PewSpective

Fog

2012-01-29T17:59:00.000-08:00

You are here because you love me. And you are here because I love you.

So ended the brief address of a friend of mine on the occasion of his solemn profession of vows to the Order of Cistercians of Strict Observance—the Trappists—a few days ago. The day had begun bleak and rainy, but as the opening words of the mass were spoken the light broke through the clouds, flooding the sanctuary with a play of golden light from the stained glass windows, patterns playing over the plain floor and making a carpet of light in the spot where my friend would prostrate himself in the course of the liturgy. By the time we were in the refectory for the reception, it was clearing and becoming bright.

It was a fitting grace note for an artist who has come to understand the creative life within the monastery walls. There was mass, with a homily that intertwined the life of the Creator with the creativeness of his creation, a mass rich with both music and the silence that, in a Trappist monastery, is a living presence; a mass that did not feel the need to fill up every vacant space with notes and words, one that left time for contemplating the wondrous event that was taking place in front of us, the binding of this one man to his community until death would change—but not really end—the relationship. For, as my friend pointed out, he knows where he will be buried, and it is still within the embrace of his brothers. He knows his place in the world, and which of us would not wish the same?

I had arisen early, well before dawn, in time, had I been at the monastery already, to join the brothers in the night office, the watch in the night. I left the mountain and drove the nearly three hours to the monastery in a driving rain. By the time I left the Interstate for the road that would dwindle from six lanes to two in its course to the monastery, I was surrounded by fog.

I headed into the darkness, all the light going in the other direction, the headlamps of cars heading into town as I headed away. My world contracted to the confines of my car and the play of its own lights on the asphalt. The thick, white mist covered everything to the left of the yellow line and to the right of the white one on the road. I drove on, pulling up memories of this road I had driven so many times before, willing myself to recall how it felt, its curves and intersections, its very being.

It worked. I missed only one turn, and knew it immediately. It took a while to find a spot that permitted me to turn around, and a break in the long line of lights that allowed me to do so. Even so, I arrived at the monastery in time for Lauds, and to hear the community pray for their brother on the feast day of their founders. As I walked toward the church, sparely lit in the gathering dawn, the fog was lifting. I slowed my steps and paused to drink in the silence, to watch a bare tree emerge from the mists and to see a bird hop from branch to branch. To pause and to begin to bring my own rhythm into those of the measured and patient cadences of monastic life. And to reflect on the gift of fog, which helped me make the transition.

Living where I do, I’ve had to come to terms with fog. On our mountain, it is often so dense—as it was this particular morning—that the only way to navigate is from one reflector in the middle of the road, to the next, taking cues in the darkness from things I’ve experienced before: my off-rear tire drops into a small hole, I find the blue reflector that suddenly looms on the left and it means I have arrived at the turn-off for my street , and I turn the car as much in faith as in assurance. It’s a reality of my existence and a pretty good metaphor for my spiritual life. And it appears that it suits me.

Some folks spend the bulk of their lives walking about in the spiritual sunlight, seeing clearly where they are and where they wish to be and getting there with remarkable directness—and that is a good thing. But some of us, like a climber who ascends a mountain at exactly the same rate the fog lifts away, find ourselves never quite getting through the mists. And after a while, the fog, that dampens the senses and blurs the light and softens the darkness like the quiet in a Trappist monastery, takes on a life of its own, a teaching of its own.

I’ve grown accustomed to the fog and its inherent darkness, and I’ve developed a fondness for it, for it is, after all, an integral part of my life. Wishing it away would be as effective—and as silly—as wishing to be tall and blonde when it is clear that I simply am…not. If part of being me is the physical body I inhabit, then so is the spiritual place I have been given in the grand scheme of things. And any artist will tell you that there is no great work of art that does not depend on the play of light with shadow. I get to be part of the shadow.

Two years ago, on the day I first met the monks at Conyers, this particular Brother led me to the balcony of the Church after vespers and I was stunned by the beauty of the silence and the shadows. Since then, I have found my best place in darkened churches full of that same silence and shadows, places where the smallest details matter. The shadow of a shadow that reminds me that this is the spot where the step is. The reflection of the votives in the polished stone of the altar that reminds me to pray for the intentions of those who have been there before me. The gradual change of the stained glass behind the crucifix as the sun rises and the dullness gives way, gently at first, them with a great rush, to colors, making clear both face and body on the crucifix and burnishing the brass of the tabernacle into warmth and brilliance, reminding me in Whose presence I find myself. The silence of emptiness that amplifies every creak and shift as the church itself wakes up and talks to me like an old friend. The silence and the darkness that pushes all other concern away so that, sometimes only for the briefest of moments, I can simply be there and simply be.

I can’t put it into better words, for how can words explain silence any more than light can explain shadow? But I have learned that it is in that place that I find my center and it is in that way that I grow so that when the light and noise of day confound me as much as the fog on a country road, I can shut my interior eyes and remember—what it feels like to be in the presence of God--always closer to me than my own breath even when the noise and the light conspire to make me forget that.

In those darkened churches, in the shadows and the fog of my interior life, I meet God again. In those shadows, which are no longer fearsome, but welcome, I recognize Him in the place and the way He has arranged for me, in the place where, after all, I live. A place that is familiar and unspeakably intimate and in which I can let Him lead me in the confidence of faith. One reflector at a time, because I understand that.

I am there, in that mist, because He loves me. And I am there because I love Him.

Mass Rock

2012-01-23T15:08:00.000-08:00

Mass Rock

I live on the side of a mountain in Tennessee, one characteristic of which is that nearly every yard is littered with large, exposed rocks. Now that winter is here and I can see down the hill from my home to the expanse of my lot that stretches down a steep slope to the valley below, I am looking for a likely prospect for a mass rock.

Mass rocks were the rocks in the fields and woods where the persecuted Irish Catholics met to celebrate the Eucharist when to do so in church was impossible and to do so at all was to risk imprisonment or death. More than one priest met his end at a mass rock. But the Irish were stubbornly committed to their faith, and even the fear of death and ruin—real and present—did not deter them from practicing it.

These days, we civilized Americans are not so frightened of losing our lives for our faith—that is for another place or another time. The specter of red martyrdom isn’t very real in modern America. But the persecution of the Catholic Church is. And persecutions necessarily bear martyrs of one kind or another.

It is from the ranks of us comfortable, established, protected folk that some unlikely martyrs will come. And if we are serious about our faith, there ought to be a lot of us.

For the word martyr simply means witness. And the call to witness is both simple and blunt, with little room for dissembling: He who is not for Me is against Me. When the persecutions come, it’s time for the faithful to stand FOR something. It is not enough merely not to be against.

The early history of the Church is awash in blood; indeed the blood of the martyrs is in every generation the seed of the Church. We know this as historical fact; we’re about to know it as present reality.

Here the prospect of martyrdom is different. Here instead of shedding blood, it looks like Catholics will be called on to shed economic security, social position and the prospect of “remaining at the table” for wider influence in social and political processes. In short, we are being asked to compromise our beliefs in the interest of multicultural unity and the greater social good. The Obama Administration’s hard line on requiring Catholic institutions to provide health care coverage of abortion, abortifacient drugs (birth control pills), and sterilization is the most immediate—but not the only—frontal assault on the Church.

There are lots of arguments to be made and a lot of discussion to be hashed out, but they tend to cloud the issue, which is really pretty simple:

Do we really believe what the Church teaches: that to assist in the procuring of abortion or sterilization or artificial contraception is a grave and inherent evil in which we may not participate?

And are we willing to stand by that belief, no matter what it costs? Or will we try to shade the edges of that very clear truth and try to avoid for now what is inevitable: the clash of Catholic conscience and secular culture?

There is an almost irresistible temptation to try to find a way around the issue—to find a way to compromise, to make the problem go away and leave us in peace. But it won’t, because the issue isn’t health insurance. The issue is witness, and God help us if Catholic witness ever fades from the scene.

Demanding that Catholic institutions cover abortions and abortifacient drugs and sterilizations is just one facet of a dark, dark diamond that threatens to cut through the very bonds of the faith if we permit it. Already Christians (not just Catholics) of conscience who try to refuse to accept the abortion and homosexual agenda are pressed on every economic side.

Already, wedding photographers with a sense of sacrament and conscience have been sued for refusing to take the job of photographing a homosexual union.

Already pharmacists of conscience have faced fines and firing for refusing to fill prescriptions for the morning after pill.

Already in other countries whose protections for free speech are weaker than ours, Christians can face fines and lawsuits simply for presenting the traditional teaching go the Church on the subject of sexual morality.

This latest attempt to force Catholic institutions to violate their consciences is another assault in the same battle: conform to the world’s views or be destroyed.

The time is coming, I am afraid, when every economic force will be brought to bear to force Christians of conscience, especially Catholics, to succumb to the secular agenda. And in many cases, it will work because we love our comfort so very much.

If contributions to a Church that fails to recognize homosexual unions are no longer tax deductible, will we continue to make them—in fact increase them so that our churches can survive after they lose their tax-exempt status for the same reason? Will we sacrifice our level of economic comfort to preserve our parishes?

If it becomes—in some ways it already is-- a requirement for admission to law, medical or business school to accept abortion, contraceptives and homosexual behavior, will we go along to get along? Or will we sadly turn away and find some other means—far less remunerative—to serve the King and the Kingdom with our intellects and our hands?

If those choices of conscience mean that we will lose our comfortable homes and our jobs and our 401K, what will we do? Will we trust that the loss is worth it? Or will we compromise our faith to keep our money?

There’s a temptation to look at these possibilities as ginning up ghosts in a graveyard—to terrible to contemplate, too impossible to happen, but they are not. The history of the Church proves they are not. The history of mankind proves that generation after generation is faced with just the sort of challenge that strikes at the very root of its own weakness—for the Adversary is clever and well versed in flanking maneuvers.

We are faced with an all-out assault on the freedom of conscience in America. I hope and pray for a compromise that will forestall the battles and change the shape of the battlefield. And I am taking a cold, hard look inside myself and my ability to bear the white martyrdom—the enforced renouncing of material goods and status— that seems to be looming.

I’m not sure I have the perseverance, I know I will be tempted to offer the pinch of incense to Caesar.

I can only pray that I recognize that temptation for what it is and that, like the martyrs of so long ago, I can say to myself—and to others—I have served Christ these many years as my Lord. Should I deny Him now? And for today, the pinch of incense comes in the form of accepting this violation of conscience in the supposed service of the “greater good” and “women’s health.” St. Polycarp, pray for me, for us all.

In my mind and in my heart, I’m clearing a way to that mass rock, metaphorically speaking. I hope I will never need it—but if I do, I want to be clear in my own mind that I know the path through the woods to find it.

Giving Footprint

2012-01-22T14:32:00.000-08:00

I’m always looking for ways to—borrowing a phrase from the environmentalists— improve my "giving footprint." In austere times, there comes a limit to how much in dollars and cents one can give and there’s certainly a limit in terms of time—but if one is creative there are many ways to enhance our commitment to serving the body of Christ by our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service. Here’s a list of some of the more creative ways I’ve discovered.

(1) MyPoints.com. MyPoints is a website that—fair warning—sends solicitations for various goods and services available on the Internet. It’s a marketing website, pure and simple. Signing up WILL clog your inbox with things you ultimately may not want. BUT—and this is the important BUT—you rack up points just for visiting the advertised websites, and can get points for shopping online through the MyPoints portal. Accrue enough points and you can exchange them for gift cards that can, in turn, be donated to local charities for use. I’ve redeemed points for cards totaling over a thousand dollars over the past few years, and didn’t do anything online—except visit a few websites—that I would not do otherwise. The cards for which I redeemed my points (good for gas, food, Wal-Mart, Target) have gone to the local homeless shelter, the Hispanic ministry outreach and to seminarians. In my book, a few e-mails a day that can be quickly taken care of, then trashed, is a small price to pay for free cards worth real money that I can give to charities of my choice. MyPoints also gives points for referrals; if you have a group of friends—or if a parish wanted to undertake this as a way to support a particular project—this would be a good way to amplify results.

(2) GoodSearch.com Good Search/GoodShop/GoodDining is a search engine and portal for shopping and dining out that directs a portion of each sale and a certain amount per search to your designated charity. It’s now my search engine of choice. The number of charities you can support is limited by those which have applied for the privilege—but there are a number of Catholic ones. My money goes to the Priests of the Sacred Heart. If you are on the board of a charity, this might be a good site to register with. They’ve just announced a dining program—register your credit card with them and a portion of the money you spend at participating restaurants goes to your designated charity.

(3) iGive.com. Like GoodSearch, iGive donates a portion of sales to designated charities. It requires you to download a toolbar button and $10 will go to your designated charity just for downloading the button and keeping it until April 14, 2012. There are 1300 online retailers listed, and a good number of Catholic charities, so if you are an online shopper, this one might be a good choice. iGive also gives money for referrals.

(4) Downsize! Like most affluent Americans, I am overrun with stuff. Periodically I go through my closets, basement and garage and weed ruthlessly. Some stuff just needs throwing out, but some of it is great for St. Vincent de Paul or the local parish rummage sale.

(5) Corporate matching gifts. My employer has a matching program that matches my donation 1:1 or sometimes 2:1. Though they will not match donations to a purely religious institution, I’ve been able to multiply my donations to Catholic schools and colleges—and even to the Matthew Kelley Foundation.

(6) Gazelle.com Gazelle buys used electronics and phones for surprisingly good prices. If you aren’t in need of the money selling your old iphone/ipod/digital camera/electronic games liberates from Gazelle, give it to the charity of your choice. Gazelle will also send the money directly to designated charities.

(7) Donate services to a charity auction. If you are an awesome baker, donate a tray of custom pastries. If you’re better at main courses, offer to cater a dinner. If you are talented with your hands, donate something you’ve made. If you have a vacation home, offer a stay. Over the years, we’ve raised quite a bit of money for various groups by doing just that.

(8) Donate your time. Most charitable groups can find a way to use even a few extra volunteer hours. If you have more time than money or talent, call your favorite group and offer yourself. No better gift!

And of course--support all these with prayers. Lots and lots of prayers.

If you have other ideas, please! Let me know!

Addendum

2012-01-08T10:49:00.000-08:00

Naturally today we sang another of them, one that underscores the avoidance of man for no particular reason: God in Flesh Made Manifest. Aside from the fact that it raises images in my mind of prime rib rather than humankind and utterly destroys the poetic rhythm of the refrain, it reinforces the sense that the word man is the problem, not a real sense of exclusion. Jesus is--I repeat--a man. In man, as man made manifest.

Us and Them

2012-01-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

As long as I am ranting there’s another syntactic offense that surfaces in my world every year at this time. The one minor downside of the two great feasts of the Christian year is that the feminists have butchered the great songs with their inclusive language. I find myself repeating as a mantra as I sing these revised hymns: all worship is inadequate even the kind I like all worship is inadequate even the kind I like all worship is inadequate… Even so the revisions in these songs I learned as a child continue to irritate me. Try as I may, I can’t get past it, so I end up offering up a lot of my Christmas and Easter worship as penance and suffering, rather than joy.

The revisions irritate me in part because I am something of a purist when it comes to art. My position is that if you don’t like someone’s art (1) don’t use it and (2) find someone else’s you do like or (3) make your own but (4) don’t go messing with the original, if for no other reason than respect for the creator. And for me, that is as true for the words of a song as they are for the Mona Lisa. It makes me absolutely nuts that the inclusive language police have decided that any reference to “man” must be scrubbed from the hymnal because, God forbid, it might offend some poor feminist who feels excluded by the language. Inclusivity, after all, must reign.

And if inclusivity is the standard than, yes, it trumps such concerns as artistic integrity and grace and poetry. If inclusivity were the goal—and if the revisions reached that goal—I would put up, more or less cheerfully, with the grating, thudding inelegance of inclusive language that changes pleased as man with man to dwell to pleased as one with us to dwell.

But the revision doesn’t do that. It isn’t inclusive at all—in fact, when you get right down to it, it’s more exclusive that the original and in a way that offends my Christian sensibilities. And I pray, fervently, for a return to the original language, not just for artistic purity but because it teaches me something profound that the revisions have heedlessly excised.

First of all, it really doesn’t take much erudition to understand that in the context of the hymn, the second man refers to mankind, not to male human beings. To think otherwise takes, in my never to be humble opinion, a certain amount of willful obduracy. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that Isaac Watts was a misogynist and really believed that the Redeemer of the world came to save only those with an XY complement in their chromosomes.

Not to put too fine a point on it—it’s silly. And I am not fond of accommodating silliness by a wholesale revision of another man’s (a particular one with XY chromosomes) art. Entering into art, even by singing a hymn, requires a good-faith attempt to understand what the artist is trying to convey, and that might mean leaving one’s own prejudices behind. Is it too much to expect that we might find ourselves (including our hurts and our prejudices) changed by art, rather than demanding that the art change to suit us?

Then there’s the matter of pleased as one …last time I checked Christ is, in fact, a man. That’s the whole point of the Incarnation—God became a real, live, human man. Rephrasing that impossible, wonderful truth by the use of one is the kind of revision that makes me suspect it isn’t delicate sensibilities that are at work, it’s a real animus against anything male. And that brings to mind another of those atrocious revisions, one that underscores the avoidance of man for no particular reason: God in Flesh Made Manifest. Aside from the fact that it raises images in my mind of prime rib rather than humankind and utterly destroys the poetic rhythm of the refrain, it reinforces the sense that the word man is the problem, not a real sense of exclusion. Jesus is--I repeat--a man. In man, as man made manifest.

But more to the point is the use of us as an attempt at inclusion. It fails on its face, for wherever there is an us, there is also a them. Christ didn’t come to dwell with us and not them, he came among men, to dwell with all—and the jury is still out on which group is which, us and them. In an attempt to launder language imagined to be sexist, the revisionists change the whole meaning of the phrase. God was, if I get the Incarnation even partly correct, pleased as man, as a male member of humankind to dwell with all of humankind—not just those who are singing the song, in this particular parish or group, and not just the elect. My guess is that just might be the reason Watts penned the phrase that way in the first place—to transcend both time and divisions, to state both truth and hope.

Born to raise the sons of earth has morphed these days in to born to raise us from the earth. Not only does this little manipulation set in motion the us/them divide, it seems a weak statement of the reality. Christ came to save all mankind (not just us); whether all accept is another matter. But He came for all the poor children of Eve—the sons of Earth—whether they ultimately accept Him or not.

Think of it—sons of Earth. For that we are, or that we were. When I hear that phrase, my mind ricochets among images: God creating man from the slime of the Earth, or James Weldon Johnson’s image of God kneeling on the banks of a river carefully molding man out of the clay of the riverbank, of Ash Wednesday and ashes, dust to dust. In three little words, the hymn brings into play the great sweep of creation and redemption—what we are before and until we receive the divine life through Christ and what we are after. The revision dilutes the universality of the Paschal Mystery to a simple statement of redemption for the saved. Granted, the latter is still true (assuming the us involved persevere to the end) but the former is so much more sweeping, dramatic, profound and…inclusive.

But the true divisiveness of the new language finally got driven home to me when I heard a glorious, pre-revision recording of Jesu, Joy of Man’s (not our) Desiring on my way to work yesterday morning. Because, after all, if Augustine is right, every human heart, every one, not just ours, is restless until it finds its home in God, in Jesus the Christ. All of mankind. All men, in the great and wonderful sense the hymn writers knew.

Not just us.

Articles and Pronouns

2012-01-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

I had just made the point to my catechumens last October that the Church is she—a mystical person, the Bride of Christ. Listen, I said, and you will hear Catholics refer to the Church as she, Holy Mother Church, not it.

Imagine my astonishment to go into mass later that week and hear clearly something I had inexplicably suppressed in my five years of Catholic worship:

…..for your holy catholic Church, watch over it, Lord, and guide it; grant it peace and unity throughout the world.

One of the best things about the new translation is that the Church is, once again, she in liturgy. No longer it, but she, as she properly should be:

Be pleased to grant her peace, to guard, unite and govern her throughout the whole world.

For what can the Bride of Christ be, if not a person in her own right? And because lex orandi, lex credendi, I look forward to a better, in my bones, understanding of just who this Bride of Christ is, nourished by the liturgy.

One of the things I found disconcerting when I first entered the Church was to encounter those who asserted with some asperity We are Church! Aside from the grammatical heresy and a crime against definite and indefinite articles involved (rather like Gift of Finest Wheat), I was put off by the fact that the statement was usually made in a foot-stomping tantrum against authority.

We are Church seemed to surface most often from people who were fuming against some affront, real or imagined from some nefarious them, usually the priest or the bishops; I rarely if ever encountered it when folk were discussing the humble and sacrificial service of self to others. We are Church seemed to me to be a rallying cry to wrest control, real or imagined, from the hierarchy of the Church to the people in the pews. Granted, I haven’t experienced firsthand the phenomenon of clericalism, which probably gave rise to the sentiment—but going from one extreme to another rarely remedies much of anything.

What the new translation makes clear for me is that while I am part of the Church, she, the Church (note the article), is more than just me. Or you. Or those who think like me. Or share my preferences in worship. Or church governance. Or…. anything else. And she is not limited by any group that claims to "be" Church, whatever the motive and whatever the message.

The Church is more than the sum of her parts, just as a body is more than the sum total of cells and organs. She has a life and a dignity and a purpose that surpasses my --or anyone's--narrow and individual tastes and experience.

Like any good mother, she has great wisdom to give me from the experience of her long, long life if only I am humble enough to listen. She is a mystery, in some ways a paradox, here and concrete and strong and visible even as she is gentle and loving and transcendental and eternal. As any Bride should be.

When the Church is viewed not as she but as it, there is the great temptation to treat her as Protestants do: a confection of man, of his interests and his foibles, malleable and subject to man’s control and whims and always in danger of re-creation. It, after all, implies a created thing, not a living one, and things can be used, re-formed, re-created, re-purposed and re-invented according to the desires of the creator, with no thought to the thing itself—which is, after all, just an it. Make the Church an it, and there’s the temptation to think of her as subject to us, rather than the other way around.

Ah, but when the Church becomes a person in her own right, both Bride and Body of Christ, she has her own identity, marred though it is by the all-too-human faces of those who comprise her temporal presence and govern in her name. She becomes both real and living, not just a construct for governance and worship. She becomes, truly, our loving mother, to whom we have a filial obligation.

From the Holy Father on down, we are all subject to the Church, for it is in her arms that we live the life of faith, through her we receive the sacraments that give and sustain life, in her we encounter Christ, because of her we take Him to the world at large who needs Him so very, very much. She has her own personality, her own essence, arising in part—but not in the whole—from those who form her and are at the same time are her children. It is the great both/and of the Catholic faith. True, we are in part, an integral part of the Church—but her life is so much more than our lives separately or combined add up to without the divine gift of Christ.

Who founded His Church. Note the possessive pronoun.

Dowry

2011-12-10T08:27:00.000-08:00

Because I took a step out of my comfort zone for about thirty seconds a year or so ago, I am learning to cook Kenyan style. And I am learning something about God in the process.

I noticed a man standing off to the side of the crowd at a fundraiser for Catholic Charities. I never—repeat, never—talk to strangers, and I’m, not all that good at talking with those I already know most of the time. Small talk makes me uncomfortable. But I took my heart in my hands and went over an introduced myself. The rest is, as they say, culinary history.

I am a Southerner, born and bred, which is in itself remarkable as my parents were not. Yankees displaced to Alabama, their raising of me ought to have made me a tweener—someone neither fish nor fowl, not comfortable either in her place of birth or her place of origin. Instead, it made me, with God’s grace, nimble. Not really belonging to any particular place or culture, I find it comfortable (though not always easy) to adjust to my surroundings of place.

The easiest entry to culture is, of course, through food. My affection for Kenyan food, if not actually planned from the dawn of time, was at least destiny. I might be adrift in culture, but I love Southern cooking. Give me grits and greens and I am a happy woman. Give me grits and greens on steroids—ugali and sukumu wiki, the traditional dishes my friend has taught me to make, and I am in hog heaven.

Last evening, we gathered in the kitchen to make a feast, my husband and daughter, a bonus baby, and two friends, including my Kenyan brother. The evening was filled with chopping and laughing as dinner took shape in leisurely fashion amid the conversation, all of us gathered around the stove --quite a difference from my upbringing. At my mother’s house, if dinner was set for six, it was on the table at six, and woe be to him who came late!

But lesson number one of Kenyan cooking is to love time. Maybe it’s looking down the long barrel of my seventh decade, a case of too soon old, too late smart, but it has dawned on me that the present moment is all I have, and it’s best to savor it, not rush through it. I’ve always loved cooking, but when it becomes a joy in itself, and not just for its end, when it becomes a prayer and not just a promise, it is so much better.

