Infused Knowledge

Au revoir!

2010-10-22T04:53:00.000-07:00

Down to the wire

2010-10-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

I think I stand a decent chance of finishing all the essential tasks before I leave tomorrow. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel is making me feel more excited about going. :)

Last night I got to spend a few precious hours catching up with two friends I met in junior high and have scarcely seen since high school. It was so encouraging to hear their stories and see how God has been working in the lives of all three of us.

I'm typing this at the library, watching my allotted time tick quickly away in the corner of the computer monitor, because our internet access is down at home. Fine time for it! And much of what I have left to do requires the internet, so this has to be a short blog post. If you email me, I might not be able to see it before I leave.

I won't be using the internet at the convent, of course, and I can't write or receive snail mail either except with close family. If you know my mom, let her know of any big news in your life and she can pass it on to me. :) It might work out to have my sister update this blog occasionally with letters. If I happen to post again around three months from now, it's not because I've washed out of the order, nor because I'm sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to update my blog when the other sisters aren't looking. It's because I think I'll have to come back to California just to get a visa. We'll find out.

Pray for me as I will for all of you!

Two days left

2010-10-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

   But I have a somewhat anticlimactic announcement: I still haven't got a visa. This means I'll be back in America a heck of a lot sooner than expected-- months instead of years-- to go to the Italian Consulate in Los Angeles and apply for it. I have no idea exactly when or for how long I'll be back, but I can only stay in Italy for three months as a tourist, so I'll leave in January or before. I'll try to post on this blog then and say hi. :) As for why I don't have a visa yet, I don't even know the full story but I think it has something to do with someone forgetting that the Vatican is run by Italians. ;) Meanwhile everything else is the same; I'm heading to Italy on Friday and two other girls and I are officially being received by the order as postulants on the Feast of Christ the King, which is October 31 this year in the old calendar.

   It's been a hectic week, but with many lovely moments. Some of my friends came over for dinner and I was able to palm off many of my books on them-- it's satisfying to know they'll go where they might be read. Most of my favorite books and a bunch I haven't been able to read yet will be coming with me to the convent to be added to the library there.

   My sister arranged for some photographer friends of hers to take pictures of the whole family at our favorite beach-- here we are about to get kicked off the lifeguard tower. :) 'Twas a nice day, bringing back many sweet childhood memories. I was the terror of the sand crabs.

On Saturday I had a last meal with a friend whose current project is chalking out Gallifreyan symbols to be painted on her living room wall. You either get it or you don't. :) I wish I could keep up with all the things she'll get herself into when I'm in the convent!

   Then there was my last Sunday Mass at St. Peter Chanel. I sat in the second row and remembered one of my first Sundays, in early January 2007, almost four years ago. I had an appointment with one of the priests before Mass and I told him why I wanted to become Catholic. I was concerned I'd have to wait a long time because I was joining SPC's RCIA class halfway through, but since I pretty well knew what they were teaching already, and my sponsor could catch me up on the rest, Fr. John said he couldn't see any obstacles to me being received into the Church at Easter. I was thrilled to hear it and went into the church, where I knelt in the second row and prayed: "Dear Lord, thank you. Thank you very, very much. Thank you thank you. I'm very happy. Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou...." From that day to this, wow. :) I'll miss the parish where I've received so many blessings.

   It was Fr. Craig, my spiritual director, saying Mass last Sunday, and when he saw me he called me up front at the end, told the congregation I was headed to a convent, made them all pray for me (especially for the gift of languages!) and gave me a blessing. Afterwards several people came by to congratulate me and promise to pray for me. One told me that she had a cousin with almost the same first and last name as me-- one letter off-- who died a year ago on the same day I'm leaving. She felt it meant something good. :) Two other women had tears in their eyes; one hugged me and wouldn't let go. It was... humbling, to see how happy and grateful they seemed that I was going to be a nun, because although I do want to serve the Church and pray for everybody, I think most of my discernment has been about what will make me happiest. "Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it"-- I feel like I'm just making the prudential decision, grabbing for the biggest prize. I'd be a fool not to do it and I'm really grateful that God is giving me the gift of a religious vocation. But the people who congratulated me reminded me of how connected we all are, how by doing God's will we can lift each other up. I've felt that way before. When I see others living their lives faithfully, raising their children or helping others or patiently accepting the suffering that falls to their lot, I feel like it's enriching me, even if I don't seem to be directly affected.

   On Sunday afternoon Peter and Tam had a farewell party for me and I got to stay and chat with people well into the evening. They have six beautiful kids and they invited over other families even larger, so the house was full of life. Peter told everyone about the first time he'd met me. "It was right after the Christmas Midnight Mass in 2006, and I was holding Therese who was just a little baby, and I saw this girl walking around looking at everything, so I said, 'Hi, you must be new!'"

   I remember that night, meeting Peter and his sweet little baby. She's now big enough to make me a farewell card:

Her big sis Maria too!

   Both of them have depicted people sitting around the tabernacle at St. Peter Chanel. :)

   As for my adult friends, they've been having Masses said for me, at St. Peter Chanel, St. Pius V, and St. Margaret Mary in Oakland. Most will be said in November right after I leave, so if I'm not inundated with grace in my first month at the convent, it won't be my friends' fault! I'm really glad they're doing it.

   I also got a very cool card from Fr. Antolini, an Italian who's old enough to remember being bombed in Rome in World War II. He wrote his card in Italian, French, English, and Spanish, and all of it upside down. You'd have to know Fr. Antolini to know how typical that is. :)

   The party ended with Peter and Tam giving Mom and me four very big suitcases for our trip. Exactly what we needed to haul around the four pairs of shoes, two pairs of boots, sheets and towels and a pillow, dozens of books, and all the other stuff I'm taking. It was a relief to get them; we didn't really have a good solution before that.

   So that was the party. On Monday I worked in such a frenzy that a friend who called for a last-minute goodbye thought I must be sick (I'm doing better now, Rachel!) I spent much of yesterday stressing about the visa (though it was flattering when I called the Papal Nunciature in Washington D.C. and they said they knew who I was because they'd just received the nota verbale from the Vatican about me... but the bottom line was there's no way that nota and the letter from the Nuncio will get to the Italian Consulate in time.) For a while I thought I'd have to return home right after the little Florence vacation with my family, but now it turns out I'm going to stay at the convent and worry about the visa later, so I'd better get back to packing.

   I'd like to say something profound here, conveying my gratitude to God for the settled feeling I've had all summer that this is what I need to be doing, in spite of the various ways I've been stressed out. I feel that He's given me all the assurance I need. And I'd like to express the strong desire I have to be there in Italy, because whatever the life will be like, easy or hard, I've got to start living it already-- feels like I've been hanging around forever!

   I've no time to express myself better than that, so I'll just say: CARDINAL BURKE! BOOYAH! Did you know he was the first one to bring the Institute of Christ the King to the U.S., back when he was a bishop in Wisconsin? He still ordains priests for the Institute; just one more reason to love him. And now he has a bunch of important jobs in Rome and the pope's giving him a red hat to match, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer person. :)

Life update

2010-10-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty darn busy trying to a) prepare for life in the convent in Italy, b) wrap up my life in California, and c) learn French. Here's a short summary of other stuff I've done recently.

August: Quit my job. My co-workers took me out for a really nice farewell dinner, and then threatened to follow me to Italy, find my order, show up at Mass, and shout, "Hi Rachel!" really loudly. :) A co-worker who's known me as long as I've been there told me he thinks it will all work out for me, because those last few weeks on the job I looked happier than he'd ever seen me. I was surprisingly emotional on my last day in the lab and got teary-eyed saying goodbye to people (and sea urchins). Behold the desk and the bench where I worked for nearly seven years:

Labor Day weekend: Had a great trip up to northern California. I stayed first with my college roommate, who now lives with her husband on acres of land in Sebastopol. She's got a guest room I've always liked with a real wood-burning stove; I'm sorry I probably won't get to stay there again. She invited up some other college friends and their significant others for dinner one night, and we had enjoyable conversation and they all wished me well. I was very glad the timing worked out for me to see her and our other friends one last time before I had to leave. To think I met them fourteen years ago when I was but a dumb eighteen-year-old! We all lived next to each other that memorable first year of college.

We ate well: pesto from home-grown basil, vegetables from the backyard garden, blackberry crisp from the berry bush out front, and for an appetizer... sawdust!

Actually it was frozen froth left over from apple cider making. Sebastopol is famous for its Gravenstein apples, tastier than any other variety I know but impossible to get in stores because they're too delicate to ship.

Then I headed to Corpus Christi Monastery where another former roommate of mine is now Sister Mary Isabel of the Angels, a contemplative Dominican nun. She's in her canonical novitiate year, which means she's supposed to be even more retired from the world than usual and only close relatives can visit her. But she asked her superiors to make an exception for me, in view of the fact that I'm leaving for my own order and this could be the last time in our lives that we'll be able to see each other. They granted permission and the other nuns made lunch for the two of us to eat together. It was so much food that we just stood and laughed for a while.

Then we spent hours eating and talking, both of us so happy to have been given the chance. She gave me the scoop on the various trials of her first year of religious life, and the advice her spiritual director gave her that helped her. We tried to get a picture of us together:

After that I headed down to Oakland, where the Institute of Christ the King has a parish named St. Margaret Mary. Here's their statue of the saint the church is named for. St. Margaret Mary was a nun of the Visitation, the order founded by St. Francis de Sales. The Adorers have copied the Visitation habit, which means that in most portraits of St. Margaret Mary (including this statue) she's dressed the way I'm going to be eventually. :)

Canon Moreau is the nearest Institute priest to me and he's the one who invited me to spend a few days in Oakland getting to know the parish. He set me up with a very hospitable family who hosted me in their gorgeous home, and I spent the better part of two days tagging along after him as he dealt with parish business and showed me the various places he works. It was fascinating. The highlight was when he took me to the chancery in downtown Oakland to meet Bishop Cordileone (!) and get his blessing (!!!) I got hit with holy water and everything; it was awesome. :) Bishop Cordileone is great to the Institute; he even travelled to Italy this past June to ordain some deacons for them. So pray for him, 'cause bishops have a hard job and are hated if they do it right.

The Oakland Cathedral was next to the chancery, so Canon Moreau and I toured it. Every cathedral has a cathedra, a big ol' chair for the bishop, topped with his personal coat of arms. I took this picture of Bishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone's coat of arms. The crab I'm told represents San Diego, where he's from. The lion with a heart represents his last name, and the carpenter's tools represent his middle name. Not sure about the star and the tree, but if it's the Christmas star and the Tree of Life they could be representing his first name. I need a coat of arms. But I digress.

Canon Moreau informed me that there was a girl from his old parish in Green Bay who decided to join the Adorers, and he took her to get blessed too (by the bishop of Green Bay) before she headed to the convent, "and she is still there." Looks like I'd better not break his streak!

After that lovely northern California tour, I got home, realized I had only six weeks left, and went into hyperdrive.

The rest of September: Mostly panicked preparations and stabs at learning French, but a number of people also invited me out for one last meal together, until my mom finally observed, "You've got a real racket going. You string them out one at a time!" It was good to have the time with them all. I had a long list of tasks like finding health insurance for a year and getting a copy of my (non) criminal record. And I thought it was ironic that preparing for a vow of poverty meant buying lots and lots of new clothes (shirts, shoes, sweaters, and a bunch of other stuff, all in dashing black and white.) It's what I'll wear as a postulant, and much of it will also be worn under my habit once I've got one.

One encouraging interlude involved talking with a girl from our parish who left to be a nun, stayed for eight years, and then left her order about a month before she was supposed to take final vows. Now she's back at the parish, figuring out where to go from here. I'd always figured that was the worst case scenario, but her story was wonderful, all about how perfectly God has led her. She'd really wanted to stay and make final vows-- "Leaving was the hardest 'yes' I ever gave to God." But she's just full of joy and peace. I wish you all could meet her. She's going to kick Satan's butt wherever she goes.

October: I'm even busier, and facing the fact that lots of stuff on my "Do before entering the convent" list isn't ever going to happen. I wish I had more time to just hang out with folks, go walking around my neighborhood at night, sit in the yard and read a book, do all the stuff I've loved doing in these first 32 years of my life. But I have pressing chores to finish. So whatever activities I failed to appreciate at the time won't have a chance to be repeated now-- no doubt there's a profound lesson in there somewhere.

Fortunately I have known for a long time that I was likely to be a nun, and especially in the last year or so I've been thinking, "This might be my last chance to do this... or that..." So although I have no time to savor things now, there's a lot that I've already said goodbye to. For example, I was right that two years ago was my last chance to go to Yosemite. Then last fall I was driving home from work right by my old high school, and I realized it was Wednesday night and the band would be practicing its field show. Probably my favorite high school memory is the way we used to march back to the band room after practice with the drums echoing incredibly loudly in the school hallways. It was magical, seriously; it felt like we were in another world, just floating along the hall, feeling the relief of having finished practice and the joy of esprit de corps, hearing nothing but the pounding drums, each section doing a little routine with its instruments. (The bass clarinets were the best.) So I pulled over, watched the end of the field show practice, and followed the band to band room one last time. They were still playing the same awesome cadence they've always used.

Another time this spring I was sent to our marine lab by the beach to pick up some special sea urchins, and before heading back to our lab in Pasadena, I lingered by the beach and walked on the sand. It was raining very softly and everything was misty and grey and beautiful, and I thought, "Perhaps I'll never see something like this again." But if not, in Heaven I'll see something better.

People think I'm really going to miss the internet because I spend so much time on it, but I'll be so glad not to be wasting hours in front of a screen any more. I consider it a great feature of my order that I won't have email or a blog

I can't wrap my mind around the fact that I'm gone in eleven days. Everything here is so normal and utterly familiar that I can't imagine it all being permanently out of reach.

I told my spiritual director that I'm stressed about getting ready to leave and not especially attracted to where I'm going. He understood at once: "Because you don't know them." How much can a one-week visit tell you? Mostly I'm walking into the unknown. Father said it was like that for him when he went to seminary in Rome: for a while his emotions were up and down, as he missed his old life and wasn't yet familiar with the new life. After a while, the seminary started to feel like his own life, and then he was fine. (It's been great having a director who can so easily relate to my situation.)

My mom's helping me out a lot, doing lots of legwork and finding all the stuff on my shopping list that I couldn't find myself. My parents are letting me dump all my stuff on them, and if I stay with the Adorers, eventually they'll get rid of it. I'll leave them my car too, which they can sell after a while (if I remember to sign the deed over to them before I go). What's left of my money can sit in the accounts till who knows when. (I don't think I have to give it away till final vows.) I'll vote by absentee ballot before I leave. Heaven only knows how I'll file my taxes next year. The details go on and on.

   A few days ago some longtime family friends took me to my favorite place in the world to eat: the Tea Room at Huntington Gardens, where little tea sandwiches are all-you-can-eat. They also thought up some gifts to give me that I'd actually be able to take to the convent. It was great to hang with them one last time... perhaps I'll see them in Italy one day. :)

   I still haven't seen every friend I'd like to see, so hopefully there'll be time. My sister had the happy thought of taking me to Disneyland last week. :) We hit all my favorite rides and I got to eat at the Blue Bayou for the first time in my life. You know the restaurant inside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride? I always used to float by it in the boat and wonder about the people eating there, on the mystical dark platform under the glowing colored lanterns... Turns out if you go between normal meal times you can get right in without a reservation. :) We shared a yummy Monte Cristo and it was plenty of food for us both.

   Did you know Disneyland has single rider lines now? If you're willing to go alone, you can walk up the exit of some of the major rides and be seated much faster; they use single riders to fill up holes. My sister and I split up to single-ride Splash Mountain. The regular line was supposed to be 55 minutes long, but we were both seated (a few logs apart) within seven minutes of finding the exit.

   I found that this time, the part of Disneyland I enjoyed most was Fantasyland, with all the old European-looking houses and castles and fairytale stories. I think it's because if you could go back to the time when those houses and castles and stories were current, the people would have been worshiping with the same Mass the Adorers have, and some of our patron saints would have been there.

I need to get back to sorting and packing, but first, anyone who can... PLEASE tell me, what episode of Star Trek is this picture from, and what on earth is going on? The seriousness of the faces combined with the ridiculousness of the situation is cracking me up.

10:10 AM on 10/10/10

2010-10-10T10:10:00.001-07:00

Gotta post something, so here's a very disorienting version of Tetris. Be sure to try the night mode.

And this video confirms what I always suspected about Tetris (warning: I can't vouch for anything else on that site).

H/T to Ventures 'Neath Aeviternity.

If you've got a hankering now for Tetris straight up, here it is.

Halloween gingersnaps and Jack-o-lantern cookies

2010-10-09T22:58:00.000-07:00

The feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King, which in the old calendar falls on the last Sunday of October, is the titular feast day for the Institute of Christ the King. This year I'll be arriving in Florence on October 23rd, I'll join the Adorers a few days after that, my family will stay till the 29th, and the last Sunday in October comes on... the 31st! My arrival date was suggested by the sisters to give me time to get all settled in before the big ol' Solemn High Mass on that day. So since Christ the King shall henceforth be a very important feast for me, and since it falls this year on All Hallows Eve, I'm obviously obligated to make a bunch of Halloween cookies.

Here are some cute Jack-o-lanterns!

I'm sure you'd like to know how to make them, but you know creating shapes like these with the great faces and all is bound to be difficult. I'll include instructions, but only the advanced baker should aspire to match my feat. Here we go!

Step 1: Go to the grocery store and buy this:

Step 2: Open the package, break the cookies apart, and toss everything on a cookie sheet.

Step 3: Bake them and take them out of the oven.

Whew! After all that, you wouldn't expect me to make anything else, but I'm dauntless and made gingersnaps too. :) My basic recipe for gingersnaps is here. My adaptation for Halloween is as follows: go to the grocery store and get some orange and black sugar-- they sell it in the baking aisle in October. Then make the basic gingersnap dough.

Roll the dough into balls and dip each ball halfway into white sugar. Dip the other half into colored sugar. Place each ball on a cookie sheet with the colored side up.

Then bake 'em!

They spread out and crack.

With this pretty result.

I think gingersnaps look awfully appealing even just dressed in plain white sugar. And they're really tasty too.

I had a list of stuff I wanted to bake before leaving, and these gingersnaps were pretty much the last item on that list. It's been great fun, and hopefully in the convent I'll lose whatever weight I've gained. :) It would have been nice to lose pounds before entering and arrive at the convent slender, but I keep seeing tasty foods and thinking, "Oooh, it's my last chance to eat that!" and... well...

I interrupt my preparations to bring you this short conversation

2010-10-05T13:45:00.000-07:00

A month or two ago I was talking with a friend who was about to enter the Nashville Dominicans:

Her: "There are two other postulants there who just graduated from high school, so I'm glad I won't be the only 18-year-old."

Me: "That's nice. They have a lot of young sisters in Nashville. Supposedly their age range for entry is 18-30 years old, but they let me visit when I was older. Actually the Adorers' limit is 30, but they're still letting me enter."

Her: "Yeah, one of the girls in our postulant class is 34."

Me: "Well, speaking as a 32-year-old, I'm grateful that these orders with low age cutoffs are willing to bend their limits. I'll bet the 34-year-old is happy about it."

Her: "Yeah, she'll be like a mother to us!"
Me:

(On reflection I realized it was a very sweet thing to say, implying love, respect, and emulation. But it sure made me realize I'm not eighteen anymore!)

Ten new posts

2010-10-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

Nearly all of them sat in my Drafts folder for months, or years. Tonight I suddenly realized that if they're going to be published at all, it's now or never-- I'm only on the internet for three more weeks. :) So I kicked them out more or less as is, and there they are.

Of course, now it's eleven new posts...

The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe

2010-10-01T22:12:00.000-07:00

Why is the sky blue? You could say it's because air molecules scatter blue wavelengths while letting reds and yellows through, so that when you look up you see all the blue wavelengths bouncing around. But I've heard it's just as true to say the sky is blue because the air is blue: if you took a big ball of Earth's atmosphere and suspended it in space (near a star), it would shine blue. A leaf is green because it reflects green light while absorbing other wavelengths, but we don't typically give that scientific explanation of it; we say the leaf looks green because it is green. Likewise the sky. So tell that to your kid when he asks. :)

But there's also this: we humans write ideas down in words, but God can write with all Creation. He can create signs that point to higher truths, like the union between husband and wife that signifies the union between Christ and the Church. And along those lines, the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins has convinced me that the sky is blue to stand as a sign of the Mother of God. He wrote her into creation and waited untold years until a Jesuit poet in the 1800's figured it out.

