Farming in the frigid north; or, lessons in the fragility of life

Every morning, my routine here on the farm begins with outside chores. As dawn breaks, I don extra wool socks over my regular socks, then winter boots, a thick coat, leather work gloves, and a hat. I may have grown up in Wisconsin, but after four years in Texas, and another four in North Carolina, I readily admit that I've forgotten just how cold it gets here. With a cold front firmly settled over the Midwest right now, this past week has definitely been a period of reeducation for me.

Nevermind their warm winter coats, the bucks insist that they are not fans of the lower temperatures.

A few mornings ago, I was greeted by a temperature of 11 degrees below zero fahrenheit. For my friends in the south, I need to describe how there is an instinctive feeling of danger at that temperature. I step outside, and everything is perfectly silent. Then I hear--and see--myself breathing, and my breath starts to crystallize on my beard. When a branch breaks in the woods, the sound crescendos, carried through the still air with a peculiar dry snap. Then I feel the cold start to spread from my nose and ears, and inward from my fingers and toes. As I go about my morning routine, I stamp my feet and shake my hands, curling my fingers inside my gloves to warm them, with ever decreasing success, and with an ever increasing desire to get back inside as quickly as possible.

My Wisconsin friends are probably chuckling at this description. After all, 11 degrees below zero is only the beginning. I just saw that 17 below zero is in the forecast as the low for New Year's Eve. I still remember the feeling of bundling up and going for a run at 36 below zero during my years in college in Minnesota. And I know that, historically speaking, it can get even colder here in the Midwest. Then there is the wind that can accompany the cold up here on the ridge where our little Wisconsin farm is located. Eleven below zero on a still winter morning is one thing; eleven below zero with the wind blowing at your face at 30 miles per hour is an altogether different beast.

Whatever the low temperature, there is something to that instinctive feeling of danger that accompanies a downward trending mercury.  For humans, a healthy body temperature ranges between 97 and 99 degrees fahrenheit. For horses it's a little higher, at 99 to 101 degrees, and for goats it's even higher, at 102-103 degrees. It's remarkable how little ability we humans have to cope with extremely low temperatures. Right now we have the outdoor wood furnace going full blast, enabling us to keep even our drafty old farmhouse at a toasty 72 degrees. And that's certainly not a bad thing given that we have a three week old baby in the house.

It's equally remarkable, though, to observe the farm animals cope with the cold. Down in the barnyard, I find the pigs cuddled together every morning, having buried themselves in hay with only their snouts exposed. Seeing me, they shake the hay off slowly and reluctantly, only their stronger desire to eat able to overwhelm their desire for warmth. The goats, too, sleep in pairs or trios, sharing body heat and staying as still as possible through the long, cold nights. Even our two bucks who are pictured above, who usually spend their time fighting with each other, cuddle together out of the wind in their little shelter, sharing body heat, trying make it through one more night, trying to winter through to that renewed warmth that, instinctively, every creature knows will follow the cold as inevitably and as regularly as the earth circles the sun on its tilted axis.

For all these instinctive coping mechanisms, it's all remarkably fragile. Every morning the animals clamor for their doubled rations, and when they're not staying still in order to conserve warmth, they're busily eating hay in order to generate it. At 11 degrees below zero, I find myself breaking ice even on the electrified water buckets. The animals run over and drink thirstily, hydrating themselves before a sheet of ice forms yet again. The first very cold morning, I found myself with a frozen pipe in the milkhouse. Thankfully it hadn't yet burst, and a heater applied to it for a day followed by a better wrapping with insulation and a longer length of heat tape seems to have taken care of the problem. For all their instincts, the animals themselves also aren't always helpful. A few mornings ago, our bored horse decided to entertain himself by taking the heating element out of his water tank despite my having placed it under a large rock. Thankfully I rectified the situation before he had an entirely frozen tank of water, but I still have to find a better way to secure that heating element. Really, it's all so fragile, so tenuous. The water needs to be kept free from ice, the hay needs to be replenished, and the wind needs to be blocked. If any one of these things goes awry, or any one of countless other things, then warmth turns to cold, and life slowly ebbs away.

