1/365 Poinsettias and Families

"Thanks for taking care of them while I was gone," I tell Lynn (all names in this blog are changed), standing at her front door.

"How was your trip?" she asks.

"Oh, you know, it was good. Christmas. Hectic, but not really. Kids did well, it was good."

She smiles, not sure if she believes me. "It's been 23 years with Pat's family and I'm just now getting used to it." I think about things I've said in the past in the same spirit.

"Fourteen for me," I admit.

"I didn't get to them on Monday," she switches tracks. Talking about the poinsettias at church. "But I was there yesterday and watered everything."

"Good, then," I take my keys. "I'll stop by tomorrow and make sure everything is set for Sunday."

Poinsettias. I've heard so many stories about how to care for them, I just don't know anymore. Hal, the new guy who helped with Christmas decorating, seemed to think they could be kept alive forever as a houseplant. I just don't know if I believe him, though. They don't seem very sturdy. But I know I can get them through to the end of Christmas season, which is two weeks from now. This coming week they especially need to still look nice.

This Sunday is Migration Mass, our parish's big shindig that winds up on the front page of our diocesan newspaper most years. People come from all over. It's a big production on one of my favorite Sundays of the year--Epiphany Sunday, the day the foreign magi come to visit the Christ child, thus becoming the first gentiles grafted into the People of God. I don't usually go, frankly. It has never felt right to me when I do go. One year I left after the homily. But I think I need to go this year. I need to suck it up and be a part of the parish family even when it irritates me and feels like a show.

Kind of like Christmas morning at relatives' houses. When I give in and just let it flow, you know? It's ok. Pleasant, even--and this year it was downright enjoyable now that I've let it stop being about me, all about me, in my own head and just let myself be there. I can do the same at church. As Jane will say next week at coffee, "it is what it is." And then it'll be back to Ordinary Time soon enough.

2/365 Cry Room

"Who set up the Utah Vestibule that way with the gates?" Becky asks me at coffee.

"I'm pretty sure that was Sr. Joanna," I answer, not sure what the impression is.

"It's great," she tells me.

"It makes a really nice space," I agree.

Our Utah Vestibule is a small room on the left side of the church as you face the front of the building from the street. When you walk into the main vestibule through the front doors, you step into the main part of the church (the nave) and turn directly left. It's another anteroom, another small space to gather yourself before you enter the church properly. It is the old baptistry, and was called that for many years after the baptismal font was moved up to the sanctuary. There is a stained glass window of the baptism of Christ and two cherub faces carved into the tops of the columns that would have surrounded the font when the church was built.

For a long time between the time when the font was moved and its most recent changes, the Utah Vestibule was a storage room. It was still a passage from Utah Street (hence the current name) into the church, with a door leading out onto the steep north side of the building and down many steps to the street level. But in in vestibule itself were random liturgical items--two astonishingly beautiful statues, one of St. Anne and one of the Sacred Heart, placed there like an afterthought; candle stands for devotions to....what, exactly, I'm not sure; plants that lingered and died under a fluorescent lamp too high up on the ceiling to really do them much good; and so forth. It was a place to hurry through and ignore.

A few years back, this began to change with the appearance on our parish's scene of a new pastor and a pastoral associate and other folk who decided finally it was time to clean up around here. I don't know all the details--I was just creeping back into parish life myself at that time and although pleased with the results, did not have much to do with it coming to fruition. This room was painted and cleaned and refurnished. Not as an afterthought but purposefully, as a sort of cry room.

I am not a fan of cry rooms. I believe that babies are part of the community and should not, with their mothers, be shunned behind glass with sound piped in through a speaker. But I also know that babies and toddlers (and Maeve) sometimes do not agree with sitting in pews and being quite for an hour or more at a stretch. I don't like to be a hindrance to others and so for a long time I'd walk to the back with a baby and stand there listening. Later, the Utah Vestibule was furnished with soft side chairs and even a rocker--and then that's where I took babies and uncooperative toddlers.

Now there are two gates, one at each entrance into the church. They're the kind with a lever you can step on to open it like a door. Nice. Now I can take a mobile child back there and let him burn off a little steam in the coming months--which I'm sure will happen. On Christmas Eve there was a mom there doing just that. It is separated from the assembly but not so separate. You can hear what's going on, but not on a speaker that makes the mass seem like it's happening on TV far away. You're in the back of church. It's your time of life to be in the back of church. At least now there's a way to make it comfortable.