(Oh, and you can get Hopkins' poetry on CD here. I actually found it easier to follow and appreciate that way.)

The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe
Gerard Manley Hopkins

WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.

If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.

So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Scaring off a mugger

2010-10-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

This is something that happened two years ago to my friend Adonela, and actually I guess there's no proof the guy had evil intent, but at any rate he was a bit scary.

First, something about Adonela. A former atheist now turned fanatically Catholic, she would intrepidly walk the streets of our parish every week with one of our priests, inviting the people (nearly all Catholics of varying commitment levels) to come to church / go to confession / get married if they're living together. I've gone with them a few times; I was mostly useless because I don't speak Spanish, but I was quite surprised by how well our group was received by everyone. It would never fly in a WASP neighborhood. Back to Adonela, whenever she sees a mother and child, she's likely to say, "Oh, how sweet! Is she baptized?" She then offers the parents the registration form they need to have their kids baptized at our church. She seems to carry this info around with her, along with extra Rosaries, sacrifice beads, booklets on confession and various other Catholic subjects, holy water, and who knows what else-- that's just what I personally have seen coming out of the bag she usually has slung on her shoulder. She's also taught many, many catechism classes at our parish. And the confirmation students in our neighborhood can be pretty tough-- one of Adonela's kids joined a gang, so she warned him about her last stint on a jury, when the defendant was a gang member up for quintuple murder.

So, almost two years ago in December, Adonela was walking to church as usual (she lives nearby), and it was night, and though there are usually many people around on the street, on this occasion there weren't any. Except for one man, and he started following her. He was only a few paces behind. She got worried and slowed down. Then he started asking her questions: "Do you live around here? Where are you going?"

I'm not sure how most women would deal with being alone with a creepy guy on a dark street at night. I've taken self-defense classes and have many ideas about it, but they never taught me Adonela's method.

"I'm going to church!" she told the man brightly. "Are you Catholic?"

"Yes," he admitted.

"But are you a practicing Catholic?" she persisted. He didn't know what she meant. "Do you go to church?" He admitted he didn't.

So Adonela hit him with, "How long has it been since you've been to confession?" And the man, hardly knowing what to do with this turn in the conversation, said, "It's been a few years."

"Well," said Adonela, "this is the season of Advent, and it's a great time to give a gift to our Lord, and there's no better gift than to go to confession. My church is right up here; want to come with me? I know they're hearing confessions right now!"

This was too much for the poor man, who left her at the church gate. Too bad she couldn't convert him, but at least she got him off her back!

"Nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming"

2010-10-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

There's a book I really enjoyed called Loss and Gain. John Henry Newman (recently beatified, woohoo!) wrote it in 1848, and it's a short novel set in Oxford in the early 1800's, portraying every religious opinion and character the university had to offer. One character in the book is an emotional and impetuous young man named Willis, who up and converts to Catholicism one fine day. An Anglican named Bateman challenges Willis' new beliefs, finally asking him about the Mass.

"These are such difficult questions," answered Willis; "must I speak? Such difficult questions," he continued, rising into a more animated manner, and kindling as he went on; "I mean, people view them so differently: it is so difficult to convey to one person the idea of another. The idea of worship is different in the Catholic Church from the idea of it in your Church; for, in truth, the religions are different. Don't deceive yourself, my dear Bateman," he said tenderly, "it is not that ours is your religion carried a little farther,—a little too far, as you would say. No, they differ in kind, not in degree; ours is one religion, yours another. [....] I declare, to me," he said, and he clasped his hands on his knees, and looked forward as if soliloquising,—"to me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses for ever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words, —it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go; for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon; as when it was said in the beginning: 'What thou doest, do quickly'. Quickly they pass; for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass; for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the Name of the Lord as He passed by, 'the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth'. And as Moses on the mountain, so we too 'make haste and bow our heads to the earth, and adore'. So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, 'waiting for the moving of the water'. Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;—not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and scope of it. And oh, my dear Bateman," he added, turning to him, "you ask me whether this is not a formal, unreasonable service—it is wonderful!" he cried, rising up, "quite wonderful. When will these dear good people be enlightened? O Sapientia, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia, O Adonai, O Clavis David et Exspectatio gentium, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster."

[The Latin outburst at the end is from the O Antiphons of Advent season and means something like: "O Wisdom, sweetly ordering all things, O Lord, O Key of David and Desire of Nations, come and save us, O Lord our God."]

It was December 2006 when I first read Newman's book and there was a lot of it I didn't understand-- and not just because his characters spoke in an overwrought Victorian style. I was in RCIA at the time and set to be received into the Catholic church at Easter, and I'd been going to Mass at least weekly for several months. But I had never noticed that it was thrilling and overcoming, or that the words passed quickly as the lightning which shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, or that we in the congregation were concurring in a sweet harmony, taking our part with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him.

Really the Mass seemed kinda dead to me. The people barely tried to sing the hymns, there were no Bibles in the pews, and (this was by far the worst thing) the sermons were vague and wishy-washy. I remember thinking that my old Evangelical church would look so warm and loving and zealous and fun to any of those Catholics. Those first few months of trying to become Catholic illustrated for me one reason why so many people move the other way.

But slowly I started to appreciate the Catholic ways of expressing piety, and I began to see signs of faith in that parish where I hadn't been looking before. And then I found a much better parish where the preaching was real, and that was when I really fell in love with the Mass and started going every day. In April 2007 I was received into the Church and was thrilled about it.

Then in late 2007 my parish started offering the traditional Latin Mass, which is the way Mass was said for centuries (until 1970 when it switched from Latin to the vernacular language, and was simplified and changed in other ways as well.) That older form of Mass was what Willis was talking about in the novel. After I became familiar with the old Mass, I re-read Newman's novel and came across that paragraph again. And I understood. That's exactly it.

Religious score high on non-agression and naivete

2010-10-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

When my roommate Mery (now Sr. Mary Isabel of the Angels) was preparing to be a nun, she had to undergo psychological evaluation with the psychologist her order sent her to. It was interesting. The psychologist told her that the long multiple-choice question test she'd taken was designed to measure her personality in all sorts of different areas, and he was checking to see if she fell within the normal range for each area.

There are two areas, he told her, on which future religious tend to score higher than average (though still within what's considered normal range.) One area is "non-aggression". That makes sense; monks and nuns aren't soldiers.

The other area is "naivete". HEY! I thought when I heard this. Religious aren't naive! But the psychologist explained that this didn't mean naivete in the usual sense. It means future religious are more likely to think the best of people and assume their actions had good motives.

That sounds fine to me. In fact, I read an argument somewhere-- I wish I could remember who wrote it-- that if you interpret another's actions in the most sympathetic light possible, you're most likely to have a good understanding of that person. For people don't think of their actions as evil; there's always some good they're trying to attain, though they may be doing it in the wrong way or subordinating a greater good to a lesser one. If you look for the good motive you'll have better comprehension and be closer to the truth.

Not that I claim to know from experience... :)

Quotes about the Sign of the Cross

2010-10-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

   And lastly, as every one knows, what else is the sign of Christ but the cross of Christ? For unless that sign be applied, whether it be to the foreheads of believers, or to the very water out of which they are regenerated, or to the oil with which they receive the anointing chrism, or to the sacrifice that nourishes them, none of them is properly administered.
     -St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430)

An article from Christianity Today on the subject:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/februaryweb-only/109-22.0.html

   Never leave home without making the sign of the cross.... You should not just trace the cross with your finger, but you should do it in faith.
     -John Chyrsostom (A.D. 347-407)

   This [the letter Tau] bears a resemblance to the figure of the cross; and this prophecy [Ezek. ix. 4] is said to regard the sign made by Christians on the forehead, which all believers make whatsoever work they begin upon, and especially at the beginning of prayers, or of holy readings
   -Origen (A.D. 185- 284)

   In all our travels and movements, in all our coming in and going out, in putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever employment occupies us, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross.
   -Tertullian (A.D. 160- 225)

   Let us not, therefore, be ashamed of the cross of Christ, but even though another hide it do thou openly seal it on thy brow, that the devils beholding that royal sign may flee far away trembling. But make thou this sign when thou eatest and drinkest, sittest or liest down, risest up, speakest, walkest; in a word, on every occasion, for He who was here crucified is above in the heavens.
   -St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. A.D. 315-86)

   Many have been crucified throughout the world but none of these do the devils dread, but Christ having been crucified for us, when they see but the sign of the cross the devils shudder.
   -St. Cyril of Jerusalem

   After the sign of the cross, grace immediately thus operates, and composes all the members and the heart, so that the soul from its abounding gladness seems as a youth that knows not evil.
   -St. Macarius of Egypt (A.D. 300- 390)

Servant of God, Remember
William J. Blew (1852)

Servant of God, remember
The stream thy soul bedewing,
The grace that came upon thee
Anointing and renewing.

When kindly slumber calls thee,
Upon thy bed reclining,
Trace thou the cross of Jesus,
Thy heart and forehead signing.

The cross dissolves the darkness,
And drives away temptation;
It calms the wavering spirit
By quiet consecration.

Begone, begone, the terrors
Of vague and formless dreaming;
Begone, thou fell deceiver,
With all thy boasted scheming.

Begone, thou crooked serpent,
Who, twisting and pursuing,
By fraud and lie preparest
The simple soul’s undoing.

Tremble, for Christ is near us,
Depart, for here He dwelleth,
And this, the sign thou knowest,
Thy strong battalions quelleth.

Then while the weary body
Its rest in sleep is nearing,
The heart will muse in silence
On Christ and His appearing.

To God, eternal Father,
To Christ, our King, be glory,
And to the Holy Spirit,
In never ending story.

Amen.

A bunch of long articles

2010-10-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes on the internet I read something that's informative, intelligent, interesting or otherwise engaging, and I want to post it on my blog and comment on it. But after collecting many such articles I must admit I'm very unlikely to get around to fisking them all. So here's a post where I just slap up a bunch of links, and if you're bored you can click one.

A typically wonderful recent speech by Archbishop Chaput: Living within the truth: Religious liberty and Catholic mission in the new order of the world

Some time ago, Jen did an internet fast and wrote out what she learned. I remember thinking I needed to take the time to re-read her article slowly and take it to heart. But now I'm leaving for the convent in three weeks and I won't be able to use the internet there, so I guess that solves that problem. :)
http://www.conversiondiary.com/2009/10/20-things-i-learned-in-my-week-without.html

Carolyn on why romantic comedies have the woman get drunk. I'd add that the same effect is achieved by making the woman sick, as in You've Got Mail, or sleepy, as in Kate and Leopold:
http://solofemininity.blogs.com/posts/2009/10/drunk-the-new-female-tenderness.html

Here's an article proposing a far better health care reform plan than the one our Congressmen forced down our throats without even reading it themselves. The author writes, "I’m a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/7617/

The Intellectual Capacity of Women.
http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/women.html
This article begins with the sentence, "I believe that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men." It's been a while since I read it, but at the time I couldn't think of a way to refute it, and anyway it didn't surprise me. There's no reason to assume that two sexes with such different physical capacities would have the same intellectual capacity. That makes as much sense as assuming that men and women must be equally strong, or must both be able to bear children.

People are desperate to say that women are exactly equal to men in every way, except when they're better. I think it's because women are oppressed and patronized, and Lord knows that's horrible. In China and India the sex ratio is becoming more and more skewed as mothers abort their unborn daughters to try for sons. Think they'd do that if they weren't oppressed? It's an awful injustice.

But I utterly reject any notion that we need to deny the truth and proclaim a lie in order to bring about a desired result. We want all people be treated with dignity, and the way to achieve that result is to teach that all people have inherent value that isn't tied to their intelligence, ability, appearance, performance, race, sex, age, etc., etc. Or as the Declaration of Independence put it: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." If human rights are granted not by God but by man, then man can take the rights away.

Update: I just thought of a possible refutation, and it's the research Larry Summers referenced that got him fired as president of Harvard: that men and women have a different distribution of intelligence, with women clustering more toward the middle and men grouping more at the high and low ends. That would mean that the sector of brilliant inventors would contain more men than women, even though the average intelligence of men and women might be the same. I don't know if that's the case; just throwing out that possibility.

I can't go on; this is supposed to be a short list of articles. :)

The Lost Tools of Learning-- Dorothy Sayers on education
http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html

Escape from Nihilism-- a college professor of philosophy gives a lucid account of how his mind changed.
http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9801/budziszewski.html

Faith and Private Judgment, and Faith and Doubt: These are the two sermons by Cardinal Newman that convinced me it was time to call up the nearest Catholic church and tell them I wanted to join. It isn't that Newman tackles all the many issues on which Catholicism and Protestantism disagree. I'd already read plenty of stuff like that, and it may have been a necessary prerequisite to understanding Newman. But by the time I came across his writings, the question I was dealing with was: how much more research do I have to do and how certain do I need to be? Should I convert when I'm 85% sure, or when I feel comfortable in Catholic churches, or when I agree with 100% of the doctrines? And what if I change my mind later? Newman showed me I was a bit mistaken about the nature of the choice. And my goodness, he writes such beautiful English.

Faith and Private Judgment
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse10.html

Faith and Doubt
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse11.html

The Practice of the Presence of God. I first read this very short book when I was about 14 because a youth leader had recommended it to my older sister. I don't remember what I made of it then, except that I was left with an impression of someone praying to God while working in the kitchen, and the idea that God is always present and you can pray to Him all day. But I know that when I re-read it last year I was very affected. It was a lot like something I'd concluded God was telling me after the first eight-day Ignatian retreat I made. I need to read it again. Seriously, words to live by.
http://www.practicegodspresence.com/brotherlawrence/practicegodspresence09.html

If you've ever wondered whether the Catholic Church has some recent very official statement about the blessed Virgin Mary, it's the 8th chapter of this document, Lumen Gentium:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html

I sometimes wonder (or worry) about people in extreme situations, how they cope and what they think. These next few articles are along those lines:

A mentally ill man who's often been homeless:
http://catholicexchange.com/2009/01/27/115156/

A young man tells of an awful childhood (including brutal sexual abuse, though mercifully he gives few details), his imprisonment for murder, and his hope for the future. (The "Gorden" he mentions has a blog by proxy here.) PDF WARNING:
http://www.thesestonewalls.com/Files/Pornchais_Story.pdf

A man who found out soon after marriage that he and his wife were incompatible.
http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2009/07/irreconcilable-differences-so.html

Here's a letter from a young nun who gave up everything to become the bride of Christ, and then was raped and had to leave her order to raise the child. It is a stunning letter. I could hardly believe that she could respond with so much faith. Of all the articles in this post, this is the one that moved me the most.
http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=28882

This is a woman who wanted a child but had an abortion when she found out the baby had chromosomal abnormalities. She writes about how the system of prenatal testing seemed biased toward pressuring her to abort her son. Why on earth don't we bias it the other way? I guess it's partly because a living baby with an unexpected abnormality is a liability for the prenatal doctor, but an aborted baby is the mother's responsibility alone-- she can't sue anyone for talking her into abortion. Doctors probably figure their malpractice premiums are high enough already.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/01/family-abortion-trisomy-13

Here's another mother who aborted a wanted pregnancy when the child turned out to have Down's syndrome. I was fascinated by her story. As she says, she's an atheist and there were no religious issues affecting her decision, but that didn't mean she didn't have an awful battle with herself both before and after.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/may/31/health.lifeandhealth

Compare that with this article:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-07-027-f
in which J. Budziszewski describes the ways conscience attacks when we've done something we know is wrong, but won't admit it. It's remarkable how closely Emma Loach's experience tracks with Budziszewski's description, from her compulsive donations to sick children's charities, to her new sense of closeness with the baby's father, to the very fact that she's laying her soul bare by writing the article.

Here's an excellent letter trying to contribute to "an honest public debate about abortion" by asking questions an abortion provider hasn't answered yet:
http://mulier-fortis.blogspot.com/2010/09/getting-to-heart-of-matter.html

David Warren doesn't like the Catholics Come Home campaign...
http://www.insidecatholic.com/feature/retrieving-the-strays.html

Distrust in the U.S. media is at a record high... but I'm surprised it's not higher.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/143267/Distrust-Media-Edges-Record-High.aspx

Okay, enough for now.

Men, women, religious life, celibacy, Luther

2010-10-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

The article I quoted in the previous post, the interview with the vocations director, goes on to say:

Q: You have three brothers that are priests. Do you think there is a different strategy for discerning and fostering the vocation of young women than for young men? In what ways?

Sister Hopkins: My experience has been that, in general, men take a lot longer in the discernment process, whether it regards marriage or religious life. Once a woman has “conviction” she is usually impatient to begin a process.

I wonder if men tend to intellectualize it in the beginning, whereas most women religious begin intuitively and very privately. They may struggle longer before admitting they are considering the idea, but once they discern, it is very much a matter of the heart and they are propelled past fears and natural ties to offer that gift of self without reserve....

Both men and women need to know that a desire to enter into the married state is not only good, but is even necessary if one is considering religious life. The absence of such natural desire may signal a problem of selfishness or difficulty in giving or receiving love. Such an emotional handicap would make happiness in the religious life impossible.

That last paragraph contrasts with a Protestant view I heard on a Focus on the Family radio broadcast. It was a show about marriage, and the question came up of a call to celibacy. The two women doing the show said they believed that God intends you for the single life if you're "wired that way", if you're just not interested in marriage. That's more or less the view I remember hearing at youth group years ago when the subject came up, but I now think it's a truncated understanding of religious celibacy. Jesus spoke of forgoing marriage for the sake of the Kingdom, not forgoing marriage because you don't want it anyway.

Anyway, that view apparently traces all the way back to Martin Luther. He was a priest and an Augustinian monk who declared his own vow of celibacy illegitimate, married a nun, had six children, and wrote this , a letter to several nuns:

. . .You are correct that there are two reasons for which life at the convent and vows may be forsaken: The one is where men's laws and life within the order are being forced, where there is no free choice, where it is put upon the conscience as a burden. In such cases it is time to run away, leaving the convent and all it entails behind. . .

. . .The second reason is the flesh: Though womenfolk are ashamed to admit to this, nevertheless Scripture and experience show that among many thousands there is not a one to whom God has given to remain in pure chastity. A woman has no control over herself. God has made her body to be with man, to bear children and to raise them as the words of Genesis 1 clearly state, as is evident by the members of the body ordered by God Himself. Therefore food and drink, sleep and wakefulness have all been created by God. Thus He has also ordered man and woman to be in marital union. Suffice it to say that no one needs to be ashamed over how God has made and created him, not having been given the high, rare mercy to do otherwise. All this you will amply learn and read and hear proper sermons about when you come out. . .

It strikes me that Luther's second reason for ditching religious vows could be used to ditch marriage vows too, under certain circumstances. That notion that we're not in control of our bodies, that we can't (with God's help) live chaste lives whether married or single-- I was going to call it "unchristian", but I think even the ancient pagan philosophers would have thought it beneath them. The many monks and nuns in Europe in Luther's day were a witness to the fact that although we have animal appetites, we're also higher than the animals. It's not a "high, rare mercy" to forgo sex; it's just one aspect of subordinating our physical lives to our spiritual lives, something everyone needs to do. Whether or not we're called to lifelong celibacy, we all have to be celibate at certain times.

Though Luther didn't intend it, I think his denigration of the possibility of a chaste single life was a step down the road that ended in our century with the widespread feeling that everyone's entitled to sex and teaching chastity is mean. I've spoken with two different Germans in the past few years about Catholicism, and it was interesting to me that priestly celibacy was the very first objection that both of them raised to the Catholic faith. The spirit of Luther lives on! So many objections these days have to do with what Mark Shea calls "the pelvic issues"-- that the Church says that contraception and divorce and masturbation and pornagraphy and sex outside of marriage are all mortal sins, and on the other hand the Church allows people to take vows of chastity, and all this seems inhuman and repressed to the modern mind. It makes me wish that Luther could have seen it; he'd have been horrified. Maybe he'd have rethought his strong views on the impossibility of forgoing sex.

