67/365 Fall and get up, fall and get up

1. Humility lies in knowing who I am and what my life means. Bidden or not bidden, God is always present.

2. If God is my center and my end, I must accept the will of God. How do I recognize the will of God? How do I know if it is different from my own? How do I know when to resist and when to embrace?

3. I should submit my will to those who have claim on me: my husband, my children, my family, my friends. Those around me are the voice of Christ.

4. Perseverance through difficult conditions allows my heart to endure and embrace the suffering. Life is hard. After the mountain, there is another mountain.

5. Sharing my weaknesses and struggles with someone who has the insight and care to give good advice and help is necessary for spiritual growth. Trying to hide weakness is a set-up for failure. If I admit and own my struggles and work to overcome them, I am moving towards perfection, towards becoming fully human.

6. I should be content with the least of things and positions. I should be thankful for what I have right now and not work to accumulate more than I need.

7. I should admit that I am small and embrace this.

8. I should follow the rules and examples set down for me. Experience can bring holiness.

9. I should control my opinions and my judgment.

10. I should keep laughter in check and know that humor is different from derision and sarcasm.

11. I should speak fewer words, speaking them gently and briefly.

12. I should manifest humility in my bearing and in my heart. I should tread lightly on the earth and act deliberately. Metaphorically, hood up and head down.

98/365 Still Life

99/365 Spiritual Needs

Right before Easter, Hildegard asked me if I had a spiritual director. I do, of sorts, in Sr. Jean Frances. We email back and forth regularly and she is so centered and peaceful and good. I love getting her emails because there is always something I can ruminate on, live on, for time to come. Which is good because I'm separated from the monastery for quite some time--the sisters have moved into the guest quarters while the main building is reconstructed, so there is no room for oblates. We could go stay at Conception and commute, but they strongly hinted that guests would be a burden. I can accept that, in fact, I'm glad they are honest about their own needs.

Because I should be too. This Lent was in many ways so good for me. But in other ways it got lost like a breeze in a whirlwind. I made it to Sunday mass at our parish twice before Triduum. I was here and there and everywhere and it sucked a lot of life out of me. This is good to see, in hindsight. It is, in the end, important for me to have a regular spiritual schedule. Another thing I learned this Lent.

Hildegard and I, though, were standing in the parking lot. "Have you considered going down to Pevely, even just for a night and staying the next day? What about down on Ripa?" I knew what Ripa meant--the SSND compound--but Pevely only meant a defunct Benedictine monastery to me. I mean in a Catholic sense. Pevely is also the location of one of the Girl Scout camps, but I figured that's not what Hildegard meant. I queried and she explained. Hermitages.

And I heard all those familiar nagging voices in my head. I have a baby who doesn't sleep through the night yet (yes, that's right, he's 15 months old). I have, oh, not a single weekend between now and the 5th of Never that I can easily claim for myself. I just can't trot off...but why could I just trot off to the monastery? Because they put out the weekend schedule for the year every January? They got on my calendar early?

Eh.

So she told me she'd be asking me later about it. I drove home and got things in order. Went back that evening for a Holy Thursday potluck and she handed me a one-free-night coupon to this place in Pevely. She found it by accident as she unloaded a basket to take to church for the collection that evening. There it was. Lo.

One time in Borders Books, before I was an oblate, I was searching through garbage Christian fluff, things like "The Idiot's Guide to Mary Magdalene" and crap centered around the idea that Jesus wants you to be rich--trying to find something worth my time. Maeve was wriggling in the stroller and I was about to walk away when Sophia said, "Look, Mama, a key." There on a low shelf was a key, an ordinary house key. Sitting in front of Joan Chittister's In Search of Belief. Look Mama indeed. A key.

I do not believe in coincidences. So I suppose I'm going to have to find my way to Pevely.

116/365 Maeve and the Coming Storm

Maeve was born in October 2004 and two days later, the parish had The Meeting where we found out we were going to close.

I was in the hospital. I sent Mike. I still wasn't the biggest supporter of our parish and I wasn't crushed by the news, frankly. I wasn't even sure I wanted to baptize Maeve there. I hadn't integrated our family very well. I was mad and that was that.

But the news wore down my defenses, especially when I heard about the response. I brought Maeve to a parish-wide meeting when she was days old. We were going to make a counter-proposal.

