Most of my morning prayers lack all piety and right-ness, or righteousness, for that matter. But, like Sunday Liturgy, if I skip them, the day goes to hell.
I've learned to wake before the alarm. That habit began years ago, long before I made a morning prayer rule. It started with my first alarm clock, a Lloyd's hand-me-down from my mother-- still alive and proof that old stuff was made to last. It still bleats like a lamb being stabbed. In college I got a bit superstitious about the hideous noise. I believed my day would prove unlucky if my ears heard the anguished bleating. Until I got an iphone clock, I used it. For a couple of years it lay in the bottom of a sock drawer. Now my thirteen-year-old uses it. It proves its mettle, getting him out of bed in its noisome glory. I tell myself, that it contributed to my prayer rule, however, impious. I would try to beat it awake and so, for a long time, I woke ten or fifteen minutes before its cries and that became a perfect for prayer, prone pose.
The older I become, the earlier my body salutes the new day. In spring, I rise with the sun. As the seasons warm and brighten, I cannot burrow into the firm mattress with its eggshell top, under the quilt of Guatemalan patchwork. I cannot succumb to the drug of my neighbor's wood-burning stove. I pray. I stare out my window into the void that is white vinyl siding of my neighbor's house, a mere eight feet from me. I recite words that call me out of fog.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
If I were pious, I would lumber out of bed and kneel. I taped an icon of Christ the Savior on my window trim. I could stand before it in the dawn light. Or, at least I could bother to make the sign of the Cross. But the covers are so heavy. I am the dead, the sleeper being called to action: Awake, awake, O Sleeper. Arise from the grave.
Alas. I lay in prone pose.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
On Lightning Rods
While my mother and grandfather nailed shingles on the house, a storm stirred and lightning flashed. Thunder rattled like my grandfather's great bass in my chest. The green skies warned them, "Git down." They shooed us into the crawl space as a tornado tore the neighbors' cornfields. It left a walking path winding along for miles. It shattered a summer kitchen next to one neighbor's house, left the house standing. How strange to think, a little wind, a little rain could be so selective. But my mom warned it wasn't the tornado we had to fear. Don't stand under the trees in the storm. Grandpa thought about the lighting rods on the top of the house, grounding it. My uncle, an electrical lineman, broke out a few whoppers about the lightning that hits the aerials on cars, of men who stood in bare fields inviting the lesser gods to scorch them. The National Weather Service says chances of being struck in your lifetime are 1/12,000. Chances of knowing someone struck: 1/1,200. How common the chances, more common than winning the lottery.
Some people, like Father Matthew and Presvytera Katie Baker, attract lightning.
Folks warned us when we arrived at seminary that Matthew and Katie were smackdab in the midst of a row already. Women warned me to keep my space, for she was one of those women. She'd nursed her infants in the monastery church, a scandal to the monks. --None of the monks ever peeped about these women's issues, about head coverings, nursing babies, and skirts or whatnot.-- The only folks who spoke of the scandals whispered of all manner of scandals.
I never had occasion to know Katie well, young mothers and old mothers keep different hours, different spaces. She corralled toddlers and nursed babies at church. She made home and church possible for her husband. I worked. In church I could deliver a fierce warning at my older children -- "Behave, or else" and could pray without much interruption in services. Since my income supported our family, I spent little time with the other wives, or the other families, for that matter.
Father Matthew and Katie preceded us at seminary by a few years. He arrived in the same state as my husband: without undergraduate credentials, neither ordained.
Matthew looked like a blond Abe Lincoln, a rail tall man, topped with a swirl of strawberry blond hair. He had Abe's ridged cheekbones. He wore a beard that softened the angles. He came with a reputation of being philosopher-type, a genius, a Kierkegaard kind of smart. Deep, you know?
All of us were scholarship families, our husbands too busy in theology and liturgy to work. Wives with wee ones earned the keep by home-making, by thrift and grit, by keeping hours at the WIC, CHIP, LYHEAP, and other aid offices: every month they put up with degrading waits and invasions of privacy to prove residency, income or lack thereof, legal dependents, and accumulated assets. I never suffered this because I taught. Either way, the unidentified they whispered to the wives, "Remember to kiss the hands that pay your husbands' tuition. Keep the appearance of modesty in finances and appearance." Some of us lived abject and long-suffering. It took all my energy to survive. I never took up a challenge or a fight. I took the time to learn to be quiet.
Katie spoke up for her right to feed her children, and to pray.
Some people are lightning rods, attracting energy good and naught.
Smart men like Matthew cannot abide voices of extremism, of abuse of power. He picked his audiences, picked his fights judiciously, but he spoke up. I know this because of the stories, the insights, the tidbits my husband collected. My husband reported on a sparing word spoken in class, a defeated seminarian resurrected after a talk with Matthew. The voice of reason, of gentleness, of the opposite of the power-mongers. Men like him cannot help but cross the powers-that-be. Some of those powers swore they'd never lay a hand on Matthew. He'd never be ordained on their watch. Others stood up for Matthew's right to study, to graduate, to contribute to the theology of the day. Matthew graduated, with a reputation for brilliance and with the aura of a man with strength and the scars to prove it.
Matthew, Katie, and three children moved to Massachusetts. He filled his quiver with degrees, papers, admiration, friends, and more children. A bishop saw fit to ordain him. Katie went on feeding her babies, being a patient mother.
I've seen her in pictures recently and she looks just as young as ever. Sometimes she comes up on my Facebook feed. "You might know this person." I did, sort of, but never well enough to friend her, especially after all these years. I admired my memories of her. Any woman with the grit to stand up to the nameless they for her babies, who could keep intellectual and spiritual stride with Father Matthew, who could birth child after child, six living, one recently stillborn, is a cult of personality herself. How would I friend her nonchalantly? You don't remember me, I'd write on her wall, but I heard stories about you that left me in awe of you. I don't know how to sort the legend from truth, but if it's half true, I wish you and Father Matthew hadn't been put on the roof, lightning rods for all the cursed negative energy of seminary.
So, I her pass on my Facebook feed. Contentedly, I listened my husband's tales of Father Matthew's deepening presence in discourses of faith in our church.
Some people, like the Bakers, attract more than their share. Last Sunday, while driving home from Vespers for Sunday of Orthodoxy with three of his six kids, Father Matthew's van flipped. He died, reposed. Now Katie will feed her babies without him. I cannot ever tell her in the right context that I find it profoundly, fiercely unfair that some people tried to fry her at seminary, because something far worse has consumed her. How do I now convey that whatever strength she'd always lent Father Matthew, who shared it on with my husband and the entire community, that I admired it?
Everyone's writing about Father Matthew this week, in memoriam. For a minute, I want to mention Presvytera Katie. Her husband lived and died in the service of others. So too, has she. She goes on. Thanks, Katie, from someone you probably never knew you affected.
Also, as a disclaimer. I realize my memory of the details have been obscured by time and the blurry-eyed weariness of those years. I know half of what I must have heard was legend, sixty percent was probably false and, I bet, ninety-percent of the silent credit I give you is credible.
I know that's two hundred percent, but I am a music-maker. I am a dreamer of dreams.
Some people, like Father Matthew and Presvytera Katie Baker, attract lightning.
Folks warned us when we arrived at seminary that Matthew and Katie were smackdab in the midst of a row already. Women warned me to keep my space, for she was one of those women. She'd nursed her infants in the monastery church, a scandal to the monks. --None of the monks ever peeped about these women's issues, about head coverings, nursing babies, and skirts or whatnot.-- The only folks who spoke of the scandals whispered of all manner of scandals.
I never had occasion to know Katie well, young mothers and old mothers keep different hours, different spaces. She corralled toddlers and nursed babies at church. She made home and church possible for her husband. I worked. In church I could deliver a fierce warning at my older children -- "Behave, or else" and could pray without much interruption in services. Since my income supported our family, I spent little time with the other wives, or the other families, for that matter.
Father Matthew and Katie preceded us at seminary by a few years. He arrived in the same state as my husband: without undergraduate credentials, neither ordained.
Matthew looked like a blond Abe Lincoln, a rail tall man, topped with a swirl of strawberry blond hair. He had Abe's ridged cheekbones. He wore a beard that softened the angles. He came with a reputation of being philosopher-type, a genius, a Kierkegaard kind of smart. Deep, you know?
All of us were scholarship families, our husbands too busy in theology and liturgy to work. Wives with wee ones earned the keep by home-making, by thrift and grit, by keeping hours at the WIC, CHIP, LYHEAP, and other aid offices: every month they put up with degrading waits and invasions of privacy to prove residency, income or lack thereof, legal dependents, and accumulated assets. I never suffered this because I taught. Either way, the unidentified they whispered to the wives, "Remember to kiss the hands that pay your husbands' tuition. Keep the appearance of modesty in finances and appearance." Some of us lived abject and long-suffering. It took all my energy to survive. I never took up a challenge or a fight. I took the time to learn to be quiet.
Katie spoke up for her right to feed her children, and to pray.
Some people are lightning rods, attracting energy good and naught.
Smart men like Matthew cannot abide voices of extremism, of abuse of power. He picked his audiences, picked his fights judiciously, but he spoke up. I know this because of the stories, the insights, the tidbits my husband collected. My husband reported on a sparing word spoken in class, a defeated seminarian resurrected after a talk with Matthew. The voice of reason, of gentleness, of the opposite of the power-mongers. Men like him cannot help but cross the powers-that-be. Some of those powers swore they'd never lay a hand on Matthew. He'd never be ordained on their watch. Others stood up for Matthew's right to study, to graduate, to contribute to the theology of the day. Matthew graduated, with a reputation for brilliance and with the aura of a man with strength and the scars to prove it.
