Light and Momentary

Audeamus, valeamus

I like reading the Pope's tweets in Latin because it slows me down a bit. This morning he said:

Rogemus Deum ut veniam petere audeamus et audire quae Ipse nobis dicit discere valeamus.

— Papa Franciscus (@Pontifex_ln) January 16, 2018

At first, skimming through, I thought his audeamus was telling us to listen, but then I realized I had the wrong verb altogether: audeo is different from audio. What he actually says is, "Let us ask God that we might dare to seek his mercy." I love that phrasing: the reminder that we cannot approach the throne of grace on our own merits, but we can do so confidently, with holy boldness, in the name of Jesus.

The Twitter English translation of the second half begins "...and to learn how to listen..." But oh, there's another lovely verb tucked in the Latin: that valeamus means "that we might be strong [or, alternatively, "that we might be well," or "that we might be healthy"] to learn to listen to what He Himself says to us." It reminds me that a habit of listening to God requires spiritual health and strength. It needs to be nurtured.

At the county nursing home

This summer I said yes to something I'd been thinking about for ages: I learned how to take communion to nursing home residents. One of the deacons taught me what to do for a service at a nearby retirement village, where the residents are fairly independent, and it went fine. I was a little surprised when he said I should tag along with someone named Pat for a service at another facility, but he was right. It was really different.

I held the pyx in my lap as we drove together from the church to the county nursing home, and I thought again about the wonder of it: that the One who spread forth the universe has chosen to be contained in the host. It wasn't until we arrived that I learned why the deacon wanted me to tag along this time. The residents at the county nursing home are frailer and older than the folks at the retirement village; many of them are confused and no longer ambulatory. So instead of a corporate communion service, where the residents walk down to a little chapel, the EMHCs go to them. The activities director maintains a list of Catholic residents, and she walked us through the maze of hallways so we could see them one by one.

I've worked in nursing homes that emphasize getting better and going home, and in last-stop nursing homes. Although this facility had a modest therapy space, it mostly felt like a last-stop kind of place. It was a clean and reasonably pleasant last-stop place, but the people we saw were clearly in fragile health. What stood out to me was how close to the bone faith seems to be. There was the woman on oxygen, working to breathe but determined to say every word of the Our Father, and the woman who insisted that she would overcome her vertigo and sit up to receive. "My grandmother would roll in her grave if she knew I was lying down for communion," she said. There was the overtly dysarthric man we found in the therapy room. He had to struggle to say that he had left the Catholic faith for Islam because Jesus was not God, but he thought it was worth the effort. There was the confused woman we saw at the end-- she didn't know quite where we were, and she was a little worried about it, but she wanted to be sure to say an act of contrition before she received the host reverently. Afterward she kissed Pat's hand. "She always does that," he said, a little embarrassed. But it struck me as appropriate, an echo of the passage in Isaiah that says, "How beautiful are the feet of him who brings good news, announcing peace." To be a Eucharistic minister is to bring not just tidings of peace, but the actual good news, our actual peace, enfleshed.

Many of the residents were napping, and if they didn't respond when we called their names softly we would just pray for them. One of them shared my own Stella's name. I thought about her mother 90 years ago, trying to decide on the loveliest name for her lovely baby girl. In those days, as in these, her Stella's scalp showed through her sparse hair and her gums were toothless. And as I watched her sleeping I thought about my daughter, and wondered who would be praying for her 80 years from now. I hope it is engraved on her heart, now and then and in between, how deeply and everlastingly she is loved. I hope she can hold on to that truth, whatever age may take away.

Guided

I've been meaning to write a post about something that happened while I was out of town ten days ago: I got lost. I got really, really lost. I'm a pretty good navigator, usually, but I was driving in a city with a weird layout and a ton of construction. My phone died. I memorized directions from a friend's phone when I dropped her off for a dinner meeting, and attempted to follow them over to my hotel. Unfortunately, Google Maps tried to send me down a closed road. Not "closed to through traffic," but closed altogether. Dug up and impassable. Thanks, Google Maps!

No problem, I thought to myself. I'll park the car in this municipal lot and walk over. They'll be able to tell me how to avoid the construction and I won't have to navigate the one-way streets. But the lot was full, overflowing even, and I could not find street parking at all. No problem, I thought to myself. I'll come at it from the other direction. And then...I was off on my scenic tour. 

I tried to get back to where I needed to be, only to find that I had driven myself in a giant circle and was preparing to start lap #2 of the scenic tour. This is silly, I said to myself. What did we do in the 90s when we were lost? We stopped at a gas station and asked for directions, that's what we did. The gas station attendant was not a native English speaker. "That's a good question!" she chirped when I asked for directions to my hotel. "Maybe you should ask next door at the carwash." Which was closed.

"I can do this," I said to myself. "I have been in this city before." Slowly and carefully I drove myself...the rest of the way around the same circle. Even giving my full attention to the task of getting to my hotel, I was starting lap #3 of my giant circle around the wrong part of the city. I'd been driving around for 45 minutes at this point. I was hungry.

