The lure of nostalgia for a romantic rural past

I posted today over at The Anglo-Catholic about some thoughts I had following the launch of the Development and Peace Share Lent campaign and how the lure nostalgia for a romantic rural past may prove not to be all its cracked up to be---or even possible to recreate given our connected, globalized world.

I’ve tried the homesteading thing, living on a small farm, where we raised our own beef and pork, kept chickens for eggs, (and tried eating some of them too, but my oh my are they stringy and forget trying to pluck the things), grew beans, alfalfa, got the hay in, shucked piles of cattle corn that would have made Rumpelstiltskin himself blanch, and so on. It’s hard work, and after doing it for a few years, while I liked many aspects of it, the romance is off. I like having a lawn, thank you, not something that the chickens have turned into an expanse of dirt with little shallow depressions they like to dust bathe in. And yeah, try keeping a fence intact that keeps your free-range hens from getting loose. To say nothing of washing manure off eggs. As you may have gathered, I am not good at the domestic arts. My bread always came out in stunted, mean little loaves, my jam runny, and well, journalism saved me from all that and gave me an excuse to buy at the grocery store. Homesteading was a form of voluntary poverty and as my grandmother once said in her thick Russian accent, “Being poor is very interesting for a while, but then it becomes very boring.”

How does this pertain to the Personal Ordinariate?

Because we have already seen here on this blog a yearning for the stability of a rural or small-town parish. I, too, fantasize about how joyful and wonderful it would be to live in a New England, or Ontario-type small town with a quaint main street, perhaps a village green or a park, and a beautiful Anglican Catholic church within walking distance that was open for Mattins, daily mass and Evensong.

But then I think about certain present day realities–the fact that most of the people who go to our little cathedral parish in Ottawa drive a good distance from all directions, some as much as an hour, to attend on Sunday. We dream of being able to buy a bigger building, as we are overflowing, one that could also house Augustine College and St. Timothy’s Classical Christian Academy, and perhaps have a place nearby where we could create or have housing for some of our people, particularly our elderly. But so far, the Lord has not made a way for us in this.