Light and Momentary

Juxtaposed

Two weeks ago I took Stella to the library in the middle of Mass. She gets a little rowdy in the narthex, as if "I can run around here" translates into "I must run around here" in her little brain, but she's usually pretty quiet in the library. The church's sound system is piped in, so I was able to hear the progression of the liturgy of the Eucharist.

We were at the Consecration when someone came into the bathroom, right next to the library, and relieved himself audibly and copiously. From the speakers I heard our pastor saying, "This is my body"; simultaneously, through the wall, I heard a body saying, "Hey, I'm a body!" And I thought, a little indignantly, "Excuse me, I am trying to PAY ATTENTION to the Mass here!"

Then I realized how often that scene plays out. As I navigate the world I can focus on the miracle of an immanent God, out of sight but always present, or I can focus on the crap that's closer at hand. I can get miffed enough about the crap that I disregard the miracle.

But that's always a bad idea.

Messy

I have a complicated sister-in-law.

She has been complicated for a long time, but the level of complicated increased exponentially last summer, when she found herself pregnant, single, and unemployed. The baby's due in a little over 3 weeks.

Her parents persuaded her to leave the West Coast, where she was pretty much alone, and stay with them instead. There's been a lot of drama this week surrounding her attempts to get on a train to the Midwest, and it has made me keenly aware of my shortcomings as a Christian.

I was trying to tamp down my unwelcoming feelings when it looked like she would be here for Christmas. "Excuse me?" I said to myself. "What kind of Christian would even contemplate turning away a pregnant woman on Christmas??" I will spare you the blow-by-blow on her changing travel plans and my roiling inner landscape; suffice it to say that it's been frustrating.

She was due in today. Her parents called to check on her and she said she was very sick. Headache. So congested she couldn't breathe. Very swollen hands and feet. Felt so bad she couldn't walk. They should find her a wheelchair for when she got off the train. I was not filled with compassion when I heard this litany of complaints. I thought, "Oh, honestly."

Not long afterward, I took three of my boys ice-skating with their cousin, my other SIL and her husband, that SIL's best friend, and the friend's daughter. On the drive to the ice rink the litany of woe rearranged itself in my brain: Headache. Very swollen. Felt so bad she couldn't walk. Older mom. First pregnancy. What's it spell? Pre-eclampsia. Louder? Pre-eclampsia.

Just typing that brings back the frisson of horror I felt in the van. Here I had been rolling my eyes inwardly at what I thought was more drama. What if she was seriously sick? I know a woman who had fulminant pre-eclampsia, who went from feeling fine to death's door in no time flat. I know many other women who have had a slower-developing form of pre-eclampsia, and another tendril of fear snaked around my heart when I remembered my MIL saying that she had missed her last few prenatal appointments.

We got to the skating rink and I talked it over with my other SIL and her friend. We tried to call Anne. No answer. We texted her, saying, "Please respond -- we are very concerned about you." Nothing. The friend tried to contact her OB's office for advice. Nobody picked up. We were all terribly worried.

I called my MIL, who had been planning to take Anne straight home for a nap. I said, "I'm worried about pre-eclampsia. If she still has a headache when she gets off the train, she should go immediately and get checked out. This can be really serious. It can even be fatal. In fact, we should ask if she's been having vision changes, because if that's the case maybe she should get off the train wherever she is and go to the hospital instead of staying where there's no medical care." I told her that she should call someone who knew more than I did to find out what questions to ask, and we talked about some possibilities.

She hung up the phone and said, "Anne's going to die."

My husband was with her and did his best to get her calmed down. After talking to the local L&D unit, they agreed to pick her up at the train station in town as planned. They took her straight to L&D, where the staff immediately checked her blood pressure and her urine and determined that it wasn't pre-eclampsia. They wanted her to wait until a doctor could check her out, which took some time once it was established that she wasn't an obstetric emergency. There was further drama; there was tearing off of fetal monitor belts.

She came home a few hours later, highly displeased with my meddling. "They didn't do anything," she said scornfully. And I stepped out of the kitchen and into a quiet corner, where I started to cry. My MIL and my other SIL spotted me, though, and were very kind -- so kind. My husband, who hates unnecessary fuss, also tells me that he thinks my reaction was reasonable. But I am still feeling sad and weighed down.

I have expended a lot of emotional energy on Anne over the past week: fretting and trying not to fret, chewing on her past visits and trying to let go of those old frustrations, praying for grace and trying to muster more compassion, mentally revising plans and re-revising them when she missed another train. And then there was today, when we didn't know for a while if she wasn't answering the phone because she was busy having an eclamptic seizure in her sleeper compartment. I've been hoping that I could show the love of Christ to her (or hey -- at least not provide further evidence to support her contention that Catholics are hypocrites), and instead I just made her mad.

So I am thinking about Christmas trees. My husband and I are real Christmas tree people, even though they shed needles and need watering and poke small children who get too close. Every year when I see the needles on the floor I tell myself, "Life is messy." You can have a tree that doesn't shed or need watering or poke small children, but it won't be real. And there's much to be said for real.

In the same way, I think, love is messy. You could live a life, maybe, where you never had to deal with prickly people and the stuff they strew across your life, but God calls us to love the prickly. On the long drive home I was trying to pray through my frustrations. In response I felt a wordless surge of loving tenderness from the Lord -- a momentary assurance that I didn't need to berate myself for being wrong about Anne's health. I hope she can find that same tenderness, somehow. I'd appreciate your prayers for her and her baby.

Later

When we were engaged and newly married, my husband and I were involved with a fantastic retreat program.  In the summer of 1995 I applied to be lay director for one of the retreats that next academic year. I wasn't chosen. When I got the call I hung up the phone and cried for a minute -- I trusted the team's discernment, but I was disappointed and I couldn't help feeling rejected.

A couple of months later they called me back. The guy who was slated to lead the November retreat was facing a huge family crisis and needed to step down. Could I fill in? I could. I did. It was a terrific (though trying) experience and I still think that the talk I gave to the participants on Sunday afternoon was one of the finest hours of my life so far.