I pulled into a parking lot and prayed aloud. "Holy Spirit, I need you to guide me. I don't have a map. I don't know where I'm going. But you know where I'm going, and I am asking you to help me get there."

"That was kind of ridiculous," said Mean Skeptical Jamie to Trusting Hopeful Jamie. "What if the Holy Spirit just wants you to grow in patience here? How is the Holy Spirit going to operate here, exactly? Is it going to be like Inigo Montoya following his sword around in search of the Man in Black?"

I headed out, unpersuaded that this circuit would really be any different. But this time I saw a lake winking to my left. "If I keep that lake on my left," I said, "then I will wind up in the right spot." I made one wrong turn, but it was easy to sort out. Immediately afterward I thought to myself, "What if I take this little road here?" And you guys, it was beautiful -- it carried me right along the lake, with none of the traffic that had been stressing me out. "This is too good to be true," I thought to myself. "Where's the dead end?"

The lovely quiet road tipped me out at exactly the intersection I had been trying to find. And -- it gets better -- there was municipal parking right there in that first block, with spaces available. I parked the car and headed up to my hotel on foot. "It's not going to be in this block," I said to myself. "There's too much construction here. I'm going to have to keep walking." But LO: there was my hotel.

Does this sound a little freaky and perhaps implausible to you? Because I am telling you the story exactly as it happened. And it seems to me that it is full of true things about how God guides us: it's usually true that we have to use our own eyes and our own brains, even as we invite him to nudge us in ways we cannot quite explain. It's usually true that a wrong turn doesn't mean all is lost. It's usually true that God gives us more than we ask for: the unexpected beauty and peace of the drive, the immediate parking fix -- and the destination that was closer than I'd dared to hope.

Mean Skeptical Jamie was last seen stroking her chin contemplatively.

A good-enough post about the good-enough question

The irony finally hit me: I was batting away perfectionism as I was drafting this post in my head. If you can't even write about being good enough without perfectionism besieging you, you might have a problem with perfectionism.

I wanted to give you enough of the backstory to help you understand why I was struggling, without completely exposing the depths of the crazy. I had thought that surely I must have told you the story of the last time I freaked out about retreat music, but I think I only alluded to it in this long-ago post. I'll tell you later, I said in 2005, but I never did. 

In the spring of 1995 I was asked to coordinate music for a retreat. It made me nervous, but I agreed. I didn't love the idea of playing guitar for Mass, but I felt comfortable leading the singing and I felt enthusiastic about choosing music to help people pray. And then on the weekend I lost my voice. I couldn't lead the unfamiliar song I had chosen so carefully, so the priest said, "We need something familiar and upbeat, and we need it quickly." This mild correction sparked a Krakatoan eruption of snot-festooned self-loathing. I was a mess, y'all. The priest said, "Jamie, of all the people I have ever known, no one else has ever been as hard on herself as you are."

The part I am embarrassed to tell you is that it took me years to acknowledge that this was an expression of concern and not a compliment. Because, see, if you're harder on yourself than anyone else is, you will never be surprised by other people's criticism. If you're harder on yourself than anyone else is, nobody will ever pop the happy soap-bubble idea you send out into the world. (You pop it yourself to save them the trouble.)

If you're harder on yourself than anyone else is, you can spend a lot of years with perfectionism crushing you like a Warner Brothers anvil.

So it may sound odd for me to say that my experience on the retreat weekend, in which I was able to talk myself down from the racing heart/sweaty hands/looming panic moment, was a vast improvement. But...it was a vast improvement.

OKAY FEELING TOTALLY NAKED AND VULNERABLE HERE. MOVING ON.

On the retreat weekend I was thinking about Jesus, washing the disciples' feet. The very idea makes me uncomfortable, as if I should have pre-washed them first so he wouldn't have to deal with any stink or stubble or sweat. But the image that popped into my head was sweet baby Stella, laughing in her little tub. And with that image, a certainty: God loves to make us clean. When Stella was a baby I never once said to myself, "Oh, I can't believe you have still more neck cheese for me to deal with. Can't you STOP with the neck cheese already?" Because she was my fifth baby it was easier to enjoy those baby baths: to be grateful for her chubby baby creases, to look forward to scooping up an armful of wriggly baby in a clean warm towel afterward. I loved teaching her that she didn't have to be afraid of the water, because I was there with her.

"You're not a baby," said an accusing voice in my head. "It wouldn't be cute or sweet if you still had to bathe the big kids." In my mind's eye another image followed instantly: Ryoko Uemura, her eyes full of tenderness, bathing the daughter who could not bathe herself.

It is the nature of sin that we cannot wash our own selves clean.

One more thing happened on the retreat that I want to remember: I got a letter, chosen at random from a pool of more than 80 letters on wide-ranging topics. It was written as if it came from God. Does that make you roll your eyes? It might have made me roll my eyes on a different day. But here is what my letter said: Dearest daughter, you don't have to worry so much. I desire to heal you and set you free. You don't have to be so afraid of getting it wrong. 

