Tag: hope

You, on a gondola

This is me, slowly unpacking from our recent trip to a little island off the coast of Maine.

This is me, sheepishly putting away the seven (seven!) books I hoped to read on the beach, and then barely touched all week.

This is me, dolefully discovering that the “all ages” board game I ordered specially for the trip is still in its shrink wrap, after we spent zero evenings moving little plastic pieces around the table in raucous and wholesome family togetherness.

This is me closing the tabs with recipes for seafood dinners that I convinced myself we would not only cook, but also possibly harvest ourselves from the sea; and this is also me, cleaning all the cheeseburger wrappers out of the car.

The kites I packed didn’t even make it out of the trunk.

This is not me complaining about having been on vacation! It was lovely, and we’re lucky we were able to make it happen. We did swim and wade, clamber around on rocks, and eat ice cream. We came home tired and more or less happy, with pink shoulders and sand in our shoes.

And yes, I came home a little bit disappointed. I can’t help it: I have insanely high hopes every time I plan anything at all. I am who I am, and I know this; but I’m also perpetually disappointed when I don’t turn into someone else.

Right before we left, I saw an old video from Saturday Night Live, where Adam Sandler plays Joe Romano of Romano Tours.

He tells the audience, “Here at Romano Tours, we always remind our customers: If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”

He warns us:

“We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Riviera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say, ‘Whee’ and mean it.”

I laughed at the video, and then I went right ahead and told myself that, when we got to the island, everything would be different. Through the sheer magic of dipping ourselves in salt water, we’d become joyful, energetic, screen-free types who love spending all our time together. And that did not happen. We had the week we had, because we are the people we are. And it was good! But it was not magically, instantaneously transformative. Of course, it wasn’t.

Like Joe Romano says, “[I]f you don’t like how you look back home, it’s not gonna get any better on a gondola.”

This is not only true for going on vacation: It’s true for everything.

Are you getting ready for a new year of school? Even if you’re enrolling somewhere different or trying a whole fresh program, you’re still going to be who you are as a parent, and your kids are still going to be who they are as kids.

Are you starting a new job? Even if it’s an entirely different situation, you’re still going to be you, doing that job.

Are you perhaps new to the Catholic faith? Welcome, and we’re so glad you’re here! Your life has a very good chance of being transformed, one way or another.

But not magically. Not instantaneously. And not without you deliberately, consciously deciding to make that happen, taking advantage of what the Church has to offer, and putting it into practice day by day, minute by minute.

And also, paradoxically, not without you letting go of control and letting grace work with who you are.

I watched the SNL skit again, and I laughed even harder. It’s not only brilliant and insightful, it’s hopeful, not discouraging…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

 

Sometimes the secret ingredient is time

It’s one of my favorite stories, so I’m glad it’s apparently true. The Vienna Beef company makes a certain kind of hot dog that is bright red, and it has a particular smoky flavor and a particular snap when you bite into it. It was very popular, so they made it in exactly the same way year after year, decade after decade.

Eventually the company became successful enough to upgrade to a new facility, where everything was streamlined and efficient and top of the line. But they knew better than to mess with success: The hot dog recipe stayed the same.

Except it didn’t. The hot dogs produced in the new facility weren’t as good. The color was off, the texture was feeble, and the taste just wasn’t the same; and nobody could figure out why. They hadn’t changed anything—not the ingredients, not the process, not the order of operations. It was a hot dog mystery.

They finally solved it by painstakingly recreating how they had done it in the old factory—and it turned out that, at one point, the processed ground meat was slowly trucked from one part of the factory to another, through several rooms, around corridors, and on an elevator. It seems that this arduous process, which everyone assumed was nothing but an inconvenience that ought to be streamlined away, was an essential step. The meat got warmed slowly as it went, gradually steeping in the smoke and moisture of the rooms that it travelled through. When they made the production more efficient, they eliminated this part of the process. And that ruined the hot dogs.

The secret ingredient, it turned out, was time. I thought of this story as I sat chatting with an old friend, someone I’ve known online for over two decades, and we only met in person for the first time last week. When we first got to know each other, we were in the thick of having babies and wrangling toddlers, both fairly starry-eyed about the possibilities of how to build a Catholic marriage and raise a holy family.