Also in the summer of 1995, I miscarried my first baby. Losing that baby wrecked me: I'd never grieved like that. I'd never pleaded with God as earnestly as I did for the life of my baby, and he said no. I was still limping in November. I think that was part of why my talk resonated with the participants; I think they could hear the heartbreak and the sincerity in my voice when I told them that sometimes you implore God to spare you the outcome you dread, and he says no, and he is still good -- always good.

For complicated reasons I was convinced I wouldn't be able to get pregnant again, and in fact it was more than eight months after the miscarriage, in the spring of 1996, when I learned we were expecting Alex. Today I have been thinking about the little burst of hope I felt when I got the call about directing the retreat. I had applied because I'd felt called to the position, and then I was sad and a little embarrassed when they chose other candidates instead. As it turned out, God wasn't saying no; he was saying, "Later." Maybe he was also saying "Later" about the call to motherhood. Maybe someday I would have a baby to hold.

I wish I could tell my 1995 self that she really could look forward to the future -- that she wouldn't just have a baby to hold, that she would have five children and that they would be her favorite people in the world.

Why am I thinking about this today? Tune in tomorrow and I'll tell you why.

Love and Fudgesicles

I went searching in my archives for a recipe at Sarah's request, and I stumbled across a post I had completely forgotten. I never published it, because it was long and I thought it might sound boastful, but it was about sharing my faith with my children. It was such fun to read -- a fantastic window into our family's life six years ago. That's what I love about blogging: the record of events and thoughts and quotes and stages. It slips away so quickly if I don't record it.

As I've become less anonymous I've done more self-censoring. I suppose it's inevitable but it's also a shame. In the octave of Easter, even before it surfaced in the royal wedding, I kept running across this quote from St. Catherine: "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire." I was kneeling in the Adoration chapel, asking why I kept tripping over this quote. I said, "What would you have me do?" And the answer, mysteriously but unmistakably, was "Write."

So I'm writing.

(And also feeling utterly naked.)

Since I am already feeling naked, I will share a story that my inner editor would most likely have blue-penciled a couple of weeks ago. I was at Mass this morning, sitting across from a young family that leaves me feeling like a slacker. They've had four kids in rapid succession and yet they are always, always there at daily Mass. Back in the fall when I brought Stella to a weekday Mass, I got the distinct impression from the dad that he thought she was a bad influence on his kids. (She's not a fan of sitting quietly in the pew, my Stella.)

Do you do that unfortunate thing when you feel disapproval from someone else, that thing where you find yourself looking for something to criticize in return? "Well, my daughter may be a shrieking lunatic, but hey-- your tie is totally crooked!" No?? It's just me?? [heavy sigh and firm resolve] I have struggled with that unfortunate thing ever since.

Today I was there alone, while they were muddling through with their four little ones. Usually their kids are preternaturally well-behaved, but their newest baby is very new indeed and the older ones were wigglier and noisier than usual. At one point the dad asked each of the two oldest if they wanted a swat. As you might expect, they assured him that they did not.

Ten years ago that scene would have unleashed a torrent of strong feelings in me. (OK, actually, "strong feelings" = judgy judgy judgment.) Way to teach your children about the love of Jesus there, Dad! That's why he said, "Suffer the little children to come to me, and forbid them not, for in the kingdom of God I shall swat such as these." Or something like that.

But the certainty I had ten years ago about my parenting philosophy has been eroded by the reality of mothering my children. Ten years on I am able to see the irony in feeling superior to a parent whose children usually sit quietly and participate while mine erupt in unpredictable plumes of mirth and fury.

The reality is that the research on long-term attachment parenting outcomes is not as clear as Dr. Sears likes to say it is. The reality is also that Alfie-Kohn-esque discipline strategies can leave you up a creek in the short term. I continue to believe that it is worthwhile to teach children to do the right thing for its own sake, but OH do I see the utility of an occasional threat or bribe. I cannot know how it will all shake out in 20 years' time. Will my children be faithful Christians as adults? Will theirs? None of us can really know, and so I have come to think it's wiser to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

My 6yo has been having some trouble with his temper lately. This is a new thing for him; for a long time he was the sweetest and meekest of my children. In recent weeks anger has been smacking him around capriciously-- something minor will leave him enraged. This afternoon I sent him to his room to calm down and went up a few minutes later to check on him. "What was that about?" I asked him. "Hell," he answered instantly. "I think hell took over about a quarter of my brain."

At bedtime he got angry again. He has, and hates, the earliest bedtime. "I'm not going to put my clothes in the hamper," he fumed. We talked about it for a few minutes, about flexing your doing-the-right-thing muscles so they get stronger than your doing-the-wrong-thing muscles. "I'm too tired to do the right thing," he grumped. "Doing the right thing even when you're tired is the very best practice for your doing-the-right-thing muscles," I assured him.

He put his clothes in the hamper. "I'm doing this," he said with definite displeasure but no further defiance, "because I love you."

That's my highest hope: that when it is crunch time for them as Christians, that they will choose what's right and say to God, "I'm doing this because I love you." Will they? Do I?

***

I started this post three weeks ago and buried it in my drafts folder because (a) who wants to be naked in public? and (b) it kept getting longer, with no tidy ending in sight. After that Mass three weeks ago I thought to myself, "Instead of feeling so awkward around that family all the time, you should just love them the best you can. Take them a meal now that the baby's here." Today I finally did, lentil soup and corn muffins and a box of fudgesicles, assembled during the most tempestuous afternoon I can remember. The three youngest kids took turns wailing, and an older brother punctuated the wailing with poisonous sarcasm. I dropped that dinner off while my boys squabbled in the back of the van, with a prayer that we could all be more gracious to each other.

Maybe I don't have a tidy ending because motherhood isn't about the tidy or the endings: it's messy, it's gradual. It's love disguised in a box of fudgesicles and in fumbling efforts to be patient, and you can only hope the message gets through.

Like Newborns

This morning I read that bit of 1 Peter that tells us to be "as eager for milk as newborn babies," and I've been thinking about it all day. (The picture shows a brand-new Pete -- he'll be six tomorrow.)

I've been remembering the way that newborns accept no substitutes. When they're hungry you can't distract them or cajole them: they want one thing and one thing only.

