We could have done without a multitude of categories of clouds, without birds that migrate, bugs that pollinate, mint and milkweed that battle, and little girls who know something about flying. We could have been moved by fear and panic and compulsion, rather than by beauty and longing. Why is there beauty? Why is there life that delights in life?
The world gleams. But it is so untidy.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image by Colin Poellot via Flickr (Creative Commons)
“I like praying the Liturgy of the Hours,” says Leah Libresco
because, at a bare minimum, it gives me something to say to God. Not just the words of the prayers but, basically, “I’m really grateful for prayer traditions because I’d pretty much suck at having to make all this up on my own.” Instead of just being grateful for language period, it’s kind of like being grateful for slang — the shared set of references that characterize a relationship or a community.
Jennifer Fulwiler addresses a related phenomenon when she speaks of praying the Liturgy of the Hours: She realizes that, when the words don’t apply to her life, that’s a good thing, because she is praying as part of the Body of Christ. She says,
I found myself saying “we” and “our” more often than “I” and “mine.”
We all need the discipline of praying about things that are not immediately relevant to our needs. She says,
It all finally clicked. For the first time, I think I really understood the power of the Liturgy of the Hours as the universal prayer of the Church …
As my heart swelled to think of the great drama playing out all over the world that morning of which I was only a small part, I thought back to my words at the beginning of the office — “But this Psalm doesn’t have anything to do with me!” — and realized that I had learned something critically important about prayer: It’s not all about me.”
This is not to say that we can never pray about things that do concern us. But in my experience, the formal, selfless, ritualized prayer comes first, before there can be any depth of sincerity in individual prayer.
We can, for instance, try to flog our hearts into a sensation of awe during the consecration, but we probably won’t get anywhere. But if we simply humbly accept what is being offered, and obediently participate in the ritual of thanksgiving, that is what lays the groundwork for heartfelt awe and wonder.
So both kinds of prayer are necessary for us and pleasing to God — both the formal, “ready-made” prayers that we participate in as an act of will, and the personal, immediate outpourings of our own soul.
Praying only in own language is limiting and inadequate — but so, I believe, is only ever praying in the formalized language of the Church, because it’s all too easy to keep it formulaic, and to forget that prayer is conversation, and conversation implies a relationship.
We ought to pray, at least some of the time, in our “native tongue.” Leah has already discovered this:
When I think of immaterial things, I tend to think of Morality, which might not be that bad as a focus of prayer, even if I need to expand it out a little. The trouble is I also think of Math, and since it’s much easier to think about clearly and distinctly, I was running into a problem. I certainly wasn’t intending to pray to the Pythagorean theorem (which would make me a very strange sort of pagan), but I was drifting away from trying to talk to a Person and over to just thinking about immaterial ideas.
And kudos to her for noticing the problem!
So, basically, instead of fighting these thoughts, I kept thinking about whatever math concepts popped into my mind. I thought about when I’d learned them, how exciting they were, and the way I got to share that joy with my friends. Then I basically reminded myself, “God is Truth, so he totally shares your delight in these things. In fact, he delights in your delight and would love to draw you further up and further in to contemplate and be changed by higher truths in math and in everything else.”
And that meant I was basically thinking about a person and a relationship again. In my own weird little way.
Brilliant. Leah is drawn to truth; it’s her native tongue. For others, it’s goodness; for me, it’s beauty. Pythagoras doesn’t do much for me, but corn on the cob bubbling away in my blue enamel pot as the steam sifts through a shaft of evening light? This is something I invariably hold up to God, so we can delight in it together.
The saints all found different ways of praising God according to who they are, according to the native language He gave to them. And so we have St. Francis in his tattered robe, and also Josemaria Escriva with his precisely groomed hair; King David with his wild dancing, and Mother Theresa washing wounds. All of them related to God with some combination of formal language inherited from the Church, and spontaneous outpourings of their particular kinds of heart. These individual orientations are not something to struggle against; they are languages which God gives us so we can sing love songs to Him.
Do you speak to God in your native tongue? Or do you hide your personality from Him? Do you compartmentalize your spiritual life from your daily experience? Or can you remember that everything that is good comes from God?
This is the main thing to remember when we pray, and when we live our daily lives: “He the source, the Ending He.” Both root of idea and flower of expression. Here’s Hopkins:
the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
This is how we become more like Christ: by allowing God to refine who we already are. We become more like Him by speaking to Him in our native tongue. If, like Leah Libresco, we are looking for “something to say to God,” we could hardly do better than, “Here is what I am, Lord. Make me more like You.”
***
This post originally ran in a slightly different form in the National Catholic Register in 2012.
