Author’s note: Since writing “Take Me to the Pigs: Finding Hope in Dark Times” last November, I got engaged to the very same boyfriend and joyfully married him in a TLM wedding on July 27. God is good! My little baby, Your father and I’d been married less than six weeks when we discovered that…
She looked up at me. Messy pigtails, marvelously intelligent brown eyes, a precocious wisp of a petite three-year-old: my boyfriend’s niece. Surrounded as I was by games and chatter, everyone thronging together for a day of fun on a Catholic family of sixteen’s farm, I stood still and looked down at her. “Will you take…
“My Lord and my God, from this moment I accept at Thy hands, with resignation and cheerfulness, the kind of death it may please Thee to send me, with all its pains and anguish.” Despite the countless daydreams I’ve indulged in throughout my sanguine life, it struck me a few days ago that I have…
My family and I were spread out in the living room, surrounded by that comfortable cacophony of semi-clutter that makes a house a home, poised to embark on our nightly rosary…when the phone rang. (Of course.) My brother answered in that classic teenaged, almost military style, in which his tone conveyed absolutely nothing to the…
Image: Interior of St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Roanoke, Virginia. When I was a teenager, and when it came to considering the state of life to which God was calling me, I had strong, gripping hopes and dreams for what I wanted to do – but an even stronger, more gripping fear of letting my…
I’ve had the privilege of being able to attend the traditional Latin Mass for going on nine months now. I can say without hesitation that this transition has been the single best change of my life. I’ll forever have an ongoing love story with Catholic tradition, and I’ve been blessed to discover that nowhere is Catholic…
Advent in the domestic church is a mystery lying somewhere under our wet-boot-stained carpet, the cookie crumbs, and the fir needles. Here, the coming of Christ is hiding somewhere between the packages outside our door, the voice of Bing Crosby crooning away in our kitchen, and our family Nativity scene donkey that only has one…
The days are darkening, and I am angry. Yes, angry, along with so many others who observe with growing pain and confusion what is happening to our Church from within, far more grievously than from outside. But this anger isn’t a bitter, despairing anger; rather, it is a zealous, irrepressible anger that pulses hot against…
