Friday, December 27, 2013

Sons of Mary


I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.

Wherever you were, whomever you were with, whatever you were doing, hope it was fun, fulfilling, fantastic and full of Christmas cheer!



Quite by accident, I think I may have just experienced one of my most meaningful Christmases ever.
Unconventioanl as it was, I think I may have peaked as far as Christmases go :-)

It was always going to be a poignant Christmas this year. Quite possibly, my last in a certain city. Quite the accident that I was in this city at all at this time of this year, but so it happened.

Usually, my preferred way of celebrating Christmas is the midnight Mass. Always has been. Family tradition.

Not this time. Events conspired against me and I found myself battling to make it on time...and failing miserably.

Enter Plan B:
Morning mass at a distant but favoured church. For sentimental reasons, I HAD to go to Christmas Mass at this particular church.

But how to get there?
20 km away.
No public transport.
Didn't feel like driving.

Enter crazy idea No 2.

Run.
Run 20km to favoured church, attend Mass, run back home in time for Christmas dinner.
Negotiate hard with other female members of the household to be let off cooking duty :-)

And now I am firmly on the rota to prepare our first meal of 2014 :-)

It was worth it.

The solitude (an introverted nerd's paradise!).
The quiet.
The beauty of winter stillness.

This is the ONLY Christmas carol that even begins to describe this mood:





The highlight of this little descent into insanity (as some of my nearest and dearest call my foray into Christmas madness) was just when I began to 'hit the wall'. Um, I don't mean I suddenly aged during my run :-) I am using 'runner speak' here, as opposed to Manosphere terminology :-)

A group of cyclists passed me. I think I had passed them earlier on in my run as they whizzed past me on the opposite side of the deserted streets. But it was only when I got to the centre of this great city and in need of a serious distraction to take my mind of a niggling right knee injury that I spotted them again and this time, I took notice of them.

They must have numbered about twenty. They were all men. They looked young but I cannot be sure of their ages. Dressed in funny Father Christmas hats. Made me laugh, despite my right knee agony.

The leader of this group had a ghetto blaster attached to his handlebars. This was what was playing (but in base rather than soprano, in a TaizĂ©-like fashion):





I hadn't heard this ancient hymn in ages, so it immediately grabbed my attention. I guess that was the point. Confused tourists finding out too late that nothing was open in this city on Christmas Day stopped to gawk at this little party of strange cyclists, no doubt thinking as I was, 'what the...'

I stopped to listen to them and watch them as they cycled past me. Then I realised something else. They were saying the rosary.
I wonder if they were priests or seminarians?

I will never know.

But I do know one thing:

I had just seen Sons of Mary cycle past me on Christmas Day 2013. That was the most precious Christmas gift I could have received!

Perhaps I have alludded to this before - forgive me if I have.
But I cannot help myself.

I adore Sons of Mary. For me, the ultimate 'Catholic Game' would be if a man whipped out his 'Miraculous Medal' or 'scapula' during a romantic date...

OK, enough of Catholic Girl weirdness :-)

Any man who professes to love Our Lady is a friend of mine. Indeed he is my brother.

These South American Sons of Mary are family...
They are worthy of respect.

Everyone loved Pope John Paul II for his extrovert personality. For one member of my family, however, the only reason she adored him was that he was known to be a Marianphile.
It must be genetic or something...
I seem to have the same affinity for 'Sons of Mary'.

My old school was a convent school with the name of one of the titles of Mary. The nuns there made sure we understood that we were to be daughters of Mary. Throughout our lives.
Sure, we have all failed on various levels. Afterall, none of us will ever be perfect. But I hope we at least get full marks for trying :-)

So I guess it makes sense that I have this strong sense of kinship with men who have a genuine love for Our Lady. This love cannot be faked. It is a beautiful thing when witnessed.
For example, on Christmas morning by a group of cyclists with funny hats on.