I've been thinking about newborn diligence, the way they'll nurse for 20 minutes, 10 or more times a day. They've got a big task ahead of them -- imagine if you had to double your weight by Halloween! -- and they'll only grow if they keep feeding.

I've been thinking about the contentedness of a nursing newborn, the way their urgency gives way to satisfaction. I've been remembering colossal baby burps and sweet milk-drunk smiles.

And I've been thinking about the pleasures of providing for a newborn: the perfect reciprocity of an empty baby and a full mama, and the delight I've known watching a little one get exactly what he needs.

I'm not doing so well seeking out the "pure milk of the spirit." I get distracted and grab some bubble gum instead. I'm usually in a hurry -- a baby wouldn't grow very quickly on my current feeding schedule. In fact, a baby might wind up with failure to thrive on my current feeding schedule. I've been missing that joyful symbiosis: the Provider, overflowing with bounty, and the vessel, receiving it patiently.

Penetrated

I read Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts last month. It was a hard read. At first it was hard because I don't read her blog and I kept tripping over her style. Then it was hard because I kept tripping over tough truths.

Ann Voskamp is taking some heat for the last chapter of the book, in which she talks about making love to God. It's appalling, says one blogger. (See Elizabeth Esther's post here for more details.) We should just study our Bibles like nice Christian ladies, says one of the concurring commenters. Another commenter scurried away from the combox to go scrub her brain, she said. I haven't followed the comment thread since about Thursday, but I think that's an instinctive reaction and maybe pretty widespread.

The craziest, most breathtaking part of the gospel is that Jesus desires union with us. He didn't just rescue us from sin and death so we wouldn't fry for eternity; he rescued us from sin and death so we could have fellowship with him. So we could see him as he is. So we could be wholly filled and flooded with God himself. So we could KNOW him.

Studying your Bible like a nice Christian lady is important; St. Jerome was right that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. But the inverse is not quite true: knowing Scripture doesn't mean knowing Christ. Studying the Bible equips you to know about Jesus. It's not quite the same thing.

It would be possible for me to know a lot about, say, George Washington. I could read biographies and visit Mount Vernon and sift through archives to see his letters and papers. But I still wouldn't know George Washington. [I have a vague feeling that I've read this somewhere else. LMK if you recognize it -- I'd be glad to give credit.] You can't be in union with someone you know about from books and documents.

Union with Jesus, his call to us, has a lot in common with conjugal union. Because I am writing about Protestant criticisms of a book written by a Protestant, my focus here is spiritual union, not sacramental union. In both marriage and the Christian life we say an initial life-altering yes: the two become one flesh, or the life of Christ comes to dwell within us. In both marriage and the Christian life we have the privilege of renewing that initial yes, of deepening our union. This is the source of new life -- that "life to the full" that was Jesus' reason for coming to us. And it is designed to delight, to bring joy, to draw closer together. That delight, though, is edged with danger, because union -- whether spiritual or marital -- brings with it the possibility of discomfort, heartbreak, even death (all the more so in the days before modern midwifery care and anti-hemorrhagic meds). Granting entry to another is not a casual decision. Who knows what might happen if you say yes?

Union can seem like a crazy idea, in fact. Why are we eager for something that may cost us so much? I believe we are wired for desire; I believe too that most of us are hauling around some skepticism about how those yearnings might be satisfied. Like the child who says "...is that for real?" when he learns how babies are made, we think it's a pretty wacky idea that Jesus really wants to fill us with himself. Jesus lost followers when he taught about the Eucharist and I think the identical impulse is at in us work today. You want to fill me? With you? Is that for real?

Voskamp's book is about seeing that union made tangible through thanksgiving -- thanksgiving as the source of joy and fearlessness, thanksgiving as the key that opens our hearts to the Lord. I kept getting stuck while I was reading, hung up on a painful piece of my past that has left me chronically fearful about the future. One morning I was trying to talk to my husband about it and wound up sobbing in his arms. "I just can't give thanks for that," I told him. "I can't make myself do it."

"You don't have to," he said protectively as he stroked my hair. But I think eventually I do.

It's not because I serve some sort of monster God who doles out pain and maliciously wants me to thank him for it. It's because above all else I want to live my life with open hands, to live my life with a heart yielded to a sovereign God. I can only inch my way toward that right now, asking for the grace to get a little closer to the goal. But I believe, and am consoled by the belief, that the inching can still honor God -- I am thinking of my delight in my own daughter's wobbly first steps.

Perhaps we can all take comfort in St. Paul's comment on the reality of the Church as Bride: no stranger to tricky theological concepts, he called it a "great mystery." The idea of consummation with the Bridegroom is strange, and difficult, and hey -- who'd like to have a nice-Christian-ladies Bible study instead of thinking about something so weird? Is that for real?

It doesn't get any realer, actually: he is the Bridegroom, and together we believers are the Bride. To believe in the communion of the saints is to know that our collective Yes to consummation is the sum (the product? the exponentiation?) of uncountable individual Yeses. One of the blessings of an enduring marriage is a sense of freedom born of mutual willingness to keep plowing through the quotidian struggles. I believe the same is true of our union with Christ: it is through the quotidian struggles of the will -- where forgiveness is asked and extended and received -- that we are made ready to stand before the Bridegroom, once more naked and unashamed.

Thanks

During my first year out of college I was reading 1 Thessalonians for a Bible study. "Give thanks in all circumstances," said Chapter 5. I marked the "all" and resolved to give it a try.

The next morning I was racing out the door to work. I had just enough time to catch my train if I moved quickly. I zipped through my mental checklist as I ran for it: coat, gloves, shoes, bag, lunch, walle-- rrccchhhhhh ffffffccccccccchhhh.

That was the sound of my cat vomiting all over the living room carpet. I cannot even tell you how intensely I hated cat vomit. If you'd given me a choice between being in the same room with a live grenade and being in the same room with cat vomit, I would have picked the live grenade. They can treat shrapnel wounds, after all.

If I had lived alone I might have just tossed a dishrag over the offending spot and cleaned it up that night, so I could sprint for the train. But I had three roommates, none of whom would welcome that particular dishrag in their particular living room. I waved a mental farewell to my train and prepared to clean up.

