Tulip Fancier's Weekly

I quit.

Now now, don't panic. I'm not quitting anything that I ought not to quit. Nothing that doesn't urgently need quitting. Good quitting here, not bad.

In the last few months, I've been able to come to grips with a few things. Various developments have developed that have clarified some thoughts and I wonder if I am not the only one who is thinking about this.

For many years, I thought the Church was on the upswing. I knew lots of nice young conservative Catholics and lots of less young people who had lived through the changes and had held onto the faith. It seemed that the old dry withered branch of liberalism and feminism (and all that) was finally showing dying off and would start to fall, perhaps even within my own lifetime. And I have thought of myself as part of a movement, a revival of good old sweet-smelling things that my mother's generation had forgotten or tried to bury.

When I was a child I wanted to be a nun. I hardly knew what such a thing was and certainly didn't know how to find out. But it was there and didn't go away. When I grew up and re-found the Faith, I remembered what I had wanted and set about trying to find the thing I had in mind. In the process of all this, I discovered that movement. I found out about the Nashville Dominicans, the Benedictines at Ryde, the CFR's, the Missionaries of Charity, the little groups of sisters reviving and making it new.

I was elated that the old thing, like Old Narnians, still lived on in secret. It was like finding elves, faded and diminished, but still living and singing in their lofty halls.

It has indeed been an interesting ten years; that's how long I've been a fully practising Catholic.

Since the first rush of excitement at finding this amazing thing, from my arrival in Halifax in September 1997 with a backpack full of summer weight clothes and a hundred dollars in the bank, I've found out more about the world than I had dreamed it was possible to know. I learned that there is truth to be found if you look, that the nihilist philosophies of modernity were demonstrably false and did not have to rule one's actions and outlook. I learned that the poisonous black smog that lies over nearly everyone's minds is possible to dispel with a word and an act of the will. We don't have to live like I lived before. Things can really be different.

But I've had enough now. Of the Professional Catholic Mover n' Shaker business. Of "vocational discernment". Of second-guessing God. Of punditing on all the Catholononsense. Had enough Motupropisms, End-Times Jargonising, Tradificating, lobbying and worrying.

In the last few months, since the suspension of my public blog and even more intensely since my mother's death, I have had a growing sense of nausea creeping up on me surrounding all things Cathopolitical. Revulsion at the thought of movements, revivals, groups, new orders, bright ideas and projects. I can no longer bear to read liturgical blogs, Trad blogs or Catholic news websites.

My reaction to the Motu Proprio has been to shrug. I see all the happy Trads popping champagne and setting up blogs for MP news and speculating on what it is going to mean, but I just can't get excited about it. It seemed inevitable, as action of water on stone, but mostly it just doesn't seem like my business. The Church is like the weather; it's silly to complain about its changes because they are going to come and go as they please while the Faith remains. Christ remains, but the movements of the tectonic plates of the Church are not my concern. My job is to get on with things I have to do. Was over at a friend's place this evening, just hanging about watching Dr. Who and chatting with the kids - goofing off, and I saw that someone had put a note on the fridge: "Stay Calm and Keep Going."

I've had the biscuit of trying to 'discern' what great plan God has for me in life. A long time ago, a wise friend tried to tell me as I grew more frantic over the meaning and purpose of life, "The trouble with God's ineffable plan is that you can't eff it. It cannot be known, by its nature, until it has finished unfolding. You'll just drive yourself squirrelly trying to figure it out ahead of time."

As I have said elsewhere, I've given up Vocationism as a hopeless exercise in tail-chasing and maddening second guessing. I was joking today with someone, a priest friend, saying that I think I don't believe in vocations any more. I think it's all over. What God had for The Before Time is not what He has now. Now things are different and times are requiring something else. Something harder maybe. God in his wisdom has seen fit to destroy the religious orders; who are we to argue?

