Blogging Guidelines

We're so glad you've joined us on this blogging adventure!  Just a few things to keep posts headed the same direction:

• We like the length of 300 to 400 words, which is about two to three solid paragraphs. Please make sure your post focuses on just one theme that you can flesh out in that space.
• Essentially, these posts are critical reflections on your experience of the tradition. In your writing, use the same kind of narrative tone that you used in your submission for the book. Consider this a time to raise thought-provoking questions.  
• Please remember to title your work.
• Readings can be found at www.usccb.org/nab. If you find other sites that are helpful to you, please let us know!
• The chapter topics include Growing Up Catholic, Faith in Action, Being a Catholic Woman, Vocation, and Spiritual Identity. 
• Growing Up Catholic explores the impact of that experience on our adult lives. 
• Faith in Action focuses on Catholic identity and social justice.
• Being a Catholic Woman looks at just about any of these questions explicitly through the lens of gender, however you define that.
• Vocation is broadly defined, as well, delving into the ways in which you live out your Catholic identity in the world.
• Spiritual Identity contributions challenge the rigid dividing line between “spiritual” and “religious,” seeking to demonstrate the ways in which both sides of the coin enrich and challenge one another.
• Please submit your post in a Word document, with the text copied and pasted to the end of your email.
• Be sure to attach an accompanying image to your email that fits with your post. It can be a photo that you have taken, something that you’ve found online—whatever it is, please be sure that you have the rights to post it. And if we can give credit to the photographer, let us know! They can be .jpg, .gif, .bmp, or .png, as long as they’re no larger than 8 MB in size.
• If you would like to link to a website from your post, please simply put the web address in parentheses after the word that you’d like the link to start from. For example, the September 11th post links to the USCCB website. So the start of the first sentence would read, “Hearing the first reading (http://www.usccb.org/nab/091108.shtml) during this morning's ecumenical Eucharist service, I was struck by the simplicity and the poignancy of the opening lines…”
• Be sure to sign your post and include a brief bio. It doesn’t have to be the same one that you submitted for the book. Use your creativity, and please keep it to a sentence or two. 
• If you have any questions, please be sure to let us know: youngwomenandcatholicism@gmail.com.

This is an excerpt from Jen's piece, which was prompted by her youngest brother's reflections on his upcoming Confirmation. These vignettes explore experiences of worship, one in her childhood church and the other on a DeColores service trip to Mexico with the campus ministry program at Loyola Marymount.

For as long as I can remember, Sunday Mass was a regular part of my family’s routine. My mom likes to tell how much I loved going to Mass when I was about two years old. She describes how I would try to sing along, standing as best I could atop that wooden bench, my arms outstretched, waving and clapping in time with the cantor’s; how I would bow my head with the rest of the congregation as they recited communal prayers, my own lips moving with the rhythm of theirs, not quite shaping the same words, but sensing that something holy was happening in these people coming together, and wanting to be a part of it.

I have fond memories of Masses at St. Irenaeus when I was growing up. The nubbiness of the ratty brown carpet over the cold linoleum in the parish hall where we had children’s Mass, how privileged I felt to sit with my brother so close to where the priest gave the homily. The almost overwhelming smell of incense that seeped into our clothes during Lent, how it still reminds me of fishstick Fridays when I was seven. The procession of candles and the pilgrims who carried them on Holy Thursday, how small I felt walking out of the church amid all those flickering lights. What it was like to be a part of the chorus of voices—Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom— echoing through the neighborhood, as we made our way to reverence the Eucharist before Good Friday. I was only beginning to understand what it meant, knowing that it was bigger than me, than my family, than our community. Something in all of that made it transcendent.

Mass was a part of my family’s routine, but it was more than that, too. It was a reminder of sacred time, a holy deep breath that readied us to plunge back into our day-to-day.

+++

At the beginning of my senior year of college, I joined other students on a weekend service trip to an unincorporated community near Tijuana, Mexico. After crossing the border that Saturday morning, we traveled to the site where we would join members of the community in laying the foundation for what would become a one-room schoolhouse. When we arrived, the air was thick with dirt and dust. While some of our group protected their eyes with t-shirts and bandanas, others of us were ushered into a playroom with the children. Although, admittedly, I was somewhat relieved not to be working outside, the idea of spending the day in that room with so many small children was a daunting one. Settling into a chair that brought my knees too close to my chin for comfort, I shared crayons and paper with one of the little girls. “Mariposa,” she explained, pointing to her first piece of artwork. Above her butterfly, I colored a bright sun. “Sol,” we agreed.

As the morning went on, we tired of this game, and I tried to think of activities I enjoyed at her age. Recalling the countless recesses my friends and I had spent playing pat-a-cake and singing the silly songs that went along with it, I turned to my new friend and instructor. We arranged our awkward chairs to face one another, and I clapped my hands together once. She responded in the same way, and eventually we clapped slowly and at the same time. “Uno,” I said and clapped her right hand against my own. “Y…,” I said, clapping close to my chest, “…dos,” clapping our left hands against one another. Soon we found our rhythm, singing, “Uno y dos, uno y dos, uno y dos, unidos, unidos, unidos.” One and two, one and two, one and two. Together, together, together. Together we became a part of something bigger than each of us could be individually, and the bit of transcendence from Holy Thursday liturgies was present again.

