Raining Not Kats and Dogs

I am having a great day! To begin with, it's raining cats and dogs here, which never happens. I love the rain. Thanks St. Swithin!

That would about do it for me, but we're filling Christmas orders left and right at the shop. How much fun is that? I have always maintained that a patron saint matching can't be beat as a great gift idea.

The questions have piled up like our outgoing mail.

Sister, I have a quick question. I've been looking for the patron saint of stuttering children, and Google tells me that it's Notkat Bulbulus. Problem is, I can't find any other info on him. I'd like to do a novena to him to help my daughter, but feel a little weird talking to someone I've never heard of before and know nothing about. Can you feel in the blanks on his life at all? Thanks in advance...

And you didn't think to use the Google to search any further? Oh well, that's my mission in life, connecting folks with their saints. I had no trouble whatsoever digging up the scoop on Blessed Notkat Bulbulus. I'm not sure you'll feel any closer to Notkat after reading about him, although he seems very sweet to me.

I think the name "Notkat" is a little off-putting. Let's face it, if you were at a Christmas party and someone introduced you to a guy named Notkat, you might feel a little odd asking, "Notkat, would you like some punch?" Later, after a couple of brandied eggnogs, you might forget his unusual name and reel up to him and address him as Notdog, realize your mistake and then burst out laughing.


I might do something like that even if no brandy was involved.

Let me introduce you to Blessed Notkat Bulbulus, the little stutterer.

If you'd like to do any further digging, he's very easy to find if you use his more popular name, Notker. Even harder to remember at the Christmas party.

Although he is the official patron saint of children who stutter, if you just can't get yourself excited about Notkat, you could also go with St. Raymond Nonnatus, patron saint of tiny babies, but also a good candidate for people with speech problems, including those who are talking 'endowed' (blabbermouths). He had his lips pad locked shut because the Muslims were tired of hearing him preach.

And we don't want to leave out St. Thomas Aquinas, who was also speech challenged as a youth and was known as 'the dumb ox'. He turned out alright.

By the way, we now have a wonderful set of new items in the shop for the saints for whom we cannot find a little medal. Pardon the blurry pictures, the images are not actually blurry. We better get to work on a Blessed Notker pendant!

Bridezilla

There has been a lively discussion after yesterday's post about the the Padre Pio Horror Movie Chain Letter Prayer Bread. The discussion is not about Padre Pio, the fake note from the Vatican that accompanies the "prayer" bread, or the dread of being given one of the bowls of goo.
The discussion is about this question from a reader:

Dear Sister Mary Martha,

A friend of mine was asked by her sister-in-law-to-be to be a bridesmaid. SILTB is Catholic, and getting married in the Catholic church. Good for her. Friend and I are LDS, and have certain modesty standards. Hemlines at the knee or below, at least cap sleeves, no plunging necklines, etc. SILTB is demanding that all bridesmaids wear strapless dresses to her wedding, no shawls or jackets allowed. Friend is torn between backing out, and compromising her standards because it is the bride's special day and she doesn't want to cause familial unpleasantness. Were you there, is there anything you could say SILTB? Thanks, Jana

If I was your friend I would say to the SILTB, "I'm very sorry, my church does not allow me to wear strapless gowns. I'll understand if you'd like to ask someone else to stand up for you at the wedding."

This leaves the ball entirely in her court. Your friend does not have to back out or compromise her standards, and if familial unpleasantness occurs it's really not her fault.

That's my Dear Abby answer. But you asked if I were there is there anything I could say to the SILTB.

Here are some things I might say:

Where is this Catholic church where this wedding is taking place that has no standards of it's own? I'd like to have a chat with the pastor of St. Vegas Church in Hellbound, USA.

Miss SILTB, no one should be required to appear anywhere half naked and I can't believe you are demanding that from anyone. I might say to the bride, "Now I know what I can give you on your wedding day for 'something borrowed'--a SHAWL." I might ask the bride if her Jewish friends are being forced to eat some pulled pork at the reception. I may inquire if the men at the wedding will all be wearing short shorts to compliment the bride's selection of gowns.

But then, it's not always the best idea to just say whatever it is you are actually thinking. Meanwhile, we'll ask for the intercession of St. Maria Goretti on everyone's behalf.

Padre Pio Prayer Bread

This note from a reader caused Sister St. Aloysius and I to laugh ourselves silly. We generally don't have a laugh over things involving the saints. Technically, we weren't doing that. We were having a laugh about "Amish Friendship Bread", which actually should be called "Amish I Wouldn't Wish This on My Worst Enemy Bread".