An interview with a vocations director

2010-10-01T18:49:00.001-07:00

I thought this was interesting: an interview with the former vocations director of the Nashville Dominicans. Their final tally this year was 27 postulants (to see pictures, go here and click on Postulants 2010), so they know something about attracting women to religious life. Here's an excerpt:

Sister Hopkins: The Dominican Sisters in Nashville understood that it wasn’t a matter of recruitment but of exposure. As a vocation director, I made it a point always to respect the delicate interior struggle through which most people must pass. My job was not to make a good sales pitch, but to convey the beauty of our life and to expose young women to it through a visit or retreat experience. I had to help those who had the inclination, but struggled with uncertainty, realize that the simultaneous fear and attraction they felt was normal...

What our world needs is more Mother Teresas, people with zeal, humility and a fearless love. Over the past 20 years I have seen the numbers of women inquiring into the religious life grow both in numbers, quality and openness. Given the fact that our culture is not supportive of such ideas, nothing short of grace can explain it.

She talks about things we can do to promote vocations, but I'd agree with her that it comes back to God calling. The relgious orders I've visited seem to understand that. None of them tried to convince me that I was called to join them-- they just told me about themselves and let me see how they live.

Family story

2010-10-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

I have a great-aunt and great-uncle, Aunt Esther and Uncle Dean, who are retired missionaries. I like the story of how they married:

Esther, my grandfather's sister, was 31. She had already been a missionary nurse for years in Belgian Congo, as a single woman. She was a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and they wanted a doctor from their own denomination to work with. So in 1948 when Esther was coming up on her next furlough, another CMA missionary jokingly said to her, "See if you can lure a doctor back here."

Esther went home and was introduced to Dean. He was twenty-seven years old, had served in Japan in WWII, and was a new doctor. After a radical conversion experience as an adult, he'd concluded that God wanted him to be a missionary. First, though, he planned to take a course in tropical diseases, figuring that would come in handy. Esther and Dean's parents attended the same church, but the couple had never met. They saw each other several times that summer in group settings, but that was all-- they didn't go on any dates.

Then Dean left with his mother for a road trip to South Carolina, where his tropical disease course awaited. In a hotel room on the way, he happened to be looking through a yearbook from the local university with all the young college-aged girls. And then he suddenly thought of Esther. He had some sort of vision, or at least a very strong impression, that he should marry her.

So off he went, back to Pennsylvania, offering no explanation to his bemused mother. Having arrived back home, he phoned Esther and asked to see her. She figured he must be planning to tell her why he'd decided not to take the tropical disease course after all.

They met. "You know I'm planning to be a missionary..." said Dean, and then he asked her to marry him. Just like that.

Esther was floored, of course-- they'd never dated. (But I figure there must have been some mutual attraction there...) Years before, Esther had broken an engagement in order to become a missionary, and she had firmly decided that if she ever got serious about anyone again, she'd have to make certain it was the right thing, since she didn't want to break anyone else's heart. Now here was this man she hardly knew proposing to her. Of course she'd say no, right? But she had a sort of vision of her own, a light shining in darkness which meant to her that in the midst of confusion, God was showing her His will.

"My heart says yes," Esther said to Dean, "but I'll have to pray about it."

So she went home, woke up her parents to deliver the news, and prayed about it. A few days later she gave her answer-- yes. Before too long she and Dean were married. Dean eventually took his tropical disease course, in Belgium instead of South Carolina, and by the time Esther returned to Belgian Congo from her furlough, she had a doctor husband and twin sons in tow.

That was sixty years ago. They spent years in Africa, then Cambodia, then Africa again. They had four children and bunch of grandkids and retired to Pennsylvania. Now Esther and Dean are 93 and 89, both in quite good health for their ages, with kind faces and sparkling eyes. They're unfailingly loving to each other. It's wonderful to see.

Movie sites I've seen

2010-10-01T17:38:00.000-07:00

On my way to work at Caltech (in Pasadena, California) every day, I used to drive by a house that's been in lots of movies or TV shows, judging by how often I see a row of huge filming trailers parked out there. One movie I know it's in is "Catch Me If You Can"; Leonardo DiCaprio sneaks up to one of the windows and then narrowly escapes the cop cars that drive up on the lawn. I've also seen this house painted vivid blue for a filming, and then repainted white when filming was over-- I wish I know what show that was for.

If I were to drive to work on the parallel street one block north, I'd be driving by the Mr. and Mrs. Smith house every day-- the one Brad and Angelina live in and "redecorate" by shooting it up in their epic battle.

I'm proud that in both cases I immediately recognized the houses from real life when I first saw them on the screen. They're pretty similar. Hollywood predictably goes for big white classic second-story homes.

Right in my town there's the Arcadia Arboretum, which has been used in many movies. So has Caltech itself. The Cigarette Smoking Man and others met in a Caltech library during a scene from the X-Files movie, Reese Witherspoon rides a bike over a Caltech bridge at the beginning of Legally Blonde, and lots of scenes from the TV series Numbers were filmed at Caltech, including a location just one floor above the lab where I worked.

Then there's the Huntington Library close by-- it's been in all sorts of movies as well, including flashback scenes in Serenity. Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney once played a romantic scene for Intolerable Cruelty in front of a stone arbor at the Huntington where I've taken many pictures myself. Here are the stars:

And here's me and a friend.

I know if I gave it any effort I could find tons of other movie sites-- I'm near Hollywood, after all. But I get a special kick out of the ones I find with no effort, the ones that are right around the corner, on the way to work, near home.

Catholic, Orthodox report promising progress on unity

2010-09-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

This is really cool! Everything else I've read suggests that unity is long way off, so probably the people directly involved in these talks are too optimistic, but still it's lovely to read:

"There are no clouds of mistrust between our two churches," Orthodox Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon told a news conference. "If we continue like that, God will find a way to overcome all the difficulties that remain."

Did Cardinal Ratzinger or somebody say that when it comes to Catholics and Orthodox, there's nothing lacking for unity except unity? I can't find the quote.

On nuns wearing habits

2010-09-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

I thought this was a great read, and tangentially related to my last post. (I'd better add that I don't think that any nun who eschews the habit is doing so for bad motives.)

I have a neat little story about this. Earlier this year I got to spend five days living with the Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Church (SMMC). They're located in Spokane, Washington, which was a desert as far as traditional Catholic life was concerned-- "progressive" catechesis, annoying trendy Masses, a huge collapse in the numbers of people going to church, and so on. In the whole diocese the only nuns left in habits were some cloistered Poor Clares and three or four Missionaries of Charity who'd just moved in (in answer to the bishop's plea about the "spiritual poverty" of his diocese.)

But there was also a big order of nuns up at Mount Saint Michael, who were sedevacantist and not in communion with the local diocese. There were fifty of them wearing full traditional habits and embracing all the traditional practices of Catholicism (except, of course, that little thing about the Pope-- they believed he was an imposter.) Then (it's a long, interesting story, but I'm super-condensing it for my purposes), some of the sedevacantist sisters considered their position and ended up leaving their order in 2007 and forming a new one in communion with the Church and under the auspices of the local bishop. That was the start of the SMMCs; they began with eleven sisters.

Anyway, back in 2007, these recently sedevacantist but newly reconciled nuns, who were of course used to the traditional Latin Mass and all, found themselves living at Spokane's diocesan retreat center. An older priest was the there, the retreat center's chaplain, and he was kind to them but didn't necessarily see the point of all the traditional stuff. They told him they needed to make themselves some new habits, since of course they couldn't go on wearing the habits of the sedevacantist order they'd just left. "Oh, sisters, you don't need to wear habits!" the chaplain told them. He thought that kind of thing was outdated.

Not long after that a few of the sisters were telling their story to a group of laypeople at the retreat center. Mother Catherine Joseph happened to mention, "Oh, and we won't be able to wear these habits any more, because they're the habits of our old order." The laypeople misunderstood and immediately began to protest: "Don't stop wearing habits, sisters! We need nuns in habits; we don't have any here any more!" The retreat center's chaplain was there and he saw the laypeople getting distressed and realized that the habit meant a lot to them.

That chaplain ended up buying the material for the new habits as a gift to the sisters. :)

Here's a recent picture of their four new novices with the novice mistress.

When my visit with the SMMC sisters was over, some of them drove me and the other girl who was visiting to the airport. We hugged them all goodbye and then the other girl and I were in the process of saying goodbye to each other when a man approached us. "Who were those nuns you were with?" he asked. He was a Catholic who'd lived in the area and knew its troubles, and he was very surprised and happy to hear that this was a new and growing order right in Spokane that the other girl and I had been visiting because we were thinking of joining them. He sounded like he hadn't encountered such a thing since his childhood. It was another little confirmation of how encouraging it can be for Catholics to see habits out and about. I think it might be good in some way too for those who are distanced from religion and see it as bizarre and unbelievable. It's silent testimony that there are those who perceive God as so real and religion as so important that they dedicate their whole lives to Him.

I sometimes hear that sisters should dress like everybody else because they're more approachable that way, and it always makes me think, "If they're unrecognizable, who's going to approach them?" A few times I've found myself walking the streets of some town with a priest wearing his collar. It very often happened that total strangers stopped the priest to ask a question, or to ask for his prayers. No one's ever stopped me on the street like that, and there's no reason to expect that anyone would.

There's much more to say, but you know, if I wait till I've said it I'll never publish this post. :) Gotta go get some other stuff done.

C.S. Lewis on reverence and inequality

2010-09-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

And here's an excerpt from Lewis' essay "Membership", also available in my enviable 888-page Essay Collection:

Equality is a quantitative term and therefore love often knows nothing of it. Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live. Even in the life of the affections, much more in the Body of Christ, we step outside that world which says 'I am as good as you'. It is like turning from a march to a dance.... We become, as Chesterton said, taller when we bow; we become lowlier when we instruct. It delights me that there should be moments in the services of my own church when the priest stands and I kneel. As democracy becomes more complete in the outer world and opportunities for reverence are successively removed, the refreshment, the cleansing, and invigorating returns to inequality, which the Church offers us, become more and more necessary.

I was thinking the same thing the other day (though not in such clear words) when I asked for a priest's blessing and knelt to receive it. Opportunities for reverence are increasingly rare. The American bishops robbed us when they said we should stand to receive Holy Communion instead of kneeling at an altar rail. Priests shouldn't be absorbed in their own desire to appear humble, but should serve in true humility by filling their proper and very difficult role of authority, no matter how people tear into them for it. Archbishop Burke, Archbishop Chaput, and Pope Benedict XVI are three examples of that kind of true humility and service.

Reminds me of another quote, from Fr. Feeney's excellent chapter "The Eucharist in Four Simple Mysteries":

What is Our Lord’s value to us in Real Presence – apart from His other beautiful benefits in graces in the Blessed Eucharist? Well, we now have a place to which we can go, in the presence of which we can say we are, in the direction of which we can bow our heads and fold our hands, to which we can sing our songs, strew our flowers, light our lights, shake our incense; for which we can build our cathedral, top it with a cross, stain-glass it with our windows, give it a center aisle that leads down to the Real Presence, before which we can genuflect. The Real Presence makes our bodies entitled to the prerogatives of adoration.

Some people find no outlet for that inborn desire, and I get cranky if they want to deny its fulfillment to everyone else!

Three Kinds of Men, by C.S. Lewis

2010-09-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

I just read this very short essay in my awesome 888-page C.S. Lewis Essay Collection. Resonates with my own experience for sure.

There are three kinds of people in the world. The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them. In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them—- the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society—- and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier’s or a schoolboy’s life, into time “on parade” and “off parade,” “in school” and “out of school.” But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them “to live is Christ.” These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.

And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian doctrine that there is no “salvation” by works done to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically.

The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort—- it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.

Fun French Facts

2010-09-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

In English you call nuns "Sister" and priests "Father", but in French it's "my sister" and "my father": ma sœur, mon père. Is it capitalized? I have no idea. "Merci, ma sœur!" the Adorers would say to thank each other.

The French for "Mister" is Monsieur. Go here and click on listen to see how much it sounds like the sisters are calling each other "Mister".

Then there's "je veux bien", which means you would like whatever's been suggested, or you very appreciatively accept an invitation. And "je vais bien", which means, "I'm fine." They sound a lot alike too. So suppose a cute French guy asks you out to dinner and you try to say, "I'd love that-- je veux bien!" but he hears, "I'm fine," as in, "I don't need your silly invitation; I'm fine without it!"

Thank goodness I needn't worry about that.

I understand that the priests of the Institute of Christ the King used to be addressed as "Monsieur l'Abbé" (which is just what Sir Percy called Chauvelin when the latter was disguised as a priest, but Sir Percy wasn't actually fooled), but since the Institute was elevated to the status of pontifical right about a year ago they're addressed as Monsieur Chanoine. Or is it Monsieur le Chanoine? At any rate, I have the impression that in the American parishes they're mostly still addressed as Father Smith (or whatever), not Canon Smith. Except in writing. The seminarians are "Monsieur l'Abbé", at least once they get their cassocks after the first year. I could be wrong about some of this, but it doesn't matter because I plan to waste no opportunity to keep my mouth shut. :)

I'm told that in French, "Amen" is a Novus Ordo thing to say. The traditional phrase is "Ainsi soit-il", "So be it". Sermons are likely to begin with the invocation of the Trinity, "Au nom du Père, et du Fils et du Saint-Esprit, Ainsi soit-il", followed by "Mes bien chers frères..."

Also, "Rosary" traditionally means all three sets of mysteries, so if you're only planning on praying five decades you'd say "Chapelet".

Oh, and I hear that the familar "tu" form of address is not used in religious life, which is great-- saves me having to learn it. I can just call everyone "vous". The vowels are all different depending on which one you're using, so it's no small thing to have to switch back and forth. Anyway, how awkward if you can't speak to anybody without specifying whether you consider him a close friend!

My cousin and I used to sing Sandi Patti's "Love in Any Language" at the top of our lungs together. The very first words in the song are "Je t'aime", which makes it easy for me to remember that phrase now. (Oh my goodness, I just listened to the 30-second sample and it took me right back to summers spent camping with the cousins, and Allie and I scrambling to get next to each other in the motorhome whenever that song came on. I was maybe nine years old. It's really something to think that God knew my future. I wonder what He knows now....)

My sister taught me bits of French when we visited Canada one summer. It was years ago, but I remember she would ask, "Quelle heure est-il?" and I'd reply, "Je ne sais pas." So I remember those phrases very well too. :)

Final Fun French Fact: I mainly wrote this post to procrastinate learning more French. :)

French numbers...

2010-09-23T16:37:00.000-07:00

...are fine till you get to seventy:

68 sixty-eight
69 sixty-nine
70 sixty-ten
71 sixty-eleven
72 sixty-twelve
76 sixty-sixteen
77 sixty-ten-seven
78 sixty ten-eight
79 sixty-ten-nine
80 four-twenties
81 four-twenty-one
82 four-twenty-two
83 four-twenty-three
88 four-twenty-eight
89 four-twenty-nine
90 four-twenty-ten
91 four-twenty-eleven
98 four-twenty-ten-eight
99 four-twenty-ten-nine
100 ONE HUNDRED!

Here's a great site for learning them. It has a nice quiz here-- click "new number", try to say it, then hit play and hear the French speaker say it.

Also I love that Google translate will speak a French phrase (and its English translation) for you. The French pronunciation seems to match my tapes well.

Hazelnut pancakes

2010-09-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

I had roasted hazelnuts left over from last week's adventures, and when I came home for breakfast this morning I knew that it was time. Time to make a third recipe from the awesome collection in the latest Martha Stewart Living. Time to do this:

Hazelnut pancakes
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups roasted hazelnut meal
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs
1 3/4 cups lowfat milk
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Whisk together the first four ingredients. Whisk together the last four ingredients. Whisk the two mixtures together until just combined (with some lumps remaining).

Heat a griddle or skillet over medium heat. Spray with cooking spray or lightly oil. Scoop 1/3 cup batter onto heated skillet. Cook until edges are dry and some small bubbles come to the surface, about 3 minutes. Flip with a thin spatula and cook on the other side until firm to the touch, about 3 minutes. Transfer to a baking sheet and keep warm in a 200 degree oven (as for me, I always eat my pancakes fresh and hot, and make more when I'm ready for them). Repeat with remaining batter. (You can stick the rest of the batter in the fridge for later too). Makes 16 pancakes.

Raspberry sauce (I didn't make this part, but just in case you'd like to):
3/4 cup raspberry jam
3 tablespoons water
Fresh lemon juice to taste

Heat jam and water in a small saucepan over medium heat until warm and pourable. Add another tablespoon of water if needed. Stir in lemon juice.

You know I've got pictures for you. :) Here's hazelnut meal and flour:

Eggs, milk, brown sugar and oil get poured on top.

The mixture gets cooked:

And real maple syrup is poured on

I ate that batch too fast for tantalizing closeups. Here's the next batch, which I cooked up darker:

Get a good look, now. :)

I must tell you a secret: I halved this recipe. Except for the hazelnuts. So there was a double dose of nutty nuts! And I'm happy to report it was delish.

For those keeping score, I was able to make hazelnut cookies, homemade Nutella, and hazelnut pancakes, all with one 16-ounce bag of hazelnuts from Trader Joe's. :)

2010-09-23T09:39:00.001-07:00

Happy feast of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins!

2010-09-22T20:50:00.003-07:00

September 22 is their shared birthday. :)

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

2010-09-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

I was moved by this story I just read:
Canadian Dad Sacrifices Self to Save Wife, Unborn Child in Car Crash

Nice interview with Msgr. Schmitz about the Institute of Christ the King

2010-09-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

It's an old one, from 2007, but I just read it for the first time. It's full of information about the Institute, from its founding (with more details than I've seen before) to its spirituality, and of course much of this applies to their sister order that I'm joining.

PDF warning: http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/main/pdf/inside-the-vatican-jan07.pdf

Office of Readings for the feast of St. Matthew

2010-09-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Both readings in the Liturgy of the Hours today are all about calling and vocation, and I found them very moving, perhaps because I'm a month away from joining the nuns. :)

Ephesians 4:1-16
   I, the prisoner in the Lord, implore you to lead a life worthy of your vocation. Bear with one another charitably, in complete selflessness, gentleness and patience. Do all you can to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together. There is one Body, one Spirit, just as you were all called into one and the same hope when you were called. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, over all, through all and within all.
   Each one of us, however, has been given his own share of grace, given as Christ allotted it. It was said that he would:
When he ascended to the height, he captured prisoners,
he gave gifts to men.
   When it says, ‘he ascended’, what can it mean if not that he descended right down to the lower regions of the earth? The one who rose higher than all the heavens to fill all things is none other than the one who descended. And to some, his gift was that they should be apostles; to some, prophets; to some, evangelists; to some, pastors and teachers; so that the saints together make a unity in the work of service, building up the body of Christ. In this way we are all to come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.
   Then we shall not be children any longer, or tossed one way and another and carried along by every wind of doctrine, at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit. If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ, who is the head by whom the whole body is fitted and joined together, every joint adding its own strength, for each separate part to work according to its function. So the body grows until it has built itself up, in love.

A sermon by St Bede the Venerable (d. A.D. 735)
Jesus saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him
   Jesus saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him: Follow me. Jesus saw Matthew, not merely in the usual sense, but more significantly with his merciful understanding of men.
   He saw the tax collector and, because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him, he said to him: Follow me. This following meant imitating the pattern of his life – not just walking after him. St. John tells us: Whoever says he abides in Christ ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
   And he rose and followed him. There is no reason for surprise that the tax collector abandoned earthly wealth as soon as the Lord commanded him. Nor should one be amazed that neglecting his wealth, he joined a band of men whose leader had, on Matthew’s assessment, no riches at all. Our Lord summoned Matthew by speaking to him in words. By an invisible, interior impulse flooding his mind with the light of grace, he instructed him to walk in his footsteps. In this way Matthew could understand that Christ, who was summoning him away from earthly possessions, had incorruptible treasures of heaven in his gift.
   As he sat at table in the house, behold many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples. This conversion of one tax collector gave many men, those from his own profession and other sinners, an example of repentance and pardon. Notice also the happy and true anticipation of his future status as apostle and teacher of the nations. No sooner was he converted than Matthew drew after him a whole crowd of sinners along the same road to salvation. He took up his appointed duties while still taking his first steps in the faith, and from that hour he fulfilled his obligation and thus grew in merit. To see a deeper understanding of the great celebration Matthew held at his house, we must realise that he not only gave a banquet for the Lord at his earthly residence, but far more pleasing was the banquet set in his own heart which he provided through faith and love. Our Saviour attests to this: Behold I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.
   On hearing Christ’s voice, we open the door to receive him, as it were, when we freely assent to his promptings and when we give ourselves over to doing what must be done. Christ, since he dwells in the hearts of his chosen ones through the grace of his love, enters so that he might eat with us and we with him. He ever refreshes us by the light of his presence insofar as we progress in our devotion to and longing for the things of heaven. He himself is delighted by such a pleasing banquet.

