The Japanese Foundation

It's been Nun Week as far as my other writing has been concerned. First I wrote a defense of a CR editorial decision to publish a photo of a nun in habit ("a stereotype", sneered a consecrated detractor), and second, I finished reading In This House of Brede and wrote up a review for CWR.

I didn't have space in my review to do so, but I want to clarify what I meant about not finding a note of falsity in Rumer Godden's sudden introduction of the Exotic East.

As most of us know, in the late 19th century and then in the 1960s, Westerners were transfixed by our impressions of Asian culture. The Beatles found the Maharishi. Thomas Merton became fascinated with Buddhist monks and similarities between Christian monasticism and other forms of monasticism, almost as if monasticism were the point. Non-Christian meditation became de rigeur just as the majority of western Catholics began to abandon and then forget Christian meditation.

However, Christianity had been blossoming in Asia for some time, and in the fictional house of Brede there had for a long time persisted a dream to found a daughter house in some mission territory. Catholic culture was incredibly confident before I was born, and the Church in the West was happily expanding in the Global South and the Global East, building on the now-reviled efforts of nineteenth century missionaries. So although this happens after the death of Piux XII, the desire of a Japanese businessman to built a Japanese-style Benedictine monastary for women in Japan fits in very nicely with the Brede nuns' long-cherished dream.

Some of the nuns are a bit silly in their ideas of what concessions against their own traditions they ought to allow their new Japanese postulants, but the Mother Abbess is indeed a voice of reason, nixing the proposed kimono-style habit but ensuring that the postulants get rice. In theology school I met a lot of Asian male religious, and one of them assured me that if there had been no rice pot in his new North American home, he would have gone back to Asia. (I would probably be the same way about coffee. Coffee is the one western foodstuff I don't think I could live without. Meat, sure. Eggs, sure. Bread, sure. Booze, sure. Coffee? No.)

So although this Japanese section of the book falls during THE CHANGES, I think it is actually a masterful (on Godden's part) bridging of monasticism before Vatican II and monasticism immediately after Vatican II. St Teresa of Avila, that great monastic, was very interested in missions abroad. And, I will repeat, in 1969 Godden knew that instructions stemming from the Vatican Council (or the ways in which they were received) had thrown religious life in an uproar, but she could not know of the wholesale devaluing of consecrated life in the minds of the Catholic laity, to say nothing of the desertion of convents and monasteries of so many religious. (Here is one sad story.)

As I wrote in the CR, I considered a vocation to religious life in high school, which is a very trad age for such ponderings. And I considered it again, on-and-off, after my annulment. I was usually turned off the idea by sisters themselves. But sometimes I met sisters who made me ponder the idea again--not that I was any great treasure, believe me. The most beautiful of them all was a Korean Benedictine. Ah! She was a good woman, and she had a soul like a flower. It crossed my mind that if I were ever to enter a convent (or monastery), it would be HER monastery in Korea. There was something very gentle and womanly about her that made me think "Here is the real thing". I don't know if it was because she was a Korean or a Benedictine. At any rate, I wondered if Benedictines in Korea had something the West had lost. That was sheer ignorance, though, because I never visited a honest-to-goodness Benedictine community until last year's visit to Ryde.

Now that I have helped girls find tranquility in Single life and, very indirectly, to marriage and babies, I will be absolutely delighted if I can help other girls find vocations to contemplative life. If I were twenty years younger and not married, I would begin a round of visits to the Sister of St. Cecilia at Ryde. When I was twenty-three, I had my whole life to offer, and I am sure I would have been happier there than at U of T. Sigh, sigh. But I cannot complain because although I did not find (or look very hard for) the best way, late in time God sent me a good way and, let me tell you, B.A. is much more than I deserve!

P.S. Does anyone remember me ever trashing the Novus Ordo in print? There was a letter in this week's CR accusing me of putting down the Novus Ordo, which annoyed me. As far as I recall, when I write about the Novus Ordo, it is usually to beg people to respect it and stop treating it like a canvas for all their dumb ideas or to stop yakking all the way through it. I write about various parishes where priests and people treat the Novus Ordo with great reverence or where the music is great. The very fact that a deacon (!) would accuse me of "putting down" the Novus Ordo without carefully rereading my articles shows how lightly people take the new Mass: if this deacon really understood what a serious accusation he was making against me, he might have thought twice.

In this House of Beauty

Oh, girls. I have been writing about NUNS all day and have only now sent the article in. Oh, I am so behind on the day. I have laundry, soup... Argh!

By the way, if you are still under thirty-five and Single (and not engaged) I implore you on MY KNEES to read Rumor Godden's In This House of Brede. There are still places like Brede. I have friends in one of the models for the Brede enclosure. It is beautiful, beautiful. beautiful. Buy it! Buy it new, secondhand, for Kindle, whatever. Or get it from the library. Just read it because if you haven't read it, you are missing out on who knows how much beauty! Perhaps you will just be edified by a beautiful book. Or perhaps you will be swept into a beautiful life!

(Why do I want to write like Graham Greene when I ought to want to write like Rumor Godden? Absolutely beautiful, truth-telling, non-propagandist Catholic writing!)

Why o why does no-one tell us about how beautiful enclosed life is until it is much too late?


Meanwhile, happy Saint Patrick's Day to the Irish, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Americans and the Canadians. My father is three-quarters Irish-American, so I am wearing green. But there's no point going to the EF today for St. Patrick because I know for the fact the priest mentions St. Patrick in his March 17th Mass only when in Ireland. I once walked all the way from Morningside with a half-Irish-American pal to go to his Mass on March 17, and then not a word breathed to St. Patrick. HOW we glowered afterwards. St. Patrick is not so much of a big deal in Edinburgh. The place to be today is Glasgow. But I don't have time. I must write, launder, cook!

McKelvie Is Ordained

Just a quick update for those of you who have read Seraphic Singles and remember my housemates Ted and Jonathan and our friend McKelvie. I met McKelvie in 2005, and even then he dreamed of becoming a priest. His first seminary had not worked out. However, despite various discouraging experiences, McKelvie persisted in his vocation. Eventually he joined an ancient religious order, and now he has been ordained a priest.

Sadly, the fact that transatlantic plane fares skyrocket in December meant that I could not be there. But Ted was there, bless him, and he has sent me his photographs. Three are of McKelvie giving his Primi blessing to Ted, and one of them is now my laptop background.

So McKelvie is an example of a Serious Single--although McKelvie very much likes women and would have made a great husband and father had he not fallen in love with the priesthood--who persevered in his vocation. Congratulations to McKelvie, but congratulations to all us Catholic laypeople, too. Hello, Good Man.

A Solution to the Catholic Teacher Problem

Okay, I guess it isn't just Vocations Week here on Seraphic Singles; it's Nun Week. Since most of you want to get married and have babies--and why not? I almost always did---you may be getting impatient. But hey, after seven years of blogging, it's time I had a Nun Week, you know?

As we all know, Catholic education for girls used to done mostly by women religious. When I was in theology school, I heard a lot of moaning that these women were mostly under-educated and really didn't know much beyond what they had to teach infants and some of them walloped babies, etc., etc.* Incidentally, my mother used to be a Protestant, and she says teachers walloped children at her "public" (state) school, too. Walloping children is what almost all teachers used to do. Even Anne of Green Gables at last broke down and feruled bad little Anthony Pye. Of course some of these teachers, lay or religious, Catholic, Protestant and Freethinker, were probably sadistic jerks, and I don't quite get why there have been no class action suits against Britain's most notorious/famous public schools.

I believe that the women religious of days of yore were undereducated with the same fervour I believe that Emperor Constantine ruined the Christian church, and it was all increasingly downhill for Catholics until The New Pentecost of 1962, i.e. no fervour at all. One of the charms of religious life is that it gives you a lot of time for serious reading. And when she was in Carmel, Saint Edith Stein was perfectly willing to stop her intellectual work and just scrub the floor, but her wise superior eventually told her to stop scrubbing and go back to writing. When the Allies bombed her convent, the nuns and townsfolk scurried about saving her papers. (Mention that the next time people tell you the Catholic Church hates women.)