Have any of you ever had this stuff? The "Amish Friendship Bread" experience? Because it's not just bread. The bread is actually very delicious. Too delicious. The bread isn't the thing. The "friendship" is the thing.

It starts with an overly enthusiastic "friend" who thinks giving you the stuff is just the most lovely gesture on the planet.

I don't see how. It's more like a gypsy curse.

You don't just get the bread. You get the privilege of the bread and a bowl of goo. The bowl of goo is active with yeast or something. It's "alive". You have to tend it, adding something to it and stirring it, once a day every day for something like nine days, time that could be better spent on a novena not involving a bowl of goo. The bowl of goo is like "The Blob". It grows.

Then it makes something like 4 loaves of this delicious bread. It's so rich that you really only need to eat a slice a month, unless you throw a lot of tea parties.

This is where the "friendship" part comes in. You have to give away the other 3 loaves. You really do have to. It's that, or throw it out. You can't possible eat it all.


And the piece de resistance: you have more goo left over. It has multiplied! and you have to give that away too.

It's a chain letter of bread.

It's a nightmare.

When we got ours, we didn't know. Sister St. Aloysius was delighted with the concept and tended the goo faithfully for a few days. Her enthusiasm began to wane around the time she started to forget about tending it. Suddenly, she'd get this startled haunted look, late in the evening and whisper, "the batter!"

"Batter?" I'm thinking. "Did I leave some kid on the playground?"

We enjoyed the bread. But when it came time to pass on the "love" it was a lot like this song "The Thing".


Everyone on our block was already hip to "Amish Friendship Bread" and said, "Get out of here with that ___ _____ ____, and don't come back no more!"


And the whole thing just keeps multiplying! It's a horror movie of bread.

Delicious bread.

and now this:


One of my friends gave me prayer bread..er...a bowl of goo to add ingredients to, stir, and prayer over once a day for 10 or so days. This lady is a sweetheart, but I just got the directions today (it's day 5 and I am only half way through!) and see that I am to add stuff to it so I can give 4 other friends a bowl of goo to do the same process.


I really don't want to do it. In fact, I want to toss it in the trash and never look back. I love to bake, but this recipe doesn't strike me as being a delicious bread. It's The Blessed Bread of Padre Pio. I've had Amish friendship bread and it is WONDERFUL! This one has sugar, eggs, flour, cooking oil, and baking powder. It's probably tasty, but the Amish bread is a little like cinnamon roll heaven!

I feel bad for complaining, I just don't want to do it which makes me feel worse. In addition, I have so much to do that this is really not on my list of priorities and I might forget about it. What happens if I miss a step? Better yet, what happens if she finds out I didn't make it?

I feel like I have to just suck it up and make it since I don't want to hurt her feelings, but there is no way I would pass this on to my other busy mom friends who would probably feel the same way I do now. Advice?

My advice is to follow your heart. Chuck it in the trash. It may be tempting to lie to your friend about why you didn't make it by telling her the cat licked it or something like that. While the real reason you don't want to lie is that it is a sin, the fact is that if you tell her the cat licked it, she'll jump at the chance to give you a new batch.

Try not to judge her. It's the best thing that can happen to her, to give you a new batch, because she has a lot of goo to get rid of every couple of weeks and this way she won't have to go looking for new marks.

Just tell her you failed to tend it and it died. Tell her it happened quickly because you failed right away to tend it because you have such a busy schedule. And don't tell her you "forgot" to tend it. That would be a lie, too. If she tries to foist more on you, tell her you don't like to go around murdering batter.

There is a more important issue, however, that must be addressed. There is no such thing as Padre Pio Prayer Bread. It comes with a note that says it is Vatican approved. I can tell you something else the note says that proves that the bread has nothing whatsoever to do with Padre Pio or the Vatican. The note says that if you pray each day while tending the goo, you and your family will have good luck.

There is no such thing as luck in the teachings of the Catholic Church. "Luck" is a superstition and this chain letter of bread is exactly that. It might be a good idea to let your friend the Gyspy in on that fact as well.

Deliverance

A reader commented:

Lawrence said...

"It was a duel monastery" I think you meant dual monastery.

Maybe I did.

Maybe I didn't.....


Happy Thanksgiving!

St. Aebbe's Nose

I think I am just a little behind in answering questions. Please forgive me if I skipped a question or two, but I just had to answer this one that came in just today:

Hi Sister Mary Martha, relatively new reader, first-time questioner here.

