Thursday, December 22, 2005

The Day the (Christmas) Music Died

OK. Quick rant about the abysmal lack of traditional Christmas music, even on our local Catholic radio station. You'd think it was bad enough that all major retailers have censored themselves from saying "Merry Christmas," printing it in their ads and playing religious carols in their stores. As a tightwad, I would have said not to buy CD's of Christmas music since it is so ubiquitous from Thanksgiving on. But I must be mistaken, because I have yet to hear more than one verse of two songs, and that from TBN, forcing me to watch their over-the-top lounge act out of sheer desperation.

So I am suddenly struck with the desire to hear all the old favorites, especially the most religious (e.g. most "offensive") ones, and I guess I'll have to go out and buy music CD's to do it. And I'll probably have to buy them at the Catholic bookstore, since major retail stores have probably censored or watered down their "holiday" music collections to include only instrumental arrangements of traditional carols, Bing Crosby standards, or compilations from Garth Brooks and Mariah Carey. And since I can't remember more than one verse of any of these carols, I'll have to go and get a book with the words in it. Sheesh.

Come to think of it, the secular world isn't too shy to milk the Catholic ethos for all it's worth, especially when it suits their purpose to distort and misrepresent the Catholic faith. I mean, how many cheesy pseudo-scholarly shows have we been forced to watch about "the historical Jesus"? They show their intrepid interviewers talking to Protestants in bare-bones churches, but the imagery of the show is all Catholic--images of the Blessed Virgin, the Pope, stained glass windows, and icons of the baby Jesus--and that's the "sexy" that sells the show.

With one shining exception.

I happened to catch an airing of "The Sound of Music" last Friday night. I'd forgotten that Maria starts out as "Sister Maria," a postulant at the local abbey. How refreshing it was to see nuns that weren't portrayed as frigid victims or subversive feminists, who were happy to be serving Christ. How refreshing it was to see the crucifix, the Church's ever-present reminder that it is Christ, and Him crucified, through whom we have our salvation. How wonderful that it is these same heroic nuns who encourage Maria to find her true vocation and who help her new family escape the Nazis.

I think the reason the world is so bent on censoring Christmas is that it's the last Catholic holiday. I mean, you have all these evangelicals with their campaigns to "put Christ back in Christmas," but they miss the fact that it's a MASS to celebrate the birth of Christ. In the Catholic Church, Christmas is not one day, but a season that lasts from Advent to Candlemas (Feb. 2). I read an excellent blog post on how, since the time of Martin Luther, one after another of the liturgical feasts that used to be celebrated as public holidays (holy days) have been subverted and secularized over the years, mostly by--surprise surprise--OTHER CHRISTIANS who saw these "Popish" celebrations as undermining their theological agendas.

The world loves the candles and the trees and the decorations and the presents, but forgets that this wealth of symbology and imagery is grounded in a thoroughly Catholic worldview that sees the material and the spiritual as one sacramental whole infused with God's grace. Both the secular view of Christmas (that glorifies only the material), and the Protestant view (that seeks to retain only the spiritual) have missed the boat. And until Christmas is properly understood once again in context, both groups will continue to have that hollow is-this-all-there-is feeling once the presents are unwrapped and the coffee pot's empty.

So crank up the Christmas carols, turn off the TV, and have a very happy, Catholic, holy day!

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Promised Pictures

Finally I've figured out how to publish pictures to the blog (a big breakthrough for a N-TG like me)! So anyone who is intrepid enough to find my site (I'm thinking friends and family here) can see and copy these pictures if they want.

Above you can see newborn Thomas, and Mary, my midwife, giving him his first exam.


Dean bonding with baby.







This was funny until Carl tried to brush the baby's teeth...

Or was it his ear?









That's all for now. Gotta get back on the chow train...



Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Mommy Moped

Lately we've been watching a British TV show, an espionage series called The Sandbaggers. In this series, when the boss wants to send one of his agents off on a special op, he picks up a red telephone and says, "Agent So-and-so, you're on your bike." Such has been an accurate job description for me lately.

It's almost 8:30 and I'm just sitting down to dinner. Today I was lucky because I made time for a nap, but since I got up at 5:30 pm I've been feeding, bathing, and putting to bed kids. Pushing me through the day is this sense of urgency, that if I don't get up within the next 5 minutes, my schedule will be thrown off 15 minutes or more. Today my schedule has been thrown off by only 45 minutes, so like I said, I'm lucky.

Last night we were visiting friends we hadn't seen for six months, letting them meet the baby. I felt honor-bound to confide in the woman, a fifty-something who I know has never had children. "You know, I've been saying it's easy, but the truth is it's hard," I said, intending to insert an additional comment about the redemptive aspect of motherhood. But she broke in and said, "Oh, that's why I never had children." I shut my mouth.

For the past eighteen months I've seen myself as a sort of walking advertisement for motherhood: not frumpy and overweight, not stressed, not strapped for time or money, my house in order, my kid in line, et cetera. And every opportunity I've had to open my mouth I've expounded on the joys of motherhood, the pity that in today's society more people don't have children, and more of them--that I've discovered how being a stay-at-home mom has become a bona fide vocation for my life. I wonder how many experienced mothers overheard me, thinking, "She'll learn better someday."

Well they're right. It's wrong to try and convince people that they should have kids because, like home birth, "It's really not that hard." The Catholic church claims that, in the sacrament of marriage, the husband and wife are given special graces to enable them to carry out the endless, arduous task of parenthood. Because it IS hard. More so now than ever, because there are no support systems. Oh, there's day care for women who want to work (nearly everyone), and welfare for those who can't work (presumably everyone else). But for the woman struggling through the dense tangle of overgrowth that has come to choke the road to traditional motherhood, there's no one to help--outside of her church.

So what am I saying? Am I saying that I was wrong, that motherhood isn't worth it? On the contrary. Sometimes the harder a thing is, the more worthy it is of doing. And that's definitely true of motherhood. I used to want to be a famous writer, but now I'm not so sure. My kids are going to live forever. That's what souls do. And there's nobody who's going to have more influence over them than me. Not even their dad. Each one is going to be his own person, but he will bear the unique stamp of having been my child. No one else on earth can say that.

How many books can you remember that were "hot" in their day--whether it was five, twenty-five, or fifty years ago? What about a hundred years? Five hundred? How many trendy and timely tomes now sitting on the shelf at Barnes and Noble are going to be remembered in thirty years? I've shopped enough sidewalk sales to know the answer to that question. Fact is, no matter how invisible, unremarkable, or ordinary raising kids seems, that's where the action is--and there's nothing the big, sexy, worldly world offers that can match it.