7 Quick Takes

1.  I'm alive.  I know the blog hasn't shown it lately, but it is nonetheless true.  I'm also here to answer that even when a writer isn't writing, she's still a writer, and she's just as annoyed with herself as the reader is with stopping in and finding nothing to read.  

2.  Saint Mary's College Class of 1988 Reunion Here I Come!

I've got my plane ticket and my reunion reservation so I'm all set. It is May 31st through June 1st and I've already called my favorite teachers to set up a lunch date. Can't wait.  As my dear professor says, she wishes (and so do I), we could visit for years.  We always talk non stop and it is just this amazing gift, to sit with her and laugh over everything and still touch on these very profound truths that get unearthed while musing on the world, friends, art, beauty, children, books and Catholicism over food. Really, short of adding politics, fishing, food and baseball/football, which I'll leave to nosh over with my husband and some of our family and friends, what more could one want to talk about? I always wish I had 10 sets of ears or could write legibly faster when we visit, so I could keep everything she says.   She is like a princess who drops jewels when she speaks.   Who wouldn't want to stop and listen and hold on to all of it? 

3.  The Holy Spirit Connects in Ways We Cannot Begin to Imagine

Yesterday, I listened to More2Life, a Catholic radio program on around noon in the DC area.  It's not my normal habit. In fact, I normally turn the machine off at that point, as my son has just come home from school and wants lunch. But this time, the topic grabbed me. "How do you balance/juggle kids and a spouse, how do you make sure you keep your spouse first?"  Impulsively, I phoned the station to tell them about the datebook wherein I'd written a little something each day to do to cherish/celebrate my husband.  When I got off the phone, a friend from Saint Mary's private messaged me that she'd heard the call and wondered if it was me.  We hadn't spoken since school, but  now I have a friend I can't wait to discover more about when the reunion rolls around.  

4.  There is never enough

These days, there seems to never be enough time, enough money, enough opportunity to do all we would wish that we could do...but the world needs deliberate peace. The world needs deliberate beauty.  Working on an article about blunting the sharper edges of the world brought so vividly to the forefront of our minds by last week's events.   Part of it is fighting back against the idea that everything we would do, we can't because of money or time. Sometimes the act of living itself is a deliberate defiance, not of reality, but of the unrealness of all that the world declares important.   So my motto after April 15th, after the bombings, after 9/11, after all of this evil that seems to rain on every hint of a parade, live defiantly!  As to what that means, that's what the article is about....work in progress. 

5.  Planning vacation.  Really hating these websites that insist I call, they call back, they tell me what I see and want I can't have and then offer a place twice as expensive as comparable.   If they want us, they have to work with us.  Sigh.

6.  Yes I'm still editing. Yes I'm still freaking out trying to get all of Helen just right. Yes I still think what was I thinking when I wrote that sentence?  Yes I'm procrastinating right now because I can blog instead, have to go to a play and drop a daughter off at prom...why? Because it's Friday. That's why. Not a good reason.  But it's the reason.  

7. 

In light of recent events in Boston, this still remains relevant. If we are a nation of laws, then at some point, when we bend the laws to allow ourselves to get around the laws, we break the social contract that is the law.   You can apply this to the bombers in Massachusetts, you can apply this to the drone strikes we do over countries with which we are not at war, to the tepid sending of letters to the government of Syria regarding the use of chemical weapons on its people and you can apply this to the trial of Dr. Gosnell. 

The collective yawning of this country at the overwhelming evidence of evil in its midst, at home and abroad indicates a nation determined to be blind, deaf and dumb to all sin that is not politically expedient to rail against.  Ergo, guns, smoking and big gulps, evil, abortion, indefinite imprisonment, martial law, chemical weapons, drone strikes that determine all people wounded or killed shouldn't have been there in the first place, ergo morality problem scrubbed, all of these positions are...complex, nuanced, require more understanding.   The president says, "Planned Parenthood, God bless you." And no one quickly pretends to sneeze, "That's insane!" 

When we can no longer call evil evil, we no longer know what is good. When we no longer know what is good, we'd best be ready for a very rough ride as a society.