I sank to my knees on the carpet and remembered the instruction to give thanks in all circumstances. You can probably imagine the sarcasm that crept into my voice as I began: "Thanks a LOT, Lord." As I began listing things I could be grateful for, though, I was surprised at how quickly they came.

For my cat, who was almost 19 at that point -- my first memories were of that cat. For a carpet. For able hands. For a job I loved and a train to take me there. I remember thanking God for the tenacity of life, not knowing that my kitty would die later that year. At some point it stopped being an exercise of the will and became an overflowing of the heart. I was surprised to feel it happening, and then grateful for that as well. It's a moment I look back on fondly, as a little glimpse of God's occasionally comical timing ("Thanks in all circumstances, Jamie? Here we go!") and of the fruits of a choice to obey.

***

Last night when they called school off for today, we invited the boy who was visiting to spend the night. Three of the kids slept in the fort Joe had made in our living room. At 11:30 I was awakened by an unhappy visitor. He woke up in the fort and, disoriented, was sick there. I helped him get some fresh clothes and a glass of water. I tried to contain the mess in the fort without waking the boys who'd been so eager to sleep there. It took a couple of tries to get in touch with our guest's family, and then it took me a long while to get back to sleep afterward.

I woke up too early this morning, because kids in a fort always wake up too early and even whispering boys will wake a toddler who doesn't want to miss a single minute of fun. I was crabby. I was not looking forward to our third successive snow day, this one so bitterly cold that the kids won't want to be outside for more than a few minutes. I don't mind doing my own kids' post-stomach-bug laundry, but it turns out that mother love is the reason for that particular change. (I am very fond of this kid, but vomit is still pretty gross.) I cleaned recycled strawberry ice cream out of the living room carpet with a fair amount of interior kvetching.

And then I sat down to do the Office of Readings. My ribbon was in the wrong place because of yesterday's feast day, which meant that I read, of all things, 1 Thessalonians 5. Give thanks in all circumstances, Jamie. All circumstances.

For this boy and his family. For my own family. For our friendship. For a carpet. For able hands. For a job that lets me stay home on a bitter February day. For good health (at least for the moment!). For a washing machine.

For a faithful God, who has a sense of humor.

Sunday Night Scrutinizing

Two weeks ago I resolved that I wouldn't goof around on the computer unless the dishes, the laundry, the meal prep, and my prayer life were where they needed to be first. For ten days this was an awesome plan. Things were caught up around here and I was feeling pretty good about it.

And then the habit fought back.

This week has been a real struggle. Part of it is that I hate my own sloth. Part of it is that the toddler sleep thing is kicking my butt from here to Madagascar. Or maybe Ganymede. I'm too disoriented from sleep deprivation to tell exactly where my butt has gone.

Part of it is that I'm not exactly sure how to proceed. I was in the Adoration chapel on Thursday morning, feeling guilty and frustrated about my bad habits, when I had a sudden insight, one of those moments of truth from outside my own head: overemphasizing self-discipline and to-do lists can be a form of idolatry.

The purpose of the Christian life is not to get things done. The purpose of the Christian life is not even to vanquish vices for the sake of vanquishing vices. The purpose of the Christian life is to live in relationship with Jesus.

If I fix my eyes on my to-do list, I can't fix my eyes on Jesus.

It's like I'm teetering between two errors. I can't be the person I'm called to be if sloth is grabbing me by the scruff of the neck. I also can't be the person I'm called to be if I am narrowly focused on efficiency. The computer and the to-do list are both good servants, bad masters.

I'm not making a Sunday Night Strategizing list this week because I have some discerning to do. (Also because last week left me full of discouragement and woe, but that's a secondary issue.) It's been really fun to see other SNS posts popping up here and there, so best wishes to all of you who are taking on your own to-do lists.

Oh, darn it, the 2yo is awake again. If you are a pray-er, please pray for her to sleep and me to have patience. I'm about to lose my mind here. Throwing up this unedited post and saying good night--

Your Questions Answered, Part 2

Kristin asked specifically about FlyLady and the rosary, both of which are fertile ground for breeding that alarming monster, the Perfectionist-Slacker hybrid. You can recognize it by its giant trailing flagellum (the better to beat you with, my dear) and its nauseous miasma of self-loathing.

I first subscribed to FlyLady's emails not long after she started sending them, eleven years ago, and I have been an off-and-on subscriber ever since. There are three things I have learned in those eleven years that may be useful (but may also be obvious). First, I have finally figured out that nobody else's program is going to work for me exactly as written. FlyLady and I part company early on, because I don't wear shoes in the house and I have no intention of doing so. (That was the big asterisk in my 2010 FlyLady resolution: "...everything* FlyLady tells me *except about wearing shoes because why would I want lead-contaminated soil and stray bits of dog poop tracked all over my carpet?") My house, my kids, my priorities -- why would she be able to predict exactly how I should keep my life in order?

Second, there are two truths in tension when it comes to FlyLady. I'm almost always glad when I do something she tells me to do. At the same time, I can only do everything she tells me if that's my primary focus. Outings with my kids seem to get pushed aside because I have one more FlyLady task to accomplish and suddenly it's naptime so we can't go out. It's better for me to plan on doing part of the package, perhaps choosing a particular habit to work on, and give myself upfront permission to delete freely.

This leads into #3, which is a hard one for me: running a household with small children is just not easy. There's this misperception that it's only housework, only childcare, and if you weren't a lazy slob you would just get it done. I disagree. Even in a small house there are a zillion things that need doing and entropy is an implacable force. It took me years to admit something that you may find self-evident (or whiny, depending on your POV), but I suspect I am not the only one out there laboring under the weight of a false idea. It's not an easy gig. Don't beat yourself up if you struggle: it's not you, it's the job.

Next up, the rosary. For those of you who aren't Catholic, the rosary is a structured meditation in which a person reflects on events in the lives of Jesus and Mary. A person could sit down for 20 minutes and pray the rosary contemplatively, pondering in turn the mysteries and the related scripture and her intentions and the words of the prayers. A person could also pray the rosary on the run, counting Hail Marys on her fingers while folding laundry and stopping in the middle of a sentence to redirect a contumacious child. Such a person might get to the eighth Hail Mary and say, "Wait, what decade is this supposed to be?"

