A Fine New Place for Feeding<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Joanne McPortland is one of those very rare, too-modest writers who deserves to be read more than she actually wants to be read. For the sake of Catholic\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/01\/a-fine-new-place-for-feeding\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Fine New Place for Feeding\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Joanne McPortland is one of those very rare, too-modest writers who deserves to be read more than she actually wants to be read. For the sake of Catholic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/01\/a-fine-new-place-for-feeding\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Diary of a Wimpy Catholic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-01-23T22:44:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-03-13T21:03:17+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/a\/a9\/William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_%281825-1905%29_-_The_Shepherdess_%281889%29.jpg\/300px-William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_%281825-1905%29_-_The_Shepherdess_%281889%29.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Max Lindenman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Max Lindenman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/01\/a-fine-new-place-for-feeding\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/01\/a-fine-new-place-for-feeding\/\",\"name\":\"A Fine New Place for Feeding\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2012-01-23T22:44:57+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-03-13T21:03:17+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#\/schema\/person\/f28642d6ff756d058ed6ff35f876e355\"},\"description\":\"Joanne McPortland is one of those very rare, too-modest writers who deserves to be read more than she actually wants to be read. 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{"id":2681,"date":"2012-01-23T16:44:57","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T22:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=2681"},"modified":"2015-03-13T15:03:17","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T21:03:17","slug":"a-fine-new-place-for-feeding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/01\/a-fine-new-place-for-feeding\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fine New Place for Feeding"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

By the age of 60, Joanne\u2019s made a faith journey full of loops and detours,<\/strong><\/a> flat tires and long waits on the shoulder for the Triple-A truck. A cradle Catholic, she fondly remembers her formation by the \u201csmart, faithful, disobedient, brave, creative women of the Immaculate Heart,\u201d among them artist Corita Kent. After wandering off for many years to the Episcopalians and gnostics, she decided to return home last summer while on pilgrimage to Assisi. Joanne has come to see her years away as \u201ca felix culpa,<\/em> a happy fault that both fed my hunger and stirred it anew.\u201d<\/p>\n

What keeps her from taking up I-once-was-lost-but-now-am-found cliches is more than her feel for tone or style. It\u2019s a deep and troubling sense of displacement, or as she calls it, revertigo.<\/em> The Church she re-entered isn\u2019t quite the Church she once left. \u201cI find myself,\u201d she writes, \u201cneither fish nor fowl\u2013nowhere near as orthodox or traditional or humorless as the great majority of the Catholics who hang around the blogosphere water cooler, and far less cynical and burnt out and angry than so many of my Vatican II cohort who stuck around seem to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the day of the March for Life, she does what I consider the gutsiest thing any Catholic blogger can do:<\/strong><\/a> she confesses to ambivalence on the Church\u2019s pro-life teachings. Misinformed by her obstetrician that her pregnancy with Joanne was ectopic, and by her priest that \u201ceveryone would know\u201d if she decided to abort, Joanne\u2019s mother carried her to term against her own better judgment. Though the pregnancy turned out, happily, to have been normal, her mother\u2019s \u201clove for me, and her faith in God, was distorted by having seen me, in no small part, as an assassin planted in her womb by the Church.\u201d The experience has left Joanne acutely \u2014 maybe even morbidly \u2014 aware of \u201cworst bigotry and stereotyping and hatred that [pro-choicers and pro-lifers] can muster.\u201d <\/p>\n

Now, this is all stuff the uncharitable or incurious could write off as merely typical of a generation: a drift toward feminism and goofy religions preceding a return to the Church that\u2019s halfhearted at best. Me, I belong to the generation after hers; we share a lot of our immediate forebears\u2019 aspirations and disappointments. Even those aspects of Joanne that can be reduced to a demographic stereotype move me and give me the sense someone\u2019s done my experiences an unexpected justice. Hopefully, I won\u2019t be alone in that. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s unique about Joanne, however, and what might have appealed to Archbishop Lefebvre himself, is the depth of her knowledge. In theology and canon law, she\u2019s closer to true geekhood than any other layperson I\u2019ve met. For that matter, she\u2019s a whiz when it comes to quaint and bizarre forms of popular devotion. In \u201cGirls in Love, Lambs to the Slaughter,\u201d she writes of the medieval custom<\/strong><\/a> connected with St. Agnes\u2019 Eve: by fasting through dinner and lying naked in bed (in the middle of January, no less), unmarried women could hope to receive \u201ca dreamy visitation, complete with ghostly kiss, from the spouse picked out for you by the patron saint of virgins.\u201d No passage better captures the paradox of being ravished by horror, and horrifed at being ravished, so common among modern-day tourists of Catholic tradition.<\/p>\n

Joanne\u2019s is a gentle voice, free from anger, disinclined toward bombast. Her posts aren\u2019t opinion pieces or homilies, or even anedcotes, but meditations that often refuse distillation to any single message. Her language is vivid and allusive, and you can bet her quotes from Keats and Augustine owe nothing to Jimmy Wales. She knows the pilgrimage spots of Rome intimately and makes provocative connections. For example, she says I\u2019m a regular Rose of Lima.<\/strong><\/a> Go figure.<\/p>\n

Joanne calls her blog \u201cEgregious Twaddle.\u201d It isn\u2019t. To help me convince her to rename it \u201cThe Trough,\u201d I urge my readers \u2014 all five or 10 of them \u2014 to go and feed themselves there.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"