 My friend in Section Eight housing is cooking alive. She tells me that her central air conditioning still hasn’t been fixed. Her row house’s thermostat, she says, is set to 64 but the temperature upstairs is in the 70s and the temperature downstairs is about 82. She’s already called code enforcement, but they sided with the land lord who claims there’s nothing she can do. My friend puts her baby down for a nap, and the baby wakes up... Read more
In the beginning was Delight. That’s what perfect love is, after all: delight. To love perfectly is to delight in the beloved. To love imperfectly, as humans often do, is to bite your lip and keep your temper and choose for the good of somebody anyway, even when you are annoyed. We do this so often that we might be deceived into thinking that biting your lip and being annoyed and doing good anyway are a superior and grown-up version... Read more
I do my best thinking when I garden. Gardening is where I meditate and contemplate and decide what I think about God. Some people do that kneeling in a chapel or by their bed. I do it while I pull weeds and put down cardboard. The other day, while pulling weeds, I was thinking about the time I got a chain stuck around my wrist without realizing it. Of course, this happened at Franciscan University. I was trying to join... Read more
 It’s been one of those weeks where things don’t go well, as usual. One of my student loan holders demanded I renew my information for income driven repayments, even though the whole country is supposed to be on pause right now, no reason that I could understand as to why, so I logged in to the Department of Education– which is how I found out that my littlest loan from another creditor had defaulted. Again, no reason as to... Read more
I am hilariously bad at self-promotion. I just found out that my newest book is now available online, and has been for weeks, and I didn’t know! So today, I present you with The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, a chapbook of meditations on the Gospel based on the Seven Sorrows of Mary and the Franciscan Crown. This is a revised and edited, fancy version of the meditations I blogged for Advent several years ago. Now, if you’d like to... Read more
 There is a myth that gets told in just about every culture, with variations depending on the time and place. And the myth goes something like this: there was once a poor girl who dropped her spindle in the well. She begged the well to give it back, but the well wouldn’t give. The well demanded she top it off with fresh water before the well would give back the spindle. So the girl ran to the river to... Read more
 Hi folks, This isn’t a real blog post, it’s just your periodic reminder that Steel Magnificat, and my family, run almost entirely on gratuities. I get a tiny check, which is three figures and is only coming every two months lately, for clicks on the blog in the United States. I get nothing for clicks in most other countries. And I have a tip jar where satisfied readers and people who just want to be nice can slip me... Read more
 Again and again, I return to this theme: I wish with all my heart there were someone worth your attention to show you. But there isn’t. Again and again there’s only me here. And again and again I find I need to show myself to you. Because if you can see that a life as commonplace and depressing as mine is sacred, you might see that your own commonplace, depressing life is sacred. I think if we could see that... Read more
 My daughter, Rose, is a tomboy. She is not transgender. She’s a ten-year-old girl who presents as androgynous because she likes to. When she was seven, she climbed up on the sink and gave herself a pixie cut because she preferred it to my attempts at bowl cuts, and it stayed that way. She wears jeans from the girls’ section of Old Navy and dinosaur and shark t-shirts from the unisex section. On special occasions she wears a button-down.... Read more
Today on Twitter I saw a meme, being shared approvingly by people in the conservative Catholic homeschooling world. It portrayed a black stick figure family– a small one by Catholic homeschooling standards, only a mother and father and two children. If a family that size had walked into one of my conservative Catholic homeschooling get-togethers when I was a girl, we’d have gossiped that they were on birth control. This family was covered by a wide black umbrella, held up... Read more
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