Honestly, the rosary at my house looks like option B more often than option A. My strength is not contemplation. My strength is showing up. I cannot pretend to offer guidance on how to pray like St. Teresa, but I can tell you that you won't get to ecstatic union if you don't keep showing up. (Let me throw in here that I love Peter Kreeft's little book Prayer for Beginners -- it's just full of good stuff.) If you are trying to get started with the rosary, think of option A as a destination, not a starting point. Contemplation, kind of like keeping house, is harder than I expected it to be. It's reasonable to start small.

If you are trying to fit the rosary in, it may be useful to know that it takes less than three minutes to pray a decade. It may be useful to pray along with a recording so that you are not derailed by a moment of distraction, or so that you can do something mindless with your hands. I often pray the rosary while washing dishes or folding laundry. A person could complain that this diminished attention debases the rosary, though I hope only a really crabby person would think that. I prefer to think that I am sanctifying the housework.

Because a decade of the rosary is quick and composed of familiar prayers, it's fairly easy to do with kids. We almost never sit down to pray five decades, the way a Good Catholic Family^TM might, but one decade I can manage. Instead of launching into an unbroken string of Hail Marys, I usually give them a brief thought to reflect on at the beginning, after the third Hail Mary, and after the seventh Hail Mary. The goal is to combine facts and food for thought, so I might say, "Forty days after his Resurrection Jesus rose up into heaven as his apostles watched," and then, "We honor your authority over heaven and earth," and finally, "We ask for the grace to carry your holy truth into the world" -- just something quick and off the cuff that I hope will help those words from Acts 1 sink into their heads. The kids can all tell you that it takes less than three minutes but it's longer if you interrupt. And you know, maybe if I were a better mother I wouldn't emphasize how fast it's over, but I have to tell you they're almost always willing to cooperate -- in part because it's short.

One last idea, because my word count is creeping up and up, is to pray the rosary with a child who is going to sleep. To teach my children how to go to sleep without nursing, I would rub their backs and pray the rosary quietly. I think it is a lovely peaceful association for them -- my 8yo (who has been weaned for a long time!) still asks me to tuck him in that way.

So-- I am a half-hearted FlyLady follower, but my house is cleaner than it used to be. And I am hardly a rosary role model, but I can tell you that good things will follow if you just show up.

Cause of our joy

What does the food court in a Canadian mall have to do with the Immaculate Conception? Everything. [I was writing this post yesterday and didn't get it finished.]

A couple of weeks ago a Canadian pal sent a link to this video:

I have watched it a dozen times now and still it leaves me with tears streaming down my face. One reason is that it is December and anything can make me weep in December.

A bigger reason is that I am particularly sentimental about the Messiah. I was 12 years old, living in the cultural wasteland that was early 80s small-town southern West Virginia, when my church's choir director invited me to join the community chorus. "We have a lot of fun," she said. It wasn't fun for me, exactly, because I had never seen such challenging vocal music. It was a fantastic experience, though, and that music, along with those words full of grace and truth, is etched into my soul now. Nothing says Christmas to me like the Messiah.

But I think the most important reason is that the video is an emblem of a fundamental truth all too easy to overlook: the kingdom of God is among you. The kingdom of this world -- with all its excess, deep-fried TBHQ-laden breaded chicken, lookalike ugly purses, heinous fluorescent lighting, and heartbreak and deception and failure ("Gosh, Jamie," you are probably thinking, "you must really hate the mall." --and you are right!) -- the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

I look at the choir with its lovely young women and its grizzled old men, making beautiful music together, and I think about redemption for "every tribe and tongue." I especially love the part where the guy waves the "Caution: wet floor" sign like a banner, the most mundane of items giving exuberant voice to his joy. I watch this video and I remember that while we trudge through our dreary Decembers, eyes focused narrowly on our to-do lists and their attendant headaches, the enduring reality is that angels and archangels are singing "Hallelujah!" for the Word made flesh.

What does this have to do with the Immaculate Conception? St. Anselm said it better than I can. (Scroll down to the second reading to see what I mean.) The Immaculate Conception tells us that God has the desire to free us from sin, and the power to free us from sin, and it gives us a glimpse of the beauty there can be in a world redeemed.

And that is enough to make this overtired, overcaffeinated, rather bedraggled  mama say "Hallelujah!"

Union

In college I took a class called Language and the Text, taught by a professor who seemed to be attempting to resolve her ambivalence about leaving her Catholic upbringing behind. We read bits of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin and Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and we were instructed to apply their ideas to texts that included Augustine's Confessions and St. Teresa's autobiography. The cover of our edition of the latter featured the marvelous Bernini statue.

"I am not the first person," our professor informed us, "to think that Teresa's expression looks like sexual ecstasy." Discussion ensued: obviously it's hazardous to repress one's sexual desires, etc. I was 20 at the time, the only believer -- or at least the only person willing to identify as a believer -- in that class of a dozen comparative literature majors. And I wanted to speak up. I wanted to say, "I believe that God created sex to teach us about deeper joy: union with Him. I believe that even the best sex can offer a person only a pallid foretaste of the delights of heaven."

But I didn't. And even at the time I was ashamed of the reason: I didn't want that roomful of black-clad artsy types to think "That Jamie Most just needs to get laid. That'll teach her about pallid foretastes." I had found it hard going that quarter, trying to say that perhaps we should let Ss. Augustine and Teresa speak for themselves instead of dissecting their purported delusions.

It's been almost 20 years since I sat in that classroom, but I was thinking about it yesterday morning. We went to my in-laws' church and I was struggling. I have a hard time with the liturgical innovations there and I usually spend Mass arguing with myself. Is it ostentatious to kneel after the Sanctus if no one else does, or is it disrespectful to remain standing? It was a good place for me to hear yesterday's gospel, because I may be a slow learner when it comes to spiritual things but even I can see the dangers of sanctimony when you tell me about the publican and the pharisee. I was secretly relieved when Stella needed to be taken out after the sign of peace.