I was double checking the phrase "cutting off your nose to spite your face" at Google to find out the story behind it. It's a crazy story involving a Saint so I had to come here to ask you about it.

Here's what Wikipedia printed -- take it with a grain of salt.

"The phrase is believed[citation needed] to have originated from an event that was said to have taken place in AD 867: Viking pirates from Sjaelland and Uppsala landed in Scotland and raided the monastery of Coldingham. When news of the raid reached Aebbe the Younger (the Mother Superior), she gathered her nuns together and urged them to disfigure themselves, so that they might be unappealing to the Vikings. In this way, they hoped to protect their chastity. Saint Aebbe accomplished this by cutting off her nose and upper lip,[2] and the nuns proceeded to do the same. The Viking raiders were so disgusted by the resulting scene that they burned the entire building to the ground. Ironically, the phrase as understood today does not really apply to Saint Aebbe, since she did not cut off her nose in an effort literally to "spite her face".

Have you ever heard that story and if so, what is Saint Aebbe the patron saint of. (Terrible sentence construction, I know. One should never end on a preposition. Forgive me.) Thank you!


I don't know whether to start at the end or the beginning. I feel like I should get out the ironing board to smooth out all the wrinkles of this story.

The beginning:

There are two St. Aebbe's. St. Aebbe the Elder and St. Aebbe the Younger.

St. Aebbe the Elder founded a monastery in Scotland in around 642 AD that eventually did burn down in around 680 AD. It was a duel monastery, monks in one part, nuns in the other. It was also the local watering hole and the celibacy rules were not strictly enforced. St. Aebbe was a pious and chaste woman, but she couldn't control the rowdy Scots.
I say that makes her the patron saint of classroom teachers and reformed bikers.

The Viking story swirls around St. Aebbe the Younger, but it can't be true, because the monastery had burned down 200 years before the Vikings supposedly burned it down. It had never been rebuilt. The Vikings were only ransacking Scotland in 870 AD or so.

To confuse things further there is also St. Aewthryn, who is apparently one of the pupils of St. Aebbe the Elder. She had men chasing after her as well and a story that is attributed to St. Aebbe is also attributed to St. Aewthyrn, which is that the sea rose up around wherever the women lived and kept the boys away. Maybe the sea did rise up to protect both of them on two separate occasions in two different places. Or maybe the sea rises up a lot along the coast of Scotland.

There is historical evidence that the Vikings did sack the place St. Aewthyrn founded, but again, they did that long after St. Aewthyrn had gone to her Heavenly reward.

The end:


It may be true that the saying did actually come from the Viking incident and St. Aebbe the Younger, it's just that the saying is based on a very confused legend and not an actual historical occurance.

Meanwhile, poor St. Aewthryn, was also called "Audrey" and, also according to Wikipedia, this is where we get the word "tawdry". I'll let them explain:

The common version of Æthelthryth's name was St. Awdrey, which is the origin of the word tawdry. Her admirers bought modestly concealing lace goods at an annual fair held in her name in Ely. As years passed, this lacework came to be seen as old-fashioned or cheap and poor quality goods.

Non Guilty Pleasure

Today dear readers, I'll have to ask you to answer a question for me!

Mr. Rodriguez returned today with the compost bin can and a zip lock bag with two honey combs. He was as tickled as we were that our bees were making honey.

I miss them. If I see a bee now I wonder if it's not some little lost bee looking for his hive.

But I digress. The honey is deliciously light and sweet. Here is the question: How do we eat it? It's in it's waxy honey comb. Are we supposed to eat the waxy honey comb, or somehow let the honey drip out of it first. It's really not dripping anywhere, I don't think.

I know there are some bee savvy readers out there!

Meanwhile, I'll go back to my post on the watchtower (not the Jehovah's Witness one):


Dear Sister MM, Why is a fish sandwich outside of Lent a guilty pleasure? Shouldn't we thank God for the occasional small pleasure?

Of course we should thank God for all pleasures small and large. Our bees have been relocated! They made honey! We got some!

But that fish sandwich? Probably no one should ever eat that. It's a pile of grease and processed food. White bread, fried, breaded. With tar tar sauce. Do you know how to make tar tar sauce? I actually do. It's a lot of mayonnaise with some pickle relish and Worcester sauce. That's all you need to make it. Do you know how to make mayonnaise? I actually know that too. You get a lot of eggs and even more oil and you whip it together. That's mayonnaise.

There is just not one good thing about that sandwich except the taste of it. Hence: guilty pleasure. My other guilty sandwich pleasure is a baloney sandwich with a ton of mustard on white bread. My dad was a butcher and told be all about baloney.