The girls wanted to learn to make the dishes, too, so our friend took pains to show them how to prepare it all. Just so much onion, so much pepper, so much tomato, chopped small, Kenyan style, and greens, and magic spice. So much water, so much corn meal, stirred and thickened, lumps pressed out until the resulting porridge is stiff and satiny and like all good things, stands on its own.

Over the stove he told stories, how a Kenyan man will come to dinner with his prospective bride and she cooks ugali, corn meal porridge, for him. The better the ugali, he teased, the better the dowry, the bride price. In Kenya, they have two words for dowry—one for the price paid to the parents of the bride, the other the price to the groom. Inspecting the finished product, produced after much laughter and amazement at how hard it is to push the lumps out of stiff porridge, he pronounced them worthy of a good price, ten cows at least.

Later in the meal, in a moment of seriousness, he explained that the dowry given is not just a price for the bride, it is a way of reminding families that they are connected through the generations. The price is never paid all at once; something always held in reserve for later, for harder times or celebrations when a cow or a goat or a lamb makes all the difference in the world.

My groom and I are approaching our anniversary, 37 years, far longer married than not. The conversation at table reminded me that Americans are losing sight of what marriage is, is meant to be. Too often, it’s just a convenient social contract between two people who, for the moment, are attracted to each other, and in another moment, will decide they are not and will fall apart.

But the reality is that marriage, like the bride-price, connects families through the generations, whether we know it or not. Thirty-seven years into it, I realize I married not just my husband but his whole family, past and present and future. That two-become-one thing—it’s real, whether we realize it or not. As I am part of my husband, and he of me, so his family is mine and mine his, connected as surely as if we were bound by cords of iron. I am blessed; by grace, those cords are a joy, an anchor in my life. And it is real for those who do not understand what marriage is or have fallen apart—the bonds are still there. Ask any ex-spouse dealing with a custody arrangement and a new wife or husband.

It occurred to me as I rid the dishes after the guests had left and the girls had retired to the upstairs and reflected with quiet joy on the evening, that I learned something that evening about my Christian journey. I am increasingly captivated by the nuptial language in scripture. Christ as Bridegroom and us—the Church—as His bride. After thirty seven years, I now know something about marriage, and after last night, I know something more.

For in the crucifixion there has been a dear bride-price indeed paid for our marriage to Christ through His church. It binds us all together as family across space and through time and sees us through both feast and famine. Just as it connects us to Christ, it connects us to each other, family in the same connected way that Americans seem to have lost and Kenyans understand in their very bones. It is a large family indeed and my obligations to it and in it are neither passing or insignificant nor subject to my whim and will. As I prepare for the Feast of the Incarnation this Advent, it is a good thing that a casual dinner reminded me what I am preparing for and what arrives for me come Christmas Day. The Bridegroom who has given all for His bride.

Perhaps I should spend the rest of Advent preparing, so that I may give, in great joy, my dowry to the Father of the Groom

The Best is Yet to Come

2011-12-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

How hard it is to change a habit, even when motivated! I really want to get the words of the new translation right but the old phrases are so automatic, I still stumble. It humbles me when I think about all those habits I only give lip -service to changing because, after all, I like them in spite of the fact that that they lead me astray. Or the habits I will not even try to break because I like them too much and cannot see any benefit to be had from changing them.

Not a bad Advent lesson. We are called to change and even when we enter into it with a full heart, change is hard. And sometimes, we refuse even to see the need for change because our habits are too much locked up with our preferences and the gifts of change are obscured by the pleasures of the present. It bears remembering that there are gifts to be had, always.

An Episcopal friend and I have been talking about the new mass translation. He is delighted with it, for like so many Anglicans, he revels in the majesty of liturgy and language. He’s been very open about the fact that, despite his general agreement with Catholic teaching, he’s not inclined to come home to Rome in part because he can’t handle what he calls the “Catholic aesthetic.” Translation—he finds the mass flat and uninspired, especially the just-retired version.

I know exactly where he is coming from. I left the same ecclesial environment in which he remains. It was hard for me to hear the plain words of the old mass and to hear music which, by the standards of a parish where Durufle and Mozart and Beethoven and Bach were weekly staples, was pedestrian at best and downright awful on occasion . Count me as one of those who would die a happy woman if she never sang anything by Bernadette Farrell, Dan Schutte or Marty Haugen ever, ever again.

It was a hard, hard change to come into an environment when I sang the things I so disliked so regularly, and to say things that were so ordinary compared to the ornate language of the Book of Common Prayer—especially during the long preparation for reception and especially when the Episcopal church downtown had such a good music program and such a beautiful service. It was an effort…but change always is, even when it is change we want to make. Like learning the words of the new translation, even with desire and effort, change was long in coming, punctuated by small victories and small losses all long the way.

In those early days, the losses were common, the victories few and far between. I often felt so empty during the mass, leaving not quite satisfied, the itch of my high Church liturgical nature not scratched. I can recall the feelings with clarity even now. It was a long preparation of my heart for the Lord I was eventually to receive on Easter, a long and patient wait, hoping that, in fact, as He does at the end of Avent, the Lord Jesus would come to me.

Come He did, and as He always does, in a way I would not have chosen or expected. Not in a palace, but in a stable. Not with courtly language but with plain. He came only when I was made ready, by waiting and changing, to come with open hands and heart, without preconditions.

He came though His church when I cleared out some things that stood in the way of His arriving—like my excessive attachment to exalted language and classical music. He came when I was ready to accept what was given in an attitude of at least some humility and gratitude. My battle with learning to love and accept a liturgy I did not especially like was an outward sign of a deeper engagement, with both change and what it means to have faith.

Last Sunday, our pastor reminded us that as Christians we move through change with faith that what we are leaving behind will be replaced with something better. A life with out Christ for a life with Him. This earthly life with the next, glorified one. A life of pleasure with a life of service. A Iife of self-determination for a life of obedience.

I wasn’t always so sure of that, in the beginning. I would not have called it faith, then, but faith it was that kept me in the pew until Easter Vigil. It has kept me there since, that faith I didn’t know I had: faith that what would come later would be better than what I have in hand.

And it is. It continues to be and my faith that what comes next will be even better is beginning to grow, even when I don’t recognize the faith or see the changes. Like the Jews of old, sometimes I look to the horizon, knowing there is a dawn coming, even when things look a little dark in the immediate neighborhood. And I want to be ready when dawn arrives., because I know it brings good things. I know in part because I already experience them.

All worship falls short, no matter how beautiful it is and how much I might enjoy it. And I have learned, all over again, that tastes are just that. The Church is simple enough that a child can understand it, and great enough that a mind like St. Thomas Aquinas cannot begin to encompass it. It is any wonder that her liturgical expressions span the same wide distance?

All worship is imperfect, even the kind I so love and crave. Worship is, in a sense, the particular sensory experience and expression of a much deeper reality.

In my former life, communion meant drinking from a chalice filled with the deepest, reddest, richest port. The very smell of it still kindles memories of dignity and incense and majesty. These days, depending on the parish I am in, the wine may be pink and sweet, or golden and sweet, or red and full or—in the little Italian parish I frequent in Maine—red and sour.

Consecrated, it all becomes the Precious Blood. It doesn’t matter whether I care for the particular wine used for communion or not. God knows, and knows well, that I do have preferences in these things but t is not the accidents that I come for, it is the essence, the substance. It is Jesus Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity. What else matters? Certainly not my distaste for strong and sour Italian wine. Or Marty Haugen’s music.

So it is with the words of the liturgy. As long as the essentials are met, the rest of the language becomes almost like the choices in wine, the variations having different things to teach and different ways of forming me. I gave over my love for the courtly language from Lambeth to be rewarded with the sacramental life of the Church, and in due time, to be rewarded with the elevated, complex, courtly language of the new mass. I gave over my attachment to the high music of the Anglican liturgy to be rewarded, not yet with similarly beautiful music (…or at least, not often), but by learning to be touched and formed by music I don’t really like, because it too has much to offer and it, too, carries with it the messages of the Mass.

It is almost as though I had to decide that loving God and being in His Church, the Church, were more important than my love of the other beautiful things He had provided for me elsewhere, though that conscious thought didn't surface until well after I had been received. It is, after all, the first Advent lesson: Mary and Joseph planned one way of life, one according to their preferences, but God had another plan. More complicated, less obvious, far harder, it required them to set aside their plans to accept His gifts. So it was with me and the words and music of the mass, then and now.

It took the eyes of faith for me to recognize the Eucharistic Lord beneath the appearances of bread and wine. It took a leap of faith for me to meet Him inside a mass I once found ill-fitting. But I did and was rewarded. Thankful for all that has gone before, all that I knew and loved, I now spend this Advent in joyful expectation of what He has next to give me. And I love with all my heart what He has given me so far, even that now abandoned plain language and in its own way, that music…..and the wonderful new words I am beginning to enjoy.

Because I have faith that what is to come is even better than what is today. And what I have to day is more than enough to satisfy anyone.

Patiently waiting.....

2011-11-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

One thing the Catholic Church is great on is waiting. And preparation. It is, in the end, a studied, reflective, patient faith.

In this it often stands in contract to our Protestant brethren. A friend attended the local Baptist assembly in the morning, answered an altar call and was baptized by nightfall.

By contrast, if you want to be received into the Church, you have to wait and you have to prepare. Months and months of patient study, thought, questing and questioning until finally in the evening of the Vigil of Easter, Mother Church opens her arms and embraces her new children.

It’s a pattern that is repeated in all the sacraments. We prepare ourselves for confession by an examination of conscience. We prepare ourselves for receiving the Eucharistic Lord in Holy Communion by confession, by hearing His word, proclaiming our faith and offering our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service to Him. We prepare for the baptism of our children by reminding ourselves what that grace involves and committing ourselves again to knowing, loving and serving God. We prepare for confirmation, when the time comes, by revisiting everything we think we already know and learning how boundless is the treasure of the Church and the love of Chirst.

We prepare for marriage by inviting our Mother to counsel us. Men prepare for Holy Orders for many long years, shaped and formed by the love of Church and the experience of their superiors. We prepare for sickness and death by inviting Christ to our bedside and asking to share in His suffering, and accepting His healing touch through the priest.

The liturgical year reinforces this rhythm in her liturgy, the very bones of Catholic life. Today I find myself in the long expected purple season that prepares me for the first Great Mystery, the Incarnation, the first Advent of our Lord as I wait, sometimes more patiently than others, for His second advent. As Israel waited for deliverance by the Messiah, so, too I wait.

And the question becomes: what am I waiting for? From what do I want to delivered?

I know all the school solutions. I await deliverance from sin and death, from the bondage of brokenness. But those are general terms, too easy to repeat without really understanding what they men and how they will change me. So this Advent, let me ask for deliverance, not in general terms but in particular ones.

After a weekend of family and entertaining, of changes in the mass and the music, a weekend when everything is familiar but nothing, nothing I cherish is the same because it never is even though I desperately want it to be, and everything that irritates me remains depressingly constant, I am tired of being held hostage by my preferences. This Advent, I want deliverance from them.

From the preferences that get in the way of my receiving with joy the things I am given when they are different from what I want.

From preferences that make me grasp at the things of God rather than waiting with an open hand for them to be given.

From preferences that make me forget that the gifts I have been given as as valuable as the ones I wish for but do not have.

From the preferences that separate me from my brothers and sisters when they do things differently but still to the same end.

From the preferences that set off that chain of thought in my head when things don’t go my way, making me waste all-too-precious time on consternation and regret instead of living with grace in the moment.

It is Advent. I will prepare and I will wait because I must. Mother Church will help me if only I give myself over to the rhythms of her life, accepting what comes my way this Advent as a gift, whether it is something I would prefer or not. In the discipline of the purple season, perhaps I can, in spite of my nature, still my heart and pause in my life to be, for a time, properly patient, appropriately expectant. thoroughly grateful. I will listen and I will pray and I will sit in the silence in the time before dawn and I know I will find that that which I need amid the candles and the quiet.

For, in spite of my preferences, I know I will find change, in heart and mind and attitude so that I may also find Him who comes Christmas Day to deliver me from what I too often prefer to what I truly desire.

Amen.

Not Fond of Jane...BUT....

2011-10-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

It was one of those Internet forwards one gets from good friends exercised about one thing or another. I got it from several sources. This one was about Jane Fonda. It came on the heels of a particularly meaningful encounter with a priest who is both friend and mentor. It has changed my life, in a small but significant way.

Like many of these urgent forwards that make the rounds, this one was a mixture of truth and fabrication—some truth regarding Jane Fonda’s trip to North Vietnam, mixed with many falsehoods about what went on there and what resulted—the result being to paint her in an extremely unflattering light. The missive went on to urge imminent action against Fonda’s being named one of America’s Most Influential Women—an honor she received more than ten years ago. And in the midst of it was the line “Never forgive a traitor!” That line cut to my heart when I read it.

Make no mistake, I have no particular affection for Fonda’s politics, then or now. But I also have no fondness for the sins of gossip and calumny and detraction and hardness of heart that seem to be increasingly common in American life, even amongst those of faith. Gossip, including calumny—spreading untruths about a person –and detraction—telling an unkind truth to someone who has no right to know, in order to harm another’s reputation—are now an accepted part of American discourse.

I think we’ve forgotten, as Christians, that we owe a duty of charity to everyone, even (especially) those we do not like, and especially to our brothers and sisters in faith and that duty is not abstract but concrete, real and demanding that we change the way we go about living our lives. In an age of Internet and alternative media where opinion passes for fact and talk is non-stop, we have forgotten that, one day, we will be held accountable for every idle word, never mind every ill-considered one. Perhaps we have forgotten that to gossip--to pass on calumny or detraction is to participate in another’s sin even as we commit our own. Perhaps we excuse it because everybody does it or because we blithely take all the information we receive at face value, and don’t bother to check it out, especially when it fits with our preconceived notions. Perhaps we have forgotten that our own good name guarantees the validity of all the things we say, at least to those predisposed to hear them from us.

Perhaps we don’t really understand what calumny and detraction do.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that calumny—passing on untruths about an individual-- was a sin against the fifth, seventh and eighth commandments (sixth, seventh and ninth if you use the Protestant numbering). Such gossip kills the reputation of another, it deprives its object of the possession of his good name, and it directly transgresses the prohibition against giving false witness. Detraction-passing on an unkind truth to an individual who has no need of hearing it—does the same.

We would be outraged if these things happened to us, but seem to be unaware when we do it to others. After all, gossip--calumny and detraction--- generally are passed on in the service of politics, of sounding a warning bell, of preventing some wrong real or imagined—even in passing on a prayer request. (I am amazed at how many hurtful and scandalous details people insist on sharing about others when asking for prayers. For the record—all I need to know is the name of the person I am praying for, and really, not even that God knows the problem.)

As Christians, we have an obligation to mind our tongues—and our keyboards. The forwards I got included out-and-out lies, not only about Jane Fonda, but about POWs who supposedly—but did not—suffer as a result of her visit. And it omitted the fact that twice she has publicly apologized for her behavior. On the balance, even the truthful portions seem to have been directed at an effort to demean Jane Fonda in the recipient’s eyes—and to harden hearts against her; hence the “never forgive a traitor” language. Gossip, calumny, detraction and unforgiveness rolled into one tight package.

But it was something my priest-friend said to me this last week that brought this all into focus. Somehow conversation had gotten around to the capture and killing of Libyan Col. Ghadaffi. I observed, somewhat hesitantly, that when I heard the news, my first sense was of overwhelming sadness at the great potential of a life that seems from all external evidence to have been a vehicle for evil rather than good.

He replied, “I think about the men who killed him, and what that act cost them, what price they paid for that. How they are diminished by that killing.” His words took my breath away.

That’s the rub. Not just the fact that violence of any kind affects others, but it affects us as well. I’m not prepared to discuss the culpability of Ghadaffi’s execution, but even if justified, it did not leave anyone involved unchanged. And violence, whether physical or verbal, justified or not, necessary or not, always leaves injury in its wake, one result of our fallen world and our prideful natures.

And that is the real cost of that Internet forward, and why I will read no more of them. It was violence in writing and it was unnecessary and it diminished not just Jane Fonda, but me.

For an instant, however, small, I was angry and felt (un)righteous indignation well up within me. For a moment in time, mostly over things that, as it turns out, were outright lies, I wanted revenge. The adversary distracted me from God and His love for me and for Jane and managed to convince me, however transiently, that my brokenness and my anger and my desire for punishment was somehow whole and justifiable, perhaps even noble.

Until I remembered. As I measure, so will it be measured to me. As I forgive, so will I be forgiven.

Vietnam was a long time ago. God will not hold me bound by the sins of my youth and I refuse to hold Jane Fonda bound by hers. And I have it on good authority that God forgives traitors; ask St. Peter.

Jane is a sister in Christ. She has a claim on my forgiveness and my prayers no matter what she has done, and I am in no position to judge the content of her heart, then or now. Her actions are long since over and she has apologized for them. She is in no position of either secular or ecclesial authority and poses no great threat to anyone or anything even if she were being nominated for some meaningless Hollywood honor. I am entitled to oppose her political and moral positions, if she chooses to enter into discourse about them and to dispute them vigorously. But I owe her my silence when my speech serves no good purpose and would, instead, damage her. In love and charity, I am bound to show her the kindness of not passing on invective, half truths and lies or even unkind truths that serve only to demean her.

I am called to live the life of Christ. To be visibly different, transformed in action as well as in sentiment. To live radically in love, even loving—desiring at my own expense the good for--- those people I don’t especially like. In my heart and in my life; in my thoughts and in my words, and--oddly enough—in my Inbox and my Outbox.

Manners

2011-08-21T06:56:00.000-07:00

Anyone who comes to the South understands very quickly that there is a code of gentility—manners—that governs every aspect of life. It’s a little complex sometimes, but all of us who live here understand it. After a time, it becomes such a part of life that we don’t even think about it any more, we just do it. And not only does life go more smoothly, the accepted manners of life reassure each of us of our place and worth and our relationship to each other.

We just do it, except, of course, at Church. We accept—bless our hearts—we regularly engage in-- behavior in church we’d never tolerate in our homes.

The cornerstone of Southern manners is hospitality. Let a stranger show up, and we immediately respond to him with warmth and engagement. So pleased to meet you! So consistent is this that Northerners who come south remark that they are invariably asked three questions in rapid succession: Where are you from? Who are your people? Where (not if, mind you) do you go to church? And they remark that if the answer to the last question reveals a lack of a church home, the very next statement is invariably Would you like to join me at worship on Sunday?

So how come visitors to Catholic churches complain they are never welcomed?

Southerners have an innate dress code. In face, there’s some sort of silent communication among Southern women that even communicates changes in the dress code. I remember vividly showing up at a wedding shower in white cotton slacks and a bright shirt (last year’s uniform) only to find that this year, the order of the day was pastel linen pedal pushers. And every woman there was wearing them. Men go to work in suits and ties and most of their children wear uniforms to school. We know better than to show up at a reception for the queen wearing jeans and a tee shirt.

So why is it I see so many people who regularly dress better wearing grubby sports clothes and stained deck shoes when they come to visit the King of the Universe? Who do I see so many teens in tee shirts with secular sayings on them , so many girls in short shorts, so many boys in the same worn flip-flops they wear to the beach?

And while we are on the subject of a reception for the Queen, every good Southerner would know to show respect for the sovereign –even of another country--with a deferential curtsey or bow.

So why is it that, when entering the presence of the Sovereign Lord of Life in the tabernacle, or seeing Him pass in the Blessed Sacrament on the way to repose, we don’t even pause in our conversation, let alone bow or genuflect with the reverence He deserves?

We Southerners know how to be punctual, at least when we think it’s important. We make tee-times and kick offs and flight schedules with time to spare. We even have rituals that prepare us for getting there on time and help us get in the proper frame of mind (think checklist for packing and tailgate party). And it’s an affront of major proportions to come so late to a dinner party that serving has already begun. Yet Catholic tardiness is such a reality that even Protestants make jokes about it.

So why is it that people who are regularly ten minutes late can’t make the effort to be five minutes early? An occasional late day is one thing, but chronic tardiness means that mass just isn’t important enough to require a rearrangement of one’s day.

And speaking of dinner parties, what Southerner would pick up and leave from the table the minute he is done eating, without even saying thank you and goodbye to his hosts?

So why do so many people leave right after communion or before the recessional hymn is completed? It might be well to remember that Judas left the first mass early, and he didn’t fare too well, all things considered.

No Southern parent would permit his child to ignore an adult’s question. When conversation requires interaction, we insist on that our children pay attention and be respectful and be heard, and we model it ourselves. How many times have you heard a Southern momma tell her child, “What do you say dear? Speak up. Aunt Lindy asked you a question.” And she’ll usually remind the child to stand up straight and look dear old Aunt Lindy in the eye because it’s respectful and because we Southerners understand how very much the conduct of our bodies shapes our minds and hearts.

So why is it that our responses are so anemic in mass, and so many stroll up to communion as though it were a fast-food drive-through and people don’t even pray the required Amen! (Yes, Lord I believe!) when receiving our Lord at communion?

I’ve also found there’s a good sense of “right place, right time, right activity” among Southerner. Talking during a concert or movie is considered the height of ill-breeding. It disturbs others and it is not respectful of what is going on. The music, the movie deserve our full attention.

So why do I hear so much loud, secular conversation in Church, before, during and after mass? Before is time for preparation—conversation interrupts those who are trying to orient their hearts to God. Conversation during is simply disrespectful. Conversation after interrupts those who have taken time to give thanks—I have even had people come up to me and try to start conversation despite the fact that I am on my knees with my eyes closed (trying desperately to concentrate over the din around me).

And Southerners have a good sense of priority, especially when family is involved. I daresay there’s not a one of us who did not give up a much-desired activity as a child because some family event or another intervened, and family always came first.

So why is it I hear so many parents say that they can’t get to mass (or PRE or confirmation classes) every week because their kids have baseball or football/soccer/baseball/music /practice/games/recitals/tournaments that conflict? When did we decide it was just fine for secular activities to take precedence over the time we set aside to be with our Father and our families on Sunday? When did we decide it was perfectly fine to miss dinner with Jesus, the one He looks forward to. After all, He understands.

It cannot be that we are being intentionally rude. It must be that, like Northerners who move down here and struggle to figure out the way of things, we just don’t know what’s proper. We don’t know the reasons for the rules and we haven’t got our priorities straight.

Maybe it’s time we learned.

Big Sis

2011-07-29T18:21:00.000-07:00

Today is the feast day of my patron saint.

They say that a Catholic doesn’t find a patron—the patron finds the Catholic. So it is with Martha. Left to my own devices—thankfully, I never am—I would never have chosen such a humble and relatively ordinary saint. I would have chosen someone flamboyant, someone, well, interesting, a mover and shaker, someone with accomplishments….not the humble homemaker of Bethany.

Martha’s story surfaces several times a year in the readings for mass, and not just on her feast day. I found it unusual to hear her tale so often recounted. I think it’s a way for the Church to tell us Listen! This is important. There’s more here than meets the eye.

And—as my children and husband will attest after many Thanksgiving Day eruptions—I can identify with Martha. Ultimately, I chose Martha for no good reason I would identify at the time I was preparing for confirmation, explaining with self-deprecation that it was easy for me to imagine my fussing to the Lord that someone within my orbit has let me down in that arduous and never ending task of keeping house and feeding the multitudes (heavy sigh). There’s a part of me that embraces the virtue of hospitality with almost abstract enthusiasm, and another part that frets far too much over the details. Like Martha, I can get lost in the weeds and forget that the object of hospitality is to make welcome a guest. In the corporate world, they call me process driven, concentrating on the steps, sometimes forgetting the goal.

Martha chose me to make sure I’d never forget the goal again. In the ensuing years since my reception into the Church, I’ve discovered a lot about my friend, Martha of Bethany. For starters, even though everyone knows of her, finding St. Martha medals, cards or statues is a little difficult. She’s not as popular as Therese or Catherine or Elizabeth Ann Seton or Philomena (about whom we know almost nothing!). On the counter above my sink rests the only St. Martha statue I have, a kitschy little plastic item mass marketed in slight irreverence to waiters with the assurance that she’ll help improve tips. Most of the artwork I have seen portrays her as older (I can relate to that) and a little dour (unfair). Martha, at home in the kitchen, seems never destined to take center stage.