Which, seriously. Cue the Twilight Zone music.

Instead of humming Twilight Zone music at the letter, though, it is probably better for me to take it to heart-- to live a life in which I am less afraid of breaking things inadvertently. There's a line I love in Psalm 119: I will walk freely in an open space, because I cherish your precepts. It encapsulates three of the things I want to remember from the retreat weekend: first, that God invites us to walk in freedom in union with him. Walking freely = no more helpless wriggling under imaginary anvils! Second, that his precepts are to be cherished-- not feared, but loved as tools for freedom and forward progress. Third is the idea of open space: here I am in a world full of possibilities. Holy boldness in a good-enough life, or apprehensive perfectionism?

Let's go for holy boldness.

Good Enough, part the zillionth

I was the lone guitarist for the Masses on the retreat weekend, a fact which stressed me out. I don't mind playing guitar in public; I don't mind singing in front of a crowd. But I have A Thing about playing guitar for Mass. This was my third retreat team for our parish, but it was the first time I've been the only guitarist at Mass. During the Friday morning Mass my hands were sweating, my heart was racing, my legs were shaking. It all eased up at the moment that I received communion (which was cool to see), but I thought to myself, "Oh, man, I have to do this again tomorrow."

That night I was going through the music, trying to make sure I had my ducks in a row for Saturday morning. It hit me that freaking out to that degree is a perverse manifestation of pride: it's as if I am afraid I could break the Mass with a missed cue or a wrong chord. As if Our Lord might be thinking to himself, "Well, I was going to be miraculously present under the form of bread and wine, but that Jamie Gladly is such a wretched guitarist that-- no. Just no."

It doesn't work like that.

And so I thought to myself, I am just going to try to stay out of my own way. I am going to be a good enough guitarist. I am a reasonably competent amateur musician, and reasonably competent is the only standard I need to meet here. Getting panicked about possible missteps is self-defeating. It's like skiing -- if you're all tensed up while you ski, it's harder to recover your balance when you wobble and it hurts more when you fall.

Things went fine on Saturday morning. It was much less stressful than Friday had been.

Shortly after Mass our pastor gave a talk in which he shared this piece of music: 

He was talking about its beauty but I was listening to it with a musician's ears, thinking about its difficulties. I was thinking about all the takes that didn't make it onto his CD, all the times the director cut them off to say, "No, you're singing a minor third but it's actually supposed to be a second." A focus on good enough only gets you so far; it can't take you all the way to transcendent.

I imagined myself in a bumper car, chugging through the Christian life, yawing from exacting standards to good-enough-ness and back again. This theme kept popping up all through the weekend. Actually, this theme has kept popping up for the past 30 years of my life. More thoughts tomorrow...

Accidental Sin

I didn't say a lot about it here, but 2016 was a year of spiritual change for me. Let's see-- I told you about some of the bits and pieces along the way. I told you about the retreat with old friends in May, without sharing details about how my friends had prayed for me. I told you about reading Understanding Scrupulosity, but not about my own struggles in this arena. And there's some other stuff I should really post about for the benefit of my future self, except the prospect leaves me feeling raw and vulnerable. But here is the bottom line, which is probably not a surprise to anybody who's been reading this blog for very long: I have always been a worried person: I might make a mistake. It might be a big mistake. It might be an unforgivable mistake. Perfectionism is not my friend, I know, and yet it has been so hard to shake off.

But reading the catechism and Understanding Scrupulosity, and having a conversation with my pastor about the things they stirred up for me-- that was huge. This is going to sound bizarre to those of you who aren't Catholic perfectionists, and maybe even to those of you are well-catechized Catholic perfectionists, but I let go of the idea of accidental sin. While I can commit an inadvertent blunder that might necessitate an apology or require me to provide compensation (or both), I can't sin against God inadvertently. Serious sin is chosen, freely and deliberately, in defiance of a clear understanding of what's right.

This afternoon in the Adoration chapel I was reading Leviticus. It has pages and pages of instructions about remedies for accidental sin. This is maybe the fourth or fifth time I've read it, but I have to say it's the first time Leviticus ever left me bursting to discuss important issues. Friends with theology training, can you help me out here? It seems like the new covenant has altered the very definition of transgression. I am intrigued. Can anybody tell me more?

Voting while Catholic

I want to know how "I vote like a Catholic" turned into "I vote against abortion." Because do you know what that equivalency got us, you guys? It got us Donald Trump. It got us a political culture in which if you choose your buzzwords wisely, you can get 60% of white Catholics to vote for you -- even if you admit to being a serial adulterer who thinks it's NBD to grab women's genitals without their consent. This state of affairs does not align with any plausible definition of a culture of life. And yet if you are a Catholic spending time with other Catholics, you doubtless heard that your faith required you to vote for Trump. A vote for Clinton was a mortal sin, they said; a vote for a third-party candidate was a vote for Clinton. QED, they said. Arwen opened up a Facebook discussion in which she invited Trump voters to talk to her about their reasoning, and in it she was told categorically that there was no possible way she could have cast an ethical vote for Clinton.