Cost of health insurance for women vs. men

2010-09-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

I'm researching health insurance, and it appears that women my age have to pay a lot more than men. For girls and boys the cost is the same, and as we get older it's the men who are more expensive to insure, but right now in the childbearing years, women get charged more.

Now I need to stop procrastinating by blogging.

Update: So I can pay about $1850 for a year of fairly comprehensive health coverage, or pay only $312 for a plan that covers all the same stuff, except... they casually slip in, at #28 on the list of stuff they don't cover: "Treatment for all forms of cancer."

Update: Forget both those plans. They're not renewable if I come back to the U.S., and of course if I get seriously sick I *will* come back to the U.S., so the plans won't cover me just when I most need coverage. I'm rather glad I talked to an agent who pointed that out. :) Okay, back to work.

Fr. Barron with a story that makes a great point

2010-09-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

H/T romish internet graffiti
I just learned how to make the embedded video start right at the start of the story. :) Check here if you want the details.

Hazelnut cookies and homemade Nutella!

2010-09-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

It's been a fantastic summer here in Southern California, cool and pleasant. A shame to see it go, but fall is coming, as we can tell by the leaves on the driveway and the hazelnuts being sold in stores (and the Christmas decorations at Kohl's... good grief....) I saw hazelnuts at Trader Joe's today, and recalled that the latest Martha Stewart Living magazine had featured hazelnuts, and, well...

Hazelnut cookies
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup roasted hazelnut meal
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350°F. Beat butter and sugar with a mixer till fluffy. Add flour, hazelnut meal, and salt. Beat until dough forms. (This isn't in the recipe, but I had to add about two teaspoons of half and half to make dough form; it was too crumbly without it. You could use milk too, just enough to bind it all together.)

Roll dough into 1-inch balls and transfer to baking sheets (use parchment paper if you've got it). Press balls with a fork to flatten. Bake until edges are golden, 12 to 15 minutes. Let cool.

Such a simple recipe! Assuming you own a food processor, of course; it ain't happening without that.

So I bought the raw hazelnuts and roasted them at 350°F for about 17 minutes. You must roast them; it completely changes the flavor. Anyway, raw hazelnuts have something in them that irritates my throat.

Here are the raw hazelnuts and the magazine the recipe's from (which had a ton of other hazelnut recipes-- I still want to try the hazelnut pancakes!)

And here they are after roasting.

You can see how the dark skins flake off easily when they're roasted. I rubbed the hazelnuts together in my hands to remove most of the skins, leaving this:

Then I ground those suckers down to hazelnut meal:

Mix that with the butter, sugar, salt and flour. Add milk or cream if needed, until you get dough:

Roll the dough into balls and mash 'em with a fork. Use the universally-acknowledged code for nut cookies: a crisscross pattern means peanut butter cookies, while parallel lines mean hazelnut. (I totally just made that up.)

Then bake them.

And eat them!

Now friends, I didn't mean to make two different sweets in one day. Even I am not normally that decadent. But the problem was, the cookies called for half a cup of hazelnut meal and I didn't know how many nuts to grind for that, so I had meal left over. And lo, Martha had a recipe for homemade Nutella that let me use up that meal (plus grind more). So rather than wash the food processor only to drag it out again another day...

Hazelnut-Chocolate Spread

7 ounces blanched hazelnuts, toasted
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 1/2 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted.

Puree nuts and salt in a food processor until mixture is the texture of peanut butter. Add sugar and chocolate; pulse until combined.

I ground up a bunch of hazelnuts to the consistency of peanut butter,

And added sugar, salt, and melted chocolate.

So simple, so good!!!

Nutella is perfectly smooth, while my homemade spread is a bit grainy. And Nutella stays spreadable even if you put it in the fridge, whereas the homemade stuff gets pretty solid when cold. Also, they don't taste quite the same; there's a different flavor profile. The real Nutella might have more salt; I'm not sure. They're both scrumptious.

You can put homemade Nutella on French bread, water crackers, a spoon, your finger, whatever. What should I put my Nutella on? I can't decide. There's probably something in my kitchen that'd be perfect topped with Nutella. What could it be? While I think about it, here's a final picture of today's goodies:

This was my 700th blog post and I think the subject was appropriate, don't you?

Overheard from my mom, who loves travel and Tuscany:

2010-09-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

"We'll have to go to Florence to see her; she can't come here. I'm trying to work up some tears about that, but I haven't been able to so far."

I should be ordering my trousseau

2010-09-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

But first: a fun mindless game of Chain Reaction!

Just got back from Kohl's

2010-09-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

I was acting on a tip that there are long black skirts there; I need one for the convent. In the meantime it was great to look around the store at all the many, many clothes, and think, "This is all completely irrelevant to me." I didn't have to care about finding something decent, not pricey and not ugly-- I could just pass it all by. I know there are people reading this who'll envy that. :)

The other day I told some friends, "I've never achieved my dream of a wardrobe in which everything is so comfortable and flattering that I can just reach in blindfolded and pull out something to wear in seconds." One of the friends pointed out that becoming a nun pretty much achieves the dream perfectly. :) :)

In other news, I've always laughed at the stories about the Académie française enforcing French culture and fighting the Anglicization of the language by opposing English loanwords-- but it's not as funny when I have to learn to pronounce "voiture" instead of "car". The French string together their vowel sounds in a most astounding way.

Also, I'm back from a great trip to Northern California and I'll blog it when I can, but right now I have to finish a French language tape. No, I'm not blogging right now. It's your imagination.

Road trippin'

2010-09-02T19:57:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'm off to Sebastopol, California, to visit college friends. There may be blackberries involved. You kids be good while I'm gone!

(The picture is some of the Adorers walking the tunnels under the main train station in Florence. We were on our way to Mass on Pentecost Sunday.)

The best lemon bars, by far

2010-09-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

Somewhere there's a book that says that Rachel's feast day is September 2. That's Rachel the matriarch, from the book of Genesis, wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin, the very woman I was named for. I don't know if the book was up to date, and I doubt it's proper Catholic practice to refer to those who died before the time of Christ as saints. But there's one thing I'm sure of: I have pictures of lemon bars, and I want to post them. So let's all celebrate my name day!

I like regular lemon bars, with their bland crust, lemony filling, and powdered sugar topping. Nothing against those. But these here lemon bars, with thyme in the crust for depth and ginger in the filling for zip-- these are scrumptious.

See below for the recipe. First you mix up all the crust ingredients:

And then press out the crust in a pan.

Bake the crust till the edges are golden.

Meanwhile, whip up some filling. You must own a microplane zester to get your lemon zest.

Now here's the fun part: pour the filling on top of the hot-from-the-oven crust, and hear the sizzle!

This is why I love baking. Non-bakers might eat the final product, but they miss these fun steps on the way.

Now you've got some leftover crust saved, and you sprinkle that on top. (The filling in this picture is still liquid, but it's turned white from some reaction with the hot crust.)

Bake the whole thing...

...and top with lemon glaze. I flick on the glaze with a fork, trying always to move in one direction. Some like to double the glaze and really coat the top.

Then you chop that thing into squares (removing some to test for quality assurance)...

...and they look like this!

Or better yet, like this!

And just before you gulp one down it looks like this!

The recipe:

Crust
2 cups flour
2/3 cup powdered sugar
2 1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup butter

Filling
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
3 Tbsp. flour
3/4 tsp. ginger (powdered)
1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. lemon zest
1/2 cup lemon juice
3 eggs

Glaze
3-4 tsp. lemon juice
3/4 cup powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350ºF. Mix all the crust ingredients together. Set aside 1/3 of the mixture (about one cup) and press out the remaining mixture into a greased 9 x 13 baking pan. Bake 15-18 minutes, or until crust is lightly browned.

Combine the filling ingredients and whisk until blended. Pour over the crust. Sprinkle reserved crust mixture over the top and bake for 20-25 minutes.

Mix the glaze and drizzle it over the bars. It will set when the bars cool.

Nun pun

2010-09-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

I have a set of friends from St. Peter Chanel that used to get together to study encyclicals and such, back when Mery and I had an apartment very near church. We who remain still assemble from time to time, but Mery is now a Dominican nun. When I told the others I was heading to a convent too, Christie remarked that within our little group, I'm second to nun. :)

Quick takes Tuesday, Adoratrices edition

2010-08-31T19:58:00.000-07:00

It's not Friday, but quick's all I have time for. :)

1. Just when I actually have an important life event to blog about, I'm too busy to write! There's so much to get done before I leave for Italy.

2. I leave on October 22, Lord willing and the creek don't rise.

3. I have to learn as much French as possible before I go. It's not my forte. I've always been a procrastinator, very bad at long-term projects, but learning a language is something I have to practice as much as I can every day. So I'm slogging through it with Pimsleur. I like the program a lot; it spoon-feeds a few new words at a time and gives lots of repetition and pronunciation practice. It's satisfying to see or hear some French and understand it. But sometimes the amount I don't know seems like a mountain hanging overhead, ready to drop and crush me. :P (Buy the way, if anyone reading this is thinking of buying the Pimsleur program, you can save a lot by getting it on microchip from pimsleurdirect.com.)

4. I wonder if I can at least learn enough French to learn more.... pick out words I don't know and ask about them, instead of listening uncomprehendingly to a whole lot of jabber I can't make out at all...

5. I also have a ton of stuff to buy. If I stay to become a novice I'll get a habit made for me, but postulants wear basic black skirts, white shirts, sweaters, tights, black shoes, that kind of thing. I need to buy black snow boots. In southern California. In August. L.L. Bean catalog, here I come. :)

6. I'm happy and rather shocked that my parents and both of my brothers are planning to come to Florence with me when I go. They'll spend a week in Florence; I'll spend the first half of the week with them and then go with the sisters. I hope my visa comes through in time because we've already bought the plane tickets and the non-refundable reservations. So one way or another we'll be forced to vacation in Tuscany in October. I hear y'all playing the world's smallest violin in sympathy, but seriously, please pray I'll have a visa by then.

7. Here are some French words that have been adopted into English recently enough for their pronunciation to be more or less retained: hors d’oeuvre, à la carte, table d’hôte, en route, en masse, rendezvous, carte blanche, savoir-faire, faux pas, fait accompli, par excellence, bon vivant, joie de vivre, raison d’être, coup d’état, nouveau riche, esprit de corps, laissez faire, allons-y, chargé d’affaires, piéce de résistance, and R.S.V.P.

8. If you feel like you missed the neat organized post where I wrote all about how I decided to join the Adoratrices and how happy I am to have found an order at last and everything that's happening in my spiritual life and so on, that's because I haven't written that post yet and I don't know if I'll have time before I leave. I will if I can, but you know not every blog can be Conversion Diary. :)

9. I should say the fact that I'm going to join an order doesn't mean that I know I'll stay. That's probably obvious to anyone else who's trying to become a nun, but those who don't know much about it sometimes don't realize how it works. I've seen not just one, but two news stories about nuns or monks that made the mistake of saying that the newcomers take vows when they enter the order! But it takes years to reach final vows, and until then a person can leave, or be asked to leave if he's not a good fit for the community.

There's still so much I don't know about the Adoratrices, but the quickest way to find it all out is to head for Italy. I'm going because there's no other way to discern whether God wants me to stay forever. I really hope the answer is yes, and I'll assume so unless God shouts otherwise. :) Prayers are much appreciated!

Adoratrices, part trois

2010-08-31T19:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to my announcement (it's at the end) that I'm becoming a nun. For those of you who don't carefully comb through each of my posts. ;) Now it's time for another installment about the Adorers! The first post was an account of my visit to them in May and the second post was a collection of links. Now a friend to whom I still owe an email has sent more links, so here we go:

First, various bulletins of the St. Louis Oratory (an Institute parish) announced the arrival of sisters for the first American foundation... which ended because of illness, but no doubt it'll be started up again.
http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/stlouis/bulletins/websiteSFdsBulletin08-09-2009.pdf
http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/stlouis/bulletins/websiteSFdsBulletin%2008-16-2009.pdf
http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/stlouis/bulletins/websiteSFdsBulletin%2010-11-2009.pdf
http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/stlouis/bulletins/websiteSFdsBulletin%2010-18-2009.pdf
http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/stlouis/bulletins/websiteSFdsBulletin_12-13-2009.pdf
http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/stlouis/bulletins/websiteSFdsBulletin_01-31-2010.pdf
http://www.institute-christ-king.org/uploads/stlouis/bulletins/websiteSFdsBulletin%2005-23-2010.pdf

Next, photos of the convent in St. Louis (I linked to some of these, but here's another set):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/msabeln/sets/72157623205855488/

A parishioner of the Institute parish of St. Margaret Mary in Oakland has put up a lot of videos-- mainly sermons, and also various other goodies about the Institute if you scroll down.
http://www.youtube.com/user/santamargaritamaria

Best of all, the mother of a candidate in the order is blogging her daughter's story (the letters her daughter wrote home are especially interesting.)
http://ladymodesty.blogspot.com/p/my-daughters-journey.html

Also, the other girl who visited the motherhouse with me sent me the pictures she took, and hers were much better than mine because she wasn't shy about getting shots of the sisters themselves. Here they are.

Me eating:

Me drinking after eating:

Me about to eat:

Me concentrating carefully on what I'm about to eat:

That is all.

Congrega nos!

2010-08-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel that the "mutual enrichment" the Holy Father talked about should be mainly one way...

H/T Fr. Z and A Minor Friar

Also, for the feast of St. Augustine, a comic book of his life (in Italian, alas).
H/T The Hermenuetic of Continuity

If you're waiting for a link to make you feel nauseated...
H/T Domine, da mihi Hanc Aquam! (Which means "Lord, give me this water!")

Rachel²

2010-08-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

I cannot forbear to advertise this post by my friend Rachel , who's moving up to Oregon in a week, blowing the joint several months before I will. Who knows when we'll ever see each other again, but prayer unites us wherever we are, and I'm so glad we got a last good talk in. If I don't say much more about our friendship, it's because she already said it perfectly, and she's the writer. :) She lived in France for a year and learned to speak French. Boy, could I use some of that.

I can't say what we're doing in the picture; it's a great secret-- even to myself.

Summer vocations

2010-08-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

Seems like everyone at St. Peter Chanel (Hawaiian Gardens, Los Angeles County, California) is going off this summer to become a priest or a nun. When I realized how many there were I decided to list them all, along with a few others I know who entered religious life in previous years.

There's Teresa, who's joining the Nashville Dominicans straight out of high school and is the youngest in a postulant class of...(drumroll please)... 27! I hear they're excited that they have the previous class beat. I'm glad I got to know Teresa a little bit before she left. Also in the new class is Courtney, whom I met when we were on the same visit to the motherhouse more than a year ago.

There's Teresa's older brother Paul, who's joining the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, the same order that staffs our parish. I remember seeing him nearly four years ago when I first joined St. Peter Chanel. He was leader of the altar boys and I thought it'd be pretty cool if he became an OMV, but of course you shouldn't assume that someone has the call you think would be cool... Anyway, he left for Boston on Sunday. :)

There's my own former roommate Mery who entered Corpus Christi Monastery in June 2009 and became a novice a few months ago and is now Sister Mary Isabel of the Angels-- WOOOOOHOOOOOO! Not least because the confusing spelling of "Mery" is finally amended. :) She's learning piano and singing and organizing the monastery's vast library and doing lots of other stuff-- harvesting fruit, painting, swimming, partying on every birthday and feast day... seriously, the Dominican nuns have too much fun back there in their beautiful 1920's Gothic cloister, but their main work is praying. Here's a story about someone who's about to join their monastery as a postulant.

Just before Mery entered, a big group of us from St. Peter Chanel were all heading home from a wonderful trip up north to St. Stephen's in Sacramento, where Fr. John, formerly of our parish, was celebrating the 25th year of his priesthood. I posted pictures from the trip here-- check out the prescient comments.

There's Nathan, who's leaving this Friday for the Norbertines. Along with the OMVs they're the order I'm fondest of in my area-- may the Lord bless them for providing the traditional Latin Mass all over Southern California, and even into Northern California when someone needs a substitute. Nathan majored in music at Ave Maria, and gave a wonderful voice recital a few weeks ago to raise money to pay off his student debt so he could enter the Norbertines this year. It succeeded and all was paid in time, hooray!

There's Joe, whom I first met on the internet before I realized he lived not far away and we became real-life friends. I'll miss seeing him serve the TLM now and then at St. Therese. He's introduced me to his new order, the Mercedarians, who say both the old Mass and the new with reverence-- I know Joe wouldn't settle anything less. I can't neglect to mention his fifteen minutes of fame playing the bad altar server in this video. :)

There's Quan, who used to go to my parish but started seminary shortly before I joined. I met him on a St. Peter Chanel pilgrimage to Mexico. A month or so ago he was ordained a deacon for the Diocese of Orange, and I'm so happy I got to see it. I believe he'll be ordained a priest next year, but even after that he'll still have more studying to do at the Angelicum. I'm not jealous of his adventures in Rome, really.

And there's also Marta, whom I met last February and then again in March-- we were hitting the same convents as we both discerned our vocations. She'd stepped away from a relationship to try to discern faithfully what God really wanted her to do with her life, and the Lord made it clear to her that she was supposed to... marry the guy! So she very happily did, just a few weeks ago. It's so wonderful. There's a joy and peace that comes from doing God's will. See how neatly I segue back to religious vocations? ;)

I've only listed people I know personally; I bet there are others I haven't heard of at St. Peter Chanel, since it's a big parish. WOW, so many who have entered religious life or are doing so this summer. It's the trend. All the kids are doing it. But just because my friends jump off a cliff, should I?

Oh, why not. So I'm leaving to join the Adorers on October 22. :) :) :) Please pray for me!

Saint Louis

2010-08-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

It's the feast of Saint Louis (1214-1270), King of France. Here's a letter of advice he wrote to his son and heir. It's almost unbelievable that a king could write like this!

Pistachio pistachio macarons!

2010-08-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

These are my favorite of all the varieties I've made so far. :) Recipe's at the end. I began with pistachios, powdered sugar, and a touch of grass green powdered food color, in the food processor

Here's what it all looked like being mixed with the meringue.

I'm getting better at piping even sizes, but it's still hard to make them as small as I'd like.

Thanks to my dear sister for giving me the set of pastry bags and piping tips for Christmas! I filled a bag with the pistachio buttercream.

For the first time, it occurred to me to use a fluted tip instead of a plain round one, and oh my goodness, people-- suddenly I felt like an actual pastry chef!

I'd just assumed the pretty fluted edge would be smooshed when I sandwiched the shells together, but instead:

It was a lot of fun to pipe the fillings. :)

Of course I had to bite one for purposes of photo documentation.

And then I just kinda went nuts with the camera in our pretty front yard.

Recipe: First, know how to make macarons. Here's a PDF of Tartelette's great tutorial.

Then use Tartelette's tips to make macaron shells with the following ingredients:

90 gr egg whites (everyone tells you to age them overnight on your countertop, but I have never aged my egg whites, never, and the little macaron feet form just fine. I live in Southern California; perhaps a dry climate helps.)
25 gr granulated sugar
200 gr powdered sugar
110 gr raw pistachios
powdered green food coloring (about 1/2 teaspoon.)

Grind the pistachios with the powdered sugar in the food processor. Whip up the egg whites and sugar into a meringue. Mix the two parts together along with the food color until your batter flows like magma. Pipe the shells and bake-- I did 315°F for 18 minutes.

Now make pistachio buttercream as follows (slightly adapted from Our Patisserie):
2 oz pistachios
1 cup powdered sugar
7 tbs butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Add some food coloring if you like... I think I added too much....

Grind the nuts and sugar in the food processor (I hope you didn't bother to wash it out). Add to the butter and vanilla and beat until you get a nice buttercream. Transfer this to a pastry bag and pipe.

I have to admit something about macarons. They are way too time consuming. I spent four hours making a grand total of 18 of them. That's... let's see... more than 13 minutes per macaron. 13 minutes for something that takes me 30 seconds to consume. Now, if I could pipe like this guy, it'd be worth it:

As it is, I've gotta stop making these things. I love them, but there are so many tasty desserts that can be made in much less time.