Keep in mind that we're not a congregational system of government. The Catholic Church is not a democracy. But we made a counter-proposal.

Imagine my surprise when the bishop's committee changed its mind.

I was the 3rd baby baptized at the parish my parents' attended when I was born. First book, first page. I was afraid Maeve was going to be the last one at the parish where her parents attended. Flip to the last book, last page, that's me. But no. We weathered the storm and, just like her sister, the Sunday after a tragedy (this time the tsunami), Maeve became part of our parish family.

And I started praying every night for guidance. Where was I headed and what should I do?

139/365 Pentecost

There’s a lot of Christianity out there that insists that faith is all about a conviction you have in your head, a decision you make in your mind—that God exists or that Jesus saved us. It’s all theoretical and rational—a faith for intellectuals. But Pentecost shows us that Christian belief and spirituality happen to your whole body. Your mind follows your feet. Decisions come after something happens to your life. A new consciousness comes when you have to figure out what to do with the mess of people all around you and the concrete responsibilities of mutual care: feeding people, praying for needs, sticking around when some folks start getting annoying, or sticking around when the excitement wears off and life gets boring, mundane, ordinary.

--Isaac Villegas

I've had two moments of conversion: one happened after a long period of spiritual crisis and the other happened after I couldn't help myself anymore. I was confirmed in my parish, and that wasn't my conversion. That was my, "yeah sure whatever" moment of learning that I really should be confirmed if I'm going to teach religion in a Catholic school. Then confirm me. I'm catechized, trust me. No, it was after that, when I started to drift away from the church and from the parish. I kept telling myself that I couldn't stay just because I played softball with Colleen O'Toole. There had to be more than that.

So I prayed.

I prayed a lot. I talked to myself a lot. My friend Mary would say I started telling myself a different story. I thought I should leave...my daughter's godmother suggested the Quakers. She did both: Catholic mass and Friends' meetings. But here in town they happened at the same time on a Sunday morning. I couldn't just try it out. I had to make a decision. I read Thomas R. Kelly and prayed.

The archbishop decided to close our parish. It seemed like a pretty big sign. And then he changed his mind (or, rather, the committee recommended something else), and that seemed like just as big a sign. I kept praying. I went on retreat. I tried again. That fall, 7 people nominated me for parish council--Caroline told me I had more nominations than anyone else on the list.

I decided I was done looking for signs. If I was going to believe in the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, here it was. Here I was. I was Catholic and this was my parish and holy crap. Here I am.

Then, starting at that moment and tumbling forward, perhaps I shouldn't even separate them into two events, odd things started happening to me. I'd pick up a book with no real intent to read it and find myself sucked in. I'd hear words falling from my daughter's mouth that had to be at least casually inspired. I'd wind up at websites in the middle of the night without really meaning to. And suddenly it was right there in front of me. From the first time I heard the name Hildegard--the medieval abbess, not the pastoral associate--all the way to St. Bede's monastery and knowing I was so close but not there and searching and staying up thinking too much and worrying about it working out and knowing in my heart that I'd been a Benedictine at least since 6th grade, I was falling into a conversion I could not stop.

Because I didn't want to. My hands and heart and spirit were taking me someplace that had been created for me. I was the youngest oblate candidate at Clyde in 15 years; Sr. Jean said in front of the gathering of oblates that she'd never read a candidate's writing that got so close to the heart of Benedictine thought so fast. I blushed, I remember, but when I got home I wrote this:

Something about that place makes my brain reorder itself. Like physically. I can feel the change.

It was my Pentecost. Something changed and here I am.

141/365 Venerable Bede

Random thoughts:

Today is the feast day of Venerable Bede, one of those saints of the Church who don't go by Saint. He's technically St. Bede, as far as I know (I mean, I first looked at a monastery in Illinois for an oblate program, and it was St. Bede's) but goes by Venerable. Pope Leo XIII named him so in 1899. He lived in the 8th century and is the only Englishman (by birth) known as a doctor of the church.

St. Bede's Monastery is on a flat featureless plain known as Central Illinois.

But the Venerable Bede was not flat and featureless. He wrote extensively--one of those hypergraphic monks who gave us all the information we have on a specific time and place, in this case, the Church of medieval Britain through 729. He was an oblate in the old meaning of the term--a child dropped off at the monastery to be raised by the monks, perhaps eventually taking vows. He did, and was ordained at age 30. He survived the plague when it ran through his monastery--he and the abbot were the only two to make it.