42/365 Garden Misunderstandings (History Continues)

"I was just afraid the railroad ties would fall apart," I try to explain my negative attitude. Joey and her landscaper Piper sit on one side of the table, and I sit on the other with Martha. I know she's the anonymous donor but I understand well enough that I'm not supposed to know.

"What about concrete pavers?" Piper asks. She opens a binder and shows us options. They rather generic, without much character, but they would be sturdier. I say so.

"Ok, I'll talk to my source on those," she says, closing the binder. Martha has a worried look on her face. "Now, the fence."

We talk about the iron fence. About a gate. Yes or no to the gate. What kind of gate. Then I ask what later seems like the stupidest question:

"So are we going to have a set up like the community gardens? Are we going to lease plots to parishioners first and then open them up to the neighborhood?"

All three of them stare at me like I've just yelled, "I have rabies!"

"No, nothing like that," Martha shakes her head after she recovers from my apparently shocking question.

And then they continue as if I'm no longer there. Shunned, I listen to the discussion. Serviceberry tree or redbud? White redbud? Holly? Male and female pair? Then Piper opens her binder again and shows me the diagram for the first time. The school part is along one side. Oh. That makes sense, I guess. I process the new information and sit silently, feeling the creeping sensation of "I'm redundant at this meeting", which is a feeling I will have so many times in the years to come at the parish. But here more than ever before or after, frankly. We adjourn soon after and I head upstairs to my classroom to look out the window at the lot.

It'll be good to have the asphalt gone, I tell myself. A nice green space in the city. Not every green space has to have a use. It takes me several self-reincarnations to realize that usefulness is not the only scale upon which something should be measured. It will be good just to have it not be asphalt.

I don't know, standing there at the windowsill, that years later I'll witness Easter fires in that garden. Or that even the next year, it will become an obsession of mine and my friend Mary's, along with the library and so many other little nooks and crannies at the school. I can't know, standing there, that I'll get hot under the collar about this little lot. I don't know how it will all end. All I see right at that moment is a wasted space that's about to become a green wasted space.

But it will grow on me.

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.

93/365 My morning, my triduum

Friday night, Good Friday, I got to bed at 2:30. But they were done. Hidden in those stitches are scenes from the DVD I was playing while I worked, which always happens to me (my Christmas banner is Law & Order Season 5, for instance). I look at quilts or knitting later and remember the music or movie or TV that was on in the background. I should probably plan better and watch/listen to meditative things. But I don't--I keep part of my brain amused and offline while I work with other parts. This banner was done with Sports Night on in the background--an Aaron Sorkin show about people who make a nightly sports show on a cable network. It doesn't sound like something I would like, but two out of three episodes find me in tears even though I've seen them a half dozen times already.

So I crawled into bed at 2:30 and slept like a rock until my alarm went off at 8. I help prepare meals for the homebound three times a year--Thanksgiving morning, Christmas Eve, and Holy Saturday. The events officially begin at 8, and run until the folks who are delivering the meals show up about 11. Then there's clean up afterward. On Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, I get out of there at noon. But Holy Saturday is the day to decorate for Easter so I split my time between meals and the church.

I took Sophia with me because she wanted to help. We counted containers and cupcakes. I chatted with friends and people I know only through this ministry. I like doing this because I'm not in charge. I ladle sweet potatoes into foil containers and enjoy the banter. I commiserate with Sr. Vanda when she rolls her eyes at a participant who will not stop talking. "All the time, she always has something to say. And look at me, it's Holy Saturday and I'm saying that." But nothing is mean-spirited.

Sal the janitor pops in and out to have his conversations with us. He talks to Astrid about being a server. He talks to me about church decorating. Sal is developmentally disabled and lives across from church with his family--I think he's probably about 60, and our church is his life. My relationship with him has changed over time--my part of it has, I mean. He comes to every church decorating moment and fusses around ("hedgehogging" is a term I might use, looking busy without really being busy). This day, Sr. Hildegard has him doing dirty work with candles and candlestands. Soot and wax and who knows how many years of neglect. "I bet he regrets ever saying he'd come up to help," she says to me. But after the vigil mass, downstairs, all he can talk about is how dirty the candles are and how nice everything looks now. "We done good!"

Fiona arrives midway through the morning to deliver flowers for church--she works for the florist we order from. She has me come with her with a rectory key to drop off flowers for Fr. Miguel. "He got you flowers, too," she tells me, and I think she means the several dozen flowering plants for church. Then she hands me a vase with my name on it. Sometimes. I show the card to Astrid, who sighs and says, "I guess we can keep him!"

