The drawback of blogging is I think of something I want to say, but it's gone by the time I can actually sit down at the keyboard and I end up winging it.

I do recall I wanted to say something about how much I get out of my faith- not just that I think I came through losing my husband with infinitely more sanity intact because of my faith, but because I really do enjoy practicing it. It's fun to be Catholic. I love my parish, it's big, it's young, it's devout and it's active. Despite the media spin that the Church is in crisis and everybody's leaving and there are "no new priests," around here the parishes are bulging at the seams, full of young people, and we have seminarians and deacons young and older passing through ours, and three priests in residence, and only one is approaching geriatric and he's adorable, with a sharp, snarky sense of humor. I enjoy going to Mass, it's like the starting block of the new week. I was touched and happy to learn that a co-worker who was baptized Catholic but, like many of us immediately-post-Vatican II kids, never learned a damn thing about her faith in her original exposure to it wants to start going to Mass with me, because she sees that I enjoy it and wants to have what I have. And that's the only way somebody can really "get it" I think - no amount of preaching can do what living it can. I don't preach, I don't invite - I just am. I think I learned and benefitted from my decades of wandering and exploring other faiths, and I have respect for the thought processes of other faiths, but Catholic is what I am. It is what works for me.

Today I found myself watching one of the altar servers. We had an almost all-female roster at this Mass, and I started thinking how lovely it is to see these young girls on the altar. I've heard/read criticism of female "altar boys" here and there, and I just don't get it - they look so sweet, how can anybody gripe about it? One of them was so exquisitely beautiful, even with hair pulled back and solemn expression, she looked like a Renaissance artist's concept of an angel. The servers in our parish, male and female, are devout and dignified, even when they make unfortunate choices in hair coloring, as one of the guys last week did. Taxicab yellow spikes?


Which reminds me of a moment a few years ago, on Ash Wednesday. As someone who was raised Catholic and marched to Ash Wednesday like a prisoner to the gallows, who quit going as soon as I could, I remember sitting in quiet amazement, watching several large groups of kids with jeans and tattoos show up voluntarily and participate devoutly. Every Mass is like that - I see kids who look like the Last People On Earth you'd expect to go to Mass in the communion procession, pierced and tattooed, and there without their parents holding guns at their backs. So that's what I see, and I don't think my parish is unique. Something wonderful is happening here.


I haven't always been an active, practicing Catholic - I was led back to it a few years ago, before my husband's illness, which sounds sort of wifty but is the truth - maybe I'll tell that story another time, but it was a process of years, not "God whapped me on the ass with a flaming sword and I fell down and had an instant conversion." Far from it, it was a gradual growth process and one I resisted at first. And my husband (an even longer lapsed Catholic than I) had been amused and bemused by my decision to start going to church again, and ended up going with me, and some of my fondest memories of the past year were those of him at Mass, standing there singing hymns with me, because unless you knew this tough, cynical, smart, survivor of an abusive childhood, hard-edged Vietnam-veteran, you can't really understand that this was a very beautiful small miracle. I truly believe he had a special grace from God to endure the hideous suffering of the last two years of his life, even if he didn't quite believe that himself. His normal response to a bad traffic jam was anger and bitching, and yet he went through a living hell on earth without ever once losing his serene acceptance and glow of peace. (I lost my own glow, such as it was, left and right. ) But that's more than enough about that, because this is a knitting blog.


I cast on the market bag from Knitters today. I need to have more than one project in play, and it was perfect for my "a little focus is good" attention span, and Bravo has The West Wing reruns on Sunday afternoon. I love that show, why can't those people run our country? I got through the top band and 2/3 of the way around the first set of triangles before the animals demanded feeding and the phone started ringing, but I like the colors and I think it will be wonderful. Rob of Threadbear did one in a similar color scheme and said it looked "medieval." I am excited about working through the pattern, I need something like that to offset the solid red of the SCC.


Girlchild's quest for a roof over her head was stalled, the leasing office is closed today. Crap. I'm glad I knit and I pray.