Empty Tabernacle Tour of Lower Manhattan

There are many different devotions for the Triduum that take you on a mini-pilgrimage. Some people walk the Stations of the Cross through neighborhood streets. Others spend Holy Thursday night driving around to visit the Eucharist at seven different churches before midnight.

The Southern Baron has introduced me to the New Orleans Good Friday Nine Church Walk custom. If you start early and have a plan you can visit nine empty tabernacles before the 3pm liturgy. Luckily the NYC skyline is crammed with church steeples, so we have plenty of nearby opportunities to make it happen.

This Holy Week we're planning a route through the Upper East Side. Last year we started near Battery Park and worked our way up to Midtown West, traveling from the early days of the American Church to the site of some recent archdiocesan controversy. Besides being an interesting walking tour (who knew there were zero churches in TriBeCa?), it was a beautiful experience of the universality of the Church. Witnessing the once-a-year bare emptiness of parishes is always a favorite of mine too.

You can see the entire itinerary after the jump! No selfie sticks were used or harmed in the making of this field trip.

What PBS Taught Me About Our Daily Bread

Baking has been on my mind a lot lately, thanks to several holidays. This month I've made Irish soda bread and Pi day apple pie on a whim. I've also been trying my hand at yeast bread. One of my Christmas gifts was Gluten Free Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day, and I spent a couple snow days testing it out.

The good news is, you don't have to knead gluten free bread dough; assembly is like making brownies. The bad news is that title is a lie. It really means "In 5 minutes of active prep time, after you spent 2.5 hours the day before weighing flours and bringing the dough to a slow rise. And then you have to bake it for an hour. So yeah, carve out some time."

After all that weighing, mixing, and waiting, the results have been surprisingly delicious, although not practical for sandwiches. My loaves still aren't perfect, though. The dough is too dense, the rise too low, the crust too tough. I keep thinking about what I should do differently next time. Should I add less water? Does my pie crust need a higher fat content?

My first attempt at artisan bread. 

Still, I think all my experimenting has helped me understand the process better, even if that batch of bagels turned out flat and lumpy. While visiting my in-laws in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, I went back to the old puzzle of king cake. I attempted it several times the year we got engaged, but I never matched the Haydel's cakes the Southern Baron grew up on. This year, though, I took a long look and a light bulb went off. Eureka, it's a brioche! I just have to make a sweet bread dough enriched with eggs.

The same day as my king cake epiphany, we ended up watching the Great British Baking Show while we waited for Downton Abbey to air. I thought I was over baking competition shows - how much drama can you manufacture out of cupcake decoration anyway? But this show was different. The contestants were doing some serious, complicated stuff involving lots of rising time.

I ended up glued to the screen in suspense, hoping each person would have long enough to proof their dough AND bake it completely. Will the doughnuts puff up enough? Will the layered swirls of the Croatian coffeecake maintain their integrity? Will the fruit bread be raw in the center? (Spoiler alert: it was.) Even though the bakers had the luxury of a personal Kitchen Aid mixer plus a fancy proofing drawer (which I covet), their work was still a delicate balance of math and luck. If they didn't plan out everything perfectly, the results would be messy.

You have to assemble your flours before you make the dough.  

All this baked good suspense made me think about how we pray to God for "our daily bread." It sounds like the most basic, bland food. Sure, bread and milk are what everyone runs to get in a snow storm, but they aren't super exciting. But the actual process of making bread is a complicated scientific reaction.  If any factor goes wrong, it won't work. A round, fluffy loaf is actually kind of a miracle. It's appropriate that the Passover "bread of haste" is bread that doesn't bother to be leavened.

Daily life can feel like a maddening balance too. My routine is a pile of deadlines dependent on each other. I must leave the house no later than 7:32 am, or I'll miss the train. If I don't put my phone in airplane mode while I'm underground on the subway, the battery will drain to nothing. A letter template must be formatted perfectly, or the 250 letters I'm mailing will look terrible. 

Just as the Father wants to give us the food we need to live, we can also ask Him to give us success in our daily tasks so that life rises into a cohesive whole. The unleavened bread of Passover and the Eucharist symbolizes taking time away from the rat race demands of the everyday. We put aside complicated dough proofing so we can focus on heavenly things instead. 

My Dive Bar Catholic High School

This weekend we traveled down to Virginia to celebrate Brother #3's graduation from 8th grade. It's not a huge transition, since he'll still attend the same grade 7-12 school, but rites of passage are always a good excuse to eat cake. On the long drive I filled the Southern Baron in on more quirky details of my tiny Catholic school, like the locker situation.

Me: "So the Sevvies get these tiny boxes, but the high school ones are huge enough for a couple people to share."
Him: "Wait, you SHARED a locker? What if you want to lock it?"
Me: "Oh, nobody has a lock. There's just a general sense of trust, and it's not like you have anything worth taking in there. I shared with the J and K last names all four years."
(Brother #3 later confirmed that anyone caught messing with another guy's stuff would be dealt with behind the school.)

My husband and I both look fondly on our solid Catholic high school educations, but as a New Orleanian he basically went to school on another planet where your identity is fixed before you take the SATs. NOLA and St. Louis are the only two places I know where "Where'd you go to high school?" is the defining question to ask when meeting someone. There's something about those cities on the Mississippi river settled by tenacious French nuns - Catholic schooling caught on and never let go.