You guys, we've got to get it less wrong next time around. 

Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016

Today our president-elect proposed that protected speech should be grounds for stripping away citizenship. I am aghast: the soon-to-be leader of the free world is suggesting that dissidents should be deprived of citizenship. Let's talk about CCC 1902 ("Authority...must not behave in a despotic manner") and CCC 1903 ("If rulers...enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order,...'authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse'") and CCC 1917 ("It is incumbent on those who exercise authority to strengthen the values that inspire the confidence of the members of the group"). And let's not forget CCC 1915: "One must pay tribute to those nations whose systems permit the largest possible number of citizens to take part in public life in a climate of genuine freedom."

I believe in the unique and unrepeatable nature of each unborn life. That belief compels me to express vehement opposition to the nomination of Tom Price, who would work to diminish access to prenatal care for pregnant women as well as medical care for their already-born babies and children. I believe that I am called to preferential love for the poor as described in CCC 2448-- not just tolerance coupled with admonitions to take some personal responsibility already, but preferential love. And based on the first three weeks of Trump as PEOTUS, I have to say I'm not seeing much in the preferential-love-for-the-poor department.

Tonight after Evening Prayer I asked the kids if they wanted to write postcards with me. Some of today's ire was directed at state officials; some was aimed at Trump. In my little stack of outgoing mail I'm telling them about CCC 1935 and about CCC 2240. I didn't get to CCC 2211 tonight, but it's next on my list. In the 51 days before the intemperate and inexperienced Donald Trump is given command of our drone army and our nuclear weapons, I plan to make a lot of noise. And in all of the noise I make I'll be telling my elected officials to watch out for 2018, when I'll be voting Catholic.

On the margins

On Wednesday afternoon I walked over to the student center and voted. I was walking back, musing on the election craziness, when a voice pushed its way into my consciousness. A young black man was spewing profanity. Streams of profanity are common on a college campus, but this was unusual in its vulgarity and its volume. I looked over at the man and saw that he was clearly out of control. His movements were jerky and abnormal; his frantic furious words weren't aimed at anyone. He dove into a busy intersection against the light. I noticed that everyone around me was studiously looking away. "Is that guy...all right?" I asked the man closest to me. "Couldn't tell you," he said, and flicked his eyes away again. 

I watched the man as he headed away from me, knowing that he was not all right and not knowing what to do. He was walking right past the student services building -- maybe someone there could help him? As I thought about running after him to ask if he needed help, my own inner voice was unequivocal: "Not safe." I thought about calling 911, and something twisted inside me at the thought. He was moving quickly northward; my office lay to the south. I turned away.

I went upstairs to my social worker friend's office. "What should I have done?" I asked her. "911," she said. "If someone is completely dysregulated, the police are his point of entry into the mental health system." I wanted to tell her how wrong that seemed to me. In this year of Terence Crutcher and Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, I am intensely reluctant to call the police on a young black man. Probably, objectively, it is less safe for him to lurch into Gladlyville traffic than to encounter the police in his out-of-control state. I think. I hope. 

I'm not sure.

I was sitting in Karen's office trying to explain the wrongness on display, the way that something was clearly broken inside this man. "I appreciate how appalled you are," she said as words failed me and the tears spilled over. "It's easy to get jaded, but you're right: it's outrageous." 

Every time I've tried to pray for this man I've thought about Jesus and his resolve to help the mentally ill of his day: the self-injurious, the people disconnected from reality. I'm fully on board with destigmatizing mental illness; I suspect I'm not alone in wanting to keep my distance from its more severe manifestations. I am remembering my resolute "nope," and thinking about Our Lord's willingness to draw near. I can't stop thinking about the way he welcomed the people on the margins. 

I have been trying to get a new ministry off the ground at my church, aimed at people on the margins. Here's how it started: we always sit in the first or second pew at Mass. One day two years ago we didn't leave quite enough time and the church was packed, so we wound up sitting in the narthex. The vibe back there was so different, astonishingly different. It made me think of Eutychus, in Acts 20. Something drew him to hear St. Paul preach, but he was hanging out at the edge of the room, on the margin. He was not engaged, to put it mildly, and yet his disengagement brought him into a transformative encounter with the power of God.

What if we could share that power with people on the margins today?

Trying to get a ministry off the ground is making me keenly aware of my weaknesses, I have to tell you. I keep wondering if this is a dumb idea, in fact. But then this afternoon during the 4:00 Mass I was in the Adoration chapel when I heard someone weeping right outside -- enormous, heartbroken sobs. I left Joe in the chapel and stepped outside to see if anyone needed help. A woman was walking briskly toward the parking lot. "Excuse me," I called to her. "Excuse me, are you all right?" She was wiping away tears. We spoke for a few minutes about her situation and I wound up praying with her there on the sidewalk. "You are welcome here," I wanted her to know. "Please come again."

