Triduum, Bananas, and a Conspiracy Theory

 

Late, as seems to be the new normal, but present. 

1.) That Weird Paper Mache Thing. 

Y'all remember that weird thing I was trying to make with the newspaper and the cardboard box last week? 

It continued to develop and actually turned into something that looks kind of cool. 

The corpus is detachable (that part actually ended up working, wonder of wonders) so I can take it off of the cross and place it in the tomb, 

that I built on the back side. 

I'm pretty happy with the way that it turned out. I'm thinking of maybe putting a small LED utility light that we have lying around inside on Easter Sunday morning to up the "wow" factor of an empty tomb, but we'll see. I'd have to change the batteries in the thing, which will require a screw driver and a significant absence of toddler. These two things can be difficult to find in conjunction. 

I did not make a resurrected Christ figure. I didn't have a good enough picture or holy card I could cut up to use, and I knew that if I attempted to draw one it'd end up looking derpy in contrast to the rest of the project. 

2.) Cool Easter Project

In case the insanity surrounding dying eggs isn't enough for you, or if you'd rather not dye eggs but still want to do something crafty, I wrote a tutorial this week for making "stained glass" out of paper, crayon, a really hot cookie sheet, and water colors.  Veggie oil is also involved. 

Basically, you use the heat of a cookie sheet fresh from the oven to slightly melt the crayon as you draw. This results in a really thick, solid line that looks like the lead in a stained glass window, and that keeps the water color in place in the piece you're painting. A very light coating of veggie oil on the back of the picture makes it a little more translucent and see through when you hang it in the window. 

The results look pretty nice. I let each of my kids paint one (and I did one myself) and I'm going to put them in our windows Easter morning. 

3.) I Got Deleted (Achievement Unlocked!) 

I suppose this isn't something to brag about, but I've now been both officially published by and had a comment deleted by the same outlet. (I'm not going to name said outlet, because I do have some class. Not a ton. But it's there). 

I guess it's a sign of a decent outlet if they're willing to publish my stuff and stuff I really disagree with. Shows that there's some variety being given a platform there. 

But man...some of the stuff being given a platform there I really, really disagree with. I've ranted before on this blog about the tendency in some conservative Catholic circles to say that the abuse crisis in the Church is primarily a homosexual clergy problem, and saying that sexual abuse of women is "understandable" and even the result of a "natural tendency" and more or less ought to be given a pass in the face of the "lavender mafia" scourge. 

As a woman who's been sexually assaulted by a priest  (I assume the guy was straight) and got to deal with a massive spiritual, emotional, and relational fallout from that, I have an issue with that viewpoint. 

 This article said both of those things pretty directly, and when I pointed out that abuse of women gets WAY less press and tends to get excused when it is brought up (and named as support for my point the comment section on a blog post on the same site about a member of the clergy recently credibly accused* of sexually assaulting an adult woman (and that the chief editor knows in person)), the comment mysteriously vanished into the ether. 

I mean...c'mon.  Maybe I'm reading a bit into this (or misremembered hitting "publish"), but that just really seems like a bad look. 

*article link is to a different outlet, not the one I'm complaining about. 

4.) Palm Solutions

There's nothing that can be done to prevent the misuse of palms in the pew when you have children. There just ain't, short of collecting them all and hoarding them in a purse or pocket like some sort of bizarre plant miser. 

I came up with an idea for what to do with them when we got home though, in a desperate bid to keep from having crumbling blessed plant fibers underfoot for the next couple weeks. 

I sewed them into a mat! 

I figured I could stick it under that paper mache thing I made, and use it as part of our home altar afterwards. Stick a statue on it or something. 

Unfortunately, this is what a mat made of palms looks like after drying out for almost a week. 

It's still holding together, mostly, but it's not nearly as pretty. I might still put a statue or something on it, but it's also possible that it'll end up in the charcoal grill for Chris to burn the next time he uses it. 

Oh well. Chalk it up to a learning experience. Possibly I'll let the palms dry out before I sew them together next time, and maybe it won't look so...gap-ish. 

At least they're all together and not floating around the house, so that part worked. 

5.) Holy Thursday

Our kids are not yet at a point where we can participate in the masses of Triduum (especially when the first one starts at 7pm...that's just insane), so we try to keep things holy at home.  

For Holy Thursday, we try to do a Passover-ish meal every year. We don't do Seder prayers or anything, but we make lamb, matzoh, and have wine (grape juice for the kids) and talk about what the Passover is and what Jesus was eating during the last supper. 

This year I did lamb chops instead of trying to do a roast or leg, and it turned out SO much tastier (and cheaper, because I was buying less meat!) than in years past. Everything actually got eaten. 

Tiny bit of wine, because preggers. 

After supper, we got the kids into their pajamas and watched The Prince of Egypt together, which we do every year.  I remain convinced it's one of the best animated movies of all time, and has the best bald villain that Ralph Finnes ever played (forget Voldemort...Ramses is where it's at). 

Then we read an account of the Last Supper and the Agony in the Garden from a children's Bible, and sent the kids to bed. 

Overall, it went pretty well. The kids were a little hopped up from the movie while we were trying to read, so we might re-arrange the sequence of things a bit next year to try and minimize that. 

6.) The Rest of the Week 

Good Friday is today, of course, and I'll probably use that thing I made (I really gotta come up with a name for it) from noon to 3pm today as an aid to meditation on the crucifixion. FORMED has some halfway decent made-for-kids stuff about the Passion, so I may let the kids watch something there, and then we'll say the Divine Mercy chaplet (or watch this video of people praying it and try to pray along), put cardstock  Jesus in the tomb and seal it up afterwards. 

Holy Saturday (tomorrow) will probably be largely spent in the kitchen by me. I'm trying to be realistic about how much I'm actually going to be able to do, but at bare minimum I said I'd bring Easter egg bread to our family get-together on Sunday, I need to make party food for our "vigil", and it's our tradition to make resurrection rolls with the kids. 

The Easter Vigil is hands down my favorite liturgy. It stinks that we can't realistically participate in it yet, but we try to do at least some of it at home. We light a paschal fire in the grill outside, light a homemade paschal candle from it, renew our baptismal vows and sprinkle everyone with holy water. Then we eat a bunch of party food (chips, dip, "fancy" fruit (anything other than apples and oranges), pretzel dogs, etc) and watch The Miracle Maker.

 It's one of the very few Jesus movies in this world that doesn't suffer from either theological ineptitude or a fatal attack of the cheese whiz factor, and probably the only one that's appropriate for kids.

 Sunday morning, we're actually able to go to mass! And we'll spend the day with family. 

7.) Bananas 

Also this past week, I bought 50 lbs of very green bananas for $3 from a local mom and pop produce store. 

That's a lot of fruit. 

Ironically, my midwife just recently told me I need to cut back on bananas because of their high sugar content and because they can make pregnant women constipated if they eat too many of them (!). So I'm probably going to stick a lot of these in the freezer next week. Maybe bake some into bread and freeze that for breakfasts post baby. 

Other suggestions welcome. 

Check out the rest of this week's takes here.