Tag: our sunday visitor

Memento vivere

At our house, there are no skeletons in the closet. All our skeletons — well, all the decorative ones — are outside, zip-tied to the trees, holding up the mailbox, and popping up between dead sunflower stalks. We are officially One Of Those Skeleton Houses, and they are there year-round, not just during Halloween.

This is hardly an edgy aesthetic these days. Lots of people set up elaborate skeleton displays at this time of year, investing hundreds of dollars in the deluxe 12-foot ones that loom over suburban streets. Lots of people never take their skeletons down and simply add Santa hats or Valentine hearts or Easter bunny ears, as the season demands.

But I’m different. I have a unique personal reason for keeping my skeletons up all the time, and it is this: I like skeletons. I always have. I think they are beautiful, charming and fascinating, tragic and dear. I also have a painting of a skull on our family altar and a painted, tin-winged skeleton Sacred Heart in the dining room, and I’m working on carving a melancholy little skull out of scrap cedar for my cold weather hobby. In elementary school, I obsessively drew skeletons dancing, climbing ladders and raking leaves. In college, I startled the chef by running a load of leftover ham hocks through the industrial dishwasher because I wanted to sketch those elegant bony curves and undulations. I just like skeletons! I think they’re neat.

For a while, I tried to persuade myself that this was a good old Catholic memento mori-type fascination. I was keeping all these skulls around as a reminder of my mortality, just like St. Francis or St. Jerome. Do all your work and live all your life as if it’s your last day on earth because you never know: It might be. Make your peace with death while you still have the choice, because it’s coming either way.

I wish this were my motivation, but it’s not. The last time death came to collect someone I cared about, I fell to pieces, as if no one had ever died before, and this was some new, monstrous means of torture designed specifically to make me, in particular, unhappy.

So I can’t claim to be particularly comfortable with death. Instead, I have made my peace with a related concept: not the fleetness of life, but the perseverance of the living, even after death. The tenacity, the sheer, dogged refusal of the human body to go completely away.

The German word sitzfleisch, which translates, as you might guess, “sitting flesh,” means the kind of single-minded persistence you need to, well, sit on your bum until you get the job done. And, in fact, sitzfleisch also means your bodily bottom, your “sit meat.”

Sometimes, it means not so much the meat you park in the chair as the patience you will need to sit in one spot until things resolve themselves, no matter how long it takes.

So here we arrive back at skeletons. There is nothing more patient than a skeleton. Osteogenesis, the process of growing bones, begins in the first few weeks after conception. Tiny little skeleton, bitty little pretty bones, raring to go, gratefully, eagerly borrowing calcium from the mother’s bones and teeth, with no intention of giving it back. Single-mindedly intent on adding to itself and not collapsing back into nothingness, while the mother, knowing or unknowing, steadfastly releases herself into building someone else.

This, too, is sitzfleisch…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

On hearing the word

Do you have a priest with a non-American accent? We’ve had several in our little parish over the years. That’s not surprising, even in our very white, very homogeneous region, because according to a recent study, about a quarter of seminarians in the United States are foreign-born. 

When Catholics hear a thick accent coming from the pulpit, they tend to respond in one of two extremes: either with a cranky dismissal, with undertones of “Why don’t these people go back where they came from?” or else with a warm, self-congratulatory welcome of ethnic diversity — which lasts until the own-back-patterns discover this new priest doesn’t omit the bracketed section for shorter reading. 

But I heard a new take the other day, a rather bracing one for native-born Americans like me.

Father Ryan Hildebrand wrote on X: “‘I can’t understand my foreign priest’s accent!’ Instead of belittling you for not sending your sons to seminary (like I normally would), I’ll give you a helpful tip: Go to YouTube. Pull up BBC [his country of origin]. Watch it for a few minutes each day. That’ll help.”

He’s right, it would! It really is the kind of thing you can get better at with practice.

I loved the advice itself; and I loved the implication that a priest’s hard-to-understand accent is a problem for the listener to solve, and not only for the priest or the pastor or someone else. It’s certainly not something we should be mad about, because a foreign accent is the sign that someone has been brave and persevering, and willing to do hard things to serve God and us. But it’s also not something we should be passively, contentedly tolerant of, without trying to make the situation better. It’s something we should work on, from our end.

The Word — every word, but especially the Word of God — is meant to be heard and understood, and we should do what we can to help that happen.

How many problems in the world actually have a simple, at least partial solution, but it never occurs to us to discover it, because we don’t consider the problem ours to solve? Probably about as many problems as we drive ourselves crazy trying to solve, even though they’re not our responsibility or not under our control.

