A Monday Daybook: Hazy July

Outside my window:  Hazy, humid, and warm.   It's quiet outside.   

I am listening to:  Shouts and booms from the basement.  Laughter.  We watched the Women's World Cup last night: the kids are playing soccer.  In their pajamas.  "SCORE!!!!"

pondering and pondering:

One positive that has come from the Supreme Court's decision is the opportunity to revisit, rethink, and reeducate ourselves as to what we believe about marriage and the family.  There is so much beauty to contemplate in the teachings of the Church.  I can't help but share a little here.

I thought htis article was especially helpful in making the distinction between what the Church sees as love verses what so many others mean by love:

The thing is, love does win. But I think that what's making the difference is that "love" means two different things here. For people using the hashtag, love means the amazing feeling you have when you find someone you want to spend your life with. For the Church, love means the cross. But, but, but...what about the love between couples married in the church, you say? Well, of course romantic love matters! The pursuing, relentless love of eros is an image of the way God wholeheartedly pursues us. But the eros only finds its fulfillment in caritas - a love willing to die in order to save the soul of another.

read the rest here

Chesterton makes a similar distinction in this article.  Our society is not alone: the Church's view of the sacramental union in marriage was contraversial, seen as an incredible or impossible ideal, from the beginning:


"But Christ in his view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of Palestine of the first century. He does not suggest anything at all, except the sacramental view of marriage as developed long afterwards by the Catholic Church. It was quite as difficult for people then as for people now. It was much more puzzling to people then than to people now. Jews and Romans and Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand enough to disbelieve, the mystical idea that the man and the woman had become one sacramental substance. We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time. Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is perhaps suggested in the end of his story."

~G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man   (italics mine)

read the rest here

I am hoping: That my new "running partner" will start walking on a leash soon.  I've gotta get some hotdogs to lure her off of our front lawn.  I have the laziest dog in history!  

but she's so cute and sweet!

running parner? not so much. She's my "writing partner" as I type on the couch

 prayers please:  I know it's not that big of a deal, but Galadriel has to have her adenoids and tonsils out and tubes put in her ears.  I'm thankful this is the first time I've had to go through surgery with my children, and I'm thankful that it's nothing more serious, but I'm a mom, and I'm still worried.  Help me pray for a safe operation? Thanks!!  (It's scheduled for July 16th)

Looking ahead: a few plans:  my husband just signed my oldest two boys up for their first golf tournement.  Clubs are out again.  Aragorn is worried about keeping score correctly.  Gimli? He's sweating the collared shirt. :)

Last week of swimming lessons, last week of baseball/softball (before the tournement).  Oh I look forward to a break from organized anything for the rest of the summer!

Go, go, go!  It's Monday again at Vine of Plenty. Did I mention how much I love the psalms beautifying my house each week this summer?! What will I do when fall comes?