Ah, but the part of the stage she does occupy! When we first meet Martha in the Gospels, it is because Jesus has come to visit, and Martha is making the home ready for her guest. She takes His visit seriously; she clearly wants to present the very best she has. Granted, she gets her priorities a little skewed, but is it really so terrible to want to give the best we have, and do the best we can do, to welcome Christ? And I find it comforting that Martha does not seem to be called to cast over the traces of her established and very ordinary life in order to receive Jesus. He comes into her home, into her very kitchen, the place where she has long lived and worked, and He visits with her right there. Good news for me, so prone am I to think that I have to go running after God for Him to find me. Not so, Martha whispers to me. He’ll come to the place you live, wherever that is.

Then there’s that famous interchange. Martha, Martha!

I have often wondered about the inflection of those words, and the tone makes all the difference. Was the first word sharp and accusing, to get her attention, followed by the second firm and authoritative? The tones of rebuke? Were the two said quickly together with a shake of the head, and a tut, tut aura, the words of almost patronizing sadness? Were they ironic, as though playing to the crowd, making Martha an object lesson, her cheeks aflame with embarrassment?

I don’t think so. When I hear them in my mind, the words are soft and gently coaxing, warm, comforting, almost teasing, the words of a loving Friend, a verbal embrace. Here, dear Martha, I am here. Don’t fuss, just come and be with me. Martha and Jesus are clearly friends, friends so close that she has no anxiety in letting even her lesser, frazzled, sometimes unpleasant self, warts and all, out. My friend Martha has no fears that Jesus will abandon her even if (when) she’s gone a bit off the mark in her life, even when she doesn’t exactly see it herself, even when she is beyond the limits of her own self control. It never occurs to her to dissemble, or to hold back, even though any hostess worth her salt will tell you that you never—never---involve the guest in a family squabble.

This is comforting to me; I can’t always see clearly where I am and what I am doing in the grand scheme of things. It's easy for me to lose sight of the one thing necessary because there is always something to do. So much goes either justified in my own mind or unremarked because I can’t even recognize it as off-kilter. Martha reminds me that I don’t have to understand what I am doing, or what life is doing to me, in order for Jesus to enter in and point me in the right direction. I just have to be there and be willing to talk to Him.

Then there’s the incident of Lazarus. This time, Martha doesn’t wait for Jesus to come, she goes out to meet Him. I think she learned something in the kitchen. I can’t imagine that she has any idea what will happen, she just knows that in her pain and confusion, she needs Jesus. And so she goes out looking for Him, just as she always does, in the ordinary course of things, on the road she knows He’ll travel because, after all, it’s the way to her house, the way to where she lives, and He has been there before. He knows where it is, even if He seems to be a bit tardy in His arrival.

And—bless her heart—Martha is just as direct with Him as she was before. If you had been here, my brother would not have died. It’s not exactly a recrimination in my mind, just a statement of fact—and of faith. Martha has utter confidence in the healing attention of Christ for her brother.

It’s not said anywhere, but I’m pretty sure Martha is the Big Sister of the family, accustomed to taking care of everyone. She and Mary sent for Jesus and He took his time arriving. I hear in Martha’s words the frustration and pain of those of us who have done everything we think we can to make life turn out right for those we love and disaster still happens.

Just as I wonder about the inflection of Christ’s words before, I wonder about hers now. Angry? It’s certainly possible. After all, she sent for Jesus and he dallied. Agonized? Certainly. She was grieved, the more so because she saw the death as avoidable. Perhaps there was even a little self-recrimination in them, asking herself how she failed to convey the urgency of the situation. If Martha was anything like me (and I’m betting she was), she found a way to make this whole thing her fault.

But again, perhaps the words were an honest acknowledgement between two friends touched by grief, a simple statement of what just is. Perhaps it was Martha’s invitation to Christ to share her sadness and her own entry into His. After all, this was no academic exercise for Jesus. It cost him dearly, too, for scripture reminds us that He wept. Fully man, He must have felt the pain of loss just as Martha did that day. I hear her words as I have heard so may over the years, from people in like situations touched by deaths too sudden or too early or too unexpected, the great Why, God? of the bereaved. Martha is again unafraid to state it in plain and ordinary and unmistakable terms.

This time, we know she knows exactly to Whom she is saying it, because she says so in one of the great affirmations of faith in scripture: I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world. Martha, too preoccupied by the cares of daily life; Martha, who did not recognize the one thing necessary as her sister did; Martha, perpetual Big Sis; Martha, who wants it all under her control and done her way, when push comes to shove, gets it. In spite of herself and in the midst of her pain and confusion, Martha understands and Martha abandons herself to faith even as she has no idea where that faith will really lead, uncertain that it will change the particulars of the moment, even as she dares hope that it will.

Of course, her practical side surfaces, too. She can’t help it. Lord it has been four days. There will be an odor…. Mind you, there is not disbelief in that statement; Martha has already said she understands that the Father will give the Son anything He asks. She is just thinking ahead and aloud in practical matters. Martha, like me, has trouble getting her head in the clouds for her feet are firmly on the ground and her hands are in the sink.

But that’s of no concern in the long run, because Jesus is standing there, beside her, on that road, in front of the tomb. Right where she is, right where she lives, right where her heart aches, right where she asks, in spite of herself and everything she sees and knows, for the best. Right where her faith meets her problems.

I’m guessing Jesus was thinking to himself Martha, Martha as he called Lazarus from the tomb. Martha, my good friend and my patroness, in the gentlest of voices, calls me the same kind and inviting way to stand with her.

Beside Him. Before an open tomb.

Remember Whom to Thank......

2011-07-14T11:56:00.000-07:00

A presenter at the Eucharistic Congress last month told several stories of evangelization that involved his praying for particular, and very specific, favors for non-believing friends He would always honor even the most patently sarcastic requests for prayer ("Can Jesus get me a basketball?" for instance) with a sincere prayer, but always prefacing it with the admonition that, if the prayer request were granted, to remember whom to thank. Often--in fact, very often--the prayers were answered in an immediate and sometimes spectacular way (think basketball literally dropping from the sky). I talked about it with him later and he reiterated to me the point that he made in his talk: I think God especially likes granting those kinds of prayers because they get the attention of non-believers.

I smiled, in part because, despite myself, I fall into that all-too-broad category of self-reliant Christians who figure that God has better things to do than to worry about my own particular problem of the moment. Intellectually, I am very comfortable with God involved in the Universe, but in my zeal to avoid seeing God as a sort of beneficent slot-machine-in-the-sky, I think I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking His action too limited, in the world, in life, in me. I have too often forgotten the truth of the faith: fear not...for God is pleased to give you the kingdom. I have too often fallen prey, in spite of myself, to the modern idea that God--if He exists at all--is a distant and disinterested force.

Lydia Faith reminded me otherwise.

My good friend announced in November that she was expecting again after fifteen years. She and her husband were thrilled, and so were we. A new baby--what could be better? Having no children in imminent danger of being parents, this was the next best thing I was going to get to a grandchild, at least for a while.

Almost immediately then the problems began. My friend has a history of miscarriage, and I held my breath until the first trimester was over, and asked the intercession of St. Gerard and Our Lady of Hope. A moment for a sigh of relief, and then more news, bad news: the first ultrasound revealed a potentially life-threatening complication, one that could cause massive hemorrhage and loss of both mother and baby if the placenta separated itself from the uterus too soon. I know the numbers. It often does.

I’ve seen that happen and dealt with the aftermath, both in the operating room as a long-ago medical student, and after that as a pathologist. My experience with this particular complication is not happy. I prayed again, even more, for the health of my friend and the safety of her child, a great, grey fear lurking in the background of every petition. I prayed, but I believed in the most private recesses of my heart that my prayers would come to nothing, that this pregnancy would end like so many others like it I had seen, in pain and heartbreak. But I kept praying. Not expecting, but praying.

My friend, on the other hand, never lost her optimism. Like me, she prayed; unlike me, she expected. She expected to get through without a bleed. She stubbornly resisted the admonitions of her family, friends and obstetrician to have her delivery at the (very expensive) high-tech hospital, pressing for a family centered C-section (look it up) at a smaller, less expensive hospital nearer home. She made contingency plans for what she’d do if and when she was confined to bed, confidently expecting that she never would be. She did her research, developed a birth plan and prayed, and kept on with herlife as though nothing were amiss.

I worried enough for both of us.

I prayed and watched, just knowing the other shoe would drop. In some part of myself, I thought that, in her place, I would have long ago capitulated, would have given up the plans, would have simply let myself be carried along on a tide of fear and precaution. And even as the weeks stretched on, with no problems, I would not permit myself optimism, though I managed to keep a quiet counsel and offer support when others voiced to her the fears I held close to my heart.

Finally, the date was set, and I scarcely breathed during this past week. My friend continued making her birth plans and everything began to fall into place. Insurance coverage materialized at the last possible moment. A second study for a suspected, even grimmer complication that would have meant hysterectomy proved normal, the worry a false alarm. No need for the ultra-high risk obstetrician, and the green light for the local hospital. Enough weeks of gestation that even an emergency delivery would mean a baby big enough and healthy enough to breathe.

Still, me of little faith, in the back of my mind, I wondered about that birth plan. I know enough about hospitals and protocols to know how hard it is to get staff to do something different. Even as my friend planned, even as I supported her with my words, my mind and my heart were thinking: Not a snowball’s chance that she can pull this off.

Let me go on record here and now as saying that snowballs have excellent chances.

My friend showed up on the appointed day having lost not a drop of blood over the course of her pregnancy. She passed out copies of her birth plan in the delivery room, complete with literature annotations, and explained what she wanted, even though she knew it was unorthodox. It’s against protocol, but it’s safe, see here? The anesthesiologist cheerfully relocated the oxygen monitor and the EKG leads so as not to interfere with her ability to hold her new baby to her chest. The obstetrician dutifully lowered the screen to let her see her baby being born and then ordered a recalcitrant nurse to bring Lydia Faith to her mother, so she could hold her new little girl. Height, weight and footprint waited until later, much later. And everyone, my friend, her husband, the doctors and even the recalcitrant nurse, teared up at the sight of a tiny little child, crying from the shock of leaving the safe, warm home of her mothers womb, sigh and calm and settle as she felt the warm safety of her mother’s breast instead of being whisked away to be poked and prodded and bathed and handled by everyone in the area except the woman who carried her for nine months.

I had prayed for just such an outcome, not really having much faith it would happen, not even believing that it could happen.

God likes granting such prayers, if only to prove a point to unbelievers.

For the safe delivery of Lydia--and a lesson in the mystery of faith--thank you, Jesus.

One to Go

2011-05-28T04:10:00.000-07:00

(Given May 27, 2011, at Our Lady of the Mount in thanksgiving for the priesthood of Monsignor Leo Herbert, on the occasion of his retirement.)

I am rarely at a loss for words, but I find myself struggling to give voice to what Msgr. Herbert has meant to my life.

Lucky for me, I am not above plagiarism. I remembered a story I have loved for years. It’s about a young Episcopal missionary. If we leave aside the fact that the fellow is an Anglican, and reform him in our minds as a young Catholic priest, this story gives voice to all the things I want to say about—and to—Msgr. Herbert. So indulge me as I tell a little of it to you.

The story begins as the bishop is looking for a man to go and serve a community of Haida Indians in the Pacific Northwest who have been without a priest for a long time. He has several candidates in mind, and this is what runs through his mind as he considers whom to send:

The one who went to the little, forgotten Indian settlement in the Queen Charlotte Islands must choose it for himself and with his heart or he’d be bushed in three months, to be plucked from the dock like an oil drum, drained and empty.

We here on the mountain like to think ourselves as senders of missionaries, not as being served by them, but we are. Some forty-odd years ago a young Irish priest answered a call, from within and without, to come to a distant shore and be a missionary to us. He left behind home, family, everything comfortable and familiar, to expend himself in the service of people he did not even know.

That’s the first thing I know about Msgr. Herbert. He is a missionary, and after a lifetime of serving God’s church in distant lands I heard him say, just a little while ago, how he hears the call in his heart to “give back” as he puts it, maybe by serving—yet again, in mission.

So the young priest in the story heads out for his distant post and he arrives in an isolated spot, with no friends and no family, to begin to build something out of his life and the people he serves. Here’s what he thinks as he enters the ramshackle church for the first time:

The cross was there with its hope and its promise and to it, he put his question. Where do I begin?

That’s the second thing I know about Monsignor, he is a man of the cross. Today’s Gospel reading at mass struck me as I was considering what I wanted to say tonight. It’s a familiar verse, and especially applicable to priests:

Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends.

That’s not just about martyrdom, you know. It’s about what priests do. It’s what we are all meant to do. But we need the example of men living among us to remind us, and that is what Monsignor has done for me, for all of us. It is at the cross that the story always begins.

Our young parochial vicar starts to serve his people. The Indians are suspicious of him, a little reserved, he is an outsider, not one of them. They come to church and they listen, but he senses that he is not yet reaching them. The Constable explains what’s going on:

It’s the ritual they like. What you say won’t matter much yet. It’s what you are and what you do that will count.

And I know Monsignor is a man not just of the cross, but of the Eucharist. For me, the cadences of the mass will always be the cadences of his saying it, the gestures that attend it his gestures. I always listen, in the intercession between the Our Father and the doxology, for the little lilt as he says “keep us free from sin and pro-tect us from all anxiety…” and I miss it when another priest is saying mass.

When I first came into the Church, I remember going to Monsignor to ask him for something I could read about the various—and very confusing—sorts of spirituality Catholics can tap into—you know, Benedictine, Ignatian, Franciscan, Carmelite, mystical, not mystical. I remember clearly his smile, that self-effacing smile he sometimes has, as he told me “I can’t really help you very much with that. My spirituality centers on the Eucharist.”

What better place to put one’s center than at the source and summit of our faith, that which makes us CATHOLIC.

Monsignor brought me into that gift and I will never be the same again. He heard my first confession, received my profession of faith, anointed and laid hands on me in confirmation and gave me the Blessed Sacrament for the first time. He is truly my Father in Faith.

I think of all those converts and first communicants who have received Jesus from Monsignor’s hands for the very first time, and all those who take food for their final journey from those same hands, and I am both awestruck and grateful.

But the center is not the whole and it is not enough just to feed the people. The young parochial vicar in the story learns that soon enough:

He kept working to make the Indians his people. He fished with therm. He called on families and always on the sick….That same month, Mrs. Whitty’s parrot died and he went over to sit with her in sorrow. Mrs. Whitty was inconsolable. She wept and wept and when she was done at last and mopping up, he made her a cup of tea.

It is in joy that families are made, but it is in sorrow that they grow. There’s not a mother’s child among us, I don’t think, who hasn’t shared our grief with Monsignor, and had his comforting presence in the worst parts of our lives. He was there when, like Mrs. Whitty, I was inconsolable over the loss of a family pet, and he was there when our Korean bonus baby, Jade, lost an uncle to a freak accident half a world away and he has been there for all the joys and sorrows between. Monsignor shares our lives as a father always does and we are strengthened and enriched by it, and we shall miss that.

Eventually in the course of the story, the bishop decides to visit the young priest and he brings with him Mrs. Clifton, the wife of the owner of the steamship line and the head of the missionary board. She’s described by the Captain as a “good woman....they are always the most pestiferous.” The woman noises about, tells the poor priest exactly what he is doing wrong and how to set it right. At length, the bishop meets with the priest in quiet after she sets off to set right the village, having rectified—at least in her mind-- its priest:

The bishop and the vicar went over the records. The young vicar told the bishop all about it, and the bishop listened, and made suggestions, and he watched the young man. The smile was the same, but on the face was the look a man earns only with discipline in some far place, and he would wear it for the rest of his life.

Ordination gives an indelible mark to the priest’s soul, faithful serviceputs one on his visage. I know that look, for I see it in Monsignor’s face.

As the story ends, the vicar and the chief of the Indians stand on the dock to watch the packet boat steam off with the bishop and the busybody in tow —and I have told you all that I have told you, in order to simply tell you this, the end of the story:

“My friend,” said the chief slowly, ”What are you thinking?”

The funny little smile took over the vicar’s face as he answered. “I’m thinking the Lord uses some very strange people to do His work for Him. Don’t you agree?”

The chief smiled. They stood there nodding in complete agreement, but with a difference. The vicar was thinking of the formidable Mrs. Clifton, who in a gruesome sort of way had turned out to be quite wonderful.

But the chief was thinking of the young vicar, and he did it thus:

Long after I am gone my people will remember this one. In the fall twilights of the powwows they will speak of him and they will smile. He couldn’t hunt. He couldn’t fish. He shared our joys and his heart ached with our sorrows. How good he was and how stupid. Can you believe this? He was so stupid, he never knew he showed us clearly the love of the Great One who sent him.

Amen.

Thank you, Monsignor, for showing us so clearly God’s love in this distant place. Godspeed in your new mission, whatever that may be.

(The story from which this was taken is One To Go by Margaret Craven)

Living with....

2011-05-17T04:24:00.000-07:00

Can you live with that?

It’s a question a friend of mine is fond of asking. It’s usually directed at pushing me in the direction of faith, asking me whether I can live with the uncertainty that is inherent in faith. And it’s usually coupled with a blatant statement that I’ll never be good enough to make God love me for my goodness alone.

Most of the time I growl back at him, I guess I will just have to. It’s grudging acceptance at best, an unwilling submission to a truth I know but cannot quite bring to the deepest parts of my heart and reconcile. Given my druthers, I prefer certainty. And I prefer perfection. Who doesn’t?

Can you live with that?

Intellectually, I know that certainty is not faith--if anything, it is the enemy of faith. That which we know does not require us to believe.

On the other hand, there is very little I really know. Most of my life, when I get right down to it, is lived in belief, even the part I call science. I know the sun will rise because, based on what I have experienced before, it always does, and some bright folks in this world have figured out some pretty impressive equations to define it and predict it. I rely on those predictions, but I couldn’t possibly figure them out. I know only because I believe a reliable source.

And so it goes through all the proofs and arguments that I use in my everyday scientific life. I manipulate facts and situations according to expectations garnered over my lifetime and countless others and call it fact. Fact it is, perhaps, but in the physical world, I assign it much more importance and value and certainty than I should.

And to the things I cannot demonstrate, to those invisible forces and unseen truths, I tend to assign paradoxically less, wanting more certainty than there is, and more “proof” than I demand elsewhere. I tend to view my religious life as akin to the fellow who believed a tightrope walker could ride a bicycle across a tightrope strung between two buildings, having seen him do it, but refused the offer to climb on his back for a ride.

In reality, religious life is a lot more like climbing on a Delta jet to Miami. I am in good company, the track record is great, there’s excellent cabin service, autopilot and instruments to aid the flight, and the physics of the whole thing don’t depend on the vestibular apparatus of just one mortal man. And I get on jets with a great deal of regularity and pleasure, with out a second thought.

Can you live with that?

I almost reverted to tightrope and bicycle form this week, when I got the news a friend had committed suicide. I’m getting used to the fact that I have reached the season of my life when deaths will be a constant companion, at least until my own, but the sudden ones are so hard. And in this case, I cannot even begin to imagine the pain that my friend must have been in to take his own life. In my darkest moments, I have not been there.

But Christ has. In His agony, in his assuming our nature and ultimately our sin, He knows the very depths of all that sin and despair can do to a human being. My soul is sorrowful even unto death. I usually read that to mean sorrowful for Himself, for the passion He was facing, but now I am not so sure. Perhaps it was sorrow at knowing all that we face, knowing it from the inside out, within the very real confines of a human nature, knowing it in away that only God become man could know, and taking it all for us, from us, with us for all time. At any rate, He knows my friend’s agony, for He has been there before.

Can you live with that?

I am surprised at the number of my friends who assume my Catholic faith means that I am having more trouble dealing with this death than they are. I suppose this stems from the strong stance of the Church against suicide, its recognition that taking one’s life, objectively imputed, is the ultimate rejection of Him who is life. They don’t seem to know that the Church also teaches we cannot know the state of the soul of anyone, even ourselves--the source of my usual discomfort, the tipping point my friend regularly prods.

Not knowing, fearing I am not good enough--which, of course, I am not, and never will be on my own. Liberating, once that thought finally works its way into one’s heart. Liberating not to give up and to despair, but to open up to the promised, reliable presence of God at work in my life--even when I am not aware of Him.

So it seems odd that in working through sorrow for my friend, his death would lead me to a new place of peace in my own life. As I have prayed rosaries and chaplets for him, one verse from the Stations of the Cross we use at our parish keeps surfacing. It deals with the promises of redemption, and though I can recall the phrase, good Catholic that I am, I cannot cite chapter and verse: I have said it and I will do it says the Lord.

And behind that flood all the usual statements of comfort, that none consigned to Christ’s hands will be lost, that God wills all men to come to Him. Not unmindful of the fact that there is a mysterious dance between God’s will and ours, and that our freedom means ultimately the freedom to reject Him at the last, I pray for the gift of final penitence, for my friend, for all those who despair, for myself. And I trust another promise: Ask, and you shall receive.

I do not know the steps of my own dance of will, and certainly do not know the dance of my friend. There are days when I am lucky even to hear the music. But Christ knows. He knows the dance and he knows the steps and He knows the despair and He knows my friend. And He came to love and heal and break through our darkness and bring us to Light in a wonderful dance of abandonment to love.

Do I know what has happened, do I understand it? Of course not. But in a way unfamiliar and welcome, I am learning to trust, and keep dancing.

I have said it and I will do it, says the Lord.

I can live with that.

Let me be frank.....

2011-05-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

I am of an age to begin to wonder what my "golden years" will be like. It seems as we get older, we often become more of who we really are. Sometimes that scares me. I know the sometimes ugly litany that goes on in my head, the ornery, judgmental me that I work so hard to keep at bay. What will I be like, in years to come, when my better self no longer stands watch over my lips? Is there enough time that I can reform myself in fundamental ways so as not to be a total pain to those around me? Is that even possible?

There's a man in the little community of Catholics that gathers at the downtown church for daily mass. He's an older man, who has long outlived his wife and one son, I never knew him as a vital, young mover and shaker in Catholic and social circles, but I'm told he was something.

The years have taken their toll. A cadre of younger men collects him in the mornings to bring him to mass, and they coordinate their duties with the care of devoted family. He rarely misses a day, They make sure he remembers his coat, or hat or umbrella, and they shepherd him to his accustomed seat on the right side, front row, next to the wall.

After a few years of sitting several rows back, and generally on the other side, I know something about who this old man must have been, because there is no longer a self that closely guards his words. He desperately misses his wife and son, and often during the prayers of intercession talks aloud to them, particularly to his wife, and sometimes, his momma and daddy and a woman I take to be his sister. He tells them he misses them and he needs them and often, that he is sorry for things he did. He talks to them as though they were sitting right beside him.

And I'm guessing he had an eye for the ladies, because he's wont to tell whatever woman sits behind him that she's beautiful or that he loves her. I'm also guessing he was a man in charge, because he's been known to scold the priest for starting mass without him when he's late. He almost always cautions the celebrant to "Be good today, Father," which brings a smile to the lips of those who know him, and curious glances from those who don't.

But what strikes me most is that deep in his bones resides the mass and all it means. Past ninety now, he still genuflects at the end of the row of seats that are lined up in the chapel. He still sometimes serves as an Extraordinary Minister at Sunday mass. Most telling, he often recites the words of the mass along with the celebrant. So invariable is this custom of his that I wondered when I first started attending whether he might be a retired priest.

And at the end of the mass, he invariably responds after the dismissal with "You did good, Father."

It might take a team of men to get him collected, to make sure he finds the page in the missalette, and to ensure that he goes home with all the things he came with. But he still knows how to talk to God, he lives in the very midst of the communion of saints, and he still knows the words of the mass--all of them. And he still remembers to say, " Thanks."

It's impossible to start getting older and not realize that we will leave behind much of what we have been, who we "are." Truly, only God knows what antics I will engage in when my time comes. I hope that they will be, if not endearing, amusing and at least tolerable to those I love and those who love me. And in the center of it all, deep in my bones, I hope that I retain that ability to enter into the mystery and the reality of the mass.

No matter what, even if I cannot articulate it, even if it comes out loud and sometimes garbled and occasionally inconveniently, let me never lose my love for the mass, for my Lord present to me and with me in a way that defies explanation under the best and most lucid of times. Please let it wash over me and nurture me and sustain me to the last. Let the mass be so much a part of me that I know its words and rhythms and importance from a place so deep inside that it never gets lost.

In all those things, please God, let me be Frank.

Cascarones

2011-04-21T04:58:00.000-07:00

Preparations for Easter dinner are underway in the Golder house. It’s an odd juxtaposition in my mind. I am preparing menus, shopping and figuring out how the logistics of feeding the 20 people who will show up at my doorstep Sunday evening to celebrate the Resurrection and the LIfe, even as I spend three days steeped in the suffering of the Passion.