Image: The Astronomer by Johannes Vermeer [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Dear Father,
I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve said, “Quit telling priests what to do.” You guys are super busy and already working harder than anyone could reasonably expect.
But today I’ll give one of those imaginary dollars back, because today I’m going to tell you what to do this Sunday. Trust me, it’s for your own good.
This Sunday is, as you no doubt know, Mother’s Day, and a lot of your parishioners are going to expect you to acknowledge it. Also, a lot of your parishioners are going to be mad if you acknowledge it.
A good portion of your congregation feels that the world despises motherhood, and they look to the Church to be the one place where they are appreciated for their sacrifices and their hard work.
Another good portion of your congregation feels that the world only cares about women if they are mothers, and they look to the Church to be the one place where no one despises them for not being mothers.
Some of your parishioners are pregnant, and they’re miserable about it. Some of them desperately wish they were pregnant, and are working hard not to hate their fertile sisters. Some of them look pregnant, but are just fat, and if one more well-meaning priest blesses their unoccupied abdomens, they’re going to sock him in the jaw.
Some of them look pregnant, but they’re the only one who knows that the baby they’re carrying is already dead.
Some of your parishioners are the mothers of children who are already buried, or children whose bodies went straight into the hospital’s incinerator while their mothers wept and bled. Some of your parishioners paid to have their children put there.
Some of your parishioners have been wretched mothers, and they know it. Some of them have been excellent mothers of wretched children, and everyone assumes that wretchedness must be the mother’s fault.
Some of your parishioners hated their mothers. Some of them just lost their beloved mothers yesterday. Some of them never knew their mothers at all.
Some of your parishioners are excellent mothers who pour their heart, soul, mind, and strength into caring for their families, and as soon as they get home from Mass, everyone expects them to get right back to cooking and cleaning and making life easy for everyone else, the same as every other day.
And then, of course, you will have the people who are mad that you mentioned a secular holiday during Mass. And the people who remember how much better it was when Fr. Aloysius was in charge, oh yes, it was much better then. It’s a shame.
So, what’s your plan, Father? Gonna make all the mothers stand up and be acknowledged? You’ll be forcing a lot of women to make a statement they may not want to make. Gonna pass out carnations? Same problem. Gonna make us extend our hands over mothers in blessing? Well, you’re the priest, aren’t you. We would rather keep our hands to ourselves.
The real answer would be for Americans to just calm the hell down about motherhood, and not to expect the Church to cater to their every emotional need. But that’s not where we are right now. It’s a mess, and you’re right in the middle of it. Sorry! But I really do think you can thread the Mother’s Day needle without getting poked if you offer something like the following blessing before the end of Mass:
On this Mother’s Day in May, which is Mary’s month, we remember that our Blessed Mother was honored above every other human being besides Jesus Himself when she was asked by God to bear His Son. Lord, we ask your blessing on all women, because all women, no matter what their state in life, are specially privileged to bring Christ into the world. Mary is our model in joy and in suffering, in trust and in sorrow. Blessed Mother, intercede for our earthly mothers and for all the women who cared for us. Holy Spirit, increase our love so that we will always honor the women in our lives. We ask this through Christ Our Lord.
Amen.
Then scoot out the side door before anyone can yell at you.
Amen.
***
Photo of woman who is disappointed in you via Pixabay
This post originally ran at Aleteia in 2016.
Most of us realise we’re not supposed to live in a state of constant fear. It isn’t any fun, for one thing; and we can see it leads us to make bad decisions. Jesus came right out and told us, “Be not afraid!”
How, though? Much as we’d like to, we can’t just decide to stop being afraid.
Last night, we got up to the chapter about fortitude in our current catechism read-aloud, How To Be a Hero: Train With the Saints.
Sometimes we decide to make a change in our lives,
it says,
like giving up sweets for Lent or making a New Year’s resolution to keep our bedroom neat. At first, we are able to keep our resolution out of excitement and because it is something new. Eventually, though, it becomes more difficult to wake up each morning and make the bed, or turn down an offer of candy from a friend.
And is said, “SHUT UP, BOOK! YOU DON’T KNOW ME!” Ha ha, just kidding. We had just barely recovered from a conversation about whether it was, in fact, fartitude we needed to cultivate in our house (answer: No.), so I wasn’t going to derail Edification Hour again. But I thunk it.
One of my resolves for Lent was to reinvigorate my prayer life. It . . . has not been going well. I wish I could say it’s due to the mid-Lent doldrums, but it actually petered out almost immediately.
Happily, this morning I suddenly remembered a strategy for daily prayer that even I can manage. You cover ACTS:
Adoration,
Contrition,
Thanksgiving,
Supplication.
Or, as I used to tell my kids, it’s telling God:
You are great!
I’m sorry.
Thank you!
Please?