Matthew, Katie, and three children moved to Massachusetts. He filled his quiver with degrees, papers, admiration, friends, and more children. A bishop saw fit to ordain him. Katie went on feeding her babies, being a patient mother.
I've seen her in pictures recently and she looks just as young as ever. Sometimes she comes up on my Facebook feed. "You might know this person." I did, sort of, but never well enough to friend her, especially after all these years. I admired my memories of her. Any woman with the grit to stand up to the nameless they for her babies, who could keep intellectual and spiritual stride with Father Matthew, who could birth child after child, six living, one recently stillborn, is a cult of personality herself. How would I friend her nonchalantly? You don't remember me, I'd write on her wall, but I heard stories about you that left me in awe of you. I don't know how to sort the legend from truth, but if it's half true, I wish you and Father Matthew hadn't been put on the roof, lightning rods for all the cursed negative energy of seminary.
So, I her pass on my Facebook feed. Contentedly, I listened my husband's tales of Father Matthew's deepening presence in discourses of faith in our church.
Some people, like the Bakers, attract more than their share. Last Sunday, while driving home from Vespers for Sunday of Orthodoxy with three of his six kids, Father Matthew's van flipped. He died, reposed. Now Katie will feed her babies without him. I cannot ever tell her in the right context that I find it profoundly, fiercely unfair that some people tried to fry her at seminary, because something far worse has consumed her. How do I now convey that whatever strength she'd always lent Father Matthew, who shared it on with my husband and the entire community, that I admired it?
Everyone's writing about Father Matthew this week, in memoriam. For a minute, I want to mention Presvytera Katie. Her husband lived and died in the service of others. So too, has she. She goes on. Thanks, Katie, from someone you probably never knew you affected.
Also, as a disclaimer. I realize my memory of the details have been obscured by time and the blurry-eyed weariness of those years. I know half of what I must have heard was legend, sixty percent was probably false and, I bet, ninety-percent of the silent credit I give you is credible.
I know that's two hundred percent, but I am a music-maker. I am a dreamer of dreams.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
What I pray for, by the numbers
By the numbers,
A friend once asked me how many times I'd made love to my husband. What a wonderful joy to count those little pleasures in life. What do you count?
How many children you have?
How many godchildren?
How many nieces and nephews?
How many vacations have you taken?
How many books have you read?
How often do you enjoy chocolate?
How often you enjoy a meal?
How often you pray?
How often you get a night's sleep in a comfortable bed, under warm blankets?
How often can you flush your toilet without using a bucket of water and how often does it go to a sewer system, not out the back of your house and down a rivulet by your street?
How often your car starts on the first turn of the key?
How often lights turn on with a flip of your wrist? How often you find enough funds to pay the fuel or the bill?
These are blessings.
Now here some other numbers to consider. Recently, I've been heavy-hearted about these. It seems every day I add someone else to these lists, or lose someone. I pray a lot. I am not sure I thank God as much for the thousands of things above as I do lay my heavy-heart before God for all those below.
How many people I know living with cancer? I have three in my family -- a younger sister, an uncle, in my family now. More have already gone on.
How many have already gone on? Three. All grandparents.
One cousin survived his. I have many friends who are cancer-free. I know many others who are living it with
How many people do you know have lupus, or multiple sclerosis, or cystic fibrosis or celebral palsy? I know of three. At least. One of my father's cousins died last year after years with MS. A friend from childhood had a mother with it.
What about Spina Bifida? Or other genetic or developmental disorders
How many people do you know on the spectrum (autism)? How many in your family? None in my family but oh so many friends and students. How many have ADHD? How many kids have you sat down with only to discover they have so many meds in their system they cannot function on all cylinders? How many don't have a hobby? Can't read? Don't eat vegetables and fruits? How many lack impulse control, self-control?
How many people have divorced parents? How many have been hit, neglected, abused? How many knew too much about sex at too young an age?
How many have depression? Anxiety? Bi-polar? Schizophrenia? Too many and it's too delicate to say how many in my family, how many among my dear friends, how many I know.
How many do you know are transitioning from one gender to another. I have three students and a friend. Maybe more.
How many do you know are attracted to members of their same sex? How many colleagues? Friends? Family?
How many have given up on God? Never believed?
How many people have lived in your home while addicted to substances, more than sugar or nicotine or caffeine?
During this Lent, I find myself asking, what is the balance of my litanies? How much am I dumping on God? How many times do I say thank you? He's so big, you know. I don't worry about taking more heartache than gratitude, but it helps to bring my thanks and my hurts.
So many days, I want to cry about all the brokenness. I put on my big-girl panties and don't cry.
On Friday, at ten am, I came downstairs broken. I'd spent an hour with a girl with "mild cognitive disability" who was seventeen, engaged, living with her mother and her fiance, who couldn't read words like thesis, or proposition, or objective. She couldn't read, really. She could write. She's supposed to pass my 11th grade English class. She has an 82 percent but couldn't fluidly read a single passage from the curriculum. I sent her to the dictionary to look up words she didn't know and she couldn't read those words.
A couple of years ago, I had a senior, with a cognitive disability in Philadelphia who wrote me one day asking which teacher it was from the school I taught who wanted to meet her on the corner of her street. None of us did, that I know of. I was horrified. I called CPS because someone was going to take advantage of that girl. She was already pregnant. She too couldn't read, couldn't write, could synthesize or analyze.
I have students who are transitioning who are afraid to tell their parents of their "other" names. I have so many female students, bright and capable, with one or more children, whose next step is cosmetology school, because it's a quick training to a job they hope will support them and their children. I have girls failing high school who think they'll be able to hack nursing school. I have students who've never been to church but think the world was created in six days. I have students who think "colored" is still a word they should use in academic essays to describe another human being.
I have a long list of heartaches.
And I have two amazing kids. A phenomenal husband. Parents and a mother-in-law I'd nominate for sainthood. I have ancestors who prayed me into the Kingdom of God. I have a few neighbors who knock my socks off with love, kindness and grace for the tiniest mammals to the most dysfunctional families in neighborhood. I have a spiritual family who carries each others' burdens. I am blessed. I have the Mysteries and a great God and Savior from who all blessings and gifts flow.
Glory to God in All Things, for All Things.
A friend once asked me how many times I'd made love to my husband. What a wonderful joy to count those little pleasures in life. What do you count?
 |
| Lady Lent: Week 1 |
How many godchildren?
How many nieces and nephews?
How many vacations have you taken?
How many books have you read?
How often do you enjoy chocolate?
How often you enjoy a meal?
How often you pray?
How often you get a night's sleep in a comfortable bed, under warm blankets?
How often can you flush your toilet without using a bucket of water and how often does it go to a sewer system, not out the back of your house and down a rivulet by your street?
How often your car starts on the first turn of the key?
How often lights turn on with a flip of your wrist? How often you find enough funds to pay the fuel or the bill?
These are blessings.
Now here some other numbers to consider. Recently, I've been heavy-hearted about these. It seems every day I add someone else to these lists, or lose someone. I pray a lot. I am not sure I thank God as much for the thousands of things above as I do lay my heavy-heart before God for all those below.
How many people I know living with cancer? I have three in my family -- a younger sister, an uncle, in my family now. More have already gone on.
How many have already gone on? Three. All grandparents.
One cousin survived his. I have many friends who are cancer-free. I know many others who are living it with
How many people do you know have lupus, or multiple sclerosis, or cystic fibrosis or celebral palsy? I know of three. At least. One of my father's cousins died last year after years with MS. A friend from childhood had a mother with it.
What about Spina Bifida? Or other genetic or developmental disorders
How many people do you know on the spectrum (autism)? How many in your family? None in my family but oh so many friends and students. How many have ADHD? How many kids have you sat down with only to discover they have so many meds in their system they cannot function on all cylinders? How many don't have a hobby? Can't read? Don't eat vegetables and fruits? How many lack impulse control, self-control?
How many people have divorced parents? How many have been hit, neglected, abused? How many knew too much about sex at too young an age?
How many have depression? Anxiety? Bi-polar? Schizophrenia? Too many and it's too delicate to say how many in my family, how many among my dear friends, how many I know.
How many do you know are transitioning from one gender to another. I have three students and a friend. Maybe more.
How many do you know are attracted to members of their same sex? How many colleagues? Friends? Family?
How many have given up on God? Never believed?
How many people have lived in your home while addicted to substances, more than sugar or nicotine or caffeine?
During this Lent, I find myself asking, what is the balance of my litanies? How much am I dumping on God? How many times do I say thank you? He's so big, you know. I don't worry about taking more heartache than gratitude, but it helps to bring my thanks and my hurts.
So many days, I want to cry about all the brokenness. I put on my big-girl panties and don't cry.
On Friday, at ten am, I came downstairs broken. I'd spent an hour with a girl with "mild cognitive disability" who was seventeen, engaged, living with her mother and her fiance, who couldn't read words like thesis, or proposition, or objective. She couldn't read, really. She could write. She's supposed to pass my 11th grade English class. She has an 82 percent but couldn't fluidly read a single passage from the curriculum. I sent her to the dictionary to look up words she didn't know and she couldn't read those words.
A couple of years ago, I had a senior, with a cognitive disability in Philadelphia who wrote me one day asking which teacher it was from the school I taught who wanted to meet her on the corner of her street. None of us did, that I know of. I was horrified. I called CPS because someone was going to take advantage of that girl. She was already pregnant. She too couldn't read, couldn't write, could synthesize or analyze.
I have students who are transitioning who are afraid to tell their parents of their "other" names. I have so many female students, bright and capable, with one or more children, whose next step is cosmetology school, because it's a quick training to a job they hope will support them and their children. I have girls failing high school who think they'll be able to hack nursing school. I have students who've never been to church but think the world was created in six days. I have students who think "colored" is still a word they should use in academic essays to describe another human being.