Nowadays, of course, most Catholic teachers are not sisters but layfolk, men and women, and in Canada and the UK, they get paid really well. In Ontario their pensions are fantastic. When my sister got a job with a Catholic board, I almost cried with happiness. Stable job for life, good pension, and it's an elementary school in X, so no drugs-and-sex problems to depress her. Also, my sister goes to Mass and comes from a Mass-attending Catholic family, so she is actually, you know, Catholic.

A woman I know here in Scotland is now homeschooling her children, so that they will have a Catholic education. Previously, she had sent them to Catholic schools. However, this ended when she discovered that (A) the "Catholic" teachers openly mocked principles of the Catholic faith and (B) the other "Catholic" kids made fun of her children for going to Mass on Sundays. Let's just say I was not shaken to the core with shock. That kind of thing happens back home in Canada, too, believe me.

But I don't want to dust all lay Catholic teachers with the same chalk-brush. My guess is that there are tens of thousands of Catholic teachers who are loyal to the Catholic faith, and tens of thousands more who would be loyal to the faith if priests and theologians stopped with the wink-wink-nudge-nudge stuff about sex, birth control, divorce, Mass attendence, "Rome" and the entire history of the Church between Constantine and 1962, except where it suits them (Hildegard! Mary Ward! St Francis in the dungeon! St. Ignatius in prison! Catholic Worker!). Still, how many Catholic parents are brave enough, or have the power to establish, what kind of Catholic teacher has the ears of their tiny tots or beautifully hulking adolescent from 9 AM to 3:00 PM?

I will now amaze you all by stating that my plan, if I had daughters, was not to send them to Catholic school at all but to, by hook or crook or harvested kidney, get them into one of the last surviving private girls' schools in Edinburgh and oversee their religious instruction myself. I would encourage them to make friends with girls from other devout families, be those families Presbyterian, Jewish, Catholic or Muslim. Anything rather than have them inoculated against the faith in a local Catholic school. A little bit of Catholicism can inoculate a child from the real, full-blown thing.

Naturally I would have preferred to send these sadly non-existent daughters to a proper convent school run by nuns, where not only would they have a Catholic education without any wink-wink-nudge-nudge, but examples of women who, unlike their mother, can get by in life without clandestine trips to the MAC counter and base flattery of anyone handsome in trousers. (A more serious-minded girl in the Ontario Students for Life movement dismissed me as "a party girl", and, alas, 'tis true, 'tis true. La la.)

But there aren't any proper convent schools within miles and miles because most of them have closed down, due not only to a lack of women religious to run them, but the new interest of women religious in advanced university degrees and proper careers. I once met a woman religious, from a once-famous teaching order, who worked in a factory as an engineer by day and returned to her apartment by night, which she may or may not have shared with another woman religious. I remember her because she was the bitterest nun I ever met in my life. She really hated the bishop of her diocese and felt marginalized by him, etc., etc. Amusingly, I had been experiencing a little tug towards religious life, but she cleared that right up.

Her memory makes me wonder if she might not have been happier as a science teacher in a girls' school, living in a proper, polished convent with a dozen or more nuns instead of one or none, singing Lauds and Vespers and cutting capers at Recreation. She might have inspired hundreds of girls to become engineers and tens of girls to become science-teaching women religious. Instead of longing with angry passion to be on the Bishop's advisory committee, she might have felt somewhat indifferent to the Bishop, or seen him as the much-prayed-for figurehead who preferred seedy cake with his tea, in contrast to the last one, a fiend for chocolate.

You can see where I am going with this. Yes. As usual, I am calling for Catholic Revolution, or Counter-Revolution, or the Restoration, whichever you like to call it. The thing to do, and many good girls are doing this, bless them, is to join real, solid, teaching orders with a healthy, loving attitude towards their spiritual ancestresses, not just the apparently super-feminist-and-rebellious-and-prophetic foundress. And those married Catholics in the near vicinity, if they won't actually starve to death, could make the sacrifices Catholics used to make for their children, to send their children to these nuns and to help out the nuns in any way they can, remembering always that they themselves are the primary educators of their children.

And now that I have said all that, I think I will find out if there IS a single good teaching order left in Scotland, so I can send them some money for their school.

*This is not to denigrate the sufferings of those who really did fall into the hands of horrible women in dysfunctional communities. To this very day, children end up in the hands of wicked adults who do unspeakable things while other adults turn a blind eye. Now that most of us know about this possibility, we can thoroughly scrub both kinds of behaviour--the abuse and the turning a blind eye--out of our societies.

Supernatural in the Natural

This is turning into Vocations Week at Seraphic Singles, so I will have to be careful. Many of you are in college or uni, so you may already be suffering from Vocations Awareness Fatigue. I really don't like the "Job Fair" approach to advertising the religious life. I bet it would be much more effective if nuns and monks just put their habits back on and were visible 365 days of the year, as part of ordinary life.

My grandparents bought their first television in 1953 so that they could watch the Coronation. Basically everyone in the British Commonwealth who had enough money did that. (I don't know what inspired Americans to buy a television set, but in Canada it was definitely the Coronation.) Catholics have always had a rich visual culture, but after television and mass advertising--who-hoo! The past three generations of western human life have been all about seeing dramatic, stirring and/or beautiful sights. You would think that the orders would get that Hollywood directors keep dressing their nun-and-monk characters in habits because they look good, grab viewers' attention, and identify the nuns and monks at once as Catholic nuns and monks. Yet the traditional (so to speak) excuse for rejecting the habit is, "When people looked at me, they didn't think about God, they thought about the habit."

First of all, how does Sister Rejected the Habit know what people were thinking, or if thoughts about the habit didn't lead eventually to thoughts about God?* Second, people are even less likely to think about God when seeing an elderly lady with a short blow-dried haircut in a business suit. Incidentally, there is no garb more becoming to an elderly woman than a full-on old-fashioned Benedictine habit. It looks good on young women, too. They all look so dignified, and all you can glean about their looks is their posture, their hands and their round and beaming faces.

But I am going off-topic because what I really want to say is that it would be a lot more natural if we were aware of all the states in life as children and teens and grew up with visual and everyday reminders that there are contemplative orders; active orders; consecrated virgins in convents or out in the world; devout, chaste Singles dedicating their lives to humanitarian missions or to ordinary professions; married people with many children; married people with only a few or two children; married people through sad circumstances with only one child or no children at all; priests and bishops. And I don't mean just books and films from before 1963 showing these people. I mean contemporary, up-to-date reminders, presented in a positive fashion, and not just the minute we all turn 18.

Naturally those of us who go to Mass see priests at least once a week and see bishops from time to time. But we don't often see recognizable nuns, or young nuns, so no wonder women start feeling "left out." The associate pastor of one parish I frequented was a nun, and my goodness, was she mannish in her pantsuit. Sorry to be so shallow, but I am a child of my television-watching generation, and she would have looked so much more attractive, and so much less like a wannabe-priest, had she been wearing a habit. And as I said yesterday, anyone who longs to see women take charge in church should listen to cloistered nuns sing the Office. How sad that so few of us have had that chance! Vite, vite! Grab your best buddy, a car and a map and find some to listen to.

As a matter of fact, when I started elementary school, the principal was a sister--the last sister ever to be principal at that school--and at four I thought she was wonderful. When she was given a retirement send-off, I cried inconsolably and had to be taken to her office. It is the only evidence that I was a child mystic: presumably I was mourning the twilight of a formerly great teaching order and the centrality of nuns in the lives of generations of Catholic children.

And this was important because Vocation doesn't show up in a vacuum. If you're like me, you grew up thinking a Vocation happens in the same way as Samuel heard the voice of the Lord in the Temple. You know what I mean. You'd be sleeping on your little bed, surrounded by dolls and stuffed (woolly) animals, and suddenly you'd hear a voice saying your name, and you'd wake up, and nobody would be there, so you'd fall asleep again. But then the voice would say your name again, and you'd wake up, and LO! The voice would tell you that you were supposed to rise up and go at once to Convent X in City Y, and you'd have to do it whether you wanted to or not. Oh, woe! How terrible the voice of the Lord; holy is His Name. When I was 20 I was busily praying, "Oh God, please don't call me to the Single Life. Please, please, please!" What a nice trusting relationship I had with the Lord--not.