We don't know much about him. In two passages he mentions being married, and this puzzles scholars--could he be speaking metaphorically, or did he really mean he had a wife? It's not like he mentions her by name and gives her family history, and frankly, he was big on the history. But how much metaphor is appropriate? Don't you know you're writing for the future, for generations who aren't going to understand poetic license unless it can be txtd 2 frnds?

He was a Benedictine, of course, in the early centuries after the writing of the Rule, back when there were monasteries in England that weren't sacked and burned down and forced to fall into the swamp. He followed the same rule the sisters at Clyde do today. The same one I do my best to live and breathe within.

His name is rare for his time period. It probably comes from an old English word, bed, with a long e, meaning prayer.

My name means fiery arrow. Prayer is good, too, though.

144/365 On the other hand: grace

It is the daily dew and the light afternoon shower that keeps the garden of our souls growing, rather than a once-a-year downpour of grace. --Father Dominic Garramone

This quote is at the top of a blog I read, called Everyday Unitarian. I'm obviously not a Unitarian, but like I've said before, I have lots of ecumenical leanings and I like reading her reflections on faith and church (and it led me to decide to write this blog, even if just for myself, as a reflection on my own parish and its community life).

Fr. Dominic, OSB, wrote some of the first books I read by modern Benedictines. I read through (too quickly) the Rule, and I read some things about the Rule, but when I started thinking more about becoming an oblate, I found his books, and Daniel Homan, an easy gateway. Later I would read and reread Joan Chittister and Kathleen Norris and Michael Casey and lots of other folks, but Dominic was my first step.

We'd lost electricity. It was the summer of 2006 and that first night, it wasn't so bad in the house. The girls slept in the living room on the floor and Mike split the night between our house and my parents' house, just to keep things safe. I lay in my bed with a flashlight and read Bake and Be Blessed. It was like trying on a pair of jeans with a size you're hoping will fit, and then they zip up right away and don't make your rear end look too big. It was a perfect little joy of a book to read. I read the whole thing in that one setting and fell asleep convinced of what I needed to do.

There are so many good gateways to a more spiritual life. Which amuses me (or makes me shake my head ruefully) because I have a minor in Theology from a Jesuit university--my major is in elementary education, but I've taken a lot of theology. A lot more than just a minor's worth, in fact. And in high school, our junior year theology course was the study of Vatican II documents. We studied 4 of them over the course of the year. Four: Lumen Gentium, Dignitatis Humanae, Dei Verbum, and I believe the other one was Gaudium et Spes (but I had to look it up to try to guess...). For a high school theology course, that was pretty heavy. I have a lot of theology under my belt. And yet, by the time Maeve was born, I was no longer in conversation with God.

It was books like Bake and Be Blessed that put me back on that path. The Quotidian Mysteries. Benedict's Way. Simple little books that opened that door again.

155/365 Oblate Director

Sometimes I feel like I'm on a path to my death and other times I tell myself to perk up and make the most of whatever time I have. That's all any of us can do, no? Anyway, I'm sending my love and care and my prayers for you and yours. You are never far from my heart's prayers. Lovingly, Sr Jean

My oblate director has been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and has some other very mysterious symptoms. And she's older--probably nearing 70. The possibility that by the time I make it up to the monastery again, she may not be the oblate director, for one reason or another, is pretty, well, possible. And thinking that made me suddenly realize how glad I am to be an oblate at Clyde compared to my first attempt at a men's monastery in Illinois.

It was all fine and good. There was nothing really wrong with it--online, it certainly seemed worth a try (compared to the local Benedictine presence, which did not seem worth a try, frankly). I talked back and forth via email with Fr. Paul and made a trip up there one Sunday in November, which was, frankly, one of the worst car trips I've ever taken.  But that wasn't the monastery's fault.

What struck me most, though, was the groupie atmosphere. There are several authors at that monastery, men who have published books on various topics.  The other oblates were so excited when they found out there would be speaking engagements with these authors in the coming year.  And that's great, but you know what, I didn't come to be part of a fan club.