What else is there to say? If you can make the sign of the cross and thoughtfully make a personal expression of each of these things to God in the morning, then son, you have reinvigorated your prayer life. Fortitude!
(I purposely left the image at the top nice and big, in case you want to click on it and print it out for your wall. Obviously I just something I threw together with a marker, which you can easily replicate and do a better job with, but maybe you can’t find a marker.)
Yesterday, my friend Leticia Adams shared the devastating news that her oldest son, Anthony Gallegos, committed suicide at her home. He had long struggled with depression. He was the father of two young girls.
If you care to, please join me in praying the novena to St. Michael the Archangel for Anthony, Leticia, and their whole family. You can find the novena here and sign up for daily reminders.
Leticia would be very grateful to have Masses said for the soul of her son. His full name is Francisco Antonio Gallegos. You can request online for Masses to be said with Marians of the Immaculate Conception and at St. Michael’s Abbey in CA. (Those are just a few suggestions; many other places accept online requests for Masses to be said for particular intentions.)
Gift cards for cash and fast food would also be very helpful as they deal with the immediate aftermath of this tragedy. You may use the PO Box of the Catholic Sistas blog, and note that your gift is for Leticia Adams:
Leticia Adams c/o Catholic Sistas
PO BOX 71
McNeil, TX 78651
If you are local to the family, please consider donating a meal to help. CareCalendar lets you sign up to bring meals on specific days. The Calendar ID is 251799 and the security code is 7880.
There is now a YouCaring page set up to raise funds for funeral costs. If the goal is reached, any extra funds will go for college funds for Anthony’s two little girls.
There is a separate YouCaring page set up for Ariana, Anthony’s girlfriend, to help her pay bills and to care for their two daughters.
Comments are closed for this post.
***
Image by FaceMePLS via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Ever have frozen pipes? Us hardscrabble New Englanders are used to dealing with them, but 2017 is shaping up to be colder than average, and soon people all across the country may discover the joy of waking up, heading to the sink, turning on the tap, and getting a fine, rushing stream of nothing at all. Bah. I suppose you should have checked the weather report last night, and you should have left the cabinet doors open and left the faucet running just a trickle. Or gosh, you should have invested in some pipe insulation or heat tape when the home inspector said it would be a good idea. But you didn’t, and now here you are.
Moreover, you need to do something about it quick, before the ice in your pipes expands and bursts and floods your basement and walls. Then you’ll have more than no water to worry about — you’ll have water damage, corrosion, mold, and alligators. Basement alligators. Take it from me, a hardscrabble New Englander: when my pipes freeze and I have to send my husband, who is from Los Angeles, down to the basement to deal with it, you do not want any part of those burst pipe basement alligators. They do not fool around.
So, your pipes are frozen. What do you do? Oh, it’s simple. You dedicate the next several hours of your life to one of the most mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly tediously activities known to man: you sit there with a hairdryer, heating up the pipe. You could use a blow torch, which is hotter and faster, but then you will hot and fast a hole in your pipe, and your pipe will no longer be frozen, but it will no longer be a pipe, per se, either.
You sit and you sit, and you heat up that pipe. Is it working? Who knows? If you are in the basement (which is where the frozen part probably is), you will be haunted by the fear that you are not aiming the heat at the right spot. Somewhere in there, up in the cobwebby shadowland of joists and timbers, there is the spot of evil, the point where everything is getting held up, the coldest little nubbin in the universe, which is making everything miserable, unworkable, intolerable, frozen. You think you are probably heating it up, and making that little gob of ice smaller and smaller, but what if you’re not? What if the real trouble spot is icing itself up more and more as you speak, and you’re sitting there like a moron, concentrating all your time and effort on a bit of pipe that is fine?
Do not switch tactics. Do not move. Take it from me, a hardscrabble New Englander who has done this at least once, several years ago, and then realized that, even if your husband doesn’t want to do it, he kind of has to, and so it’s his turn from now on: stick with the spot you picked. Sit there. Blow with that stupid old hair dryer.
And eventually, it will happen: WHOOSH. The water will come on. I promise you. Just when you are about to give up — or maybe when you have given up, three or four times already, and then glumly, grudgingly, hopelessly gone back to the dreary task, it will happen. It will work. The blockage will clear, the ice will melt, the water will flow again, and life can go on. You will have running water again.
Oh! You thought I was talking about the pipes, didn’t you? Yes, well, that too. But I’m talking about prayer. I’m talking about suffering and pain, and despair, when everything is blocked up and impossible, and the water won’t run, and the day can’t happen.
