rejectedcandystripersofthechurch

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An Orthodox priest in a particularly war torn part of Ukraine, did not have the money or a supply of icons. He asked local children to draw pictures of Saints and biblical scenes and uses them as Icons. 

Posted by the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria.

Source

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Lessons from Frozen

Yeah, I can’t believe that I’m talking about Frozen either.

Cards on the table, I used to really like Frozen before it completely saturated everything so that you couldn’t turn around without being spammed with snowflakes. I was reminded of that fact when I went to see my cousin last week as her ballet school presented Frozen in dance for us. It was pretty good, and something about seeing it in a new form away from the overzealous Disney marketing team’s efforts made it easy to just enjoy the show for what it was and not feel the crushing weight of every Elsa themed product on the market.

Today’s topic oddly works out for the start of Lent, and I’d like to say that I planned that, but that would be lying. During Lent, we practice denial as a way of trying to grow in self-control. We give things up, add new habits to our routine, abstain from meat on Fridays, and fast two days all as different ways to work on this, to remember how Jesus went into the desert to fast and pray to overcome temptation, and to prepare ourselves for Easter and hopefully to become better people, if only minimally. 

I think in this day and age we have a difficult time pinning down what self-control is supposed to look like. The way that people talk about self-control (or temperance, as we might see it in older texts) it comes off as a practice of extreme denial in the face of anything that might be considered temptation. Consider the Temperance Movement from American history- it represents a time when people sought not to cure the ills of society by the elimination of all alcohol.

Temperance is in fact not about denial at all, but about examining our relationships with others and with the things in our lives to see what is really in control. Temperance is the virtue that seeks to put us in control of the things that might otherwise control us. The website Education in Virtue explains it as “joyful mastery over one’s passions and desires”. Note that it mentions joyful, and does not talk about the elimination of desire. Desire is a great thing! The world is full of great things! And most of the time self-control is not about cutting those great things out of our lives. Of course, there are exceptions- sometimes we need to put space between ourselves and the things that control us, like when someone develops an addiction. Generally, though self-control is about trying to make sure that there are healthy amounts of things in our lives, and that those things come from healthy sources.

Mostly when people talk about Frozen, I’ve seen them talk about the bond between sisters as a sign of true love, or about how you can look at Elsa’s transformation as a metaphor for someone coming out of depression or anxiety, or maybe how Ana is so relatable because of how impulsive and imperfect she is. But we can also read the story of Frozen as a narrative about someone learning self-control over a difficult part of their lives the way that Elsa literally learned to control her ice powers.

Like Ana and Elsa, for many of us there are things that were easier to control when we were children. Maybe it was because we had different distractions in our day, maybe it was because we weren’t responsible for all of our own decisions, maybe it was because back then we didn’t have the same temptations as we do now. But at some point, those things evolve and we are forced to confront them when we see that perhaps we aren’t as much in control of them as we’d like to be or when we see that they have begun to hurt us or those around us. This is when we first come to truly understand the need for self-control. This can make us uncomfortable. We might panic. We understand the need for self-control, but not always what healthy self-control looks like. We might be tempted to try and suffocate our own desires the way that Elsa tries to suppress and ignore her abilities. Maybe we think that if we ignore it it will go away. Maybe we don’t know how to approach whatever it is in a healthy way. Regardless, like certain ice powers cannot be suppressed desires will find a way to resurface and control us in new ways if we can not find a healthy and open way of dealing with them. A way that brings us peace.

By the end of the movie, Elsa has found happiness and true control over her powers by acknowledging them and dealing with them in a healthy, constructive way that doesn’t let them control every aspect of her life. I am not going to say that I am an expert in self-control. I watch too much tv, I don’t know what one serving of ice cream looks like, and I have a tendency to listen to songs on repeat until I can’t stand them anymore. We all have something we need to deal with. The important part on this journey for all of us is that we keep trying to do it better and that we remember that control shouldn’t look like trying to cut ourselves off from everything and become someone who we don’t recognize. Control should be about trying to make sure that we are the ones making the decisions, and if we do it very well, might even allow us to more fully enjoy the things that make us happy.

Happy Lent Everyone.

[rejectedcandystripersofthechurch]

Being Catholic and taking my gf for the first time. This is what she sent me.

[rejectedcandystripersofthechurch]

7 Female Saints Who are Tired of Your Nonsense

We like categories.

We like to keep things broken down into groups so that we know what to expect. It’s comforting. We expect comedians to be funny, teachers to be smart, and artists to be creative. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Other times it can isolate us from the people that are supposed to be our role models, like when we classify saints. I don’t know a lot of virgin martyrs in real life. Or anyone who traveled to the edge of civilization to become a missionary. My friends are not Confessors, or Church Fathers, or hermits (even though they might like to be) and I’m willing to bet that yours are not either. You know what almost all of my friends are?

Tired.

One day they will call us ‘the Tired Generation’ but the truth is that the things we are tired of (war, racism, sexism, poverty, entitlement, illness) are all things that people have been tired of long before we came into the picture. People like these women.

St.Agatha

From: Italy Era: Roman Empire Things She is Tired of: Sexual Assault, Harassment, Entitled Men.

St.Agatha is a virgin martyr perhaps most famous for surviving her breasts being cut off. She ended up in that situation after taking a vow of purity that none of the eligible men around her were willing to respect- one of whom unfortunately turned out to be a judge. The rest of her young life was spent under house arrest in a brothel, dodging assault, or being tortured by the jerk who felt personally slighted by her life choices. 