So it was a shock for me to have one of those jolts of recognition and deep gladness when I received the Eucharist -- a brief taste of what union with God might be like. If I were a different kind of blogger I might say more about the parallels between Eucharistic and marital communion [.pdf link to John Kippley's essay comparing the two], but I'm not. I'll say instead that sometimes I fumble for analogies to describe an experience that is profoundly right: it's like sunshine, I might say, or it's like an organ chord. (I'll also say that another thought occurs to me about the Bernini sculpture: if you ask a sculptor to depict blissful union, what's his referent most likely to be?) Maybe, though, all my experiences of profoundly right things are meant to remind me not of other profoundly right things but of the profoundly righteous One -- the "full-of-right" One.

Maybe it's no coincidence that I encountered God more powerfully than usual during a Mass when I was working hard to eschew self-righteousness. It's hazardous to think we can explain encounters with God, or, worse, summon them up, but it makes sense to me nonetheless: when we are resolute in saying "God, have mercy on me, a sinner" (instead of "Aren't you glad you have someone as awesome as me on the team, God?"), then we can see real awesomeness.

For almost twenty years it has niggled at me that I didn't speak up in that class, and for such a pathetic reason. Yesterday it finally dawned on me: I could take it to confession and then let it go. Life's too short, too full of glad surprises-in-waiting, to cart around regrets like that. And the best part of being a Christian whose petition is "God, have mercy on me, a sinner," is the assurance that when we ask, He always does.

Dust

So I was standing on the dining room table a few days ago, having a pocket-sized existential crisis. I had just squashed a second tiny spider easing his way down from the blades of the ceiling fan, and I was having visions of an egg sac hatching out up there. Which, no. Just no.

Mercifully I saw no arachnid families plotting parachute parties over our dinner table. What I saw was dust aplenty. I do clean my ceiling fan blades periodically, but for pete's sake: it hasn't been that long since I was up there with a pail of soapy water. August, maybe? Shouldn't I be able to get by with the feather duster for a measly two months?

In the moment it was overwhelming: the cleaning, the laundry, the never-never-but-never-ending paper. I had just put down the day's mail, thinking I didn't have it in me right at that moment to deal with the pile yet again, knowing that one day's undealt-with pile turns into a fanged and fire-breathing heap of time suck in no time flat. (I expect all y'all even-tempered types are thinking a soupçon of Zoloft might be appropriate. Welcome to my peaked-and-valleyed inner landscape.)

And then I thought about what that dust was, exactly, those tiny bits of skin and clothing fluff (and, okay, the carcasses of dust mites if you must be buzz-killingly precise about it). I was surprised a few years ago when I realized that unused rooms don't actually get very dusty -- the dust piles up where the people are. My house gets full of dust because it's full of life.

One year we had a Christmas tree that shed needles to beat the band. I think it waited until I wound up the vacuum cord and then did a brisk shimmy, showering the carpet with a fresh crop. I did not want to be ranting about our Christmas tree. Better a slightly prickly carpet where peace is than an immaculate floor in an apartment where Mom is ranting about how the Christmas tree is out to get her, to...um...totally mutilate Prov. 15:17. I knew that I wanted a live tree and not a fake one and so that Christmas I kept telling myself something I've been saying ever since, "Life is messy."

It's a good mantra for mothers, I am convinced, and I used it again to talk myself down from my perch on the dining room table. This is where my family gathers, I said, to share meals and play games and finish homework. Ergo, dust. The bedrooms get dusty because they are full of people, who pray and sleep and dream there. The living room gets dusty because of the children who sprawl there happily to talk about their elaborate Lego civilization with its own currency and constitution, to read the books that pile up relentlessly on the end tables, to wrestle until a parent says "Take that game outside!" It's good dust.

This is the season for stripping and shedding. The trees are telling the glory of God; I cannot walk outside without praying, "Me too, Lord: when I go to lay down something you have given me, let it shout out your glory. Teach me how to let go, to trust that you can make something beautiful of the letting go." The detritus in my home -- the cast-off papers, the flaked-off skin, the fallen hair -- it all reminds me that this life is given us to be laid down.

Those could be gloomy thoughts, remembering that the children whose bodies I have tended so carefully will leave them behind someday. But they don't have to be gloomy. I am thinking about the privilege of carrying an immortal soul in a mortal body, about the truth that shocked Wormwood into heresy: "For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left."

Anointed II

Thanks for the kind words on that last post. Two more thoughts about the bishop and his flask of oil--

The first: I was trying to remember how the Israelites had consecrated their altars, but my brain kept drifting over to this story. (My kids love that story. "Perhaps he is meditating!") Finally I looked it up: when the tabernacle was ready, Moses anointed the altar with oil to consecrate it for sacrifice.

The second: my friend Anneleisa told me she attended another rededication Mass recently. She said there was a note in the program about the women who helped to rub the oil into the altar, in an echo of the service of the women at the tomb on Good Friday -- preparing a fitting resting place for the precious broken body of Christ. (AL, if you see this, please let me know if I've got that wrong.)

God the Ancient of Days, who taught the Israelites how to offer sacrifice; God the Word made flesh, perfect victim and priest forever; God the eternal Son, whose sacrifice stands for all time and is miraculously present at each Mass. For a moment I could see it like a bright syzygy of truths. I wish I had the words to say it better, to share that little glimpse of Christ sovereign over time and eternity.

Planned Obsolescence

After you're pregnant, then you have a baby.

Fourteen years ago this summer I was pregnant with my oldest son. Four of my friends were also expecting their first babies that summer. When I went to visit my friend Vivian in the hospital I was floored to see that her belly had yielded up an actual...baby, with limbs and hair and a heartbreakingly beautiful fringe of black eyelashes. It's elementary biology, of course -- after you're pregnant, then you have a baby. The assiduity with which I had been reading What To Expect and The Baby Book would have led an observer to believe I was on top of the basics, but such an observer would have been wrong. Who knew? I was growing not just a bulge but a person. The intransitive "I'm expecting" had acquired a direct object: suddenly I was expecting eyelashes.

After you have a baby, then you have a toddler.