I have a long list of heartaches.
And I have two amazing kids. A phenomenal husband. Parents and a mother-in-law I'd nominate for sainthood. I have ancestors who prayed me into the Kingdom of God. I have a few neighbors who knock my socks off with love, kindness and grace for the tiniest mammals to the most dysfunctional families in neighborhood. I have a spiritual family who carries each others' burdens. I am blessed. I have the Mysteries and a great God and Savior from who all blessings and gifts flow.
Glory to God in All Things, for All Things.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Praying with the Theotokos
Did you know Dave Sedaris, among other writers, gets up daily to journal the previous days events?
I used to keep this kind of laundry list, scribed with wit from my own head. Sometimes, it was less than wit and more negativity, but I kept it. Last year, I planned to keep it again, only with Thanksgivings. I failed. I quite blogging in the late winter. January brought a fractured pelvis, which hurts, darn-it. February brought my younger sister's cancer diagnosis. That hurts worse, and like my fracture, intensified before I intuited the awfulness of the diagnosis. A lyric from an 90's Christian band, Prayer Chain, haunts when I think of this. "It takes years to get here/ It takes years to get back/ All your feelings some streaming down your leg."
March I was traveling as the security of my employment was unraveling. The politics of education are bad everywhere. They are horrific in Pennsylvania. Is it a truism yet that when the folks at the top are unhappy, they just pass it down to everyone else? The environment at my school was toxic. I was glad to work from Indiana since I wanted nothing to do with the fear and insecurity and, being in another state, I could pursue a similar position without breaking the non-compete clause in my contract. Still my heart was wounded for so many friends there.
April I was starting heal and went for a run, only to have another stress fracture.
May Our car exploded. Literally blew the pins and rods like bullets through its engine, on the way to trade it in for another car. We'd hedged every financial bet and played it close, so close that by the time we called the dealership to say, we'd still be buying the car, we were just stuck on the side of the road. The salesman said someone else bought it.
We bought a suburu. It saved my life ten days later. Technically, I think God was in control, but practically, I hit a bear during a business trip. It was rainy, dark and almost ten pm. My husband and I were chatting (yes, I had my blue tooth in and both hands on the wheel, going the speed limit in a calm unwinding with him at the end of the day) when a large mammal ran out in front of me and I heard the POP. I pulled over enough to avoid getting whacked by semis on the snug mountainside area. Fluids diverse, colorful, viscous, pooled where the front of my car was crunched. I stood under brewing clouds and lightening crying out in anger, towards my God.
It was a bear. I became bear-slayer, bear-bane. The story is famous by now.
I lost my job within two days. My daughter lost a friend.
In June I took up cycling. I broke my wrist trying to stop for the Amtrak at seven am one Monday morning. But, I got another job. Officially I had been out of contract for one week.
After that, it got better. I had plenty to be thankful for as we had reliable transportation, local employment, my sister seemed to be improving, another sister was planning marriage, kids were healthy, I was finding balance in my writing and work. I met new and wonderful people.
I did not stop to journal, but I prayed each morning, long litanies for loved ones with cancer, MS, depression, divorce, spiritual trouble, mental illness, loneliness. I read Scripture. I want it to be the music in my head.
I sang it. I sang Waterdeep's rendition of Psalm 131 all the time: "I have calmed and quieted my soul. O Israel trust in the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore."
But the unwieldy spring, the harsh communication of my writing mentor, the pain of life mingled with the memory of writing about someone I was learning to love, to trust, the Theotokos, kept me in a state of disarray. My spiritual father was telling me to pray with her, to turn to her as I parented through these bad times. Oh, yes we all have them, my mentor wrote in an email when the paper after my sister's surgery turned out sloppy and disorganized. Get it together, pray it together, do something, I kept thinking. Pray with Mary, truly a sister in salvation and Mother exemplar to us all.
I couldn't. I almost couldn't write. I nearly did not return to my studies at Chatham University.
Now, here I am a year later. I am writing about something different now, something as important and personal as building a relationship with the Mother of God. For a long time, I've been thinking about the failure to journal daily, even to keep a bit of a list of what happened, for story's sake, and to pray with her. Nothing I churned out last semester had the personal intimacy and affection I'd hope to cultivate. I'm back. I'm hoping that story goes on and I can journal it, and pray with her. How are these linked? I'm not even sure. Writers often say they write to read what they think. Ditto. We shall see.
For now, I'm just going to end with Julian of Norwich's words, "All will be well. All manner of things shall be well."
I used to keep this kind of laundry list, scribed with wit from my own head. Sometimes, it was less than wit and more negativity, but I kept it. Last year, I planned to keep it again, only with Thanksgivings. I failed. I quite blogging in the late winter. January brought a fractured pelvis, which hurts, darn-it. February brought my younger sister's cancer diagnosis. That hurts worse, and like my fracture, intensified before I intuited the awfulness of the diagnosis. A lyric from an 90's Christian band, Prayer Chain, haunts when I think of this. "It takes years to get here/ It takes years to get back/ All your feelings some streaming down your leg."
March I was traveling as the security of my employment was unraveling. The politics of education are bad everywhere. They are horrific in Pennsylvania. Is it a truism yet that when the folks at the top are unhappy, they just pass it down to everyone else? The environment at my school was toxic. I was glad to work from Indiana since I wanted nothing to do with the fear and insecurity and, being in another state, I could pursue a similar position without breaking the non-compete clause in my contract. Still my heart was wounded for so many friends there.
April I was starting heal and went for a run, only to have another stress fracture.
May Our car exploded. Literally blew the pins and rods like bullets through its engine, on the way to trade it in for another car. We'd hedged every financial bet and played it close, so close that by the time we called the dealership to say, we'd still be buying the car, we were just stuck on the side of the road. The salesman said someone else bought it.
We bought a suburu. It saved my life ten days later. Technically, I think God was in control, but practically, I hit a bear during a business trip. It was rainy, dark and almost ten pm. My husband and I were chatting (yes, I had my blue tooth in and both hands on the wheel, going the speed limit in a calm unwinding with him at the end of the day) when a large mammal ran out in front of me and I heard the POP. I pulled over enough to avoid getting whacked by semis on the snug mountainside area. Fluids diverse, colorful, viscous, pooled where the front of my car was crunched. I stood under brewing clouds and lightening crying out in anger, towards my God.
It was a bear. I became bear-slayer, bear-bane. The story is famous by now.
I lost my job within two days. My daughter lost a friend.
In June I took up cycling. I broke my wrist trying to stop for the Amtrak at seven am one Monday morning. But, I got another job. Officially I had been out of contract for one week.
After that, it got better. I had plenty to be thankful for as we had reliable transportation, local employment, my sister seemed to be improving, another sister was planning marriage, kids were healthy, I was finding balance in my writing and work. I met new and wonderful people.
I did not stop to journal, but I prayed each morning, long litanies for loved ones with cancer, MS, depression, divorce, spiritual trouble, mental illness, loneliness. I read Scripture. I want it to be the music in my head.
I sang it. I sang Waterdeep's rendition of Psalm 131 all the time: "I have calmed and quieted my soul. O Israel trust in the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore."
But the unwieldy spring, the harsh communication of my writing mentor, the pain of life mingled with the memory of writing about someone I was learning to love, to trust, the Theotokos, kept me in a state of disarray. My spiritual father was telling me to pray with her, to turn to her as I parented through these bad times. Oh, yes we all have them, my mentor wrote in an email when the paper after my sister's surgery turned out sloppy and disorganized. Get it together, pray it together, do something, I kept thinking. Pray with Mary, truly a sister in salvation and Mother exemplar to us all.
I couldn't. I almost couldn't write. I nearly did not return to my studies at Chatham University.
Now, here I am a year later. I am writing about something different now, something as important and personal as building a relationship with the Mother of God. For a long time, I've been thinking about the failure to journal daily, even to keep a bit of a list of what happened, for story's sake, and to pray with her. Nothing I churned out last semester had the personal intimacy and affection I'd hope to cultivate. I'm back. I'm hoping that story goes on and I can journal it, and pray with her. How are these linked? I'm not even sure. Writers often say they write to read what they think. Ditto. We shall see.
For now, I'm just going to end with Julian of Norwich's words, "All will be well. All manner of things shall be well."
Monday, May 27, 2013
Reasons to Live: Gratitude, Eucharist and Life
Some Christians believe in the symbolism of Communion, of Eucharist.
I believe in the Mystery.
Eucharist means thanksgiving
It is an oblation, an offering.
We offer God's gift up to Him, and act of obedience to which we are called,
during Liturgy, the common act of the people.
Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ Jesus.
His Life becomes what sustains mine.
After the past five months instead of climbing upward, I've been spiraling down. I started reaching for gratitude. Then I just tried grasping for life. I was losing. I was being cloistered into a kind of soul-crushing isolation. This post is my act of defiance against the grip of this in my life.
I need the Eucharist, the Mystery.
I confess that it is no mere symbol.
I confess that it is miraculously real, a miracle at every liturgy.
As Rich Mullins penned in "Creed,"
I believe that what I believe
is what makes me what I am.
I did not make it. No it is making me.
It is the very Truth of God and not the invention of any man.
. Below is a TED talk I watched this morning, about John. It speaks to this confessional here.
It's worth showing to justify what I just wrote.
And, now that I'm done writing today's confessional, I'm going to dig my fingers into the side of these "cliffs of insanity" by writing to gratitude, for even in the darkest of my emotions, there is always something to be grateful for. I was listening to last week's The Path postings this morning, after a long bike ride in the hills around Frederick, Maryland, where so many of my siblings live with their families. I was invigorated by the thumping hard-press of biking in the elevations and then showering to clean up and found this reminder that "Our thoughts do determine our lives."
