Risk is our game; puppies is our name.

When people name puppies after you, you know you must be doing something right.

A family e-mailed bink tonight to tell her they'd named their chocolate-lab puppy after her!!!
She's has been getting the most amazing outpouring of gratitude and support for her DVD to ART project, collecting the archbishops anti-gay marriage DVDs to turn into art.
Everything from friends who dropped off bagels to a stranger who gave her a $100 bill.

Not totally surprising, though I am surprised. bink's offering a loving, creative outlet for people who are angry and hurt. One woman I talked to at Mass last Sunday was almost weeping with rage at how the pastor has "suspended" bink as artist in residence.

bink, meanwhile, has been ... Well, honestly, I don't know when I've seen someone so centered, aligned, on target. For fifteen years she never said boo to the Church about its rancid sexual politics, and now she just calmly steps forward and says, with one calm stroke, Enough of this silliness.

It's like watching the Church get slapped with a fish.

This evening I made up these snacks that bink, Maura, and I can eat out of our jacket pockets while we stand--on public property [1]--outside the Basilica for five hours tomorrow, so people going to Mass can hand over their copy of the DVD to bink, if they want.

I'm not real jazzed about doing this.
I certainly have no doubts it is the right thing to do, but taking a stand in public, well, honestly, it frightens me. I have friends who relish political action, but I am not one of those. (Neither is bink, in fact.)
Especially when there might be media and cracked nuts around.

I know mostly people will be happy to see us, and throughout the morning other volunteers will join us, but it's just, you know, nervous-making.
So, I am reciting the mantra of the Capt. Kirk Academy for the Pursuit of Excellence to myself:
"Risk... risk is our business.
That's what this starship is all about. It's why we're aboard her."
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[1] Exercising our Freedom of Assembly, per the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Funny how I rarely think much about my Constitutional rights unless I'm dealing with the Catholic Church.
One pastor wrote a comment on the DVD to ART blog asking Lucinda to take his church off the list of places volunteers will be collecting near. She politely declined.