Today I met an acquaintance at the park, someone I'd last seen when Stella was a dark-haired infant sleeping peacefully in the crook of my arm. These days she has blond curls that spill across her shoulders, and the gleam in her eye coupled with the set of her jaw should serve as a caution to the observant: she is a force to be reckoned with. She has strong opinions and a favorite video and it's a bit of a stretch for me to call her "the baby" now.

Then you have a preschooler, and then it's time for school.

Tonight Petely and Stella and I took a long walk, down the bike trail and home through the neighborhood. We passed by his preschool and he got wistful. "I wish I could go there instead of kindergarten," he said. "It was a really fun place, wasn't it?" I answered. "You know, though, you've learned everything they teach kids there. I bet you'll have a lot of fun in kindergarten." Pete is on the small side, gray-eyed and sweet-tempered. His backpack, overloaded with school supplies, makes him look like an overly ambitious hermit crab. When I started this blog he was younger than Stella is now. 

Then you have a teenager.

My oldest son left the country without me last week. It's not, of course, as if he ran away from home. He's on a ten-day Scout trip, fishing on the Canadian side of the Boundary Waters. Still: I have a child who's old enough to leave the country without me. I keep butting my head up against this reality like a mama cow at the fence, complaining about being separated from her weaning calf. I know, logically, that this is the goal-- to teach them to get around in the world without my help. But it's a hard goal, a bittersweet goal.

See, I've never had a job before where my goal was to obsolesce. Always before, I wanted to offer something unique, something they'd find tough to replace. I wanted to be a little bit indispensable.

Motherhood's not like that. To be a mother is to make an openhanded offering of the best of yourself, to say, Here is most of what I know about making a way through the world. Wouldn't you like to learn it? How to wipe your nose. How to change a light bulb. How to chop an onion. How to say, "I was wrong; I'm sorry." How to pray for your enemies. How to seek God in all things.

I'm better at chopping onions. Oh, God, make me the mother they need me to be.

After you have a teenager, then you have an adult.

This post was prompted by two friends, both excited and wistful, who are sending their oldest daughters off to college tomorrow. One is coming to Gladlyville for school; the other is leaving. They will probably cross paths on the interstate. I am resolved to offer up my little-kid sufferings of the next few days, the wakeful toddler and the spilled milk, for those mothers and their daughters.

I will do so knowing it's not long until my turn: in five years my oldest son will be 18. I suspect I will look at the boy who once dazzled me with his eyelashes, and wonder when, exactly, he sprouted those wings.

In My Dreams

One of the reasons I've been quiet lately is that I've been stewing. I have this long-haul prayer intention that I've mentioned here occasionally, and lately the situation has been making me crazy. Crazy crazy. I started a post about it that I called "My Little Pony," as a reminder to myself that I need to not be the little girl wailing to her father "But I neeeeeed a pony RIGHT NOW." If God is sovereign, and if God supplies our needs, then I need to trust his timing. My grace is sufficient for thee, and all that.

But I have to tell you-- I went back and re-read another post on the topic that I drafted in April of '09 (but never published), and I was a little shocked to see how much grimness had crept into my thinking. The waiting has sucked a lot of hope out of me.

Last night I dreamed that it was the beginning of Lent and I was deciding what to give up. In my dream the voice of God said to me, "Give up worrying about that pony." I said, "Really?" -- and oh, the peace that washed over me.

I am a worrier by nature and it is a worrying state of affairs in itself, but I am going to try it for forty days. I'd appreciate your prayers.

Patient endurance attaineth to all things

One of the not-quite-completed tasks on my April list was to finish Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, a book I've been meaning to read for more than 15 years. It is kind of a crazy little book. A good kind of crazy, but I am just not there yet on the kind of radical surrender it describes.

I've been trying to practice it while I've been reading, and I expect to blog more about the attempt in the future. This week I have had some particular opportunities to cultivate the spirit of yieldedness that the book describes. Opportunity #1: we are having the paint on our house cleaned up, and this crew is not as careful about wet-scraping and clean-up as I would like them to be. I am trying to be vigilant but not flipped out about the lead hazard.

Opportunity #2: I have to deposit my dissertation this week to graduate next month, and it is pushing a particular button of mine. I have this bureaucratophobia -- an unreasonable fear about situations that require an application to be approved. I get worried that some minor hiccup is going to create chaos and the person wielding the rubber stamps is going to smack my paperwork with the FAIL stamp.

I had hoped that this evening I'd be done with the yuckiness: the painters said yesterday that they'd be finished this afternoon and I was going to campus to submit my deposit paperwork. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing day of HEPA-filter vacuuming and windowsill scrubbing and toy washing tomorrow. (They did some work on our windows and got lead-contaminated paint chips and dust inside the room where the toys live. They could see perfectly well what was in there, and I was home. How I wish they had given me a heads-up so I could have moved the toys to another part of the house.)

Instead, both the painting and the deposit process are lingering. The painters didn't finish, or at least they didn't finish by my definition of finish. My wonderful fabulous advisor forgot to have the department head sign a necessary form, and now the head is out of town until Monday.

Neither problem is a big deal in the scheme of things. If the painters flaked out, I'm sure the company owner will tell them to get their butts back here when I let him know what it looks like. If the associate head can't sign the form on the head's behalf, then I'll graduate in August instead of May.

I am hoping that the painters show up at 8am ready to get to work, and that the guy in charge of dissertations is accommodating. At the same time, I'm trying to practice detachment about the outcome. God is sovereign. I am not. God is good. Worry is fruitless.

I am bad at detachment.

Rubber, This Is Road; Road, Rubber

Last February I spoke at a retreat about especially helpful things I'd learned over the previous ten years. Part of the talk was about striving to give generously to God -- to tithe, to offer back Sundays as a day of rest and worship, to be generous in the service of life.

[Interruption: I feel a burning need to clarify the tone here. It was not about me sailing from victory to victory, with nary a doubt or a moment's foot-dragging. It was me saying, "I don't want to; I'm scared to; I can't," followed by God saying, "How about if you try it first?" It was years of God saying, "Trust me, Jamie, with your money and your time and your body," and me saying, "Careful! Are you being very careful there? I'm not sure you're being careful enough!" Afterward I found myself saying, "...Who'd'a' thunk it? I feel...rested? and provided for? and blessed? Who knew?" This was about Jamie as Slow Learner, not Jamie as any kind of Uber-Disciple.]