So it's probably not a dumb idea, to reach out to people on the margins. But it's a hard idea. I went back into the chapel and worried about whether I could have handled the conversation better. Maybe someone more socially adroit should be in charge. But I am remembering what my friend Kathy said when I told her about the new ministry: "So you just want me to be a friend to people? I can do that!" And I am remembering what Pope Francis said: "Love heals everything."

The surprising pleasures of the CCC

I was going to read the catechism in 1996, but then a friend of mine -- a big theology buff -- said, "I'm never going to read the catechism cover to cover." "Oh," I thought to myself, "maybe it's a bad idea." It is actually a really excellent idea. Who knew?

My pastor reads a chunk of the catechism every morning, and this is an excerpt from an email I wrote to him in April:

When I first heard you mention that you read the catechism daily, I thought to myself, "Blech! Sounds about as pleasant as reading the phone book every morning!" We've had a catechism on our shelf since it was published early in our marriage, but I've only used it for addressing occasional queries. It didn't strike me as a joyous read at all.

In December I resolved to read the Bible and the catechism cover to cover in 2016. As a former evangelical, I knew what I was getting into with the Bible, but reading the catechism has been a succession of lovely surprises. Some days it's a little like a long-distance book club, in which the person across the circle says,  "I LOVED that part!" and I say, "I KNOW! Me too! It's the best!!" Other days it's like being in a really excellent English class, where the professor points out a connection I had never noticed before even though I thought I'd read the book carefully. 

 

Sometimes, reading the words of the church fathers, it's like being at a family reunion where you see that your great-grandfather and your brother have exactly the same nose and chin -- I love those moments of seeing how thoughtfully, and for how long, the saints have reckoned with hard questions. Some mornings I have to go and wake up my husband, so I can get some help in wrangling with questions like how the paschal sacrifice is distinct from the sacrifice of the New Covenant. (For this reason I am not 100% sure that he is a fan of the habit. :-) He might prefer to talk about sacrifice subtypes at a more civilized hour.)

 

I knew the Catechism would be full of truth, but I didn't understand that it would be written lovingly and compellingly, and organized so sensibly. And I didn't expect it to feed my soul along with my mind -- at my last confession the words "has sent the Holy Spirit" hit me in a completely new way because I had just been reading about the person and the work of the Holy Spirit.

 

This is not a practice I would have undertaken without some encouragement, so many thanks to you for the suggestion.

 

So if you have ever thought to yourself, "Hm, perhaps I should read the catechism," or even if you have not-- I'm a fan of the idea. I might not start it again in January 2017, but at some point in the near-ish future I'll definitely do it again.

The Wackadoodle Brigade

I am just home from Alpha, where tonight's topic was talking about the faith with others. One of the women at my table was talking about her fear of being seen as a wackadoodle if she shared candidly about her beliefs. I have some thoughts on this question, which I am going to attempt to corral into a speedy speedy post. Let us see if they are willing to be corralled...

Imagine asking an average "none," a member of the mushrooming demographic that expresses no religious preference, to describe the priorities of the Catholic Church. What do you figure she would say? My guess: don't get abortions, don't have sex, don't use contraception, listen to the pope. These putative priorities, you'll note, do not align well at all with the actual priorities of the Catholic Church (love God with everything you've got, love your neighbor as yourself). Just this morning I encountered the first words in the catechism on abortion, a six-paragraph section that starts on page 547. Next month there's a 12-page section on sexual morality, but a lot of it is stuff that people generally agree on: rape is evil and cheating on your spouse is a bad idea.

Let me say it again: all through 2016 I have been inching up my way to p. 547. Nothing about abortion -- not a word -- until today. Less than 2% of the book addresses the topics that take up so much space in the public conversation about what the Church stands for.

Isn't that kind of weird?

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the Church and the nones are asking different questions. The catechism addresses two primary questions: who is God, and what does he ask of us? If a person is an atheist, perhaps it makes sense that the answers might seem to be "nobody and nothing, but what was that crazy thing about birth control again?"

Here's another factor. In speaking to its members, the Church reiterates St. Paul's message: You are not your own; you were bought at a price. And I suspect, though I have not investigated the question thoroughly, that frictions between the Church and the world have always arisen in the places where the Church tells a culture to hold lightly to something it values deeply. Maybe in times past that issue was patriotism, and people looked skeptically at the Church's teaching on just war. Probably Church teaching on parents' responsibilities to their children was unpopular in the long-ago era of paterfamilias. But here in the US in 2016 we live in a culture that places immense value on sexual freedom, and so that's where the sparks fly. 

When we talk about sex in this place and time, we are destined to sound like wackadoodles. But really, to talk seriously about the Catholic faith is to sound like a wackadoodle. I believe that I have been redeemed and set free by God's willingness to become incarnate, and by the power that enabled him to rise from the dead. Hallelujah! And what a wackadoodle thing to say! I believe that I can receive my savior himself, body and blood, soul and divinity, as often as I attend Mass in a state of grace. Hallelujah again, but does it get any wackadoodlier than that?