I am grateful for BK Loren's comments that it was out of the earthquake in San Fransisco, out of losing everything, that she could begin to climb out of the depression that was freezing her soul. Pick up Animal Mineral Radical if you haven't. Read it. Lots of healthy spiritual insights in the midst of her essays.
I am grateful I read that before I hit a bear and totaled a car we've owned only two weeks. When I hit the animal, it was dark and storm clouds were gathering. Lightening lit the lump of flesh dead on the side of the road, less than 30 yards from me. Because I barely got to the right side of the white line, I was out of my car in knee high grass on the highest elevations of the Northeast quarter of the PA turnpike. I called my sister, my parents, another sister, the State Police, my husband and stared at the car, hoping it would be okay, and wouldn't be pummeled by a careless driver. Lightening showed a rainbow of fluids on the pavement and both airbags had deployed. I knew in my heart it was irreparable. I knew I hit an animal, but I didn't know it was a bear. It was the officer who told me, as I gave testimony in his squad car. It was a big one, he said.
I am grateful my mother said to me, "It's a good thing you killed that bear, Maria." If I hadn't it might have been me versus injured beast, on the side of the PA turnpike.
I am grateful for my sister Leah, who facilitated calls to get me out of the weather. She prayed a lot too. She listened to me despair and scream at God. Clergy wives minister to one another in ways that few others can. It's so nice to have yet another one in my family.
I am grateful for my father's neighbor who picked me up with all my luggage at the turnpike station at 11pm at night.
I am grateful that my father reminded me that God has always always always been faithful in job insecurity,
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| Canal walk in Frederick MD |
- Part One: http://youtu.be/BA5_ECBFd0M
- Part Two: http://youtu.be/yh-qqUQOrfk
I am grateful for Vespers at St. Paul Antiochian Church in Emmaus. It was a reader's service. I sneaked in and out. Once again, the Psalmody of Vespers left me "mourning" but the kind that lets you know not of despair but of the Beatitude promise, "Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted." When Tig Nitaro speaks of needing to get on stage days after her breast cancer diagnosis, it resonated. I needed to get in church. As a Christian and priest's wife, it has become so ingrained into who I am, I must be there. It saves my life. Thank you to the people there who were present and didn't know the ministry in my time of need. With them, I confessed, "Christ is Risen from the Dead. Trampling down death by death and on those in the tombs bestowing life." I walked out know life comes from God. Below are the verses from Vespers I need to hear and whisper with the readers.
I cry to the Lord with my voice,
I pray with my voice to the Lord.
I will pour out before Him my prayer,
I will tell my trouble before Him.
When my spirit departs from me,
You know my paths.
In this way that I was going,
they hid a trap for me.
I look to the right hand and watch,
but there is no one who knows me.
Escape is cut off from me,
but there is no one seeking my life.
I cried to You, O Lord, and said,
“You are my hope,
You are my portion in the land of the living.”
Attend to my prayer,
for I have been brought very low.
Deliver me from those who are persecuting me,
because they are stronger than I am.
Bring my soul out of prison that I may confess Your name,
The righteous are waiting for me until You reward me.
Psalm 129 (130)
Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice.
Let Your ears be attentive to the cry of my prayer.
If You, O Lord, should take note of our sins, O Lord, who would survive? But with You there is forgiveness.
For Your name’s sake, O Lord, I wait for You, my soul waits for Your word, my soul hopes for the Lord,
From the morning watch until night. From the morning watch let Israel hope for the Lord.
For with the Lord there is mercy and with Him there is great redemption. And He will redeem Israel from all his sins.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Thanksgiving: For Proverbs
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I have so much to be thankful for, but it's been under a pile of academic words, church busy-ness, and a lack of time with my husband. On that latter note, nothing drains my spirit like long weeks of barely speaking to each other. It's the consequence of chronic activities, a combo of Lenten practicalities and spiritual battles. Funny how just when we are called to quiet ourselves, to focus inward, to seek silence and let God show us the gap between the mark and our energies, that's just when we are tested. This is logosmoi, according to the Church Fathers, and my sister Lydia gave them a great moniker too: Anger Bats.
So, it has been a showdown. Anger bats V Beauty for Ashes.
On one side, massive academic papers, oil leaks, service-styles, raising teens, leaky basements, leaky roofs, peanuts, broken pelvis, cancer, death and miscarriage, sudden and chronic health problems, plus a lack of time to be "present" for those people, my kids, my husband, our families. No, a lot of these are not my issues. It's just as a priest's wife with a certain disposition, I am trying so hard to carry these in prayer. The alternative is to be depressed, angry, worrisome, et al.
On the other side, a son who is going through a "give-mom-a-back-rub" phase. Nice.
Three weeks of running, speed back up and adding up distance has been my recent coup de etat! My daughter noticed that I'm much more cheerful when I have had my daily 8-10 miles. Eat your miles, Momma.
The finish line on this school year is about here.
I get a date with my husband tonight.
I get two new goddaughters on Lazarus Saturday. Godchildren are my one weakness! (To paraphrase from a favorite show, Larklight to Candleford.)
I might sit down and do pysanky this year.
I might repair the damage to my grandmother's spirits and her manuscript.
I have been reading Sayings of the Deserts Fathers, Proverbs, Isaiah, Genesis, some Marilynne Robinson and the newest book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and the wisdom is humbling in and of itself.
Great Lent is almost over, and Fr. Thomas' Hopko's piece on AF Radio, about moving towards the light of Christ's redemptive rescue was a wonderful reminder to me. You can hear it here: http://audio.ancientfaith.com/hopko/stt_2013-04-09.mp3
Friday, March 22, 2013
Three Thanksgivings, or more
Three is good. Three is triune, a callback to God.
This morning's passages for Great Lent are all OT passages, Isaiah, Genesis and Proverbs:
Isaiah 3:1-15
Genesis 2:20-3:20
Proverbs 3:19-34
And I'm struck by three messages in them.
In Isaiah, the voice of solidarity with me.
Why is okay to form and fashion a society where the poor are the ones left to take care of themselves?Research bore this out this week in an Atlantic article, wherein Ken Stearn reported in "Why the Rich Don't Give to Charity" that the bottom 20% of wage earners give 3.2 percent of income on average, and to people-centered or religious organizations. The wealthy give to academic and cultural causes and at a rate of 1.3% of their income.
In Genesis, we heard our story, as Fr. Chad Hatfield speaks of in the Lenten meditation, and I happen to be writing an extensive piece on this mythos versus the one of Second Eve, Mary. Which story do we believe?
For this, I was reminded of Bruce Feiler's wonderful read this week on healthy stories for families. I know the story we had on my father's side of the family was one of service to God, of hardship survived by joy and family and prayer. Eve's story is one of hiding, of brokenness and a God of Love who chases them down in the Garden. Then, when God cannot fix this, He sets in motion a plan to set humankind free of the injury and sickness separating His beloved from Him. This is not the retributive, punitive God I thought I knew growing up. It is a God who always loved us so much and wanted to be with us. Parenting a teenage daughter, who pulls away from me and thinks my desire to take her out, to eat as a family, to smile at each other, is me, longing for her. This is the love of God.
And, finally, the final lines of our Proverbs reading. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. It is Great Lent. Please forgive me, a sinner for any haughtiness as I work through what see, often in judgment against another, but need to turn back to my behavior. For instance, I need to be one of those poor people and give out of my best, for God's people. For restored and loved people heal the world with the gratitude that the care and newness of generous giving creates. And, I need to make it clear to my kids that our story, the story after seminary, is that prayer and love bring us through the ups and downs. My story needs to be one of joyful struggle. Gratitude. True Eucharist.
This morning's passages for Great Lent are all OT passages, Isaiah, Genesis and Proverbs:
Isaiah 3:1-15
Genesis 2:20-3:20
Proverbs 3:19-34
And I'm struck by three messages in them.
In Isaiah, the voice of solidarity with me.
What do you mean by crushing My people And grinding the faces of the poor?” Says the Lord God of hosts. Isaiah 3:15What poetry in those words, for I feel that way whenever I hear them dismissed, whenever I hear they are bottom feeders, like the woman of Cana, fit only to eat the crumbs of others. Someone recently asked me when I was returning to Mexico, because she had saved pencils stubs for the orphans there. "I figure, when you've got nothing, anything is good," she said. She's known nothing, but why are these stubs not good enough for our thrifty selves, up here, north of the border. Why do we not use those ourselves and save our money to give the best to those cannot enjoy such bright newness?
Why is okay to form and fashion a society where the poor are the ones left to take care of themselves?Research bore this out this week in an Atlantic article, wherein Ken Stearn reported in "Why the Rich Don't Give to Charity" that the bottom 20% of wage earners give 3.2 percent of income on average, and to people-centered or religious organizations. The wealthy give to academic and cultural causes and at a rate of 1.3% of their income.
In Genesis, we heard our story, as Fr. Chad Hatfield speaks of in the Lenten meditation, and I happen to be writing an extensive piece on this mythos versus the one of Second Eve, Mary. Which story do we believe?
For this, I was reminded of Bruce Feiler's wonderful read this week on healthy stories for families. I know the story we had on my father's side of the family was one of service to God, of hardship survived by joy and family and prayer. Eve's story is one of hiding, of brokenness and a God of Love who chases them down in the Garden. Then, when God cannot fix this, He sets in motion a plan to set humankind free of the injury and sickness separating His beloved from Him. This is not the retributive, punitive God I thought I knew growing up. It is a God who always loved us so much and wanted to be with us. Parenting a teenage daughter, who pulls away from me and thinks my desire to take her out, to eat as a family, to smile at each other, is me, longing for her. This is the love of God.