Now we both have several adult children, and our “babies” are almost as tall as we are. We talked about what we expected our lives to look like, what we were so sure about, and how differently things have turned out. We talked about our struggles and also our successes, and how we seem to know less and less as time goes on.

And we talked about how sometimes, the secret ingredient is time…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Photo by ArtHouse Studio

When the darkness passes, do not forget the Lord

It was four years ago, at this time of year, that COVID social isolation began in earnest. Remember?

First we started staying home from Mass, then from school, then from everything else. The thing that brought me up short, though, was when it dawned on me we wouldn’t be back to normal in time for Easter. It seemed so terrible not to be present for my favorite day of the liturgical year, such a loss.

Then my father died suddenly, just before Easter, and I had to adjust my views on loss.

It was a strange thing. Instead of planning for my father’s visit, we were planning his funeral. All through the Easter Vigil, live-streamed on a laptop, I was aware that this wasn’t ideal. We should be inside the actual church, actually receiving Christ’s body and blood, and instead we were crammed into our living room watching a tenor singing out “Christ our light” into an empty building.

But I couldn’t stop smiling.

It was a strange thing. The seminarian started to read from Genesis, telling us how the world was empty and void, and then God spoke, and there was light. He told us how God made the water, and fish to swim in it, the land, and creatures to crawl on it, and sun, moon, and stars to rule the day and night, and man. And breath for man, the breath of God. It was a good story, and I wanted to hear more. I was spellbound through the entire Mass, as if it were all new. Out of the void, God made something firm, something real, something for us to stand on. And then he gave us life.

When I got the call that my father was dead, even as I cried, I kept finding little stepping stones of joy. It was like trying to make your way across a dark, formless swamp. No one would dispute that death and grief are dreadful and cold, but there was always something to stand on, something good.

I kept thinking: At least he died at home in his comfy chair, not hooked up to the beeping hospital machines he loathed. At least he was a praying man, and he had been to confession. At least the last thing I told him was that I love him. There was something for my feet to stand on amid the grief.

At least I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. It’s a good story, and I want to hear more. I kept thinking of it at his burial, where my siblings and I stood six feet apart, in an almost comically tragic scene straight out of a Russian novel, with fog and mud and solitary mourners by an open grave; and I smiled then too.

That was the year when one thing after another started to unravel in my life. I kept losing things, precious things, that I thought I utterly depended on; but I also kept finding firm ground under my feet. Not a lot of ground! But enough…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image via PickPik

Be ye patient, as God is patient

When people start to really hit their stride at adults, they will often laugh at themselves for what gets them excited. “You know you’re really grown up when you’re thrilled to get a new toaster,” they might say, or: “A clear sign of maturity: I can’t wait to tell my friends about these amazing new dryer sheets I discovered.”

Spiritual adulthood is kind of like that, too. The things that you once passed over barely noticing, much less valuing, now rock your world. I remember discovering, for instance, that prudence was actually kind of a big deal.

I had once considered it sort of a loser’s virtue, something that you practice if you don’t have the imagination to excel at anything more interesting. But then my circumstances changed, my life got rearranged, and I realized that not only was prudence really hard, but the steady practice of it could yield beautiful things. And that’s why it’s one of the cardinal virtues! Turns out the church knows what it’s talking about; how about that.

This year’s revelation: Patience. Patience is technically a secular virtue, and not one of the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) or one of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude), or even one of the gifts of the holy spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord). But when you imbue a secular virtue with faith, then it becomes something sacred.

Patience, like prudence, maybe doesn’t sound very impressive. It sounds like not doing something, and since when is that something to get excited about? Patience also gets a bad rap because there are all kinds of harmful or thoughtless or cowardly ways to be patient.

You could patiently wait for someone to stop hurting you or your family, even as they give no indication they are trying to change. This is bad for your family, bad for you, and bad for the perpetrator, as it just gives them more opportunities to sin.

