significant-narratives:

great game, boys. i doubted you every step of the way <3

quill-of-thoth:

gallusrostromegalus:

discoursedrome:

monks debating whether vows of silence should still allow you to leave emoji reacts on the monastery groupchat

So a guy I went to middle school with now works in the vatican and according to Cam, the rules on:

• Whether you can leave emoji reacts in the groupchat
• Whether you can leave regular messages in the groupchat
• Whether you can HAVE a groupchat
• Whether you can have Electronic Devices

-vary from one silent monastic order to another, but none of them have ever successfully banned “Long trail of increasingly hostile post-it messages on the fridge”.

#prev#uh#hwhat - @thirdspin, responding to

#I still remember the christmas that half the nuns decamped to grandma’s#because the debate about whether it was sinful to grease bird feeders#to prevent squirrel theft#had gotten out of hand#grandma didn’t know where to PUT them all

So. My grandparents were catholic and born in the late 20’s. Nearly 100 years ago. Therefore my Grandma’s youngest sister became a nun, which was a viable career path if you 1) didn’t really want to get married, 2) wanted to have an education, 3) were dirt poor and hey! Your parents know the church will feed their daughter through the depression!

Most of my great aunt’s cohort came from option number three. It was the Midwest, these were farm girls, their order was mostly about public service, teaching, and hard work, and they were used to a life of telling men “yes sir” and then doing whatever they were going to do anyway. Priests did not faze them. My mom remembers them mostly as teachers with rulers, but the ones willing to deal with me as a small child in the 90’s and early 0’s were pretty rad.

This made for some, shall we say, spirited arguments. Great Auntie’s order drew from a lot of very small towns with a lot of strong immigrant farming tradition and English as a second language, and an Irish catholic, a German catholic, and an Italian catholic are not the same thing, even if they’ve been Dominican Sisters for sixty years. They were all also named Sister Mary Something, except Sister Scholastica, and whenever things got too ridiculous at the convent my great aunt decamped to her biological sister’s house for dinner and a round of scrabble.

She always returned with a few jars of grandpa’s honey “for the church” which goes a long way towards explaining why the convent approved of Gramps so much, even though he was born a protestant.

On to the squirrels.

One year, Christmas break fell in such a way that my family arrived at my grandparents’ to stay several days before Christmas eve. We even got there before the convent cookie drop, which was usually shortbread from the depression and pizzelles. Pizzeles are anise flavored wafer thin cookies that are cooked in highly decorative waffle iron things one at a time, and come out looking like snowflakes or quilts or some combination of the two. We got pizzeles every year because Sister Pizzele was good friends with my great aunt and had inherited her pizzele irons from her mother’s dowry. We got crisco shortbread with grocery store brand jam in it because of rampant market speculation in the 1920’s.

No, when we arrived days before Christmas eve, the nuns were still baking in the convent kitchen. Entertained by the extremely fat urban wildlife of the convent garden that they could see out the window, courtesy of Sister Birdfeeder, who kept their various seed dispensers full despite her aging knees, and whose love of all god’s creatures was tested by the fact that squirrels are thieves.

Thieves that don’t just eat the birdseed, but knock it all out of the feeders so that Sister Birdfeeder had to go out into the iced over sidewalk of the convent courtyard to refill the bird feeder multiple times a day, which the squirrels regarded as a neat hack for endless room service.

So in secret - relative secret given that it was in a convent - Sister Birdfeeder had gone out the night before the big bake to grease the bird feeder pole with crisco.

An extremely fat grey squirrel took a running leap at it in full view of the nun baking battalion and sliiiiiid back down the pole. Slowly. Bewildered that its endless buffet was not a quick scamper away anymore.

The nuns either burst out laughing or turned to Sister Birdfeeder, who proudly exclaimed that she’d shown those little thieves, and produced a partially used tub of crisco to demonstrate.

Immediately, someone in the crowd exclaimed “But that’s a sin!”

Cue instant chaos. Everyone had an opinion. There were bible passages being quoted. Someone threatened to Get The Priest About This.

Great Auntie and Sister Pizzelle looked at each other over a table of cookies and boxes as the argument raged on, and decided that this was one war they did not want to be part of. They made their excuses (Gotta deliver these cookies to my sister, her grandkids are coming early this year!) and escaped the kitchen trailing nearly another dozen nuns who all wanted out of the current convent schism. Their excuses included carrying boxes, driving the car, loading up people’s walkers, and driving the other car with all the other people necessary for this voyage. They descended on my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve eve to tell this story to my grandmother, her fine educated catholic daughters who were their former students, and her fine educated catholic granddaughters. Who they would attempt to recruit to convent life as soon as any of them showed signs of reaching twenty five without being in a serious relationship.

“So is it a sin to grease bird feeders?” I asked, having taken seven pizzeles while the adults were occupied, much like the squirrel.

“It depends,” said my great aunt. “On intentions and the actual consequences and -”

“More importantly,” said my mother, staring at the shortbread, “Which tub of crisco did you make these cookies with?”