I.
OK. Me, being me, we have to start with this. The March for Life is in D.C. today. I’ve never been, but I have a lot of friends who are attending. I pray that they will have a good March and that maybe this year the people in D.C. will listen.
I’m pro-life for a lot of reasons: I’m Catholic, for one. I love kids, for another. But also because I was born in 1982, and my mother could have aborted me. Not that she would’ve, because she loves kids and wanted me rather badly; she and my father had sort of given up on my ever showing up when I was conceived. I was–I am not–a “perfect” human being. I am massively, genetically flawed. I am expensive to keep up. I’ve almost died a lot of times, and I’m pretty sure no parent wants to experience that once, let alone more than once.
Parents have filed “wrongful birth” suits because their child was born with CF. That chills me. Life is life. And we have a duty to protect it. Places like this are doing the work of it, and we have to support them.
So, yes, I feel pretty strongly about this, because those babies? They could be me.
II.
Well, OK, we started with the heavy! Whew. But I honesty couldn’t let the MFL go by without commenting on it. It’s the way I’m wired.
III.
T.S. Elliot, famously, said April is the cruelest month. I think January has more right to that than April. Christmas and the holidays are over, the world is full of snow and grey and generally gross (at least in Ohio), you just want to hibernate but you can’t, and you may or may not have failed in your yearly resolutions to do better. The days are longer, but not warmer–yet. And of course January is 31 days. Oh well. I console myself with things like opera and good books.
IV.
On the reading list this week: Everyday Divine; Cravings; The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena, and hopefully finishing Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ this weekend. I’ve been dipping into this for awhile and it’s time to just finish it. I’ve also been weeding out the library. I only want books that I love and that I read regularly. You don’t meet the criteria, you be going to Half Price Books very soon.
V.
January does have one thing going for it: since it’s cold and gross you can spend time straightening the house and organizing it. So that’s a plus. Right now, that means the library and the basement–two areas that are sort of “undefined” since I moved in over a year ago. The basement is waiting on furniture and c., and better storage units (as in, something beyond the black stacking blocks I used in college). The library is the manifestation of Psalm 23: “My cup overflows {with books}.”
VI.
Have I posted library pics here? I can’t remember, so here’s a taste:
One of the library shelves
This is OLD so I’m going to have to update these later. Book photography!
VII.
Some of you may know I write other places than just here. I write regularly for Suscipio, a Catholic women’s blog. We’re women from all walks of life: students, moms, singles, whatever. The blog is written by a bunch of regular writers and contributors, we have a book club, and all sorts of fun. Here are my last two columns: this one, about the presentation in the temple, and this one, about the finding of Jesus in the temple. (I’m doing a yearlong series on the Mysteries of the Rosary and Faith, since it’s the year of faith. We start the Luminous mysteries next week!)