In other news, I thought I knew all the titles of Our Lady.
Queen of Peace.
Our Lady of Victories.
Our Lady of Sorrow.
Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.
Queen of Angels...
And so on.

This Christmastide, I have come across a new one. I had never heard this one before!

Mary Undoer of Knots.

Has anyone of you heard this one before? To my eternal shame, I hadn't even heard of St. Irenaeus...

But I am so pleased to be acquainted with this Our Lady. I like the idea that she can undo knots, for some odd reason...


Finally, I leave you with a poem.
Sent to me by none other than a very kind 'Son of Mary'.

I am not a natural poet. But even I have more reverence for poetry than the mother in this film :

 
 
  
 
Mother: My boys don't go to your school no more, and that's gonna be it.
Teacher: You took 'em out of school?
Mother: You're damn right I did. I saw what they were bringing home... poetry and sh*t.
 
Hahahahahahaha!
 
That scene continues to amuse me to this day...
(Do excuse the utter irreverence, I beseech thee).
 

 
Here is the poem: 
 
 
I Can Do Anything Better Than You
“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
I can do anything better than you.
Anything you can do, I can do better.
Why can’t I get you to say that I Do?
 
Women like me sail as one of the crew.
Fish don’t need bicycles; fish need it wetter.
I can do anything better than you.
Adam, you slept late; to Hong Kong I flew.
I’m a dealmaker, self-starter, go-getter:
Why can’t I get you to say that I Do?
 
Whispering underlings call me a shrew.
I build my business; my man is a debtor.
I can do anything better than you.
Eggs I have frozen for motherhood too.
Marriage should fit like your favorite sweater.
Why can’t I get you to say that I Do?
 
Just when we women were getting our due!
Dizzy with freedom from breaking each fetter.
I can do anything better than you.
Why can’t I get you to say that I Do? 
 
 
This is not how daughters of Our Lady think.
This is not what daughters of Our Lady do.
This is not what Sons of Our Lady deserve.
That it is so in many households is  a travesty.
 
Food for thought... 
 
 
May you all experience a happy and holy start to 2014.
 
And to the Sons of Our Lady, may the ultimate feminine woman wrap you in her warm arms and keep you snug in her motherly embrace. 
 
 
 


Friday, December 6, 2013

The case against 'Go get a surrogate!'

This post is a knee-jerk reaction to a horrible image that popped into my head a few days ago.
You can blame PVW for this one.
(LOL, it is always someone else's fault, don'tcha know!).


PVW sent me this link:

I became fixated on one idea, and now I really cannot get it out of my mind.

Here is the source of my latest problem:


In that article the case of the fatherless daughter is put before us. And how unfair it is that she is barred from a father-daughter dance. Fair enough. It is not the daughter's fault for not having a  father. Perhaps Mum kicked him out. Perhaps Father was a dead-beat who walked. Perhaps he died tragically. But make no mistake - she will pay for this lack in her life. More on her later.

In that same article, the concept of mother-son events are also mentioned. But what of the boy with no mother? He would undoubtedly be barred from such events too! Again, not his fault he has no mother. He too will surely pay.

And in my overactive imagination I got to thinking...what happens when we have a world consisting solely of children missing one parent? What would it look like?

We already have plentiful fatherless children. No problem there...we could throw a lot overboard and we wouldn't miss them.

Don't understand that reference? It comes from a joke an Indian friend of mine made. Only an Indian could have made this joke, by the way. Anyone else would be 'racist', of course:

A British man, a Norwegian, a Swiss man and an American were on a boat with cargo representing their respective countries on board. Soon the boat started to capsize.
In an attempt to solve this problem, the men decided to offload the boat, starting wih the merchandise that was most common in each of their countries.

The British guy stepped up and said: 'Well, in my country, we have loads of tea, so let's throw all the tea on board out into the sea'. So they did. Things got a bit better, but they were still in trouble.