And, finally, the final lines of our Proverbs reading. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. It is Great Lent. Please forgive me, a sinner for any haughtiness as I work through what see, often in judgment against another, but need to turn back to my behavior. For instance, I need to be one of those poor people and give out of my best, for God's people. For restored and loved people heal the world with the gratitude that the care and newness of generous giving creates. And, I need to make it clear to my kids that our story, the story after seminary, is that prayer and love bring us through the ups and downs. My story needs to be one of joyful struggle. Gratitude. True Eucharist.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Top Ten This Time
Just a few days before Forgiveness Sunday, which goes with St. Patrick's Feast Day this year.
I haven't posted on a number of awesome "Gratitudes"--
1. Two days of no stress (and no writing), to do simple things, like grocery shopping and planting.
2. Summer Scallop Squash is started.
6. Teaching my son the mysteries beans.
White beans easily grind into the base of many of our favorite cakes and breads, replacing the flour and increasing protein. This was a handy dandy "learn" just before Lent. Now, what to use in place of ghee (the de-lactosed butter that tastes like a piece of heaven). I use a ground flax seed 2T soaked in water 4T to make the egg replacer. I used cream of tartar and soda with a 1t of apple cider vinegar to raise it. Add vinegar just before pouring into the pan. A good cake recently has been
Preheat oven to 350! Very important.
30 ounces butter beans, drained, rinsed and blended
4 eggs (or egg replacer)
1/3 ghee (or dairy free earth balance)
1.5 t baking soda
1 c xylitol
1T imitation almond flavoring
2t imitation fruit flavoring (if you like)
1t cream of tartar
1t cider vinegar
Blend all ingredients except the vinegar in the blender or food processors until creamy.
Pour batter into pan and then add your vinegar. Dropping in chopped nuts or chopped apples, dates, or cinnamon and cloves is a good way to throw in variety.
Bake at 350 (preheat your oven!) in a greased loaf or cake pan.
Bake until the sides just start to pull way from the pan and a toothpick comes out clean. For Bundts, about 45-50 minutes. For 9x13" 35-45 minutes, and for thin sheet cakes or cupcakes, much less.
7. In unrelated to food news, I am so thankful for a day to celebrate my students. The threat to funding in Pennsylvania meant asking students for stories of success to take to the capitol. I have students who are earning huge scholarships, publishing books, self-publishing, graduating college with high honors, students who have done extensive missions trips, etc. It's so wonderful.
8. I have ideas to rid myself of more junk. I'm thankful for this. Sometimes, I don't have that vision and I just die.
9. I feel almost ready to start running again. I can jog through the cold into the grocery store. No pain. Soon, I feel miles under my feet.
10. We've had a family dinner at least once a week recently. Ah.... Nice.
It's the little things.
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| By Rameshng (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0via Wikimedia Commons (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], |
1. Two days of no stress (and no writing), to do simple things, like grocery shopping and planting.
2. Summer Scallop Squash is started.
Scallops, which Fr. Theophan, served as baby squash in pesto sauce with roasted peppers, etc, and pasta for a few wives' dinners at St. Tikhon's.3. Zucchini Squash is started.
I love to make "chips" of fresh, thin-sliced zucchini for bean dips and salsas. My local mexican restaurant lets me carry in fresh zucchinis, which I slice to scoop up the complimentary salsa.
I also love to grate these, saute in 1t of ghee, put on imitation almond extract, stevia and so delicious coconut creamer. In non-lenten times, I add egg whites.4. Heirloom Tomatoes are started.
I have been cutting up tomatoes, spraying with my mix of 2/3 olive oil (I use unfiltered extra virgin oil) with 1/3 water in a sprayer, with fresh ground smoked peppercorns available here (http://myspicesage.com), and smoked applewood salt with balsamic vinegar. A sprinkle of rosemary needles crushed between my fingers, and a splash or two of good balsamic vinegar.5. The smell of rosemary I crushed between my palms.
6. Teaching my son the mysteries beans.
White beans easily grind into the base of many of our favorite cakes and breads, replacing the flour and increasing protein. This was a handy dandy "learn" just before Lent. Now, what to use in place of ghee (the de-lactosed butter that tastes like a piece of heaven). I use a ground flax seed 2T soaked in water 4T to make the egg replacer. I used cream of tartar and soda with a 1t of apple cider vinegar to raise it. Add vinegar just before pouring into the pan. A good cake recently has been
Preheat oven to 350! Very important.
30 ounces butter beans, drained, rinsed and blended
4 eggs (or egg replacer)
1/3 ghee (or dairy free earth balance)
1.5 t baking soda
1 c xylitol
1T imitation almond flavoring
2t imitation fruit flavoring (if you like)
1t cream of tartar
1t cider vinegar
Blend all ingredients except the vinegar in the blender or food processors until creamy.
Pour batter into pan and then add your vinegar. Dropping in chopped nuts or chopped apples, dates, or cinnamon and cloves is a good way to throw in variety.
Bake at 350 (preheat your oven!) in a greased loaf or cake pan.
Bake until the sides just start to pull way from the pan and a toothpick comes out clean. For Bundts, about 45-50 minutes. For 9x13" 35-45 minutes, and for thin sheet cakes or cupcakes, much less.
7. In unrelated to food news, I am so thankful for a day to celebrate my students. The threat to funding in Pennsylvania meant asking students for stories of success to take to the capitol. I have students who are earning huge scholarships, publishing books, self-publishing, graduating college with high honors, students who have done extensive missions trips, etc. It's so wonderful.
8. I have ideas to rid myself of more junk. I'm thankful for this. Sometimes, I don't have that vision and I just die.
9. I feel almost ready to start running again. I can jog through the cold into the grocery store. No pain. Soon, I feel miles under my feet.
10. We've had a family dinner at least once a week recently. Ah.... Nice.
It's the little things.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Preparing for Confession
St. Ephraim the Syrian has a wonderful pre-confession prayer that I almost always use in preparation.
I, who am full of transgressions, judge those who transgress. If I am not honored I feel abhorred and consider as enemies those who tell me the truth. If I am not flattered, I feel disgusted. Being unworthy, I accept honors Those who do not serve me I defame as arrogant. I ignore the brother and sister who are sick, but when I am sick, I want to be loved and cared for. I despise my superiors and overlook the inferiors. If I keep myself, even for a little bit from unreasonable desires, I become vainglorious. If I attain some degree of vigilance, I am entrapped by its opposite. If I restrain myself from foods, I am thrown down because of my pride. If I make some progress in virtue, I boast before my brothers and sisters. Externally I appear humble, but in my soul I am presumptuous I am not going to mention the vain thoughts I have in church, and the wanderings of my mind during prayer. I leave aside the hypocritical meetings, the greed in the give and take of business, and the publication of the mistakes of others and the disastrous slanders. This is my accursed life. O Lord, grant me repentance for the sake of Your infinite compassion.
St. Ephraim the Syrian 4th century
I love this prayer, for it captures so many of my sins, and it always evokes some amazing realization, about half-way into confession. I end up surprised, in tears, and unbound.
Recently, God has been doing this to me, putting on chains that unbind something else. The broken pelvis, that forced me to realize I don't have to be a slave to a run. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I think Legion plagues me, for other passions attack. But He teaches me that I can let go. I don't have to yell and scream when I don't get my way.
Second, I had prayed, when a friend was diagnosed with MS, that God afflict me, not her. It was a prayer of self-pity and sin, I realize now. I've always counted myself deficient, but in a shame-based way, not in a humble way. Brene Brown, in her TED talk on shame, points out that shame saying we are not good without reason, whereas guilt is knowing what we've done that was no good. One is from the father of lies, for we are good. We created Imago Dei, in God's image. But we still sin. Guilt is something we can release, in the Sacrament of Confession. Shame is the lie that we were never any good, not even created in goodness. It is the rejection of God's love for us. When my sister was diagnosed with cancer recently, and I saw my father's heartbreak, I realized that prayer, me not she, would not do my father good. His heart would still be broken. So would our Father God's. He does not desire the death of us. He desires that all should be saved, be healed.
Today, my sister began chemo for her cancer. We messaged her verses 1-4 of Psalm 41:
Blessed are those who have regard for the weak;the Lord delivers them in times of trouble. The Lord protects and preserves them —they are counted among the blessed in the land—he does not give them over to the desire of their foes.The Lord sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.I said, “Have mercy on me, Lord;heal me, for I have sinned against you.For a bit, I wondered if we should message that last part, the part about mercy, healing and sin. But then, I realized, whenever Christ healed a person in the New Testament, he often said, "Go. Your sins are forgiven you. He was healing us both of infirmary of body and soul.
Glory to God.
Today, the snow came down, seven soft inches of duvet. It calms the world. It is purity that absorbs sound and at a certain warmer winter temperature, it packs into delicious toys of snowballs and snowmen. Most of all we can scoop into snow cones. Tomorrow it will melt away, and in my post-confession glow, I thank God.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Mary's Message about Christ, Her Son
What if Mary spoke, right out of an icon, to us? What would she say?
Yes, I know, she is in Abraham's bosom, so-to-speak, but if we boiled the Christological message of the Mother of God down, what would we get? I mean if you took out developmental and reactive doctrines and the fancy terms, like Theotokos, Panagia, Mater Gloriosa, Mater Dolorosa, which are mostly "Greek and Latin" to us.
Watch the video, and think about it.
Any answers?
