Tuesday Catch-Up Post #2
Featuring: Thoughts on Advent Colors, 2 Recommendations, & What I Highlighted In Middlemarch This Week
Happy Tuesday, Friends!
To be honest, a part of me has always been a little bit frustrated at the way the Church’s liturgical pinks and purples of advent somewhat clash with the festive reds and greens of the larger culture’s ‘holiday-season’ decor. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for living liturgically. I always look forward to pulling out the advent wreath and lighting a new candle each week to build anticipation. And I get it: Advent is not Christmas. It’s its own season, about preparing for Christmas. Yes. Fine.
I’m just saying: pink and purple??
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I put two and two together after picking up Matt Maher’s Advent book for my kids:
I’m probably just very slow, and maybe everyone else in the Catholic world already knew this. But when it comes to liturgical colors, I had always heard the emphasis placed on symbolic meanings as opposed to natural imagery. For example, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard that ‘purple’ means repentance, preparation, or royalty. And that it’s not pink, it’s rose, which represents joy (for some reason). As someone who has always been a flashcard learner —a fan of rote memorization— I guess it never occured to me to just… look up.
It took Merce Tous’ beautiful illustrations in that children’s book for me to finally see, but I have a new appreciation for the purples and pinks of the advent season.
Now, instead of lectures about repentance and preparation, or jokes about pink chasubles, I see sunsets and starlight and a twilight sky splashed with purples and pinks. Even as we have grown accusomted to putting up twinkling lights of varying dazzling colors at this time of year, creation puts on its own light show, and the heavens bear witness to the Advent of the Christ Child with its pinks and purples.
Two Recommendations:
I told you guys I’d use these Tuesday catch-up posts every other week to share some recommendations, and this week I have two:
On Praying to Mary
Yesterday was The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Friday is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is a very Marian week in the midst of a season when images of Our Lady cradling the Christ-Child are commonplace even in protestant and secular spaces. As the world remembers that first Christmas, Mary’s role simply cannot be ignored.
So especially this week, I’d recommend for you 1.) to up your devotion to Our Lady, and 2.) to brush up on your Marian apologetics.
To that end, this article from Patrick Neve is a great primer on why devotion to Mary isn’t optional, it’s essential—for all Christians
From the article:
The implicit assumption is: if it’s not absolutely required for salvation, it’s optional. Maybe even wrong.
But that’s not how Christianity works.
Is baptism absolutely necessary? Christ saved the thief on the cross without it. Yet baptism remains necessary because Christ commanded it. Baptism is the proper, fitting way to enter the Church.
It’s good. Go read it! And then pray a rosary!
My Fav Podcast
Next up: just a plug for one of my favorite podcasters/stand-up comedians/ writers / former Catholic bloggers: Jen Fulwiler. I’ve been a fan of Jen for years. Her time as a Catholic blogging queen overlapped with my brief foray into the mean streets of the Catholic blogging world of the 2010s. I’ve always appreciated her writing and hearing her point of view. In 2020, she quit her daily national radio show on the Sirius XM Catholic channel to start her own podcast and pursue a career in stand-up comedy. Ironically—though I’m about as into Catholic media as a person can be—I rarely listened to her radio show, but I never miss her podcast. She’s hilarious, insightful, and just someone I genuinely love listening to. Go check her out.
And while you’re at it, please pray for Jen’s daughter, Lane. Lane is 19 and was recently diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a form of brain cancer. She and her family need continued prayers as she undergoes treatment. They are asking for the intercession of Our Lady of Champion.
What I highlighted this week:
Readers will remember (or not) that I’m chugging along through Middlemarch for the first time. The other week, a friend asked me what it was about, and I..didn’t know what to say?
You guys, what even is Middlemarch about? A group of people in a town? I’m surely missing probably a really important piece of the puzzle by simply not caring enough to dig into the historical context of the time period it’s set in. But you know what? I’m still enjoying it, still getting to know the characters, and still finding pithy, hilarious, and meaningful quotes worth highlighting on my Kindle.
Like this one:
“But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such stores of mind, the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still—very wonderful things have happened!”
I love that. Very wonderful things have happened! The phrasing just makes me chuckle: that we all have resolves, or things in our life that we are pretty near certain about what the right course of action ought to be. Yet we secretly long that action will turn out to be unecessary. We all lean towards miracle. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been known to daydream about fire alarms canceling tests, waking up to find something was all a very vivid dream, or even Jesus Himself coming back in glory simply to get me out of a deadline.
Doing the work is hard. Besides, very wonderful things have happened!
Thank you for reading. I hope all the very wonderful things happen to you this week, that you lean towards miracle, but also that we all can remain firm in our resolves to achieve the ambitions set before us.