So it was that I found myself dyeing the blown out eggs for cascarones this morning.

For the uninitiated, cascarones are hollowed out eggshells, filled with confetti, that are broken over the heads of friends and family at Easter. It’s a Mexican tradition I adopted after living in the Southwest,--and because I was quick to adopt any custom that spoke to me as we reared our young family and created memories of our own. It is said that having the confetti eggs broken over one’s head brings good luck. In reality, I have a sneaking suspicion cascarones developed because they are a great way for youngsters let off steam in a relatively benign way during a celebration that they otherwise don’t quite “get” yet.

We’ve had a grand tradition of casacarone wars, the most memorable of which was on a beach in Lake Powell one Easter morning after a wild ride on a houseboat in a wicked storm that left us high and dry on the beach awaiting rescue. I had smuggled the hollowed out eggs all the way from Florida in anticipation of Easter morning.The kids raced among the cholla and the broombush pelting each other and shrieking with delight. The Navajo who lived there would have called the experience hozro. I have learned to recognize it as the peace Christ speaks of--when all is as it should be between me and my fellow man (even my children) and God. Waiting in peace on the beach in the cool March morning, knowing rescue was on its way. Waiting quietly in Lent, knowing Easter is coming.

So it was this morning that I plunked the hollow eggs, saved lovingly over the Lenten season, into a vat of red food dye, and reflected. I won’t have time to make these fancy, like the ones sold in shops in Tucson at this time of year, with rolled newspaper handles and petals wrapped in crepe paper to make an effective cascarone-club that looks deceptively like a bright Easter flower. Instead, I’ll just put the filled eggs into a petal-shaped holder of construction paper, and put the resulting flowers in a bowl for guests. They’ll toss well....and they will hit their marks.

As I watched the eggs take on the red of the food dye, my thoughts began to wander. These cascarones will be all red, just like the eggs in the Greek tradition, red for the blood of Christ shed for us. A good choice as it turns out. I must remember to make certain that I have everything in the house for my Greek Easter bread, including more red dye for the eggs that will adorn it like a crown, before sundown tonight--there will be no more shopping until Monday.

Red, for blood. Christ’s precious blood, of which we cannot be reminded often enough. Petals for the flowers of Easter, for the rebirth that comes, unbidden and sometimes unexpected, with the spring, with Christ, like the volunteer pansies that have poked up their heads in my garden, bright purple faces to greet me in the morning. The joy of the Resurrection that steals on me in the oddest of times: when I watch my kids making a fine mess with broken eggs and confetti, when I stand in my kitchen making preparations for Easter dinner, when I wash up, spent and tired, after the crowd leaves and the house is silent and still full of warmth and love.

Perhaps hidden in this joyous custom is another meaning, another layer. When we break the eggs over each other’s head, I will remember that we are all bathed in Christ’s blood, in baptism and this we rise with Him in the Resurrection. Blood hidden in flowers, not a bad image.

And no one breaks an egg over his own head. It’s no fun, and tradition says not effective, unless someone else pelts you with the treasured confetti. So it is with our faith. It is a gift, wholly a gift, tossed in our direction by the grace of God, and always, always breaking over us through one of His servants in this life.

And it should be accompanied by racing about--at least metaphorically--with great abandon, and with shrieks of great joy, to spread to others what we have received ourselves, then to stop, exhausted by the experience, to settle in and clean up the world that we have transformed around us by our joy and the sharing of our blessings. I learned long ago, that there is as much pleasure--though of a different kind--in cleaning up eggshells and confetti as there is in making and breaking the eggs.

My bowl will hold a few dozen cascarones, and they will be gone and shattered before the end of the evening. Thanks be to God that HIs bowl of confetti eggs never empties.

Gift Box

2011-03-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

What was your best experience in confession?

So was posed the question in a blog I frequent. My immediate response? The last one!

The last confession is always the best because it restores me to grace, cleans me up again. Still, I am a new enough Catholic to remember most--if not all--of the times I have been to confession and some times stand out. They are landmarks in my journey of faith and understanding.

First confession tends to be intimidating, if for no other reason than it is the first. There is an overwhelming , wildly inappropriate, desire to ask a cradle Catholic: May I come and listen in to make sure I do it right? There is no way to adequately communicate the anxiety that confession can gin up in those for whom it is a totally foreign practice. Intellectual understanding and acceptance do not--repeat not--mean ease.

I'd actually been to confession fairly regularly as an Anglican, and I remember that first time there with some amusement. After the formula Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, I started explaining explaining why I felt the need to come, in a rather intellectual fashion. You see, in the Anglican tradition, all can, some do, no one must go to confession...so it seemed natural in my mind to try to justify why I was there is, after all, it was not exactly needful.....

My confessor, a friend who knew me well, just smiled. It's a big, holy mystery. Just get on with it.

It is indeed a big, holy mystery. I have been ever since that first time aware that when I come into the confessional that I am there to meet Jesus on intimate, mysterious terms. The unease that I feel--after all, I am going to meet Him to lay bare my soul and my deficiencies-- would be enough to keep me away were it not that I know the joy that comes after when the words of absolution are spoken. Sometimes I need to hear with my own ears, the physical ones, not the ones of the heart, that I am forgiven. I am spirit and body. Sin involves both parts of me; so should forgiveness.

As my friends who are preparing to enter the Church approach Easter Vigil, they too are making confession for the first time. I remember how hard it was to walk into the confessional and speak to the man, the Father in faith who had shepherded my journey, about my sins. I'd prepared as best I could and as soon as I sat down and began to speak, I forgot everything, an experience that would often be repeated, and one that still gives me pause. Rehearse all I want the things I will say, when I am confronted with Jesus in the confessional, I am very often speechless and what comes out can be very different than what brought me in.

And at least for me, I am nearly always tearful. I am so grateful for the gift of Irish linen handkerchiefs from friends. I am comforted by the fact that science supports me in this: studies have proven the tears of women to be unpredictable and the result of joy, sorrow, fear, relief, anticipation, just about every emotion known to womankind....now if I could just get comfortable with the idea that it's going to happen and quit apologizing for it, I would be fine. Anyway, I got through that first confession, made my penance and came into the Church joyfully on Easter (when I cried again, receiving the Eucharist...)

After that, there have been a few stand-out confessions that I recall with great fondness, in part because they poke at my self-sufficiency and my pride, and in part because they are the sign-posts on my journey.

About a year after I entered the Church, I went to a penance service at my parish. Deciding I wanted to avoid confessing to my own pastor (a common, but ultimately futile sentiment), I went into a room marked with the name of a visiting priest. I expected him to be sitting back to the door so that I could choose anonymous confession (the better to spare my pride) but to my utter dismay, there he sat, looking right at me and beckoning me to the chair. I clutched my little orange index card, on which I had taken notes, and started.

And couldn't take my eyes off his, big and brown, that held my gaze as I stumbled through my examination of conscience. It was like looking right in Jesus' eyes, and it wasn't long before my speech dwindled to a halt. I could not stop looking at those eyes.

Let me see your card , he said gently. I will give it back, I just what to be sure to speak to all you've said.

I clutched that card for the very life of me, but then passed it over. He glanced at the notes and then spoke kindly and gently to each one, ending with You've named them. You've claimed them. They are gone. I was still looking into those big, brown eyes, the eyes of a man acting in persona Christi. Looking, in a very real way, into the kind and forgiving eyes of Christ.

As I continued my walk in faith, long forgotten things began to surface, unbidden and unwelcome, things I had done and not remembered--literally--for 30 years. Trust me, when you come into the Church at two score and fourteen and you came to adulthood in the Age of Aquarius, there are some things in the memory closet that you'd just as soon not air out. Such memories sent me back to confession--not because I was uncertain of forgiveness already received for sins forgotten at the time of confession, for I was not. I went because I knew by then that if I left them specifically in the confessional, there they would remain. After a couple such trips, I decided it was time to do a spiritual housecleaning, a thorough general confession, something I had not done all well when I was received.

So I met with a priest and told him what I had in mind. He pulled a book on confession off his shelf, gave it to me to read, suggested prayer before the Blessed Sacrament and fasting as preparation, and we set a date.

This time the list was longer. I sat in the sacristy, unhurried, and for once unashamed to be tearful. It took a while but I got through the whole list, everything I could remember. I'll never forget his words of consolation:

There is always shame in confessing what we have done wrong. And the Adversary will use that shame against you over and over again, try to make you stumble by remembering it. When he does, I want you to remember this: at 4:30 in the afternoon of November 30, you were forgiven.....and there is no more shame.

Now I come knowing a list of transgressions, but working harder to get at what lies beneath them, what really interferes with my relationship with Christ. It is often not at all what I think, and it reminds me of that first confession--I came prepared with my own ideas, but God gave me others. So it is now....I come open and prepared, but I am learning to let the Holy Spirit lead me into what I need to confront, just as I must trust Him help me to move past it. Looking back, I can see the road clearly--and walking it, I saw it not at all. I just knew, because others told me so, that the path lay in part through the confessional.

My best confession? The last one. Because I can look into the eyes of Christ, because I can hear His voice. Because I have discovered my faults, I have named my sins, claimed them, they are gone and I am forgiven. And because it is always the next step in my journey......

Empty Crosses

2011-03-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

One great thing about getting together with a group of enthusiastic Catholics is the possibility--nay, probability--of deep and spontaneous conversations on the most extraordinary of theological topics. Redemptive suffering, for example.

I was recently at a meeting that brought together Catholics of every variety and calling, and in the "down time" between convocations, redemptive suffering--the scandal of the cross--was the topic du jour. I had to smile inwardly. In part because there was such constancy of understanding both of the topic and its daily relevance to the Christian walk. I remember, shortly after being received, that I was astonished at the consistency of Catholic beliefs among the faithful: I knew unity was promised, but my make-it-up-as-I-go Protestant mindset was astounded, and delighted, when I kept hearing the same ideas, over and over, from all quarters.

And I remember to the instant the first time I encountered the concept of redemptive suffering, months before I began my journey to Rome. I remember the relief and joy I had when, in the course of my catechesis, I was able to put a name to it, and to realize the depth and centrality of the concept, how it was destined to change both my thinking and my living.

I was driving up the mountain in the rain, at the end of a long, dark day. One of my children was in the throes of a deep depression, the kind that divides the soul and poisons the life, and there was nothing I could do except experience the pain second hand, come running when terrors struck in the night and be rejected again and again when the black moods hit. This particular day, I had reached the end of my rope and there wasn't enough left even to tie a knot in to hang on. Through my tears and the physical pain in my gut, pain that never seemed to leave as long as I was worried about my child, I prayed more deeply than I have ever prayed before.

Please God, even if I never speak to my child again, even if I never see my child again, even if this bitterness against me never ebbs, please make my child well. Bring my child out of this terrible darkness, and into your light. Even if that means that I have to live with this pain in my heart forever, I just want my baby to be well again, and in Your arms.

It became my only prayer. Over and over, all day, every day. Eventually, God and the doctors, God through the doctors, healed: the depression vanished and I found my child back not only in disposition but in the circle of the family. Even the terrible agnostic-atheism of the college student began to fade away and the language of faith seeped back in. I held my breath and prayed again, in gratitude. I learned that it's possible to endure the most difficult things if there is a purpose, and Christ on the cross always provides us a purpose. His suffering redeems. His suffering on the cross, the cross which He occupied for us and ultimately, occupies with us.

Recently, my groom was in an ecumenical, predominantly Protestant, Bible study in which the leader made an eloquent description of the process of redemptive suffering...something not often heard in Protestant circles. In my admittedly narrow experience, it seems to me that the Protestant denominations have trouble dealing with suffering. It's most commonly configured as either punishment or trial, something either deserved or desired, and the affirmative will of God for particular persons in particular times. A lot of energy seems to be spent figuring out which it is, punishment, trial--the meaning of it all.....

I wrestled with this for years in my journey and finally decided that it was futile and probably counter-productive to try to sort of why bad things happen to good people. I decided a better use of my time was to ask God what He wanted me to do, given the situation. That started a journey that ultimately led up a mountain road in the rain, and--not coincidentally--right past the Catholic parish I would eventually join.

I suppose there are many reasons that redemptive suffering isn't well articulated in the Protestant world. In part, it may be there result of an intellectualization of the concepts of the faith. For a Catholic, being part of the body of Christ isn't just a metaphor, it is a mysterious reality. If I really am part of Christ's mystical body, then it makes perfect sense that my suffering is His as well. And His suffering redeems--His suffering, not just HIs reurrection. His suffering transforms my suffering. Suddenly, it doesn't matter so much why it is visited on me: the most perfect and innocent man in the world suffered unjustly; why should I expect to be different? It matters only that when I suffer, He is right beside me, suffering too.

But I think, really, the difficulty for my Protestant brothers and sisters all stems from those empty crosses in Protestant churches. We are an Easter people. The sacrifice is ended, the passion over. It's morbid to fix on the crucifixion. This notion of redemptive suffering means that the once-only sacrifice of Christ is somehow insufficient. Empty the cross--we are victorious over death!

Such a perspective tends to make the passion of Christ an historical event rather than an immediate and transcendent reality that is the experience of a God who stands outside time and for Whom there is no past and not future, only an eternal now. And the reality, both immediate and transcendent, is this: no Good Friday, no Easter.

St. Paul tells us I preach only Jesus Christ and Him crucified....the crucifixion is, was and will ever be central to the Christian experience, not an unpleasant detail that can be brushed aside in favor of the glorious news of the empty tomb. First there had to be a tomb.

Seeing a crucifix every Sunday (every day) meditating on the sorrowful mysteries, hearing over and over, throughout the year, readings that declare the inevitability of Christ's suffering--from Isaiah onward--makes it clear: this was the choice of God, as freely accepted as it was also the result of the decisions and actions of sinful mankind through all time. And it calls to mind: No servant is greater than his master....Where I am there will My servant be....and He is on a cross, not of His own making and not of His deserving, visited on Him by vengeful mankind as well as freely chosen by Him. The paradox, the scandal of the cross....

So the cross...If any man wishes to follow me, he must take up his cross and follow Me...

Take up the cross, indeed, but not in the sense of bearing a burden only. Follow Me...to Calvary, and there get up on that cross and suffer and die. Because only through that death can the day of Easter come. Only in the cross with Christ on it does the empty tomb make sense. Only when suffering is bound to Christ on the cross does it have any meaning, only then not the capricious result of uncaring fate or the sole actions of an uncommunicative God. Suffering with meaning can be endured--ask any mother. Empty the cross, and you lose sight of the path...the meaning of suffering, His and ours.

I haven't had to suffer as I suffered for my child since that terrible depression lifted. My life of late has been remarkably smooth and pleasant. No crosses of note...no suffering more than intermittent inconvenience and the usual slings and arrows of daily existence. Not that I am looking for them, mind you.....personal suffering is a fact of life, and it comes soon enough, often enough.

But lately, there has been a lot of suffering around me, in my immediate sphere. A friend with a complicated pregnancy. Another with a child wrestling with depression. Incest in the family of a friend. Cancer, heart disease, death, lost jobs, a home destroyed, emotional crises--the usual detritus of living long enough to see the burdens of life, the context that drives me, as Lent is wont to do, to the Sorrowful mysteries, where I pray that I might not fall asleep on my friends, that I might not add to their pain, that I might shoulder the cross.

It was in the course of such a meditation that it occurred to me that not all the crosses I am required as a Christian to carry are my own, personal ones. Sometimes the cross I am to carry belongs to another, and because membership in the Body of Christ is real and mystical, not just metaphorical, those crosses are mine too. If I take it seriously, I am meant to be Simon of Cyrene to others.

I've come to love the Cyrenian. I have a vivid image of him from Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: a passerby, curious about what's going on but not necessarily interested, pressed into reluctant service carrying the cross of condemned man, fearful for his own reputation, desirous that he not be tainted by proximity to a criminal on the way to ignominious death. It is not accidental, I think, that Simon leaves his son at the roadside, telling him to wait until he returns. Simon wants very much to protect his life from interruption by the passing of this battered man, this Jesus of Nazareth.

As Simon takes up the cross, the camera pans back to show him lifting the heavy weight, circling the long wooden beam, the arm of the exhausted Christ coming from the opposite direction, entwining with Simon's as they trudge forward. By the time Jesus falls again, Simon is a changed man, encouraging Christ with the words, "almost there..." with a gentleness in his demeanor that belies the horrible destination that lies ahead. At the end, Simon does not depart in haste to return to his son and continue on his journey; he lingers until he is chased away, not quite sure what he has seen and experienced but changed just by walking that distance with Christ.

Most of us are Simons, midway between the two thieves who also walked the road with Christ. Unlike Dismas, we do not see the reality of Christ in a flashing instant of understanding, repentance and acceptance. Unlike Gesmas, neither do we deny Him in the face of our own sin and tragedy. We stand, at the foot of the cross, wondering, and walk away to think a little more. Perhaps Simon didn't leave altogether, perhaps he waited in the crowd, watching Christ on the cross and sorting out in his own mind what was happening, what it all meant. Between Dismas and Gesmas is the path of Simon. Between Dismas and Gesmas is Christ.

I am following Simon this Lent. I am, like Simon, offering a shoulder to bear the crosses of others, because in shouldering them, I shoulder my own. Just as my suffering is linked to Christ's by the very fact that I am incorporated into His body so is the suffering of those around me linked to me for we are part of the same, the very same real and mystical body. A reality, not a figure of speech. Their suffering is mine. Their crosses are mine. Linked to Christ, there is redemption in the suffering, because Christ in His infinite wisdom and love permits it to be so. And if they cannot themselves join their suffering to Christ's, perhaps I can.

For we all stand at the foot of a cross, with Simon. And the cross is not empty.

Dissection

2011-03-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

Pathologists follow death like night follows day. And when we encounter it, we dissect it, in part to give voice to the departed but also in part out of a pathological (no pun intended) need to know, to organize and sort and make sense of the world around us. This is, by the way, a deep, inborn trait, and not an acquired skill. I am a pathologist because I am this way; I am not this way because I am a pathologist.

So naturally, in the aftermath of grief over Richard's death, I find myself in the familiar posture of the pathologist, metaphorically leaning over a stainless steel table, picking apart the last few days. One thing I know from many years of standing at morgue tables, and dealing, if at one remove, with the aftermath of death sudden or violent: It moves people. The wake of such experiences is broad and deep and deeply unsettling; it can knock a person loose from his moorings or swamp his life in a heartbeat.

It is at such times we are weakest, at such times that the adversary, always ready to exploit an advantage, goes on the attack, with anger and fear, and doubt and grief. Especially with doubt. For those of us who have spent so much time in the fields of the dead, that doubt is never very far away. Handling, exploring, dissecting a body so recently warm and animated, now so cold and lifeless has a way of enforcing the notion that what we see--and only what we see--is what we get. Knowing the hows and whys of when a body ceases to function, and the utter hopelessness of fixing the completely broken undermines faith in the hereafter, in resurrection, perhaps even in redemption. One's vision can become very narrow in the morgue if one deals only in the immediate and broken and not in the grand design.

And so, on reflection, it surprises me not that all those questions, experiences, doubts that lurk in the back of my overtrained mind came instantly to the fore when I heard the news. He was just talking with his brother when he slumped over and he was gone.

Gone, indeed, that gentle Southern euphemism for the D-word that is never uttered in polite society; people are never dead, they have passed, they are departed, they have gone. And that is what it feels like, gone. Gone, never to return. Whatever mystical nature it takes to completely and utterly believe and understand that this life is not all there is, I do not have it; my barque sails on the waters of doubt on a daily basis. It doesn't take much wake to tip me off that balance, and this wake was large indeed.

I also know from many years in the morgue that in the face of sudden or violent death, people react to God. They may turn toward HIm, or they may rail against Him, but it is the rare individual indeed who ignores Him altogether. Even the most recalcitrant atheist will snap out in pain Where is your loving God now? The most committed agnostic may find himself calling out for mercy from whatever power is out there in the Universe, if it exists at all....

And so in the rocking waters of my world in the aftermath of Tuesday, there intersected in my mind two prayers this morning, as I jogged, an intersection that put the pieces of the last few days together for me. I am learning that, rather than making my morning rosary and divine mercy chaplet a perfunctory exercise, praying them as I run actually forces me into internal silence. (Hypoxia will do that) When it takes all that I have to be able to put one foot in front of the other, and pray, there's room and time for God to talk to me. Ant talk He did, words unexpected and welcome that calmed the waves in my harbor.

The intersection was simply this: my morning offering:

Nothing will happen to me today that was not foreseen by You and directed to my greater good from all eternity..

and the ending prayer for the Divine Mercy Chaplet:

Look kindly on us and increase in us Your mercy so that in difficult times we may not despair or become despondent but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your Holy Will which is Love and Mercy itself.

Slowly, against the rhythm of my run, a thought formed in my mind as I examined the details of the events of the last two days. First, the reality that what happened--all of it, even my doubts and my mixed motives if such they were--God knew from all eternity, and directed it to my good if I but embrace that good. Second, that that good might just be the very thing that worried at the edges of my mind. After all, in the first aftermath of the news, my reaction, my first response was not just despair, but doubt, in both the general and the particular senses. Doubt--is there really anything more? Doubt--why am I going to mass, why am I going to adoration, what does all that really mean, any why, oh why, does it feel like I am doing this just for me? It was through the doubt that mercy became first focused, and then released.

The choice, not just of that moment, but of all of life, and so pervasive in Lent as to be the very essence of the season: Will you turn toward God, or away?

Toward. That in difficult times..... Toward. Perhaps not with great confidence, perhaps with no confidence at all, with just the merest leanings of faith, but toward none the less. That turning, even amid the fear and the doubt was all I could manage, and it was all God needed.

I'm not enough of a theologian to argue the fine point of God's will, permissive and prescriptive. Long years in the morgue taught me not to tread the ground of the why--Why did that drunk driver run over my little girl? Why did that aneurysm decide to break just as he was walking down the aisle? Why did such a good man die so young? Why did an old man have to suffer? I learned to limit myself to picking apart the how and putting it back together in a response that somehow made sense and a practical difference.

Really, it was very sudden and there was no pain. No, there was nothing you could have done. And knowing from seeing it, and standing beside it, that the pain lands all in the survivors. Pain that must be endured, and can lead either to restoration or ruin.

In all those cases, and in this one, present and oh-so-bitter, all that I could offer were the facts that helped put it all in perspective. Facts that point beyond themselves to a sense of order, dimly seen and partly understood, that might allow, someday, living with the reality in some sense of normalcy and peace. That's the light that dissection can shed, the gift that a pathologist's mind holds locked in its recesses. A little light for the path.

That, and the hope that in that light, we will turn toward, and not away. And in the end, despite the pain and the doubt, that's what I did, instinctively, from my very bones. Not really knowing why and not knowing what to expect, that's what I did. The reality of that both humbles and delights me, at the same time it surprises me; more faith in me, perhaps, than I generally apprehend. No great answers, no complicated demands, just a simple turn of the head and heart. Perhaps that's all that the will of God required of me on that day: just to remember to turn toward Him and not away. One small but beautiful act of faith.

The rest can wait for later, for that's all the mercy that I need in the moment.

The Stones Are There For A Reason....

2011-03-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

A year or so ago, the father of a friend died. He’d been mowing the lawn and he came in, sat down in his chair and just never got up again. He was in his late 90s. That’s the way to go, my friend remarked.

I’m not so sure. I’ve dealt with a lot of death, and the sudden kind is always harder on those left behind. In my own life, I have accumulated a stunning series of abrupt passings, marked both by their unexpected nature and the fact that somehow, in the days or week preceding, I skipped an appointment that--had I made it--would have been a last visit.

Chalk up another one today.

I'm sorry to tell you that our friend Richard passed away unexpectedly last night from a massive heart attack.

Not exactly the way I wanted to start my morning, with an e-mail like that. Richard, my best buddy from my days as a malpractice defense lawyer. Richard, honorary uncle to my children, the one at whom my daughter looked one afternoon and pronounced (to his great amusement), You can't be a lawyer. You're a boy! Richard, companion on many a family vacation, of great good humor and endless adventure. Richard, the finest lawyer, and one of the best men, I have ever known.

I'd heard, just a little while ago, ago of a failed surgery and widely metastatic cancer, something not destined to end well, but he'd survived the initial intervention, and was preparing for chemotherapy. I'd spoken to him just a few days ago. He was in good spirits, sounding for all the world like his old and congenial self. We'd laughed at the collection of humor books I'd sent, recalling nights around a campfire with some of the stories.

For a man with a diagnosis of cancer, I'm the happiest man in the world! There was a cadre of helpers bringing dinner and companionship every evening. His strength was returning, He was healing better than expected. He was supposed to start chemotherapy next week. My husband had tickets to Florida to see him in less than a week.