Or you could be endlessly patient with yourself while you do the exact same stupid or harmful things over and over and over again, without ever jamming a wedge in those spinning wheels and taking a closer look at what is making them keep turning.

Or you could be patient with a bad situation because you think, consciously or unconsciously, that it’s exactly the crappy kind of thing that a crappy person like you deserves, and why would you even dare to hope for something better, like decent people get?

Or you could be outwardly patient, “keeping sweet” and putting on a mask of unperturbed tranquillity, while under the surface you’re plotting how to get even in subtle ways; or maybe telling yourself that you just need to sit tight until God swoops down and avenges you, humiliating and crushing your enemies, which is something you will enjoy heartily.

You could certainly call these things patience, because you’re quietly waiting without fussing or fighting while something undesirable continues. That is secular patience. But sacred patience is something very different.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image via pxhere
(Creative Commons)

Frog and Toad at Cana

Not long before he died, I was complaining to my father I couldn’t persuade any of my kids to go to a Catholic college. I said I knew they were getting decent educations at the places they chose, but still, I was sure my plan was better than theirs. Half jokingly, half dead serious, I groaned,  “How will they ever find a nice Catholic to marry?”

My father said, “Well, I found one at Brooklyn Public College!” He was half joking, half serious, too: the joke being that, when he met my mother, they were both about as far from Catholic as anyone could be.

They had both been raised as non-practicing Jews, met at college when they were both cutting class, got married in secret in a hurry, had a second public ceremony to appease the parents, dabbled in Buddhism, moved to a kibbutz in Israel, came home, briefly joined a cult, found the Lord, and then eventually became Catholic — my mother and older sister first, and my father and the rest of us a year later, when they had already been married for about 20 years. They ended up as a happy old married Catholic couple, but they certainly didn’t start that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and God’s will and who belongs together and how and why marriages work. It is very true that it’s smart to do a thorough investigation of your own understanding of marriage and of your spouse’s expectations before you take the leap. But it really is a leap. You can’t guarantee that doing everything the smart way will result in a strong or happy marriage, and you can’t guarantee that a strong and happy marriage will stay that way. Sacramental grace is mysterious and unpredictable, and so is human nature. It’s a leap.

My parents made each other truly miserable sometimes. We kids saw a lot of that. You probably could have made the case that they didn’t belong together.  But by the end of my parents’ lives, I could think of all sorts of ways that God’s will had indisputably been carried out in their marriage.

Even my mother’s dementia seems to have worked some kind of transformation on my father, and the last years of their lives together did something mysterious but important to him. They weren’t even really together; he just visited her in the nursing home every day, fed her, prayed with her, and was delighted when she would occasionally mumble “amen.” By the time he died, he was a happy man; happier than I ever remember seeing him. And then, her final work done, my mother died too.

Does this mean they were made for each other? Yes and no. They eventually became made for each other, I know that. I know couples who seem so incredibly well suited for each other, it’s hard to imagine them living any other life other than with each other. And I know couples who are monstrously incompatible, and seem to belong with each other even if they don’t make each other very happy. There are all kinds of successful marriages. Marriage is strange. Life is strange.

The other day, we prayed the second luminous mystery of the rosary, which is the Wedding at Cana.

“When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you,’” we read.

Jesus hadn’t yet done any public miracles, and apparently didn’t think it was the right time to start yet; but Mary was apparently focused on saving a young couple just starting out from the embarrassment of not being able to serve their guests. We’re all familiar with the somewhat amusing account of mother and son having a little spat, and the mother confidently assuming he’ll do what she says. But it occurred to me for the first time: They are both sinless. This means that neither one of them could have wanted to do something that was against God’s will. And yet they disagreed about what was best to do! What does this mean?

I think it speaks to the notion that God’s will is hardly ever one specific action or decision. Sometimes it is certainly clear: Don’t murder, for instance. Don’t do evil. But it’s much more common, when we’re faced with choices, to be torn between a few different possibilities which might be good, but we’re not sure yet how they will turn out. It’s pretty rare that we can just “do whatever he tells us” and know for sure that we’re doing the right thing. Even when one choice seems like the natural, godly, wholesome choice, and the other seems more murky and less desirable, we really can rarely say, “This one is definitely God’s will, and that one is definitely not”.