Then the Norwegian said, 'OK, in my country we have a lot of snow, so let's throw the snow overboard'. So they did, and thngs improved, but not by much.

Then the Swiss guy got up and said, 'we have lots of expensive watches, so we can afford to throw all the watches overboard'. So they did. Again an improvement, but something else had to go.

Then the American stood up and said, 'in the States, we have Indian computer engineers coming out of our ears, we can sure lose a few, no sweat'. So they threw into the sea the computer engineers.

Terrible joke, I know...but you get the picture...


And now, with all the negative consequences of feminism rapidly coming to light, men are responding quite logically with their own solutions...in an attempt not just to 'hurt' or punish women, but in some instances to nullify them. Indeed annihilate them.

I won't rehash John Galt's words here. A few posts back, I recounted my reaction to them. Chilling and disturbing.

The reason I found his words disturbing is not so much that I want to see women destroy society with no consequences. Being a woman myself, I do love other women, (because I love myself). But alas, not that much.

It's not all about us women. I hope that much is clear.

I do firmly believe that some women are just not suited to marriage, because they really are incapable of giving a man what he wants and needs. Such women should not be given the time of day by men. I fully believe that. The same goes for men who really are not cut out for relationships of any sort with women.

But the (right) solution to feminism and 'choice motherhood' is not surrogate mothers for single fathers, or worse, artificial wombs and the like.
Two wrongs definitely don't make a right.

In much the same manner as I felt strongly against the mother in this post, I think Cristiano Ronaldo's dodgy parenthood is also questionable...


We all accept that where one parent is missing, the child suffers in some way, even if there is a 'substitute' parent. Where is that substitute at 3am? The substitute is never as good as the original, as we all know. So why do we pacify ourselves with poor alternatives? (Rhetorical question).

We can spot the child of a singe mother (at least the worst kind) by now. Here comes the generalisation: usually narcissistic, they lack the drive that fathered children have. The women are poor examples of femininity and the men are overly supplicative, something which hurts their chances of success with women. These people are sorted as far as social skills go though, in the sense that they are usually extrovert. They identify strongly with the feminine, which explains why perhaps some of the men turn out to be 'manginas'.

But what about motherless children? This sample population is small, granted. But I think there are accurate characerisations of them in some films. Take 'Firelight' for example. Both Eliazbeth Laurier and Louise Godwin are motherless children, the former more than the latter, who gets a break when her mother shows up.
The kid in this movie is also a classic example.
Introverted, insular, generally highly principled, very disciplined, but alas, they have deep emotional issues.
These people identify strongly with the masculine: in Elizabeth's case, she very nobly decided to pay off her father's debts. In her era, the only option available to her was the 'surrogate mother' route. Have a baby for a strange man and give up said baby? No problem.
Ms. Laurier was thinking like a man. Nature taught her a feminine lesson she would never forget. She spends the next seven years searching for Charles Godwin and Louisa...
I daresay, a woman with a mother in her life from a young age would never do what she did.

In both cases of an absent parent, there is an imbalance in the child. Emotionally, psychologically, financially, whatever.

Life is sometimes unfair to some of us: sometimes a parent dies when a child is very young. Sometimes there are very serious reasons where a parent must be removed from a child's life. Barring these legitimate cases...

So, 'Children of women', meet 'Children of men'.

Trainwreck...

Do we really want this future? Aren't things already bad enough for us yet in the SMP? Do we really want to reduce parenthood into yet another 'his and hers' war?



The use of the phrase 'Children of men' was no accident on my part. The film with the same name is a truly chilling experience. Do we really want to go there?
(Rhetorical question).




So the feminists banished men from the home front and now there are long queues at the sperm bank.
And the response from men?
Get a surrogate!
Get an artificial womb!

Do you really mean this? Have you thought this through, all the way to the ugly and bitter conclusion?

Is anyone thinking about the children?
(Not a rhetorical question).