Read this today

To help you make dinner tonight, but also if you need another helping of hope

A Catholic school that posts this in the restrooms is my kind of place.

1. As I do every September (aka Parents’ New Year), I am convinced I can become a new person. This year I’m trying to enjoy cooking, which I have never liked but apparently must do every day. Giving thanks for Emily Stimpson Chapman who loves cooking and gave us Around The Catholic Table: 100+ Simple Recipes for Family and Friends. Can confirm her recipes are inspiring and easy for non-chefs!

2. Speaking of cooking, if you don’t want to tonight (Wednesday) and you live in Minnesota, order Papa Murphy’s pizza for dinner and 50% of online sales will be donated to Annunciation Church and School. This is my kind of mutual aid.

3. Striking words for a week in which everyone is angry: My Family and I Disagree about Politics by Heather Lanier (read or listen to the poet). If you’ve ever sat in a surgery waiting room or let your own body be cut open, this poem is for you.

4. I deeply appreciated this pastoral word from Rich Villodas on the past week.

5. Brian Doyle is one of my favorite authors and a fierce influence on my own writing. He gets the final word here, both in remembrance of 9/11 (about which he wrote more powerfully than any other writer I know) and Sandy Hook. His words are meant to make us move—against every act of violence, to protect every life.

“I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love. Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God.” (Leap, which you can also listen to Brian reading here)

“The next time someone says the word hero to you, you say this: There once were two women. One was named Dawn, and the other was named Mary. They both had two daughters. They both loved to kneel down to care for small beings. They leapt from their chairs and ran right at the boy with the rifle, and if we ever forget their names, if we ever forget the wind in that hallway, if we ever forget what they did, if we ever forget that there is something in us beyond sense and reason that snarls at death and runs roaring at it to defend children, if we ever forget that all children are our children, then we are fools who have allowed memory to be murdered too, and what good are we then? What good are we then?” (Dawn and Mary, from The Sun)

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