We have to take a leap, and the leap is important, but even more so is what comes next. It’s rarely the leap that puts us either in or out of God’s will; it’s what we make of where we landed, and what we do with the grace we find there.

I was mulling all this over when a quote popped up in my Twitter feed. It was a line from one of my favorite “Frog and Toad” stories by Arnold Lobel. Toad, after admiring his friend’s garden, wants to start one of his own. So he plants the seeds, but they don’t immediately sprout. Fretting, and increasingly frantic, he spends the next few days exhausting himself with trying to make it happen: He plays music for them, he reads poems to them, but nothing works. Then Frog gives him some advice:

“Leave them alone for a few days. Let the sun shine on them, let the rain fall on them. Then your seeds will start to grow.”

And this, of course, works. The seeds start to grow. Toad has done the work that’s indispensable: He has put the seeds in the ground. Then he wastes a lot of effort and anxiety trying to force things to work out well in the time he expects. Finally, he gives up and while he sleeps, the larger forces at work, the rain, the sun, and time work to achieve the thing he is longing for. The seeds sprout. He has his garden.

And . . . an angry boy in Brooklyn ends up married to a nice Catholic girl who brings him to Jesus and makes him very happy, eventually. A mother has done her best and then tries to sit back and let her adult-ish children make their choices about college and everything else, because they are adults, ish. Let the sun shine on them. Let the rain fall on them. Let people take their leaps, and let the Holy Spirit do what he does when they land. It really is the only way.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I have taken the leap. We’ll see.

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A version of this essay first appeared in The Catholic Weekly in August of 2021.

This potted plant life: Lessons on prayer for the new year

Let’s talk about prayer. Let’s talk about how January is a wonderful time to start or restart a habit of daily prayer.

But first, let’s talk about winter.

I’m not a big fan of this time of year. There are plenty of unpleasant things about the winter months where I live: The way the coldness makes you cold, the way the darkness is so dark, and the way the dark and the cold make you kind of stupid.

But the thing that really hurts is how all the green goes away. You look outside, and everything is gray and white and brown, and it’s just sad. I need green! This is why, of course, people have houseplants. Nothing livens up a living space like living things. It’s the obvious solution to my green starvation, right?

Not so fast. I’m an absolute plant assassin. I love having plants around, but I’m terrible at keeping them alive. If plants were people, I’d be on an FBI watch list for the sheer number of suspicious disappearances associated with me.

Take, for example, my little fig tree. I had put it outside on the patio over the summer, but then a frost came and I forgot to bring it in. The poor thing turned brown, all the leaves fell off, and it went from a luxurious, broad-leafed beauty to a dry stick in a pot. I was so sad.

But I’m telling you about it because I realized that I’ve actually learned a thing or two in the last several years — and what I’ve learned dovetails very nicely with what I’ve learned about prayer. Just as I suffer when there is no green outside, so too do I suffer when I don’t have a naturally flourishing relationship with God; and just as the solution to green starvation is having houseplants, the solution to spiritual starvation is prayer.

And if this metaphor doesn’t quite work out perfectly, just assume it’s because it’s dark and cold and I’m stupid. Not my fault!

I am the queen of letting plants dry out in between waterings. Then, when I finally do remember to do it, the soil has become so parched that the water goes straight through it and runs out the bottom. Depending on the plant, you can fix this by either flooding it with water from the top down, or putting it in a second pot of water and letting it absorb it from the roots, or you can give it little sips of water very frequently until it softens up and is ready to accept more.

But the point is: There are consequences to letting it get that dry. If you neglect it for long enough, you can’t expect to just leap back in and pick up where you left off. The same is true with prayer. If you’ve been out of touch for a long time, you might be able to reestablish contact by flooding God with your passionate prayers; or maybe you need to sit and quietly meditate for a long time; or maybe you need to start small with short, frequent prayers until your soul softens up and feels ready for more. But there will be a period of adjustment…Read the rest of my latest monthly column for Our Sunday Visitor

The long game of Advent parenting

I don’t mean to alarm you, but it’s almost Christmas. Advent — what’s left of it — is a time of preparation, but unless you live a very unusual life, you probably need some time to prepare for this season of preparation.