The Southern Baron is proud of his all-boys Jesuit education, and has the swag to prove it. There are lapel pins, an etched rocks glass, and glossy alumni magazines in our apartment. Last time we flew to Louisiana, the college kid in our row recognized his class ring and they proceeded to trade saints' and bishops' names like a secret code. At a Memorial Day barbecue, we discovered that my aunt's boyfriend's niece's husband also went to Jesuit, and it took the two men only five minutes to sniff out the other's academic track and activities. They count a Supreme Court justice and an American Idol judge among their fellow alumni.

My diploma doesn't have that kind of clout, except among the Steubenville/ Christendom crowd. When I tell people where I went to high school, I usually have to say "You've probably never heard of it, it's really small..." But I've concluded this means Seton is secretly super cool. My high school is the Catholic education equivalent of an awesome hipster dive bar.

The building is a little rough around the edges, with a distinctive musty smell, unreliable climate control, and worn mismatched furniture and paint colors. The same faded posters have been on the wall for years, if not decades. The menu hasn't been updated much since they opened, and you won't find anything too exotic or complicated. Some employees have cycled in and out, but for the longtime head staff, keeping the doors open is a labor of love.

Christ The King watches over the lobby.

You've probably never heard of it because it's pretty small and in a random part of town between the fire station and the railroad tracks. They don't really bother to advertise since word of mouth promotion from the regulars is enough to fill the seats.

But if you are lucky to be one of the insiders, it's a place where you know everyone and their mother and their brother and their six other siblings. Memories of fun shenanigans, long deep conversations, and romantic misadventures are scattered among the uncomfortable chairs. Other places may have broadened your horizons since, but this place knows how to deliver the classics insanely well. It also offers all kinds of obscure retro small batch stuff most people have never heard of.

It's great that there are flashier, bigger Catholic high schools with enough long hallways of identical lockers for each student to keep one with his own padlock. But I'm glad I went to a place with dubious fire code compliance that taught me about things like: logic syllogisms, sentence diagramming, Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God, Fr. Walter Ciszek, St. Januarius' liquefying blood vial, and King Philip II"s last days in the Alcazar. I'm glad that they made us go Mass twice a week and sing Pange Lingua so many times we'll never forget the lyrics. I'm especially grateful for the community of devout families in which I still find warm welcomes a decade after I graduated.

Because sometimes you gotta go where everybody knows your name.

What I Wore Sunday, Entry 12

Top, skirt, and cardi: Anne Taylor outlet and clearance; flats: Aldo; purse: thrift store

This Sunday's picture was taken in New Orleans' Audubon Park. Our quick weekend trip was bittersweet, since we were in town for the funeral of my husband's Grandma Marie. We're all sad to see her go, but she had a long and blessed 92 year life. She passed peacefully in her sleep the night of the feast of St. Joseph, the patron saint of a happy death. Seeing so many family gather for her funeral was an amazing testament to her legacy - in fact, her thirteenth great-grandchild was born just this week! The Good Shepherd was favorite devotion, which perfectly suits what a caring woman she was. There were references to that title of Jesus all through Sunday Mass. We were even sitting near a Good Shepherd stained glass window. 

I'm grateful that I was able to know Grandma Marie's kind, joyful spirit and that her generosity helped our married life get started. Her diamonds are in my engagement ring and some of her furniture helped furnish our living room. We flew home today with one of her bayou oil paintings, an heirloom we're excited to hang in our home. 

Sunday we were all emotionally and physically drained, so the Southern Baron and I spent a relaxing day with his parents. After Mass we walked around the park enjoying the sunshine and went out to their favorite Middle Eastern restaurant. Driving around we noticed that the Southern Baron's high school was having their annual bazaar! So we hit up the craft booth for some Jesuit memorabilia and marveled at how young all the students running around in blue and white shirts looked. It was the perfect way to round out a weekend full of reminiscing and celebrating family history.

For more Sunday outfits, visit Fine Linen and Purple!

Look at those azaleas! Why do we live in the frozen north again?

Road Trip Quick Takes

Thanks as always to Jen at Conversion Diary for hosting this link-up.

 The Betrothed and I just spent the last three weeks of June on an epic road trip visiting many friends and relatives across the Central time zone. Here are some of the funny and interesting things we saw at each of our stops.

This is what it looks like when two nerds  revisit childhood road trips. 

1. A store along the highway in Tennessee proudly proclaimed, "JESUS IS LORD" and "WE BUY GUNS."


2. The tiny town of Morrisville, AL is only nine square blocks. It was cute, but not as much of a time warp as  my doctor's office Southern Living December 2009 made it out to be. 



Quaint, but overrated. 






Fathers' Day Mass at my future sister-in-law's Florida parish featured the "Knights of Columbus Chorale" - basically Dads in matching Knights polo shirts leading the hymns. Adorbs. 






My fiance took me to a bayou nature preserve outside New Orleans, where the air was thick with humidity and cicadas. The alligators were hiding from view, but we did see lizards, a million dragonflies, and a crawfish crawling around in the the dirt. He threatened us with his claws.






Don't worry little guy, we won't eat you. 






There are a ton of historic plantation houses down River Road outside New Orleans. Evergreen Plantation is still privately owned, and so not jammed with tourists. Hollywood has found them though - apparently Quentin Tarentino has been filming scenes for Django Unchaned there. We only saw intact slave cabins, though, no movie stars.






Can't begin to describe how seeing these buildings blew my nerdy mind. 





A bumper sticker on a truck outside Dallas informed us that "Kids who hunt and fish don't steal and deal." Ok then. 







While visiting grandparents in Chicago, I did some archival research of old family photos. Check out the fantastic vestments at my great uncle's diaconate ordination. (Rest in peace. Fr. Kevin.)

Seriously, check out that man-lace. 

I hope we come back soon, Chicagoland.