What exactly is Marge Mix?

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite things to do was to make up a “mix”. I’d get an old coffee can, go out to the back yard, and gather every kind of oddity I could find: birch tree seeds, tiny pebbles, flower blossoms, twigs, leaves – you name it, I included it. Then, I’d dig up some dirt (much to my poor Dad’s frustration), throw it into my makeshift mixing bowl, add water from the hose, and stir it up with a “mixing spoon”, alias a branch torn from one of our apple trees (thanks for your patience and mercy, Dad). Then, I’d pour my mix into the “pan” – usually one of my mom’s baking pans from the kitchen (thanks for your patience and mercy, too, Mom) – and bake it in the “oven”, which was actually my Dad’s old cement mixer. When it was “baked”, I’d serve the contents to my imaginary family – who happened to live in the hole I’d dug getting the dirt in the first place, which, usually had to be widened in order to hold all the pan’s contents – and begin the process all over again.

This blog, Marge Mix, is a little like the mix I used to make as a kid. I’ll be gathering every kind of oddity, throwing it in the can, baking it up, and serving it. As with my childhood mixing, the focus is on family – protecting, fostering, encouraging, and informing families, which also includes the Family of God. That’s all of us. Whether we’re called to married life or single life; whether we have a family of our own, come from a family, or hope to someday form a family, everything family is important to us, since strong, Christian families are essential to the survival of humanity. So are genuine motherliness and fatherliness – which can and should be renewed and developed among all women and men, even those who are single, consecrated, or ordained.

“In today’s society the presence of exemplary Christian families is more necessary and urgent than ever. Unfortunately, we are forced to acknowledge the spread of a secularization which leads to the exclusion of God from life and the increasing disintegration of the family, especially in Europe. Freedom without commitment to the truth is made into an absolute, and individual well-being through the consumption of material goods and transient experiences is cultivated as an ideal, obscuring the quality of interpersonal relations and deeper human values; love is reduced to sentimental emotion and to the gratification of instinctive impulses, without a commitment to build lasting bonds of reciprocal belonging and without openness to life. We are called to oppose such a mentality!” Pope Benedict XVI recently said in an address to Croation families.

This blog is an answer to the call of our Holy Father to oppose the anti-family mentality that is quickly growing throughout the world. I hope to see you back here often; it’s really true that there’s strength in numbers.