I am weary, my friends, of the Facebook arguments in which the measure of one's faith is allegedly the vociferousness of one's opposition to [insert least favorite sin here]. I suggest, you guys, that a better strategy is for us to strive to be the gentlest, joyfullest wackadoodles we can be, to put the focus on the crazy glorious truth that we have been invited into a deepening union with the eternal God.

The Abridged Version

My new year's resolution to read the Bible and the Catechism has laid to rest a long-standing niggle at the back of my mind about the Church and the Bible. When I was attending an evangelical church, I had the standard list of reservations about the Catholic Church, almost all of which were laid to rest during RCIA.

• Teaches salvation by works. --NOPE
• Worships Mary. --NOPE
• Doesn't understand that people need to plan their families. --NOPE
• Doesn't understand how forgiveness works and makes people do that dumb confession-to-a-priest thing. --SO MUCH NOPE
• Added a bunch of weird stuff to the Bible and only emphasizes selected parts. --Well, there's that...

If you're not familiar with the Catholic Church's approach to Scripture, it works like this: there's a lectionary with prescribed readings for Sundays and weekdays. There's a three-year Sunday cycle and a two-year weekday cycle. People who pray the Liturgy of the Hours will read more Scripture there, with a medium-sized chunk in the Office of Readings.

Among my evangelical friends, there was a lot of emphasis on Bible-reading. A lot of people resolved to read the whole Bible starting on January 1 (no idea how many of them got to Revelation in December, though); people would memorize big blocks of Scripture. I myself memorized the letter to the Ephesians in 1991-2 at my pastor's encouragement. Both former-evangelical Jamie and English-major Jamie (burn ALL the abridgments, says E-mJ in her less temperate moments; Moby-Dick is SUPPOSED to be 650 pages long!) have been a little uncomfortable with the idea of presenting an abridged version of the Bible to the faithful.

Although daily Scripture reading has been part of my practice of faith for many years, I haven't read big long chunks of the Bible consistently for >20 years. This year I am finding that many sections of the Old Testament make me say, "...hmm." Head counts. Genealogies. I can believe that they speak to a God who loves order and who has numbered the hairs of our heads. (I am grateful the hairs-of-your-head thing is a New Testament quote. I imagine an Old Testament passage written in its light: and Ahaziah son of Eliphelihu had 87,328 hairs on his head, while Micaiah son of Obadiah had only 42,316; he was struck by baldness when he scorned the priests of the Lord. The thought makes a person sort of grateful for 1 Chronicles.)

Anyway, I've been ruminating this year on how to encourage my high schoolers to cultivate a deeper prayer life. The trouble is that you can't mandate an encounter with God; you can only lay the table. I've been puzzling over a way to help them learn more about the beauties of the Bible without getting bogged down in Numbers. It hit me like a belated thunderclap: the Office of Readings. Of course! Right-sized passages, sensibly arranged, free of census results.

I've been listening to the readings at Mass with a new perspective as well. That was one of the surprises for me as a convert, how well the first reading and the gospel fit together. It still surprises me sometimes, actually; still makes me say, "Huh, never saw that before." The Church has a plan for spreading forth the riches of Scripture without overwhelming us with the hard bits and the dry bits, and for showing us hidden OT/NT connections. What a great gift!

I'm going to keep plugging on my one-year read-through (oh! I have to tell you about the CCC in another post! there will be far more exclamation points than you would expect in a post about the CCC!), and I'll probably even do it again sometime soonish. But I'm going to be grateful from here on out that there's an abridged version for ordinary use-- for a lectionary and an Office of Readings pulled together with reverent wisdom.

Perfect timing

I have been inching my way through the Catechism this year, and the timing of today's scheduled reading could not have been any stranger:

625 Christ's stay in the tomb constitutes the real link between his passible state before Easter and his glorious and risen state today. The same person of the "Living One" can say, "I died, and behold I am alive for evermore":⁴⁶⁵

God [the Son] did not impede death from separating his soul from his body according to the necessary order of nature, but has reunited them to one another in the Resurrection, so that he himself might be, in his person, the meeting point for death and life, by arresting in himself the decomposition of nature produced by death and so becoming the source of reunion for the separated parts.⁴⁶⁶

The rest is here if you are pining to read more.

As I have done for you

Back in the fall I had a rough weekend. My husband was on a retreat team and I was supposed to run music for a Saturday night gathering. I didn't have enough childcare, I hurt my back trying to change a tire with rusted lug nuts, I was 15 minutes late to the rehearsal I was supposed to be in charge of, and when I got there I was on the very edge of tears. 

And then, afterward, some of the women at the gathering wrote a letter to the pastor complaining about the music. The gathering took too long, they said, and some of the songs were too old. I didn't read the actual letter; the people who did told me it was nasty. The other music leader just rolled her eyes. "You don't need to worry about that for a minute," she said. But it's niggled at me ever since.

I don't know who wrote the letter, but the pool of possible authors is small and I've been nursing suspicions about one of them ever since. Tonight I was sitting where I could see her during the Holy Thursday Mass, and having a familiar conversation with myself: "You need to let that go and move on. --But maybe it would be easier if we just knew for sure who needed forgiving. --Or maybe, JUST MAYBE, you should just let that go and move on."