Sometimes it takes fiction, "the truth inside the lie," as Stephen King called it. If any fiction captures this, it was the book I just finished, Bernardo and the Virgin (Silvio Sirias). The biographer telling the story even purports to write a fictionalized account: "I want to write your story," he tells Bernardo, then warns him he will make it a novel. Bernardo, having to learned to read late in life is at peace with this, so long as the novelist "remains true to her message," for Bernardo knows the lines between fiction and non-fiction are often unclear. Bernardo, having grown up in a poor Nicaraguan pueblo, had to work for most of his life for the luxury of literacy. In spite of his poverty, and second-class citizenship as a campesino, he lived a humble pious life. Most of his neighbors think he is "simple," or worse, mentally handicapped. Most of them tell get to tell their stories in biography, and almost all of them characterize Bernardo as somewhat thick, for how else can a man live with such devotion to prayer, faith, and being self-less in nearly every way? Padre Ginés, Bernardo's confidante, former priest, and later colleague said Bernardo was "far from being the brightest man on the planet."
Early in the revolution, Mary appeared to Bernardo, asking her to carry a message to Nicaraguans, and to the world at large. Every time she appeared over the course several years of revolution, she repeated herself:
I want everyone to pray the rosary, every day, not only during the month of May. I want everyone to pray it with their family. Teach our children to pray the rosary as soon as they are old enough to understand. Pray the rosary at the same time of the day, once the chores of the home have been completed. El Señor does not like prayers that are said in a hasty, distracted, or mechanical manner. Make sure that when you pray the rosary, you take time to reflect upon the appropriate passages of the Bible. Renew the first Saturdays. you received many favors when you last did this. And above all, I want everyone to live La Palabra de Dios (the Word of God).
Love one another. Fulfill your duties and obligations to each other. Forgive one another. Work for peace. Do not ask El Señor for peace. You need to work to make peace among yourselves; otherwise it will never happen. Do not choose the path of violence. Never choose the path of violence. never choose the path of violence. Since the earthquake, your county has suffered much and now dark, menacing clouds cover it again. Your suffering and the suffering of all of humanity shall continue if people don't mend their ways.
Pray, mi hijo (my son). Pray the rosary for the entire planet. Tell believers and nonbelievers alike that grave dangers threaten the world. I am begging El Señor to delay his judgment. If you don't mend your ways your dependence on violence as a way to settle difference will bring forth Armageddon.
Throughout out accounts in Bernardo and the Virgin, Bernardo and all those whose accounts the narrator includes share key snippets of the message, with the central message repeating in the novel over and over. Sor Milagros (Sister Milagros) includes it in her accounts. Bernardo repeats it in the chapters devoted to his point of view. It is borne out, or the horrifying consequences of it not being honored repeat in the stories of women who lose husbands to infidelity, sons to the violence of the revolution, or themselves to that violence. Bernardo repeats it and he is not immune to those who ignore the message. When Sandra, who grew up Catholic, pushes against the violence of the dictators, she is pulled into the violence of the communist rebels. Having been tortured herself, she both gives up on prayer, then on the Church with its Scripture and rhythms of prayer, feasts and fasts. Finally she abandons God and gives herself over as a crowning tool of torture. She becomes Bernardo's torturer, trying bribery, then sleep and food deprivation, and electrocution to force him to recant. Unable to succeed she orders him sodomized and released.
After such horror, a good man is hard to find. Bernardo hides in the seminary, one of a few worthy candidates flooding its doors, seeking its refuge. But Sor Milagros and friends convince him that is not God's will. He finishes his education, is ordained to the diaconate at fifty-seven, and goes to serve and to repeat the message.
"I want everyone to pray the rosary every day, not just in the month of May. Teach your children to pray the rosary as soon as they are old enough to understand. Pray at the same time every day, once the chores of the home have been completed. El Señor does not like prayers that are said in a hasty, distracted, or mechanical manner. Make sure that when you pray the rosary, you take time to reflect upon the appropriate passages of the Bible. Renew the first Saturdays. you received many favors when you last did this. And above all, I want everyone to live La Palabra de Dios (the Word of God).
Love one another. Fulfill your duties and obligations to each other. Forgive one another. Work for peace. Do not ask El Señor for peace. You need to work to make peace among yourselves; otherwise it will never happen. Do not choose the path of violence. Never choose the path of violence. never choose the path of violence.
Bernardo may be painted as a simpleton, a kind of "fool-for-Christ," but he is no idiot. His actions speak so loudly, but do not overshadow the words he is given. His actions testify on behalf of his character and capacity. He teaches himself to read and to be a tailor to move up and out of the field work of the campesinos. He preserves a statue of Mary from destruction in his teens. He cares for the local parish. He advocates for schools in his pueblo. He protects a widow and provides a father-figure for her orphaned son.
Most of all, he never tooted his own horn, as the idiom goes. He remained silent on matters of his own intelligence, goodness, piety. His purpose was to speak the message he was given, not speak for himself.
While Padre Ginés says in one breath,
I realize some of you may be put off by Mary, by the rosary. The divide between Catholic and Protestant has made all things Mary fodder for reaction, but what message, what Christological message is she speaking? Does one exist in this book? If so, what does it offer us?
What excites me is that these very Scriptural messages are never debunked in the novel. The skeptic (of our culture) that I've become, just kept waiting for the novel to betray me. I thought it would sell out to skepticism of the modern man, rather than fidelity to creed, to God, to His created beings, all my neighbors on this planet.
It's not that the campesinos in Nicaragua didn't need, and long for. These were temporary and new needs would arise. When Bernardo begs Nuestra Señora to answer the petitions of his people, she responds, "Bernardo, they are asking for things that are not important. They should be asking for greater faith and patience to help them bear their crosses. I cannot take away the suffering that is part of living in this world. Those are the crosses we all bear. I, for one, witnessed my Son's Crucifixion, and I later held his tortured body in my arms. Instead, everyone needs to listen to and act upon this message: love one another, resolve your differences by talking to each other. Do not take the path of violence. Never take the path of violence. Ask for faith, and you shall be rewarded with patience."
This gives me wings, to paraphrase St. Ephraim of Syria's prayer. It fits with "Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good" and the fathers of the faith before us taught the same, that we should not pray that all affliction be removed from us, but that we be given the strength. "Consider pure joy brothers when you face trials of many kinds, for you know the testing of your faith brings about perseverance..." says St. Peter.
Fidelity to our faith, to each other, in times of strife and violence (when is that NOT happening) is hard. In fact, I think we "sex up" the conflict, sell the heavy-handed reaction, and reach towards violence or vengeance for the thrill, whether in the story or real life.
It's much harder these days to live in fidelity to one another. It's a bombastic time. When I was chatting about Wendell Berry with fellow author Scott Russell Sanders last summer, he reminded me that living in fidelity is hard to do, and harder story to sell. I get a little thrill when someone can do it, someone like Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, Anne Tyler, Oscar Hijuelos and now Silvio Sirias, among the writers whose story, characters, conflicts and complications, point to the mystery of something more. What I hunger for. For the love of God and our fellow human.
Mary was a first of the followers of Christ and faithful to the end. What a joy to read fiction that points to the truth as she did.
Yes, I know, she is in Abraham's bosom, so-to-speak, but if we boiled the Christological message of the Mother of God down, what would we get? I mean if you took out developmental and reactive doctrines and the fancy terms, like Theotokos, Panagia, Mater Gloriosa, Mater Dolorosa, which are mostly "Greek and Latin" to us.
Watch the video, and think about it.
Any answers?
Sometimes it takes fiction, "the truth inside the lie," as Stephen King called it. If any fiction captures this, it was the book I just finished, Bernardo and the Virgin (Silvio Sirias). The biographer telling the story even purports to write a fictionalized account: "I want to write your story," he tells Bernardo, then warns him he will make it a novel. Bernardo, having to learned to read late in life is at peace with this, so long as the novelist "remains true to her message," for Bernardo knows the lines between fiction and non-fiction are often unclear. Bernardo, having grown up in a poor Nicaraguan pueblo, had to work for most of his life for the luxury of literacy. In spite of his poverty, and second-class citizenship as a campesino, he lived a humble pious life. Most of his neighbors think he is "simple," or worse, mentally handicapped. Most of them tell get to tell their stories in biography, and almost all of them characterize Bernardo as somewhat thick, for how else can a man live with such devotion to prayer, faith, and being self-less in nearly every way? Padre Ginés, Bernardo's confidante, former priest, and later colleague said Bernardo was "far from being the brightest man on the planet."
Early in the revolution, Mary appeared to Bernardo, asking her to carry a message to Nicaraguans, and to the world at large. Every time she appeared over the course several years of revolution, she repeated herself:
I want everyone to pray the rosary, every day, not only during the month of May. I want everyone to pray it with their family. Teach our children to pray the rosary as soon as they are old enough to understand. Pray the rosary at the same time of the day, once the chores of the home have been completed. El Señor does not like prayers that are said in a hasty, distracted, or mechanical manner. Make sure that when you pray the rosary, you take time to reflect upon the appropriate passages of the Bible. Renew the first Saturdays. you received many favors when you last did this. And above all, I want everyone to live La Palabra de Dios (the Word of God).
Love one another. Fulfill your duties and obligations to each other. Forgive one another. Work for peace. Do not ask El Señor for peace. You need to work to make peace among yourselves; otherwise it will never happen. Do not choose the path of violence. Never choose the path of violence. never choose the path of violence. Since the earthquake, your county has suffered much and now dark, menacing clouds cover it again. Your suffering and the suffering of all of humanity shall continue if people don't mend their ways.
Pray, mi hijo (my son). Pray the rosary for the entire planet. Tell believers and nonbelievers alike that grave dangers threaten the world. I am begging El Señor to delay his judgment. If you don't mend your ways your dependence on violence as a way to settle difference will bring forth Armageddon.
