have to tell you: going to this sort of event is way outside of my comfort zone. I tend to project a confidence in groups, and I know I seem so outgoing... But I'm actually quite shy. I love new people, but I make them approach me first. And thanks to a vicious case of bitchy resting face (I kind of hate that term, but I haven't ever heard a better one to describe just how unpleasant I apparently look from a distance!), people rarely approach me.

When I saw that Blessed Is She was encouraging these Blessed Brunches all around the country, and that one was being held in my town, I was still hesitant. After all, Fairfax is enormous and getting from one side to the other can easily be forty minutes in the car. And I have a nursing baby, who wouldn't do well in that sort of environment, during naptime, mostly because he only nurses well in the quiet now and he absolutely refuses to sleep in public.

And and and, excuse excuse excuse.

Something made me go back and look at the list of upcoming brunches again. I realized that the fact that there was one even potentially up to forty minutes (or an hour, depending on the DC metro area's infamously awful traffic) from home was close, compared to the opportunities for ladies in some parts of the country. On the same night, while browsing Pinterest, a "suggested pin" popped up: "How to make friends as an adult." AND THEN, the next morning, I happened to be reading a blog I've never read before and saw a picture of a book entitled Women Are Scary: The Totally Awkward Adventure of Finding Mom Friends. Around the same time, I saw that Mary had posted on the Blessed Is She Facebook group some more details about the brunch she was hosting, and I realized that her house would not be forty minutes away. More like five.

And I said, "All RIGHT, God, I get it." I RSVP'd immediately.

I have almost no friends from high school or college who are Catholic. In fact, I have almost no friends from high school or college who are not hostile to religion -- the curse of being a scientist and having friends who are scientists. I work from home and thus don't have that many opportunities to meet new people. My best friend, who's both Catholic and a mother to littles, moved to Texas before my children were born. My family is all in Pennsylvania, which is not very far from Northern Virginia but is also not around the corner.

I have felt like I've been parenting -- and Catholic-ing -- in a vacuum. I'm involved in the music ministry at my parish, but the ages skew significantly older, and anyway since Declan was born I've been unable to attend choir practice because it falls exactly at bedtime. Someday he'll be done nursing and I'll be freer to move about in the evenings, and I'm simultaneously looking forward to and dreading that time. For the time being, my life is work, and weeknight dinners as a family, and time spent with the kids before they go to bed, and family time on the weekends.

Most of the time, I don't even notice that I haven't had a social life in years. But when I do notice, it hits me like a ton of bricks.

So there I was, scared to death, on a beautiful Saturday morning, on Mary's back deck with 20+ strangers who ceased to be strangers immediately. Everyone brought something to share -- and, of course, there was enough food for four times as many women! -- and Mary provided a beautiful spread, coffee, tea, and some cold beverages. Mary's husband (who is a saint for letting everyone invade!) led us in an opening prayer. Everyone filled their plates and chatted while we chowed down. Then we went around the table and introduced ourselves to the group. After that, we had a free-flowing group discussion about community. I may have openly wept. (Okay, I definitely openly wept.)

It's such a blessing to meet so many like-minded women of faith! I had to be the first one to leave, after getting an SOS text message from Michael (poor Declan was late for his nap and completely over waiting for Mommy to come home and nurse him!), but I could otherwise have stayed indefinitely, getting to know more of the ladies better and filling up my soul. I didn't get any pictures myself, so you'll have to check out the hashtag we designated on Instagram (#blessedbrunchfx). There are only a couple because everyone was too busy bonding to do much documentation.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Mary for hosting, and to Blessed Is She for making it possible.

"What punishments of God are not gifts?"

So I've been thinking about Stephen Colbert. He's often held up by Catholics as "our guy" in the world of political comedy because he's open -- and talks frequently -- about his Catholicism.

But I've always felt rather disappointed by him, personally. His tenure on The Colbert Report featured him, in character as an over-the-top right-wing blowhard; as a genuinely right-wing person myself, I found it annoying that I could nod along with his take on a situation until he took it a step too far. And he always took it at least one step too far.

In fact, that was the point: to discuss conservatism in a faux-approving way, but to reach the most obnoxious possible conclusion; to make conservatives into a caricature of a bigoted, selfish Scrooge McDuck. This formula was guaranteed to make the Comedy Central audience, still on a high from Jon Stewart's conservative bashing in the previous slot, sneer.

{I'm not sure it would be quite so harmful if an alarming proportion of my generation didn't get their news exclusively from Comedy Central. Get a grip, fellow millennials.}

Furthermore, he was known to espouse some pretty un-Catholic positions (ugh, I feel dirty even linking to The Huffington Post!). I just can't really get on board with Colbert as a Catholic we should be holding up as an example.

But then every once in a while he says something beautiful that makes me understand why Catholics do it. Consider this excerpt from an interview with GQ recently, talking about the loss of his father and brothers in a plane crash when he was young:

He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.