We have done various things over the years to try to make Advent a season of anticipation that leads up to a day of Christ-centered joy, rather than a month-long wallow in decorations and cookies that leads to a volcano of presents. We fail every single year.

But we do always try. The nice thing about Christmas is that it’s a birth, and that means it’s a beginning, not a culmination. Call me hopeful or call me delusional, but I always feel like as long as we TRY, then we’re getting Advent and Christmas right.

So this is how we try: We set aside the day after Thanksgiving as Jesse Tree Day. And that is about all we do the day after Thanksgiving. The kids are home from school, nobody expects me to cook anything elaborate, and God has granted me the gift of a profound unwillingness to rush out and shop for amazing Black Friday deals at Target. So Friday is the day of getting ready to get ready.

The first step is to choose a list of Jesse Tree readings. The idea is to find one that more or less matches up with the actual calendar. Advent begins Dec. 3 this year, but if we end up with one that starts on Dec. 1, it doesn’t matter that much, because we know we’re going to miss some days anyway, so it all evens out. Then I print it out, round up the kids, and read off the symbols, and they dibs the ones they want to do.

Some years, I get fancy and buy special paint markers and a bunch of blank capiz shell discs with holes drilled in them, so we end up with a set of more or less uniform ornaments. Other years, I just open the infamous craft cabinet and pull out everything that looks like it won’t cry if you put glue on it. (This is my first act of Christmas Generosity: I renounce my claim on anything I put out on the table. If you’re not going to use the good stuff for getting ready for Jesus, then what in the world are you saving it for?)

Then I start some music going. In this house, we do not listen to Christmas music before the day after Thanksgiving; and the very first one we listen to is “A Medieval Christmas” by The Boston Camerata. The kids groan and complain, but I’m a big believer in building unwilling fondness through repetition. I choose my battles with music, but I insist on this one at least once a year. This is my first act of Christmas Bullying, which is also an essential part of the season, if you’re in charge of other people.

So then I toss the list with names into the middle of the craft heap, and I leave the room. The kids are going to be incredibly mean to each other while they work, which is just how they show affection; and they are going to make an insane mess, which is something I don’t need to see happening. This is my first act of Christmas Surrender. Some things are beyond my control, and it’s very good to keep this in mind and not waste emotional energy getting upset about it.

Read the rest of my latest monthly column for Our Sunday Visitor.

All of life is worth living

The other day, I performed the solemn rite of white women in their late 40’s: I shared a photo of my lunch salad on social media.

The ritual goes like this: I post a photo of my lunch, and I complain about trying to lose weight, and then I humblebrag about my plate full of nutrient-dense leafy greens and lean proteins, and I say that between this and yoga, I’m going to live forever. Then my friends commiserate about how, if I keep it up, I’m not going to live forever; it’ll just feel that way. Then we all anoint ourselves in the digital stream three times, sprinkle ourselves with irony, and we are cleansed.

This ritual has worked for me for many years. I’ve always looked at health fanatics with something of a jaundiced eye, thinking, “If that’s what it takes to extend my life, I’d rather cut it short, thanks.”

Jokes like this were very much a part of my family culture, growing up. My father, in particular, believed that life was worth living as long as you were enjoying yourself, and if you weren’t, well, maybe your time was up. Or at least, part of him believed that. He especially liked to eat whatever he wanted, as much as he wanted, and he really relished heavy foods, sugary, fatty foods, noodles and greasy briskets and things filled with cream. (And so do I.) He wasn’t exactly a hedonist. He believed in constant conversion of heart and the resurrection of the body and things like that; he really did. But in practice, noodles and brisket often got the upper hand.

I want to tread carefully, because it’s easy to get carried away when you’re telling the life of someone who is dead. I don’t want to speak for him just because he can’t speak for himself anymore. So I will just tell you what I observed, as I remember it, and maybe the conclusions I drew were wrong. Nevertheless, this is what I saw:

My father’s health was poor for many, many years, partly because of his personal habits, and partly because of terrible genetics. I remember him going in for serious medical procedures throughout my childhood, starting at about the age I am now. He had a hard time staying motivated to take care of himself, although he did keep trying, for his family’s sake.

