Sunday Brunch’s premiere is See Jane Single’s swan song.
Predictably, post after post of reflecting on life as a single woman – upbeat or not – wears one down. I set out to be positive, but was ultimately unable to convey that while singlehood is a lonely reality, it’s far from the epicenter of life. I felt like I was stuck in Genesis 2:18, in which God mused amidst all the goodness, “It is not good for man to be alone.” I felt like I was writing about waiting for life to “happen” while life was happening all around me.
Meditating on the “not good” was missing the mark.
Even as I await a vocation with graceless impatience, life in Christ provides all good things, and every good thing. As John Allen said, writing for NCR, “Fundamentally, I don’t think the Catholic church gets enough credit for being a hell of a lot of fun”.
I’d like to write about the joy. Sunday brunches convey that joy. Memories of the occasional Sunday brunch thread my life together, whether at home on Christmas morning, with several dozen Domers in a dorm room kitchen, with choir members in the parish hall after Mass, whether adrift in Dublin, Oxford, Santiago, Puebla, Rome, or an Appalachian campsite, or with my family on the dock at Lake Cayuga in late summer. Each time, whether I ate heartily or not, I always came away full.
At Sunday brunches, there are mismatched plates and bowls strewn across the table; there’s juice splatters and blueberries dropped in pancake batter and a percolating coffee pot gurgling amidst the four part harmony of the cooks. There’s the great Amen before eating. The day is full of possibility and pancakes, and there’s bacon for the taking. Guests mill in and out, and every time a person enters, the room gets bigger, not smaller.
Yes, Sunday Brunch will do.
I write so that his joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete. Expect more prose than polemic, more pondering than politics. Expect the kind of talk you may have with a table of trusted guests. The Sunday brunch table is the vantage point from which I await the great Wedding Feast. So, pull up a chair and feast away. The coffee is hot and we are here, on this Lord’s Day.