Oh, these macarons are also good with a simple chocolate ganache filling. FYI. :)

Sweets for the August feasts

2010-08-22T19:56:00.000-07:00

Behold the pistachio macarons I just made!

They're filled with pistachio buttercream and they're délicieux. Please note you can click for a nauseatingly large version of the picture. Many more to follow if I find the time. :)

Today's the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and if pistachio macarons seem insufficiently related to her crowning as Queen Mother in heaven, I've got a better Catholic dessert for you-- this one from the feast of a week ago. Good Thunder made an Assumption Cake. See, she's being borne up on the clouds of heaven. :)

St. John Damascene on the Assumption

2010-08-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

There's great stuff to be found in the breviary:

It was necessary that she who had preserved her virginity inviolate in childbirth should also have her body kept free from all corruption after death. It was necessary that she who had carried the Creator as a child on her breast should dwell in the tabernacles of God. It was necessary that the bride espoused by the Father should make her home in the bridal chambers of heaven. It was necessary that she, who had gazed on her crucified Son and been pierced in the heart by the sword of sorrow which she had escaped in giving him birth, should contemplate him seated with the Father. It was necessary that the Mother of God should share the possessions of her Son, and be venerated by every creature as the Mother and handmaid of God.

St. John Damascene was born in the 600's, and I was interested to learn from Catholic Encyclopedia's article that he was the first (that we know of) to attempt a Summa Theologica, "to collate and epitomize in a single work the opinions of the great ecclesiastical writers who have gone before him." His book Concerning the Orthodox Faith, "is the most important of John Damascene's writings and one of the most notable works of Christian antiquity. Its authority has always been great among the theologians of the East and West." Now you know. :)

I also really liked the point that Pius XII made in Munificentissimus Deus that sin and death are linked and triumphing over one means triumphing over the other:

Above all, it must be noted that from the second century the holy Fathers present the Virgin Mary as the new Eve, most closely associated with the new Adam, though subject to him in the struggle against the enemy from the nether world. This struggle, as the first promise of a redeemer implies, was to end in perfect victory over sin and death, always linked together in the writings of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Therefore, just as the glorious resurrection of Christ was an essential part of this victory and its final trophy, so the struggle shared by the Blessed Virgin and her Son was to end in the glorification of her virginal body. As the same Apostle says: When this mortal body has clothed itself in immortality, then will be fulfilled the word of Scripture: Death is swallowed up in victory.

He's dead, Jim

2010-08-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

Vincenzo's illustration of the comments on A game that made me waste time. I do get around! See his post for the video.

Thomas Merton, 14 years before Vatican II

2010-08-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

I'm reading The Sign of Jonas, which is a very personal journal that Thomas Merton kept from 1947 to 1952, about his life in the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. He writes something I want to quote or remember on just about every page. Here's a paragraph from September 1948, ending with a throwaway remark that just nails it.

Evelyn Waugh wanted to edit the English edition of The Seven Storey Mountain and has apparently already done so. I am glad. Also it seems he is going to do a feature for Life on the Church in America. The idea seems to be that there is a great Catholic revival in this country and that the future of the Church depends on us. That is all news to me. If we are supposed to be reviving, where are our saints?

A game that made me waste time

2010-08-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

Here's the game. You knock tiles off the board by clicking a square where you have a clear path to two (or more) tiles of the same color. Mistakes knock time off the clock. My highest score after five or six attempts is 90.

I'll be very busy at work for these two weeks-- heck, nearly working full time-- so the world will be somewhat deprived of my bloggy wisdom during that time. It's amazing how well everyone gets along without it.

Incidentally, this blog gets spammed with a lot of comments from spambots, advertising various dubious links. That's why I have it hold comments for my approval on all posts older than two weeks. The other day I got a spam comment that I almost wanted to approve. It said, "I'm currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don't approve this they will kill me. Please send help!"

I probably would have approved it if it hadn't been accompanied by some rather inappropriate ads.

Fresh-brewed coconut caramel crunch coffee from Kauai

2010-08-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

My mommy just made me some, with half cream on top whipped into a foam, and raw sugar sprinkled on top of that.

Just had to share my happiness. :)

Paean to the universal nature of the Catholic Church

2010-08-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I just had no idea what to title this post. :)

Fr. Jeremy, a priest who used to be stationed at St. Peter Chanel, was back in our area recently, spending some of his vacation with his old parishioners. (Awww....) So Peter and Tam threw a big potluck and pool party for him on Sunday afternoon and had about 75 people over to their house. I think they would have invited the whole church if there'd been room.

The party began with all of us gathered in the living room. Our hosts have six kids and most of the guests were families they'd met through homeschooling, so there were lots of children there. One of the little girls made the rounds with dozens of Rosaries hanging from her arms, and once we all had one we prayed the Rosary, followed by the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, followed by a big ol' blessing of various items that people had brought: water, salt, oil, candles. The blessings were taken from old Roman Ritual books, translated from the Latin. So, for example, the blessing for salt ran,

P: O salt, creature of God, I exorcise you by the living (+) God, by the true (+) God, by the holy (+) God, by the God who ordered you to be poured into the water by Elisha the prophet, so that its life-giving powers might be restored. I exorcise you so that you may become a means of salvation for believers, that you may bring health of soul and body to all who make use of you, and that you may put to flight and drive away from the places where you are sprinkled; every apparition, villainy, turn of devilish deceit, and every unclean spirit; adjured by him who will come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire.

R: Amen

P: Let us pray. Almighty and everlasting God, we humbly implore you, in your immeasurable kindness and love, to bless this (+) salt which you created and gave to the use of mankind, so that it may become a source of health for the minds and bodies of all who make use of it. May it rid whatever it touches or sprinkles of all uncleanness, and protect it from every assault of evil spirits. Through Christ our Lord.

R: Amen.

And then the blessed salt was used in the blessing of holy water. All the praying and everything must have taken about 45 minutes, and I was impressed by how still the kids were during that time. They weren't perfect, but they were quieter than I would have expected. Here's a really wide-angle picture of the blessings (Adonela on the left is bathed in a heavenly white glow.)

After all that, we pigged out on a great variety of food and watched the kids disport themselves in the yard and the swimming pool. Adonela and I had to leave early to make it to the evening Mass, and Tam, our hostess, came to hug us goodbye and thank us with her usual grace, as if we'd done her a favor by coming.

"Thank you so much for having us!" I told her. "I really loved that we started with prayer. How many parties have that?"

"Yes, we were trying to think, 'How can we make this party different from all the others?'"

"It was great of you to host so many of us!"

"Well, when we got this house we promised God we'd find a way to share the blessing with other people!"

Then the next weekend, Shane and Mary were having their newly-adopted son baptized. A big crowd showed up that Saturday morning for the baptism. There were eight altar boys at the Mass that followed; it looked like every boy who knew how to serve had thrown on a cassock and joined in. Father said something in the sermon about the child now being a part of the family of God, and then he paused and looked at him, being held by his parents in the front row. "You all can't see it, but he's smiling!"

After the Mass we all drove to a nearby park, where the new parents provided a catered lunch. Joanne and I got Gary talking about the foundation of America's government versus an ideal government from the Catholic perspective, and we were so fascinated that hours slipped by and the party was over by the time we looked up. I laughed when I saw this picture of the water balloon contest, because I hadn't even noticed it while it was going on, even though it was right beside us and Joanne and I got splashed. We were too busy solving the problems of the world.

I was thinking, after those two fun events, about the blessing of a church community. I've been going to St. Peter Chanel for three and half years and that place just makes me happy, and parties like we had seem to extend SPC to other cities. :) And then it occurred to me that a big part of what forms the SPC community is the shared ritual, the praying together, the words we all know. We gathered at Peter and Tam's house and prayed 45 minutes straight without needing to get a good public pray-er to lead us or plan the meeting beforehand-- it was just, "Let's all pray the Rosary now," and we all started doing it. Same thing with the baptism and the Mass: we could easily participate in the ceremonies we were so familiar with.

And that made me think of the TLM that I blogged about here starting at #4-- how it was only the second time I'd met Fr. Moreau, but we didn't have to know each other to worship together. It's Mass, we both knew it, it was right there in my missal

That's a great advantage of having certain set rituals that are the same the world over. I remember the very first time I went to Mass, how I couldn't feel that I was worshiping God because it was so unfamiliar to me. But now that I do know it, I can go to Mass anywhere and join right in, even if I'm just a visitor. And the Rosary-- it felt so artificial and unspiritual the first time I knelt with the beads in one hand and a booklet in the other and tried to say it right. But it's very different when you know it, and it's perfect for a bunch of people to all pray together out loud for a while, for any intention that deserves more time than you can fill with a few ad-libbed sentences.

The other day I needed an evening Mass near work and ended up going to St. Dominic's in Eagle Rock for the first time. Lovely old church, not too much wreckovated, staffed by (you'll never guess) Dominican priests. We prayed the Rosary, then had Mass, then prayed the Chaplet, then I did a holy hour. I was stressed when I arrived, but one of the readings at Mass was consoling, and praying the Chaplet together gave me peace. I was right at home in a place I'd never been; felt a sense of community with all the people (mostly Filipino women) who were there.

It's nice to be Catholic. Seems like I can go anywhere, and there'll be a church nearby that I can waltz right in and call my own. (I have heard of parishes that just make stuff up and seriously change the ritual-- that would throw me off, but I haven't encountered that in any of the churches I've been to.) This morning I was at the Carmel of St. Teresa in Alhambra, where the chapel is simple and white except for big colorful stained glass windows. I stayed after Mass till everyone else had left and had this whole beautiful place to myself, so I knelt on the steps of the sanctuary and read John 21. (Do you ever just think about that scene? Jesus cooking up some fish by the Sea of Galilee and saying to his astonished disciples, "Come and have breakfast"?) Supposing I was a millionaire and built myself some places to pray in, it still couldn't match what I already have-- Catholic churches all over the world, open nearly all the time, where I can go and worship with like-minded people. Do you know what I mean?

Hey, speaking of visiting new churches, in a month I'm hoping to go to Carmel in Carmel. Yes, the Carmel by the sea in Carmel-by-the-Sea! It's not a vocation discernment visit or anything; we're just going to be driving through. I must be careful not to eat caramel in the Carmel in Carmel-- no, not even caramel lite-- or the interaction of three sources of carmelness will become the seed of a self-reinforcing harmonic resonance that grows through time until in ten years it reaches such amplitude that all nearby glass windows of the same frequency will be destroyed.

That's the signal that I need to stop blogging.

Rare moment of insight

2010-08-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

Things have a way of working out for me. Like last week, when I got stopped for speeding. "Were you headed somewhere in a hurry?" asked the cop. "Going to pick up my parents at the airport," I replied. To my surprise, he let me off with a warning. LAX turned out to be really crowded that night, the worst I've ever seen, and my parents were very late getting out to the curb. But I was quite late myself, and so it was perfect timing-- I pulled up to the curb, they found me in minutes, and we were out of there before I was forced to move my car and go around the loop again. It would have taken longer if the policeman hadn't stopped me.

It's like the charmed life of Bob the Dinosaur:

But I had a rare bad day today: stuff went unexpectedly wrong and people were upset with me. Feeling depressed, I reread my post below about the dumb personality test, and you know what-- it seemed to describe me well. Maybe it's not inaccurate after all; maybe my nice life just masks the undesirable aspects of my personality! I'll do my best not to learn from this. ;)

To Mistress M.R. -- Counsel concerning her choice

2010-08-04T12:49:00.000-07:00

DEAR, heav'n-designed soul!    Amongst the rest
   Of suitors that besiege your maiden breast,
   Why may not I
   My fortune try,
And venture to speak one good word,
Not for myself, alas! but for my dearer Lord?
You've seen already in this lower sphere
Of froth and bubbles, what to look for here.
Truth bids me say, 'tis time you ceased to trust
Your soul to any son of dust.
'Tis time you listen to a braver love,
   Which from above
   Calls you up higher,
   And bids you come
   And choose your room
Among his own fair sons of fire,
   Where you among
   The golden throng
   That watches at his palace doors,
   May pass along
And follow those fair stars of yours;
Stars much too fair and pure to wait upon
The false smiles of a sublunary sun.
Sweet, let me prophesy, that at last 'twill prove
   Your wary love
Lays up his purer and more precious vows,
And means them for a far more worthy spouse
Than this world of lies can give you:
Ev'n for him with whom nor cost
Nor love, nor labour can be lost;
Him who never will deceive you.
Let not my Lord, the mighty lover
Of souls, disdain that I discover
   The hidden art
Of His high stratagem to win your heart.
   It was His heav'nly art
   Kindly to cross you
   In your mistaken love.
   That, at the next remove,
   Thence He might toss you,
   And strike your troubled heart
Home to Himself; to hide it in His breast,
   The bright ambrosial nest,
Of love, of life, and everlasting rest.
   Happy mistake!
That thus shall wake
Your wise soul, never to be won
Now with a love below the Sun.
Your first choice fails, O when you choose again,
May it not be among the sons of men.

   --- Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)

Okay, maybe this order

2010-08-02T23:37:00.000-07:00

Since their apostlate appears to be cuddling with baby miniature horses. :)

Lime Cake

2010-08-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

I must have been in a fruit mood. Needing a recipe for a dinner party my parents were having, I looked up cakes on Tasty Kitchen and picked out the lemon cake... the mango raspberry cake... the strawberry shortcake cake... the rhubarb cake... the lime cake... and one inexcusable chocolate cake covered in caramel pecan praline sauce which I will never make. I settled on the Lime Sheet Cake with White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting.

You start by zesting and juicing two limes. Then add a french vanilla cake mix, eggs, sour cream, oil and water. Dump it all in a bowl.

When it's mixed it looks like a sour-cream-and-chives vegetable dip. I decided to add just one drop of green food color.

It looked nice being mixed in, but then the color seemed to disappear and I wondered if I'd added enough. The baked cake layers didn't really look green. But once I'd cut them open-- perfect! Just a bit of green, light enough that people could believe it came naturally from the lime zest.

Into the oven with you!

Perhaps you've wondered, "Why does Rachel make so many sweets?" My people, this is why. There is no greater food-related pleasure than licking out the bowl. If my mom were doing this, she'd scrape the bowl much cleaner and have almost nothing left to enjoy. Mom weighs about 110 and looks fabulous. I lick out the bowl.

I lost track of time and the layers darkened too much at the edges and cracked in the middle. But that won't matter much. Oh, the recipe called for this all to be baked on a big sheet pan, but I wanted a layer cake so I had to bake the batter in 8" pans for much longer than the recipe called for. Don't ask how long-- I lost track, remember?

When I quit my job two years ago, I was given a really nice (and heavy) marble cake stand that a co-worker's mother had bought at the Carnegie-Mellon Museum. They invited me back six months later and I gladly accepted, so I'm at the same job still, but I didn't give back the farewell presents. :) This cake stand has a raised medallion in the center, and I wasn't sure how that was supposed to work with a cake, but I decided to just go for it.

It was a bit nervewracking trying to center the layer of cake perfectly, 'cause it's not going to slide when it's on top of that raised medallion thing (maybe that's what it's there for?) Fortunately I got it right. You can't exactly hold the layer upside down and slowly position it perfectly, 'cause the cake might fall apart under its own weight. So you just flip it over quickly and hope for the best.

The white chocolate frosting looked great. Meditate upon its whitechocolateyness:

Frosting is one of the most fun steps, I think.

Spread it out and then it's time to slap on the second layer.

Drat. Off-center.

Fortunately, on frosting it slides right over.

Now to frost the sides! (You might notice I cut off the burnt edge. That wasn't because I was longing for a piece to snack on or anything.)

The main problem with baking too long is that the darkened edges want to show through the frosting. But once all the frosting was on and evenly spread out, it was fine. Like love, frosting covers over a multitude of sins.

Now for the top...

I just slapped the frosting on quickly and smoothed it out roughly, but it already looks great. I stuck it in the fridge after this to firm up the frosting a bit, and then I obsessively smoothed it out for ten minutes, at the end of which the cake looked... about as good as it does in this picture.

The final stage. It was my mom who took a potato peeler to the third lime we happened to have. I didn't think the idea would work out, but Mom's usually right and the peel was a perfect decoration, looking pretty and effectively communicating, "This is lime cake you're looking at."

It's too bad I wasn't making this cake for someone named Elizabeth. I don't know what her last initial would be anyway.

I just know that it was a nice summer cake, not too sweet and full of lime flavor. And the frosting was a perfect complement.

And by the end of the night the nine of us had polished it off.

St. Ignatius of Loyola and Jesuitical conspiracy stuff

2010-07-31T18:31:00.000-07:00

It's St. Ignatius' feast day! He founded the Jesuit order in the 1500's, and for some reason today I kept remembering a scene from The Man in the Iron Mask, when Aramis, who has become a Catholic priest, meets in a secret crypt with his former Musketeer buddies: Athos, Porthos, and D'Artagnan. He tells them that the wicked King of France, Louis the WhateverNumber, has commanded him to find out the identity of the secret leader of the Jesuits, and kill him. "Let the secret leader of the Jesuits worry about that," suggests Porthos. "The problem is," says Aramis, "I am he." And he goes on to ask the Musketeers to join him in a plot to replace the king with a lookalike.

Doesn't have a whole lot to do with the awesome spirituality of St. Ignatius, but it is an interesting indication of how the Jesuits came to be viewed in certain sectors of the secular world. St. Ignatius wanted complete loyalty to the Pope to be one of the hallmarks of his order. In fact he made it a fourth vow, added to the traditional religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. While the Jesuits were still young, St. Ignatius and some of his followers presented themselves in Rome and asked the Pope to command them, and the Pope told St. Ignatius to send missionaries to the East. So St. Ignatius sent St. Francis Xavier, telling him "Go, set all on fire!" and St. Francis Xavier converted thousands in India, then went on to Japan and died on his way to China. St. Ignatius in the meantime developed the Spiritual Exercises, which are a series of meditations to help you order the disorder in your life and live entirely for God. He was big into the question of how to know and do the will of God, and how to recognize when you're being deceived and the impulse you're sensing is not from God. The fourteen basic rules he wrote about this are explained in a most useful book called The Discernment of Spirits.

Incidentally, the Jesuits were active as missionaries in North America in the 1600's, at the same time as the Pilgrims were settling here. Some of them were tortured and killed. One of them was tortured, escaped back to France, and begged to return to the Indians, who killed him. His journal revealed his burning desire to be martyred for Christ; I think only the Holy Spirit could have inspired it.

But I was talking about loyalty to the Pope. That came to be viewed as a threat in some countries. The Jesuits were a big, successful, well-educated order that made a lot of converts and had a lot of influence-- apparently at one time the Superior General of the order was known as the Black Pope because he was supposedly the second most powerful man in the Church (Jesuits wear black and the Pope wears white). And since their ultimate loyalty lay with the Pope and not with the secular leaders of the various European countries in which they lived, those European leaders suspected them as a source of foreign influence.

So there was some huge conflict involving lots of politics and not enough religion, and the upshot was that for a time the Jesuit order was actually suppressed. The Pope, to keep the peace with the political leaders in France-- or was it Spain? I'm telling this history off the top of my head-- shut down the Jesuits entirely. I think the order never really recovered.

But in the early 1800's an Italian priest named Pio Bruno Lanteri had a Jesuit as a spiritual director. This was when the order was suppressed, so maybe the director wasn't officially a Jesuit any more, but he taught Fr. Lanteri the Jesuit spirituality-- the Exercises of St. Ignatius, and the rules of discernment and all the rest. And Fr. Lanteri, influenced by this Jesuit, decided to found a new order that would propagate this spirituality and focus on helping laypeople grow in holiness by teaching it to them. They'd sort of be Jesuits, but legal.