I’m talking about the seemingly foolhardy effort we put into fixing our lives, sitting there in the dark, wishing and praying and hoping with all our hearts that our stupid little hot breath of air is actually going to make a difference. We’re not even sure if we’re aiming it in the right direction. What if I should be doing something else, instead? What if all this effort is wasted? What if I’m not having any effect at all, when I go, “Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary?” Should I try something else? Should I even bother?
Take it from this hardscrabble Catholic, who cannot, after a certain point, palm everything off on her husband. Do not move. Do not switch tactics. Keep on praying, keep on pointing your feeble little stream of air at that invisible clump of ice. It will melt, I promise you. It will give way. And the water of life will come rushing back, WHOOSH. And life will go on. And you won’t have to even think about the alligators again. Not until next time.
***
This essay was originally published in the National Catholic Register in 2014.
Image by Lara Danielle via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Trying to tamp down the guilt that rose like a cloud of evil dust, I mentally ran through my week, comparing it to the week that my brothers and sisters have endured in Aleppo. I shouldn’t have bought any presents, I thought. How could I even dare? How can we light our Advent candles and sing “O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel?” We are not captives. We are healthy, wealthy, safe, pampered. Our walls our intact. We are home. Our children are with us, safe and warm in bed. The Syrians, they are the ones who need rescuing, Lord. Lord, isn’t there something I can do?
Read the rest of my latest at The Catholic Weekly here.
***
Image: By Ahill34 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
When my mother was a new Christian, she was in with a crowd that put great stock in outward appearances. Since she had many more kids and much less money than everyone else, she felt horribly self-conscious about her house, which was shabby and cluttered despite her constant housekeeping. She got in the habit of saying, if someone stopped by, “Oh, please excuse the house. We’ve been away all day and I haven’t had a chance to tidy up!” or “Sorry about the mess around here! The kids have been sick and I’m so behind.”
Then one day, she just got sick of it. The smarmiest, must judgmental neighbor of all happened to drop in, and she said, “Well, I’m sorry about the house. This is how we live.”
I wish I knew the rest of the story. Did the judgy woman gasp and flee? Did she tell everyone that Mrs. P. lives like a pig and isn’t even ashamed of it? Did she (it’s possible) think, “Wow, that’s kind of refreshing. Someone just told me the truth”? It’s possible that the woman was even grateful that someone trusted her with some difficult information. It’s possible she went away and asked herself why it was that people felt they needed to lie to her.
Telling the truth is says something about us, and also something about the person we’re talking to. When we tell the truth, its a risk to ourselves, but also a great compliment to them.
The older I get, the less patience I have for people who try to shine me on. It feels rude to be lied to. Do you think I’m too dumb to know the truth? Too weak? Too shallow? Who has time for pretense? There’s so much nonsense in the world that we can’t get around. Why add to it by pretending to be someone we’re not?
I’ll tell you something. God is even older than I am, and he has even less interest in hearing lies. My brother Joe tells about a priest who had a big problem. And he was mad. Mad at the world, mad at his situation, and mad at God. So every day, he went into the adoration chapel, knelt before the Sacrament, and told the truth: “I don’t love you, God.”
Every day, every day he did this. Until one day he said it, and he realized it wasn’t true anymore.
I’d like to know the rest of that story, too. I do know that it’s never useful to lie to God. It’s never useful to lie to ourselves about what our relationship with God is. It’s never useful to run away from God, and refuse to talk to him, if we feel like we can’t say the right things or feel the right things. No one has time for that, and it’s an insult to God to even try it. If you feel like you have to hide, then tell him that. If you feel that he’s not fair, tell him that. If you aren’t even sure he exists, tell him that. There’s no time for anything less than the truth.
Utter honesty is a luxury we do not always have with the rest of the world. Civility, duty, and charity often demand that we reserve such blunt honesty from other people, at least most of the time. So do what you need to do when you’re presenting yourself to the rest of the world. Sometimes it’s appropriate to lay it all out there; sometimes you will want or need to be a little more guarded.
But not with God. Never with God. Go ahead and tell him, as you open your front door, “This is just how I live.” It doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility of changing things, if that’s what needs to happen; but God will not help you change until you are willing to talk to him about where you are. He is a gentleman. He only comes in where He is invited. Honesty is an invitation he always accepts.
***
Pray. Pray!
Maybe you don’t need a reminder, but I do. Almost none of us are in a position to do anything else. We can vote, we can argue, we can maybe collect money or baby carriers or signatures or other signatures or bug-out bags – but if you believe in God, then doing any of these things without praying is like shopping for furniture when you’re homeless. Prayer is where we ought to live, where we ought to start our day from and where we come home to at night. Prayer is the foundation under our feet and the roof over our heads. Going it alone, without prayer, turns us all into refugees.
Read the rest at the Register.
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image: in the style of Godfried Schalcken (http://www.bassenge.com/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