I have some time--the cooks are standing around drinking wine at 10 in the morning and I tell Sr. Vanda I'm heading up to iron some. I'll be back. I iron the banners, worried that the red isn't balanced enough ("But that's nature," Hildegard points out). I take them upstairs to unfurl (I like that word). Hildegard helps me straighten them out--for whatever infuriating reason, I cannot maintain a straight line over 12 feet of fabric. I pin here and there at the top, and get them to the point that they seem about right.

I go downstairs to look at them for the first time. Rina Yoon would be proud. They're so dang big. I sat up in the sanctuary surrounded by all the disparate parts that will become Easter at our church, staring up at the choir loft.

And everybody loved them. That is important to me, of course, but more than that, I think I finally got a handle on Easter. The fire, the water, the circle, the earth, change, transformation, surprise. Jack said he thought it was the best thing I'd done. I think I agree. Miguel said he knew what he saw in it...but didn't elaborate. After the vigil mass, Paul told me he was glad he had 50 days of Easter to ruminate on them. Bev couldn't stop telling me how astonishing they were. It was a good moment.

The vigil was long and dark and just right. The church was set, as Hildegard had told me, and we got out of the way so Christ could step in. It was Easter, after Triduum. In many ways.

103/365 Children's Liturgy Moment

I wake up early enough on Sunday to check to be sure I'm not in charge of Children's Liturgy. I'm not. I've missed so many homilies the past two months. Please not today as well. But no, luck on my side, I get to sit at church and listen instead of do.

End of the opening prayer, Fr. Miguel invites children up to be dismissed for Children's Liturgy. There's Sr. Edith, standing up there with the lectionary. Lots and lots of kids come up. A huge number. They head back and I realize she's alone. I can't recall who her help was supposed to be, but she's not there. A mom is heading back with her 3 year old (maybe?)...there will be another adult. I catch Hildegard's eye. She shrugs, not knowing either.

The first reader is approaching the ambo. I should head back. I should go downstairs with Edith and all those kids. I should. But. I. Don't. Want. To. Mike is in the back with Leo and both my girls are downstairs and I have a moment. I can listen and be here.

I look back at Hildegard one more time and she kind of shoos me away with her hand. Don't go. I have permission. Or at least I have a similar opinion.

It strikes me as we stand for the gospel that this might be one of the Sundays the deacon is going to give the homily. In which case I should have taken one for the team and gone downstairs. I hold my breath. And it turns out just fine.

175/365 Astrid's House

I spent the morning at Astrid's house. She lives a few blocks north of me and her house is open. It is pristinely clean and she always has coffee brewing.

This is what I want as time goes by. I have it in some realms, but as things evolve with neighbors and in-laws and friends, I want this more and more. I want a comfortable place to waste time with folks and talk about important and unimportant things. I have it there, and I can see in my mind eventually having it in my own house, too. It isn't my time right now, as Astrid always says about this or that, with a new toddler and sloppy school aged children, but it's coming.

It's interesting to me how notions in one's head become reality. Sometimes not the way we plan, but if something gets mulled over long enough, it starts to emerge.

It makes me careful what I spend time thinking about.

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.

268/365 Autumn Days

These autumn days are warning us
Of winter sure to be,
When all the leaves have fallen off
From every branch and tree.

These earthly friends are leaving us
Their autumns being past,
And thus the winters of our lives
Will come to us at last.
--Shaker poem

It is this time of year that brings me face to face with aging. In the mirror every morning, in the red bud tree in the backyard turning unceremoniously brown. The hard green tomatoes left on the vine, never to ripen, might as well pick them and make salsa verde. Again. The air is unforgivingly dry and Maeve's eczema returns with her asthmatic cough.

I am, most likely, God willing and the creek don't rise, far from the winter of my life. But it struck me that Sophia is 9, and if she is a typical child, we're half-done with having her live in our house full time. This created a sort of panic in me akin to having a baby reach up and touch a hot burner. Hurry, fast, before it's all over.

All over. It's all over in a hurry, yes. I need to be sure to hurry up and take things slow.

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.

294/365 What I pondered today

There is no moment when God is not manifest in the form of some affliction, obligation, or duty. Everything that happens to us, in us, and through us, embraces and conceals God's divine but veiled purpose, so that we are always being taken by surprise and never recognize it until it has become accomplished

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ

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.

323/365 Immaculate Conception

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

I was in a foul mood. I was all knotted up about Maeve's doctor's appointment tomorrow and I had a bad cold settling into my chest. I was troubled by many things. So I went to church.