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In her mid-20s, Kate has begun to realize that running has become the kind of spiritual ritual that Mass once was. Here, Kate connects the Eucharistic prayer to running in cold mornings and her introduction to feminist theology.

May the Lord accept the sacrifice of your hands, for the praise and the glory of the Lord, for our good and the good of all the Church.
As I snooze my alarm just one more time, all I want to do is stay in bed until the last possible moment, hiding from the twenty-degree New England winter morning. My partner playfully nudges me out of bed and I crawl back in. He chides, “You’ll be crabby later.” I know.

During my sophomore year of college, I discovered why some feminist theologians refuse to spend much time thinking about the whole “Christ died and rose” part of the Christian tale. The glorification of sacrifice, as read by too many women for too long as instructions for being a good person has left too few women able to stop abuse of various shapes. As a sign of solidarity, my twenty-year-old self decided to be silent during the Eucharistic prayer; a protest against the oppression of sacrifice.

But this resisting sacrifice, it’s a slippery slope. It so easily becomes ideological. All of a sudden, I was unclear if I was living up to my protest if I sacrificed time alone for time with a friend in need. Of course that was good, important even. I knew that. But it has taken me a while to understand what feminist theologians must already know: there is good sacrifice and bad sacrifice; good suffering and bad suffering and the lines are blurry—the challenge is to lean toward the good kinds.

With one more nudge from the other side of bed, I force myself out of bed and spend ten minutes finding enough clothes to wear so I don’t freeze outside. Moments later, I’m relieved to be out in the crisp morning. I feel alone and unique in this morning. For this, I sacrifice the warmth of my bed. And it is good.

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“We come to our stories in the middle of them; they are already in progress when we are born.”
--Paul Elie, editor of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Elie explains that this can be the impetus for exploration of other traditions, because we may feel bound by the confines of these stories. But it also can lead to a fuller appreciation of our stories—what makes them unique, how others can relate to them—when we decide to truly live in them as they unfold. What stories are we in the middle of?

“They bring their own world with them.”
--Jen’s Mamita
Recently Jen's mom and her Mamita took a trip to the East Coast. It was her Mamita's first time seeing where Jen lived and meeting her friends, so the three of them made empanadas and tea to celebrate. After an afternoon of sharing good food and good stories around the table with some of our classmates, Jen's Mamita reflected on how full of life each person was. "They bring their own world with them," she said. What world do we bring to the table?

We hear one another into speech.
Regardless of our access to power in our tradition, giving one another a forum from which to name our realities is a first step in doing feminist theology. Further, it is a way of building community. What are our needs as young women with experiences of Catholicism?

The institution of the church is not necessarily synonymous with the tradition.
The institution has the responsibility of carrying the tradition, but it is human and fallible. How does our position in the tradition, whether toward the center or on the margins, make us and our stories unique?

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Places to Start
• places where you don’t know very much
(the things you already think you know will probably come out stilted, formulaic, and in a way that will be less hospitable to the reader; you may have to start with the things you think you know, but the trick is to continue to write through this until you come to an opening, the place where you come to the end of what you’ve already “figured out.”)
• memory, observation
• unanswered / unanswerable questions
• nagging memories that make no sense
• situations that are incomplete, interrupted
• a desire to redeem / honor / make meaning out of anything

A Method for Drafting
• A first draft is chaotic, messy, unformed, a dumping ground, a place to challenge yourself. After this is down, give yourself time away for “wordless amusements,” walking, showering, gardening, cooking, etc.
• The second draft is when you’ve finally figured out what you want to say. Now you can be a craftperson, be more cagey, come up with strategy and stucture. This is when you should think about the reader for the first time.
• The third draft is when you finally begin to think about language, word choice, and where you might look to get a response from a few readers. Before this point, it’s nobody’s business but your own.

Thoughts on the Personal Essay
• In the personal essay, there is no universal truth, only personal truth.
• The personae with which you write is a little bit bold, a little presumptuous.
• Yet it’s the form most available for people who are clueless.
• You start with “this is what I think” and you move somewhere.
• The strongest thing in this form is the antithesis—the point in the essay where you try to speak from the opposite of what you think and belive. Often its in that dialectic that the insight comes. If it’s really an essay, you need to wrestle with ideas.

A Method for Structure
Carol Bly has the following method for creating structure in the personal essay—to include:
1. an image (something concrete, dialogue, a visual, an object)
2. an idea (vision, insight, something that can be said in a sentence, a question)
3. an anecdote (a story, a memory)

Often by including these three elements as you write, one of them will rise up to sort-of run the essay. You can reinforce that piece and allow it to weave the essay together. But you keep them all in there, working their synergy together.

Memoir
• Any decent memoir has to have an essay component
• If your territory is dark, readers will stay with you if they know that you’re going somewhere. Humor is a huge help.
• Specificity of detail—things that are very unique to your own experience and personal sense of place—ground a memoir.
• Also good to pick a structure, a timeframe, a point of view, a storyline
• And, it’s good to remember that nothing is inherently interesting; we sometimes think that our own personal history is fascinating in all its intricate detail. But it’s good to be selective with details. The interest in reading a memoir comes in the meaning making. Sometimes describing a highly dramatic event can be almost harder to handle because while writing you become so caught up in how it all happened. Writing memoir is about moving through this, and discovering the meaning you didn’t know was there when you started to write. Memoir is about meaning making.

Credits: Patricia Weaver Fransisco, Hamline College. Compiled by Kate Lucas.

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