And then came the e-mail. I doubled over as if I'd been punched in the gut. I was a tomboy; I know how that feels. Odd, how emotional pain can be so very, very physical.

I'm not ready! I'm not ready! I want to talk to him again. I was going to visit in April! I had books to send, a rosary to make! I'm not ready.....

It's not particularly flattering to realize that my first thought was about me, but there you have it. I sat at my desk and cried for a bit, then excused myself and drove across town to the adoration chapel, where I knelt and prayed and cried again. And dealt with terrible, frightening thoughts, my shoulder devil whispering in my ear between every Hail, Mary, every Our Father, my own heart trying to answer back.

It's a myth. He's just gone. You're a fool.

It's not. Please, Jesus. It's not. It's not. He needs You. I need You.

Some Christian you are. Even this poor man's death, and it's about you.

For his mother, Lord. For his brother. His friends. For him. It's the best I can do.

Even being here is for you. What a showman you are. You should be back at work.....

By the time I had struggled through my prayers, not even sure how I said them, the words mechanical and the beads slipping unmarked through my fingers, my tears had, for the moment, stopped, and my shoulder devil was temporarily quieted. I slipped out the back door, to make the trip back across town to hear mass. My personal demon made one last volley.

Pharisee! You haven’t seen him but once since you moved here. What good is another mass going to do him--or you?

Oh, be quiet. Go away. I'm going because I want to. Because it's where I want to be. Leave me alone!

I'd already been to morning mass, so hearing mass again seemed even to me a bit excessive, but it's where I wanted to be, perhaps needed to be. In any case, it's where I found myself. I slipped into the rectory chapel at the downtown church I frequent, and took a corner seat, resting my head against the cool wall and looking at the crucifix, unspeaking, exhausted and for the moment, unthinking. A friend sat in the chair next to me, and I smiled by reflex.

The entrance antiphon was different from the one I had heard this morning, and it called me to attention, the words an antidote to the dialog in my head, the pain and the morning suddenly very different.

Come, you whom my Father has blessed, says the Lord. I was ill and you comforted me, I tell you, anything you did for one of my brothers, you did for me.

Then came the story of Tobit's blindness, in which his wife, annoyed with his contrariness, finally asks Where are all your charitable acts? See, your true character is showing itself!

True character. Illness reveals that, not only in the one who is sick, but those around him.

When RIchard fell ill, the motley crew of lawyers, clerks, judges and hangers-on that constituted his inner circle so many years ago found each other once again, in touch despite distance and the separation of jobs and the passage of years. We exchanged stories and pictures and found ourselves connected and enveloped in the companionship of years past. Visits were quickly made, letters, food, flowers and care packages sent. Calls went back and forth and it all surrounded Richard--and the rest of us--in love, the revealed character of this once thoroughly secular, cynical group surprising even ourselves.

And it's the same today. E-mails are flying and calls have been made and photographs are being sent. We're taking walks and saying prayers and crying on each other's shoulders and generally telling the world: Be quiet. Go away. This is what we want to do.

By the love you show one another will others know you are My disciples. The last words before communion, before I heard the priest tell me May Almighty God bless you today.

Oh, He has. Even in the midst of all this, He has. And I need to remember that.

In the voices of each other and in the words of the mass, I hear my Father, feel His arms around me as he lets me cry, and tells me in a soothing voice that it will all be fine. That while all my plans were well and good, they weren't His plans. And that even not knowing His plans, His timetable, somehow, I managed--we all managed--to find our way into His love and into Richard's. Not bad. Not bad at all.

I'd lifted Richard up during the intercessions with words I never thought I'd be saying--or at least, not for a while For the response of the soul of Richard Garland and the comfort of his family and friends, let us pray to the Lord.

As I left, one of the women called me over for a hug. I know you have been praying for him for a long time. We'll keep lifting him up. You too. God bless. Who knew that she had noticed, remembered?

The last words before the blessing echoed in my head as I walked on, surprisingly warmed, the ache at bay at least for a moment: May those of us who are strengthened by the Eucharist like St. John of God seek You above all things and live in this world as Your new creation.

That was my friend Richard. A man who lived, every day, as a new creation. The best lawyer I ever knew, never letting the adversarial nature of his job tarnish his innate good temper. A slightly renegade attorney who expressed his rebellious side in tried and true Catholic schoolboy style with a wardrobe of the most outlandish socks ever to be seen peeking out from under the hem of navy blue suit pants. A Catholic who quietly and consistently practiced his faith, in season and out, an example to me even before I knew I needed one. A brother in Christ who, on hearing of my reception into the Church, called to tell me Welcome Home!

Richard's nickname in the family was Slick, because on one family vacation, he failed to appreciate the unreliable nature of wet slickrock in Utah's mud season. Stepping off the flagstones that dotted a narrow path, he skittered down a slope to the hoots and catcalls of all. As he made his muddy way back up our son called out a statement that lodged itself permanently in the family lexicon: The stones are there for a reason!

The stones are there for a reason.

So they are. The stones of life are there for a reason, to give us purchase when the way gets muddy, and heart, or mind, or adversary threatens to send us down a treacherous slope. Richard was one of life's great stones, and I will miss him.

Tomorrow I will start the long journey of Lent, sadder and more somber than in a long, long time. I’ll receive the ashes that remind me this year all too clearly of my own mortality. I’ll be looking for the stones, the path through the desert. And at the end of it all, the greatest stone of all will wait--but it is the one that has been rolled away.

Easter’s coming. The stones are there for a reason.

Moyross

2011-02-22T03:27:00.000-08:00

You’re going to Moyross? God bless you, are you sure? Its a ....rough place. Not very nice. Desperate. Drugs. Murders. Are you sure you want to go? Be careful.

Our Irish hosts were concerned when we shared our plans to get up before dawn and head out to one of Limerick’s more infamous and troubled neighborhoods. Before we had come to Ireland on our latest trip, I had read about the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and their work in Moyross and something drew me to the idea of visiting them Crazy enough, but I’m learning to respond to that tug when it happens--there is always something God has in store for me to learn. And so, on our next to last day in Ireland, I called the number listed on the website.

I introduced myself and explained what I wanted, and the voice on the other end paused for a moment then said familiar words in a familiar accent. You’re not from around here, are you?

I’ve gotten used to the idea that all I have to do is open my mouth in that lovely, green land to be identified as other, shattering my cherished illusions of anonymity. I wasn’t prepared for the surprise my response brought back to me. The brother on the phone was not only American--I expected that--but from Kennesaw, a bedroom community of Atlanta not far from my own home in Tennessee. And his pastor as a young teen had been the same pastor of mine with whom we travelled, the man whose desire to visit his sister in Killaloe had brought us within striking range of Moyross in the first place. With God, there are no coincidences.

Still, it was with increasing apprehension that I sat in the car as my groom made his way through the grey, damp dawn toward Moyross. Our GPS couldn’t find the address, so we relied on dead reckoning and a few general instructions our hosts and the brother on the phone had finally supplied, one of which was to pass a closed, burned out store. Never a sign of prosperity and peace in a neighborhood, that. As we drove, second thoughts crowded my mind as I reflected on what he had said. Have I really done it this time? Are we going to be all right? Please, Father, keep us safe. I’m not entirely sure why I got this cockamamie idea to go, except to make images of these men’s hands, but we are on our way. Please, Father, keep us safe. Even if we’ve set out on this for the wrong reasons, keep us safe, use our work.

We found the general area of Limerick in which Moyross is situated at the first light of dawn. Our appointed time--ten of eight--approached, and we were still wandering about like the Israelites in the wilderness. Finally, we spied an open gas station and stopped for directions. They put us closer to our goal--the name Moyross surfaced on a sign--but still not there. Another stop to ask a man in a white van where the Friars lived. More directions, another miss. We were asking a third time when the white van passed and the man inside beckoned. Follow me.

We did, and he took us right to the spot, the promised red van in front of council houses and all. As we thanked him and got out, I noticed Mary in the yard, the statue whose image had set my mind working about this place, these men in the first place. Through the window, we saw a tall, dark priest pulling a chasuble over his head. I looked around at a grim, grey settlement on a cul-de-sac. I’ve spent more than my share of time in precincts like this in my former life, and the very atmosphere brought memories crashing back.

Memories of cops calling me in the middle of the night and insisting that they meet and escort me to the scene of violent death, offering protection and comfort to me in the middle of chaos. Memories of onlookers hanging back, scuttling in the shadow as we did our work, some of them as familiar with this kind of end as we were ourselves, but with no place to go to escape from it. Memories of going home again, to my safe and clean and bright part of town, always accompanied by a thick, black plastic bag that held death. Always in the service of giving voice to those who could talk no more. Here is how I was done to death. Here is the one who did it. Back to my role in the justice, if not of God, of man. And in spite of my familiarity with such places, my fear would not go away. It was with an edge to my heart that I stood back as my groom knocked on the door of the friary.

The brother I had spoken to met us at the door and we entered, a spare, beautiful chapel with a carved wood altar in the little room to our left. Before long the tall, dark priest entered and the mass began, an oasis of American familiarity in the midst of Ireland. So accustomed had we become to the rhythms of the Irish mass that we had to be reminded--invited--to come to receive the cup. At the end, we prayed the prayer of the companions of St. Francis. The words silenced me and all I could do was pray them in my heart....lukewarm because of sloth...languid because of idleness, half-alive because of negligence, it indicted me, but then promised in spite of being surrounded by inextricable dangers , grace and prayer and humility and charity. All, I know, that I need.

And the grace and charity were not long in coming. I have grown accustomed to Irish hospitality and the friars shepherded us into their kitchen for breakfast and fellowship. Good, strong coffee--a rarity in our travels--toast and peanut butter, cereal--and the conversation that I have learned unearths the connections between us that the Church already promises are there. We showed the the tiny book of the Hands Project and the card we had made up.

Wait. You did this? I have this card. I’ve seen this work. It’s beautiful.

Not only are there no coincidences with God, He’s got a great communication network too. We laughed at the discovery and set about making images--of drying dishes, holding steaming mugs, putting on sandals, a very Franciscan thing to so. Soon we were out the door, across the way to a garden interposed between two of the plain, grey houses bundled up against the day that was, though fully light, cold and damp. cutting us to the bone as only Irish cold can do.

There used to be a derelict house here. In those houses there, on either side, the families had a son murdered. When they tore down the house, we decided to plant a garden.

A garden, with chickens for eggs and ducks for pleasure and a pond and a greenhouse overseen by Christ Himself, in statue and in print. Fitting, that a garden should be here, for it is in a garden man first met God and in a garden that God as man retreated before the crucifixion that would open the gates to that first garden once more. What better than a garden, with its cycle of birth and rebirth, green and vibrant signs of the power of new life, to stand in the middle of this troubled place?

Too soon our time wound to a close. As my groom captured a few more images, I sat in the kitchen and talked with the brothers, asked them about their needs.

We live simply. Mostly our needs are food. We beg for our food. We even begged for the van outside.

There it was, the reason God dragged me across a great ocean and past my own inhibitions to talk with these men, this man. Beg I thought. How uncertain, how demeaning, to have to rely on charity, to have to ask for the very means of life. Then How ashamed I am to have taken breakfast from these men, under these circumstances. How extraordinarily generous of them to have offered it.

No. Think again. The thought interposed and sent my other reflections fleeing in shame almost as soon as they formed. We all have to beg and we all rely on charity. Not in the deformed sense that modern society sees it--condescension to the weaker and puffing up of the giver, but in the sense the Church teaches: that I love God above all things and because I do, I love my neighbor as myself, as God loves me. Without restraint.

None of us comes to God’s table by right, by justice, only by grace, in a sense, only as mendicants. And we are fed beyond our needs, so much so that baskets and baskets are taken up after to be distributed later. The Friars know what I am only slowly learning: that God’s life flows through me only as much as I realize I have nothing and need everything from Him. And that only in giving the life of God in me away, freely and cheerfully, even to the stranger who calls up out of nowhere and horns his way into my life, unbidden and unexpected at inconvenient hours, making peculiar demands on me and my time, do I really receive what I need. Generosity, it seems, comes not from abundance, but from the poverty of spirit that recognizes--really recognizes--my utter dependence on God, and the faith the knows He really does--and will--see to my needs.

One last image to be made, that of the Mary statue, she whose hands were missing because of vandals. Fitting, somehow, even in its sadness. The first hands who brought us Jesus now need other hands to do her work, just as her son does. In this place, it is the hands of the good friars.

And they are making progress. It is also somehow prophetic that the other vandalism of the statue is that the head of the snake at the Blessed Mother's feet has been crushed.

As we left, the sun was beginning to struggle out from behind the clouds and the soft rain had stopped, at least for a time. We said our goodbyes, and walked to the car. I looked around at the row of houses and remarked without thinking, This place is beautiful.

Veil Wars--Skirmish

2011-02-01T04:42:00.000-08:00

It has been about a year since I started covering my head at mass. What started out as a difficult exercise in humility and an exploration of tradition has become a comfortable norm for me. These days, I feel oddly bare on the days when I forget to bring my lace, a bit our of kilter, if only in passing.

That's why it was interesting to read that the Cathedral in Columbo has asked women to cover their heads in an effort to improve the propriety of dress among modern young women who don't seem to understand that a mini skit and halter top might not be the most respectful garb for church. I was surprised by the edict, and more surprised (though I should not be) by the howls of protest that it elicited in comments to a blog that brought it up.

Angry women (and a few men) compared the veil to the burqua and railed against any sign of submission in women. Militant feminism and moral relativism at it best, on full display. As my kids would have said in their teen years: PUH-LEASE.....

I continue to be amazed at the strong feelings that a tiny bit of material on the head of a Catholic woman can stir up, perhaps because I missed the napkin on the head phase of strict observance. I admit, I've never been tossed out of church and berated for lack of a head covering.

That said, it's time for a certain amount of perspective on this. For a woman to decide that it is an asset to her devotional life and a sign of respect to God and the Church to cover her head does not mean a wholesale retreat into the dark ages. For a priest or bishop to request it is not an egregious abuse of clerical power, and more than it is for that same priest or bishop to ask a man to remove his hat.

But the language this engendered! My particular favorite (the allusion to Moslem women forced to wear the burqua was just silly) was this: I won't submit to any man other than Jesus or my priest!

Setting aside for the moment that it was a priest in this particular instance doing the asking, I wonder how that's working our for her? I find myself having to submit to all sorts of men in the course of my daily life: to the demands of the clerk at the store that I pay for my goods, to the police officer who (only occasionally)_ asks for my license, to the comptroller who sends me my tax bill, even to the guard in my building who demands to see my identification before I enter.

I comply (submission is such a loaded word these days) because the demands are reasonable, the one making them has the power of office, and ultimately, because they are for the good of the greater whole. Stores don't stay in business long if customers don't pay. THe policeman needs to be sure I am who I say I am and that I am properly licensed to drive (and don't have a raft of unpaid tickets in the well...). The city needs tax dollars to run its business, and this is they way we have chosen to collect them. The guard has interests in protecting my safety. The worshipping community--and the priest responsible for it-- has an interest in a certain amount of decorum and respect in the liturgy. Our posture informs our minds, and our minds, in the liturgy, are to be on God, not ourselves.

The strident nature of the protest strike me: I will not! Not a good posture to start out a response to a spiritual issue. It sounds precariously too close to the Non serviam! that set this whole world to falling in the first place. It's taken me a few decades t learn this, but it's generally a measure of my own pride and failing when I respond so vehemently to a simple request. There are larger meanings, indeed, to everything, but they are often not what I think on first, disproportionate, selfish glance.

Even in the areas where I should not submit, I often will; best not to exclude off the mark areas in which my compliance might actually make me grow.

A friend who started following the blog at the time of the last round of veil wars stories was nonplussed by them. She dismissed my desire as harmless enough, indulgent of a new Catholic wanting to explore the old days...but dismissive at the same time of the whole idea that covering might have meaning in any sphere. Another silly rule that we can do without. Another silly rule that drives people away.

Perhaps. But I don't think it's the rules that make people leave the fold of the Church, I think it's coming face to face with the demand that we change that makes people uncomfortable. Just like the woman who railed I will not, we are reluctant to give over any part of our imagined self-determination. The change we are expected to make is far greater than deciding to wear a veil or put aside a hat. It's a change in the heart, and that is so very frightening to us. Even as we know how miserable we are, misery is at least familiar to us. This giving over to God can be intimidating, frightening, even as it draws us in our deepest core. And so we search for excuses: veils, hats, tithing, scandals, music, liturgy, personality--any reason to leave the place that we are drawn to and that makes us so profoundly ill at ease.

But the unease is just the first part of it, as I discovered with my veil. Live through it and it becomes a different experience, not because the act of putting on a piece of lace that will make one stand out like a sore thumb in a crowd of bare heads is any different, but because eventually, the wearer becomes different. In my case, it's been a means to a wonderful end. I can feel myself centering as I pull my scarf or my mantilla over my head. I am preparing to meet my Lord and the Love of my Life in His place, on His terms. And His terms are generous indeed. Difficult--but generous.

It's time we adopted the attitude of permission in these matters. Wearing a veil does not make me some sort of inhibited,unthinking, retro-Catholic throwback who endangers all of Vatican II by my obstinate adherence to an outdated dress code. Worshipping bareheaded is not a sign of militant disrespect. In this matter, as in so many others, we should be free to express our personal devotions without incurring the wrath of others. No one is obliged at this point at least not outside Sri Lanka and St. Peter's, but no one need be discouraged, either.

It has been an interesting year. When I started, I feared snide comments; if there were any, they have been said behind my back. The people who speak to my face have only good things to say. Little girls (always discerning in matters of taste) find the veils pretty. Older men are nostalgic about their mothers. And last week, one of the women greeting after mass told me she really liked seeing my veil.

I reminded her: They still sell them.....

Love Song

2011-01-25T14:07:00.000-08:00

You know what your problem is? You don’t really believe God loves you, passionately and devotedly, right this very minute. And until you stop trying to be good enough for Him to love you, you aren’t going to make much progress.

So says a friend of mine, a friend with an indecent insight into my spiritual life, for he is right. I can’t quite bring myself to believe. I work at it, but I can’t quite let go and...have faith. And of course, that’s the problem. Believing isn’t just knowing. Believing draws its life from a place beyond merely knowing, for that which one knows does not require faith.

I know. I have that part down, the head knowledge that God loves me, the central construct of my faith. In my intellect, I understand that God created me out of nothing and for Himself, a sheer, utter, gratuitous act of ongoing love, for only by His ongoing love do I continue to exist at all. But heart knowledge, belief, is a very different thing, and like all graces a gift that is received according to the mode of the recipient. (More head knowledge.) My mode seems a trifle...closed, as though there were a detour sign from my heart, directing all traffic to my head, and that a long, long way away.

I’ve lately quit beating myself over the head with this particular little paradox, content for now to work on the edges of my spiritual life, dealing with things I can grasp and mold and feel as though I am making progress as though progress as I measure it is important.

I am weary of trying to wrestle that particular truth, the truth of faith and love and knowing, to ground. If it is so, that God loves me so very much, then He loves me enough to give me time, space, latitude to be caught by Him. If I ask for the grace of faith, He’s promised it to me, and God is a Father who keeps his promises (with apologies to Scott Hahn, and even more head knowledge.) So I have asked and asked again.

I count on the gentle and relentless pursuit of God, the completeness of His ardor for souls, even mine. If life is what happens when we make other plans, grace is what happens when we are distracted by other cares. Perhaps necessarily so. Only when we let down the defenses of the will, the mind, the imagination, the intellect, can God’s indefinable mercies flow in. God the Father is also God the Suitor, casting pebbles at the windows of our soul, knowing that sometimes to catch us in moments of surprise is to catch us when we are open at last, vulnerable to the ministrations of love. One such moment came this week as I caught myself up in other pursuits and projects and plans.

Saturday vigil took me visiting a neighboring parish, a liberty I permit myself when our pastor is away, and one in this case necessitated by a full Sunday of travel and photography for the Hands Project with a deadline looming. I fretted about the work to be done and the time to do it. Logistics and problems interrupted even my preparations for mass and my rosary. While I worried about things that are not, in the end, all that important, God managed to get past my defenses on the one thing that does matter.

The text for the sermon was the commencement of Jesus’ public ministry, and His call to repentance, the lines of scripture perfect to feed my ongoing quest for perfection. After all, does God himself not call us to change? Is not change something necessarily in our own control? He cannot call us to that which we cannot do. And that which He calls us to do, ought we not do well?

All true, but this priest, gentle of speech and gentler of demeanor, took a different tack. Recalling the prodigal son, he wove the stories together reminding us that we don’t have to be perfect. The prodigal son wasn’t and we never are. But the father in the story, and our Father loves us so much that He waits expecting us and runs to meet us as we come home.

I lost the rest of the sermon as those words led me off to a place of my own. Not only do we not have to be perfect, we don’t really even have to be all that close, at least, not to begin with. My reading of that story tells me that the prodigal was willing to voice that he had sinned against heaven and against his father--but it was the fact that he was cold, hungry and homeless that made him say it. It was his own personal, individual pain, not his awareness of sin, not his father’s anguish, and not his own anguish at his father’s pain, that set him on the road back home. He was sorry the same way I am so often sorry--not because he had caused his father grief, but because he had come to it himself. Not because he had done wrong but because his own wrong had done him in.

Read in that light, the remainder of the story becomes even more remarkable: the father (and the Father) does not wait for the son even to stutter out his own crabbed, inadequate version of repentance. The father, who was more than willing to give all he had to a son guaranteed to be profligate and ungrateful, was also watchful thereafter for the perfect opportunity to pursue his errant child and shower him again with gifts all over again and welcome him home. He welcomed him not because the son deserved it, nor even because he’d learned his lesson, but because, it seems, there is nothing else that this particular father can do. He is just that kind of Father. Turn to Him and He is there in all His fullness.

Good thing for me. At least the son in the story had some inkling of what it is he had done wrong. There’s so much in my own life I do not even see, even as I am metaphorically feeding seed pods to the swine. But if the good Father who preached Saturday of an even better One is right, it is only needful that I start my turn back to the road from which I strayed, turn my face to the Father I have offended. My Father will run to meet me, covering more ground in His great and loving strides than I ever can in my own small and misguided steps; He will overtake me, not I Him. Important head knowledge to have.

And ah, the mystery of becoming a child of that great Father, the adoption that occurred when water was poured over my infant forehead! It seems that it was the Roman tradition, the culture of the time, to lay a newborn infant on the floor, then call the father to examine it. If the child were acceptable to the father’s criteria--that is, perfect, desired, his own flesh and blood, and very often, male---the father would raise it up--that’s what it was called, raising up--from the floor, to be reared as a child of the family. If not, the baby was consigned to the trash heap to die.

Raise up. In Matthew’s gospel, John the Baptist cautions the crowds that God can raise up sons to Abraham from the stones of the desert--God has the power to make even the most unsuitable material into real sons, as real as, perhaps more real than, the crowds who stood on the banks of the Jordan that day.

And the words of Jesus: Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has real life in him and I will raise him up on the last day.

Raise him up. Raise me up. From the floor, the dominion of this world, where I wait to be cast aside if the criteria of the world are to prevail, for I really can’t ever be good enough, complete enough, enough of anything to warrant being picked up and saved from the trash heap. And my head knows that.

But I also know, at least in my head, something about the Father who comes in to look me over, the One who decides. He is the One who runs to meet me. The One who gathers me up in His two strong arms, and declares that He loves me and makes me a child of His own.

My head, then, reminds my heart to breathe easy, for He will never, ever let me go. If just for a moment, I let out the smallest and most comfortable of of sighs. I am met on the road. I am raised up from the floor. I am, in fact, loved beyond my wildest expectations, certainly beyond anything that I deserve. That I know, and that when I begin to live in that knowledge, it brings me to that land beyond knowing, to that place of faith.

I am loved by Him who is Love, Who can do nothing else but love in all its extravagant, complicated, difficult and overtaking forms. Perhaps the distance from head to heart is not so very great after all, only the span of a Father's arms, and there are no detours. In one embrace He makes my head knowledge into the very song of my heart. A love song.

Monk's Bread

2011-01-02T18:33:00.000-08:00

A piece of bread started me thinking.

Really, really good bread. Thick, dense, wheaten bread, like the bread I love from Ireland, only loaded with raisins, pale and dark and scented with an elusive aroma, tantalizing and distant that made the whole thing as exotic as it was familiar. They say that God’s manna held all the flavors in the world in one bite. This bread was like that.

