“I’m sorry, Adelaide. I can not get married tonight.”
“Why not?”
“I have to go to a prayer meeting.”
“Nathan, that is the biggest lie you have ever told me!”
“I swear to you, it’s true!”
– Guys and Dolls
This morning I drove up to East Syracuse to attend a breakfast meeting of about 85 Catholic women. Chaste Catholic women. Learning how to be chaster. Really.
Until the priest arrived, I was the only male. By and by a teenage bus boy popped his head in periodically, but that was it.
The occasion was an address by the remarkable Dawn Eden, with whom I have been exchanging emails and blog comments for the last two and a half years, mostly on her esteemed blog, The Dawn Patrol.
Shortly after I discovered her blog, I sent her an old piece I had written on Thomas More and the tough decisions judges sometimes face. Minutes later it was on The Dawn Patrol and in a brief exchange she encouraged me to start my own blog, and then when I hit a slow period she pushed me to start it up again and keep it going.
It was a crazy period in her life. She had just been fired by the New York Post on the eve of what is arguably her greatest front page headline, acknowledging the latest marriage of The Donald with LADY IS A TRUMP. She had put her first tentative toes on the bridge to Rome, having spent a few protestant years after a lifetime of living as an agnostic unchaste Reform Jew.
She landed on her feet, of course, took a job with the Daily News, wrote a book, The Thrill of the Chaste, now in its sixth printing, and has been on a whirlwind lecture tour on two continents for the last year, recently taking a position with the Cardinal Newman Society in Washington.
I had thought of driving to Worcester a couple of weeks ago to see her speak at the Bishop’s request, but the City Hall boiler blew and we had an emergency meeting of the Common Council that same night. Over the years she has suggested getting together with Mary and me when we are in New York, but it never lined up. I’ve seen her on television, listened to her on the radio, seen her in numerous video clips and exchanged dozens of correspondences, but we had never met.
Until today.
******
“You know, you look like a judge! I didn’t recognize you without your baseball cap.”
Yeah, I guess I don’t actually look like a judge in that picture, though I was. Now, almost seven years later, finally I look like a judge and I’m not.
*******
The presentation was sensational and well-received by a mesmerized audience. I have seen the earlier clips from the tour, and it is amazing how much more polished she is now: relaxed and yet brimming with enthusiasm the whole time. She is in near constant motion and if I didn’t know better I’d suggest a strong Italian streak in her gestures [NOTE TO SAM ZURLO: THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE STEREOTYPICAL OR DEROGATORY].
I’ll have a second post on her speech after I have edited the video clips. That’s how I got in. Dawn convinced them that I was her official videographer.
********
Near the end, she talked about her conversion to Catholicism and how difficult it had been and how she had been helped and aided by the encouragement of her friends at The Dawn Patrol.
“And one of those people is here today. His name is Robert N. Going, whom I met here today for the very first time, and I want to thank him.”
Well. Wow.
If only the tiniest part of what she said is true, at long last I’ll have something to say to The Lord if He should happen to bring up that other stuff.
*********
“Hi, Daddy. What were you doing in Syracuse?”
“I went to a lecture, Anna.”
“What was it about?”
“Chastity.”
“Uh huh. Chastity.”
“Chastity.”