But eventually, he really lost enthusiasm. He had the choice to correct a problem with heart bypass surgery, and he didn’t want to do it. It just didn’t seem worth it to him. His family felt differently, and we urged him to consider it. We contacted a friend of his, who had had the same surgery done, and was very glad that it bought him some extra years of life; and that finally did it. My father agreed, and he got it done.

And he got better. He recovered well, even in his old age, and he started doing so well. He had a lot of health problems, still, but he accepted this; and my overall memories of him from this time are of him smiling. Smiling at my kids, smiling up at the sky, smiling at the brilliant clouds, at birds singing, at snow melting, at records playing. This was something new for him, or something he hadn’t felt in decades. He seemed to be enjoying himself in a way that I had never seen him do, ever.

But how strange it was, to see him looking small. I had to keep correcting the image I had of him in my head. I still thought of him as a powerful, deep-bellied, overbearing, heavily bearded man, taking up as much space as he wanted. Never bothering to whisper in quiet places, never bothering to follow signs that said “no admittance.” I still thought of him as doing what he wanted. And he wasn’t like that, anymore. His clothes hung loosely; the top of his head showed through his brittle hair. His voice was muffled, as if wrapped in cotton. He was so physically diminished, and he shuffled, and tipped over sometimes. But he smiled so much.

It was also during this time that some personal reconciliations happened, or started to happen. He knew he was at the end of his life. But that was the key: He knew it, and he was getting ready, rather than dolefully sliding along. He said that the Lord was taking more and more things away from him, and he was glad, because it was getting him ready for death. He smiled when he said this, too. He was grateful it was happening—the getting ready, not the dying.

So, then he died. It happened quite suddenly, and I’m not sure if it was COVID or not. He went to watch TV in his reclining chair, and when my brother went to check on him, he was on the floor. It was very hard when he died, and I won’t pretend he made his peace with every last person, or that he had righted every wrong, before he went. There were a lot of wrongs. But those last few years were undeniably, irreplaceably fruitful. For him, and for many of the rest of us. Fruitful enough that they are not yet over, even though he is dead.

If you are halfway imagining that people live the real bulk of their lives when they’re hale and hearty and doing as they please, and that they slowly dwindle into a less and less meaningful existence as the standard earthly pleasures drop away, well, possibly that’s true for some people. There are many ways for the course of a life to run, and not all of them are within our power. The end of my mother’s life looked very different from my father’s. But even that was not what you might think. Strangely enough, caring for her in her profoundly vulnerable and inert state was a huge part of what transformed my father’s final years, which makes me almost quake with fear when I think of my mysterious mother and her strange, quiet power to change people, for good and for ill. A power that continues to burn and insist, like the light from a star that is already dead. 

As I said, I am reluctant to tell you what someone else’s life means. So I’m not going to tell you that the last two years of my father’s life were his most significant. I’m just telling you that there was a time when he thought he could have done without them, and he was wrong.

Take care of yourself. Take care of your poor, dumb, needy body. Your body’s time will run out eventually, because it isn’t meant to last forever; but it isn’t meant only for pleasures and satisfaction, either. Most people are joking when they say life isn’t really worth living if you’re just eating salad, but most people also halfway believe it. Don’t you believe it. Your time on earth is your time on earth. If you’re still here, it’s for a reason.

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A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on May 5, 2023.

Begin with gratitude, and figure out later what it’s for

When we are young, we are taught to say “thank you” for gifts, whether or not they instantly fill us with delight.

No doubt some mom influencer on Instagram believes this is unhealthy and a betrayal of a child’s natural spirit, and little Ryleiyghye should never be compelled to express something that doesn’t well up spontaneously from her psyche. But I think it’s a good idea to teach kids to say “thank you.” I think it’s a good idea to teach it to myself.

I have started to make myself say “thank you” to Jesus for each day when I wake up in the morning. Even before I check my phone! First I thank him for the day, then I offer it up to him, and then I ask him for help making it a worthy offering.