Bread that once I tasted it, I could not put it down. Bread the monk who cut it sent home as a gift, bread which we enjoyed with our New Year’s night cowpeas and hog jowl, and stashed away for breakfast the next morning. Bread, so tied up with Christ, with the Church, with my own journey for it was the seeking of Living Bread that led me home to Rome.

For five years, I’ve wondered, on and off, when I’d really feel like the Catholic everyone else accepts me for, when I would cease to fell like an interloper and feel like a real child of the family. I remember one of my brothers, before he knew I was converting, saying That’s what the Catholics believe. It’s not what we believe. In the Deep South, Catholic is what you were born, not what you became. I have no Catholic history, no family to show me the way through this extraordinary, complicated, beautiful faith journey.

In my saner moments, I know that this is an exceptionally silly notion on my part. I’ve encountered enough Catholics of enough different stripes to know that Peter’s boat is very big indeed, with room enough for me, and passengers of every possible condition. Still, there’s a need to feel—really feel—Catholic, to feel the faith in my very bones rather than having to think about it. To have the rhythms of Catholic life really flowing in my veins. Even after five years, there is so much that is foreign, unfamiliar, so many new things, my shoulder devil whispering in my ear that I’ll never really belong…

In the dining hall of a monastery, on the first day of the new year, one of the brothers cut slices from that wonderful loaf and shared it with my husband and me. We spent two days in the company of the monks, my husband taking images of hands: hands making rosaries, creating bonsai trees, serving customers in the bookshop, arranging flowers, doing all the ordinary tasks of life. Old hands and young, and all of them with stories.

Connections began to emerge as my groom worked and I talked casually in the background. With the monk who lived in Arizona at the time I was in college there, and who once lived in Oregon as did we. With another whose own story is connected to the Cathedral in Massachusetts where I go to daily mass when traveling on business. With another who gave tips on making rosaries gleaned from years of practice to me, a novice. With another who is a friend of the priest who has been advising me on a book. The easy conversation of extended family getting to know each other. The realization that across time and space, we share some of the same experiences, the same places, the same expectations and disappointments and joys. The same faith….

Later, in the church made one wheel-barrow full of concrete at a time, with soaring Gothic arches and trusses as sooth as a baby’s cheek and rounded as a cat’s back, I knelt in the back, in the part reserved for those who are neither monks nor lay faithful on retreat. My groom was busy making images in the church proper as preparations for vespers commenced. I was alone in the dark rear of the church, in front of the crèche, wool-gathering as my mind turned over the events of the last few days and weeks.

No great surprise, I spent a substantial portion of that time meditating on the Incarnation. Aside from the overwhelming mystery, what struck me this year was the wonderful, deliberate, glacial pace of it all. God appears among us an infant, and it took thirty years before He started to proclaim His message to the world at large. In the meantime, in those largely hidden years, He grew and worked and became a part of the very people He came to save. He became part of them simply by being with them, and doing what they did in the ordinary course of daily life. Belonging, it seems, just takes a little time, and it happens all on its own. He becomes a part of me in much the same way, slowly, bit by bit, in the most humdrum of circumstances. And I become part of the Church likewise. Day by day, in the long expanse of ordinary events, and the blessed, comforting routine of masses and seasons and feasts and fasts. Without great fanfare, largely unnoticed, and wholly according to God’s good plan.

Sitting in the back, of the church, behind the railing, I realized I was not separated at all, but a very part of the office that eventually began in the lighted church before me and filled the space with light and prayer. Mary and Joseph and the Infant Jesus drew my attention as I heard the words of the vespers of Epiphany, as I watched the monks in their cowls and the play of light on the walls and found my gaze drawn back again and again to the Nativity. In the middle of the service, the sounds and the silence eventually drew me into the deep, deep quiet of simply being a part of the Body of Christ.

There is a place for all in the Church, and I have found mine—sometimes behind the rail, sometimes in front, but always within the walls and within reach of those I call my brothers and sisters. I now have what I thought I would always lack: a Catholic past. Not a long past, but a past, one that connects me in ways I cannot even begin to predict, to my family. It is, after all, not just kinship, but history that makes family, and eventually we all contribute a few stories to the mix.

Too soon the service finished, and everyone began to leave in the same silence in which they had gathered, a pleasant contrast to the hectic noise of the coming and going in my parish church. I remained in my pew, kneeling, not much thinking of anything, just watching the congregation disperse, one this way, one that, the contrast of the gentle flow of habits with the casual dress of those on retreat.

One monk walked down the length of the center aisle, and I reflected for a moment on the great value in measured steps and the habits that create the quiet we all need and so few of us find. As he approached the rail. I recognized him as the purveyor of the bread, one of the two we’d spent most of the afternoon with. He pointed silently to the balcony, and regarded me with a question. Have you been up there?

I shook my head. He opened the gate to lead me up the stairs. I shed my shoes and followed him barefoot—the soles of my clogs made too much noise for the place and the moment.

The view from the balcony took my breath away. I stood at the edge, looking down on the long nave and up at the soaring buttresses. One last monk walked slowly down the aisle, and one by one, the lights went out along the sides, leaving only the tabernacle in the sanctuary illuminated, a simple, radiant golden box in a pale-blue arch of concrete. I had started the Octave of Christmas in a balcony, because there was no room for me in the main floor with all the others, and my banishment reminded me then of the exile from Lambeth that brought me to Rome. I ended the Octave in another balcony, as far distant in this beautiful Church as I could be and still be present, but present I was, and present I will remain, a part of the family, a part of the Body.

Because of the Bread. All because of the Bread.

Technologically Catholic

2010-12-29T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Catholic blogosphere is all atwitter (no pun intended) about the refusal of Apple to permit a Manhattan Declaration app on the iPhone. While I agree it would be a wonderful thing, I’m not sure the refusal of Apple to permit the app is evidence of wicked bias against Christians—it strikes me as (unfortunately) good business sense. The rage of the Culture of Death over pro-life activities is hard to underestimate, and Apple is in business to do business. Besides, this is the same company that has gone to great lengths to prevent the iPhone being used as a platform for porn, so overall, I give them better-than-average grades in the culture wars.

In addition, there is a plethora of Catholic apps already available, so it’s hard to argue that Apple discriminates systematically against the Catholic faithful. In fact, I’ve found my iPhone an indispensible aid to my devotional and apologetic life. It’s a back-pocket homilist, choir, bookshelf, retreat master, prayer partner, cheat sheet and art gallery all rolled into one. It might be an interesting Lenten penance for me to give up my use of the iPhone so much has it wound its way into my daily devotional life. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t retreat to my iPhone (or iPad or iTouch) for one of the following:

iTunes: Not only is it possible to purchase only the music I want, I can customize playlists for the seasons: Advent Mix, All Saints’ Day, Lent, Christmas, Easter, Psalms, Gregorian Chant, even a cobbled together sung rosary (in Latin) which takes a wonderfully long time to sing. Plunk my iPhone into the dock on my desk and I work with the constant background of music that refreshes me and uplifts me.

Podcasts: I’ve found a number of homilists that I like and I subscribe to their podcasts: Fr. Larry Richards, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Fr. Robert Barron, and a variety of EWTN podcasts. CDs from Lighthous Media and other Catholic sources have talks available on MP3 downloads as well. There’s no Catholic radio readily available in this particular prong of the buckle of the Bible Belt, so I rely on podcasts, tucked into my faithful iPhone, for inspiration and education. I listen to them in the car, thanks to a patch cord that connects to my radio, or when I take my lunch-time constitutional, courtesy my equally useful earplugs.

YouTube: Fr. Barron’s Word on Fire videos are available through YouTube as are many, many other interesting video clips. Check out Msgr. Charles Pope’s blog at http://blog.adw.org/. He almost always ends with a video.

Search for Catholic Apps in the iPhone App store and it’s like entering a candy shop. Many are free, most are inexpensive. Here’s my list of indispensible ones:

Magnificat: Although I also have the print version, it is almost never where I am when I want it, so I downloaded the app. It’s free for a month to try it out, the $1.99 a month thereafter and worth every penny. I have not yet garnered the courage to use it in church, not wanting to appear disrespectful or provide a near occasion of sin to some teenager who might mistake my reading the texts for texting during mass. But it has come in handy when I have found off minutes when I wanted to spend some time in prayer and meditation, and it’s a great help when traveling. Couple it with the alarm on the phone and I might be able to start praying the liturgy of the hours in the New Year, who knows? iMissal provides the mass readings, daily verses and prayers for $4.99 and iBreviary Pro is an app for the Liturgy of the Hours, for free.

Recordatio: You can have at your fingertips all the papal encyclicals of the last 50 years, as well as prompts for praying the rosary, a generous assortment of prayers, the Litany of Saints and acts of adoration, contrition, consecration, faith and praise. A great way to spend time waiting in line, for $1.99.

iPieta: This all purpose app contains the Bible, the Novus Ordo Calendar with readings for each day, prayers (some audio) and selections from the Church Fathers, Bible Commentaries, Papal encyclicals, the Summa Theologica, the Ecumenical Councils and writings of various saints including Joihn Vianney, St. Louis De Montfort, St. Augustine , St. Theresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross. No excuse for not doing ten minutes of good reading a day with this app, which is an entire library for $2.99.

St. Augustine: Just in case you want Confessions, The City of God and Christian Doctrine in one place, you can have it. For free, no less.

Saint of the Day: St. Anthony Messenger press’ application provides both written and audio biographies of the saint of the day, and also includes a calendar, alphabetical and patronage listing for $2.99. Saint a Day, from iMissal, has a similar app for $1.99, which does not include audio but does include devotions and prayers. If you want a little longer audio with more content and a more “edgy” delivery (the intro sounds like a voice-over from a super-hero movie) and a different, more “hip” approach, SaintCast is worth a try at $1.99. Buffering can take a while, so not something for when you are pressed for time, and the audios are much longer than the other apps.

iGod Today: Father Mike Manning of the Vatican Observatory provides daily sermonettes, video included. I like Fr. Manning’s gentle and enthusiastic messages. $1.99. You might also like iPadre, with Fr. Jay Finelli, also $1.99. Then there is an library with classic Fulton Sheen talks for $8.99—but with a free trial to decide whether you like it. You can also download the major works of St JoseMaria, but it’s a pricey app at $9.99, and there is no audio. Loyola Press has 3 Minute Retreat ($0.99) that can be a nice interlude in a busy day.

The Catholic Directory: I have used this to find mass times when traveling. It’s free and generally reliable.

Catholic Cheat Sheet: This app contains an outline of beliefs, disciplines, devotions and practices as well as general prayers and an explanation of the mass for $0.99. I’ve used it more than once when my memory fails me in a discussion with my Protestant friends. Answers for Catholics (A4C) is a good pocket resource for apologetics, either in answering questions from the curious or helping lapsed Catholics home to the faith. It has a section on Matthew Kelly’s Rediscovering Catholicism, as well as audio links, Bible quotes and an outline of apologetics in the most common topics encountered in discussions with non-Catholics. For those of us who have trouble remembering chapter and verse, even when we know the content, it’s a great resource at $1.99.

Virgin Mary, Cathedrals and Jesus Christ are all art applications that contain images that can be used as a focus for meditation. Some are better than others; the Jesus Christ app has some images that I really don't like and I keep hoping for an update to improve the selection. Cathedrals is the most extensive, and the most expensive at $4.99, but the images—photographs in a slide show--- are better as well.

I’ve never felt the need to use a rosary app regularly, but there are many, ranging from free to $4.99 for the Art Image Rosary. Most contain art, prompts for prayers and a focus for meditating on each mystery. Some have audio as well. You’re on your own to find one that works for you.

iConfess ($2.99), Sin Diary ($.0.99) and Prayer Steward ($1.99) are note-taking apps for confession and intercessions. I confess (no pun intended) that they languish on my device, as I have not made the transition to iPhone note taking yet, but if you have these might be useful.

The one downside to iPhone apps is that it’s not always possible to test them adequately, and you’ll probably find yourself, as I did, buying some you don’t like. No matter. Even the most expensive ones are reasonable, and it’s a good thing to support Catholic evangelism in the New Media. Most apps have a mechanism for feedback, and they are regularly updated with improvements.

Not all apps can be used equally well on iPhone, iPad and iPod, but many work on all the Apple technology, and they are easily managed and updated. Keeping up with the times can be a challenge, but with savvy Catholic programmers out there, we have an abundance of 21st Century technology to help feed—and spread—our faith.

I'll be Home for Christmas...

2010-12-28T06:14:00.000-08:00

It’s been an interesting Christmas, I encountered my own Ghost of Christmas Past and finally, I think, have begun to put some of the pieces of my journey in perspective.

It began, innocently enough, when I invited a Protestant friend over for tea. We spar from time to time on the subject of faith, sometimes very pointedly. But I enjoy her company and there is no better time to share than as the year winds down, so we had a rendezvous at the house for tea while the regular chaos of my life--including an interval of no power that pre-empted tea and made eggnog a last minute substitute--swirled around us. We spent a good deal of time just catching up; she and her husband had recently been to Iraq on a mission trip and I was anxious to hear the news.

Eventually, though, as it often does, conversation wound around to the differences in our faiths. What, she wondered, is the difference I experience between being Catholic and being a high-church Anglican. I cannot shake the idea that she finds the Catholic faith not only odd, but vaguely un-Christian, though she has never said so. Otherwise why would it matter, if one denomination is as good as another?

I reflected a minute, more out of habit than out of necessity, for I’ve considered the question often enough. Only recently have I voiced the answer, even to myself. In twenty years as an Anglican, felt no need--ever--to share my faith with others, though I practiced it earnestly and regularly. Now that I am a Catholic, I cannot be silenced. One friend even noted that my groom and I are the mouthiest Catholics she’s ever encountered, and indeed, we may be. Having discovered a treasure, I want the whole world to know about it.

That is a great change from my former, live-and-be silent self. I am, in fact, a new and very different person, in many, many ways. More patient. More tolerant. More vulnerable. More open. More involved. Less caustic. Less political. Less guarded. Less fearful.

And what, she wondered, did I think was the reason for that?

Not a hesitation: the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the full and lively sacramental life of the Catholic Church that brings me grace in ways I could not even begin to imagine before. Grace that must, in the end, change me, for that is the purpose of grace. Grace I never encountered before, at least not in that compelling and powerful way. My previous walk seems a distant impression, an image rendered in soft watercolors; my current journey a riot of form and color and texture, so much more vibrant and real is it.

Difficult sentiments to voice for a woman who spent a good deal of time loving a parish where the theology preached and expressed--including the Real Presence--was a lot like the Catholic faith, one of the reasons, I think, that crossing the Tiber was more of a wade than a swim for me. I’ve spent the last five years wrestling with the fallout of my conversion, trying to put into place my prior faith and my present one, in order to give the past the honor it is due. It has not been easy, and I have pushed the effort aside as often as I have encountered it. Easy to face the problems that drove me away from Lambeth Palace, harder to acknowledge the strengths of my Anglican life because it seems so confusing even as it is so dear.

The night we lit the first of the Advent candles began to bring it into focus. We still use the devotion that was our tradition in our former Episcopal community. I love the rich language of the collects that call us to put on the armor of God, the call to listen to the prophets, to bestir ourselves in God’s grace and to await the coming of Christ. And this year, succumbing to the residual house-pride I carry, one of our wreaths, a centerpiece in the dining room, had Anglican blue candles to match the decor. It became a subject of conversation among some of my Catholic friends.

There are still a few vestiges of my Anglican life, I excused myself as I lit the first candle in preparation for the devotion and grace. And this is one of them.

Of course, they responded, as well there should be. You, after all, all you have been as well as all you are becoming.

Later, I would find myself in the balcony of the church on Christmas eve, because it was SRO on the main level. I realized as I watched the mass from this unfamiliar perspective, that I have not sat in a balcony since leaving the Episcopal Church, though that was my location of preference then because there is no better way to watch the unfolding of the pageantry of the liturgy than from above. I wondered in passing whether it was an accident of the churches I attend, or an unspoken desire to make things different, and leave behind what had gone before. I decided that I did not know and that it does not matter. I felt a passing nostalgia for a prior place and time, the smells and bells and sights and sounds of Christmases past and it warmed my heart even as I realized the difference in where I am from where I was.

Then I lost myself in the mass. In the lovely, comforting, incomparable words of the mass, that once sounded so plain and ordinary to me when compared to that flowing, English poetry of the Anglican service. I realized that the beauty of the mass now transcended the words, and the robes and the ritual--it resided in the fact of what I knew, really knew, was happening before me: Christ made present in this place and time so that I may really, truly receive Him. The pageantry of a most solemn high mass is wonderful it is elevating, it is elegant--but it is, I realized, also somewhat superfluous in the grand scheme of things. Christ is as truly present in a humble parish as in the grandest Cathedral, from the hands of the youngest priest as from the hands of the Pope.

I recalled that this was the last Christmas I would hear these words, as there will be a new missal next year this time. And the good Father who brought me into the Church will retire, so that an unfamiliar voice will be saying unfamiliar words in a new rite that echoes back to the ancient words of the early Church, bringing the liturgy--and me--full circle. Away from what was to what always was. And bringing me deeper into the self that God has in mind for me.

For once, the change does not worry me--the biggest change of all, for in my past I considered change to be a four-letter word. I am confident that whatever happens with the words of the mass, Christ will still come to me in the Eucharist, and in the end, all will be well. For all their foibles and problems, I trust the Bishops and the Pope under the protection of the Holy Spirit, whose hand I see throughout the great sweep of Church history, to safeguard the deposit of the faith and thus, the essence and treasure of the Church. I don’t feel compelled to fight so hard to maintain the status quo--I have learned by experience that growing in faith means letting go of some things in order to let others in, as long as I remain focused on Who really matters, and trust in His providence and reside in His Church.

My Anglican past taught me to appreciate the rhythms of liturgy and the beauty of language. The rector of my parish helped grow in me a deep reverence for the Eucharist, for which I will be ever grateful. That community set me on the path to Rome by nurturing a love for undeniable Truth and the reality of Christ still present and acting in the world through the sacraments and the conditional baptism I needed. The ground was well and truly plowed and the seeds of faith deeply sown in that twenty years.

But it took the Catholic Church to bring them to flower, to provide the nourishment that brought forth real fruit, fruit that even I can see, change in abundance, grace overflowing in the manner, and in the Church, Christ prescribed. I am grateful indeed for the plowshare and the hand that held it, and the seeds that were dropped--but it is the message of the great bounty of harvest of grace and the garner of the Church into which it comes about which I find myself wanting to shout from the rooftops.

I am thankful for the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Past. The incomparable, splendid joy-that-must-be-shared of Christmas present in my Catholic faith gives me life and I am home. And there is no place like home for Christmas.....

The Glorious Mysteries for Seminarians

2010-12-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

St. Paul talks of the groaning of the Spirit within us as prayer too deep for words, groaning that cannot be uttered. Most times, I think of that groaning as an expression of pain and suffering that is simply too vast or overwhelming to articulate. The Spirit steps in to uphold us in our weakness, to give us the strength to sustain our journey in faith, and to give vent to the things that try the core of our very souls and carry the message to God.

When I started to pray the Glorious mysteries, I discovered that the Spirit can groan because things are just too great and wonderful to articulate as well. More than any other time, meditating on these mysteries causes my mind to wander far off the path of language into images and senses that I have a hard time putting into words, the following rather lengthy attempt notwithstanding. The weakness I experience in casting my mind on these mysteries is not the failing shortfall of sin, it’s the shortfall of trying to put into words the unimaginable glory of the new creation….rather like the difference between seeing a sunset and trying to describe it…and so, the Spirit steps in. The Spirit will always step in, if we let Him.

The Resurrection: I believe in the resurrection, but like Thomas, there is a part of me that cannot begin to comprehend it. Not only did Jesus consent to die for me, knowing all the while what I have done and will do to separate myself from Him and reject the gift He offers, He returns, lifted up from the dead, and His first word is Peace.

Not recrimination, but peace. Not bitter disappointment at those who denied and abandoned Him, but the calming quiet of love. His resurrection completes the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation, God made man, made vulnerable, made subject to His own creatures, and returning with arms outstretched in greeting to embrace us even in our brokenness.

Father help those who are called to the priesthood to remember that You knew, even as You called them, their weaknesses as well as their strengths. You knew their limitations, how they would disappoint You and how they would falter and You called them anyway to be men of the Resurrection as much as men of the cross. Men who know that the worst the world has to offer is not the end, men who will by their lives give witness to the stone rolled away from the tomb. Help them always to be men with their own arms outstretched for those they serve. Help us, too, to always embrace them with a greeting of peace and love grounded in the living Christ.

The Ascension: Jesus, You went before us to prepare a place for us, and so will our priests will prepare us to meet You. Prepare the hearts of Your seminarians to love Your people, so that they may preach and teach and baptize and make disciples in Your name. Give them a love for Your Church, both as it is in its worldly imperfection and as it will be in the perfect fullness of time.

We pray for those who are being formed in seminary, and for those who are responsible for their formation. Ground them in Your love and Your will. Transform them, with Your love so that they can become the beacons that lead us to You. As You stretched out Your hands to bless your Apostles when You returned to Your Father, bless these men whom you have called as their successors. Strengthen them, confirm them, and let Your glory be ever before them to guide and strengthen them in their vocation.

The Descent of the Holy Spirit: Ordinary men, once touched by the Holy Spirit were released form the prison of their fears, and with a boldness of spirit—Your Spirit—went forth to share the good news with the whole world. You made possible the seemingly impossible: the transformational love of God spread to the farthest reaches of the world because a remnant of believers received in their hearts the fire that Christ longed to cast upon the earth, the fire of the Spirit. It changed them and You used them to change the world.

Come, Holy Spirit, and enkindle in the hearts of your seminarians an unquenchable love and desire to serve God and His people. Pour out Your gifts on them. Strengthen them, and give them joy, peace, love, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Make them modest, generous and chaste. Convict them when they sin, and lead them to continuing conversion so that they always know Your presence in their lives.

Comfort them in times of trial. Empower their learning and give eloquence and force to their ministry. Enable in them the life of Christ Himself, so that they may assist in bringing to completion Your work in the Church. Prepare them to bring by the sacraments and by their lives the life of the Spirit to those they will serve.

Give us, too, we pray, a share in Your Spirit, that we may love and serve them as they love and serve us. Use them, and use us, to change our world, and illuminate it with the fire of the Holy Spirit.

The Assumption: Oh, Mary! You show us by your very life the path of discipleship that we are to follow, the one thing Christ could not show us Himself. Too often we describe your life in terms of acquiescence or submission to God’s will, but I think it was more than deference, yielding. Was it not more an active joining of your will with God’s? A resounding, confident yes. A yes that, even though you did not understand the particulars, was completely, absolutely and freely given because you knew how to trust God as completely as He loved you. A yes that flowered in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and at length, the Assumtion.

Mary, your response to God opened the way for Him to come among us as man. Help those who would share in the priesthood of your Son to learn all the the lessons of your yes, brought to wonderful completion in your assumption, the assumption that means a human mother, body and soul, intercedes for them in Heaven. Nurture in them the life of Jesus, your son. Guide and direct them with maternal love and concern. Wrap your mantle around them. Hold them in your arms with joy as you held your infant son, and in sorrow as you stood at the foot of the cross.

As you walked with Jesus through His ministry, be with them in theirs. Spread your mantle around them, strengthen and protect them and lead them gently and perfectly, as you always do, to your son, our Savior. Teach them the deepest expressions of yes to the will of God, whatever form it takes for them. Help them keep their eyes on heaven, which is home, the place their Father, Brother and Mother all await them, and us.

We ask too, that gift of joyful assent for ourselves, that we, like you, may open ourselves fully to the will of God. We ask particularly that we see the gift of vocation to the priesthood as an opportunity for a joyous yes from those of us who surround our seminarians. Intercede for us that we may be rid of selfish desires and fears that would impede the vocations of those we love. As your yes to God’s will in your life ultimately gave rise to the priesthood of your son, let ours be the soil from which the priesthood of others will grow.

The Coronation: Mary, Queen of Heaven, has a unique relationship with God. She is, after all, the only one with whom she can speak to God the Father of our son. What a surpassing mystery that intimate relationship is, and what deeper mystery it holds for the rest of humankind, still broken and fettered by sin. A God who loves us enough to become Man, a mother who so completely loved God that she could give a free and unfettered yes to her role in salvation history. A Redeemer kinsman who knows what it means to be human and who walked the very path we have to walk in order to show us the way out of darkness.

God could have chosen to redeem the world in so many ways, but He chose this one. His grace gives us Father and Brother, and mother; King and Sovereign, and queen. The threads of human life so intimately bound together with God Himself that participating in the Divine Life becomes the very purpose of our own existence—to love God, and to serve God, that we might, like Mary, be happy with Him in heaven for all eternity.

