The Eucharist Project

Thirteen months ago, on the day before Thanksgiving, my husband went to Kroger, bought a gift card and drained our bank account onto it. I finished my workday, stashed a twenty dollar bill between cards in my pocketbook and packed up the last of the food in the house, except for some flour, some dried beans, herbs and spices and a couple of bags of frozen food. As I recall, all the milk, cheese, cereal, oats, fruits and veggies- fresh and canned- were cleaned out. Almost every bit of food we had was in the coolers and baskets. Except for spending my twenty on the last gift, an Amazon gift card for a sibling, we were set to start out for the annual Reynolds' Christgiving. 

Our sixteen-year-old daughter carried her lime green comforter, stuffing coming out of huge gash in the seam to the Camry  Over her shoulder, she had slung a pillowcase, stuffed with her MP3 player, a couple of favorite stuffed animals, books, games, snacks and her coat. She squeezed her items on top of the packed out back seat and maneuvered her long legs in the cab. My son hefted in under his ratty blue comforter. --Back in our seminary days, when parishes helped Seminarian families buy the Christmas gifts, the kids had opened the blankets.-- This was our second year crawling out of seminary debt and scaling back on all those gifts. Liam too had a pillow case stuffed with toys for the drive. Both kids looked snowed in the back seat, but excited for our trip. 

For the twelve hours drivng, they sharing earbuds, groaned against the unbalanced baskets of gifts and food. Road-weary in the wee hours of the morning, they car-napped and snarked at each other.  We have driven this path so many times, it is no longer adventurous, especially when we cannot bribe them with sodas and Subway this time. 

During seminary, we drove from Pennsylvania to Indiana, for two weeks of Christmas or three months of summer. We stretched our hands and feet as we crossed back into the Hoosier state, joking that one of us had made it home first.

Now we do a four-day round trip in the opposite direction. It's not so bad on the way out, with the anticipation of Christgiving-- Christmas celebrated back to back with Thanksgiving in November-- It is a necessary tradition for an extended family with several ordained clergy. We smooshed together Christmas and Thanksgiving on a lark and ended up with the newly christened Christgiving, a lovely accident since it blends the gratefulness with Christ's gift.  It's a family kind of Eucharist. Eucharist is what my clergy husband and our parish offer up to God every Sunday. It means thanksgiving, literally. 

Last year, I trembled the whole trip, not with the joy of the Nativity season either. I was excited to see family I hadn't seen in months. I was excited to give out my handmade gifts, but spending our last two hundred dollars on gas and tolls scared me. The empty pantry, refrigerator and freezer flashed to mind as the mile markers passed. I pushed  back tears and gulped down the  lump in my throat. We were going on faith. There was no food or paycheck expected for the entire week following the trip. I reminded my husband to hyper-mile. He made up reasons the kids did not need sodas and fast food. In the backseat, they knew. They ate in silence. Thanksgiving felt like oxygen on a mountain peak, thin.

We made it home on what we had. My husband asked the parish for his check early. We bought groceries. In the following weeks, we had enough.

 We stuffed St. Nicholas stockings with socks, undergarments, candy and bubble bath. We bought our modest presents for the kids, even a small bit for each other. Folks in the parish gave us books, gift certificates and little extras. It was festive in a kind of restrained and beautiful way, like a slow and sparkly snowfall. That the week after Christmas, with a full heart, but empty pocketbook, I was looking for a way to give more outside our family. I started a 5000 mile challenge, of walking and running for the year, with the hopes of fundraising for several missionaries, mission groups, ministries and non-profits.

DISCLAIMER: Before I continue, I should tell you that my dream of raising a dollar a mile for the year resulted as well as a sales-drive test by Herff Jones went years ago. I am terrible at the ASK, that is the asking of money, it turns out. I got about five cents on the mile this year because I'm worried about putting people out. I went 5400 hundred miles. Actually, I'm finishing those as we speak, thanks to a free treadmill from my friend Melissa. It probably has 5000 miles on it since she gave it to me five years ago.

When I started a year ago, I was full of hope and thanksgiving, trepidation nagged at me, because I had just overcome a pretty nasty sprain. On Dec. 31, 2011, I was running a 9-minute mile. Still it seemed a good idea, a good gift for my running and my restless, worried body.