Anyway, I am sure God does sometimes call people with such bolts from the blue, but I suspect that these are very rare. He is much more likely to bump you along the path of history and circumstance, leading you naturally and through all kinds of friendly people to the way He wants you to go. My friend ex-Berenike is in the same abbey as her dear friend ex-Boeciana who conceived a love for the Benedictine Rule by studying mediaeval history as a then-Presbyterian. And I met B.A. because while writing her PhD thesis, Boeciana read my blog, and got Berenike hooked on it, and she got Aelianus hooked on it, and I became pals with them and wrote about them, and so Aelianus' pal B.A. started reading my blog.

What we had going on here, and still going on here, is the supernatural as a golden thread through the natural events and relationships of Christian life. Boeciana found her vocation by reading about Benedictines, and I found my husband through Boeciana and her friends, and Berenike found her vocation through her friendship with Boeciana. My friend El found her husband at our friend Lily's wedding, and Lily found her husband at some event at the university church.

It seems to have taken the Lord a long time to bump me into place, but now that I think about it, I didn't give Him much to work with, being so mistrusting and pessimistic when I was 20, and not really open to His plans until I had my "It's Okay to Be Single" revelation in my mid-thirties (Feast of St. Jude the Patron of Lost Causes) and washing the dishes. That was one of the places were the gold of the supernatural showed through the silver of the natural, too.

*In Norman Jewison's Moonstruck Loretta (Cher) buys an expensive new outfit for a date with her fiance's brother and bumps into a trio of habited nuns. Loretta's expression shows that her conscience has suffered a big fat pang. See what Jewison did there? Yeah. Is Loretta thinking about the habit? No.

An Utterly Awesome Option

Okay, I was Single for a really long time, and none of my crush objects fell for me in high school, so even when I was nineteen I hated people asking me if I had ever considered being a nun. I felt extremely cheesed off, as if what these people, arms entwined around the waists of spouses or partners in at least minor sexual sins, were saying was, "Listen, we all know you'll never get a man, so why not just give up now?"

HOWEVER I am just back from a weekend spent visiting an enclosed order of nuns, and I would be really furious with everyone, including my teenage self, who spoke, thought or acted like nun life is second-rate, were I not so blissed out from being around such beauty from Friday Vespers until after Saturday Vespers.

B.A. and I were at the abbey to see a blogger-pal, once known online as Boeciana, take her final vows as a Benedictine and to sneak a peak at our other blogger-pal Berenike, who disappeared behind the big wooden doors a year ago without so much as a party or a "toodle-oo!" Lots of other people wanted to see them, too, so forty or so ordinary non-professed types crowded into the people's tiny transept in the abbey church.

The abbey church is set up so that ordinary non-nun layfolk can access the church by an outside door. We sit in this aforementioned transept, and so look at the altar sideways. The altar is on a platform in the sanctuary, which priests can get to by going through the gate in the low black altar rail in the people's transept. The sanctuary is divided from the nave, which is enclosed and thus just for the nuns, by a tall screen of ornate black metal bars. This tall screen has gates, too. The nuns process into the nave through big wooden doors to the convent. The priests can't go into the nave. They give communion from the sanctuary.

Essentially, we were all in an inverted L shape, with a place in the church assigned to everyone according to our state in life. The priest or priests and any altar server can see the nuns, but the public can see them only if we cleverly snaffle the pews on the far left of the mini-transept, and then we can see them only as they come through the convent doors. They then disappear somewhere out of view of the transept, and the most beautiful Gregorian chant you have ever heard in your puff rings out from the nave.

Women who have a hankering to be priests could be cured, I think, if they attended the Office or Mass in this Benedictine convent because, my goodness gracious me, talk about "women's active participation." Whew! Obviously, one has to pay attention when the priest or bishop is speaking and to the Canon, but when the nuns sing, it is like a visitation of angels.

Naturally the Benedictines at this abbey all wear proper Benedictine habit of black robes and white wimples, with black veils on the professed nuns, and white veils on the novices. They have brown leather belts and black slippers. Most of them wear glasses and look about nineteen, unless they are over 60, in which case they look perhaps 45. And also at this Abbey, even thought it is not an Old Rite sort of place, all the Offices and Mass and the Professions are in Latin. (We the people are provided with programs with both Latin and English.) The nuns are all taught how to sing, and sing they do with the sweetness and clarity of silver bells. It is their principal job, after all.

The Profession, i.e. the Sister who used to be Boeciana taking her final vows, was more beautiful, holy, dignified and joyful than any wedding I have ever seen in my life. Really, I am on the brink of floods of tears thinking about it now. The gates of the sanctuary were opened, and the Bishop sang (not too well, but you know how it is): "Veni, filia, audi me, timorem Domini docebo te." (Come, daughter, listen to me, and I will teach you fear of the Lord.)

And then the most beautiful female voice I had ever heard, sang the Latin for "Now with all my heart I follow You; it is You I fear, and Your face I long to see. Oh Lord, do not disappoint me; deal with me gently and according to the greatness of your Mercy."

And then there there came into the sanctuary a tall, slim nun with glasses, a white veil and a lit candle, with two nuns with black veils as attendants, looking expectantly at the bishop. Her song was so plaintive that I was surprised that, when the Bishop asked her (in Latin) if she wanted to be "more intimately consecrated to God by the bond of the monastic profession," her "Volo" was so strong and confident. Indeed, it was almost droll. I remembered then that this particular nun had gone to Oxford and later got a doctorate in history.

Her spoken responses and vows were clear and confident; her sung prayers were super-feminine--really, it was a devastating combination. And then there was the Rite of Consecration of Virgins, which most definitely emphasized that virginity is beautiful and not a burden or a joke, and the sister-who-was-Boeciana lay down flat on her face like a priest being ordained while everyone except the Protestant guests sang the Litany of the Saints.

Now at that moment, my happiness for the Sister-who-once-was-Boeciana, who was radiant and had been smiling with pure joy, was shot through a bit with regret for Seraphic-who-used-to-be-a-virgin-herself. Fortunately, I didn't cease to be one until the first time I was married, although I made out like a bandit, alas, alas, nobody told me it was wrong, etc. However, it still seems all a bit of a shame and a waste, especially as I never had any children, and it would have been a lot better to have been where the sister-who-was-once-Boeciana was lying now. Obviously the older and more worldly I got, the less of a good fit I was for a Benedictine convent, but that is entirely my own fault. Fortunately, Benedict Ambrose was right beside me, so I wasn't too sad. If you end up a divorced-and-annulled sardonic storyteller like me, a nice husband like Benedict Ambrose is an amazing gift displaying the great mercy and generosity of God. I really have no right to complain for myself ever again.

So I was not overwhelmed with regret, just a tiny bit ticked off that nobody told me or, at least, that nobody outside of a book every told me that a traditional Benedictine profession is more beautiful than a wedding, and that every Catholic teenage girl should at least visit a cloistered community of Catholic nuns to see if she is attracted to their life. Heaven knows how many women long for men's love only because we are told over and over again that there is nothing better than that in this whole world, except maybe the love of children. Meanwhile, there was a child in the transept being noisy and naughty throughout the Mass and Profession, a wonderful reminder that marriage and children are not without headaches. Indeed, some young mother or father didn't get to see as much as she or he wished, for the howls disappeared outdoors--in the rain.

How it rained! And how cold was the visitors' hallway! There the priests, monks, marrieds and singles stood around eating a buffet lunch and waiting for it to be time for the "Festive Recreation." The Benedictine nuns, being cloistered, were having their own lunch in the mysterious depths of the convent, and didn't make an appearance until after 2 PM. At some point the doors to the visitors' half of the "Large Parlour" were opened, and I caught sight of some jolly nuns waving and smiling at me from behind the grille--not mesh like a confession grille, but tall, gilt-painted bars set into a waist-height wooden wall, sort of like at an old fashioned bank. So I zipped in and tried to catch the eye of white-veiled Berenike and, failing, chatted with Sister Mary D--, who had read my "The Flyer's Ring" and possibly even "The Bodis Riper," gracious.