I knelt there after communion and prayed as people streamed past me. It was one of those lovely post-communion moments in which the goodness of God and the joy he offers shone especially clearly, and I was thinking about God's love for each one of the people in the aisle. I had a quick flash of tender feeling for my children waiting at home, whom I hadn't seen all day, and a quick flash of worry about how their outing with Elwood had gone, and then a surge of wonder at the idea that God loves each one of those people in the aisle -- and their neighbors, and their neighbors' neighbors -- with a ferocity and concern far keener than my feelings for my own children.

With sudden conviction, I knew it was also true of the woman sitting near me, the one I haven't wanted to look in the eye for months now. And as I reflect on it now, it occurs to me that this is an especially good night on which to offer up the pain of feeling betrayed. If Jesus had only stewed and muttered about that unbelievably unappreciative Judas, it would be an altogether different story, would it not?

Well, that's a relie--

This morning I was reading Numbers and thinking about what a terrible Israelite I would have been. It was Numbers 9 that was stressing me out: I was imagining myself living in the desert, eating mystery food that I had to pick up off the ground ("Where is my list of INGREDIENTS? Is this Whole 30-compliant??") but not being allowed to pick up extra food from the ground (except before the Sabbath) because it would grow worms. ("Worms, I ask you! Worms! I never had a wormy cucumber in Egypt, not once.") "Looks like bdellium" would probably raise my eyebrows even faster than "tastes like chicken," because that linked picture does not look especially delicious to me.

The uncertainty about travel would have been especially frustrating for me, the not knowing whether it would be a week or a month or a year before we moved on. ("Should we dig a well?") Even within a day, the cloud might lift in the morning or it might lift at night. ("I need to wash these clothes but I hate packing damp things!") And the unspecified length of the journey, and the unfamiliarity of the destination -- I would not have been a happy camper, I thought to myself this morning, because my inner control freak would have had a lot to say about life in the desert.

And so I said to myself, "It's a good thing I don't have to travel an uncertain road of unknown length to an unfamiliar homeland. It would be way too hard to trust God to lead me and feed me all the way there."

Oh. Wait.

 

The Pearl of Great Price

It's been 12 years since I read Leviticus all the way through, and the thing that stood out to me this time was the cost of holiness, the cost of attempting to live according to the dictates of the law. In an era when livestock equaled wealth, God told his people to set aside sheep and cattle for him. Not just to make a special feast in his honor, but to be burned entire. The law also says, Hey, don't try to sneak in your ugly diseased livestock; bring the good ones.

I wonder if it seemed painfully extravagant to them, or if it seemed right and just.

It makes me think about the ultimate cost of holiness, of God's own blood poured out. It makes me think of the times I have sailed on past the sacrifice that should stop me in my tracks, the most extravagant sacrifice imaginable.

And the rough places plain

My mother gets cranky about the crowds at church on Christmas and Easter. I get the feeling, though she might not put it this way, that she thinks you need to earn your seat at Christmas by showing up the rest of the year. But I am going to Mass tonight with a person who is emphatic about not going to Mass most of the time, and I am grateful that there's something about those celebrations that draws the reluctant and the skeptical.

Last night at choir practice the altos and tenors were picking their way through their parts in It Came Upon The Midnight Clear, and I was thinking about the third verse: O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing. Maybe the people who will be there tonight after a long time away will be thinking they're there to please family or to satisfy a dubious obligation. But I wonder if it might be an echo they're hearing, a little snippet of angel song pulling them into the crowded parking lot.

And so I hope that I can keep my own ears open, listening for those strains of angel song. I hope I can remember to be patient with the parking situation, and the seating situation (it helps that I'm singing with the choir tonight), and the communion line situation. This morning at the gym I was reflecting on the gift of desiring God, and it left me a little wobbly with gratitude. I am so grateful, too, to serve an open-handed God; I really want to be generous as I go to celebrate his generosity.

The wobbliness at the gym was partially fueled by low blood sugar and by seasonal blues. In the early part of December I was congratulating myself on my relative sanity. Wasn't it nice that I was feeling so calm about things? Wasn't it nice that I was recognizing shreds of seasonal crazy as, you know, crazy, instead of being whipsawed by them? Imagine the crazy lumbering after me, dragging its knuckles as it loped along determined to catch me. About a week ago it tapped me on the shoulder, panting, "Didja miss me? Didja? Didja?"

The place where I'm most likely to get sucked in by the crazy is in my self-perception. Last night I was trying to pull off a birthday celebration for Stella in time to get to choir practice. She had requested a castle cake, iced in ivory with ribbons and tall candles. I was doing fine with the baking, doing fine with the algebra required to turn a square into a regular octagon, but then I was clotheslined by the piping bag. I made my sad little rings of cockeyed shells, lamenting the too-warm cake and the too-soft icing; I made squishy rosettes in lieu of actual roses; I wound gold ribbon with a wincing awareness of the gulf between my version of the cake and the picture in the cookbook. I will not reproduce my inner monologue here; perhaps you can imagine it. But then, you guys, the kids came in. And where I saw only shortcomings, they looked with loving eyes on an offering made in love. "It's amazing," they said. "You," said my husband in a voice both tender and stern, "are always too hard on yourself."