In the past year, I trained non-stop. Before my marathon this October, I was running a 7:21 minute mile. I ran the marathon well, though I tripped. i finished in 3 hours and 41 minutes. Within a few weeks, I hit my 5000 mile goal. The same week, I felt the sprain. It traveled down my legs and knotted up my feet.

I'm nursing it back to health, running once a week, at most, and slow. I'm running 12-minute miles. I hurt. And the thanksgiving this year, well, I think I'm cresting Mount Rainer, or K2. It's been thin and I'm ragged.

Twelve months ago, when I began, I acknowledged the unknown snarls that might undo my plans. Injury aside there was job uncertainty, and many demands and choices that years bring. I knew I would be facing the annual uncertainty that my position for a Pennsylvania virtual school creates. I live too many states away. If I were not such a committed teacher, they might have let me go, as they have to several friends who moved after me.  

I started a graduate program, to hedge those fears about my job. It's like working two full-time jobs, while being a mom to a teenage girl and 'tween son. Spice that up with a few other roles, like ingredients in my identity and energy: priest's wife, partner, supposedly a friend, sister and daughter. 

Of all of those, parenting has been the biggest challenge this year. Maybe because I feel time is running out with my beautiful daughter. She has a boyfriend, is apply to colleges, and starting her first job. She texts people all day and aces her AP and Honors classes. But, if you have heard the adage that parenting a teenager is akin to parenting a preschooler, heed it. Preschoolers need mom and dad at all hours and have no sense of time or general awareness outside of their sphere of existence. Teens are like this too, but the situation is deceptive, because parents can convince themselves this is not normal, that these kids are older and more mature than this needy-ness they exhibit. It is normal, and they are age-appropriate. -- Too bad I haven't been age appropriate. If I graded myself, I would get F's in some of those positions, and none would hold at higher than a B on some tests. Most F's come in the area of parenting a teenage daughter. Just when I need to be flexible to start a tearful heart to heart at 11pm, I am bleary eyed, demanding the shower, and nodding off, or just plain intemperate at her imposing need for reassurance at that hour of the night.

That's just speaking to my failure as a mother. 

So, when Rachel, who started going to my church this year, handed me a book last week, Ann Voscamp's 1000 Gifts, I got the sense it was providential.

Voscamp is a protestant, but she had me at her epigraph on Chapter Two, words from Fr. Alexander Schmemann from his book For The Life of the World:

Eucharist is the state of perfect man.

Eucharist is the life of paradise.

Eucharist is the only full and real response of man

 to God's creation, redemption and gift of heaven.

Remember that Eucharist is the oblation- the obedient offering- of Thanksgiving that involved the Body and Blood of our Savior. We say the Church is a hospital, that Christ came to save not the righteous but sinners, that the Body and the Blood are for healing, for the life of the world.

In thirteen months, in more ways that I can count, but close to 1000, I have not been thankful. I have grown sick and shriveled, akin to the figs on the tree cursed.

I need a 1000 thanksgivings. I cannot do all those liturgies in one year, I cannot take in the medicine, literally, 1000 times. I can begin, though. I can begin by offering a thanksgiving for every mile my feet take me this year. I would love to replace every curse, every complaint, every groan and growl, every sigh of hurt and anger with a thanksgiving, but I know my stubborn will. I will pair Thanksgiving with the use of my body, which gets hurt and tired, and joyful and energetic in seasons. I will learn thanksgiving like one learns prostrations.

And perhaps, I will find the joy of the Lord is my strength,

That He gives beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, a garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness,

His peace {He} gives to me, that passes all understanding,

That He clothes the lilies of field resplendently,

That he heals bruised reeds,

That he comforts those who mourn,

That He might be glorified.

Pray for me. At the end of this, there will be fasting, repentance, joy and peace, In short, Eucharist.

More Meditations on a Lament

In my previous post, I reference Josh Ritter's "A Girl in the War" and I started thinking further of my recent commitment to Rafe Esquith's example from Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire or Viktor Frankl's discussion of the existential vacuum and man's search for ultimate meaning in his tome by that name.

The lyric that links them opens the song:

Peter said to Paul you know all those words we wrote
 Are just the rules of the game and the rules are the first to go


I've wrestled with those lyrics. I like rules. I tend to be a very 'justice' oriented person. I am very rule driven.