Eventually the other people of the world crowded in, and we sat and watched the Festive Recreation through the bars. The sisters read us poetry and comic monologues, sang songs and played instruments. And when the little show was over, there was a rush to the grille, as if two lots of iron filings flying to the sides of a magnet, and a long line of nuns chatted eagerly with an eager crowd of world. The nuns all looked very well and happy. I can't decide, though, if this is because they always look like that, or because seeing such a big crowd of old friends and new people was a hilarious treat. Still, the nun-who-was-once-Boeciana has been there for about six years, and she was obviously eager to promise to spend the rest of her life there, so I suspect they usually look like that.

Such hand-shakings, and face-kissings, and news-exchangings! After all our travels, I was feeling very tired, so eventually I just sat and gazed at my two nun friends, especially Berenike, whom I love so much, and at other visiting friends, whom I see so rarely. The two sisters were allowed to stay as long as they liked, so we got to see and talk to them until shortly before Vespers, when off they flew.

And then some of us visitors left, but many of us stayed for Vespers and, for Benedict Ambrose and I, last glances (for now) at our friends and to hear the nuns sing so beautifully. This time, I recognized the other sisters, too, and recollected little bits of information I had got from them. One of the younger sisters had not gone to university, but had entered at age 19. An older one had entered 12 years ago, after working as a secretary. Another young one had, I think, gone to the University of Saint Andrews and entered after graduation. I wished I had asked more of them what they had done before they entered, so that I could tell all of you.

For here comes the pitch. I love B.A. and I like being married, and I have a pretty easy life because B.A. is so generous and easy-going. But I recognize that it is a very worldly life, especially because we haven't been given any children to sacrifice for. We don't make a lot of money, so we don't have worldly hobbies: our wild vacation paradises are Kraków and Rome where we spend a goodly amount of time in churches, as you can imagine. We both feel lucky that we managed to meet each other, and this was literally because Boeciana and Berenike read my blog and became my friends, which is to say, the intercession of the sort of women who become nuns. We know perfectly well that we are not as good as the most God-centred of our friends, and we are very lucky that they like us so much.

I think it would be awesome if more young women had the encouragement to at least VISIT a community of cloistered nuns. Everybody in the universe encourages you to do this or that to attract a husband, but the best husband any woman could ever have is the Man who is wedded to us, the Church. And all you have to do to attract this Man, is to pray to Him and strive to do His will. And if you think you would enjoy a life of praising Him and living with women who think the same way you do--not to mention living in a beautiful place where the ugliness of modern life can't get you--then I encourage you to follow up on this feeling in a concrete, active way.

Going to Visit Nuns

B.A. and I are shortly going to visit some Seraphic Sisters, so that's it for my blogging this week! As usual, I will not be taking my computer, so nobody do anything emotionally risky while I'm gone. If you're strongly tempted to telephone, Skype, text or write to a boy to clear the air and express your feelings or to get him to open up, phone the friend most likely to stop you.

Holy Celibacy

The secular media got all excited this week because the new Vatican Secretary of State told them that priestly celibacy was a discipline, not a dogma.  So in their usual spirit of creating realities by reporting them as fact, the secular media said that mandatory priestly celibacy may be on the chopping block.

Cue people, even people in Catholic media who should know better than to trust the secular media, to to get all excited. Married priests! Wow-wee! The solution to the priest shortage!

So far the media buzz around Francis' papacy is reminding me of what I've read of the buzz around the Second Vatican Council. "Everything's going to change," was the watchword then and now, and of course nobody bothers to read what was and is actually said.  You can search the Documents of the Second Vatican Council pretty thoroughly, and you will find absolutely nothing about ripping out old altars and shoving the statues in a broom closet. If you want to see what churches after Vatican II are supposed to look like, go to Poland. Bling, bling, bling, far as the eye can see.

As for the priest shortage, I think we all know who is not having a priest shortage. Tradition-minded dioceses, tradition-minded seminaries, tradition-minded orders.  Oh, and tradition-minded countries. My friend Berenike told me that Poland supplies Europe with a quarter of Europe's priests. (Or was it a third?)

There are so many Polish priests that apparently relatively few of them are gay. Personally I do not enjoy writing about how-many-priests-are-gay, but that is sort of an issue in Scotland right now. Not only has Edinburgh's former archbishop Keith Cardinal O'Brien all but confessed to making sexual advances to a seminarian and to priests, a 48 year old priest in Motherwell has alleged that his seminary was rife with gay bullies who went apoplectic if he shrank from their kisses. If two percent of priests had a homosexual orientation, well, that would be commensurate with the general population. But Wiki, at any rate, is saying that it's somewhere between 15 and 58% in the USA.

Many of my readers may be saying "So what? Maybe a homosexual orientation carries some good stuff with it, like a tendency towards compassion, solidarity with the oppressed, greater sympathy for women, better listening stills, and an appreciation of beauty." Maybe. But I wonder if, just as it seems that altar girls dissuade boys from serving at the altar, a disproportionate number of gay men in the priesthood dissuades ordinary boys from going into (or staying in) the seminary.

Is the solution to import men who are proven, by their relationships with wives, not to be gay?

In English-speaking countries, the entire notion of the celibate Catholic priesthood has been overshadowed by the tiny minority of twentieth-century priests who have sexually abused boys and, even more rarely, girls. Rather horribly, those who think married men should be priests have floated the idea that "celibacy is to blame." This is completely unscientific because sexual abuse of children and teenagers is usually committed by laymen, married or single, and not by vowed celibates. Families, schools, TV studios, backstage at rock concerts, group homes. Anywhere where adults have unfettered, unsupervised access to children and teens is a potential locus for abuse.

Meanwhile, the notion that marriage is a sort of sexual dumping ground where potentially abusive men relieve their sexual tensions is pretty disgusting. That's not what Saint Paul meant by "Better to marry than to burn."

The Eastern Churches, Orthodox and Catholic, have a place for married priests, it is true. These married priests can never become bishops, and they are supported and supplemented by monks. Unless I am mistaken, the monks are the, for lack of a better phrase, spiritual elite. And the Eastern Churches have developed a culture around married priests, one mysterious to me, but it works for them. As a matter of fact, though, I have met only unmarried Eastern Rite Catholic priests.

We in the Latin Rite Church don't have a model for married priests--unless we are in minority-Catholic countries where, of course, there are Anglican vicars. Personally, I would be interested to find out how many Anglican vicars are still ordinary married men with families unregulated by artificial birth control. When B.A. was a Scottish Episcopalian, he knew a zillion Anglican Communion "priests", and they had three children max. Sometimes they got divorced. And the "higher" (more trad-Catholic looking) he went, the fewer married Anglican Communion "priests" there were. Celibacy in the Anglican Communion was part of the rediscoveries of  the Oxford Movement.

The Oxford Movement found real richness and grace in traditional priestly celibacy, and indeed John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have all rewritten on the importance of virginity and celibacy in the priesthood. If they sound at times defensive, that is probably because--in the climate of change for change's sake--it needs to be defended from people who just don't get it.

The Second Vatican Council inspired thousands of men, perhaps a hundred thousand men, to quit the priesthood. That thought should make any of us pause before we cross our fingers hoping for yet another drastic change to the Latin priesthood. And even if it were advisable to lift the discipline of mandatory celibacy, is this really the time to do it? I cannot think of a more difficult time for men to attend to their marriages, care for a large family--for surely our priests would not be availing themselves of contraceptives--and be entirely devoted to the Lord's service, e.g. pastoral care of us.

We live in the most outrageously sexual degenerate times the world has ever known. (The Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Romans would gag.) Priestly celibacy stands out in stark contrast against them, and so of course the times hate it.

"We want to see the nuns!"

I could have been a nun--after I gave up the Star Trek obsession.

I've been thinking about teenage girls worrying that they'll never get married (or, thanks to Beyoncé, that nobody will "put a ring on it" ) and was reminded of my own teenage emergency plan. My emergency plan was that if I were desperate I would just go to Communist-oppressed Warsaw and casually drop my Canadian passport by "accident" outside churches after Mass. Now that I think about, this was flattering neither to Warsawians nor me, but hey, I was a teenager.