Walking in, I tossed the week 3 banner on the pew. Jack laughed, just enough to notice. I realized I was being inexcusably huffy, and I couldn't help myself, I had to turn and smile. I hadn't meant to be such a drama queen. I put the altar cloth I finally ironed away in the sacristy, said hello to Miguel, and went to sit.

The Mary altar was decorated for the feast, and will remain so through Our Lady of Guadalupe, which always makes me think of my sister Bevin's murdered friend Jesse, who had a place in his heart for Guadalupe. I think about his mother, her grief mixed with a brazen need for attention, that had repulsed me at first ("how can she act this way when her son has been murdered?") and had later caused me to be even more sympathetic. How terrible a thing to have to live with. We all grieve in our own ways.

Mass began. Dolores was the cantor; I wished Astrid was there for more than one reason. I was having a hard time engaging. My voice faltered due to the cough. At one point as we sat down for the first reading, I almost took out my phone to check my email. But I caught myself. Don't be ridiculous.

The homily was about saying yes. Yes. I listened but it still didn't bring my mood around. We recited the creed and I wondered if I'd ever get that version out of my head when the language changes came. And got irritated as we said "God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God." Wondered what heresy we were defending our faith from. Thought about the song "Our God is an Awesome God" and how it implied that not only were there other gods, but that also our God might not be the only awesome one. I remember laughing about that in high school. Where everything was black and white and simple all over.

Somewhere, though, maybe around the Our Father, my heart started to thaw. Receiving communion, looking into Fr. Miguel's blue eyes the same kind of blue as Leo's, how had I not noticed that before? and returning to my seat to sing the song and relax my jawline.

I hung the week 3 banner after mass was over. Jack helped me get it straight, which means not straight, because it isn't but it matches week two that way. It almost looks like I'm doing it on purpose. Talked a minute with Miguel and Jack about the banners. About my week. About my cold (Miguel is getting over a cold as well). And I walked out into the cold. Happy again.

365/365 Didn't Think I'd Do It

Didja?

What this has taught me is that parish life is the same thing over and over. Could I have written another blog post about Lynn and her special brand of crazy? Could I have posted another recap of a worship commission meeting? Another review of a holy day and how nice the church looked? I could have done it again and again and it would have all blended into an amalgam of sleepy memory familiarity for years and years.

Sometimes I'm at a meeting now and I realize I've been in the parish longer than anyone else. This really freaks me out.

I worry about the future: not about the parish, but about me. Besides attending where I am, there's very little about me that feels attached the greater Church. I'm not angry, I'm just...disconnected. I've tried to leave before and have failed. Becoming an oblate I hope is a step to remain and not a last ditch effort before I give up. I think my faith is strong, but my earthly connections are weaker all the time. I think in the end, my problem with RCIA isn't the teaching or presenting faith or fussy old law professor or any of that. My problem is that I'm not really sure this is the place for me--rather, the denomination for me--and so I feel like I'm being false to present it to those seeking a place. Every time I'm with someone converting from another denomination (as opposed to someone coming to us from no faith background) I think of Sr. Jean's comment that most folks don't need to leave, they just need to go deeper and set down roots. She was talking about me, of course, but I wonder. It's easier with children's liturgy because these kids come from families who are already Catholic. And I know how to do it right...

But I remain here. In my mind I whisper the words "for now" but I will probably remain here. It's too hard to leave. I could spend my life searching and never find a place to call home. Or I could realize that where I am? It already is home. It's good to have certain things certain. I don't have to think about what to do on Sunday morning, I don't have to look up service times or check out directions or tips on how to be a good guest. I just go to my parish and that's what I do. I'm kind of entrenched. Who knows what will happen when my kids leave, but it's almost like I have to say that because of the indefiniteness of my own life and history. Of course I'll stay. But what if I can't? There's always going to be an asterisk because I can't fully say that this is where I am, forever.

But maybe it is. My roots are spread everywhere--baptized at Mary, Mother; first communion at St. Bernadette's; married at St. Cecelia's; confirmed at St. Pius. My children, though, have one taproot, more like Mike that way. Everything on his character sheet is at St. Patrick's in Cairo. And all of Sophia and Maeve and Leo, most likely, all their religious history, will be at our parish. I wonder where that will lead them. I wonder how it will be different for them.

A continual conversion of heart, that's the less than perfect translation of the other benedictine vow: obedience, stability, and conversatio. I may be here, I may stay here, but I will always be saying yes. That won't end. It shouldn't. And so I do.