--anyway, I told them earnestly, "No one ever says, 'Look at that, I have an extra day in my week and an extra 10% in my budget! I think I'll rest on Sundays and tithe!'" I believe that the decision comes first and then the pieces can fall into place around it. It is a truism that you cannot out-give God, but I was still astonished to see the fruits of those choices.

Right at this moment, though, I am feeling the pinch. I told my advisor that I would have a complete draft of my dissertation to her by Friday. Whoa, I just got a little woozy typing that. Friday. The prospect of taking off to a coffee shop tomorrow afternoon and working away in the quiet is very tempting. Is it necessary work? Probably not. Will I feel better on Monday if I take tomorrow off? I am certain I will.

My littlest blessing is snoring in my lap right now. If I could have picked the week when she would get so sick, it sure wouldn't have been this one. But you know, if I could have picked the year when she would arrive in our family, it wouldn't have been 2008. Now I am so glad she came along when she did. So I am trying to roll with it, and give her and my dissertation what they need at the same time. (Elwood took that picture after I'd been kneeling in front of the couch crunching numbers one-handed for ... I don't know, 20 minutes? The baby didn't want to be put down even after she fell asleep, and I was determined to finish a particular section of chapter 3 before nightfall. She complained when I sat down, so I knelt instead. Please ignore the festive stripes of ibuprofen and amoxicillin on my shirt where she spewed them in protest.)

It's also pinch season financially -- I got behind on giving during the last quarter of '09, and caught up in the last week of the year. Those credit card bills are coming due and I am juggling figures in my head, trying to keep us on track. Everything taken together, right at this moment, makes me want to say "Generous schmenerous!"

This post is me taking myself by the shoulders and saying, "Let's not go back to remedial class. We know better than that." I believe God is faithful through lean seasons and sicknesses and weeks when I just don't know how it's all going to get done. So. The decision is made and I'm going to trust that the pieces will fall into place. (But if I'm scarce this week, you'll know what I'm up to.)

What She's Missing

We made a speedy trip to see my family over New Year’s, and this morning the whole gang of us had brunch. I asked my sister-in-law about a good friend of hers whose baby died earlier in 2009.

It was a brief conversation but it brought tears to my eyes a couple of times. The thing that killed me was when she told me they’d hung a stocking for the baby. Aaggh, it still brings tears to my eyes. Can you imagine? Empty arms, quiet house, and a stocking for the baby who never heard her mother call her name.

I’ve only met my SIL’s friend a couple of times, and it surprised me that I was teary-eyed during our conversation. I was thinking about it afterward, wondering why. Here’s what I think: I think that one of the gifts of motherhood is the recognition of the treasure we’ve been given. Do you know what I mean? The treasure itself is one gift; seeing its real value is still another.

Sometimes I worry that the big picture doesn’t come through for my kids. I’m afraid I get so busy saying “blow your nose hang your clothes wipe your feet brush your teeth quiet quiet quiet will you LISTEN already?” –- so busy that they think the hygiene or the manners or the chores are my top priority when really, my top priority is to teach them about love. I want to love them the best I can, and to teach them to think, in every situation, “What is the loving thing to do here?” I want them to know down in their bones that the greatest of these is love -– love and not snot management. (Although I have to ask -– does anyone else find that it takes boys a long time to figure out how to deal with snot?)

It’s a cliché that you don’t know how much you’ll love your children until you become a mother but you know, things get to be clichés because they’re true. I think I am sad for this woman because I know what she’s missing. I know that the fringe of 4-year-old eyelashes, closed in sleep, is about the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. I know the delight of laughing out loud at a perfectly timed joke from my 13yo, and the pleasant puzzlement I feel when one of my middle boys stumps me with a question I can’t even begin to answer. I know the visceral pleasure of smelling my baby’s sweet milky breath.

That might be the most intimate smell I know: the smell of my blood, fashioned into my milk, offered to my baby, assimilated into her body, breathed back into me. It is like my baby speaking to me, saying, “I was once a part of you, and now you are a part of me.”  The closeness of pregnancy is not the closeness of infancy which is not the closeness of adolescence. But on this solemnity of the Mother of God, I am asking her to pray for my children and me, that we might stay close all along the way. I am wondering what it must have been like to breathe in God’s very breath, and asking her to pray, too, that we might love her Son as dearly as she did.

I am also praying for my SIL’s friend, who has a new baby on the way but who is not finished grieving the one she lost less than a year ago. Will you say a prayer for her too?

We crossed the Ohio River this afternoon and Joe said, “That big bridge makes me nervous. What if it breaks while we’re driving across it and we fall into the water?” I said, “Oh, honey, there’s no need to be nervous. It’s a strong bridge. Besides, God is sovereign over everything, and there are much worse fates than going to heaven together with your whole family.” He said, “You’re right! I hope it does crash! I want to go to heaven with my whole family.”

I can certainly think of ways I'd rather go. Even so, the sentiment makes me want to say, Me too, sweetie. Me too.

O Emmanuel

Today's antiphon calls Jesus the "legifer," the law-bearer.While Moses climbed Sinai to receive the law, Jesus came to us, bearing the law in himself. He took on human flesh with its many limitations to teach us this truth: his law is love.

From Adam's time onward, every human baby was conceived beneath the shadow of original sin. (The Blessed Mother was freed from its stain at her conception, but even she required a redeemer.) The Lord pierced that shadow with his own light. He needed no redeemer; he is redemption enfleshed and his law is righteousness.

He came to bring the heavenly food that still sustains us; he came in the innocence that would take on sin. His law is written plainly on pierced hands: his law is grace. Glory to him.

O God-with-us, our King and law-bearer,
the long-awaited of the nations and their Savior,
come to save us, Lord our God.

O King of the Nations

I don't feel very praise-y right now. A few weeks ago my husband and I had some late-night fun picking out gifts for our boys. Today two of the boys' gifts are missing, and the most likely explanation is that they were stolen from our porch. This makes me sad, and suspicious, and slightly stressed.