So I went home unsure. And later found my way to Clyde, which was more what I was looking for. I didn't need celebrities. I needed a grounding place. The oblates I met the first weekend, and then on subsequent retreats, had been through a couple of directors over time. They loved Jean, and they loved the women who preceded her. But they weren't starstruck. They could probably have a different director every year and it wouldn't have changed how they felt about the place and the charism there. It was like the difference between following a preacher to the new Church of What's Happening Now compared to sinking into a parish and seeing several pastors come and go.

I pray for Jean, for her health and comfort. But I know I won't be left twisting in the wind when she leaves or dies.

166/365 No Man's Woman

I don't wanna be no man's woman
I've other work I want to get done
I haven't traveled this far to become
No man's woman

She told me, sort of off-hand:

It was my senior year of high school and Rosie and I went down to her family's place to look after it, make sure it was ready for summer. We were almost about to graduate. The house was fine, musty, but just how we remembered. We stopped by the chapel, the one we used to have in central Illinois, and after mass that Sunday, I told her, "I think, this is where I have to be."

"Good," she told me, "because I'm coming here in July. You can go with me."

I wrote to the sisters, here at Clyde, and I asked them to please write to me via Rosie's family. You see, my sister had left for the Dominicans already, and they'd sent her home that Christmas. She was too nervous, they said. And my father had just had a stroke a few months before that. Fell in a ditch on the way home from work and people walked right past him. By the time they got him to the hospital, it looked hopeless. So I was supposed to stay home after I graduated and take care of him. My life's work. My sister was going to get a second try somewhere else. But she was recuperating, my mother was barely holding all together, my father was an invalid, and I was sneaking around trying to figure out how to become a Benedictine.

Of course the sisters sent a letter home to my house, with their return address plain as day. I walked into the kitchen that evening and my mother was frying hamburgers on the stove. She waved that envelope at me and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing to my family.

I told her: "Did you ever have to do something, even if it was crazy, but out of love?"

She turned to me with the frying pan in her hand and gave me a look like I have never seen. I'm surprised she didn't hit me with it. I took my letter, which gave all the directions and information I needed. She and I didn't talk the rest of the month, and in July, Rosie's dad pulled his car up in our driveway and I walked out of the house with my suitcase. My mother was weeding in the front yard and didn't look up when we drove away.

"I'll go around the block," Rosie's dad said. "She'll be standing on the driveway when we come back around." But she wasn't. She'd gone inside.

I didn't go home for 5 years. They never answered letters. Then, finally, I went home to visit. My father had gotten out of his sickbed. He was back at work, halftime. When I left, friends came out of the woodwork to get him back on his feet. He lived another 20 years. But my mother died without ever forgiving me.

My sister, by the way, married a man who dropped out of the seminary and they have 7 kids. I spend a week with her every summer and come back here glad to be back.

Would I have done it this way again, knowing what I know? I don't know. It helps that Rosie's still here--she's Sr. Lioba now, of course--but it was a costly decision for me.

172/365 Hospitality Quote

Merely being nice to people does not fulfill the deep requirements of Benedictine hospitality. We must let the person stir us; we must connect. Benedictine hospitality will extract a cost from us, and it will tumble us into the magical realm of personal transformation. -- Daniel Homan osb

I was at my aunt's house and she said, "I don't eat organic food because it is more contaminated than conventional food."

And I took that amazing contradiction into my head and rolled it around a bit. How could that be? How could she hold that so confidently? And for a moment I tried to make it make sense. In the end, talking to my sister about it, we just laughed. But she said the same thing I was thinking, although on the offense instead of the defense: when people say things like that I think, "really?"

There are few sweeping statements that do not make me ponder, even if just for a moment. Weigh it in my head or my heart, depending on the issue at hand. Many of them I wind up discarding, like this bizarre quote of my aunt's. When Gianna looked at me, all submissive and peculiar, until we stood in the vestibule and she whispered, "I don't speak in the nave of church." It made me think for a moment: should I be practicing that? Why would she do that? And it troubled me a moment or two. I rejected it as strangely superstitious, but I didn't reject it at first hearing.

I think that is the heart of the change in me as I try to become more hospitable. No, I don't change with the prevailing winds. I don't leave my door unlocked and let strangers walk through my house. But when someone does come in, when the wind does blow, I consider it. If a statement is more conservative than my current view, have I gone too far in the other direction? If it is more radical, have I not stretched enough in my view or belief? In the end I don't change that much, I think, but I weigh things now.