“It's not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened.”

Gorgeous. Gorgeous. This is an absolutely breathtaking reflection on the nature of suffering. I could never have articulated that; I can appreciate it, I recognize the Truth of it, but it's beyond my ability to verbalize. He's clearly smarter and more articulate than I am.

And that, I think, is where my problem really lies:

He's smarter than I am. He's more articulate than I am. He certainly has a larger field of influence than I can ever expect to have. And he's using it to do more harm to the Church than he's doing her service. More people will have seen him bashing the Supreme Court judges who opposed the gay "marriage" ruling than will likely see him waxing poetic about God's gift of suffering in our lives. More people will remember him as a faux conservative bigot than as a Catholic.

I understand that not everyone has the courage to be counter-cultural. As a Comedy Central news-comedian, Stephen Colbert was expected to carry water for progressivism. It would have been an act of sheer foolhardiness to come out in opposition to the legalization of gay "marriage" if he wanted to keep his job at Comedy Central and his upcoming gig at CBS. And maybe it's not moral cowardice at all: maybe he genuinely thinks that the Church is wrong in her steadfast opposition to gay "marriage."

She is not, and that is why I find him to be disappointing and an unworthy role model overall. Even if his reflection on suffering and gratitude brought me to tears.

Because someday I won't remember exactly how my two-year old used to count:

"One, two, free, four, fibe, six, seben, eight, nine, ten, eweben, twelbe, firteen, fifteen, nineteen, twelbe-teen..."

The. Greatest.

#UnplannedParenthood: Got anything to add?

In the wake of the videos being released by the Center for Medical Progress revealing a small measure of the depravity of Planned Parenthood, and the attendant absolutely deafening silence from the mainstream media, pro-life Twitter has unleashed a barrage of beautiful, life affirming tweets using the hashtag #UnplannedParenthood.

People are sharing their stories: either they were unplanned pregnancies themselves, or they experienced an unplanned pregnancy and chose life and (obviously) do not regret it. The troll quotient is pretty low, too (surprisingly enough).

So here's the thing...

I contributed one little tweet:

I think this #UnplannedParenthood hashtag thread is so beautiful! Congratulations to everyone on having the courage to #chooseLife! <3 <3 <3

— Colleen Snow (@ColCol37) July 29, 2015

... but I can't do much. I myself was a planned birth for my parents, and thanks to my experiences with infertility my own babies have been planned and planned and hoped for and prayed for and planned some more.

But this community can offer so much insight here!

And who doesn't want to make Twitter explain why #UnplannedParenthood is trending? ;)

GO!

Can open, worms everywhere.

I have a daughter and a son (so far).

I was already 100% sure that my daughter would never be a Girl Scout. That is because of the Girl Scouts' extremely troubling involvement with Planned Parenthood, and also their founding membership in WAGGGS (the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts), which has been known to send girls to petition the UN for sexual and reproductive rights. This from an organization intended for girls under 18.

Just today I saw the news that the Boy Scouts of America have decided to end the ban on gay scout leaders. There is a tiny silver lining in that there is an exemption in place for scout troupes that are sponsored by churches. (For now.)

I'll say it straight out: this is depraved.

This is obviously a touchy subject. The BSA has been fighting making this change for years in the face of enormous pressure and has evidently finally buckled under the strain. And let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that all gay men are pedophile predators, or that there's no reason other than sexual interest that a gay man might be interested in being a scout leader. But the reality of the situation is that some scouts are 18, or nearly so. Furthermore, unlike other jobs that men can hold which brings them into regular proximity to potential objects of desire (for instance, high school teachers), the boy scouts go camping. Overnight. And it's not as if high school teachers have a stellar track record of keeping themselves from temptation under circumstances that afford them far less privacy with the teens by whom they find themselves tempted.

I was recently discussing this with a priest friend. His pastor has put him in charge of deciding these issues in his parish and he's feeling paralyzed with indecision. On one hand, the church-sponsored troupes of both the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are faith-centered in a way the national charters can apparently no longer sustain. On the other hand, he's worried about the trend, and how long the church-sponsored troupes will be allowed to maintain their independence in these matters.

I told him about how my pastor denied the Girl Scouts meeting space in our parish a couple of years ago. It made national news. Obviously some of that coverage was extremely unfriendly. But it blew over, and fast. In my opinion, I told my priest friend, it's smarter to cut ties now and face the angry parents -- and there will be angry parents -- than to wait until he's looking at a lawsuit for refusing to allow a gay scout leader in his troupe. I don't know what he's going to do, but this decision makes the need to decide more acute.

My decision is made: my son will not be a Boy Scout, any more than my daughter will be a Girl Scout.

Such a shame.

New Life's Goal:

I've been watching Death in Paradise on Netflix and now I want to move to the British West Indies and solve murders.

Because apparently everyone gets murdered in the British West Indies.