We're off to the cottage, so I won't be around for a bit. The cottage does not have internet access, but B.A. is already anticipating wi-fi in village cafés. Not really sure that's in the spirit of "getting away from it all", but never mind.
I feel like leaving you with a list of random instructions. So here you are:
A. If you take care of your skin now, you will be pleased with yourself later.
B. Appreciate whatever it is that you have today while honouring your hopes for tomorrow.
C. Everyone is born Single, and most--especially teenage Cradle Catholics--are is called to live to live the Single Life as Christians on their Confirmation day. Christians are called out of ordinary Single Life to marriage, religious life and/or the priesthood.
I think I will have to write a lot more about that in future. Kudos to the Polish reader who gave me the idea that Confirmation is the "event" in which you are called to Christian Single Life. This is really an awesome idea, for it underscores to teens that whatever they might be called to LATER, right now they are called to the SINGLE way of life, which has its own responsibilities, challenges and graces.
D. Men who believe in casual sex will lie to get it. The ability of many men to lie about really very important and personal things is really quite breathtaking.
E. Men tend to talk too much on the first date and tell you all their bad habits, weak spots an obsessions. Listen closely. Discuss your doubts with a hard-headed, relatively closed-mouthed female friend.
F. Women tend to talk too much on the first date because we are nervous or because we are used to making friends with women by sharing personal stuff. We shouldn't do that on first dates. Men are not women.
G. All women are called to motherhood, spiritual if not physical. And nature made us to outlive our fertility by decades so that, if necessary, we could help raise other women's children.
H. You will one day be too old to give birth, but you will never be too old to be married.
I. Think very hard before you go into debt for a second Arts degree. Research your job prospects and be rooted in reality, not wishful thinking.
J. God has a plan.
11 comments:
Great list! I think I'll post it on my bathroom mirror to remind me. :)
I made a major move a few years ago, and the bittersweetness of it taught me the truth of B. For years I had wanted to make the change, but when I did, I lost some things I had and realized I'd been taking them for granted. I try very hard not to take things for granted now, and when I catch myself complaining and/or wishing I was someplace else (including being married), I remind myself that I might not have all the blessings I currently have in that new place. That really helps to keep me both rooted in reality and seraphic about it.
This is a great list! I would add to it your much-given advice to write down fits of passion for use in a future novel. It's terribly useful and cathartic.
Enjoy the cottage - getting away sounds perfectly lovely.
Enjoy the cottage!
Thank you for I. (which I have been contemplating lately but for a fourth degree...yikes just typing that makes it sound more odd!).
And especially thank you as always for J!
However-not sure about all the nuances of C...I have just spent many semesters trying to knock out of my students' brains that confirmation is any kind of coming of age ritual that = a graduation and is rather than a completion of initiation/sealing of baptism.
Great list!
I think that confirmation as coming-of-age/graduation and confirmation as completion of initiation are NOT mutually exclusive. Indeed, why should the completion of initiation of baptism not feel like a coming of age ritual or graduation from the child-focused religious ed into the normal life of a Christian single?
Great list, and "spoken" like a true Auntie! Have a lovely trip. I will also be saving this list.
I kind of really want to print this out and post it on my door where I see it every time I leave my room.
Great list! Love it. Hope you enjoy the cottage!
Sciencegirl and MC, there's a bishop in my state who cynically refers to the Sacrament of Confirmation as a Sacrament of Exit, because once the kids get confirmed, you don't see them at Mass again.
D is freakishly accurate. I was stunned to discover that someone who began as a friend was hoping so hard for casual sex that he founded the friendship on a set of lies just to get in the door. I'm still sort of reeling from it. But it is logical that a person who is loosey-goosey about sexual morals would be relaxed about other morals as well, I suppose.
Confirmation does have lots of nuances, but I think your insight about the for-now Single vocation is wonderful and helpful.
I do hope you write more about this.
I will have to do some reading up in Sacramental Theology before I work it up into an "event" calling unmarried Catholics into "Single" life. But it would be a solution to the old "But HOW is Single life a vocation" conundrum?
Good list, very true. I need to ponder point E.
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