Liturgical Lifestyle | May

May flew by, and now we are in the thick of summer.  In central Florida, the humidity is palpable; it has a certain smell.  A wet, dewey, heavy green scent.

We kickstarted Mary's month with a visit to the grotto, where we offered prayers and placed tulips.  A lovely tradition is to do a May crowning, and although I saw all the Mary statues in all the parishes I've visited appropriately wreathed in blossoms, I didn't know of any official ceremony or prayer gathering.

In other parts of the world, there are dances around the May Pole and excursions into woods for flowers.  In Wales, it was called Calan Haf and people gathered hawthorne.  Sad that those traditions are all but lost now.

Mother's Day falls on May 9th in this country, which I suppose is appropriate as it is Mary's month, though its founding has nothing to do with that.  In the UK, Mother's Day is always in Lent.  It originated as {Mothering Sunday}, a time in pre-Reformation days when the Catholics made a pilgrimage home to their mother church or parish.

Wish we could somehow rework this philosophy back into our modern Mother's Day, but I don't see how.  Maybe in future, my family will give up American Mother's Day for the traditional Mothering Sunday, as I aim to value Church holidays over secular ones.  (Always planning, never doing, that's me!)

Then we celebrated Holy Mother Church's birthday on Pentecost, and we all wore red (of some kind) to Mass that morning!

I briefly entertained the idea of doing a Marian consecration, as I started but never finished 33 Days to Morning Glory last year.  But it was not the time.  I'm not discouraged.  Mary will always be ready and waiting, and I don't need a special month or time of year to accept her invitation to better learn how to love her Son.

How was your May?

Liturgical Lifestyle: May Day

May Day is one of my favorite days of the liturgical year.  It summons ancestral visions of colorful ribbons flying and excursions into heady woods for bluebells.  Those are the kinds of ghosts I know, rather than the Old Hamlet's variety.

{This time last year}, we ran like wild things on rocky beaches of Britain.  All we were missing was the bonfire!  But I felt while we got the spirit down, we were missing the liturgy.  We had {Saint Walpurga} but wanted for Mary.

Strangely enough, this little country corner of central Florida is more Catholic than the ancient Catholic strongholds of Albany, so we had our pick of grottos and churches to attend to honor Our Lady, and we picked this one near the old Benedictine monastery.  I would have liked a May Crowning, but I didn't give it enough forethought to research how to make a flower crown.  Instead, we brought some potted tulips to sit in the sunshine and draw the butterflies.

Afon ran around wild, reaching for votives and clambering over where the old abbot rests.  My friend Masha says he is a changeling child, and I can't believe how right she is.  And how right it is.  That my wild-spirited son was held still for a few minutes to say his Memorare and his Hail Marys and then let loose again: a perfect embodiment of the synthesis of this holy day.

Twenty Hobbies

I stole this quote from Sarah of {Little Progress Notes}, and even though I have read it before, it stuck in my flesh like a thorn, sharp, sweet, and chastising, as it did the very first time I read it.  Someone close to me was very upset by this quote at the time, and I couldn't understand why.  Not intellectually.  Intellectually, I could understand how someone, a woman, who aimed for a profession or the perfection of a trade would balk that Chesterton thinks she oughtn't.  But my heart cannot fathom it.

When I read this quote, it's like if someone handed me a translation guide to the language of my soul.  People talk about wanting to be stay-at-home moms, and the majority of that talk revolves around the raising and education of children--which is, obviously, the most important aspect of homemaking if you're blessed to have them.  But there's more to it than that, and I see the fruits of the domestic woman in those who are not able to have children.  They're free to perfect their skills and passions.  They're broadly educated, not necessarily formally.

My own mother is extremely well-informed about current world events; her relatives in high political places talk down to her "narrow" point-of-view and are abruptly put in their place by a southern housewife.  I have a friend university-bound after seventeen years of graduating high school; she speaks with more lucidity and grace than most of my college professors.  My godmother has helped her husband raise the children from his first marriage, run three successful businesses, and start a grassroots ministry addressing the sorely ignored crisis of human sex trafficking.  My favorite women bloggers are, by a landslide majority, homemakers; more than gifted writers, they are photographers, crafters, architects, chemists, seamstresses, artists, philosophers, poets, botanists, activists, farmers, chauffeurs, and cooks.  They're quite literally everything to someone (their families).  And it just wouldn't be possible for them to be that astonishingly versatile in a career.

It's very telling that after a century of liberation, women are choosing to go back to the professions (oppression?) of their great-great-grandmothers.  Instead of being taught in an unbroken chain of mother-to-daughter lore, they're having to re-learn many of those skills that made suppressed Woman so dangerously skillful.  I suppose the feminist movement was necessary because it helped us understand.  For now we have the double benefit of having the freedom to choose and choosing not to be "free."

As for myself, being a Catholic, I have no problem being told what I ought to do and what is good for me.  But then, I believe that the so-called restraints of the patriarchy are not man-made at all, but transcend the world.

I don't think that a woman can't be focused on a single aim to forge a career.  Or that some women are best suited to that lifestyle.  I just know that in my first-hand experience with competent, thoughtful women, and for me personally, that would be sad.  It would be a kind of compromise.

I have so much to offer, so much that I'm passionate about.  God has generously equipped me.  I don't care that my ability to make a dwelling a comfortable home, or the home a place of spiritual peace and healthful stimulation, will go unappreciated by society.  And I grow weary of rationalizing my "career" preferences to that same society.  Like if I don't chose something concrete to achieve and then run it down like a fox, I'm irresponsible or somehow mis-made.  I feel, when I tell the world that I wish not to work formally for a living, a reaction akin to sexism.  If I can chose a lifestyle, God willing--and not without knowledge and acceptance of the sacrifices, as well as the blessings--in which I need not be distracted by the minutiae of the outside world, then that is what I want.  Because this is not a useless, fruitless aim.

Chesterton's logic gives me permission to embrace the scattered person I am; and he gives me comfort by telling me my efforts are not vain, nor shameful.  The domestic woman is unimpressed by the limp equality offered by a world that seeks excellence at the expense of freedom, that considers seclusion oppression and liberality narrow.  Our role model for Womanhood is a virgin and a mother--a handmaid and a queen.  And the domestic woman is the original Renaissance Man.

Thanks to Sarah of {Amongst Lovely Things} for hosting Weekends with Chesterton.