I came across this passage in one of Dorothy Day’s monthly columns for the Catholic Worker paper the other day, written when she was staying with her daughter before the birth of her third grandchild:

“It has been a month of ‘ice, rains, snow and stormy winds,’ and every morning after the routine of fires, breakfasts and dressing has taken place, Becky, Susie and I rock in the wicker chair and sing, ‘All ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; oh ye ice and snow, oh ye cold and wind, oh ye winter and summer, oh ye trees in the woods, oh ye fire in the stove, oh ye Becky and Susie, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.’ It is a song with infinite variations. You can include Mr. Clark’s cows, Leslie’s horses, the Hennessy goats, and all the human beings for miles around…What are we here for anyway except to praise Him, to adore Him and to thank Him? … and there is plenty to remind us of that in the country.”

-Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (in the CW paper – not the book) March 1948

We have our own verses to add lately. (Because of course you don’t have to be in the country to come up with more.)

Swallowtails and zinnias, bless the Lord.

Sprouts and seedlings, bless the Lord.

And as Hurricane Ida gets here, it will be winds and rains, bless the Lord. Fortissimo.

It’s a good reminder: we aren’t on Earth just to work and to suffer, we are here to praise God. Last week our praise (besides morning prayer) included our school work and dance and play-doh and some spent-grain bread; next week I expect it will include fallen-limb removal.

The pre-hurricane preparations are finished, except for the boards for the picture window, which we’ll do tonight. And then comes the waiting. And we get to be reminded just how small and not in control we are.

I’ve been doing some stress gardening lately. It’s a lot like stress cleaning, but with more dirt and sunshine. (And sweat, of course. It’s August.) It’s a practice that has felt natural and necessary as we endure another massive wave of Covid here in Louisiana, driven primarily by our low vaccination rates and high proportion of unwavering anti-maskers. It’s been hard to hear every day of someone else we know who is quarantined or sick, some of them very sick. 

If that were not enough, my oldest is starting school for the first time (as a freshman in high school) and Craig’s workplace is not a safe place right now. Despite how closely this pandemic is hitting us, many people, including some I love dearly, are still choosing their preference not to mask over protecting those around them. 

And it is hitting extremely close to home – I got an email from our nearest hospital last night explaining that they are so overcrowded that they are going to be rescheduling appointments. One of the board members from Craig’s school needed to be admitted with Covid, and there simply wasn’t a bed for him. He waited two days before it was his turn.

There’s not a lot I can do about other people’s choices, so I’ve been pulling weeds. Gallons of them. The summer plants are mostly done, so I pulled out the sad-looking bush beans and the dried-up sunflowers. I’m still battling the blackberries that took over the back corner of the garden and threatened to overwhelm our yard and our neighbor’s. Slowly, something resembling order is rising out of the chaos.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, in their vision for the Catholic Worker, spoke often of the need for scholars to be workers and workers to be scholars. Right now would be a bad time for me to live entirely in my head. But being on my knees, hands in the dirt, working to make something beautiful has helped. If nothing else, any time I spend in the garden is time I’m not scrolling Twitter or reading the most recent nurse’s plea for people to get vaccinated.

Because most of the work has been in ripping out rather than planting, and because it’s been a blisteringly hot August, the gardens aren’t much to look at yet, mostly just bare dirt. Starting over is a slow process. Still, two weeks into my refocused gardening efforts, I’m starting to see a difference. The kale and mustard greens and cosmos by the front porch have sprouted. They are a very hopeful shade of green. The long vegetable bed that came with the house is now clear except for the tomato jungle and a couple of leeks, and the bare earth looks eager for new life.

We weather storms around here. It comes with the territory. Just how much this one costs us remains to be seen, but I’m sure we’ll get through it, too, eventually. But it may not be before I start harvesting all that kale.

We studied the Holocaust in our homeschool a little while back. It was hard in so many ways, (how do you explain so much evil to children?) but it was past time I came back to it myself, and definitely time my older girls started to learn about it.

One of the things I had missed (or forgotten) about the concentration camps was the sign that hung at the gate of Auschwitz: “Work makes one free.” Which, obviously, was a blatant lie in that context, but it struck me like a slap in the face, because a part of me believes that, at least under normal circumstances, it is a true statement.

I would never have listed it as a tenent of my philosophy. “Work is good,” maybe. Or “Work is healthy.” Or “Work is necessary.” But seeing “Work is freedom” in that context made me realize that even if I wouldn’t say it, I often act as if it were true.

If I can just get the house clean, then I can relax. If I fold all the laundry first, then I can play with the kids. Or I tell the kids, After you finish your chores you can play.

Clearly there is nothing wrong with being conscientious about work and chores. But what I realized was that when that work comes first, and when I let it rule my life and come ahead of my family, ahead of prayer, then it’s no longer the life-giving “tending the garden” which God asks of us, and instead makes an idol of productivity.

(I should say this seems to be extra tricky for those of whose work IS our families – when is folding laundry doing the good work of the Kingdom, and when are we making it an idol that separates us from God and the very families we’re trying to serve? I would be open to any advice on achieving a balance here!)

The point is not that work is bad (another heresy common in our culture), but that it is not the source of our freedom.

