Ardent Devotion

I grew up in the golden era of Catholic mom blogs. As a teenager, I nourished my heart and imagination with Sarah Mackenzie's Amongst Lovely Things and Haley Stewart's Carrots for Michaelmas and Mary Haseltine's Better Than Eden and many others. These are the spaces I learned about liturgical living, family read-alouds, cloth nappies, natural birth, and how to wrangle kids through Mass... a solid ten years before having any children of my own to wrangle.  These little pockets of the internet gave me a window into the otherwise hidden lives of mothers trying to live out their faith in the sacred spaces of home and sometimes work. Although I was by no means convinced that my own vocation was to marriage, I gravitated towards these women and their domestic churches because they seemed to show me it was possible to love God in the middle of the world.  They didn't idealise it: there was mess, spiritual struggle, always a tight budget and an unexpected baby and a little mo...