If you had to make a diagram, it would probably look to an outsider like a lot of arrows going back and forth for no particular reason. Thanks for the day! Here’s the day! Give me things so I can do the day! Let’s not worry about that part right now. We’ll just call it the economy of grace and let the Holy Spirit work out the details. The part I’m interested in is the “thank you.”

I struggle with mornings. I don’t fall asleep or stay asleep easily, so when I first become conscious in the morning, gratitude is not the first thing that naturally wells up in my heart. So it really is an act of will, and an act of trust, to thank God for the day that is beginning whether I want it to or not. What I have found is that, like most prayers faithfully prayed, it has begun to affect me.

What began as mere spiritual good manners has become a minor revelation. I have begun to see something that perhaps you already know and feel: That whether I would have asked for it right then or not, each day is not just a thing that happens. It is something that is given to me. I didn’t make it. I didn’t cause it to be. I have no idea what it might possibly be full of.It is even pretty likely that something excellent will come to pass or will begin to take shape to come to fruition sometime in the future. It is, whether I’m happy to have it or not, a gift.

I always think of the lepers that Jesus healed, and only one came back to thank him.

Understandable, maybe, because they were so excited and incredulous at getting their lives back so suddenly and unexpectedly. They had never met Jesus before and maybe they got caught up in the amazement of this brand new thing.

But I can’t say the same. Jesus has healed me many times, in tiny ways and in major ways, and I expect this will continue for as long as I have breath in my body. Sometimes I asked for it, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I realized right away that he was the one doing it; sometimes it took me years to catch on. But that’s what he does. He’s the healer. That’s why he came. I know this about him. 

Am I grateful for this in general, even if not at this exact second? Yes, I am! So I start the day by thanking him.

Sometimes, as the day progresses, it quickly becomes obvious what I have to be grateful for. Sometimes thanking God is, as I said, purely an act of trust, because the day does not shape up like anything anyone in their right mind would receive as a gift.

But then I remember the lepers. I remember that I do know this Jesus, and I do know what kind of things he is likely to do for me. I know him, and what he is like, and I know that he is not going to stop being that way. I can trust him. So far, I have never regretted starting the day with an act of gratitude. It is changing my life. 

***

Image: Niels Larsen Stevns: Helbredelsen af den spedalske, Healing of the Leper, 1913. Public domain
A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly in March of 2023.

Childhood is a wild bird

The first time I took my kids out to hand feed wild birds, it didn’t go well.

I had hit upon the activity out of desperation at the beginning of spring vacation. The kids were so bored, but I had COVID and was much too tired and contagious for outings. We had long since exhausted the charms of reading books via FaceTime, with and without silly filters, and even the kids were tired of TV.

But maybe we could feed the birds together! We could sit in chairs, safely distanced, enjoying nature, being quiet, doing something wholesome and memorable, and did I mention being quiet?

It didn’t go so well. But that was okay. It was pleasant enough just being outside, and I’m a firm believer in the value of unstructured, unplugged time for kids. We thought we might get a nibble or two, but you really do have to be quiet to attract birds, and my youngest is made out of monkeys. The first few times she squirmed or chattered, I fondly and gently shushed her; but I recalled that our goal was to have a nice time together, so before long, I released her, and we dispersed without having fed or even seen a single bird.

We agreed it was fun, though, or at least potentially fun. Apparently you really can train birds to get to know you. I talked about our attempt on social media, and people shared photos and videos of their kids’ success in making friends with these wild creatures.

The idea began to take hold. I started to see hand feeding wild birds as the ideal summer activity. By the end of vacation, I thought, this is how we would greet every morning: We would step into the backyard with a handful of seed, and our feathered friends, who knew our gentle ways, would flock to us like a gang of modern day St. Francises.

A eager twittering grew in my heart. It was everything I wanted for my kids: A break from screen time, a memorable bonding experience, and a naturally contemplative pastime that would sweetly, easily open the gates for all kinds of other goods of the spirit.

The idea took flight. This could be about so much more than birds, I thought…

Read the rest of my essay for Catholic San Francisco here.