I don't simply say "that's the way I believe and if you don't like it, you can stuff it." It's easier to do that. But I try my best to really let things into my heart, at least for a moment of consideration.

Hospitality has a lot to do with sharing space and welcoming the stranger and being mindful of the other, but I think this is the part that hit me hardest. So many strident beliefs I held in early adulthood have fallen away. My edges are rounding.

It's a good thing.

196/365 Altar Guild Part One

I was headed to my in-laws, but I needed to go to this meeting first. Basement of the rectory with Sr. Hildegard and a few other folks she'd emailed to see if they'd be interested in helping out at church. Behind the scenes stuff, the stuff nobody notices until it doesn't happen. Laundry, dishes, polishing, candles.

I drove over to the rectory thinking of the Benedictine passage about tools of the monastery. All tools of the monastery are to be treated as the sacred vessels of the altar are treated, for all tools are in fact sacred. Jobs done well, with focus and purpose, are all part of a path toward God.

And I knew that I was heading into the lion's den of meetings. I was going to leave that meeting with more to do, officially, than I had before. But I was ok with that. Kids are older, I have more time come the fall. I can take on a bit more, at least what I had going on before Leo was born.

Right?

201/365 Reset

Waking up, I'm already sick of church. All the laundry is ready to take over and I grab it up and stumble out to the car. I'm in a foul mood--my 4th night in a row of 4 hours of sleep or less. Mike was out of town all week and I fear I'll never catch up. I already have my excuses and defense at the ready, should anyone have anything to say about my laundry duties. It starts with "I didn't ask for this job" and just gets angrier from there.

I walk into church--7:30 mass is sparsely populated--and take this stuff back to the sacristy. Monique is back there in her hat, going over the reading. Monique is a character. A little odd. Many of us are. She has a thing for hats. And she's always giving people hugs. I'm not a hugger. At least not often, and definitely not with people I hardly know. I know Monique from several small things I do at the parish, but she's one of the people I put up the protective coloration for. I don't want to have to try to translate my life. I keep it on the surface with her.

She ignores me as I put purificators in piles and some in a drawer. Glance out to the credence table (I think that's what it's called) and there are already ones in place. Wilma, of course, is really in charge of all this. There are, in fact, plenty of purificators in the drawer. I really could have brought my load up when we came for 10. More words in the back of my head, but I'm done. I turn and smile at Monique.

Who of course, according to strict cliche, puts her arms up to hug me. And I'm not in such a bad mood to tell her to go away. So I hug her. "Everyone needs a hug!" she announces. Maybe so.

After brief pleasantries, I go sit in the second pew. I'll stay for mass, and then go home and try to catch up on sleep. And quit all this grumbling.

203/365 Inner Thoughts and Filters

There are like, 6 people reading this. Maybe more--there's a woman in Portland who belongs to a UCC church there who may have spread the word. I get 70-100 hits a day over at South City but this is definitely a niche market.
And I use pseudonyms, although long-term readers or folks who know me "in real life" know exactly who Astrid and Hildegard and Lynn are. I occasionally get an email asking "ok, who is ____" and I fill them in. I write with pseudonyms because I sometimes say things that aren't 100% sweet and nice. I sometimes wish I started that long ago on all my blogs, but it would be hard to keep up the facade. Here it works because it's so specific: parish life.

I love my parish. It is intertwined in my life in such a way that there's no way I can leave at this point. As much as I have troubles with Catholicism, it doesn't matter. My parish has ruined me. I can't go anywhere else. A long time ago I thought I was convert material but it turned out I was just looking for the right community. I found it here.

Things change and especially an organization that is bound only by the words "I belong" changes. Nobody is stuck in our parish the way you might be stuck in a neighborhood or marriage or demographic group. If you don't like the parish, you can move up the way to several different Catholic choices, and there are plenty of non-Catholic options, too. People stay because it brings them life in some way. Sure, there are probably people who aren't self-reflective about why they're in the parish (duh) but if they were truly unhappy, they'd either get involved to try to change things (like my mother-in-law, who stays in her parish against all possible odds) or they would walk away to greener pastures.

I used to say things, in general, like "for right now, this is right for me," or "this is what works for now." In regards to not just my parish membership, but where I lived, where I worked, where my kids went to preschool, and so on. Things aren't permanent but this is what is good now.