The order that he founded was called the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, and it still exists today and it's the order that runs my parish. :) And, mirable dictu, they are still faithful to their founder's vision and they teach the Exercises all the time. I've done two eight-day Ignatian retreats-- one last summer and one the summer before that-- under the direction of our priests. It was such a privilege to be able to do that. They also continuously teach the Exercises in a ten-week format so people who can't take all that vacation time can just meditate for one hour every day and meet in a group every week to learn about Ignatian spirituality and get the meditations for the next week and so on. I've done that twice too; I'm sort of a Spiritual Exercises junkie. It's a GREAT program, and for many it's life-changing. I think a few thousand people have joined in now! They come from other parishes, from all over the area. If you live near L.A., you should do it. :)

Update: Seriously, you should do it, and here's a message from the SPC parishioner who coordinates it all: "To get more information and to register for the next session (which begins the week of September 18), contact Jim Martorana at 562 924 5193 or anarotram@verizon.net. The program will be offered at 3 different times each week for your convenience. " If you're reading this after September 18 has passed, email Jim anyway. The ten-week cycle of Exercises usually starts again at our church as soon as the previous cycle has finished. The address is St. Peter Chanel, 12001 E. 214th St., Hawaiian Gardens, CA.

Wow, I wasn't even planning to go into all that, but anyway now you know why I like St. Ignatius of Loyola so much-- the Oblates of the Virgin Mary are pretty good at teaching about him.

Now, to my knowledge the Jesuits have never had a secret leader, nor been involved in replace-the-king plots. And I don't think anyone has to worry today about their dangerous loyalty to the Pope, because a large swath of the order (which was re-formed once the suppression against them was lifted) went kind of crazy liberal in the 60's and started more or less advocating against certain Catholic teachings of which the Pope is the principal exponent. A year or two ago they had a big meeting of the order to elect a new superior general, and one of their leaders gave a speech at that meeting explaining that their loyalty to the Pope really means that they're loyal to the Pope of the future, the Pope we're surely going to have one day, the one who will agree with everything the Jesuits are already teaching and doing. They're not loyal to this current Pope, because heaven knows he's too Catholic for them...

It's so ironic that the Jesuits are like that, because if you Google "Black Pope" you still find some whacked-out conspiracy-theory sites explaining that the Jesuits would kill for the Pope, just like the albino assassin monk in The Da Vinci Code, and they're coming to get us all!!! If that's the case, they've certainly taken secrecy and disguise to new heights. In fact, that's rather a neat explanation of the sad changes the order has undergone... they're all just going undercover to fight the Pope's battles in enemy territory... I like it. One almost wishes it were true. Like that Jack Chick tract that warns, "The name of every Protestant church member in the world is being recorded in the big computer in the Vatican." You just wish we were that organized. I thought the same five years ago when a Democrat congressman suggested that Karl Rove had deliberately planted the Rathergate memos to destroy Dan Rather's credibility. If that were true, how totally awesome would that be?

Okay, link time. Here's Laetitia Crucis, who is proving to be very much like me in lots of delightful ways, blogging about St. Ignatius.

And here's a translation of a prayer he wrote:

I love Thee, O Thou Lord most high,
Because Thou first has loved me;
I seek no other liberty
But that of being bound by Thee.

May memory no thought suggest
But shall to Thy pure glory tend,
My understanding find no rest
Except in Thee, its only end.

My God, I here protest to Thee
No other will I have than Thine;
Whatever Thou hast giv'n to me
I here again to Thee resign.

All mine is Thine; say but the word,
Whate'er Thou willest shall be done;
I know Thy love, all-gracious Lord —
I know it seeks my good alone.

Apart from Thee all things are nought;
Then grant, O my supremest Bliss,
Grant me to love Thee as I ought —
Thou givest all in giving this.

I learned that song from the Echoes of Ephesus CD here.

And now I must be going-- we have company tomorrow and I'm in charge of dessert. Hard life, I know.

St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us. :)

Take this dumb personality test!

2010-07-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

In the middle ages it was popular to classify personalities according to the four humors: phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, and sanguine. Without knowing too much about the four categories, I figured I must be phlegmatic because I'm generally a calm and happy person. Then a spiritual director called me melancholic. Then I found this 107-question test via Lapsus Linguae and decided to settle the matter. Result: 88% melancholic and 12% phlegmatic. "That sounds fine," I thought, but then I read the analysis and nearly gagged. Who is this irritating person they're describing? Maybe I didn't understand how they meant most of the questions. Once I took a joke test that insulted all the takers by telling them the bad sides of themselves (making fun of how most personality tests are relentlessly positive) and even that test seemed more accurate than this one.

Two things are true: I instinctively want to say "no" to any request or proposal the first time I hear it, and I have a double dose of introversion. :) And a strong desire to succeed, only if success is defined entirely my way and not the world's conventional way. But "long-lasting hurts, an erosion of self-confidence and self-esteem, and even depression", "highly attentive to what others need or desire", "a tendency to hypochondria or to genuine physical weaknesses, as well as a tendency to timidity and anxiety"-- where the heck did all that come from?

Having read my ringing endorsement, you should take the test yourself here! Be sure to log in first or the site will lose your results-- very annoying. If you wish, sign in as Duckface, password Faceduck. And I'd be highly interested to hear your results and whether you agree with them-- post your results in the comments or on your own blog. Consider yourself tagged. :)

Here's my profile (gag gag):

The Melancholic / Phlegmatic
The melancholic-phlegmatic is tidier, more procedural and less flexible than the phlegmatic-melancholic. He may be slower to take on new projects, as the melancholic fear of new situations and tendency to perfectionism takes over. The double-dose of introversion, along with the melancholic tendency to negativity, makes it difficult for him to give compliments and make upbeat small talk. It also causes him to instinctively say “no” when he first hears a request. Others may perceive this as “snobbishness.” Unless the melancholic-phlegmatic is very comfortable, and is surrounded by understanding long-time friends, he may find himself somewhat isolated and alone, unable to warm up in a social gathering. He is less critical and less grudge-bearing than a pure melancholic or a melancholic-choleric. However, the tendency of the melancholic to dwell on things for a long time in their mind, combined with the sensitivity of the phlegmatic toward interpersonal relationships, can result in long-lasting hurts, an erosion of self-confidence and self-esteem, and even depression. Extremely sensitive and possessing a longing for the ideal (melancholic), they are also highly attentive to what others need or desire, through their phlegmatic aspect. This makes them more than usually susceptible to anxiety and a negative self-image
This temperament combination is highly driven to succeed—not for success’ sake alone, but because their melancholic nature is drawn to high ideals, and their phlegmatic side will have a strong desire to please. Thus, they are capable of long-range planning, organization, and attention to detail that makes them excellent and conscientious scholars. They are capable of pursuing highly idealistic goals, usually with long-term academic requirements, such as attaining their doctorate. They value their friendships, but can spend many hours alone reading or studying. They may have a tendency to hypochondria or to genuine physical weaknesses, as well as a tendency to timidity and anxiety, especially about new activities or ventures.
One melancholic-phlegmatic we know is highly organized, critical, slow, and dogmatically unforgiving, yet reveals her phlegmatic aspect in her intense discomfort with confrontation (unless she is very at ease among the warring members) and in her strong relationships with her friends. You wouldn’t guess that she is so devoted to her friends, however, because true to her melancholic nature she rarely initiates contact with them – they always have to call her first. A tendency to avoid the stresses of social interaction by spending overmuch time alone—whether in scholarly pursuits or reading for relaxation—is something that melancholic-phlegmatics need to watch out for.

Sunrise nectarine cupcakes

2010-07-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

The August 2010 issue of Martha Stewart Living offers a recipe for nectarine cupcakes. I added the "Sunrise" part this morning when I photographed them at dawn. :)

Isn't it a joy when a recipe turns out much better than you'd hoped? That's what happened with these guys. I got my heart set on making them and went to the grocery store for nectarines, but they were nearly all hard as apples. So I picked one hard one and some of the softest I could find, but I found when I got home that the soft ones were beginning to rot. I ended up using the one hard, unripe, tart nectarine-- fortunately it was a big one. Here it is, cut up and ready.

I put some batter in each cup and piled nectarines on top.

Then I didn't have enough batter left to cover the nectarines.

So apprehensively I stuck the tray in the oven to bake, and here's what it looked like twenty-six minutes later:

Lovely! They came out very well!

Cheered, I turned to the frosting, which was nothing other than the awesome frosting I'd made once before (recipe here). I'd already cooked the flour and milk mixture-- it thickens very quickly-- and stuck it in the fridge to cool to room temp. What resulted was this unappetizing conglomeration:

But just whip it up with butter, sugar, vanilla, and touch of orange gel coloring, and all is right with the world.

Time to frost these suckers.

And now to taste one for quality control...

Yuuuum! The nectarines inside were perfect! It didn't matter that they weren't ripe, because they already had nectarine-y flavor and all they really lacked was sweetness, which the cupcake batter provided. This cupcake was so delicious warm, but as you can see it wilted the frosting. The frosting still has texture issues and really needs to be kept in the fridge. If I could somehow dissolve the sugar... this is why most frosting recipes use powdered sugar rather than granulated. Anyway, no matter-- it's tasty frosting and not as heavy as a traditional buttercream.

I cut a cupcake open the next day for the dramatic dawn portrait:

Perfect for summertime. :) Here's the recipe:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup whole milk (I used 2% and it was fine)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature. (I only had salted butter, so I used that and cut out the 1/4 teaspoon salt. Salted butter contains 1/4 to 3/4 teaspoons of salt in every stick of butter.)
3/4 cup sugar
2 large eggs
2 medium nectarines, chopped in little pieces (1 1/4 cups) The recipe says to peel them, but I didn't bother.
Optional: I had lemons on hand, so I zested one (that is, I used a really fine grater to grate off all the outer layer of skin) and added that to the batter. Another time I might put lemon juice in the frosting too.

Preheat oven to 350°. Mix flour, baking powder and salt. Stir together milk and vanilla. Beat butter and sugar on medium speed till pale and fluffy, about three minutes. Add eggs one at a time and mix after each. (The recipe says to add them with the mixer running, which would guarantee you'd drop shells in the batter-- forget it!) Beat in the flour mixture in three additions, alternating with the milk mixture.

Line a standard muffin tin with baking cups. The recipe says to fill twelve baking cups with one tablespoon batter each, then add 1 heaping tablespoon of nectarines and an additional 2 tablespoons batter. What I found was that I had enough batter for 1 tablespoon on bottom, then nectarines, then one more tablespoon on top-- and only if I made eleven cupcakes instead of twelve. Evidently I was very generous with my tablespoons.

Bake until edges start to turn golden, about 25 minutes. Let cupcakes cool.

Now, you can frost with the awesome frosting I used, adding just a little bit of orange color (if you have red and yellow liquid colors, I think five drops of yellow with one of red would do it), or you can use the magazine's suggestion, which is: Whisk together 1 cup cold heavy cream, 1/2 cup sour cream, and three tablespoons sugar until the mixture forms medium peaks. Top cupcakes with a dollop of cream and a few very thin nectarine slices. If you're going to store the cupcakes overnight, don't top them with topping until you're ready to serve them.

If you like dogs, this'll make you happy

2010-07-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

A video of dogs.

When I see them surfing, riding in a motorcycle sidecar, catching frisbees, and swimming underwater, I think that it's amazing what dogs will do to be close to their humans.

A t-shirt

2010-07-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Pictured is Mike Mason, an author who must be good if he chooses to be photographed in a shirt like that. :)

How to know if you're called

2010-07-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

I was reading the blog of a Franciscan named Matt who just finished postulancy and entered novitiate a few days ago, and he had a post on the question he's often asked, "How do you know you have a vocation?" It's hard to sum up, he replies, but there are some things that don't make a vocation:

I'd say that one who approaches religious life and its struggles as something to be "conquered" or "overcome" perhaps doesn't have a vocation. Religious life is not something that's meant to be triumphed over nor is it a competition between who can and can't survive the gauntlet.

My first response was to wonder, "Is that a guy thing?" I certainly never felt the slightest temptation to tackle religious life as a challenge to beat into submission. It's more like something God had better help me with, or I'll never make it! But then I'm a bit indolent. Maybe there are some women, now that I think about it, who'd approach it in a more competitive spirit.

I have a little story about this question of how you can know if you're called to religious life. Well, a long story. Goes like this: three years ago the pastor of my parish pulled me aside after Mass and said he wanted to speak to me. I didn't know him well at that time, so I was a bit surprised, but I followed him into his confessional. The confessionals at St. Peter Chanel are on the large side, and they also serve as offices for the priests and meeting spaces for small groups if you shove the screens out of the way. We desperately need more proper classrooms, but in the meantime I have fond memories of packing thirteen people into a cozy confessional for a talk on the Ignatian Exercises or a discussion of St. Faustina's Diary. One of the confessionals even has its own bathroom inside-- I kid you not-- and a back door that could allow the lucky priest to escape obnoxious penitents before they get to him, though I'm sure that never happens. :) Yes, and the rooms are used for their ostensible purpose too; my parish has five Masses a day and there are priests hearing confessions at all of them but the 6 AM Mass. I'm just bragging now.

I followed the pastor into his confessional, extremely curious about what he had to say to me, and he soon came to the point: "I wanted to ask you if you've ever thought of becoming a nun."

I paused, wondering how to put my whole tangle of feelings into words, and then said simply, "You know, I have."

To be honest I was just a little bit piqued. I think I'd had an idea that some day I would announce dramatically, "Father, I believe I'm called to be a nun!" and he'd say, "Wow, that's amazing, I'm thrilled!" and shake my hand. But instead he asked me while I was still unsure, and sort of stole my thunder. Now I realize that most priests won't jump for joy anyway if you say you want to be a nun. They take it pretty calmly; I'm guessing that they've known many people who consider the idea and end up discerning otherwise. Maybe they also understand that if they got really excited that would put pressure on the girl not to change her mind, and then her decision would be less free than it should be.

"Well, I think that would be good," my pastor replied, and he calculated how long I'd been Catholic. Seven months-- most congregations wouldn't admit me so soon after confirmation, he told me. But he said that Sister Guadalupe, one of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy and a former parishioner of St. Peter Chanel, was coming back for a visit, and if I liked I could meet with her and talk about being a nun. I happily agreed to this.

So a week or so later I met Sister in the church and we went to Fr. Ed's confessional to talk. Scarcely had we sat down than I asked her the question uppermost on my mind: "How can I tell if I have a vocation?"

Sr. Guadalupe smiled knowingly. "Ah, the big question!" And she told me a story of her own:

"When I was first discerning I went to visit the Missionaries of Charity. They gave me a nice little room with some videos I could watch, and I sat down, just so happy to be there, and I put in a video of Mother Teresa. It was an interview that she gave, and they asked her, 'How can a girl know if she is called to be a nun?' And of course I was just putting my hands on the TV, saying, 'Yes! Please tell me! How do I know if I'm called to be a nun?'"

"What did Mother Teresa say?" I asked, as breathless for the answer as Sr. Guadalupe had been.

"She stopped," said Sr. Guadalupe, "and she smiled. And then she said, 'The girl who is called-- she knows.'"

End of story. I trust that answers all questions! Please don't thank me-- it's my pleasure to use this blog to help people discern their vocations. :)

By the way, the Franciscan whose post I quoted above has been hitting them out of the park lately. He has another post on what it's like to be young in religious life (he entered at 19), and he just added some reflections on all the changes he's going through (written just before receiving the habit.) In that last post, he writes this:

One of the things that I learned here, which maybe seems like a no-brainer, is that I need to have a radical dependence on God. Perhaps you're thinking that, as someone who is rather religious and a member of a religious community, I should certainly have known that I needed to depend on God long before I came here to Kansas. The truth is, I think that you're always aware of your need to be dependent on God and yet it takes moments of real stress, when your "cage is rattled" that you realize how important you relationship with God actually is and you begin to find deeper consolation, deeper joy, and deeper need for that relationship to grow.

I'm constantly surprised to hear that even in religious life you have to struggle and strive to grow in your relationship with God. My mind tends to keep sliding back into the habit of thinking that holiness will come really easily if I go to a convent and put on a veil. But then I'm reminded that it takes effort even for religious. And the equally important corollary is that as a layperson out in the world, I'm not excused from the effort. Sometimes I feel that my circumstances are less than ideal for growing in holiness-- there are distractions, and all sorts of things I have to do, and difficult people, and many obstacles to prayer. I told this to my spiritual director and he (a religious priest) smiled knowingly and said that very likely I'd find the same thing in the convent.

Oh, I'm just gonna link to Matt's whole blog. I'm waiting breathless to hear if he'll learn how to walk around without getting his new Rosary caught on everything.

And if you insist on more serious guidance for discerning your vocation, here's a very clear-cut way to figure things out.

Alarms

2010-07-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

I've been so busy lately, but I hope you all appreciate the clever blog posts I've been composing in my head and never publishing. :)

This morning around 3:50 AM I was gradually awakened by a weird repeated sound very close by-- right next to me on the bed, in fact. It didn't sound anything like an alarm clock's tone, but it was persistent like an alarm, and like an alarm it was dragging me out of sleep, so I quite naturally attempted to silence it by bringing my whole arm down upon it, palm opened and flat to slap the snooze button. It wasn't my alarm I slapped, though. It was the fuzzy wuzzy cat, who'd been repeatedly flexing her claws into my tightly woven comforter. At any rate, it worked-- the sound stopped and I went right back to sleep. Forty minutes later the real alarm went off. That one I couldn't silence with a slap, because (knowing myself well) I'd placed it all the way across the room, to force myself to get out of bed to shut it up.

At least I haven't required the flying alarm clock. When it starts shrieking, the key that's required to shut it off goes flying away and you have to get up and chase it down. :)

Found another order I'm not joining

2010-07-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

The scary cat nuns who run hospitals on New Earth. Just not my thing. Someone needs to run a caption contest on this picture, though...

Update: This must be one of their adorable novices!

A sign I use the computer too much

2010-07-21T19:53:00.000-07:00

My cat has to do this to get my attention:

Big lemons

2010-07-21T19:49:00.000-07:00

The lemon tree in the backyard is dropping about eleven lemons a day. And some of them are... pretty big.

My arms are still sore from lemon-squeezing on Monday, but there's nothing for it-- gotta get these puppies juiced before a few dozen more fall. So I just engaged in an hourlong wrestling session with the juicer and the ginormous, thick-skinned lemons.

Actually most of them are a more reasonable size. In fact I'm intrigued by the size variation to be found on one tree:

In my family we make very strong lemonade, maybe three parts water to one part lemon juice, and about the same volume of sugar as of juice. The result exfoliates in unexpected places and is more acidic than many lab chemicals I handle with gloves. But for those who can stomach its lemony power, it's FAR more tasty than the silly lemon-scented water currently sold in stores under the name of "lemonade".

Maybe I'll take some into work and see what my co-workers make of it...

Humbly I bow to the master of Catholic desserts

2010-07-20T18:20:00.000-07:00

Brown scapular brownies for the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. I acknowledge this woman as my superior, and I only hope that she will allow me to live.

Three random things

2010-07-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of stuff to do... many emails to answer, for one... but first, some short links! Here's a property Mel Gibson just sold, and I must say he's got good taste in houses. I really like that old English half-timbered look, and with Gothic arches too!

Second, just read the bizarre opening sentence of this article.

Finally, I must post a poem I came across in an old book. The poem was written around 1910 by a student at Eton, the very posh boarding school in England for boys age 13-18 that was founded six centuries ago by King Henry VI and has produced many famous leaders and writers. The main thing to remember is that the writer of this profound poem was high school age. He addressed it to one of his teachers.

I, who have made you songs in terza rima,
I, who have droned you dirges for a cat,
Aye, and could sing lamenting for a lemur,
(Well may you wonder what I'm aiming at),

I, who have dabbled in the dreams of Dante,
I, who have gibbered of the Golden Age,
I, though my brain be fatuous and scanty,
Though I be not a prophet or a sage,

I, who of old (the nominative pendent
Is just a joke-- there is no verb at all)
Like some bright planet in the sky resplendent,
Clad in a cloud, empurpled in a pall--

I, who at last have altered my intention,
And like the rain upon the drooping herb,
Gentle geranium or gaudy gentian,
Send you the crowning mercy of a verb,

I, who am I, and no one shall deny it,
I, who am I, and who shall say me nay?--
Yes, on the house-tops and the hills I cry it,
I have forgotten what I meant to say.

Macarons' New Popularity Worries Fans

2010-07-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

Little did I know I was stepping into the middle of a passionate culture war:

Mon Dieu! Will Newfound Popularity Spoil the Dainty Macaron?
Parisian Treat Goes Mainstream; McDonald's Recipe Has Provenance

Once the preserve of high-end French patisseries such as Ladurée and Pierre Hermé, macarons are showing up at retailers like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Starbucks. Even McDonald's is selling a scaled-down version in its McCafés in France, backed by ads showing two hands holding the tiny treat like a hamburger.
Instead of celebrating, however, fans of the meringue-like pastry have been whipped into a frenzy.
"Macarons are not meant to be mainstream," sniffs Laetitia Brock, a native of Paris who has been blogging about French culture from Washington for the past six years...Her negative blog post about the trend elicited a tempest over the tea cake.