Jesus Christ is the source of our freedom.

If we are too old or too young or too broken to work, we still have our value and freedom in Christ. When we start there, with our dignity as sons and daughters of God, then our work is no longer a title which defines us, nor a representation of our worth, but a gift we are able to share with our families and our communities.

I’m not advocating for a messy house either, necessarily. I know I am more at peace when the floor isn’t hidden under a pile of Legos and stuffed animals. But I believe there is something my kids need more than a spotless house: a mom who remembers where her freedom, and theirs, comes from. That is, they need a mom who is free to toss a ball or read a book, even if it means the laundry has to wait till tomorrow.

It’s time I add becoming that mom to my (long) list of works-in-progress.

Obedience is a word that feels a little outdated in our culture today. When “living your best life” so often means “going your own way” and trying to just “be you,” to whom could we possibly owe obedience?

Most people would still agree that we should follow the laws, sure, and maybe we should “be nice.” But that seems to cover the extent of our obligations in many people’s minds. And being nice includes to yourself, of course, which sometimes precludes being nice to someone else. So even that leaves a good bit of wiggle room.

This is on my mind in particular at the moment because as a parent, I would like a certain amount of obedience from my children. I don’t even expect to be obeyed blindly–in fact, I hope to raise kids who question rules, especially if they seem to go counter to the Good. But I would also like their starting place to be obedience, not rebellion. First get out of the road, then ask me why you should, assuming you didn’t already see the speeding car pass by.

This is a constant balancing act in our home, but certain recent events in the public square have made it seem a very relevant topic. Because if our obedience is only (or even first and foremost) to ourselves, the result is the situation we have right now in Louisiana: thousands of people in hospitals with the Delta variant, and thousands of others still refusing to get the vaccine or even wear a face covering in public.

And here is where the obedience issue really hits home for me: we all know that the best way to teach children is by example. “Do what I say, not what I do” simply doesn’t work. So when our (Democratic) governor institutes a mask mandate (and I don’t even need to discuss the necessity of this, because every nightly news program has that covered), and the (Republican) Attorney General promptly issues statements endorsing all the loopholes he can think of, what kind of obedience are we teaching our children? That we only owe obedience to those of the same political party?

When our bishop “strongly urges” that everyone wear masks at Mass, and our priests go out of their way to point out (in parish communications and on social media) that no one is required to wear a mask and no one without a mask will be turned away, what kind of obedience is that? Obedience to those in the congregation who don’t like masks?

Coming back to the governor, if a school administration tells its high school students that mask wearing to protect others is their personal choice, while wearing a seatbelt to protect themselves is obedience to the law…what is a sixteen-year-old supposed to take away from that?

And here’s my favorite. This is part of what the Catholic Church has to say about Covid vaccines and masking.

At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent. In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable. (emphasis in the original)

Note on the morality of using
some anti-Covid-19 vaccines
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20201221_nota-vaccini-anticovid_en.html

Sadly, often when this is quoted (at least in south Louisiana), the quote only goes though the first sentence, which I think you’ll agree misses the point of the paragraph. Now I don’t blame anyone who is nervous about putting this fairly new vaccine in their body, or who doesn’t want to participate, even with “remote passive material cooperation” (bullet point 3 in the above document) in anything connected to abortion. But the Church then requires those refusing the vaccine to “do their utmost to avoid, by prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.”

Translation: Wear a mask. Social distance. Don’t go near those who are especially vulnerable.

When our congressmen and attorneys general aren’t obedient to their superiors, we cringe and call it bad behavior or plain old politics. But when our priests and Catholic school administrations ignore not only civil law, but also the clear directives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and their own bishop, what on earth are we supposed to tell our children?

It appears that our individual freedoms, our personal preferences, while good in themselves, have become our idols. When we can honestly say, as Catholics, that we would rather risk sending someone to the hospital than wear a mask or stay home from a social gathering…I don’t know what to say anymore. We (including many anti-maskers) spend a great deal of time railing against our culture’s individualism, and yet what is this if not choosing our own comfort over the good of our brothers and sisters in Christ?

I didn’t think I would have to write a post like this. I thought we were moving on, that this kind of rhetoric was so 2020. Clearly I was wrong. Early on, there were predictions that the pandemic would teach us to appreciate each day, appreciate each other, care for our neighbors, and the like. If it’s taught us anything, it seems to have taught us to double down on fulfilling our own desires and to entrench ourselves in whichever ideology is most amenable to those desires.

I don’t think the story has to end there, however. I think there is still plenty of room for us to grow as a country and as a church, to learn from our mistakes, and to reconcile those relationships into which politics has driven a wedge. But all of this takes humility. It takes an openness to hearing what the “other” is saying, and to imagining what the “other” is feeling. When I put myself in the place of someone with a chronic illness, and hear that my parish won’t be accommodating me, but I’m welcome to watch on Facebook, my heart breaks. At the risk of stepping on toes and sounding divisive, that is the person I choose to stand beside. And I ask, humbly–because I don’t have all the answers, but I do read the hospital numbers–be obedient to your leaders, at least about this. Listen to your doctors and nurses. Listen to those whose health is vulnerable.

Please, please, just wear a mask.