The last 3 years or so, since I became an oblate, things feel more permanent. Leaving would take so much energy and so much wasted time. You can't grow olive trees in one summer season. You have to plant them for your children to raise.

So when I complain about doing "Jesus' laundry" or get aggravated with people who sit on committees with me or realize with guilty dog looks on my face that I haven't watered the plants all week and they're probably dead now--it doesn't have to do with church. Like everything I write about, frankly, it has to do with me. "Look how I screwed up again" could be the title of every blog I write. Of every entry. Of every letter I send, every phone call I make. Because that's where the story is, in the details of mistakes and annoyances and little victories. And, like Miguel said the last time I went to confession, it's hard to live under a big tent. There are folks who belong to my parish that I think I wouldn't miss. But maybe I would. What would I say? If everything was wonderful and perfect and I loved every moment, well, what good is it to love those who love you? Obviously you do that. And what good is it to write about things that are 100% "right" and perfect? It makes a better story this way. And I am so in love with our story.

I want to raise olive trees, not just cucumbers and tomatoes.

205/365 A Humble Reminder

Flipped open a simple little book by Verna Holyhead about the Rule of Benedict this morning and read the following sentence:

Personal initiative is not denied, but not everyone and everything have been waiting for centuries for transformation to an individual's personal preferences.

Well then.

225/365 Things are important

"When you take a dirty floor and make it spotlessly clean, and then polish it until it shines, it radiates back to you the love which you poured into it; the divinity of that floor has been drawn forth" --Eileen Caddy

I just scrubbed my shower walls. They are glass, and therefore get dingy quickly. Kid hands, soap scum, hard water, the first creeping bits of mold. I scrubbed them down and dried them with a squeegee. They aren't perfect. I need to do more on them, but I also need to bring the rest of the bathroom up to at least that level. The floors, the walls--I wash the toilet and sink regularly, and wipe down the tub after baths, but these other surfaces get neglected. I need to get down on my hands and knees with a scrub brush and get the grout clean. I need to whisk away the house spider under the sink. I need to vacuum up the stray bits of cat litter that get under the feet and annoy.

Because I know that sigh of relief, I know the happiness of a clean room. A really clean room, inside and out. Baseboards and ceiling and corners and surfaces. Dust sucked up and wood polished with lemon oil and things old and new made bright and shiny again.

We are working on cleaning the girls' room--it is huge and they are scattered. It is on the 3rd floor and therefore out of my sight unless I intend to be there. We've been gathering up the fragments into baskets and sorting out legos and dollhouse spoons (3/4 inch long) and Polly Pocket shoes. Things are nearly finished, and the girls have gone to visit my mother-in-law, so I know it will be ready for them when they get back. Ready for a new school year and a fresh start in many ways.

The things we choose to surround ourselves with require care and attention. It's one thing to allow things to relax with time: the plate with the small chip, the quilt with a couple of repaired winklehawks (a winklehawk is a 90 degree L-shaped tear. You should use that word), the dresser your husband's great-grandfather built with square nails. It's another thing to neglect things so that they age prematurely. In my daughters' montessori upbringing, one of the things they learned first was a category called "practical life." Some of this was pouring and tying and using tweezers, that sort of stuff, but a lot of it was care of the environment. Handwashing. Flower arranging. Sweeping, dusting, care of candles (in the Catholic montessori atrium). Polishing of all kinds. Tending plants. These things are important, and not just for a tidy classroom. They're important because all of these things are gifts, one way or another. We should treasure them.

269/365 Not at the Monastery

I'm not at the monastery. I don't even know if this was the oblate weekend or not.

I haven't been for two years. We have three retreats a year, and Leo was just too new to drag out to Clyde. And it would have been a burden to leave him here or take him with. We're just at that stage right now.

I know Sr. Hildegard is going to say something to me, something specific about a retreat, and yes, I know. Just tell me when that could happen. I looked at the calendar and EVERY WEEKEND from here until Christmas is now officially booked. Not each day, but at least one of the days of the weekend is scheduled. It will fly by, and I'll love it, but I'll be spiritually exhausted by the end.

So I'm going to make a plan. February 19-20 I'm just going to block out. I don't know yet where I'll go but I'm going to go somewhere. Maybe down to Pevely. It isn't far away. I want to go to Clyde--I could stay at Conception--maybe. I've got a few days to consider.