Later today, as the temperature creeps toward the zero degree mark, I need to head out to the barn once again. The goats are all bred for January kiddings, in order to provide goat meat for folks who want it for the Easter holiday. Although I've worked hard to get the barn finished, even adding a plastic strip door to block the wind, I still have to finish the individual kidding stalls to separate out the mothers and their new babies. So, pray for a mid-January warm-up and successful kiddings for us here at Kleinshire. The goats and all our other animals are amazing me with their remarkable adaptability, but the extreme cold of the last few days has also reminded me that it's all remarkably fragile.

Stay warm, everybody!

It's still Christmas, please don't take down that tree!

This is the day when discarded trees begin to litter the curb, awaiting trash pick-up. Admittedly, Christmas begins to wear thin after awhile. The presents have all been unwrapped, the warm cider drunk, and the cookies eaten. The guests have all gone home, and today most of us are probably back at work. As regards the tree itself, at least if it's the real thing, the needles are probably beginning to fall off. From a practical standpoint, it's totally understandable that we're ready to move on to New Year's with resolutions and fresh starts and all.

But for the love of God--seriously, for the love of God--please make a resolution right now not to follow the horde!

A Christmas tableau from the Christmas Vigil Mass at St. Peter's, Middle Ridge, Wis.

The problem, of course, is that our secular, consumerist-oriented society has started turning the wheels of Christmas too early, and we've been madly spinning like hamsters ever since in order to keep up the frenetic pace. There is a collective groan every year following Thanksgiving, when the Christmas sales begin. Actually, in recent years I've seen Christmas sales as early as Halloween. The lights have been up since the beginning of the month. I've learned the hard way that you can't show up at tree farm and expect to get a tree after mid-December. There simply aren't any trees left by that point.

There are economic forces at play here that don't need to be belabored. But most of us are at least vaguely aware of how the ever-earlier Christmas has robbed us of Advent, that period of expectation and anticipation. Have you ever tried to avoid hearing Christmas carols, even to the beginning of the octave prior to the Lord's Nativity? The distinction would be between Joy to the World, the Lord has come, which implies Christmas is here, and O come, O come, Emanuel, which signifies that we are still awaiting the Savior's birth. Don't turn on the radio or visit a Christmas market if you're trying to avoid the early celebration.

Of course, we're too late for these warnings. Yet somehow we need to live in the world even as we strive to live the distinctiveness of our faith. I'm actually serious: Continuing to celebrate Christmas is striving to live our faith, the very sort of counter-cultural example that we Christians are called to be. I can't think of a clearer instance in our culture where one consciously declares, "I am a Christian," than in continuing to celebrate with earnestness at least through Jan. 6, Epiphany, the traditional twelfth day of Christmas.

So how exactly does one continue to celebrate, especially if one is already experiencing Christmas "fatigue"? Here are a few practical examples from our own family efforts:

-- First of all, do keep the tree up. Add water to the base and vacuum up those needles. With LED lights, there really is little fire danger, even if the tree is dead. You simply need a visible symbol of Christmas in your house, and in our American culture that's principally the tree.

-- We also continue to illuminate our outside Christmas lights through Epiphany. After New Year's, we're practically the only ones with lights still on, but again, that's the counter-cultural example that I mentioned above.

-- Keep things fresh. We do little things, like gradually moving the Wise Men from one side of the room to the other as they make their way toward Bethlehem. Of course, you have to keep the Nativity set up, too. But that's the point. You can also keep things fresh from a culinary point of view. Christmas cookies keep very well in the freezer. We make a huge batch before Christmas and continue to enjoy them all through the season.

-- Commit to attending a few daily Masses. With our move to the country and with the overall busy-ness of farm life, we've attended fewer daily Masses than we used to. But even if you can't make it to church, you can still follow the liturgical cycle and the special feasts of the Christmas octave--the martyrdom of St. Stephen today, the Feast of St. John the Apostle tomorrow, the martyrdom of the Holy Innocents the day after that, and so on. The liturgy is a tour de force of the events surrounding the Nativity and the early Church, and participating in it can rekindle the Christmas spirit.