Throughout out accounts in Bernardo and the Virgin, Bernardo and all those whose accounts the narrator includes share key snippets of the message, with the central message repeating in the novel over and over. Sor Milagros (Sister Milagros) includes it in her accounts. Bernardo repeats it in the chapters devoted to his point of view. It is borne out, or the horrifying consequences of it not being honored repeat in the stories of women who lose husbands to infidelity, sons to the violence of the revolution, or themselves to that violence. Bernardo repeats it and he is not immune to those who ignore the message. When Sandra, who grew up Catholic, pushes against the violence of the dictators, she is pulled into the violence of the communist rebels. Having been tortured herself, she both gives up on prayer, then on the Church with its Scripture and rhythms of prayer, feasts and fasts. Finally she abandons God and gives herself over as a crowning tool of torture. She becomes Bernardo's torturer, trying bribery, then sleep and food deprivation, and electrocution to force him to recant. Unable to succeed she orders him sodomized and released.
After such horror, a good man is hard to find. Bernardo hides in the seminary, one of a few worthy candidates flooding its doors, seeking its refuge. But Sor Milagros and friends convince him that is not God's will. He finishes his education, is ordained to the diaconate at fifty-seven, and goes to serve and to repeat the message.
"I want everyone to pray the rosary every day, not just in the month of May. Teach your children to pray the rosary as soon as they are old enough to understand. Pray at the same time every day, once the chores of the home have been completed. El Señor does not like prayers that are said in a hasty, distracted, or mechanical manner. Make sure that when you pray the rosary, you take time to reflect upon the appropriate passages of the Bible. Renew the first Saturdays. you received many favors when you last did this. And above all, I want everyone to live La Palabra de Dios (the Word of God).
Love one another. Fulfill your duties and obligations to each other. Forgive one another. Work for peace. Do not ask El Señor for peace. You need to work to make peace among yourselves; otherwise it will never happen. Do not choose the path of violence. Never choose the path of violence. never choose the path of violence.
Bernardo may be painted as a simpleton, a kind of "fool-for-Christ," but he is no idiot. His actions speak so loudly, but do not overshadow the words he is given. His actions testify on behalf of his character and capacity. He teaches himself to read and to be a tailor to move up and out of the field work of the campesinos. He preserves a statue of Mary from destruction in his teens. He cares for the local parish. He advocates for schools in his pueblo. He protects a widow and provides a father-figure for her orphaned son.
Most of all, he never tooted his own horn, as the idiom goes. He remained silent on matters of his own intelligence, goodness, piety. His purpose was to speak the message he was given, not speak for himself.
While Padre Ginés says in one breath,
"May Bernardo forgive me for saying this... He was clever, no doubt about. He was good at solving common, everyday problems. But the only way Bernardo could be sure about accurately spreading her message was by memorizing it word for word...
"Señora, soy muy bruto,' he said to her. 'I'm as dumb as a stick. Please repeat your message once again so I can get it right. Otherwise, I'll forget what you said and make a mess out of everything.' That's why the message is always exactly the same."But is he as dumb as stick? For a few minutes after this, Padre Ginés implicates the rest of clergy. He condemns their hidden motives: "Whenever you relay someone else's message you will, at some point or another, get it mixed up. El Señor knows we clerics have done our own share of it with Jesucristo's message." He switches persons in his response, you the second person is invariable used where we shirk from true speaker I.
I realize some of you may be put off by Mary, by the rosary. The divide between Catholic and Protestant has made all things Mary fodder for reaction, but what message, what Christological message is she speaking? Does one exist in this book? If so, what does it offer us?
- That prayer, and Scripture, must be constant, central, attentive, even in terrible times.
- Mean what you pray. Let your yes be yes.
- As worthy as prayer and Scripture are to live, they require discipline of ourselves.
- We do our children a favor if we teach them the habits from the youngest days, for as Solomon writes, "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Prov. 22:6)
- Keep the holy days. Don't be a skipper. Honor the Sabbath Day (for Christians this is the Resurrection Day.)
- Fulfill your duties to each other cannot be a more direct pointer to all of Romans 12, the whole thing. Particularly this: "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality." Read it again here.
- Do not pray for peace. "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." or "Blessed are the peacemakers." It's not a question of relinquishing it until it appears, but a matter of our taking action to make peace. I love that making peace is an action. It is obedience that is blessed. So is being merciful, mourning, hungering for righteousness, and attaining a state of being called "pure in heart." These are actions that require we work for them. We experience the energies of God, grace, when we these, and God, with all our might.
What excites me is that these very Scriptural messages are never debunked in the novel. The skeptic (of our culture) that I've become, just kept waiting for the novel to betray me. I thought it would sell out to skepticism of the modern man, rather than fidelity to creed, to God, to His created beings, all my neighbors on this planet.
It's not that the campesinos in Nicaragua didn't need, and long for. These were temporary and new needs would arise. When Bernardo begs Nuestra Señora to answer the petitions of his people, she responds, "Bernardo, they are asking for things that are not important. They should be asking for greater faith and patience to help them bear their crosses. I cannot take away the suffering that is part of living in this world. Those are the crosses we all bear. I, for one, witnessed my Son's Crucifixion, and I later held his tortured body in my arms. Instead, everyone needs to listen to and act upon this message: love one another, resolve your differences by talking to each other. Do not take the path of violence. Never take the path of violence. Ask for faith, and you shall be rewarded with patience."
This gives me wings, to paraphrase St. Ephraim of Syria's prayer. It fits with "Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good" and the fathers of the faith before us taught the same, that we should not pray that all affliction be removed from us, but that we be given the strength. "Consider pure joy brothers when you face trials of many kinds, for you know the testing of your faith brings about perseverance..." says St. Peter.
Fidelity to our faith, to each other, in times of strife and violence (when is that NOT happening) is hard. In fact, I think we "sex up" the conflict, sell the heavy-handed reaction, and reach towards violence or vengeance for the thrill, whether in the story or real life.
It's much harder these days to live in fidelity to one another. It's a bombastic time. When I was chatting about Wendell Berry with fellow author Scott Russell Sanders last summer, he reminded me that living in fidelity is hard to do, and harder story to sell. I get a little thrill when someone can do it, someone like Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, Anne Tyler, Oscar Hijuelos and now Silvio Sirias, among the writers whose story, characters, conflicts and complications, point to the mystery of something more. What I hunger for. For the love of God and our fellow human.
Mary was a first of the followers of Christ and faithful to the end. What a joy to read fiction that points to the truth as she did.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Mourn With Those Who Mourn
Just a quick thanks today. Yesterday, it saved my life. Even in the final exhausted hours, when I gave up and cried myself to sleep, I posted my little sorrow and so many many voices sent little notes, my daughter gave me a hug, my husband sat beside me as I wept, he made me mix CD's, and this morning, I heard the voice of God in the shower. He speaks Scripture to me.
I am thankful for those who rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.
If you want to know what God said to me in the shower, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has appointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed and to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.
Is. 61:1.
Sometimes, I am brokenhearted and made a captive to my own sin, my despair at ever-mounting little things, to a sense that I cannot get it all done, that I'm a failure because another day passed with my children saying I caused their anger. I probably did. Because I didn't call that person who is suffering from cancer or some sickness. Because I didn't call the person whose mother is in the hospital. Because I forgot again to send a thank you card, a birthday card, a shower gift. Because the essay I wrote just wasn't polished or cogent enough. Because I missed another church service. Because I need the sacrament of confession.
Yesterday just was too much, and God sent people to mourn with me. I thank God for them because I said things to God that hurt Him, but not as many as I've said before. I kept a heart that was more pointed at repentance, which means that when the eyes sting the next morning, the conscience doesn't as well. For a disposition of repentance makes tears worthwhile.
I am thankful for those who rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.
If you want to know what God said to me in the shower, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has appointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed and to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.
Is. 61:1.
Sometimes, I am brokenhearted and made a captive to my own sin, my despair at ever-mounting little things, to a sense that I cannot get it all done, that I'm a failure because another day passed with my children saying I caused their anger. I probably did. Because I didn't call that person who is suffering from cancer or some sickness. Because I didn't call the person whose mother is in the hospital. Because I forgot again to send a thank you card, a birthday card, a shower gift. Because the essay I wrote just wasn't polished or cogent enough. Because I missed another church service. Because I need the sacrament of confession.
Yesterday just was too much, and God sent people to mourn with me. I thank God for them because I said things to God that hurt Him, but not as many as I've said before. I kept a heart that was more pointed at repentance, which means that when the eyes sting the next morning, the conscience doesn't as well. For a disposition of repentance makes tears worthwhile.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
An Act of Obedience
Today I can think of at least five things I am not thankful for. So, as act of will, I am going to name five for which I am thankful.
My friend, Jewell, who helps us troubleshoot the mysterious leaks and problems in our house. He has fixed our roof, replaced windows and doors, and myriad other helps.
Suzi and Phil, who sold us another Camry, which reliably takes the thousands of miles we put on cars.
That travel for my job happens around my dad's birthday each year, meaning I get to be with him.
That my son does come back and sweetly apologize for mistakes and failures. There is a beautiful age between eight and around twelve when our kids are fun to talk with, can play games, are discovering the world and responsive to others. Oh, don't get me wrong, they can throw tantrums, conjure up some tall tales and pull some bone-headed stunts, but they have a penitent streak.
For good books, that open up wonder in the world. I'm thoroughly enjoying Bernardo and the Virgin by Silvio Sirias. What makes any story good is how it lets me see that difficulty and tough stuff grows our muscles.
For the gift of a good meal, and letting go to enjoy it. House blessing with Wilson's last night was yummy. They minister in ways they do not realize.
For the gift of pain, which sets limits on our stubborn wills. When I learned today there is a good reason for the profound pain I feel when I speed the walk into a run, I was relieved that I learned to trust and life in the pain, without masking it.
Thanksgiving is not ibuprofen though. It does not mask today's pinches and sprains, the oil leak, the screaming son, the leaky roof, the broken tooth, sickness, another friend's parent being much much sicker, the students whose trauma we teachers adopt in secondary fashions each day. It does not mask the lack of time to clean my house, the sorrow over my sins of selfishness or self-pity. It is nutrition from the soul, like Scripture, prayer, worship.