Sometimes the best way to help the Word be understood is to get out of the way.

Here is another scenario … Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image: Christus met sterren in de hand (1899) Odilon Redon, public domain (creative commons)

 

Feeding the poor is Free Parking

If my faith were a Monopoly game, the church food pantry would be the space marked “free parking.” If you need food, you can go and get free food from the church, because it is the church. Simple, easy, free and occasionally massively important.

My family is not, by the mercy of God, in need of the food pantry to feed our family, but I am so glad it exists — for the sake of the people it serves, and for my own sake, every time I can donate.

I keep my involvement simple: When I do my weekly shopping, I pick up a few duplicate items of shelf-stable food — the same foods, and the same brands, that I want for my own family, because if I can afford a few extra cents to get the good kind for myself, then I can afford it for someone who doesn’t get many choices in life.

If I have one of my kids with me, I let them pick something out, so they feel more involved. Then, when we go to Mass the next day, I drop the goods off in one of the collection boxes — or, ideally, I ask one of the kids to drop it off, so they continue having a hands-on familiarity with this basic work of charity.

And that’s it. Simple, important, undemanding and effective. Free parking for Catholics.

But why would someone need a concept like “free parking” in the Church, especially if they aren’t poor and in need of its services? Because God may be simple, but our relationship with his Church can get complicated. So many aspects of our faith can become painful or confusing or fraught, and it may get harder and harder to find any point of connection with God, any spot where we can just keep things simple, and just be.

Maybe we’ve had a bad experience with someone in the parish, and, because we are human, we have a hard time untangling that relationship from our relationship with God. Sometimes it’s our fault and sometimes it’s not, but it’s fairly common to struggle with some unpleasant associations with the very place that is supposed to be our spiritual home, with the very people who are supposed to make up our spiritual family.

But donating to the food pantry is free parking! When we give, we don’t have to deal with anybody, and we don’t have to use any kind of social finesse. Absolutely anybody can plunk a case of mac and cheese into the collection box and then just walk away; and it will always be a necessary and salutary thing to do.

Maybe we’re frustrated or discouraged or mistrustful about finances in our diocese. We take our obligation to contribute to the church seriously, but we also have serious doubts that money is being used well. FOOD PANTRY, FREE PARKING. That little bag of coffee, granola bars and tuna stays right in the neighborhood and feeds someone who wants and needs it. Feeding the hungry will always be one of the least problematic transactions possible.

Maybe we’re having a hard time praying. Maybe our spiritual life is incoherent or angry or just kind of flat right now, and we can’t seem to snap out of it. Maybe we’re not in a state of grace and aren’t yet ready to do what it takes to get back. Where to go?

Food pantry! Free parking! Making a little, easy decision to give to the food pantry each week is a really good way of keeping that connection to God open when we’re not necessarily feeling it otherwise.

Good works are not a substitute for prayer. There was a whole Reformation about that. But…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

 

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.

 

Don’t listen to thoughts you have when you’re tired

I am a life-long insomniac, and please believe me when I say I have tried everything. I do all the right things, and avoid all the wrong things, to encourage good sleep, but it just seems to be my fate that sometimes I lose the knack, and long periods go by when sleep eludes me, night after night. I just forget how to do it, and the only thing to do is wait until I get the hang of it again. Staying asleep is like trying to stay underwater while clutching a giant beach ball: You can go under for a bit, but pretty soon you’re bobbing around on the surface again, blinking and frustrated, high and dry.

But nighttime is still different from daytime. The thoughts you have when you’re awake, and shouldn’t be, are very different from the thoughts you have when it’s just regular daytime. Nighttime thoughts can take on a certain urgency, even a certain spiritual compulsion.

Not long ago, Catholics on social media were talking about liminality: of “threshold” experiences when we are passing, or trying to pass, from one state or stage to another. We feel a sensation of peculiar and unsettling ambiguity, when we are neither this nor that, here nor there, but maybe we paradoxically feel a sharpened awareness of our in-betweenness.

There are some places on the planet that tend to make people feel this way – mountaintops, caves, very open spaces, heavy fog — and also some experiences: sitting with the dying, having sex, giving birth.

Sometimes insomnia puts us in this state. Eyes wide open in the darkness, body looking for all the world like it’s fully at rest when it’s actually tense and alert. The harder you try to push through from consciousness to unconsciousness, the more stuck you become in this liminal state.

