The Mom Weekly Volume 136: March 17, 2026
You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here.
Notes:
First of all, I just realized that I’ve been incorrectly dating most of the weeklies for 2026 with “2025” so I apologize! I’ve corrected it going forward.
Second: Apparently, last Wednesday (or this past Sunday, Laetare Sunday) was “Mid-Lent,” which is, as it sounds, the midpoint of Lent. So that is good news for me and many others! We have less ahead of us in Lent than behind us.
Finally: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! What a fun weekend we have had celebrating the wedding and family. (I’m writing this well ahead of time, so I’m just going to assume that we did, in fact, have a fun time.)
I’ll be making soda bread and I think we will be having corned beef and cabbage. I hope you enjoy this day too!
Remember how much I love you,
Mom
Eleazar’s Commonplace Book, or Shine Like Lights, Part 2 (From the Vault, 2016)
More Definitions:
COMMONPLACE BOOK
How many of you know what a commonplace book is?
I’ve always thought of it as a “quote book” in which a person writes down interesting lines. They’ve been around since the 17th century, and certainly earlier, without the name (Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks in the 15th century come to mind, for instance)
—kind of a scrapbook/notebook combination—a way for a scholar, a writer, or a learned person to gather all sorts of information in one place. I guess today we call that the Internet.
Here’s a link to John Milton’s Commonplace book.
John Locke’s A New Method of Making Commonplace Books.
So, from a very early age, I was a lover of commonplace books, but I didn’t know that I was.
I have loved quote books, which I inherited from my Dad. In high school, I had a folder filled with song lyrics I had written out in pretty handwriting (including, yes, Barry Manilow), and friends would ask to see it. In college I had an index card file filled with quotes from 1. my English major works, from Pride & Prejudice to Frankenstein to Anna Karenina and, 2. again, song lyrics.
Sadly, at some point in my younger life I got rid of them, thinking it silly for just writing down the quotes of others (I didn’t know that commonplace books existed back then), but I really wish I still had them.
As a mom, I’ve developed a huge love of children’s literature, from great picture books to easy readers like “Little Bear” and novels like Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, and tons of others.
I’ve kept quote books and book logs, and while I don’t have a physical commonplace book at the moment, I do still collect quotes like coins.
So you may be able to tell that a commonplace book is rather varied, and sometimes unconnected. It’s random—the only thread is quotes and great books.
And that’s how my talk will be, but it’s all to get YOU thinking and YOU coming up with ideas to keep you shining like a light all your life.
MAKING SOMETHING
Now we will Make Something
— a hot dog booklet
So, let’s make our own mini Commonplace Books
My oldest sister, artist and book-maker, showed me and my kids how to make books years ago, and it was wonderful.
(2026 note: At this point in the talk, we each made a hot dog booklet. Here is a description of a hot dog booklet so you can see what it is, and make one if you want! )
Now, to get to
(ELEAZAR’s) COMMONPLACE BOOK
All the time, I want YOU thinking to think about the context of resolutions to make time to pursue thing that energize you. That you do because you WANT to, not because you HAVE to. (More on that later)
(2026 note: I read different quotes from books or other places, to inspire questions for each of the attendees to reflect on their own—thus the question after each section).
When I prayed the Office of Readings today, the second reading (this one is usually not from Scripture) is
BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART, FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD
St Gregory of Nyssa on the Beatitudes
(Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God)
Bodily health is a good thing, but what is truly blessed is not only to know how to keep one’s health but actually to be healthy. If someone praises health but then goes and eats food that makes him ill, what is the use to him, in his illness, of all his praise of health?
We need to look at the text we are considering in just the same way. It does not say that it is blessed to know something about the Lord God, but that it is blessed to have God within oneself. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
I do not think that this is simply intended to promise a direct vision of God if one purifies one’s soul. On the other hand, perhaps the magnificence of this saying is hinting at the same thing that is said more clearly to another audience: The kingdom of God is within you. That is, we are to understand that when we have purged our souls of every illusion and every disordered affection, we will see our own beauty as an image of the divine nature.
QUESTION: How is the Kingdom of God Within You?
Being a DECIDER
City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II’s Kraków by George Weigel.
papal biographer, wrote “Witness to Hope”
He was a moral reference point for his friends and did not hesitate to be a challenging counselor and confessor. But the pastoral stress … was always on personal responsibility. He was not the decider for his friends; they must be their own deciders, he insisted, if they were to be true to the moral dignity built into them as human persons and as Christians.
I love that expression, “DECIDER”
QUESTION: How can you be a decider? How can you be a good decider, filled with personal responsibility?
WIN HAPPINESS
I am a huge fan of happiness kinds of books. I’ve read dozens of them, from positive psychology people like Marty Seligman to happiness researchers like Barbara Frederickson and Sonja Lyubomirsky, who wrote “The How of Happiness.” There are so many good books to read in this vein, but I’d like to mention one in particular.
I’m going to quote from Rilla of Ingleside by Lucy Maud Montgomery (she wrote the Anne of Green Gables books). I dearly love all of the Anne books, and this is the last in the series about her family, and about Anne & Gilbert’s youngest child, darling, charming and growing up Rilla (named after Marilla). Rilla of Ingleside is such a good book as a coming-of-age story, but also great historical fiction about WWI written close to the time. Noble and heartbreaking without being completely depressing, as a lot of fiction about WWI is, and rightfully so, since it’s the first modern war.
At one point, Rilla is bemoaning in a conversation with her brother Walter how the war is changing their whole community and family. Her brother Walter says:
“Now we won’t be sober any more. We’ll look beyond the years—to the time when the war will be over and Jem and Jerry and I will come marching home and we’ll all be happy again.”
“We won’t be—happy—in the same way,” said Rilla.
“No, not in the same way. Nobody whom this war has touched will ever be happy again in quite the same way. But it will be a better happiness, I think, little sister—a happiness we’ve earned. We were very happy before the war, weren’t we? With a home like Ingleside, and a father and mother like ours we couldn’t help being happy. But that happiness was a gift from life and love; it wasn’t really ours—life could take it back at any time. It can never take away the happiness we win for ourselves in the way of duty.”
QUESTION: What kind of happiness have you won in the way of duty?
2026 note: the completion of this next week! It was a long talk 🙂
Interesting/Notable
How to Break Your Screen Addiction: The Lamp Catholic magazine (UK)
This is (slightly) tongue-in-cheek piece by a British Dominican sister. Well written! I can’t recall how I came across this.
I Make Connections. This is What I’m Actually Thinking—NY Times Gift Article
If you like Connections, you will LOVE this article by the author of all of them. I actually read through some of the comments, and they are hilarious and delightful (the nice ones, that is).