Glory to God in all things.
My friend, Jewell, who helps us troubleshoot the mysterious leaks and problems in our house. He has fixed our roof, replaced windows and doors, and myriad other helps.
Suzi and Phil, who sold us another Camry, which reliably takes the thousands of miles we put on cars.
That travel for my job happens around my dad's birthday each year, meaning I get to be with him.
That my son does come back and sweetly apologize for mistakes and failures. There is a beautiful age between eight and around twelve when our kids are fun to talk with, can play games, are discovering the world and responsive to others. Oh, don't get me wrong, they can throw tantrums, conjure up some tall tales and pull some bone-headed stunts, but they have a penitent streak.
For good books, that open up wonder in the world. I'm thoroughly enjoying Bernardo and the Virgin by Silvio Sirias. What makes any story good is how it lets me see that difficulty and tough stuff grows our muscles.
For the gift of a good meal, and letting go to enjoy it. House blessing with Wilson's last night was yummy. They minister in ways they do not realize.
For the gift of pain, which sets limits on our stubborn wills. When I learned today there is a good reason for the profound pain I feel when I speed the walk into a run, I was relieved that I learned to trust and life in the pain, without masking it.
Thanksgiving is not ibuprofen though. It does not mask today's pinches and sprains, the oil leak, the screaming son, the leaky roof, the broken tooth, sickness, another friend's parent being much much sicker, the students whose trauma we teachers adopt in secondary fashions each day. It does not mask the lack of time to clean my house, the sorrow over my sins of selfishness or self-pity. It is nutrition from the soul, like Scripture, prayer, worship.
Glory to God in all things.
 |
| From the Holy Fathers Post |
Friday, February 22, 2013
More Than We Can Handle, Can Ask, Can Imagine
To him who is able to keep you from stumbling
and to present you before his glorious presence
without fault and with great joy—
to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority,
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.
1) a sibling still in her twenties has cancer
2) a student's parent yells at me when I have called to help her earn a passing grade
3) my tooth breaks
4) a dear child of God's will not eat because someone injured his spirit and body
5) a friend, a faithful wife, who wants only to be God's servant, is betrayed, broke and still one of the most amazing parents I know.
6) a child of God suffers the spiritual pain to her arms, and then fights back
7) a second student this year from the NE PA area, another teenager, has another case of possible thyroid cancer
8) Everyone seems so needy- my children. My husband. My students. Their parents. The grading. The coursework.
9) Another friend, another priest's wife, another family member struck with cancer.
10) more cancer, more surgery, and so many people I wake up at all hours in nightsweats dreaming of dying and just find myself praying and praying and praying.
Driving home last week, from Michigan, I was preparing for the discussion of Kisses from Katie tonight. (Shout out to the McCulloh's for providing our parish with the book at Nativity, and the hospitality tonight to discuss it.) I was preparing by listening to Kisses from Katie, which seemed, at first, a bit too perky for my melancholic soul. That is until she caught my attention saying:
“Remember, God will never give you more than you can handle.”
People repeat this frequently; I heard it when I was growing up and I hear it now. It is meant to be a source of encouragement, and it would be if I believed it were true. But I don’t. I believe that God totally, absolutely, intentionally gives us more than we can handle. Because this is when we surrender to Him and He takes over, proving Himself by doing the impossible in our lives.
…I have learned to accept it, even ask for it, this “more than I can handle.” Because in these times, God shows Himself victorious. He reminds me that all of this life requires more of Him and less of me. God does give us more than we can handle. Not maliciously, but intentionally, in love, that His glory may be displayed, that we may have no doubt of who is in control, that people may see His grace and faithfulness shining through our lives.And as I surrender these situations to Him, watch Him take over and do the impossible, I am filled with joy and peace – so much more than I can handle.
–Kisses from Katie, excerpts from p.135-137
…I have learned to accept it, even ask for it, this “more than I can handle.” Because in these times, God shows Himself victorious. He reminds me that all of this life requires more of Him and less of me. God does give us more than we can handle. Not maliciously, but intentionally, in love, that His glory may be displayed, that we may have no doubt of who is in control, that people may see His grace and faithfulness shining through our lives.And as I surrender these situations to Him, watch Him take over and do the impossible, I am filled with joy and peace – so much more than I can handle.
–Kisses from Katie, excerpts from p.135-137
He does give me more than I can handle. He did this week. On that drive home Monday, I looked up and, what do you know? The planes landing and taking off from Indianapolis International Airport strafed a perfect cross in the sky. There I was listening to her quoting 2nd Corinthians 4: "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body."
I'm not facing death. Exhaustion. Yes. But I've had worse. I slept five hour nights during Seminary. I thought someone put speed in the water in Carbondale. So, these days, it's not too bad. I called my husband.
He said, "I remember what (Dc.) Ted said when we in seminary, "This is meant to be impossible."
The thing is, my husband and I have always flown by the seat of our pants. Twas' better to get married at 19 then betray God's call to remain chaste. Twas' better just give and give, than stockpile our 401K's. Twas' better to live with three pairs of shoes than more. We've eschewed whatever we could, jettisoned, and frankly, have been a bit careless with savings and retirement because people gotta eat. Back then, we remained more more faithful than now. Nowadays, I need a reminder that three pairs is just fine. I still own too many pairs of boots. And, that the extra coat is what I stole from the poor, to paraphrase St. Basil.
Dang. Tonight, when we left McCulloh's, I knew I was in the right place and if I never travel again, true dat, so long as folks here are being fed, clothed and their spirits are not wasting away.
I am thankful for my closest relatives in the family of God, who make quilts, counsel woman against abortions, drive vets to their medical appointments, plant pretty flowers, mow the church lawn, start CSA's, feed the priest's family so they can pass along their veggies to the neighbors, gift to their priest and may we give so generously to the families around us, go to med appointments with the mother who just heard a horrible diagnosis for her kids, for starting a 501c3 to refuge God's creatures and uses those poor starving, blinded, neglected creatures to help heal broken children, who want to foster, mentor, volunteer for kids here in Montgomery County, where only TWO FAMILIES are fostering. (AAAARRRRRGGGHHH, there is reason God made me barren one way. He had to to 2x4-to-the-face-me about those kids who need a safe home.) So, there I am. Volunteer for Achaius and who knows what the future holds? Guess there was a reason I grew up around foster kids, and have friends wholly committed to serving God this way!
He sure as heaven gives us more than we can ask. When Tig Nitaro said, "God, she can't take more," I wanted to shake a fist at heaven and say, "Yeah!" Then I was reminded that I have been walking 15 miles a day on a stressed pelvis, because I cannot shake The Way of the Pilgrim. I get the sense that my life has been charmed.
When my friend wrote that Kisses From Katie wrecked her life. Yup, me too. Thanks to all my Church Family. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I would write you all a love-in-Christ note, but it seems after tonight, we got work to do. But hey, Love in Christ.
Viva La Resistance in the Name of our Blessed, Merciful God and Savior>>>
PS. My sister's cancer is Stage Two. Take that cancer. May you be starved and squeezed and cautarized!
I'm not facing death. Exhaustion. Yes. But I've had worse. I slept five hour nights during Seminary. I thought someone put speed in the water in Carbondale. So, these days, it's not too bad. I called my husband.
He said, "I remember what (Dc.) Ted said when we in seminary, "This is meant to be impossible."
The thing is, my husband and I have always flown by the seat of our pants. Twas' better to get married at 19 then betray God's call to remain chaste. Twas' better just give and give, than stockpile our 401K's. Twas' better to live with three pairs of shoes than more. We've eschewed whatever we could, jettisoned, and frankly, have been a bit careless with savings and retirement because people gotta eat. Back then, we remained more more faithful than now. Nowadays, I need a reminder that three pairs is just fine. I still own too many pairs of boots. And, that the extra coat is what I stole from the poor, to paraphrase St. Basil.
Dang. Tonight, when we left McCulloh's, I knew I was in the right place and if I never travel again, true dat, so long as folks here are being fed, clothed and their spirits are not wasting away.
I am thankful for my closest relatives in the family of God, who make quilts, counsel woman against abortions, drive vets to their medical appointments, plant pretty flowers, mow the church lawn, start CSA's, feed the priest's family so they can pass along their veggies to the neighbors, gift to their priest and may we give so generously to the families around us, go to med appointments with the mother who just heard a horrible diagnosis for her kids, for starting a 501c3 to refuge God's creatures and uses those poor starving, blinded, neglected creatures to help heal broken children, who want to foster, mentor, volunteer for kids here in Montgomery County, where only TWO FAMILIES are fostering. (AAAARRRRRGGGHHH, there is reason God made me barren one way. He had to to 2x4-to-the-face-me about those kids who need a safe home.) So, there I am. Volunteer for Achaius and who knows what the future holds? Guess there was a reason I grew up around foster kids, and have friends wholly committed to serving God this way!
He sure as heaven gives us more than we can ask. When Tig Nitaro said, "God, she can't take more," I wanted to shake a fist at heaven and say, "Yeah!" Then I was reminded that I have been walking 15 miles a day on a stressed pelvis, because I cannot shake The Way of the Pilgrim. I get the sense that my life has been charmed.
When my friend wrote that Kisses From Katie wrecked her life. Yup, me too. Thanks to all my Church Family. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I would write you all a love-in-Christ note, but it seems after tonight, we got work to do. But hey, Love in Christ.
Viva La Resistance in the Name of our Blessed, Merciful God and Savior>>>
PS. My sister's cancer is Stage Two. Take that cancer. May you be starved and squeezed and cautarized!
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