It might have been as unthinkable to my generation of teenagers that we would never, ever get married as it is to the current crop. And perhaps it was even more unthinkable because there were no young nuns around. This may make you laugh, but there were fewer young nuns when I was a teenager than there are today. And although there were about 900 girls in my convent school--by which I mean it was a school attached to a convent--there was no, no, NO attempt to interest us in the religious life. (Oh wait. There was one. More anon.)

Generations of girls were curious about the nuns, most of whom we never saw. Most of us walked past the convent part of the building, and the big chapel, to get to the door to the school. We knew they had a swimming pool somewhere, too, just for the nuns. They were among the great mysteries of the place. Where was the swimming pool? Where were the nuns?

When I began at the school, the most infirm nuns were kept on the top floor, and a door with major locks and bolts kept them safely on their side of the building. (An infirmary has since been built.) That added to our curiosity, to say nothing of our dread of old age and dementia.  In contrast, a few elderly nuns in ordinary if dowdy clothes pottered around the library. There were two or three nuns among the teachers, and the principal was a nun. Two nuns gave music lessons in a sort of musical corridor hidden behind the auditorium. So, as a matter of fact, nuns were not that hard to find. They were, perhaps, just hard to see  because they wore ordinary, boring, dowdy old lady clothes. (Except for the principal, who wore power suits.)

Boy, we hated their clothes. Have I mentioned their clothes?

I discovered more nuns when I started going to daily Mass in the chapel--something nobody ever encouraged us to do, although I believe there was an altar guild of some kind. And finally my friend Stef and I went to some nun-authority---or perhaps just the nun who sat in the porter's office near the convent doors--and said, "We want to see the nuns!"

There was some communication about this, and Stef and I were permitted to see the nuns. That is, we were permitted to visit the very oldest nuns on the third floor. And I remember us chatting with a very sweet shrunken nun with an Irish accent who might have been one hundred years old. But that is all.

I wonder if the nuns thought the 900 female barbarians of many nations who came lolloping past their convent five days of the week, white shirts untucked and blue kilts rolled, were more of a pain in the posterior than potential nuns. It's a shame because underneath our underclad exteriors beat devout, passionate and energetic hearts. We were ready to be inspired by nuns, had there been any nuns who wanted to inspire us. And as the high school program was then five years long, the nuns would have had a captive audience for five years.

Any adult in a high school has a captive audience for five years.

The one attempt to attract us to the religious life was extremely lame. When we were on retreat, I believe, a plump, bespectacled, dowdy 39+ nun (presumably the youngest around back then) was brought in to tell us about her life. She emphasized that her sexuality was not dead, and that when she saw a cute guy in a grocery store she thought, "Wow!" And she punctuated "Wow" by throwing her arms in the air.

We were very embarrassed.  Other authority figures over 39+ did not share the secrets of their sexuality with us, so we were appalled that this nun did. And I think I was actually disappointed that religious life did not kill sexual yearnings stone dead. So much for that.

Looking back, my last year of high school was the last year of my life that I could have heard a call to religious life. The summer between graduation and the first year of university I discovered I had caught my first real Catholic victim boyfriend, and that was it. The whole messy cycle of infatuation-boredom-break-up-infatuation began. And although it all worked out in the end, and I have B.A.,  I must say I am an eensy bit cross.

But I do not blame the poor nuns. As a matter of fact, when I was 38, a few weeks before I came to Scotland and met B.A., a nun at that very convent crept up to me while I was strolling the grounds and asked me if I had ever considered joining the order. (Bless her heart!) No, I blame history, really. I was a teenager in the 1980s, when religious life in my city was at its zenith nadir. The Sisters of Life, the first of the "new" nuns, did not get started until the year after my graduation, and it was some years before they came to Toronto. Amazingly, they had habits. When I first saw a Sister of Life in person, I was blown away. A nun...a young nun...in a habit! She looked beautiful.

I am absolutely delighted that the situation is so much better for young women today and there are now religious orders with young women in them, religious orders whose charism I can really get behind. And, realizing that I am probably more read by teachers than by teenagers, I implore readers to make sure teenage girls actually know about them.  When I was eighteen/nineteen and thinking about religious life, I really had nowhere to go and no-one to speak to who was not old (or "old"). Nobody really welcomed me or encouraged me, and of course I gave up the idea as soon as the first cute NCB asked me to be his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, nineteen is not too late for other women. I know two women who went to the Benedictine Sisters of Saint Cecilia at Ryde, one after finishing her PhD, and one some years after finishing her B.A.  In my UK circles, the Sisters of Saint Cecilia is where you go, darling, if they'll take you.  And in the USA and Canada there are of course the Sisters of Life, not to mentioned the fabled Tennessee Dominicans and the Dominican nuns (average age 28) in Ann Arbor, MI.

Of course there are other orders, too, but these are the ones I think of first, as they are the ones most attractive to younger women--and to me. As I never cease to brag, the Tennessee Dominicans turned me down sight unseen, and I would never want to join any order that would have me. I mean, come on. They'd have to be desperate, and this is not humility speaking. It is self-knowledge.

I wonder if religion teachers ever arrange class trips to convents and monasteries....? Just throwing that out there.

Anna, daughter of Phanuel

I have been reading up on Candlemas (Feb 2) today, a feast I particularly love because one of the blessing prayers mentions the bees.  I am a bit afraid of bees, actually, but I think it is great fun when they are mentioned in church, especially in a solemn way, in Latin.

The Gospel reading is about the purification of Our Lady (after childbirth) and the presentation of Our Lord. It mentions an elderly man and an elderly widow, and although the elderly man composed the Nunc Dimittis on the spot, it is Anna who interests me today.

According to Luke, Anna lived with her husband for seven years before she was widowed.  I don't know why Anna was living in the temple; maybe her husband or her father  had some kind of important temple connection. (Off the top of my head, I would guess it was her father, as Anna is known as the Daughter of Phanuel, not the Widow of Somebody Else.) But at any rate, Anna lived there, praying and fasting, until at least the age of 84.

Now, if Anna married at 14, which would have been perfectly normal for those days, this means she was widowed at 21 and stayed a widow for at least the next fifty-nine years. Presumably she could have married again, but presumably she didn't want to. She was happy in the temple, praying and fasting and doing whatever it may have been that women who lived in the temple were expected to do, and after fifty-nine years of temple living, met Baby Jesus.

That's pretty neat, if you ask me. It's amazing how little space Anna's story has in the Gospel, given its hold on our imaginations. Anna, daughter of Phanuel, tribe of Asher. Widow, aged 87. Married 7 years. Never left temple, worshiped, prayed, fasted. Came to Presentation/Purification ceremony. Recognized Jesus for who He was. Praised and preached. The end--or the beginning, really. Now Anna is one of the most famous women who ever was, for the Bible is the most widely read book there ever has been. More importantly, of course, she got to see Jesus before she died, as an actual baby. Maybe she was allowed to hold him and bounce him up and down. Wouldn't you love to do that?

Anna seems like a serious and single-hearted woman, not given to mourning over what-could-have-been and feeling sorry for herself or envying women with children or any of the temptations adult women give into every day. Those fifty-nine years of  life, though pious, couldn't have been dull. They must have been lived in joyful expectation of something great to come, and lo and behold, He did!

Searching Singles Seeking Something Better

I write rarely about Single women who long very much for the religious life. When it comes to discerners, I am more likely to dance a tarantella on the pretensions of male discerners, if they enjoy bouts of angst-filled dating between exciting visits to monastery and seminary.

However, today I am sparing a thought for women who desire, with real longing, religious life and for men who also seriously desire either religious life or the priesthood. I am thinking especially of men and women who have "tried their vocation" with an order or seminary, who are turned away from this order or seminary, and seek admittance at another order or seminary.

When it comes to men and women who so strongly desire religious life or the priesthood that they pick themselves up after a rejection by one order or seminary to risk rejection by another order or seminary, I shut up about pretensions. I feel nothing but respect, compassion and hope for these Catholics.

It can be a terrible shock to discover that a friend has disappeared into a contemplative order to "try her vocation". The last time that happened I felt a great sense of loss, and resentment at not being told, and finally a hope that she will find acceptance and happiness in this convent.