Pray for us, Mary, Queen of Heaven. Intercede for us, that God may raise up from among us many vocations to the priesthood, many holy seminarians who will become happy and holy priests, bringing to the people of God the sacraments of the Church. In the spiritual order, prepare them to be good priests who mirror the love of our Heavenly Father, that we may all enjoy a place in the family of God. Mary our Mother, pray for us, and remind us that we are, indeed, royal children with a heavenly inheritance.

Thanks be to God!

Infant of Prague

2010-12-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

I made a pilgrimage to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers last week. It’s a yearly trek, part of my “buy Catholic” campaign. My groom needs to give professional gifts at this time of year, so we send Monk Fudge. For the record, the Trappists at Gethsemane make awesome cheese and the Carmelites in Wyoming roast amazing coffee....

Anyway, visiting the monastery is never a brief proposition. There’s always a need to spend time in the beautiful, austere Gothic chapel, and no matter the season and the weather, my groom can always find a hundred things to photograph. I, on the other hand, gravitate to the bookshop. Finding a place to lay hands on Catholic books in Chattanooga is something of a challenge, so I am apt to go a bit overboard. And the shop also has a fine collection of statuary.....

Having discovered the utility of images, prayer cards and other such paraphernalia in focusing and enriching my devotional life, I have acquired quite a collection, my version of visual gluttony, I guess. I’m not quite of the opinion that it is not possible to have too much statuary, but I do tend to fall on the side of the argument that holds that anywhere one’s eye might fall really should hold something that helps raise one’s mind to God. Hence, it is a dangerous thing indeed to leave me unattended in a monastery gift shop.

I have to give myself credit this time for a modicum of restraint. Most of what I bought will go for gifts to others, but I treated myself to two small images: a nice statue of St. Patrick, who has been dear to me since I read his Confessions and found in him a kindred soul and a tiny, ornate statue of the Infant of Prague. It seems to me that the Infant King is particularly appropriate at this time of year.

A friend of mine, who entered the Church last Easter was initially put off by a state of the Infant that is in one of our local parishes, a traditional statue with elaborate satin gowns that are changed with the seasons. For an Evangelical Protestant who was having trouble with the whole concept of saints and statuary, this was almost too much to manage.

For me, the Infant of Prague led me to a new and deeper understanding of Advent , of Christ Himself and of the journey of faith. Not because of the history of the statue, which is impressive in itself, but because of the image itself: a child, dressed in elaborate robes, holding the world in his hand and crowned as a king. I always gave intellectual assent to Christ as King, and of course, I was familiar with the songs and sentiments that celebrated the infant Jesus as king, though I never really gave it much thought. Protestants tend to skip over the first thirty-three years of Jesus’ life, except for the seasonal nod at Christmas.

No such perspective for me as a Catholic. Every time I go to mass in the chapel at our parish, I see the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, with both Mother and Child elaborately crowned and the cross ominous in the background. When I visit another parish, there is the Infant of Prague, Child-King holding the world in His hands. Jesus certainly grew into His human manhood and undertook His ministry, but He was just as much the Word, and our Creator, and our Savior in the manger as on the cross, and just as worthy of worship and obedience. The fact that He chose to come to earth in a form which we could literally embrace, nurture and protect has some significance to our journey, God wants to enter the very center of our lives and goes to every extent—even that of becoming not just human but a newborn—to see that happen.

And this brings me to Advent. Once I began to wrap my mind around the fact that Christ is Christ whenever and however I encounter Him, eternally present and eternally unchanging in essence, I began to understand how fitting—and how wonderful—it is that He chose to come to us in the form of an infant. I begin to understand that all of His human life leads us to relationship with God—not just the last three years, days or hours. All of Christ’s life on earth was preparation for and direction to the work of salvation, even those early years about which we can only guess.

But the guesses are informed ones. Most of us have had the experience, if not of having children, of watching others go through the experience. There is the great and anxiety-filled period of waiting, preparing the house and the heart to receive a new life, without really knowing what that life will be. All parents—mothers especially—relate the undercurrent of worry that comes with pregnancy. My own experience with adoption was just the same. After our baby was born but not yet in our arms, we went through nine months of anxiety in one restless night. I woke from restless sleep and asked my husband, What if he flunks the first grade? A little later, he shook me awake asking, What if he can’t get a date for the senior prom? There’s something about letting new life in, life over which one ultimately has little control, that surfaces our vulnerabilities ., that makes us know that we are destined to change in ways we can neither foresee nor control.

And so it is when we let Christ into our lives. What if I cannot run the race? What if He asks me to do something I don’t want to do? What if...what if...what if...In following Christ, it is needful to let go of those anxieties, and let Him shape and lead us where He wants us to go. Difficult for headstrong, competent, independent people. There’s an inherent resistance to following another’s lead, even when it makes sense to do so. We’d just rather do it ourselves.

Ah, but watch the transformation in a household that receives a baby! Ordinary, established and cherished routines go out the window, and life begins to revolve around this helpless new being that communicates only by coos and wails, who has no concept of schedule and expects that life will revolve around him, and his simple, intractable, infant will. And it does.

Initially, the transformation of the household is difficult. There’s no arguing with an infant, and the only way to have peace in the house is to yield to the infant’s demands whenever and however they are made. It doesn’t take long for the parents, head over heels in love with their new baby, to begin to take the most extraordinary activity as completely normal. Tired mothers find comfort in nursing their babies even in the small hours of the morning and on a brutal schedule. Tired fathers suddenly don’t mind dragging their protesting frames out of bed to fetch the baby, the bottle or both. Fastidious adults find themselves changing diapers and exchanging stories with other of the initiated about the trials of doing so. Travel slows, and life centers on baby’s comfort, baby’s safety, baby’s nap, baby’s schedule. Soon enough, the tiny infant will become a surly adolescent, but even those trials—in prospect and in retrospect—gain perspective when remembering the baby who arrived helpless and took over the house.

If Advent does its job and we receive Christ as the vulnerable infant King, in the same way we receive our own children, then we have prepared our hearts to change, for God will always come to us in a way we can receive. We have acknowledged all those anxieties that spoil our present moments, but we have a sweet Infant in our arms, and that is enough.

Tomorrow will take care of itself, and no matter what it brings, here is this Baby who fills our hearts and stills, at least for the moment, our concerns. And like all good parents, we almost unaware begin to arrange our lives, happily and as completely as we can, around that Infant. Later, we will resist His demands as He articulates them to us, for we are fallen and imperfect. But for now, even we poor sinners know how to care for a baby.

But He is King on the throne and King on the cross and King in the manger, and we must recognize him wherever He is. And if in the hard, demanding days of summer when we encounter Christ on the way to the cross, we can remember the lessons we learned when we welcomed Him into our hearts and into a cradle in the middle of winter, perhaps we can do then as we seek to do now: let His presence fill our hearts and homes, arrange our lives around Him without questioning, and serve Him as He asks.

ILYACYTBMHTDAED

2010-12-16T05:51:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, we went to a retirement dinner of friend. He’s a great guy and a staunch Presbyterian, and one of my verbal sparring buddies. Asked to say a few words, he made the predictable comments about his career, then veered off into talking about his almost 50 year marriage. I’ll never forget my astonishment at how he talked about marriage being a hard, hard struggle. I’ll also not soon forget the amused look in his wife’s eyes. My pal is one of those folks who just can’t seem give himself permission to express unadulterated joy in public....and his indulgent wife knew how to read between the lines, even if we didn’t, at first.

Marriage as struggle is a common theme these days, and for too many it is: a knock-down, drag-out affair in which, the popular narrative (especially the feminist one) insists that one of the partners is lost in the will of the other one, never to be seen again. For too many of us, marriage has become an inconvenient convenience, a social and legal fabrication to be tossed away and refashioned at will. An institution, a mere convention, not a living, breathing vocation for which the partners are both called and shaped.

Thirty six years ago yesterday, I entered my vocation. My groom and I were married in a concrete block community hall decorated with billboards of Christmas cards, thanks to rain that made our outdoor plans impossible. Something of an omen--things often do not turn out like you think they will, but then again--wet knots hold tightest. We were married by the medical school chaplain, my groom in a rented suit, and I in a homemade dress. Unchurched at the time, we wrote our own vows that gave a passing nod to God, but it seems that’s all He needed of us.

I’ve read those vows over in the passing years and been struck by how insightful they really were. We promised to make a life together that was greater than either of our lives apart. We promised to laugh and cry and disagree with each other, knowing our love needed all those things to survive. We promised to make our commitment new every day. And we asked the prayers of our friends and family in doing so.

Our vows quickly evolved into a sort of Rule of the Order for our marriage. Having reached the point where I have been married far longer than I was single, I think it’s probably not too presumptuous to conclude that our rules laid the foundation in which God worked to shape us, to shape our marriage and to bring us closer to Him.

The rules? Not hard, and really, only three:

To view our marriage as a being in itself, one we needed to nurture above all others, even our own lives: the unchurched, hippie version of sacrificial commitment to marriage and later, family.

Never to go to bed angry. This was a doozy in the early years of working out the kinks of living together, especially given that my groom and I are in many ways polar opposites. When you add in the fact that we were chronically sleep-deprived medical students, it was a tough rule, but we never broke it. There were more than a few times we were up nearly all night wresting some issue to ground. After a while it adds a certain clarity to one’s stubbornness: am I willing to give up sleep for this position? More and more often the answer was no, and when it was, I was amazed at how we managed to find common ground that we never saw before. We still differed in our perspectives, but disagreement wasn’t the source of separation. It was the first time I realized I could love, really love, someone I disagreed with. Let God in that crack in your defenses, and no telling where that will lead.

To recommit to our marriage first thing every morning and before going to sleep at night. To this day, we repeat a portion of our vows on rising and retiring, and text each other the abbreviation ilyacytbmh/wtdaed when absent one from the other.

We’ve had an ordinary-extraordinary marriage with all the usual peaks and valleys. Infertility, then a miscarriage and finally an uninsured preemie who came two full months early at a time in our lives when we literally collected soda bottles to tide us over from paycheck to paycheck. Financial pressures, including one memorable time when we had four mortgages and would have had to borrow money to sell one of the houses we “owned.” Chronic illness and death of three parents. Estrangement and reconciliation with parents and children and siblings and friends. Adolescents, including the seemingly obligatory brush with John Law and deep, terrifying depressions. Good business deals and bad. Accidents and adventures. Fear, uncertainty, conflict, sorrow, anger, doubts, special needs, PMS--all there. More than enough rocks in the river to wreck a marriage--most of our medical school cohort are on their second--or third--marriages, with lives not so very different in stress and experience than ours and some much more placid.

But the strange thing is that, from where I sit today, I don’t experience any of that as hard or as a struggle, even when I remember the pain that I experienced--physical and spiritual--in the midst of them. To borrow a phrase from St. Paul, I count it all joy.

Joy because our marriage has truly become what we wanted it to be: a living entity, a “two-become-one person” in whom the threads of my life have become so intwined with those of my husband’s that they can no longer be separated. Joy because I understand that getting to where I am required going to all those places, pleasant and not, in the past. Joy because marriage imagery is all over the New Testament, and I understand better that my marriage journey on earth is meant to be a mirror of my journey with Christ. Same peaks, same valleys, same intertwining of threads that happens so slowly and so delicately that I don’t even know it is happening until I take a moment to look back and am amazed and humbled. I don’t understand it with my intellect, this process of growing through the journey, but I know it in my heart and it sustains me even when I am unaware of it.

Two cocky, secular, second year med students decided to marry thirty-six years ago, and because of their parents and families and guardian angels, they left the tiniest crack in their well-constructed, theoretically perfect life-plan and God sneaked in, as He is wont to do. Give Him and inch, and He’ll take it all.

This morning, I got a note from a friend asking God to bless us on our anniversary. He has. Oh, He has!

Thanks be to God.

The Sorrowful Mysteries for Seminarians

2010-12-07T03:31:00.000-08:00

If the Luminous Mysteries are my favorites to pray, the Sorrowful ones are the easiest. When I first began praying the rosary, I saw no possible benefit in dwelling on the details of the passion--imagine! With time and trust the the Church knows what she is talking about, I came to understand a little better the place of suffering in the Christian life and the Christian’s place in suffering. Hard to understand, a paradox, a necessity, and ultimately the way to joy. Just as there are no shadows without light, there can be no joy without the cross.

The Agony in the Garden: Seminarians will spend a great deal of time here with you, Father. They are asked to bear so much, give up so much, shoulder so much, love so much. It is bewildering and overwhelming, and they will find themselves asking you to relieve their burdens. Help them to know that the way through their own daily passion is through Gethsemane, in prayer with Christ who leads the way. Keep them men of prayer and trust, willing to come to you in the honesty of their hearts when circumstances seem to overwhelm, but also men who seek your will and not their own. Prepare them by their prayers to work out Your will in this world.

Mary, you were not present at the Garden but were surely there in your heart. Intercede for these men, your sons all, to walk with confidence and trust the way prepared for them just as Christ did, just as you did. And please, may we be with them in these dark hours, close by and prayerful. Seek for us the grace to keep watch without sleeping, mindful of their agony and entering into it with them.

The Scourging at the Pillar: How easy it is for others to suffer for our own sins! How easy it is to punish those who are convenient but have not offended! As priests, these men will bear the pains and problems of every community they enter into or lead. That which we cannot bear in ourselves, we cast upon our priests, and then it is our hands that hold the punishing lash.

Sustain them, Father, and intercede for them Mary, as they walk knowingly and in love into a world that will punish their faith and their love merely because it exists and its witness discomforts us. Help us to comfort them and please, Father, let us never be the ones who scourge them.

The Crowning with Thorns: Freedom without God leads invariably to cruelty and license. Jesus, you were crowned with thorns merely because the men you were given over to could do it, and no one would stop them. You endured the mocking and derision at the hands of those You came to save. So it will be with these men. The priests who have gone before them will tell them of being spat on, ridiculed, of mothers bundling their children away with frightened whispers in the ears.

GIve them fortitude, Father, to love even then. Mary, wrap them in the mantle of your love even as they expend themselves, over and over, in the face of a world that cares not for them or about them. Help them to be by their very presence a living and visible prayer for the world. We cannot bear their crown of thorns, but perhaps we can extend a hand to stay others from placing it on their brow. Give us the faith and courage to not let pass unremarked the ridicule of the world, and create in us a defender’s heart, that we too may be witnesses to Your love and theirs.

The Carrying of the Heavy Cross: All of us must carry our crosses, but these men will have crosses heavier than most, for they have been called to carry our burdens as well as their own, just as Christ did. Like you, Jesus, they will walk before us to show us the way, reminding us that there is no Resurrection without Calvary.

Father, keep that knowledge within them, the certainty that the cross leads to Heaven. Mary, walk with them and encounter them along the way of their journey, as you encountered your own Son. Intercede for them and comfort them as you comforted Him. And select from among us those who, like Simon, will stand shoulder-to-shoulder to link arms with them and carry a measure of the burden, every step of the way.

The Crucifixion: We must all die to self to rise to You, but for our men in seminary, the process begins quickly and proceeds relentlessly. We ask so much of them--You ask everything. They give up the comfort of family nearby, of independence even of schedule, of many of the comforts the rest of us rely on. Letting go is so hard, Father, but it is only when we empty our hands and ourselves that you can fill them. Still, Father it is so hard, so hard. Help them to know that when they, too are lifted up on the cross, they beckon us so that we may see Your love and your presence in the world.

Sustain these men as they join themselves to Jesus on the cross, expending themselves for us and for You. Keep us close by them with Mary and John, that we may reach out and embrace them even as they lose themselves for our sakes in Your service.

According to Plan

2010-12-06T17:14:00.000-08:00

Will this be a holiday or a holy day?

The Bishop posed the question after having asked us How many of you have bought at least one Christmas present? Dozens of hands went up. The rest were prevaricating.

Then he posed the alternate question, to which he asked no show of hands. How many of you have a plan to prepare for the coming of our Saviour, the Incarnation of Christ, that event in history that makes all the eternal difference in the world to you and me?

Darn! I could have raised my hand, and here I was deprived of the opportunity and forced into humility by the wisdom of the Bishop.

But the fact of the matter is that I do have a plan, have for years, It began with an Episcopal rector who was adamant--nay, even Grinch-like--in his determination not to celebrate Christmas until Christmas. I learned the rhythms of careful, deliberate preparation, and of separating myself from the culture at large. It is the best Advent present I ever received, and I cherish it even now.

The creche in the church, and in our home, went up one small piece at a a time. First, a stable. A week later, animals. Then a herald angel. At the beginning of the last week, Mary and Joseph. After midnight mass, the children got to place the baby Jesus in the manger, and add the shepherds. The wise men began their trek from the distant rooms of the house, moved forward day be day by the children to arrive on Epiphany Eve. The custom, curious to visitors to the house prompted questions and answers. Every move was made with stories and prayers, often tailored to a child’s enthusiasm and attention. The very act of stretching out the assembly of the Holy Family made us reflective and patient. We must, after all, learn patience because God is so very patient with us.

It wasn’t long before I started avoiding the malls because I didn’t want to hear Christmas music before Christmas. I assembled a fine collection of Advent music that played throughout the house until December 24, and I bought as many presents as I could mail order. These days I thank God for iTunes and the Internet--I can almost totally avoid being assaulted by inane versions of Silent Night and that wretched Drummer Boy until the Day actually arrives. Cleaning my ears of distracting music opened them for the messages and music of Advent, and I learned the real meaning of the old adage: he who sings, prays twice. I began to listen to the reality of our salvation in music the rest of the world forgets--a savior is coming. Not just pretty lyrics, a statement of faith, real faith, once that of Israel, now my own. My sin. My sorrow. The prophets who speak to me. And the unspeakable joy that God does, indeed have a plan and it involves my redemption.

The tree posed a problem, though. Leave it until December 24th and the pickings are slim. Besides, the kids and the culture demand trees, and anyone who ever saw my husband putting lights on the family evergreen would have no doubt that the experience is penitential. For years, we just accepted this as the limit of our ability to square the season with the culture. We even put up a joking sign advertising the trees, wreaths, and nutcrackers as “Advent decorations.” The more I came to appreciate the wisdom of the liturgical calendar, the less the rationalization satisfied. Having learned the reason for Advent, the tree was a jarring note in my preparation, but as a tradition it was hard to lose.

Of late, we’ve hit on the perfect compromise. We string the tree with white lights, then purple and separate strands of multicolored bulbs. We then decorate entirely in purple ornaments, lighting the purple lights for Advent. Christmas Eve, off come the purple ornaments, and on go the traditional Christmas baubles, and the colored lights are lit. The purple tree gives opportunity to witness about the importance of Advent to visitors to our home and indulges the festive part of my soul while honoring a tradition of many years. And after all, we’re getting ready for a birth. What mother leaves painting the nursery until the night before? We listen to Lessons and Carols as we change out one season for another in our living room. It marks the time well.

But the real changes aren’t in fixture and customs. They come in the heart, trained into a new way of thinking by disrupting the old patterns of selfishness. The new, improved, Catholic me, trained by months or meditating on the nativity in the course of praying the rosary finds herself plunged even deeper into the miraculous indulgent, extravagant love that is the reason we celebrate. Imagine, God become man (yes: man. Not generic human--MAN). And not just man, but an infant, helpless, tiny, vulnerable, the All-powerful left powerless and dependent on His creatures. The Creator of the Universe, birthed into a stable, suckled at a human breast, subject to the ills and wills and ill wills of mankind. A remarkable God, unlike any other humankind had ever imagined. What must it have been like for God to experience in human nature so fully that which He created? What must it have been like for Mary to hold her Creator in her arms? There is not enough time in a life, nor rosaries enough to pray, to begin to understand that. Time there is, however, to rejoice in it, in the God who brought it all to be.

A God who is patient enough to wait out generations on generations (count them up--they are in the readings...) until the time was right to enter human time, incarnate. A God who is, after that cataclysm, patient enough to wait out 30 years before taking His message to the world. A God incarnate of a woman who, free from the sins that bind you and me, could say yes fully and completely to a plan she had no control over and that would rend her very heart by its overwhelming sorrow. A God who would do all this if I were the only one in the world to do it for. A woman who would have said yes, just for me.

I have a plan, a plan of little things and small changes and deliberate choices that mirror the quiet way in which God entered the word, in hopes that they will help me to enter into Him. I rise early to read the morning office by the light of a purple tree and the purple candles in a wreath. I turn off the radio and CD in the car and spend my time with Mary as I drive in to work. I choose not to be rushed. What is done is done and what is not is not. As I go about my seasonal tasks, I pray for those I cook for, write to, shop for, those I see in line, those who wait on me, those I work with, those in foul tempers, those who cut me off in traffic. I save my Christmas cards to make intercessions for the senders throughout the year. I look at the year-end savings on my grocery tab and write a check to feed the poor, and throw in a little extra. Little things. Small beginnings. But God likes small things, He showed us as much on Christmas Day.

It is not enough, it can never really be enough. But it reminds me, daily, of the extravagant gift I am waiting for, living for, anticipating with every fiber of my being. And when I go to mass on Christmas morning, surrounded by gathered family, may I begin to appreciate what a gift it is I have received because God chose a particular moment in time to show us the depth and breadth of His love by entering the world so quietly, and according to plan.

The Luminous Mysteries, for Seminarians

2010-12-06T04:44:00.000-08:00

The Mysteries of Light seem particularly appropriate at this time of year. Given my preference for shadows, the fact that I love praying them is somewhat paradoxical--but then, no light, no shadows, so perhaps it makes sense after all......of all the mysteries, these have thrust their roots deep in my daily life. They speak to plain, everyday existence, that march of ordinary days that makes up the journey. They teach me how remarkable even the ordinary can be.

The Baptism in the Jordan: If I have trouble dealing with light, Father, I have even more trouble dealing with water. You created me a desert person, happy to live in the sands and fearful of water unrestricted. I share the fear the first century Jew had for the ocean depths, and for me, the roaring river and the deep lake are not far behind. Water, deep water, frightens me.

Except for the deepest water, the water of baptism. You tamed the water for me, Jesus and made it a vehicle of restoration rather than fear. The change needful in my life came when the waters of baptism, sanctified by Your Presence, were poured over my head, relieving, remaking, refreshing me.

May our seminarians be refreshed daily by the waters of their baptism. May they recall it every time they dip their hands in a font, draw a glass from the tap, pass by a lake, an ocean or a stream, feel the rain on their faces Their baptism was the start of their call from You, Father. Clean and restored by Your sacrament, may they be men of the baptismal covenant, leading others to the waters.

The Wedding at Cana: I know the traditional lessons of this mystery, but this has always spoken to me in a different way, I find great pleasure in the fact that the first miracle occurred at a party, with Jesus in attendance. God is truly there at our times of joy, and if asked, will make them so much better than we planned. It is a good thing to celebrate in this life, a good thing to enjoy time with friends and take part in their joys as well as their sorrows. Sorrows follow soon enough--let us be certain to take time to enjoy the pleasures we are afforded as gifts from God. Let us remember that the men set apart to serve us as priests ought not be excluded from sharing our ordinary joys.

May we remember that joy shared is joy multiplied. Let us remember to include our seminarians in the pleasures and celebrations of our lives, not just the somber and liturgical times. They are set apart by God, but intended to be in the very midst of His people. Help us to remember that.

The Proclamation of the Kingdom: Jesus spoke to ordinary people in ordinary ways in ordinary circumstances, and made them extraordinary. He taught the Kingdom not just in the temple, but on roadsides, on mountains, in boats, in houses, at table, and the people came from miles around to see and to hear. The message of the Kingdom is such a gift, and so hard to learn and to live! But it is intended for me, and I need to be reminded.

May our seminarians be blessed with teachers who proclaim the Kingdom clearly and lovingly, so that they, too can preach it in their own time. May the message of Christ live in their hearts and show in their lives, in ordinary places, with ordinary people.

The Transfiguration: Ah, Peter the Everyman....It is good for us to be here; if you wish, I can erect three booths...Peter had the immediate understanding that something wonderful was happening in that remote place far from the precincts of the temple, where God was supposed to do His work, even though he wasn’t certain what that was. And like all of us, he wanted as much to act in it as to simply be a part of it and savor it. Getting a glimpse of God’s glory is like that...

May our seminarians get a glimpse of that glory, and understand the power of the Transfiguration--Jesus’ and their own. Like Peter, make them men who respond to the power of God revealed to them, respond in their action, in their service, in a desire to build God a place in their very lives.