I've visited a lot of these new places and groups in my quest, and there has always been something about them that has struck me as a false note. Even the wonderful Clear Creekies, though these have the false note less than all the rest. All that is over. It is not the time for reviving old things; something else is happening now and the world can no longer contain what served before.

I was having a conversation with someone who lives in one of the Catho-commune enclaves-of-the-glassy-eyed, who asked me to pray for him and his family. He had the flu, his kids were all sick and he was having trouble booking a flight for a long vacation in a distant exotic land. "We're really under attack," he said knowingly.

I almost...not quite, but almost...yelled into the phone: "You're going to be under attack from me if you don't stop gibbering you fantasizing religious loon!"

Of course, what I said was "OK". Plus perhaps, "poor you."

But I can't do this stuff any more. I'm so BORED. Bored with the knowing glances, the paranoid certainties, the gnostic in-crowd in jokes. We're geeks who don't know we're not cool.

I'm fed to the back teeth with Catholic political correctness. With having only a strictly prescribed set of tastes, interests, friends and opinions. I'm tired, in short, of the self-imposed "Faithful Catholics" ghettoized hive mind. I want out of the Borgatorian Collective.

Some time ago, I had a guy who regularly read my blog and my LifeSite stories and sometimes sent me notes commenting on them. In the first of these, commenting on some particularly apocalyptic horror I had uncovered on LifeSite, he wrote in the subject line, "Don't you wish you wrote for Tulip-Fancier's Weekly?".

YES!

YES I DO!

YES, I want to live in the real world. I want to have friends whose conversation consists of something more than rehashing 500 year old papal documents or the latest political gambits from the homosexual lobbyists. I want to hang out with people who disagree with me. I want to explore interests that have nothing to do with eternal salvation. It was more fun than I can say to go spend ten days in Vancouver with a group of people who didn't know what a Motu Proprio was. I was able to recall that I had once liked the theatre, that I had enjoyed working in wardrobe at the North Shore studios. I remembered suddenly that I had once been keen on fencing and aikido. I remembered that for years I had spent a week a year, every summer, walking around the Gulf Islands camping and swimming in the ocean. That I knew how to draft dress patterns and make hats. I remembered that I had family somewhere in England and that I had always wanted to go live there.

I left Vancouver in 1997 like Bilbo rusing out of Bag End without so much as a handkerchief. And like Tolkien's reluctant English adventurer, I discovered things of inestimable value. Precious and wonderful things that I could not have imagined if I had stayed home. But I'm obsessive. Once I was on the track to find what I was looking for, I gave up everything that I had loved before. I forgot where I came from.

I've got the big picture, thanks. Now I'd like to focus on day to day life. And I'd like to stop sneering at people who have got it wrong.

Let's let them be wrong! Just for a change!

There is more out there in the great wide world than is dreamed of in our little cliques. And a great deal of it is wonderful. I think I mentioned something somewhere about Milton. I was/am reading P. L. for the first time and loving it.

Ah yes, I remember now. I mentioned it on the discussion listserve for the Catholic Restorationists in the context of a list of recommended reading. The list was of the usual suspects, I'm sure y'all know who I mean, and it was depressing me. Can't we read something else? Isn't there more to educating oneself as a traditionalist than Chesterton and Michael Davies? I suggested Milton. I can't remember the comment verbatim, but the response I got was along the lines of "Well, I heard that his language is beautiful, but the theology was pretty weird wasn't it?"

Uh huh. Right. He is not correct.

How do you explain to people like this that there is more to literature than the catechism?

I am trying to get in touch with my relatives in Cheshire and I want to go see them. They will know me now only as a little six-year old girl. But I look so uncannily like my mother, I'm sure they will have no difficulty recognising me. I am going to go there and stay there and find out what it is like to live outside the walls.

Maybe I'll keep writing. Probably. In fact, I can't imagine not. But I'm finished with the Great Project. With every Great Project. I'll be looking for the small, the homely, the insignificant.

Maybe I'll end up writing for
Tulip Fancier's Weekly after all.