It's not like I will never see her again, as eventually I will be able to visit once a year. And anyway, look at me. I disappeared across the ocean as a foreign spouse and my old friends and family see me only once a year.

It would be nice if you said a quick prayer for my friend right now.

I am thinking also of a young man I know--rapidly not so young--who very much desires the priesthood, has a very good character, and has been turned down again and again from the seminary. I simply do not know why this would be, unless it is because some people mistake his cheerfulness as frivolity unless they bother to get to know him better. He is trying again, sponsored by yet another bishop, so it would be nice if you prayed for him, too.

In constrast, there is another young man, again not so young, who has left his seminary after a significant period and has, not to put too fine a point on it, apostasized from Christianity to chase after a more eastern enlightenment. Although in this case it is all too obvious he did not belong in the seminary, he too needs prayers.

I have never had a strong desire for religious life, so I do not know personally how awful it is to be bounced from convent, monastery or seminary. I do know a lot about rejections, however, about firings and about break-ups, and so my heart is as wrung by someone who is asked to leave a community as it is by someone who gets broken-up with.

Because I write so much for Singles searching husbands, I thought it would be nice to think, today, about Singles searching "something better."

I realized it is controversial nowadays to call religious life "something better", but as a matter of fact the Catholic and East Orthodox traditions have long held consecrated virginity to be ontologically superior to married life. Marriage is humanity-as-usual; consecrated virginity is a sign of the Kingdom. Not everyone is called to it, just as not everyone is gifted with breathtaking beauty, or impressive powers of reasoning, or the athletic skill of an Usain Bolt. But it is nevertheless "something better" and I am full of admiration for those who, despite hearing No and No again, struggle towards the "something better," hoping one day to hear a Yes.

Lord, accept your stubborn children to religious life, or if this is not Your will, please show them more clearly and less painfully the way.

This Is Not About Finding Husbands

I fear I've been neglecting Serious Singles of late.

As you know, I mentally think of Singles as Searching Singles, Singles who don't want to be Single but Married, and Serious Singles, Singles who enjoy being Single, prefer celibacy and look forward to a long life of single blessedness.

The second group is usually more tranquil than the first, which is one reason why I don't think of them as often. However, it is wrong to neglect them completely. For one thing, they are often good role models for happy living of the Single life. And for another, they are irritated by the idea that there is something wrong with them for just enjoying being Single. They deserve support, encouragement and references to Saint Paul.

During one homily I've heard, a diocesan vocations director, a priest, complained about the various married people who had looked at him with big pitying eyes and said, "It's such a shame you can't get married." He didn't like feeling pitied, and he thought their attitude cheapened his celibacy and devalued his priesthood. He actually liked celibacy and never wanted to get married, but he found it very hard to convince these happy married people of this.

(Happy people are often unimaginative about happiness. Happy married people think everyone who isn't married must be miserable, and happy priests thinks every young man should think about the priesthood, and happy Catholics pity Protestants, and happy writers encourage young men at parties to write their first novel before they are 25 so as to get maximum publicity.)

I received an email from a reader working in some remote spot who just wanted permission to stay home and not have to go out and find a husband. There was
no-one eligible in town, and when people in town, eyes glistening with sympathy, asked her if she had found anyone, she would point out that there was no-one in town for her to find. And the townspeople would think about this and conclude that she was right. I cheerfully gave her permission just to stay home.

Even Searching Single girls can stay home and veg if that's what you want to do. My now husband found me because I spent quite a lot of time blogging and writing funny stories. I literally did not have to leave my room. And when I did leave my room, it was to visit readers in the UK, not to buy clothes and meet cute new boys, which led one of my best friends to conclude I didn't really want to get married, "and that's okay."

Listen, girls, if God wants you to get married, you'll get married. Don't go to that stupid party if you really don't want to go.

By the way, I'm talking to girls here. Searching Single Guys should be out there meeting girls. It's okay for Searching Single girls to slump in front of the TV and feel bad because they aren't wildly popular, but it's not okay for Searching Single guys. Most women make daily efforts to look more attractive; most of us, for example, put on lipstick. So it is not really all that much to ask when we ask Searching Single men to improve whatever it is that needs improving and get back out there. Girls like manly guys. Getting back out there is manly. And if you really, really hate "out there," think about marrying your slavishly devoted secretary.

But back to Serious Singles. Being married to a relatively young and healthy guy, it will probably be a long time before I am Single again. I hope so because I am rather fond of B.A., and it would suck if he just went and died on me. But trying to see life from a Serious Single perspective, I can see how good life can be when you make all the decisions and there is nobody there to tell you you can't have a pony or a pot-bellied pig or a pug. (By the way, I finally have a pet. It is a sour dough starter named Herman. Every day I get to mix Herman, and he eats only once every four days.)

For me, trying to imagine myself as a Serious Single, the most important factors in my life would be family and friends. Not all Serious Singles would agree, of course, as some are rather hermit-like, and for some much more important are work and prayer. But I would be conscious that the two great temptations for Serious Singles (and Singles in general really) are (A) becoming isolated and (B) doing everything for everybody out of fear that if I don't somebody won't like me.

Family and friends would thus be very important, both for company and for more-or-less unconditional love. I would be lucky in that I already have lots of Serious Single friends, and really the hard part would be convincing nervous confirmed bachelor friends that I wasn't merely hunting down Husband Number 3.

This blog, like my book, has never been about finding husbands. It has always been about appreciating and living the Single life as happily as possible, and the Single life includes friendships and dodgy old dating, which is why I write about them so much. But I honestly don't think it is a woman's job to go out and find a husband. I think it is a man's job to go out and find a wife. And therefore I am never going to write a book called "How to Find a Catholic Husband" even though my own Catholic husband would love the money it would bring in. Ka-ching!

"Young Nuns"

In a rush, poppets. Read what I wrote over here, come back, discuss in the combox.

All I want to add is that the French nun who spoke to Catherine and the cameras stressed that a vocation can be judged by how much you want it. It is a falling in love.

"Falling in love with Jesus" does not necessarily mean becoming a monk or nun. You have to fall in love with that kind of life itself, and with a particular Rule, and with a particular group of people living the Rule. Jesus is the spouse of every Christian soul, so perhaps it is wrong to overemphasize the "Bride of Christ" aspect to religious life.

Fr Z mentions Consecrated Virgins

Here you go! (Update: There's some interesting, informative stuff in his combox, so that's worth a read, too.)

I have met Consecrated Virgins, especially in theology school. They have very strong identities as Single, Catholic women. They have careers of their own, and they are very much rooted in reality. They know, for example, that they are footing their own bills for the rest of their lives. They know, too, that they will get only a very limited amount of personal support from other Consecrated Virgins, as they tend to live far apart. (They do look forward to getting together, though.) They do not live in communities of Consecrated Virgins. In this they are better off than those nuns who expected to live in community but, in fact, now live on their own or with a single roommate.

The Consecrated Virgins I have met (that actually told me they were C.V.s, mind you) seem very autonomous. There is something about one or two of them that is very reserved, almost cold. I could be wrong; I'm naturally gregarious myself, so it's hard for me to understand people who work with people and yet seem utterly remote. (I will note that one big temptation for Single people--including young male religious---is self-absorption.)

That is just an observation about one or two of the C.V.s I have met. I'm not dissing the order. It was a wonderful innovation of the early Church that was revived when 1960s people got extremely excited about what they thought they knew about the early Church.

I am not quite sure what it was about the 1960s that made people think that the experiments of antiquity, which had developed into more confident and public forms of organization, worship and spirituality over fifteen hundred years, should be brought back. Traditionalist Catholic young women I know are not as interested in becoming C.V.s as they are in traditionalist religious orders (looking, perhaps, to the High Middle Ages, not to late Antiquity, for inspiration) although, of course, most of them want to get married and have babies.

Most definitely, I can see how women who live in countries were Christians are a despised minority would do well to see how early Christian women flourished and lived their lives for Christ under similar circumstances.