I am one of the people that Esquith puts on Max Kohlberg's fourth stage of moral development.

Level I. I don't Want to Get in Trouble (Obedience and Punishment Orientation)

Level II. I Want a Reward (Individualism and Exchange)

Level III. I Want to Please Somebody (Good Interpersonal Relationships)

Level IV. I Follow the Rules (Maintaning the Social Order)

Level V. I Am Considerate of Other People (Social Contract and Individual Rights)

Level VI. I Have a Personal Code of Behavior and I Follow It (Universal Principle)

Esquith is one of those hyper-enthusiastic teachers that I fancy myself to be, but alas, I'm not. Still, if teaching has done anything for me, it has taught me to be a better parent and better person. When Esquith says he learned over his first ten years of teaching that from levels 1-5 "We can do better," I though to myself, I can do better. 

That has become even more important since I tend to parent in a crisis mode, a reactive rather than pro-active one. This problem is the result of being too busy. Our kids get shoved to the margins of our jobs, which I believe are also our ministries- my husband's and mine- but I tend to fall into a delusion that our happy marriage and relatively stable home mean that our children can sustain periods of busy-ness. Those get out of control and suddenly we're sparking off each other like electrons in a chemical reaction. Next I start parenting from the holster at my hip.  "You don't want me to come after you..." "Do this or else..." "Because I said so, that's why!" or "If you do that, I will take you shopping, out swimming, we'll play a game together, I'll make you a smoothie or (insert reward here)." Or, because "I love you." Or, because "families take care of each other." Or, because orderliness is from God and order matters. Some of those higher moral reasons for good behavior aren't bad, but as Esquith notes, "WE can do better."  These earlier things are the rules of the game. "And the rules are the first to go," says Ritter's lyric.

It is not lost on me that his speakers are alluding to the Apostles Paul and Peter, the rock upon whom "I will build this church" and the most loquacious of the New Testament writers. They argued with each other about right and wrong too. But, if Kohlberg is right, the rules are training wheels, supports, buttresss, scaffolds, for something greater.

Consider the Fruit of the Spirit. I was listening to Fr. Thomas Hopko speak on this in a podcast yesterday morning and he notes that we change this into "fruits" but shouldn't. The Fruit of the Spirit is either singular or a collective noun. It is a lump. If we have love then we have joy, he says. How can we have love without joy? How can we have joy without peace? And peace without patience, et cetera? We are aiming for something higher, and he teaches on that the Desert Fathers exalted humility as one of the greatest virtues. Consider this quote from a Fool-for-Christ:

If you are praised, be silent.
If you are scolded, be silent.
If you incur losses, be silent.
If you receive profit, be silent.
If you are satiated, be silent.
If you are hungry, also be silent.

And do not be afraid that there will be no fruit when all dies down; there will be! Not everything will die down. Energy will appear; and what energy!

~St. Feofil, the Fool 

It takes extreme humility to avoid words when scolded, praised, in loss, in hunger, and when we are over-full. It takes a relinquishing of ourselves and recognition of greater Goodness that we don't have to create or deliver the Fruit. That is God's job.

This is what Kohlberg and Frankl praise too. A higher order, not without rules, but embodying them yet not bound by them. Frankl's big on God, on His place in ultimate meaning: 

“As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

 In other words, man wants love, but love even is impossible unless man finds something more than himself. He cannot find even love without getting outside of himself, his ego, his own identity. He is called to look beyond, to a Thou (God). Meaning in life, greater good, is always found when we stop introspecting and start living for Thou, beyond ourselves and our full knowing and understanding. I love his articulation of this mystery.

Read on, if you so desire:

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth-that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which a man can aspire.

Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of human is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for the brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way-an honorable way-in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words,"The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
― Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning  

Ritter, towards the end of the song wrestles angels too: "Angel fly around in there but we can't see them." In Ritter's song, man is all tangled up in existential anger towards the unjust controllers of society, the men and women who call for war, and send his girl off into it.  He's looking up there into the meaning of things, trying to figure why bad things happen. He's trying to find meaning, right and wrong, next steps, and why he should do the 'right honorable' act when other people do bad things. 