So, just a few practical examples. It's true that there can be too much even of a good thing. Nonetheless, we need to extricate ourselves from the hyped, consumerist version of Christmas and reclaim it for ourselves. Really, we haven't experienced the "good thing" yet. We're missing out if we quit now. Again, I'm not saying that we can't live in the world and enjoy Santa Claus and presents and all. But our faith calls us to so much more than this world offers, and continuing to celebrate Christmas is a practical, hands-on way to live our faith and be a light to the world

The Domesticity of the Sacraments

Many of you already know that I'm a liturgical curmudgeon, a traditionalist, a lover of solemn ritual, of the Latin language, and of older form of the Mass. I firmly believe that many--not all, but many--of the liturgical changes following Vatican II were emphatically not for the better, and that the plummeting church attendance of the past four decades is ample evidence that I am right.

So I've become a liturgical radical in my own small way, most recently as the sacristan at our small, rural Wisconsin parish. I made some first moves for Advent, introducing the "Benedictine" altar arrangement of six candles and a crucifix. I veiled the chalice, and I polished and returned to regular use a beautiful, shining ciborium that had been tucked away in a dusty cupboard in the sacristy. We're still a long way from ad orientem, or a Latin-language canon, or even the purchase of cassocks and surplices for the altar servers, but even these first small changes have lent a degree of solemn reverence to our liturgies, a hint at the full beauty of our Catholic liturgical tradition.

I was thinking about what is attractive in traditional Catholic liturgy this past Sunday after the baptism of my newborn son, Cornelius Michael Ambrose. I had convinced our temporary parish administrator, a good, faithful priest in his eighties, to conduct the solemn ritual using the older liturgical books. It was his first baptism using the Rituale Romanum since the early years of his priesthood, and there were many stops and starts as we made our way through the ceremony. There were pages lost and then found, mispronounced Latin words, rambunctious children peering over the rim of the baptismal font, chattering and running about, tugging on sleeves, and even on this patient priest's alb.

Yet somehow, through all the missteps, and the noise, and the children's chatter, Sunday's baptismal ceremony moved inexorably forward, with the full force of its majestic symbolism. Thankfully the salt hadn't yet been exorcised and blessed when a youngster tipped the bowl off the table and broke it. A quick trip to the sacristy for a replacement took care of that matter. And it didn't matter that there were children running ahead up the aisle as the priest protectively draped his violet stole stole over the newborn baby and led him, carried by his grandmother, into the church while everybody recited the Creed and the Our Father. Symbolically, this was Cornelius Michael Ambrose's entrance into the Church, an entrance to be ratified in the saving waters of baptism, and the symbolism of that literal entrance, step by step up the aisle, was beautifully clear.

There is something about traditional Catholic liturgy, with its regularity, its repetitiveness, and its symbolism, that preserves reverence in the midst of the distractions of everyday life. It actually begins with the structure of the church building itself, with its steeple and cross rising above the surrounding houses, a constant reminder of sacred, unchanging things in the midst of the secular world. It continues as one enters a church and sees the statues, the stations of the cross, and the ubiquitous flickering red of the tabernacle candle, a reminder of the real presence of Christ and his promise to remain with us always. It is seen in the division between the nave and the sanctuary, where the priest and the servers carry out sacred actions according to set formulae, no matter what is occurring in the pews, be it the dozing of elderly people or the cries and chatter of a discontented children. There is a predictability in the priest's "The Lord be with you" and our response "and with your spirit," a familiarity that the believer can focus on, something that is constant and unchanging, to which we bring our ever changing needs and petitions.

The beauty of Catholic liturgy is that, in it, the sacred reaches down and touches the world with the eternal, unchanging promises of something more than what the world can provide. The unchanging nature of heaven's promises is mirrored in unchanging language, ritual, and symbolism, all comforts to the mind that there is also something unchanging in God's promises to us, no matter how much change there might be in our fickle life circumstances. The sacred meets us where we are at and accepts us as we are, distractions and messiness of everyday life all, and then elevates us out of ourselves, at least for a moment providing a foretaste of where we are headed and what we are to become. Sometimes, sacramentally, the touch of the sacred has enduring effects, as a newborn is born yet again, indelibly marked as a child of Christ, or as bread and wine become Christ's body and blood, his real presence in our midst. The appearances remain, but the transcendent, unchanging reality veiled behind mere appearances gives joy to the believer's heart.