Tradition is clear that a vowed way of life is better than an unvowed way of life. I was very annoyed when the folks at Laodicea (especially Aelianus) would point this out. And I still hold that the most important thing to do is to "wait for your marching orders" even if you are turning 55 and have been praying to get your marching orders since you were 15. "Vocation" means "call," and the "Caller" is Almighty God, and Almighty God is free to call if and when He likes. Your job is to keep your eyes and ears open, to use your brain and to watch your heart. Vocation does not mean taking up a woeful burden but falling in love.

Very independent women who are drawn to religious life and wish to make a commitment to lifelong virginity--but do not want to live in a formal religious community--might very well fall in love with the idea of Consecrated Virginity.

(Oh dear, this post is a bit confused. On the one hand, I want to say "Yay! Consecrated virgins! Single people living a life of holiness, having formal ties to their bishops!" On the other hand, I wonder if "bringing it back" wasn't part and parcel of the semi-mythologizing archaeologism that plagues the Church today and if what we need in a world in which people are increasingly alienated from each other is more autonomy. But if women become C.V.s, then that's great, especially if it leads to--or stems from--much reading of the Fathers of the Early Church.)

Well, read Father Z and discuss. Just remember that insulting me gets your comment wiped.

Hello to Serious Singles

It seems to me that most of the time I am writing to Searching Singles, those Singles who are trying to be okay with being Single but really want to be married or in religious life (but mostly married, really), and not as much to Serious Singles. This is because Serious Singles are somewhat rarer, and since they are generally happy and fulfilled being Single, they don't need to read about it so much. I think.

However, since the internet is not exactly crowded with blogs about the Single Life, it does not do to ignore the Serious Singles entirely.

Who are these Serious Singles?

Well, to shock the stuffing out of you all, I will begin by pointing out that most secular Catholic priests are Serious Singles. There are married priests (especially the ex-Anglican ones) and there are priests in religious life, and that suggests to me that the majority of priests are then Serious Singles, men who can't rely on a wife or a religious order as a sort of emotional/social/financial safety net. Ordinary priests don't take a vow of poverty, which means that they are often very poor indeed. It's a bit scary, sometimes, thinking of how hard secular priests work for how little money. And with fuel costs rising and with priestly dependence on their cars---eeek!

What Serious Single priests do have is a pulpit, so I wish they would use it more often (e.g. once a year) to talk about the Serious Single life, and not just the priesthood. There are a lot of devout men who, for various reasons, can't get into the seminary or are chucked out of it and (often for the same reasons) can't get married either. They don't need another homily about the priesthood, as important as such homilies are. They need homilies about how it is tough to be male and Single, but how such a life has its joys and opportunities, too. The married people can lump it one or two Sundays out of 52; they get oodles and oodles of attention.

Speaking of lay Singles, there are men and women who feel so devoted to their professional calling, like medicine or spreading L'Arche communities throughout the world, that they don't see how marriage fits into this. They deliberately make choices to travel to poor countries or live in L'Arche communities or do other things that makes it very difficult to find (or be found by) somebody to marry. They are seeking them first the Kingdom of God, and God bless them for it.

Then there are men and women who are not sexually attracted to the opposite sex, and therefore would find it very weird, uncomfortable and fake to get married. This has not stopped all such men and women, of course, from contracting disasterous marriages, but people of integrity tend not to marry innocent people as some sort of disguise.

Devout Catholics who are not attracted to members of the opposite sex, therefore, live their lives (or try to live their lives) as chaste Serious Singles. Sadly, just by being who they are, they risk criticism both from gay activists on the one side and from overly wound up fellow devout Catholics on the other. To quote my Inner Child, this sucks. If a Serious Single is Single because s/he isn't attracted to members of the opposite sex, that is his/her own business and if s/he don't feel like talking about it, leave him/her alone. Coming out of the so-called closet is not the human equivalent of a butterfly bursting out of a crysalis. It is not actually the eighth sacrament.

Then there are Serious Singles who have physical and psychological issues that make it very difficult for them to get married and have babies. There are some incredibly unselfish people who deliberately say no to marriage and babies so as not to pass on a genetic disease to another generation. I am not sure I agree with such decisions, since all things--like healthy babies regardless--are possible for God, but that is the decision of the Single person.

And then there are the extremely mentally ill and those with developmental disabilities so severe that although they can, of course, have friendly relationships with their families, carers and others in the community, they cannot take on the responsibilities inherent in marriage and parenthood or in religious life. These, too, are called to the Single life.

(By the way, there is a religious order for women with Down Syndrome, so developmental disabilities alone do not preclude religious life.)

Finally (although it might not be finally), there are Widows and Widowers, who have lived perhaps long lives as married people, and are done. The order of Widows is a very old one in the Church, and heaven knows what the Church would have done (and would do) without the activities and prayers of Widows all these past twenty centuries. Either B.A. or I will be Widowed one day, and I wonder what a job he or I will make of it.

Anyway, I am sure there are many more categories of Serious Singles, so if you belong to one, feel free to name it in the combox.

The Catechism, incidentally, says that Single people are especially close to Jesus's heart (CCC 1658).

What's Your Mission?

Just a thought today for the Serious Singles and for the very long-term Searching Singles: What's your mission?

When you are Single, you are freed up for mission, whatever it might be. And as society places so much meaning on the pair-bond and parenthood, it can be very helpful to pause and reflect on what gives meaning to your Singleness.

Quite obviously, being Single frees priests, male religious and nuns for prayer and badly paid but absolutely necessary work, either in their own communities or in the world. But being Single also frees schoolteachers, for example, to concentrate fully on their students. Being Single frees scholars to devote themselves to their research. Being Single frees doctors and nurses to volunteer their services to the Third World.

When I was 36, Single, and thought I might be called to remain Single for a very long time, I made writing about Single life my mission!

So to the Serious Singles and super long-term Searching Singles out there, what's your mission? For what good works does celibacy free you?

Truth and Joy

The Truth will set us free, we are told, and Christians take this metaphorically to mean that Christ, who is Truth, has set us free. But we can move (somewhat) beyond metaphor because Aquinas writes "The truth is what is." Now that which is is being, and all being derives from God, whose existence is His essence, and therefore is Being.

Where am I going with this? Well, I am trying to make an argument that truth is extremely important, much more important than we generally think (and you should read St. Augustine on the subject), and that no matter how many fibs, evasions or lies you offer other people (not that I'm suggesting it), you must never lie to yourself.

Being a Seraphic Single does not include telling yourself lies about yourself and your Singlehood. If you love being Single, and just want to stay Single, either as a nun or monk, a consecrated virgin or priest, or a woman or man living free of any vow but her or his baptismal and confirmation vows, then that is great. That is marvellous. Don't pretend to yourself that you really want to be married. You don't have to. It's okay.

Louisa May Alcott explained her 19th century singleness by saying (apparently, I heard this from a tour guide at her house in Concord, MA) that she'd rather just paddle her own canoe. And, my goodness, what a lot of freedom there is in permanent Singledom. You can be one of the guys forever and ever. If you're not a nun, you make your own money knowing that's all the money you'll have to work with. You organize your own retirement plans. You save up and buy your own house. You never have to ask anyone's permission for any of your choices ever. You never have to figure out or pander to the male (or, if male, female)psyche. Ahhhh....

However, if you hate being Single or like being Single for now, but hope to get married eventually, the one person who absolutely has to know and acknowledge this is you. When you take ownership of this wish it has less power over you and how you act in public. For example, I remember a desperately lonely young man at a wedding getting absolutely smashed at the open bar while bragging, "I'm sure glad it's not me putting my head into a noose!" He didn't fool anyone, and I'm happy to say he's married now. People who simply long to marry but sneer at marriage are extremely annoying.

Of course, you don't have to--and should not--tell the universe. When you are Single and you want to get married, you have to be as peaceable as the dove and as cunning as the serpent. In short, you have to take into consideration the male psyche, if you are a woman, and the female psyche, if you are a man. Women do not naturally think like men, and men do not naturally think like women. I think we should just all accept this right now. This has absolutely nothing to do with Reason. We all participate in Reason. It's just that we function differently, and women who want to get along with men simply have to accept that men are not very logical and plan for it.