St.Catherine of Alexandria

From: Egypt Era: Roman empire Things She is Tired of: Mansplaining

St.Catherine was a teenager with everything going for her. She is remembered as beautiful, smart, and of high social standing- and unlike so many ancient women she had the opportunity to become highly educated. Unfortunately for her, being Christian was highly illegal. And telling the emperor that what he was doing sucked was even more illegal. Like so many people who think they know everything, the emperor thought he could talk Catherine out of it. After all, she was basically a freshman. So he called all the smartest men he knew to do just that. And it backfired horribly! Turned out Catherine knew what she was talking about, and was pretty persuasive, to the point that the emperor ended up executing a bunch of his own mansplainers and his wife when they admitted she’d swayed them. Spoiler alert: the emperor tried to propose, Catherine was not into it, and then he executed her.

St.Dymphna

From: Ireland Era: Early Christian Ireland Things She is Tired of: Untreated Mental Illness, Incest, Creepy Older Men

St.Dymphna was the princess in the worst fairytale of all time. The queen died, and her father lost his mind because of it. His advisors got sick of that and so they convinced the king remarriage was the answer, but the king wasn’t convinced any of the women they saw were as beautiful as the queen had been and so that wasn’t going to fly. Someone then had the bright idea to point out that Dymphna looked just like her mother! A horrible idea that for some reason everyone was totally on board with except of course Dymphna herself who ran away. Eventually, the news of a beautiful rich woman appearing out of nowhere made it back to the king and mad or not, he tracked his daughter down and dragged her home and killed her because she still hated his incest plan.

St.Joan of Arc

From: France Era: 15th Century Things She is Tired of: Invasions, War, False Witchcraft Accusations, Sexual Assault Attempts, People Who are Insecure About Women Wearing Pants

St.Joan of Arc was born a peasant girl in France in the 1400′s during one of the many times France and England were fighting over territory. She was untrained and uneducated but one day started seeing visions from God that told her she should be leading France’s army. After making several predictions she should not have been able to make, the head of the army started listening, and the French started winning. Obviously, this was massively inconvenient for the English, and the two sides began arguing about whose side God was really on- a problem which became massively more important when someone captured Joan and sold her to the English, who then burned her for heresy so they wouldn’t have to deal with her or her practical clothing.

St.Hildegard of Bingen

From: Germany Era: 12th Century Things She is Tired of: People Who Follow Fame, People Who are Suspicious of Knowledgable Women

Hildegard moved to a convent very early in her life and there received a very basic education. She later joined the convent as a nun and through her personality and her faith the convent started to grow very quickly. This made Hildegard nervous so she picked up with a few other nuns and left to found their own smaller convent in another area, but when Hildegard started having visions (and people found out) the convent was swarmed again and was for the rest of her life. The knowledge that Hildegard started to display in music, science, medicine, and theology has been suggested to have been a product of her visions because of her limited education (consider: she could read but not write), however, regardless of the source Hildegard is still impressive even 900 years later.

St.Martha

From: The Middle East Era: 1st Century Things She is Tired of: Being Busy, People Who Refuse to Help, Dramatics, Dancing Around the Point

St.Martha is brought to us by the New Testament, where we famously see her buzzing around trying to serve dinner for Jesus and his Apostles and being annoyed that her sister won’t get up and help her. Later when her brother dies she goes immediately to Jesus and tells him what’s up while the same sister is too busy mourning to try and deal with the situation. Martha is always the doer, the one who gets straight to the point of a problem and manages the details so that no one else remembers them. And to her credit, we remember her that way even when she needs the most help or is the most frustrated.

St.Rita

From: Italy Era: 14th Century Things She is Tired of: Spousal Abuse, Family Feuds, Toxic Relatives, (Modern) Preventable Illnesses

Many saints take a vow of purity. Not all saints get to live their vow. Some of them are married off by their parents at 12 years old to a verbally and physically abusive disaster and his family blood feud. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with St.Rita spent the rest of his life trying to make him a better person, but as soon as he died his crazy brother walked into her house and started working to make her sons just like their father had been. Rita fought this for a long time, but despite her best efforts was losing the battle. Later she would lose her sons to everyone’s least favorite Oregon Trail event, dysentery, she was grateful for this because it saved them from becoming involved with murder from the blood feud. Eventually, through her efforts and the spread of the plague, the feud would end and Rita joined a convent.

I know that just reading this can make you feel tired all over again. It makes me tired, and I’m the one writing it. Its hard to deal with the fact that we as human beings are fighting the same battles that we have already been fighting since the beinging- that people have died and been sainted over them! The point isn’t so much the winning though, its that we are making progress. That today it is safe to say we probably wouldn’t be burned for wearing pants, but that someone fought that battle when those were the stakes. That people still struggle in abusive relationships, but that today we understand enough to hopefully help them leave. That there are people out there that are going to make life difficult, but that maybe they won’t make things difficult for people in the future. I’ve heard people upset before that they feel people are exposed to so few female role models, and that the ones they are exposed to come to disasterous ends. What end we come to does not necessisarily change our value as a role model. People make sacrifices for the things that they belive in. Sometimes those sacrifices make us uncomfortable, or are sacrifices we would rather not make, but that doesn’t make them any less significant or brave.

Get tired. Get mad. Roll your eyes at things that annoy you. You’ll be in good company.

But whatever you do, don’t stop fighting your own battles.