What I’m doing this weekend is hanging out at the Edel Gathering (read and weep on Twitter at #Edel15). Going to parties is not the kind of thing that I do. But I live in the general neighborhood, and my friend was going and she asked if I’d meet her for lunch, and then new tickets opened up, and next thing I knew, wow, party!
Coming here was the best decision ever. I have a great network of faithful Catholic mom friends at home in regular life, and a massive network of Catholic geek friends online, so it wasn’t exactly that I had a desperate sense of being alone in the world. Not at all. But to see so many different kinds of ladies from all over the country all in one room loving just being another Catholic mom living a hard ordinary life has been extremely heartening. The crowd in and out of the Adoration room just makes you want to weep for happiness. The fact that you could have a massive party that has both its own cocktail and its own adoration room? Priceless.
Because God is good, I’ve gotten to do the introvert thing in the middle of the party. I who dread mingling and crowds have gotten to sit down and have long, quiet, fruitful conversations with some ladies who were just who I needed to meet. And I who spend a disproportionate amount of my life writing on the question of “So how do we do the Catholic thing in this time and place??” get to spend the weekend with hundreds of women who are doing just that.
It is very beautiful.
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Also, riding a bicycle in Charleston traffic is very fun. And not something you can do with children.
Photo by Paolo Costa Baldi. License: GFDL/CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.
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