The prime example of this is the guy who pursues you and then, when you are hooked, drops you like a hot potato. This stems from the average man's love of a challenge and his illogical yet undeniable disappointment when something turns out to be easier than he thought it would be. It is for this reason that both the infamous Rules and Auntie Seraphic tell you that you are never allowed to talk to the man you are romantically interested in every single day. If you honestly think of him ONLY as a pal (and be honest here), then text him every hour; I don't care. But if you can barely keep yourself from seizing him in your womanly arms, then for heaven's sake don't communicate with him every day. At least don't see him every day. The Rules says you should see him only twice a week.

I just stared at my husband, pondering his psyche. Since we had quite a whirlwind romance, I suspect that the necessary challenge was the whole distance thing, not to mention the difficulties he suspected the U.K. Border Agency might throw in his way. Then there's the whole brass involved in asking a Canadian to live in an old Scottish house with no central heating and limited hot water. (Don't ask.) And it is just possible that the bonds of marriages are cemented by all the challenges, once you are engaged, of getting married: your parents, his parents, the Church, the State, the banquet hall, the florist, the hairdresser, the dress...

Another thing you must do is be open to invitations to meet men (or women), and therefore school your own psyche to be intrigued, not insulted, when people offer to introduce you to them. Yes, it is embarrassing and more than often disappointing. Yes, it would be a million times better if people would ask you first. And it would be a billion times better if married friends invited a sloo of Singles to their parties, instead of just two: you and The Other One. However, married people usually have incredible amnesia about what is most comfortable for Single people, and if you get married, you probably will, too. Bless our little married hearts.

This brings me to the subject of joy. I hope you have some because this is the part of you, if you are Single but wish to marry one day, that you must show to the world as often as you possible can. Healthy people are attracted to happy people. So be happy. When someone asks you how you are, you are not just fine, you are great. When you blog, you blog about what you love and what is great about your life, not about what you hate and what is lousy about your life. Own your sorrows, but share them with only a tolerant few. Own your joys, and trumpet them about.

Be joyful, be confident, and, if you are a woman, ask Single men to help you with stuff so that they know that you are not 100% self-sufficient and that--if they are supremely fortunate and/or hard-working--they might be allowed to add to your joy.

Freedom From "Femininity"

Femininity is certainly a controversial issue. And here on Seraphic Singles, whenever an issue seems particularly controversial, and feelings are high, I write about it again.

Femininity is controversial firstly because social codes of femininity have been used--and still are (burkha, spike heels) used to restrict women's freedoms and flourishing. It is controversial secondly because if we don't measure up to someone else's standard of femininity we tend to take it personally. At Mass on Sunday, our priest extolled motherhood and condemned how some today actually hate motherhood and I felt all very sorry for myself because I'm not pregnant yet and what's with that?

Anyway, I thought to myself later, how did this turn into a "How to Get Guys" blog? Beyond the part-self-help book, part-Catholic-anthropology, part-learning-from-mistakes philosophical mishmash that my group of friends collectively known as Les Girls and I concocted, what do I know? Mostly what I know is how to avoid Mr Wrong and how to spot other women's Mr Wrongs in those women's honest emails to Auntie Seraphic.

How not to scare Mr Right away, I think I have a good handle on. But as to finding Mr Right, that I leave to God. Let go, I say, and let God. The only three great truths about men-in-general in this area that I grasp with both hands are that 1. Men will work for what/who they really want; 2. Men are terrified of marrying the wrong woman; 3. Men prefer women to look like what they think "women" look like; fortunately there is quite a lot of variety here.

If you are a happy Single, and do not give a flying fish what men think women should look like, then you are free, free, free as a bird to ignore what men prefer. And why not? Go take a look at a modern-style nun, the kind with no habit. How does she dress? And how short is her hair, eh? I know umpteen modern-style nuns, and they all have short hair. And they love pantsuits. If you are wondering who is keeping the pantsuit makers in business, it is thousands and thousands of modern-style nuns over 60, bless them. And one thing you can say about nuns, ancient and modern, is that they rightly have zero interest in attracting men.

Two of my favourite modern-style nuns are not very feminine. I love them, and they could kill a rude man at ten paces with a glance from their nunly eyes, and they are not very feminine. I know feminine nuns, but these ones aren't. They are sharp-talking and loud and raucous. They love football, which they watch on TV. They wear trousers in and out of season. If you handed them a row of false eyelashes, they would take it outside and lay it on the porch to run free, since they could only assume it was an unusual new spider.

They have their Rule, their devotions, their convent, their household rituals, their paid employment, their other ministries, their lefty theologies, their responsibilities to the oldest sisters away in the nursing home, their holiday cottage. They have an amazing way of life. I could have shared their amazing way of life because they asked me, and I am very proud of that, but I just couldn't.

I couldn't, not just because I couldn't be a modern-style nun, but because it would just about kill me to cut my hair short, cutting my hair short meaning that it was over between me and men-as-caffeine-in-the-cappuccino-of-life forever. And indeed, that is why old-style nuns originally had their hair cut: it was THE sign that they were permanently unavailable. Buddhist nuns shave their heads, too.

Meanwhile, I know non-nun Single women who are equally as uninterested in attracting men. They live make-up free, cute-shoe free, skirt free, short-haired existences, and they have beautiful lives. They have their jobs, their hobbies, their pets, their friends (men and women), and nobody could care less that they can't flirt their way out of paper bags. It just doesn't matter.

St. Augustine, when contemplating which female lives were best, rated Permanent Virginity (proto-nun life) first, then Marriage next, because married women have to looking pleasing to only one man, and then Unmarried But Wanting To Get Married dead last because those women have to look pleasing to many men, which St. Augustine thought terrible.

My Searching Single readers may say "Thanks for nothing, St. Augustine," but perhaps this will cheer Serious Single readers who wonder if there is anything wrong with them for not being at all interested in men-as-caffeine, and prefering a quiet, busy life of comfortable shoes, Pears soap and cats.

And of course there isn't. It seems like a marvellous way of life to me. Perhaps when B.A. shuffles off this mortal coil, I'll live that way, too. When arthritis hits, I'll have to cut my hair anyway. But for the time being, I will continue wearing cute shoes and mascara, not only because B.A. likes them but also because other men seem to, and if St. Augustine thinks that is simply appalling, then I can only grovel and say "Amen, for, lo, I am a frivolous thing."

UPDATE: EEEK! Viking hordes from The Crescat! Welcome, welcome! Buy my book for Christmas! IF you have one, buy one for your buddy! Buy two! There's a special one for Americans, protecting you from Canadian spelling conventions! Special Inside American Version: an imprimi potest!

Congratulations to Sister Mary Thomas

The first thing I would like to do this morning is congratulation Sister Mary Thomas of the Benedictines of St. Cecilia's, Ryde, Isle of Wight. She took the veil and her first vows this morning. There was a small gathering of her friends, some of whom are also bloggers, at the church today. I await their reports with some avidity.

In [secular] life, Sister Mary Thomas was a pretty young woman in her twenties with a doctorate in history. We chatted a few times on Skype, and I had the privilege of being phoned up during her good-bye party (I think) before she left Scotland to become a postulant.

If reports are blogged, I will link to them in updates on this post. I think nuns are very interesting, but only if they belong to the tradition-leaning orders that are attracting young postulants. I am mean that way.

Update: Sorry for the wrong details. It was a very busy writing morning.

Nice New Nuns!

Hey, I haven't mentioned this in awhile, but there are two or three whole other vowed ways of life beside marriage.

Here are some pretty pictures of obviously seraphic Singles seraphically becoming nuns. (Warning: music.)

I loved the photo with the scissors. If it had been me, the Cardinal would have needed pruning sheers.

H/T Orwell's Picnic.

Incidentally, two happening women's orders are the Nashville, Tennessee Dominicans and the Benedictines of Ryde, Isle of Wight. Interestingly, St. Cecilia is the patron of both these houses. Meanwhile, their novices are young. I heart young novices. There's nothing sweeter in the entire world than a 20-something novice, except maybe an 18 year old novice.

Everyone who knows a woman in, or thinking of entering, the Tennesee Dominicans or the Benedictines of St. Cecilia's Abbey, Ryde, report in the comm box!