Hmmm. I guess I don't have a neat conclusion, a bow to tie this up with. In the end, I think there is reason so few of us get to Kohlberg's stage six and why even Kohlberg implies that few if none of us have ever remained there. Still, as I parent a tween and teen, I think we are working toward home and a spiritual state that says: "We can do better." Lord, Have mercy.

A Girl in the War

I was running Saturday morning in the summer morning heat. Before I crashed and fractured my toe, I was doing a little praying, a little thinking and a little dancing- this is the true runner's high- when Josh Ritter's "Girl in the War" spangled my playlist. When I listen to books and songs on runs, they take on the pain and meaning of specific runs. Last week's specific pain was centered around parenting, as much of my life is. It was parenting my girl in the war.

The girl? My teenage daughter. I can't help thinking all teenagers are on a spiritual precipice. Have you read the research on adolescent brain development? These kids think with their frontal lobes, the emotion center of the brain. They are cutting as many synaptic connections as their pre-kindergarten development built, in about the same amount of time. Thousands. They are juiced on hormones to do the work and grown the body at the same time. They make many or most decisions from this portion of their brain. Damned be logic and reason.  They take risks without the ability to calculate cost. They still need directions in three or fewer steps at a time.

Did anyone ever tell you your teenager will need you as much or more as your preschooler? Heed those words.

This is a war and the battlefield is our culture. By sixteen around 50% of our kids' peers will have had one sexual encounter. Most will have tried alcohol, nicotine or another substance- at least a monster or red bull.

Our war? Getting a girl to

• have a spiritual life while following her passions towards an unchurched boy.
• own her faith in a culture such as a a public school where there she didn't recognize a fellow PK with whom she spent a week at science camp as a religious kid.
• recognize the trouble of technology which disconnects kids from their parents, siblings and friends by a bait-n-switch.
• discern beyond the surface, where, as she put it: "I spent the week around kids who aren't virgins and their relationship with God and others seem fine.
• realize that the only reason we kick in the 'boundaries' is because she isn't doing it herself and now is the time when she needs to be doing that.
• live with a clear conscience because only when she is clear and true to her knowledge of right and wrong can she have trust with those around her.

So that song came on and tore me up, particularly these lyrics.

Paul said to Peter 
 "You gotta rock yourself a little harder,
Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire"
And I got a girl in the war, Paul the only thing I know to do

Is turn up the music and pray that she makes it through

Because the keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom
And the angels fly around in there, but we can't see them
And I gotta girl in the war, Paul I know that they can hear me yell

Read more at http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858586566/#FDs40J4ClF3X35Op.99

I have to admit a little literalism applied on 'pretend the dove from above (allusion to the Holy Spirit) is a dragon and your feet are on fire' felt like my running. I am aware that this lyric could be interpreted to pretend the Holy Spirit is like the evil dragon of Revelation, the serpent or monster against God. Or just a frightening monster that chases us. Based on a heart to heart this week, when she said dreads church, I think my daughter feels this interpretation.

I feel the need to run run run through these days. I don't know what I'm running from, except to give her and my kids some space and quiet. It's important to avoid being overbearing. I cannot over-parent right now and that is a scary tension. I have needed to lose a few runs due to lost sleep parenting at all hours when she did need me. This was one of those weeks. I think the Spirit woke me at one am so I find out that my daughter, who thought she didn't need a parent, would discover she did. Nothing like being nearly locked out of the house in the middle of the night to create that panic in child.

Both of us need music. It's okay to tune out to it sometimes. I read recently to avoid demanding too much of your teen. Give them down time. For an introvert like her and one like me, turning up music and getting away is good, as long as it's in limited doses

But I do feel "the keys to Kingdom got locked inside the Kingdom." That's how this battle feels. I feel like I'm yelling prayers up at our Savior and to his mother: "Please God, don't let her fall off this precipice. Don't let me be the one who shoves or bumps her off. Dear Theotokos, I suck as a mom; will you please take over?"

My father confessor says it's good to ask Our Lord's mom to remind me how to parent, to pray for her, and to look to the Theotokos as an example of mothering, instead of trying to go it alone.

One of the refrain lines is "I got a girl in the war and her eyes are like champagne/ the sparkle bubble over in the morning all you got is a rain." The hard part here is to realize in the morning she'll have a reservoir of mourning. We'll pick up and carry on, but what life or damage will that storm leave? Teaching her that storms leave a bit of bad and good is the hard part.