We had invited parishioners to stay after Mass for Cornelius' baptism and reception. Not many took us up on the offer, but among those who did was a young couple visiting from another parish. They remarked to me afterward that the ceremony had seemed so welcoming, so much "like family." That comment made me happy, for in the sacraments we become one family of faith, gathered together in the one house of God our Father, for sixty minutes, or for ninety for those who can bear it that long, to experience a foretaste of our eternal heavenly home before we head back outside into the world, back to our many, varied, temporary abodes.

Of holyday obligations and mortal sin

Recently, the priest who is serving as temporary administrator of our little country parish mailed off a rather strongly worded letter to all parishioners, urging us to return to the sacrament of penance during Advent and reminding us of the importance of attending Mass. In this letter he even made that statement that one so seldom hears these days-- that failure to attend Mass on days of precept is a mortal sin.

He is an older priest who actually grew up in this particular parish, and I have a feeling that when he looks out at the sparse congregation on Sundays, he wonders what went wrong. Where are all the people who filled the pews when he was young? Where are all the young families who used to pack into church for every Sunday and holyday Mass, for Stations of the Cross during Lent, for adoration and benediction every Wednesday throughout the year, for manifold devotional practices and daily Masses whether attendance was mandatory or not? This beautiful country church, majestically overlooking the verdant, rolling hills of God's country, even used to boast of its own school, a school which has sadly been closed for decades. These days, CCD classes feature perhaps a half-dozen kids at most. Indeed, what has gone wrong?

Of course, it is partially demographics. Simply put, there are fewer people out here in the rural Wisconsin countryside. Small farms have been shuttered and sold off, leading to bigger operations and fewer farming families. Even if they still live out here, many people choose to drive into Cashton, Bangor, or La Crosse to attend bigger parishes with a parochial school and more modern facilities. The families themselves are smaller than they once were, but that, too, is a matter for another post.

It's undeniable from the ebb and flow of attendance, and from manifold anecdotal evidence, that very few Catholics believe what this good priest had the courage to write--that missing Mass on a day of precept is a mortal sin, that is, the type of sin that deprives us of the life of grace and leaves us in danger of hellfire and eternal damnation. Unlike in previous generations, people simply do not come to Mass on every single day of precept. My guess is that many people, even if they're good, faithful, Mass-going Catholics, would probably say that they just don't believe missing Mass is a mortal sin, or at least that it's very often not the case.

Yes, yes-- there is plenty of nuance to missing Mass being a mortal sin. Missing Mass is a grave matter, but like with any other grave matter it doesn't become a mortal sin unless one is fully aware that it is a grave matter and nonetheless freely chooses to go through with it. Obviously there are numerous impediments to freely choosing to miss Mass-- personal ill health or the ill health of someone in one's care, genuine lack of transportation, severe weather, multiple-week shifts on an oil rig (really, this is the situation for a relative of mine!), etc., etc.. Generally we're pretty good at discerning what constitutes an impediment, but most priests don't mind parishioners asking for a dispensation if there's any lack of clarity, especially since canon law leaves the granting of a dispensation to the pastor's discretion.

Again, I think the matter is not so much people's confusion about what constitutes a true impediment to attending Mass, but a deep-down feeling that missing Mass isn't really such a serious matter after all: Surely God knows that I'm a good person. Surely God knows how little I get out of this or that priest's sermons and out of the other people in the pews whom I hardly know and whom I don't really like very much anyway. If you haven't felt these things yourself, my guess is that you at least know people who've expressed them. Of course, they display a total lack of understanding of what is occurring at Mass and why we're there. But how do you convince people of that without starting catechesis all over again? For my own part, I haven't had much success.