There's some useful background in the article, as follows:

The word macaron comes from "the Italian maccherone and the Venetian macarone (meaning fine paste), from which macaroni is also derived," says Larousse Gastronomique, the encyclopedia of French cooking.... The English spelling is "macaroon," but the French confection is not to be confused with the dense chewy treat made with sweetened coconut.

Deacon Quan!

2010-07-10T22:54:00.000-07:00

Three years ago in May I joined a group of fifty people, mostly from St. Peter Chanel, for a pilgrimage to Mexico. In the group I met Quan. He was on summer break after his first year in seminary, and was still discerning whether it was God's will for him to be a priest. Our group visited the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a bunch of other wonderful Catholic sites, and as I had only been received into the Church the month before it was all new and thrilling to me. One night in the beautiful town of Puebla I found myself awake while my two roommates were fast asleep, so I knelt and prayed a Rosary for Quan's vocation and for my own (I had some inkling that I might be a nun.)

I thought of that today while I watched Quan and five others be ordained deacons for the Diocese of Orange. Lord willing they'll all be ordained priests next year. Great is God's faithfulness; He knows the path ahead though we do not, and it's astounding to look back and see all that He's done.

It was a fine ordination Mass. Quintilingual: I think I heard Vietnamese, Spanish, English, Korean and Latin spoken and sung. The entrance song was "Jesus Christ, You Are My Life", which I've loved ever since I heard it in this video to which Jen once linked. A Vietnamese song got lots of congregational participation, which wasn't surprising as four of the six ordinands were Vietnamese and it looked like lots of family had turned out. The Holy Family Cathedral of Orange was packed to the gills (but not to the rafters. Those rafters were really high.)

One remarkable feature of the entrance and exit processions was the thurifer swinging his censer in a full 360° circle every few steps. He was precise about it so it didn't look like he was just messing around, but still, aren't there glowing hot coals in that thing? Anyone ever seen that trick before?

The congregation burst into applause as the new deacons processed out, and no wonder, for they're enriching us all by giving their lives to serve God's Church. I thought it would have been great if the applause had lasted for the long line of priests that followed behind them, but that would have worn out everyone's hands. It reminded me of a concert the Alhambra Carmelites gave. Mother Regina Marie introduced all the sisters in the various stages of formation: candidates in black suits, postulants in blue, novices with white veils, black-veiled sisters under temporary vows, "and then there are the fully professed sisters. They're not as exciting as the others, but they are the tried and the true."

After Mass I joined up with Diep and Jeanne, two friends who were on that Mexico pilgrimage, and we chowed down in the fellowship hall. I declared I liked what many of the Vietnamese women were wearing: a long dress, often in lovely sparkly colors, with a skirt slit up both sides and loose pants underneath. "If it were in fashion I'd dress like that every day," said I. Diep has worn such a dress, and she commented that the back part of the skirt can end up in the toilet bowl.

On a somewhat more elevated note, we worked our way over to Quan and told him how good it was to see him ordained. He can't give priestly blessings (yet), but we huddled around while he prayed a really nice prayer for us. We learned he'll be stationed at a parish this summer and then it's back to the Angelicum in Rome for more seminary study. But I'm not jealous.

Now we're all supposed to pray for the new deacons that if God wills we'll see them ordained priests next year. Ha! You didn't know that reading this post to the end would trap you in an obligation, did you? Well, too late now!

Update: Pictures of the event here! I'm in one of them (along with all the rest of the congregation... good luck finding me.)

Raspberry white chocolate ganache

2010-07-10T17:34:00.000-07:00

I have an addendum to my macarons post. I used a raspberry mascarpone filling on that first try, but a few days later I made more macaron shells from the same recipe (here) and filled them with something even better: raspberry white chocolate ganache (recipe at the end of this PDF tutorial).

This time I used only a teaspoon of powdered pink coloring in one batch, and no coloring at all in the next batch. Here are some of the cookies after I piped them, drying out and forming the requisite shell on top.

Then for the ganache I began with heavy cream, always a great way to start.

I heated it and threw in raspberry jam and white chocolate, which at first didn't look like much:

It got more reasonable once it was mixed:

I then took a break (and a picture of the cat relaxing outside.) The ganache needed to cool way down before it would be thick enough to pipe.

Piping is a lot easier than spooning the filling out, once you've set everything up for it.

And there we are! I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of a bitten macaron-- the pink ones were pinker on the inside. Another time I might add red food color to the filling, because raspberry without coloring takes on that grayish color. But no matter; it tasted wonderful. :)

I figured I'd better publish this post before I made yet more macarons, which... might be pretty soon. :) Perhaps I'll even get around to posting about something other than food, one of these days.

Earthquaaaaake!

2010-07-07T16:55:00.001-07:00

Right now! It just swayed the lab around for about thirty seconds, but never got violent. I feel like it's still shaking, but that's probably just my inner ear.

Update 9:45 pm: Okay, so it turns out it was a pretty boring earthquake. Made some lamps swing and some swimming pools wave. Here are home movies.

A peach of a header

2010-07-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

I should be punished for that pun, but Vincenzo made me a lovely header that conveys my blog's food obsession and looks perfect for summer, too!

Georgia On My Mind Peach Crisp

2010-07-05T20:01:00.000-07:00

You'd think this was supposed to be a food blog, the way it's been nothing but desserts lately... but look: we have a peach tree, and it is spectacular right now.

That's not the whole tree. That's just a branch that's so laden with fruit that it leaned out to the side and had to be propped up in several places. See:

There's the whole tree. It goes on and on. And it's full of amazing-looking peaches like this one:

And they all seem to ripen at once, and right now if you jiggle the branch they just fall right off.

Soooo many peaches...

(My photographer new-father cousin strikes again.)

It must be some kind of venial sin to waste food, so that means it's morally incumbent upon me to make peach crisp. And here's the best recipe for peach crisp that I've ever found-- except that there's no reason to dilute peaches with apples, and the fruit juice is completely unnecessary; our peaches are so juicy on their own! So I suggest this modified version of it:

Peach filling:
7 medium peaches (or however many you have), skinned and cut in pieces
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Topping:
1/3 cup pecans, finely chopped
2/3 cup oats
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
7-8 tablespoons butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350°F and cut up the peaches. Spray a 7" x 11" or 8" x 8" pan with cooking spray. Mix all the peach filling ingredients together and spread out in the pan. Mix all the topping ingredients together and spread over the peach filling. Bake until juices start to bubble, 30-40 minutes. Serve at once unless you're serving to fools who'll burn their mouths. It's incredible right out of the oven and also great warmed up the next day in the microwave. Doesn't really travel well-- the topping wants to sink into the filling.

No need for pictures with such a simple recipe, so let's end the post here-- HAHAHA! PSYCH! Of course there are pictures.

So I cut the peaches:

Added the spices and such:

Mixed it all up and spread it in the pan:

Slapped on the topping:

And baked it. You can't tell from the picture, but this was right after I took it out of the oven and the juice was still bubbling. :)

Thirty minutes later it looked like this:

Yeah, it goes fast. I wasn't the only one scarfing it down, but I made the major contribution.

And you can see why:

This would be great with ice cream or whipped cream, but I inhaled it too fast for that. :)

Update: My dad polished off most of the rest last night, but kindly left me a bit for breakfast this morning. I estimate the total survival time of the peach crisp at twelve hours.

Vietnamese Coffee Jello

2010-07-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

It's the perfect time for an All-American dessert, so I threw together a little something I saw here, which borrowed the picture from here, which got the recipe here. Apparently Vietnamese coffee is mixed with sweetened condensed milk (what a fine idea!), and the Food Librarian was genius enough to jello-ize it. It's easy and fast to prepare-- a welcome change.

So, first you make strong coffee and dissolve some unflavored gelatin in it. I used four teaspoons of instant coffee in two cups hot water, and that wasn't nearly strong enough; I would at least double that amount. (I know nothing about making coffee because I prefer tea for all my hot-caffeine-drink needs. I only have instant on hand because it's so great in recipes.)

Sweetened condensed milk is just the greatest stuff. I want to use it more recipes now. You pour a whole can in there:

And stir it all in.

Pour it into a pan:

It's soft set after about two hours, but to cut it in neat cubes you'll probably want longer than that so it'll really firm up.

Then just enjoy the mysterious gleaming cubes of goodness!

I think it calls for whipped cream, but do as you feel led.

Want to know the best fireworks display I ever saw? It was the year I was driving from San Diego to Los Angeles on July 4 in the evening. There are dozens of cities on the way, and in each one I could see little private fireworks shows (legal or not). I also passed some big shows (Disneyland's is incredible). Two hours of watching my fellow Americans celebrate in neighborhood after neighborhood. :) Happy Fourth of July!

Baby!

2010-07-03T09:51:00.000-07:00

Charlie, my first cousin once removed, is the cutest. I got to snuggle him last weekend when his parents visited from Virginia.

This child never stops smiling-- here he is with his mommy:

And on his daddy's first Father's Day:

Those are just two of hundreds of great shots. Charlie's dad is such an inveterate photographer that he snapped a picture of his bride while she was walking down the aisle... so you can just imagine how many shots he takes of his baby son. :) I love to see them all on Facebook.

7 Quick Takes Friday-- Latin manuscripts, red animals, etc.

2010-07-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

Here's Jen's post

--- 1 ---

We had a nice June gloom going all last month. I always savor it, since you know the scorching heat is coming. And right on schedule, the clouds rolled back and the heat rolled in on July 1. I'm hiking in Griffith Park tomorrow... better get the sunscreen.

--- 2 ---

If you ever visit a museum and find yourself in a room full of beautiful illuminated manuscripts, and you wish to give the impression that you can read Latin, just scan all the pages for these words:

Deus, in adiutorium meum intende
Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina.

There's a decent chance that one of the books on display will have them. See, many surviving manuscripts are breviaries, books for praying the Liturgy of the Hours, which is mostly an arrangement of Psalms to be prayed several times a day. Each Hour begins with an invocation from Psalm 70: "God, come to my assistance / Lord, make haste to help me." The first page of each Hour is the prettiest, with the most decoration, which means the museum will have the breviary opened to one of those first pages, which means you'll see the opening invocation there. Sometimes it's abbreviated to just the first few words, and the reader is supposed to fill in the rest.

To prove my point I just ran an image search for "illuminated manuscript", and averaged about one occurrence of those words for each page of results.

--- 3 ---

I have an extremely important question: Why is it that red-haired people

and red-haired dogs

and red-haired cows

are all to be found in the same area of the world? Why does the red congregate in Northern Europe?

An evolutionary explanation for humans is that redheads have very pale skin and this is advantageous in cloudy climes but dangerous at the equator. But why should that make a difference for animals whose skin is completely covered?

Maybe redheads breed their animals for the same trait. I'd be narcissistic like that, for sure.

--- 3b ---

You know, I just remembered orangutans, and they're not Northern European at all. Maybe I need to think about this question some more.

--- 4 ---

My co-worker Jon saw his sister get married last weekend.

"What was her dress like?" Deanna asked him.

"It was ripply," said Jon.

"Ripply? That's all?"

"Yeah."

Along came Julie, who'd seen the dress herself.

"What was the dress like?" Deanna asked Julie.

"Oh, it was strapless," replied Julie, "and it had a low back, and the skirt was gathered into tucks all over."

Vive la différence!

--- 5 ---

Have you heard the recording of the voicemail message that a man was leaving his boss, when suddenly he witnessed a car run a red light right in front of him and hit a car full of little old ladies, who proceeded to-- I think you'd better hear it.

--- 6 ---

I know exactly which Bible he's talking about, by the way. It's the huge NIV Study Bible: leather binding, gilt pages, ribbon bookmarks, and inside it's full of maps and diagrams and commentary on almost every verse, and an extensive concordance in the back (so useful!), and a nice long introduction preceding each of the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon. Catholics, think of the Navarre Bible, but with all the volumes bound together. My church presented me with an NIV Study Bible at the end of fifth grade as a reward for five years of memorizing verses, and I loved it. I bonded with it like Hermione bonded with Hogwarts, A History. I took it with me to church always, and showed off with it in Bible study (if someone asked a historical question, the answer was usually in my notes), and underlined and dated favorite verses for years, and lugged it along on every vacation in spite of its weight, and a few times when I heard an inspiring sermon I asked the preacher to autograph the flyleaf-- I still have those signatures, and the verse references they wrote for me. When I came forward at an altar call one summer camp, I was given a little piece of paper commemorating the fact, signed by a counselor and me, and I pasted that in the Bible where it remains, dated July 14, 1991. My NIV Study Bible is bound in classy gray leather with my name engraved on the front in silver, and early on I went to the Lighthouse Christian store and bought a pink leather cover for it with a rainbow butterfly embroidered on the front. And I can tell you, if I chose to conk someone on the head with that thing, he'd feel the impact.

--- 7 ---

A friend just emailed me this: the cast of La Traviata in Philadelphia infiltrates the local Italian market and suddenly bursts into song. :)

Another great video is Bobby McFerrin performing Gounod's Ave Maria... after a manner of speaking.

Adoratrices, part deux

2010-07-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

I know some other American girls who are interested in the Adoratrices, and one of them gave me a boatload of links today, some of which I hadn't been aware of. It's hard to find info about them online, so I thought I'd post the links here:

The renovation of the convent in St. Louis, where some sisters might end up. I love that they used color on the walls:
http://www.romeofthewest.com/2010/07/st-francis-de-sales-oratory-wins-golden.html

Their French website:
http://www.icrsp.org/Adoratrices/Adoratrices.htm

The Institute's French website:
http://www.icrsp.org/accueil.htm

Institute publications, including the sisters': http://www.icrsp.org/Publications/Publications-NF.htm

Institute pictures from Italy, including lots of photos of the sisters: http://www.icrsp.org/IMAGES-APOSTOLATS/IMAGES-2010/Gricigliano/Page-Initiale.htm

The girl who told me about all these was also thoughtful enough to point out Google Translate: http://translate.google.com/?hl=&ie=UTF-8#

It's helpful, but pretty funny when "Salut du Très Saint Sacrement" is translated, "Hi the Blessed Sacrament". :)

Infused Macarons

2010-07-01T22:04:00.000-07:00

Vincenzo rocks! Also, this indicates I'm as important as Fr. Z.

This picture conveys so much of my power, knowledge, mystery, and culinary mastery. But mainly it makes me wonder how my little hands will ever hold that huge macaron steady enough for my little mouth to take a bite.

Raspberry Macarons

2010-07-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

Macarons are a traditional French confection made with sugar, almond flour, and meringue, and sandwiched over a variety of tasty fillings. They're famous for being tricky to make. Just check out this tutorial (PDF WARNING) from Tartelette. I like to have step-by-step instructions-for-dummies, so it's intimidating to read things like, "Even the seasoned macaron maker flops once in a while.... Much of the success of making a 'good' macaron does not lie in what is written in the recipe but in your reading beyond it, your touch, your instinct, and the more you make them, the more you understand their finicky nature."

Her tutorial was very helpful, though, nice and detailed. So I dared to try her recipe for raspberry macarons, and...

IT WORKED!

Pictures ad nauseum will now follow. (First you may wish to click the above photo, then right-click and select "Set as Desktop Background..." It's entirely up to you.)

First, I weighed out the almonds-- most macaron recipes are by weight because it's important to get the proportions right. I don't think I'd have tried macarons at all if I didn't already own a little scale.

Next some granulated sugar...

And some powdered sugar (by the way, this strongly reminds me of weighing out chemicals in the lab).

Oh, and egg whites. Weighing these out is tricky because they look liquid but an egg white really wants to hang together. I had jumbo eggs and needed less than three whites.

Almonds in a food processor...

Add powdered sugar...

Check this out: deep cherry pink powdered food coloring, a whole tablespoon of it, about to be dumped on the pristine white powdered sugar. Do you want to see it? Do you?

There you go!

And now it's all ready to be pulverized! Do you want to see that? Do you?

There you go!

Now to whip the egg whites with the granulated sugar.

I beat for some minutes, and here I'm holding the bowl nearly upside down to see if the meringue will defy gravity. It does-- that means it's done.

Now to sift the almond/sugar mixture on top of the meringue. I want you to know that this was my grandmother's sifter. :)

At first my meringue seemed awfully chunky and dry...

But it started to come together...

You're supposed to mix it until it "flows like magma".

Now for the pastry bag with a big half-inch piping tip. I've never used one of these before. In case you're wondering, my mom in the background was making apple burgers and they were scrumptious. This is why I weigh a hundred and sixty pounds... I'm sure it's her fault and not all my desserts....

Okay, like I said, I'd never used a pastry bag before and I didn't realize the batter would get between the bag and the tip if I didn't pull the bag very, very tight.

But it worked out pretty well anyway. I piped them much bigger than the recipe called for because I had a hard time controlling the process, but I'll learn.

I let the piped batter sit for an hour, so a shell could form on top. While we're waiting, I'll explain that these are definitely a Catholic dessert because I made them on June 24, the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. And if you think that shouldn't count because macarons are totally unrelated to St. John the Baptist, perhaps these cookies will satisfy you instead.

After an hour, I stuck the trays in the oven and waited anxiously. During baking the heat forces the batter to expand, which is supposed to lift up the shell on top and create a "foot" beneath it. Your macarons are a pathetic failure unless they have feet. So I paced up and down the driveway until it was nearly time, and then checked the oven and found...

Feet! I have feet on my macarons! Perfect rows of them!

I was so happy to see it. Bless their little hearts, and their sweet little feet!

Now time for the filling: raspberry jam and mascarpone.

After all the effort that goes into the macaron shells, the simple filling is a joy to make.

Okay, now here's the underside of a macaron shell:

And you just put some filling on-- hey! What happened to it!

It's the weirdest thing, but whenever I hold cookies up to the camera, they suddenly get bites taken out of them. Anyway, see how the shell cracks neatly and the inside is chewy goodness? That's just what we want.

So I slapped some filling on what was left of it...

And yum.

I then managed to assemble a whole macaron:

This is it suddenly moving closer to the camera...

Aaaauugh! It happened again!

That's so weird! Anyway, now it's all over but the assembly, photography and consumption of a bunch of macarons. The convention is to stack them:

Mine are a much deeper pink than Tartlette's; I think the tablespoon of food color was supposed to be a teaspoon. :) I like color, though, so bring it on! I also think it's nicer to photograph food outside. I seriously didn't notice the artistically-placed purple flower in this shot till after I'd taken it.

Look at this single cookie right here... a picture of perfection! I'll just hold it a bit closer to the camera...

Aaaaaack! Unbelievable! That happens every time!

Expense averted

2010-06-29T11:58:00.001-07:00

I was planning to buy a candy thermometer, some expensive matcha powder, and liquid pectin, all in order to spend hours making this complicated recipe for Matcha And Peach Pate de Fruit Macarons.

But on my way home from church this morning I stopped by Starbucks for a huge green tea latte, and by the time I'd swallowed the last of it, my craving for the yummy grassy flavor of matcha had been completely satisfied. I now have no need of the macarons.

All the money I saved surely justifies the 450 calories... :)

A post to throw out some recent links

2010-06-29T05:18:00.001-07:00

Horrific recipe cards from 1974. These literally made me laugh until my sides ached.

Also via Sancte Pater is a story about Voyager 2 still going strong. I had thought it was kaput when I heard a few months ago that it was transmitting gibberish back to Earth, but engineers were able to fix the problem-- a flipped bit.

Cool fact: my father, Don Gray, was chief navigator of Voyager 2 during its heyday, which means he was head of the big team of people calculating the equations that would save power by slingshotting it from one planet to another.

Quotes from Benedict XVI on the traditional Latin Mass, reminding me that I love him and want to read a lot more of his writings and speeches, because I'm impressed whenever I do. He's intelligent, understands the motivations of others, and writes in an irenic, measured way, yet without pulling any punches. His long speech from 1998 surprised me in parts, for example when he says, "the disappearance of the old liturgical books was of no importance in many countries and caused no sorrow."

Elizabeth Scalia and Jennifer Fulwiler have similar takes on church sex abuse scandals: good and evil living side by side. Jesus said something about that too.