270/365 Dregs

From Joan Chittister's reflection on today's reading from the Rule:

God does not come on hoofbeats of mercury through streets of gold. God is in the dregs of our lives. That's why it takes humility to find God where God is not expected to be.

My best daily spiritual time? Washing the endless dishes. Rinsing, stacking, loading the dishwasher, washing the pots by hand, trying to figure out how to get the burned on butternut squash residue out of my crockpot. Sometimes I have the radio on and Tavis Smiley or Tom Ashbrook tells me things. But most of the time I work with the running water and the distant sounds of my family getting on with their evening in the rest of the house.

There is a stillness in my heart when I do dishes, like when I watch a fire on a camping trip. A meditation to the work and the same scene again and again. The windowsill with my oak leaf bowl. The milk glass vases. The marble. The glass from the Buena Vista. It's kind of an altar. Old things, precious things, depictions of creation, and things that have no meaning except to me. Below them, the jar of cooking utensils, the vitamins, the dish soap. Sugar jar. The Mexican tiles I use under my big pans to keep them balanced on my lovely, but sometimes impractical, stove. I know these images by heart the way I know the rosary. I stand in the corner, the window giving the rhythm of seasons to set off the static pieces of the counter and windowsill. It's just a sink. It's just the kitchen. But God sits there and spills coffee on the table while the water runs over my hands.

273/365 I have a plan

I have two plans, in fact.

1. The Presbyterian Plan: I'm doing two banners, 36" wide by 58" long, to flank their sanctuary, basically. When I sat down with the pastor, Jim, we talked about what Advent meant to him, what it means to me, what it means in his church. We decided on a more pictorial theme than my church probably would want, but it gives me a chance to play with some different themes. The first banner is a depiction of the Visitation as an example of pure belief and faith, done in an abstract-ish way, the meeting of Elizabeth and Mary strongly implied but not, you know, titled or anything. Fields behind them, full moon in the sky.

The other banner is based on Jim's idea that Advent is about watching and waiting. You do not know the hour, that sort of thing. So I'm working with the idea of a watchman. I have the drawing done. Another moon on the horizon, seen through a window where a person sits with his back to the viewer, watching out across the vista. I'm excited.

2. The Catholic Plan. I usually just need a nudge in the right direction. We have so many places in our church where banners can go: in the sanctuary they can flank the crucifix (an unpopular choice lately because that was the same-as-it-ever-was option for many years of bad burlap and felt and lining fabric banners). They have often stood behind the ambo as a focal point, sort of to one side. They could stand on either side by the Mary and Joseph altars. They could technically hang from pillars, although it wouldn't be the same effect as in a more gothic style of church. Or they can go in the back of church, either in what has become the seasonal corner (in Ordinary Time, there is information about various opportunities or themes; in Advent the Giving Tree goes there, during Christmas, the creche, and so forth). Or they can hang from the choir loft. Jack installed curtain rods up there on the underside of the loft railing so that banners could be easily attached (I used to balance them with heavy objects here and there). That's where Easter's banners were hung.

And I sent a message to Fr. Miguel and Sr. Hildegard asking for opinions. Hildegard is on retreat or some sort of visit to her motherhouse, but Miguel wrote me back and probably thought he gave me no direction (he basically said that anything was fine, but nothing obvious like Mary and John the Baptist and--well, what I'm doing for the Presbyterians, although he didn't say that (I did). They can go where I want and say what I want.

Well, there are 4 Sundays of Advent, so there will be 4 banners, hung from the choir loft one at a time. I won't give too much away just yet but I drew as much as I could from the Sunday readings for Year A (I can't believe it's going to be Year A again already). I find I do best when I pull from scripture: my Christmas banner is Numbers 24:17; my first Easter banner was John 20:2; my current Easter banner doesn't pull from a specific passage but from creation and incarnation and resurrection and leading to Pentecost. But I already knew what I wanted from that one--the others required more thought and, well, lectio, frankly.

So these four are thus:
1. Romans 13:12
2. Isaiah 11:5-9
3. James 5:7-8
4. Isaiah 7:11 and Psalm 24 and Matthew 1:20-24

The only other thing I'll say right now is the color scheme: navy, blue violet, gray, rose, black, and lightest blue (like shadow on snow).

Next up: full sized mock ups and then off to the fabric store once I gather up my fragments here and see what I need. My favorite part.