The Establishment of the Eucharist: Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the earth. In the upper room, around a common table, with simple unleavened bread and common wine, in the course of an established and familiar custom, Christ gave us not only Himself in the Eucharist, but the priests who will bring Him to us and keep Him near.

He transformed the familiar into something precious beyond comprehension, and then gave it to the Church for safekeeping. He gave us His very Self, body and blood, soul and divinity. What was He thinking, the Creator of the Universe under the appearances of a wafer of bread, a drop of wine? God in the midst of the most ordinary and familiar of things and circumstances. God with us, pursuing us beside us, always. Here for our present, minute by minute, in what we do, alongside us at every instant. The lesson of the Mysteries of Light, the lesson of life itself.

If the center of the Catholic life is the Eucharist, how much more so for the men who will be priests? Hushed and in awe, I cannot begin to understand the breadth and depth of the miracle of the Eucharist. Help me carry it at the deepest part of my being, even if it eludes my understanding. Help me to reverence it, honor it, and to carry forth Christ in me.

Our seminarians will be first and foremost men of the Eucharist. Give them a deep love for Christ in the Eucharist. Fill them and form them and strengthen them with Your presence in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament, and accept our prayers we bring to your altar our prayers for them and their intentions.

The Joyful Mysteries, for Seminarians

2010-12-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

I have been mindful of late of how difficult formation for the priesthood is, and formation it truly is--the taking of a man and making him into the image of Someone Else. Formation is change, and it is never easy. It always demands a laying down of self, the very hardest task of humankind.

I undertook an Advent discipline of turning off the CD player in the car on my drives to and from work (and thus, my corporate rosary with John Paul II and others). I wasn’t sure what to do with the time, but figured God would let me know.

As He did. To and fro every day, I am still engaged in my rosary but alone and aloud, praying for the seminarians in my care. Casting the mysteries in the light of what we ask of the young men who wish to enter into the priesthood has been a challenge. I’ll never walk their journey, of course, but entering into prayerful support has made me think closely about it, and so I offer my meditations.

The Annunciation: What must it be like to hear deep in the recesses of one’s mind the call to priesthood? Surely, Mary, you understand. You know about the uncertainty that immediately arises, that feeling of unworthiness, and then, in response to the persistence of the call, the response, the only response that one can make to God Himself.

The way will sometimes be difficult and confusing, but the response is utterly and always, yes. The call is the beginning, not the fruition. Just as Mary pondered her own calling and the events of her life, we must ponder our own. Just as Christ grew within her, He will grow within us, not suddenly, but over time, slowly and almost imperceptibly, as a result of our affirmation of God’s primacy in our lives.

May our seminarians take comfort in that simple and perfect yes of Mary, and imitate it, knowing that God will provide for them as He did for her. May those of us around them, like Joseph, not be fearful of taking into our own hearts these men and nurturing their call.

The Visitation: As soon as she heard the call, Mary did something about it. A call from God is always a call to bring His love to others in haste and in obedience, and it is a call to recognition. The visitation teaches us both to look outward and to look within--to remember that we bring Christ to others, and that they bring Him to us. And to know that when we welcome Him and bring Him, great blessings flow.

Let us with a leap of joy recognize Christ in our seminarians, even when He is, as as the infant in Mary’s womb, obscured by what we see externally. Like Elizabeth, let our words be affirming and full of love, both for our seminarians and for the Christ they bring to us. Let us invite them without hesitation into our lives.

The Nativity: Any parent will tell you it’s possible to see the man in the child, but only in retrospect. The greatest miracle to me is not that God chose to become incarnate, but that He did it in the usual way, arriving small and helpless, and growing to His full stature in the completeness of time. It reminds me that God’s timeline is infinite, and His plan inscrutable, and that I must be patient. The story is always evolving, as are we players in it.

So it is in the formation of priests. As Christ grew to maturity under the guidance of Mary and Joseph, so will our seminarians grow to maturity under the loving hand of the Church. Send them, Lord, good foster fathers in those who teach and form them. Mary, help those charged with the education and formation of our seminarians to know your loving presence, so that you may help to shape these young men in the very image of your Son.

The Presentation: Oh what a day this was! A day of great joy and great pain. The joy of presenting a son in accordance with the law, the joy of having Anna and Simeon recognize Jesus for who He was, the pain of Simeon’s prophecy that must have rung so terribly true when Mary remembered the words of Isaiah and of the psalmist. How must she have wondered about that moment through the years as she raised her son, knowing that He would suffer so unspeakably. What grace it took for her to persevere in trust and even in joy, knowing what was to come.

So it will always be for our seminarians, joy and sorrow mixed in one as they respond to God’s demands of them. So will it be as they know that they, too, will bear some measure of the cross of Christ, wondering when and how that burden will fall. Knowing too, that there is joy beyond words to be had and shared.

Let us pray, then, for the faith and fortitude of Mary and the vision of Anna and Simeon for our seminarians, and for us.

The Finding in the Temple: “Did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?” Jesus said when Mary and Joseph found Him. Like the presentation, a day both joyful and sorrowful. So, too , the life of a seminarian: Joyful for the finding, for the contentment that comes from knowing God and His will, sorrowful because to be found, one must first be lost. The course of formation is never smooth and not often straight. There will be times of loss and being lost. May our seminarians remember that finding always happens in God’s house, while doing God’s work, in the most ordinary of ways.

Mary, help your sons to find themselves in the depths of God’s love, in the presence of His people, in the fields of His labor and in the comfort of His word. May they know that they can never be lost from His sight, and yours. Help us to guide them forward in faith and provide them refuge when confusion and loss threaten them.

Candlelight

2010-12-03T13:17:00.000-08:00

The law of growth is rest. We must be content in winter to wait patiently through the long, bleak season in which we experience nothing whatever of the sweetness or realization of the Divine Presence, believing the truth that these seasons, which seem to be the most empty, are the most pregnant with life. It is in them that the Christ-life is growing in us, laying hold of our soil with strong roots thrust deeper and deeper, drawing down the blessed rain of mercy and the sun of eternal love through our darkness, heaviness and hardness, to irrigate and warm those roots. The soil must not be disturbed. ---Caryll Houselander

I love Advent but I have to confess I get a little weary of the repeated invocation of light. Advent is in the darkest part of the year—and if the light is important, so is the dark.

By nature and nurture, I am a winter person, winter in coloring and winter in soul. I live through the long days of summer so that I can enjoy the falling of the leaves and the cold stillness of short days. The dark doesn’t frighten me. I understand the analogy of light and find it beautiful but left to my own repose, I find my peace and comfort at the end, not in the middle, of the day.

I suppose it’s because I know there are two kinds of dark. I know the reality of extinguishing darkness. I know the fears that come scuttling out of my worry-closet in the middle of the night to gnaw at the very core of my peace. I know the fatal darkness of the small hours of the night, when help and hope seem so very far away. Every doctor know that third shift is when people are most likely to die, as though the deepness of the night saps their very life away. I have had my brushes with the dark night of depression and despair and the abyss that the mystics write of.

But that is not the only dark. There’s another kind of dark, warm and enveloping, that nurtures my soul. It’s the twilight dark, when knowing is almost a living thing, like the stars hidden by the brightness of the sun that suddenly appear at dusk and grow stronger as the night deepens. In the gathering darkness, failing light and emerging shadows give new depth and dimension to familiar things. Twilight is the time when frenetic work subsides and there is time to sit and think and enjoy the colors that play out and finally fade on a distant horizon. It heralds a dark in which sounds recede and quiet envelops me, like God, not pursued, or captured, but present just the same.

Light tempts me too much to rely on myself. In the bright light of day, there is always something more to be done, another hour to be filled, another task to be finished, another shortcoming to be amended. Because the pathway for God’s action in my life is through me, I mistake His grace for my own volition, and succumb to the temptation to busy myself in the work of Finding God. Good work, in itself, but ultimately destined for frustration.

Any good scientist knows that as soon as one tries to measure a system, the very act of measuring disturbs the system and makes the measurement inaccurate. So it is in my spiritual life. As soon as I think I have nailed God down in time or place or activity, I find He’s moved—not that He isn’t there, but that He isn’t who I think He is or present in the way I think He is. It is all the result of my trying so hard to pursue God, instead of recognizing that He pursues me. The harder I set myself to find Him, the less likely I am to encounter Him, for resting in God is not a matter of my own work, it is a matter of His.

Fortunately for me, God knows me better than I know myself. He knows that the way to speak to me is not in the frenetic work of the sunlight, but in the quiet shadows of the impending darkness. It used to worry me—and still does, from time to time-- that I do not have that clear, immediate, almost physical sense of God in my life that others speak of. I’ve become accustomed to the sensation, real and pervasive, that my prayers move out from me into a quiet and often unresponsive darkness. But in the shadows of evening, I have found that the darkness is not a void. God is not absent, just talking to me in the way He designed me to hear.

My twilight dark is rich with dimensions, just not the dimensions of day, and the language of the day doesn’t fit, doesn’t do it justice. It is enveloping, keeping me focused on what is at my feet, not something distracting in the distance. It forces me to think and react with all my self, not just that part that sees and hears, and it forces me to slow myself and absorb what the darkness has to reveal before I respond. It is the time and the manner in which by some mysterious combination of will and intellect and spirit, all the thoughts and projects of the day slide into cohesion.

This is my time of year. I prepare for my day in the dark, these days reading my morning office by the candlelight of an Advent wreath. I return, if not in the dark, at least as the sun is slipping away. Even the weather cooperates; the days are more often flat, gray and bound-in than in the summer, blunting the light that seems to lead me astray. And sometimes, it is wonderfully foul.

I arrived home a few nights ago, in the middle of a driving rain, picking my way down the fog-bound road by the light of reflectors in the middle of the road. I wound down my darkened driveway, and was met at the door by my husband. He held a votive light in his hand and it cast a faint, yellow light that spilled across his hands to illuminate the doorway. The power had failed.

I followed him to the living room, where he had a low fire laid, and a few other candles scattered about. We spent the evening curled up before the flames, with wine and cheese and each other, because of the dark. The splendid, liberating, comfortable, loving dark.

I know Christ is the Light, and I eagerly await His coming. But sometimes, I think He comes, not on brilliant clouds, but standing in a murky doorway with a candle to beckon me into a place of comfort and quiet and shadows and rest.

Stray Dogs

2010-11-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

Except for one errant wine glass that I overlooked, all the Thanksgiving dishes are washed and replaced, the leftovers safely stored in the fridge. The annual feast is something of a production because---I love to cook. I was blessed to have a brilliant “barnyard cook” for a mother. She never measured anything, cooked by touch and taste and feel. Her repertoire was limited by finances and by her own somewhat particular tastes, but she was a genius with a roasting pan and would give any Top Chef contestant a run for his money in a quick-fire challenge involving making a great meal out of the leftovers in the icebox.

Some of my earliest memories are of making the Thanksgiving feast. Even as a very little girl, I had a role in the kitchen: tearing bread for the stuffing balls, rubbing salt and pepper into the pork roast (turkey was a secondary meat, if we had it at all--Mom was German and pork was our feasting dish), or making leftover pie dough into sugar and cinnamon sprinkled pinwheels, or stirring the gravy in the big roasting pan on top of the stove as it thickened and bubbled.

Thanksgiving was the time the whole family came together. My brothers were already married by the time I entered grade school, so it was a treat to see them over holiday dinners. Mom’s cooking was so good that a certain family competition for the dishes emerged. We’d each steal a dressing ball and wrap it in foil, stowing it some where special in the fridge before dinner even began; open the door and you’d find little sliver orbs tucked here and there among the condiments. There was always a battle for the last of the cucumbers and sour cream. Go for that last piece of tender port on Grandmother Harty’s wedding platter, and you might find a fork in the back of your hand--accidentally or on purpose. But our family dinner was always a place of good food and great joy, taken at a heavy, carved oak table groaning with food.

i realized, as I was drying the last of the dishes, that my mother’s gift of cooking has the additional gift of hospitality appended to it. Thanksgiving in our house isn’t Thanksgiving if there isn’t a stray dog or two--someone bereft of family, devoid of Thanksgiving invitation, or otherwise unattached and in need of a place that is warm and welcoming to rest feet under a family table and eat in the comfort of friends, old or new.

So established is this as a tradition that our daughter was relieved when I told her on her arrival that we had three extra guests at table. She was beginning to worry it would be only us--something I don’t think has ever happened in the course of her 25 years. We spent a pleasant few minutes recounting some of the more remarkable folks who have found their way to our table, including the couple we unexpectedly found camped in our driveway one Thanksgiving morning when we emerged to get the morning paper.

Inviting random people into the house isn’t something my parents did, but there was always an honorary aunt or uncle with us, and holiday time was a time that we turned our gaze very much outward. I remember packing up toys, food, blankets and clothes to take to a family whose house had burned on one blustery Thanksgiving day, and not a holiday season went by that we did not cart food (the Southern woman’s response to any crisis or season) to some needy soul. Food particularly provided a bridge across the awkward gap of unfamiliarity that separates strangers and makes us think we are not yet friends.

When I am in the process of preparing a meal, talk comes effortlessly. I lose myself in the chopping and the measuring and the mixing and the cooking, and when I forget myself, I can engage with someone else without a thought, without shyness. St. Martha and Saint Paschal Baylon look over my shoulder to remind me me that it’s the moments of liberty in someone else--not so much the cooking--that is the gift of the kitchen. And dessert is usually followed by guests who continue deep in fellowship as they help with the tidying over my strenuous objections I even love the time of clean-up, quiet with my saints and my counters.

I relish this time when the house and my heart are open as much without reservation as I can make them to those I encounter in my daily life. I look forward to the preparation, the decorating, the meals, the surprises, and the laughter. Purple though Advent is, it is not the somber and agonizing time that Lent is. It is a time to make my heart open and expectant so that, come Christmas Day, amid the smells of our traditional breakfast, and later, our Christmas goose, I can welcome Christ Himself joyfully into my hearth and home, to reside in my heart for another year.

Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest. May our home by Thee be blest.

It Ain't the Arrow....

2010-11-23T03:13:00.000-08:00

The Golder women, being from sunny, tropical Florida have little fear of serpents. Snakes we can handle.

Ditches, on the other hand, are another story. Until this morning, my fair daughter held the family prize for best ditch story. Seems she was driving the family 4-Runner down our mountain when she attempted a three-point turn in the road in an effort to go back up the street to get gas. We will leave aside for the moment the legality of that little maneuver in favor of a description of its aftermath: her rear wheels stuck on the mud of one of the smaller culverts that are a regular feature on the mountain. She tried to free herself, and succeeded only in digging the rear wheels deeper into the clay.

This little adventure occurred in broad daylight on one of the two main access roads to the mountain. She had no more than stopped the spinning of her rear wheels than a courtly gentleman on his way back from the golf course stopped to aid this damsel in distress. He tried to direct her in springing the recalcitrant SUV to no avail, He then gallantly offered to; nay, insisted that he take her to the headquarters of the local constabulary for assistance.

Which is why, some twenty minutes later, there were five cars, several of them with flashing lights, and ten men all regarding the SUV in its miry predicament. At length, one of them regarded my offspring and asked whether she had tried the vehicle’s 4-wheel drive.

Mind you, this child has driven this particular car since she got her learner’s permit, and lives in a family that regularly takes its vacations down muddy, rocky, impassable-to-the-sensible man roads. Of course she answered in the negative, big, blue eyes wide with surprise. I don’t really know what that is.

Where, oh where, is a lightning bolt when you need one? (In her defense, it turns out she really didn’t. She thought 4-wheel drive made the wheels go sideways....kind of like the little diagram on the dash....)

Whereupon, one of the gallant deposited himself in the driver’s seat, wrested the vehicle into the appropriate gears, and turned the car back over to my daughter...who got into it, stepped lightly on the accelerator and drove off to applause (not hoots or catcalls--she got those at home) waving her thanks to the men who had hastened to her side.

One friend explained the abundance of official assistance as the result of the innate need for those of the male persuasion to get out their toys and play with them from time to time. When they can do that and show of to a pretty girl, I suppose it is so much the better.

What it taught me is that if you’re going to run into a ditch, be driving a 4-Runner, make sure the ditch is shallow and do it in broad daylight. Unlike me, this morning.

On my way to pick up my daughter from Atlanta, I made a turn I have made at least a thousand times before, at a corner where the side of the pavement ends abruptly in a deep, long ditch. No berm, no shoulder and in my case--no excuse. Dark, yes, but no fog, no rain and not even the seasonal excuse of a slick layer of leaves--but somehow the off front tire slid off the pavement (of its own volition, surely), and the rest of the car followed it spectacularly into the ditch, ending up canted at an impossible angle on its side. The headlights of a car on the other side of the road swept across but apparently the gallant men of the day were off-duty as the car continued its journey without even slowing down. I did have the presence of mind to cast a few imprecations at the lights I saw retreating in the mirror, and the general populace of the mountain for good measure.

The shock of my predicament only lasted a moment, I took personal inventory (no injuries) and burst into tears as I dialed my husband, whom I had left only a few moments before with a cup of coffee in the dining nook.

Naturally,there was no answer. Pleased that I had finally identified a slight flaw in our cell-only family policy, I none the less still faced the problem of disentangling myself from my car--and getting to Atlanta. My difficulty was not abated at all by a fresh flood of tears, nor by the fact that the angle of the car made getting the door open--and me out of it--very nearly impossible without outside help.

I finally managed to clamber out of the offending vehicle, and started the short walk home. When my husband opened the front door in response to the impatient buzzing of the bell, I fell into his arms, ever so slightly hysterical. I don’t remember much of what I said, but I hate that car figured prominently amid the sobs.

The gallant men-on-call may have been off duty, but my own Prince Charming threw on some clothes to assess the situation and one of Lookout Mountain’s finest stopped in his patrol to help us out. (Note to self: 911 is probably the best first number to call...) Between the two of them, they brought me back to earth long enough to return to the house and collect my son’s 4-Runner (here for a visit) and et me on my way. Let me assure you that it is not necessary to back a car out of a driveway. Given sufficient time, and enough three-point turns, one can, in fact, get it headed in the right direction even in the narrowest of lanes, especially if one is fresh from a close encounter with a ditch and the driveway falls off ten feet on one side.

When later recounting the story with considerable amusement to a friend, my daughter in tow, my friend offered the observation that the reason for my annoyance was feeling just plain stupid. My daughter, hearing my invective about my trusty chariot took that opportunity to hurl back at me some of my sage maternal advice from her childhood, to wit: It ain’t the arrow, it’s the Indian....How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a child with a good memory and a tongue like her mother...

It is such an ingrained human tendency to find somewhere else to place blame. Anyone who doesn’t believe in original sin or concupiscence had only to listen to my railings this morning. Not because of the mishap, of course--that was just plain bad luck or stupidity, not sin. Because of the almost instantaneous excuse, even in the absence of guilt. Imagine what I am capable of when there really is something to be ashamed of.

Of course, she is right. It really ain’t the arrow. It really is the Indian. And hours and hours of ruminating on the events of the day convinced me of several crystalline truths:

I am, indeed, not perfect. Not exactly news to me, but it certainly blows my well-developed cover. Rats! Never the less, I am loved, in this world and the next, and my escapades are worth a good laugh now and then.

I am truly not perfect. Sometimes not even terribly competent. Not exactly news to God, either. Apparently, He has a fondness for people who bollox things up, even on a fairly grand scale (think Moses, David, Paul). He manages to bring some amazing things out of some incredible messes. I imagine He’ll end up creating something interesting and ultimately astonishing (at least to me) out of me.

Ultimately, the worst thing that happened today was that I spent several hours--off and on--so distressed by a truly insignificant-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things event that I missed out on the sheer joy of a bright fall day. Not the best use of finite time. Still, St. Francis of Rome (whom I had asked for intercession as I left the garage) and my Guardian Angel were looking after me, and all things considered, it wasn’t much of a bruise except to my ego. A near miss is a good way to remember to be more attentive, You can be sure I’ll be making that turn wide for a good long while.

On the other hand, I remembered something that just might be worth the embarrassment and frustration: As long as I set my will and open my heart to the grace of God, no matter where I find myself--whatever the circumstances--there He is.

Even in ditch. And I am equally certain that He has a sense of humor. I do think I heard a distant voice intoning this morning as I extricated myself from my car...It ain’t the arrow....

Perception and Reality

2010-11-12T04:57:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, just for old times’ sake, I like to take out the old broadsword and blue paint. A post on a comment thread discussing Catholic theology sent me running to the storage room where I keep said accoutrements. I guess I am a little sensitive on the subject because I see the same pernicious thinking I saw on the comment line pulling Catholics away from their faith, and when I am not in the mood to whop them upside the head for fulminant stupidity, it just makes me want to weep. ( Apropos the whopping upside the head part, God clearly has a good deal of work left to do with me....)

What set me off was this statement: When Jesus spoke about His body and His blood, he was just speaking metaphorically. For starters, could the language be any clearer? Even a friend of mine raised Methodist was stunned to find that his own denomination did not believe in the Real Presence. He’d simply accepted it on faith all these years, totally our of step with Wesley and his companions.

If Catholics really understood what the Eucharist is, and believed, you couldn’t keep them from mass. If they really understood the Eucharistic Lord, they’d never led a bad homily, a grouchy priest, or abysmal liturgy keep them away from church. If they really understood, there wouldn’t be seats enough in church or masses enough in schedules to hold the faithful. People would be falling over themselves to attend adoration--no matter what time it was.

The problem is, even those of us who have some inkling don’t really understand, and there are a whole lot of us who have wandered off the reservation because we’ve bought into the notion that logic, knowing and understanding are more important than--or the predecessor or--belief. And human logic simply tells us that the consecrated host can’t really be anything other than bread, the consecrated wine nothing more that fruit of the vine.

That is, of course, backwards. We don’t understand to believe. We believe so that we may understand. Nowhere was that more evident than when Christ Himself preached on the subject. Those who needed to understand first, who took the verdict of their own mind above the act of faith, grumbled about the difficulty of the teaching--and left. Those who knew--really knew--who Jesus was, even though it was then only the faintest glimmer--remained behind. “Where would we go? Who else,” Peter said, “has the words of eternal life?”

When you get right down to it, that belief is a matter of both grace and will, as is anything in the spiritual life. That annoying comment thread, the one in which a fallen away Catholic insisted that Christ was speaking only metaphorically, keeps gnawing at me, at that part of me that demands reason and explanation. I kneel in mass, and I see the host, and it looks, for all the world just like bread to me, and the cup takes just like wine...so what is it that makes me so very sure, so certain that when I receive it, I receive Christ Himself?It all started out, I think, as mere intellect.

After all, the language is pretty clear, the context striking, and, begging the pardon of my Protestant friends, one has to tie oneself into intellectual knots to get around the very, very plain meaning of the statement This is my body...this is my blood. Nothing in the words affronted my intellect except, of course, the fact that it seems a bit--well--incredible.

Enter intellect again. This is, after all, God we are talking about. Nothing--and I mean nothing--is beyond His abilities. So, improbable as it might seem, possible it is. Score another small victory for the mind.

Ah, but there was still that part of the mind that said: it looks just like what it was before. I can’t perceive anything different. How can it be anything different? That prideful part of me that seems to think nothing can be unless I understand it to be so, and understand how it is so--or at least, understand that it is reasonable.

Eventually, that sort of thinking led me back to the very premise of my faith, one that I sometimes have to remind myself of from time to time unless I too wander out of the garden. Simply put: There is God. I am not He.

So, if God wants to be present for me under the appearances of bread and wine, or to be incarnate in a stable in Bethlehem, so much the better for me. And the more I ponder both, the deeper that well seems to be.

I began to realize that by understanding had begun to make its way from my intellect to my heart when, after some time of attending daily mass, I found real disappointment in the days that I could not go. Not the disappointment of appetite or addiction, like someone accustomed to drugs who suddenly feels the pains of withdrawal, or the disappointment of the athlete, who feels restless and incomplete without his daily workout. It was the same disappointment, the same emptiness inside that I feel when travel takes me away from my groom, or when days are too busy for us to touch base, even for a moment, in the course of our work. The deep, keen disappointment of missing the presence of my nearest, dearest friend.

I believe, even though I cannot possibly understand. There is precedent for that, even in my material life. I believe in the structural integrity of the Empire State Building and my Avalon even though I haven’t a real clue about how they are put together. I believe in the love of my husband, even though I try it mightily on some days. And I believe in them both for the same reasons: I have experienced them in a very, very personal ways.

And because I made the choice to risk the assent of faith, and step out in the belief that what I was told--the building supports you, the car will drive, I love you, Christ is truly present.--was true.Oh, the rewards! Help me to see You with my heart more than with my mind. I believe Lord, help Thou my unbelief!