Martyr priests of the Mexican Revolution. One little detail that stood out was a soldier who refused to participate in a firing squad to execute one of the priests. He was executed himself. I'm sure none of the soldiers knew they'd face such an agonizing choice that day-- God grant me the grace to be like the one who had conviction.

Reminds me of a story, I can't remember from where, about a group of Christian martyrs in the very early centuries. It was cold and snowy, and Roman soldiers forced them into a lake to freeze to death. They also built a fire and said that anyone who denied God could come get warm and save his life. One of them did, but the rest were so joyful about dying for their faith that one of the Roman soldiers suddenly declared himself a Christian and threw himself into the freezing lake with them.

Naughty boys in 1909.

Thomas Merton, and how the devil holds you back

2010-06-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

The priest's story in my last post, about the unreasonable fears the devil uses to hold us back from religious life, reminds me of Thomas Merton's struggle as recounted in The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton lived quite a reprobate life until his radical conversion to Catholicism as an adult. Then he felt strongly called to religious life, but the Franciscans who initially accepted him ended up rescinding their acceptance when they learned the full story of his past. He was crushed by this but told himself he had to put the possibility out of his mind, and he feared to speak of his longing to anyone lest he be rejected again. He started teaching at a Franciscan college, and tried to be content just with living as much like the friars as possible. But the idea of religious life wouldn't go away, and eventually the possibility reopened, and he arrived at a crisis:

Finally, on the Thursday of that week, in the evening, I suddenly found myself filled with a vivid conviction:

"The time has come for me to go and be a Trappist."

Where had the thought come from? All I knew was that it was suddenly there. And it was something powerful, irresistible, clear.

I picked up a little book called The Cistercian Life, which I had bought at Gethsemani, and turned over the pages, as if they had something more to tell me. They seemed to me to be all written in words of flame and fire.

I went to supper, and came back and looked at the book again. My mind was literally full of this conviction. And yet, in the way, stood hesitation: that old business. But now there could be no delaying. I must finish with that, once and for all, and get an answer. I must talk to somebody who would settle it. It could be done in five minutes. And now was the time. Now.

Whom should I ask? Father Philotheus was probably in his room downstairs. I went downstairs, and out into the court. Yes, there was a light in Father Philotheus' room. All right. Go in and see what he has to say.

But instead of that, I bolted out into the darkness and made for the grove.

It was a Thursday night. The Alumni Hall was beginning to fill. They were going to have a movie. But I hardly noticed it: it did not occur to me that perhaps Father Philotheus might go to the movie with the rest. In the silence of the grove my feet were loud on the gravel. I walked and prayed. It was very, very dark by the shrine of the Little Flower. "For Heaven's sake, help me!" I said.

I started back towards the buildings. "All right. Now I am really going to go in there and ask him. Here's the situation, Father. What do you think? Should I go and be a Trappist?"

There was still a light in Father Philotheus' room. I walked bravely into the hall, but when I got within about six feet of his door it was almost as if someone had stopped me and held me where I was with physical hands. Something jammed in my will. I couldn't walk a step further, even though I wanted to. I made a kind of a push at the obstacle, which was perhaps a devil, and then turned around and ran out of the place once more.

And again I headed for the grove. The Alumni Hall was nearly full. My feet were loud on the gravel. I was in the silence of the grove, among the wet trees.

I don't think there was ever a moment in my life when my soul felt so urgent and so special an anguish. I had been praying all the time, so I cannot say that I began to pray when I arrived there where the shrine was: but things became more definite.

"Please help me. What am I going to do? I can't go on like this. You can see that! Look at the state I am in. What ought I to do? Show me the way." As if I needed more information or some kind of a sign!

But I said this time to the Little Flower: "You show me what to do." And I added, "If I get into the monastery, I will be your monk. Now show me what to do."

It was getting to be precariously near the wrong way to pray-- making indefinite promises that I did not quite understand and asking for some sort of a sign.

Suddenly, as soon as I had made that prayer, I became aware of the wood, the trees, the dark hills, the wet night wind, and then, clearer than any of these obvious realities, in my imagination, I started to hear the great bell of Gethsemani ringing in the night-- the bell in the big grey tower, ringing and ringing, as if it were just behind the first hill. The impression made me breathless, and I had to think twice to realize that it was only in the my imaginination that I was hearing the bell of the Trappist Abbey ringing in the dark. Yet, as I afterwards calculated, it was just about that time that the bell is rung every night for the Salve Regina, towards the end of Compline.

The bell seemed to be telling me where I belonged-- as if it were calling me home.

This fancy put such determination into me that I immediately started back for the monastery-- going the long way 'round, past the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes and the far end of the football field. And with every step I took my mind became more and more firmly made up that now I would have done with all these doubts and hesitations and questions and all the rest, and get this thing settled, and go to the Trappists where I belonged.

When I came into the courtyard, I saw that the light in Father Philotheus' room was out. In fact, practically all the lights were out. Everobdy had gone to the movies. My heart sank.

Yet there was one hope. I went right on through the door and into the corridor, and turned to the Friars' common room. I had never even gone near that door before. I had never dared. But now I went up and knocked on the glass panel and opened the door and looked inside.

There was nobody there except one Friar alone, Father Philotheus.

I asked if I could speak with him and we went to his room.

That was the end of all my anxiety, all my hesitation.

As soon as I proposed all my hesitations and questions to him, Father Philotheus said that he could see no reason why I shouldn't want to enter a monastery and become a priest.

It may seem irrational, but at that moment, it was as if scales fell off my own eyes, and looking back on all my worries and questions, I could see clearly how empty and futile they had been. Yes, it was obvious that I was called to the monastic life: and all my doubts about it had been mostly shadows. Where had they gained such a deceptive appearance of substance and reality? Accident and circumstance had all contributed to exaggerate and distort things in my mind. But now everything was straight again. And already I was full of peace and assurance-- the consciousness that everything was right, and that a straight road had opened out, clear and smooth, ahead of me.

Father Philotheus had only one question:

"Are you sure you want to be a Trappist?" he asked me.

"Father," I answered, "I want to give God everything."

I could see by the expression on his face that he was satisfied.

I went upstairs like somebody who had been called back from the dead. Never had I experienced the calm, untroubled peace and certainty that now filled my heart. There was only one more question: would the Trappists agree with Father Philotheus, and accept my application?

Answer: yes, they did. :)

The fact that he finally conquered through the intercession of St. Thérèse ("the Little Flower") resonates with me too. On those rare occasions when I find myself up against the same obstacle-- some strange and very powerful unwillingness in my own mind to do what I know is God's will-- I pull out the big guns: "All you angels and saints in Heaven, please pray for me!" Then I find strength in my soul I didn't have before, and I manage to do whatever it is I know I'm supposed to do, and it's such a straightforward simple thing that I don't understand how it seemed so confusing and difficult. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and they are not indifferent. They want to help us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

Merton's autobiography was an unexpected joy. I didn't think I had anything in common with this man who was born in 1915 and lived a completely different kind of life, and indeed the first half of the book was alien to me. But when he started moving towards becoming a Catholic monk, it all became delightfully familiar. I don't know much about his later career; apparently he studied Eastern mysticism and some seem to think that he fell away from the orthodox faith, but I haven't looked into it-- I just know that Seven Storey Mountain is awesome.

Those Nashville Dominicans

2010-06-27T23:30:00.000-07:00

Here's an article about a girl who'll be joining the Dominicans Sisters of St. Cecilia, better known as the Nashville Dominicans, on August 11. She started thinking about being a nun in college when a priest suggested it. Amazing. When I was in college I was far from knowing what I was supposed to do with my life.

As it happens, today I was chatting with a girl from my own parish-- Hi, Teresa!-- who's also going to be joining the Dominicans on that day, and she's going straight from high school. She tells me there are nineteen girls so far in this year's postulant class, with time yet for others to join them before the entry date. There are two other eighteen-year-olds, so Teresa's glad not to be the only one who hasn't been to college. Anyway, they'll get their degrees and teaching credentials during the years of formation. I think of my mostly-wasted twenties and admire the girls who live their lives deliberately while they're young.

Apparently three of the nineteen incoming postulants are named Courtney. And whaddya know-- I happen to know one of the Courtneys, and here's her blog, currently featuring a great post about finding her vocation.

All this news about the Dominicans' latest postulant class has me remembering my own visit to them. I went in May 2009-- that's where I met Courtney-- and I posted pictures of it on Facebook soon after, but I never wrote much about it. I'd asked the Dominicans about visiting because I thought they had an important apostlate and I loved all the studying and learning they get to do. But I knew almost as soon as I arrived at the motherhouse that this wasn't the place. It was obvious how good the order was-- there's a sense of mission and purpose and joy there; they love being teaching sisters and they're in love in God. The girls who were on retreat with me were fun too, friendly and interesting. Yet I felt detached from all the awesomeness. It was as obvious as could be that this was not my call.

So I philosophically settled in to enjoy the five-day retreat as a nice visit with a great religious congregation. The joke is that discernment is the fourth state of life (the others being singleness, marriage, or consecrated life) and one benefit of living in the fourth state is that you can travel around enjoying the hospitality of various orders, and meeting a bunch of holy nuns. How many laypeople get to do that?

Everyone was fond of the dorms they had us sleeping in with their rows of white beds. Back in the 1800's when the convent was also a boarding school, the girls who lived there had exactly the same sleeping arrangement. They would goof off at night and sisters would come upstairs to hush them up, but they could never catch the girls in the act of breaking the rules because the girls heard them coming by the rattling of their Rosaries. Finally one night a sister kept quiet by clutching her Rosary in her hand, and she succeeded in sneaking up on the reprobates.

We retreatants didn't goof off at all-- we needed the sleep! Our days there were so packed that we all just dropped dead at lights out.

One girl on our retreat had come all the way from Australia, and the sisters picked her to perform a little nightly ritual for us. It's the custom after the sisters retire for one of them to walk by the closed doors of all the cells, blessing them with holy water. So the Australian girl did the same for us visitors: at bedtime each night, she'd go around the dorm flinging holy water at each curtain and murmuring "Hail Mary..." every time. It was comforting to hear as I drifted off to sleep.

The order is huge-- something like 250 sisters. Everything was on a big scale. The day we arrived there was a constant parade of vans between the motherhouse and the airport to pick all of us up. Fortunately the parking attendants let the sisters park for free. At the motherhouse there are about a dozen visiting rooms and a gigantic common room, dozens of white rockers on a lovely back porch, and so on. The chapel is new, big, and gorgeous, and is packed to the gills when all the sisters are home on vacation and pretty full even when half of them are out on assignment.

Our meals were mostly eaten in silence while a sister read to us from "Peter on the Shore: Vocation in the Scriptures and in Real Life". I was sorry she didn't finish it before the weekend ended because I found it fascinating, no doubt because it was so relevant to my situation.

Towards the end of the retreat we broke into smaller groups and I found myself with two sisters and three other girls in one of the pretty visiting parlors. We asked the sisters lots of questions and I was completely absorbed by the conversation, but there's only one topic I recall now: Sister Michaela urging us to ask God for big things. When I heard her say that, I at once asked Him to change my attitude in a certain way, and almost at once, He did! No one else knew anything about it, but I knew a little miracle had happened in my heart.

There was a young priest on the retreat, who in one of his talks to us mentioned the irrational fears the devil uses to keep you from pursuing a vocation. He illustrated with his own story. He'd always wanted to be a lawyer, and he became one, and he was dating a woman he thought might be the one. But he was hesitant to propose to her and he didn't know why, and he also wondered from time to time, "Is this all I'm supposed to be?"

So he decided to sort things out on a weekend retreat, and he made arrangements to stay at a monastery, but driving up to the place he suddenly panicked, felt he couldn't do it, and nearly drove right away again. However, he knew it would be rude to just take off when the monks were expecting him, so he went up and knocked on the door just to say he wouldn't be staying. A monk answered and immediately began to show him to his room, and he had to keep up and didn't really have a chance to say, "No, I'm leaving!" They arrived at the room and the monk disappeared at once; our hero was left alone. He went looking for the front desk to cancel his reservation, but monasteries don't have front desks, and finally he decided to just settle down and stay.

On the Saturday evening of his little retreat he prayed the Litany of Loreto and was moved to tears. He realized he'd never asked what God wanted him to do. He was terrified of being asked to be a priest because it seemed like it would be the end of his life; all his work as a lawyer and his relationship with the girl would be for nothing. But he realized that if he left the chapel without asking the question, he'd be saying to God, "I don't care what You want." So he gave up, and prayed "If you want me to be a priest, I will," and he felt his fear disappear. In due course he became a Dominican priest, and he told us, "You couldn't give me anything in the world to make me go back to the life I had before."

I loved his story because part of it reminded me of me: the whole approach-avoidance nonsense. Afraid to stay and afraid to go, afraid to ask and not to ask, wanting to speak but feeling inhibited, unwilling even to think of certain possibilities-- yet once the obstacle is overcome you wonder how it ever seemed so insurmountable. That dynamic cropped up a fair bit when I was converting, and again when I was first feeling drawn to become a nun. The stress and nervousness I sometimes felt was out of all proportion to the situation; I remember wondering why I, a theoretically mature person in my late twenties, was having such a hard time calling up the nearest parish to say I wanted to be Catholic, or asking a priest if I could talk with him about religious life. I can be inconveniently shy, but I suspect that most of the problem was flat out spiritual warfare, and that it's very common whenever anyone's on the point of doing something the devil really, really doesn't want him to do.

Anyway, I left the retreat glad to have had the experience. The Nashville Dominicans are obviously not hurting for vocations, nor are they the least bit interested in pressuring girls to join, so I had no problem telling Sr. Mary Emily what was thinking and how I didn't seem to be called to their congregation, and she set up a meeting with the priest, who had the scoop on some places that might fit me better.

Now let us pray for the continued discernment of the nineteen-and-counting girls who are heading to Nashville this August. :)

Dr. Pepper Cake with Awesome Frosting

2010-06-26T22:52:00.000-07:00

Heehee-- I had my dad take a shot of me holding a piece of this cake, and my arm's been caught at an odd perspective...

I was intrigued by this recipe for Dr. Pepper Chocolate Cake and ran to the store to buy the prime ingredient. (Bought two liters of it because that was actually the cheapest option.) But instead of making the frosting it calls for, I tried out this recipe, daringly advertised as "The Best Frosting I've Ever Had".

I didn't take a ton of pictures this time because it's just a simple recipe, but here's my bottom line: the Dr. Pepper cake was forgettable. It was a nice moist chocolate cake, but I couldn't taste the Dr. Pepper at all. I think I've given up on cakes made with soft drinks now-- I couldn't taste the Sprite in my Sprite cupcakes either. If anything it just made the cake too sweet for even my taste.

The frosting, however...! Okay, I did have texture issues with it-- it was sort of strange; perhaps I didn't beat it enough. But that didn't matter because it was simply delicious, and a lighter texture than frosting usually has which was a nice change. In the fridge it held up very well; I don't know what it would have done at room temp. I'll have to make another batch for further evaluation. :)

Quickest takes yet!

2010-06-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

Jen's post is here.

1) Thank you, 48 hour embryos, for not clumping up like the 55-hour timepoint did. It's 11 pm and I shall be heading home. :)

2) Our lab retreat will be tomorrow and Saturday at our fabulous marine lab by the sea in Corona del Mar, California. I'm pleased that I don't have to give a talk-- I can just listen and enjoy.

3) I am so going to make Vietnamese Coffee Jello. I made another dessert tonight, something rather fancy, but I don't have time yet to post about it.

4) Busy busy weekend-- tied up all day Friday and Saturday at the lab retreat, and on Sunday I have lunch plans, and then Archbishop Jose Gomez, L.A.'s new coadjutor bishop (who'll replace Cardinal Mahony when he retires), will be celebrating evening Mass in the San Fernando valley. He's going around to different parishes meeting people. I don't know if I'll stay long enough to talk to him, but if I'm not too tired I'll at least go to the Mass.

5) If I was going to lobby the new archbishop for anything, it'd be for him to invite in the FSSP or the ICKSP, or find some other way of providing at least one parish in this archdiocese of five million Catholics where people can hear a traditional Latin Mass any day of the week without being illicit about it.

6) I have a friend who's getting into Dr. Who and she's picked out a few favorite episodes for us to watch when we get together later. Should be fun! I know almost nothing about the series, but I don't have to because she'll bring me up to speed-- muy conveniente.

7) Oh. Conveniente doesn't mean "convenient"; it means "advisable", according to Babelfish. Darn false cognates.

I have to tell you this story; I don't know if it's true but it's definitely memorable. When I was thirteen years old and went with some other junior highers on a weekend missions trip to Mexico, one of our counselors told us about a high school girl who'd gone on the same sort of trip. This girl spoke a little Spanish, so her pastor urged her to share her testimony at the Mexican church they were visiting. She nervously got up and tried to begin by saying "I'm really embarrassed; it's the pastor's fault!" What she said was, "Yo soy muy embarazada; es la culpa del pastor." Unfortunately, embarazada means "pregnant".

Our international lab

2010-06-23T10:05:00.001-07:00

I thought I was almost the only sports fan in the lab, but it turns out I just needed to wait for the right sport. We have lots of people from outside the U.S.-- I haven't counted but I think American-borns might be the minority-- and everyone's going crazy for the World Cup, all rooting for different countries. Folks are streaming the games live on their laptops and hooking them up to the break room's projector so all can enjoy. And out on the street I see the Gadsen flag cropping up everywhere; I thought Obama might be inspiring an outburst of anti-statist sentiment until I realized it's a symbol for U.S. soccer.

The international character of our lab reminds me of when I first started working here, six years ago. I owned a bunch of posters from the time of World War II, and when I saw the drab basement rooms I'd be working in, I decided to bring one of them in to hang over my desk. My big framed B-17 Flying Fortress seemed suitable. And then I took a look around and realized that:

The guy at the desk next to mine was German,
The other girl in our room was Italian,
And the guy training me was Japanese.

The three Axis powers! It seemed tactless to display a poster of the plane that bombed the heck out of their countries, so I bought some nice irises instead.

Literal coffee cake for Father's Day

2010-06-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend was Father's Day and there were three fathers at our house: my own wonderful dad, my uncle from Virginia, and my cousin who's a father for the first time this year. What a great excuse for cake, so... Literal coffee cake! I can always count on Pioneer Woman for the great recipes. This one is not chocolate cake with coffee added; there's no chocolate at all. It's just massive amounts of COFFEE, baby! Follow the link if you want the recipe; all I'm going to do is give you pictures.

I baked the cake in two layers (and incidentally, the 20-22 minutes in the recipe is ridiculous; I gave it 27 and the layers still weren't really done in the middle, even though a toothpick came out clean by 20 minutes. Was it my nonstick pans?)

Then I made the lovely speckled frosting and covered one layer.

You could stop right there, really...

The top layer came out missing a chunk (you really need to butter and flour the pans well). I just shoved the chunk back in there; it'll all be covered with frosting anyway. That's the beauty of cake.

Mom told me you normally frost the sides of a cake and then do the top, but she didn't tell me that until after I'd taken this picture.

Hey, it's only my second time making a layer cake, and I think I'm doing pretty well considering I'm frosting with one hand and taking a picture with the other.

See, it's looking decent now!

Downright yummy.

The little tube of gel frosting I bought at the grocery store had barely enough for me to write this message; you can see I got stingier with "Day". I left my offset spatula in this picture because I just bought it and don't know how I went 32 years without it. I'll give you one guess how it got so clean.

And here's the cake in action! It was quite good, excellent for coffee lovers, and we had it for breakfast the next morning too.

May God bless all fathers, especially mine! (He liked the cake.)

Adoratrices... de Justin Bieber?

2010-06-20T13:21:00.001-07:00

Someone just clued me in to Google Alerts-- you tell Google what topics you're interested in and get emailed every time your search terms show up on a new page on the internet. So two days ago I set up a whole bunch of alerts, including the names of religious orders I've visited or find interesting. One alert is simply "Adoratrices".

Now I've got an email alerting me to a news story in French. It begins: "Pour les adoratrices de Justin Bieber, un message de 140 signes envoyé sur Twitter par le chanteur adolescent équivaut à un bouquet de fleurs de leur bien-aimé."

And here I was thinking of "Adoratrices" as a very religious word, evoking traditional nuns in flowing black habits. I must say I'm a little disillusioned.