You don't want to know.

Sister, my daughter has asked for a patron saint medal for figure skating. Could you please help me find one? Thanks.

Done and done! Talk about small pleasures! The story of St. Ludwina is not very pleasant, though. She had a skating accident when she was 16 years old and it left her in pain and an invalid the rest of her life. She spent the rest of her life offering up her pain and misery to the Poor Souls in Purgatory.


It wasn't all bad. She did have some ecstasies. She went for a visit to Purgatory. Always better to simply visit than to have a stay. She also visited Heaven. That would have been a nice break from the daily grind of the sickbed. St. Ludwina lived only on the Host and lived quite a while, especially given that she was paralyzed and it was 1433AD.

She is also known as Lidwina, Lydwina...apparently you can spell her name any old which way.

Bee Gone!

The bees are gone.

The
Bee
Saga

I had been hoping that once the weather turned cool, they would migrate or something, like they did the last time. After spending that summer, they left as mysteriously as they had arrived. Had we not been so afraid that some of them might still be in there, we could have had some honey. By the time we peeked in the can again, they were long gone, their hive gone to ruin.

No such luck this year. The nights are cold now, the days cool, the flowering plants dormant, and the bees are as busy as ever. Not that we really minded. They never gave us any trouble, until recently.

It was Halloween night. It was "The Amityville Horror" bee behavior. I believe in that story, flies or bees or some flying menace blackened the windows.

On Halloween night, when the door hung open to give out treats, and while we were oohing and ahhing at little Harry Potters and dozens of fairy princesses, the bees came in. In two's and threes, every time the door opened, they flew straight to the kitchen lights until we had a little mini swarm banging into the fixtures like moths.

I said, "They're going for the lights. We'll just turn the light off."

Sister St. Aloysius said, "No! They'll just go all over the house after the other lights that are on."

I had already turned off the kitchen lights and the bees were flying around in confusion, and heading in two's and three's to the living room area. I turned the kitchen light back on. The bees came back into the kitchen.

At this point the kitchen sounded like a beehive, the buzzing was getting louder. Sister St. Aloysius dug out the fly swatter.

"Wait!" I said. "Leave this to me."

I shuffled her out the front door with the candy bowl. I found a clamp lamp in the garage and plugged it in by the compost bin. I turned out every light in the house and opened the front door. Sister Mary Fiacre dozed in front of the glow of the TV.

All the bees were out in seconds flat. Seconds!

Since Halloween, we've had to shoo them out in the evening with less trouble when we take out the trash or let the cat in.

Yesterday a man came to the door in the middle of the afternoon. "Do you want me to take these bees away."

"What?" I said. "Take them where?"

"I'll take them and bring the can back to you."

"What are you going to do with them?"

"I'll take them and make them a box. It will take a couple of days for them to transfer to the new place and then I'll bring the can back. I'll have to do it early in the morning or in the evening when they're all home."

Hallelujah!

He said he had done just that with three of our neighbors who also had hives. One family could no longer sit on their deck because the hive was in the eave overhead. They would have had to sit and sip lemonade in a cloud of bees.

Mr. Rodriguez gave me his phone number and said he would be back in the evening. At 7pm the bees were still with us. I thought maybe he was going to come for them in the morning. At 9pm when I put the trash cans out at the curb, the bees and the compost bin were gone.

"I didn't hear Mr. Rodriguez take the can away!"

"I did, I saw him." Sister St. Aloysius, as far as I knew, had been at the other end of the house all evening. In fact, I was in the front room all evening and I never saw her go by. You have to go through the whole house to go out the front door or the back door. They used to call this a 'shot gun' house.

"I asked him if he got stung. I meant, just now when he was moving our bees, since they have been so pleasant with us."

This is true. They are right next to the trash cans, and when we take out the trash or sweep up or wash the car, they just bumble around our heads.

"He said yes, he got stung a lot. But I think he meant in general and not just now. He wasn't wincing."

I wanted to ask her how he 'sealed up the can', which is something that he had mentioned to me, that he would seal up the can and then just pick it up and take it with him, but I was stopped cold by the pressing thought of how Sister St. Aloysius had ended up viewing the bee removal.

Was she bi-locating? Was she both in the back of the house saying a rosary and in the front of the house talking bees with Mr. Rodriguez?

I had asked Mr. Rodriguez, if there is any honey, could he bring us a little. I hope I manage to be available when the can is returned. Or I can just send Sister St. Aloysius over to see how the bees are fairing in their new digs while she is making lunch here at home.