Additionally, I think that many people have a problem being "told" what to do. After all, the only reason missing Mass on a day of precept is a mortal sin is because the Church, by her authority, has designated a particular day as a day of precept under pain of mortal sin. Some days make more sense than others--like Sunday, the commemoration of the Lord's resurrection. Even if Christmas occurs on a Monday--as it does this year--at least secular society pays heed and considers it a holiday. But what of a holyday like tomorrow, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception? On such a day requiring attendance at church seems capricious and arbitrary, an inconvenient intrusion into one's normal Friday evening routine after a hectic work week. Why attend church that night? Sure, church is important, but I've got other things to do, and I'll be there on Sunday anyway. It just doesn't seem reasonable, and personal judgment is more important than authority in our modern, secular culture.

Apart from love of God and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary--things that can be quite insufficient impetus if one has numerous rambunctious children, for example, or important dinner plans, or if one was just to Mass a day before, as will be the case on Christmas this year-- all that is left is the fact that the Church has decreed our attendance. Do we truly believe that the Church has the authority to decree church attendance on a random Friday in December under pain of mortal sin? She does have that authority, from Christ Himself, but I don't think most people are convinced of this.

Or perhaps it's a general feeling that hell isn't real, or that even if hell is real, that a loving God surely wouldn't condemn me to eternal hellfire for skipping Mass due to my rambunctious children or that important dinner date on a random Friday in December. 

How to untangle this mess, of that I am unsure. But I feel for this good priest, because someone of his age has been witness to a cultural transformation where so much more than demographics has been lost. Alas, his letter of a few weeks ago has not led to a dramatic uptick in attendance at our little country parish. But he's speaking hard truths. That's at least a start. Pray God he's not too late for a little jewel of a parish with far too few regular Mass attendees in the rolling hills of God's country.

'What I say to you, I say to all: 'Watch!''

The past several months, I've been bringing Holy Communion to an elderly woman in a nursing home on First Fridays. This past Friday, I showed up at the nursing home, only to learn that she had been admitted to the hospital the previous evening after experiencing difficulty breathing-- the beginnings, I was later told, of congestive heart failure. So, after a quick mental note to inform our priest as soon as possible, I was off to the hospital in search of this dear woman, so that she could receive Jesus in the Eucharist if she was physically able to do so.



Soon enough, I was making my way through the labyrinthine hospital corridors to the proper room. There she was, dozing upright in a chair with oxygen tubes, a ventilator, and the flickering lights and regular blips that are part-and-parcel of a hospital room.

There was also the ubiquitous hospital television set blaring God-knows-what cable infomercial programming at a high volume.

To me, there was something so jarringly out of place in that flickering television screen and its perky, artificial liveliness. There was a relative in the room, and I was able give the elderly woman Holy Communion in a brief moment of wakefulness. To me, her folded hands and attempted sign of the cross made the visit infinitely worthwhile.

But as I drove back to the farm, empty pyx in the seat next to me, my mind kept wandering back to that television set and its banalities. Really, what goes through someone's mind as he or she sits there immobilized, helpless, knowing that their earthly sojourn is nearly at its end, listening to an anonymous suit-and-tie attempt to market the latest cosmetic cream, or blender, or vegetable parer?

Is it agonizing to observe the world passing one by with whatever modicum of conscious thought remains? Or is it, perhaps, the Devil's way of lulling a person into an eternal embrace, keeping his weakened cognitive processes occupied with whatever first reaches the senses, focused on unimportant trivialities until it is too late to think about what truly matters?

Before our Catholic culture collapsed, a dying person would be listening to the recitation of the rosary at times like this. But really, we fallen human beings are awfully adept at keeping busy, with avoiding life's big questions and the life-changes that acknowledging these questions would entail, whether we are in a hospital room or still in the full vibrancy of youth or middle age. I think that the Devil too often manages to keep us asleep and in thrall, lurching our way from day to day, from purchase to purchase, from entertainment to entertainment, until this world passes us by. Too often, we fail to wake up, to live intentionally the one life God has given us in which to know, to love, and to serve him, so that we can be happy with him forever in the next.

The antidote, from today's Gospel reading:

Watch, therefore; you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: "Watch!"