311/365 Win My Soul for Jesus

So I got really drunk last night playing mah jongg, which means to me that I need to play mah jongg more often so I don't feel like I have to push myself over the edge when I get to. The girls who play mj with me live on my block; except for Jackie (who had left before we started the conversation below) we are all in our mid-thirties and have kids between the ages of 22 months and 14 years. And while on paper our character sheets (roleplaying game reference) look pretty similar, we are obviously not the same. Among other differences, three of us are Catholic and two of us aren't. There's another girl who plays with us pretty often, also Catholic, but wasn't able to make it last night.

The two who aren't are Zelda, a non-denominational Christian of the best sort and Gretchen, a recovering Baptist who is now a Presbyterian (USA). She's Leo's godmother and attends the church that houses my girls' school for the moment (until we don't fit in their building anymore!). The pastor of the church is the one who had me make advent banners. His kids go to our school, too. So all of this is kinda intertwined as you can see.

And we were drunk. And Gretchen, who perceives things sometimes that surprise me at first and then make me say, oh, yeah, said in the height of this conversation (after several times telling me to be quiet so that she could ask the other two Catholics a question without my interfering), "You are going to wind up at my church."

I laughed, because I'm so dyed in the wool about ritual and the jarring cracked reflections of ritual at mainstream protestant churches. There's no way I could go be a Presbyterian, any more than I could go be a Lutheran or Methodist or Hindu. The only one that draws me is the Friends, and that's really only an affectation if I admit it to myself.

I turned to Zelda, who was the only one not drunk by that point and said loud enough for all to hear, "Gretchen's going to win my soul for Jesus."

Zelda smiled wisely at me, and later, after the hangover, after the nap, I reflected on this. I want to be Catholic. I want to be a part of where I am. I'm not a Presbyterian. But sitting in RCIA some Sundays I wonder why I'm doing this. Sitting in Worship Commission Wednesday night, I looked at those changes in the language of the mass and thought about the nit picking and the hierarchy and just wanted to chuck it all.

What keeps me here? My parish keeps me here. If I moved, I'd have a hard time integrating into a new parish, starting over. Since that's unlikely to happen, a more solid question is "if our pastor leaves and we get some shit-for-brains pompous dickweed for a pastor" or, with more trepidation, "if our parish closes"....then where am I? Where do I go? I think about that line from John 6: Do you also want to leave? Master, to whom shall we go?

I'll probably always be Catholic. Stability really calls for it, frankly. This is who I am and where I am.

But I don't think that precludes finding other streams to draw water from if this well runs dry for a season or two.

Gretchen will probably not win my soul for Jesus. I love her pastor and I think he'd probably be good to listen to. He is a good person and adores me (which is always a plus). But the energy required to make that change for good is just not in my soul: I am not a convert. I would not be surprised to have a summer home, but my mailing address will always be at my parish.

312/365 End of the year random thoughts

Today is the last Sunday of the year. Starting next week, it is, liturgically speaking, 2011. Advent begins, a briefest of brief Christmas season, and then we're back to ordinary time looking towards Lent and Easter.

I raked up leaves today and thought about Benedictine values. We didn't go to mass this morning because it would have been a disaster (Mike is deer hunting), but we're also not doing anything else. No errands, no trips out and about. Just here at home on an unseasonably warm November day. I raked leaves and thought about tools: there's a passage in the rule about care of tools and how ordinary tools should be treated with the same dignity and respect as vessels for the altar. How our homes (monastery) should be cleaned with the same care. I don't own a rake at the moment--some alley clean up day it disappeared into someone else's care, but I was using Valerie's and made sure it was litter free before I had Maeve return it. When I was done--I rarely rake, too lazy to be bothered by leaves--I looked at the yard. Our front garden is ramshackle and does not age into autumn well. But with the leaves cleared away, the porch swept up, and everything momentarily tidy, I was glad. The house seemed to sigh. Time for bed, time to sleep away the winter. And I understood what Benedict wanted fir his monks and the place where they lived. They weren't obsessive about neatness. It didn't become an end to itself. But having everything away and clean, they could be ready for the next thing. Ready for pruning back the butterfly bush and pulling up the volunteer weed trees. Ready, too, for Thanksgiving and then Advent just around the next bend. Advent is busy in my life. But at least the yard is raked.