Many people say that, if they can’t sleep, they pray. They say that, if they’re going to be awake anyway, they might as well be sure they’re passing the time well. Someone even told me once that God wouldn’t let her sleep until she said a whole Rosary for me (and I was very grateful when I found out, because I had been in labor, and struggling). And some people freely admit that they just keep on saying Hail Marys until they drop off to sleep. Call it boredom, call it tapping into some kind of mind/body magic, or call it faithfully letting your guardian angel finish the set, but it works for some people.

What I find, more often, is a different kind of spiritual experience…..Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

“Insomnia” photo by Alyssa L. Miller via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Sarah Norton of Conversion Street Studio: Meeting Jesus, again

On Sarah Norton’s second day of college, someone asked her to join a Bible study group. It was the beginning of one of many conversions. But at the time, it just seemed like a way to meet people.

“I needed friends, so I said, ‘OK,’” she said.

Norton, now 33 and the mother of four, as well as the artist owner of Conversion Street Studio, originally went into college as a vocal music major. She was Catholic, but even though she had gone to Catholic school, she perceived her faith as “rules to follow, not a relationship.”

In college, she dropped her faith and started partying. When someone from FOCUS Campus Ministry invited her to join their group, she went along with it, purely for the social aspect. She went to weekly Bible study but didn’t always attend Mass.

It wasn’t until a year in, when the leader asked her to join the ministry as a leader, that it started to get personal.

“I had to come early to college campus, and all the Bible study leaders were going to daily Mass and praying, and they had a joy about them. I wanted that. So I followed them,” she said.

Twelve weeks later, in her sophomore year, she was at Mass and looked up, and she saw Jesus.

“It was him. He gave my whole life to me. I’m gonna give my life to him,” she said.

That process wasn’t seamless. Norton slowly chipped away at the partying lifestyle she was leading and learned how to take her faith more seriously. At the same time, three years into her studies as a music major, she realized that music wasn’t meant to be her life. She ended up with a liberal arts degree and “one hundred minors in music.” And she took a few art classes.

Norton also felt the pull to make good on an inheritance of sorts she had gotten back in fourth grade.

“A family friend died, and her mom was an artist. For whatever reason, I inherited all of her oil paints, thousands and thousands of paints,” she said.

When she changed her degree, she decided to try to make use of this gift. She only had a few art classes under her belt, but quickly discovered she had a love for color and an aptitude for painting.

“I felt like I was dancing when I was painting, and I still do,” she said.

After college, she married her husband (also a FOCUS missionary), and he introduced her to a sort of hidden Marc Chagall museum in D.C.

“This opened my mind,” she said. “I love that he had his own style. I love his floating people. And he was so good at color. And I loved how strongly his Jewish heritage came out, how his religion came out in his art.”

Norton began to paint in earnest, learning through online tutorials, and often following the practices of prayer she learned in FOCUS. In the lectio divina, she said, you meet Jesus in Scripture, intentionally imagining the scenes as described in the Gospels.

“I was pretty on fire,” she said.

She and her husband had their first child right away, and then life shifted… Read the rest of my latest artist profile at Our Sunday Visitor. 

This is the eleventh in a monthly series of profiles of Catholic and Catholic-friendly artists for Our Sunday Visitor. 
Previous artists featured in this series:
Eileen Cunis
Daniel Mitsui
Mattie Karr
Jaclyn Warren
Daniel Finaldi
Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs
Chris Lewis
Kreg Yingst
Sarah Breisch
Charles Rohrbacher

If you know of (or are) a Catholic or Catholic-friendly artist you think should be featured, please drop me a line! simchafisher at gmail dot com. I’m not always excellent about responding, but I always check out every suggestion. Thanks!

On my summer list: Less screen time

This is the time of year when I make a list of things I definitely want to do this summer.

Some of it is just for fun, and I consult with all the kids to make sure nobody’s idea of fun gets overlooked (which can happen to the quieter kids in a big family). Visit that aquarium before our membership runs out! Learn how to make mozzarella! Go back to that state park with the waterfalls! Try our hand at paper marbling! Spend time at the ocean!

Some of it is things I must force myself to do: Teach at least one teenager to drive! Do something about the attic! Do something about the bathroom ceiling and the mold thereon! Do something about the teenagers in general!

There is also one thing I must force myself to do, that the kids definitely don’t want to do, but it’s so we can all have fun: Institute a weekly screen-free evening. We already do this during Lent, and most years, we do it during Advent, too. It’s stupidly hard. But the rewards are almost immediate; and I hope they are long-term, as well.

The thing about screen time — whether it’s video games, or TV, or movies, or social media or whatever — is that it doesn’t just take up the time it takes up. If you spend two hours staring at a screen, it’s very hard to just snap back into other activities where you use your body and heart and senses and imagination at the end of those two hours. Screen time leeches the life out of the rest of your day, and makes everything non-screen begin to feel arduous and irrelevant, and before you know it, you can’t really remember how to do anything else. So you don’t. You just look at your screen.

I say this as a screen fiend. I have a very hard time putting my phone down, even if I’m busy and really need to do something else, or if I’m exhausted and really need to sleep, or if everything I see and hear on my screen is intensely irritating or deathly boring. It’s just so easy to scroll, scroll, scroll, and the more I scroll, the harder it is to do anything else. So I have a lot of sympathy for my kids when they don’t want to put their devices down.

But I’m still their mom, and I still get to say what goes on in my house. Here’s one of the great secrets of doing what’s best for children: It often forces you into doing things that are good for you, too, even if only so they can’t accuse you of hypocrisy (which is a child’s greatest joy in life).

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Eilieen Cunis: The art of whatever is asked for right now

Eileen Cunis, 67, makes banners for churches. Not those primitive and graceless felt-and-burlap banners that dominated liturgical decor through the ’60s or ’70s, but thoughtfully crafted, dignified works of art produced by a woman who just wants to walk through whatever door the Lord has opened for her.

One of Cunis’ pieces, a processional banner of Mary Mother of the Eucharist, was recently accepted for the National Eucharistic Revival Art Exhibit, and it will travel from Connecticut to Indiana. It is a shining, intricate, iconlike work with many layers of fabric and brocade carefully pressed, folded and sewn into position, the faces and hands of Mary and her baby delicately rendered in paint.

As delighted as Cunis is to have her fabric work honored, she’d really rather be painting. She prefers the freedom and flexibility of working exclusively with paint, and she’s starting to wade into the deep waters of iconography, with its profound theology of light.

“I would love for a priest to say, ‘I have this big wall and I want you to do a big mural, and it’s going to be in the church for 50 or 100 years,’” she said. But it all comes down to how the Lord is leading her right now.

Right now, she’s just finished a set of four tapestries for Sacred Heart Church in Bloomfield, Connecticut, a building that had some vast, empty spaces to fill. It’s a gymnasiumlike structure, and that’s not just a coincidence. The church was built in 1962, when Catholicism in the United States was still burgeoning. The congregation assumed their parish would continue to flourish and grow, so they built the church intending to eventually convert it into a gym for the Catholic school.

“It just didn’t happen,” Cunis said. “People were caught flat-footed, and the gymnasium church remained the church.”

The school closed in the ’80s, a nearby church also closed, and the large, simple structure of Sacred Heart became the main church building for the congregation. It had been decorated and made suitable for worship, but still had a rather bleak facade on the apse wall.

The pastor saw Cunis’ work in a local shop, and a lightbulb went on. The gray space has now been transformed by a small host of angels rendered in shining fabric.

Cunis’ first banner, though, wasn’t designed to enliven a large space, but just the opposite…

Read the rest of my latest artist profile at Our Sunday Visitor. 

I did and did not learn about Jesus at the eclipse

A week before the solar eclipse that passed over much of the nation, I wrote an essay about it. I had a whole thesis worked out about how the sun is like Jesus and the moon is like the sacraments. I said that the power and glory of Jesus is like the blinding blaze of the sun, and although we live every day in its presence, we can only look upon it when it’s covered. Jesus is like the life-giving, illuminating, warming, but unapproachably brilliant sun, and he covered himself in mortal flesh for thirty-three years so people could live and walk with him, and now he covers his divinity under the species of bread and wine so we can see him, and eat him, and not be burned up. Someday, I said, our spiritual eyes will be changed so that we don’t need protection, but can behold him directly for eternity in Heaven.

Then I thought, maybe I should see the eclipse first.

So we packed a gigantic lunch and our special sunglasses and piled into the car, and plowed through hours of traffic to the spot up north where we could see the eclipse.

Did you see it? Were you there?

I saw it. I was not prepared.

I know why a solar eclipse happens. I’m very familiar with the science, and I’ve seen the little animated models, and I’ve seen countless amateur and professional photographs of total solar eclipses, too. I’ve also seen a partial solar eclipse and many lunar eclipses. I saw Haley’s Comet, and I’ve seen the rings of Saturn, and I’ve seen meteors so big and bright they leave a green streak across the sky. I’ve seen things in the sky that filled me with wonder and left me gasping and grateful for the strange beauty of the universe.

This was different. And it was not Jesus.

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: Flammarion engraving (public domain)

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