I think that anything I offer to God is bound, in the big picture, to look more like the catawampus crafting of a kindergartner than the crackerjack creation I conceived. I write this, though, sitting next to a tree covered in ornaments made by kindergartners. I treasure them, of course.

A week ago we marked the end of the 10-week Alpha course that kicked off our parish's new RCIA program. I agreed to help with a measure of reluctance, but it turned out to be one of the highlights of the fall for me. It prompted me to begin a difficult daily practice, of sitting with open hands and inviting God in. It feels like work, you guys; it's really hard. But in that discipline of opening, of emptying, I believe peace and transformation are waiting for me. The secular world will not believe our claims about peace on earth if we lack peace in our own hearts. So this season when God emptied himself to open a door for us -- it seems like just the right season for emptying and opening.

I was listening to The Messiah this afternoon while I made pots de creme, and I was thinking about those beautiful words at the beginning: every valley shall be exalted. I was thinking about how the low places are temporary and the rough places, the irritations in our life, can smooth us out, if we let them. December presents plenty of opportunities for being smoothed, does it not? I am wishing you a peaceful Christmas, and a joyful heart, and as I head off to cook our Christmas Eve dinner I am still thinking about Isaiah's exhortation: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

A memory

Tonight I was reminded of something I hadn't thought about in a long time. Years ago now I was running at night when I failed to see a stick lying across the sidewalk. I got my feet tangled up in it and went down hard -- really hard. For a minute I just sat there and cried, because it hurt too much for me to put words in a row inside my brain. I fell on a brightly lit section of sidewalk next to a busy street, and I watched the cars zooming by me as I wailed. I was more than a mile from home and I had no idea -- none -- what I was going to do.

After a minute, I got myself together enough to pray. I said, "Oh, Jesus, I offer up this suffering in union with your sacrifice on the cross. Also, I am kind of stuck here." And instantly, I'm talking the second I finished that sentence in my head, a gentle voice behind me said, "Excuse me, do you need some help?"

A young guy named Brad had parked and walked over to me. He offered to let me use his phone to call my husband, or to take me home. This is the reason I never posted the story (it's still in my drafts): I felt really weird telling you all that I got in a stranger's car while injured and vulnerable. But he was so peaceful and gentle that I knew it would be all right. (Or I mostly knew it would be all right. To tell the whole truth, I did try to memorize his license plate as I was hobbling over to the car, but I wasn't in any shape to memorize license plates.) He took me right home, where I iced my poor sad ankle for the next, like, 4 days.

Sometimes you pray and it seems like nothing happens. Sometimes you pray and the answer makes you say, "HAHA, God, VERY funny." But sometimes you pray and kerblam-- God set the answer in motion before you could even form the words, so it would be waiting for you the moment you made the plea.

Bon Courage

All day Friday I was smacked around by grading procrastination. I didn't even enjoy what I was doing as I avoided my grading, but I could not make myself suck it up and do the work. I knew it was going to be painful, and I didn't want to do it. I thought to myself, "I am like an addict, who knows she is doing exactly the wrong thing and yet cannot stop." It's weird to me, the way I can KNOW how much better it feels to do the right thing -- and still choose not to do it. 

Recently I saw a Canadian participant in an online discussion say "bon courage" to someone in a tricky situation, and it occurred to me that we don't really have an English equivalent. "Good luck" suggests that it comes down to chance, when often it's not about chance at all: you need to steel yourself and plunge in. (Fun discussion here if you're into that sort of thing.) 

This morning at the beginning of Mass I was thinking about fear and duty and sin, about Adam in the garden saying, "I was afraid, and I hid myself." He must have known he couldn't hide from God for very long, just as I knew I couldn't hide from my grading-- and yet we both gave it a shot. I thought to myself, "Why did the Fall usher in that kind of stupid unproductive fear?" Immediately an answer from 1 John popped into my head: because perfect love casts out fear, and the Fall damaged our capacity for perfect love.

Then came the readings: the widow's generosity to Elijah was a choice to reject fear. The widow in the gospel also did something courageous and hidden. She wouldn't have expected anyone to see the magnitude of her sacrifice, but Jesus saw and honored her open-handed bravery. I'm going to try to keep that in mind tomorrow when I dive into the next batch of grading: it looks like a small thing to give my attention to the next paper. It doesn't always feel like a small thing. Better to do it anyway.

Wherever it pleases, part 2

Two of our kids have uber-Catholic names. You know how you see a byline from Francis X. Clines and you think to yourself, "Yep, Catholic parents"? That kind of name. Here is a weird truth about me: it never crossed my mind that the kids in question might object. I could not begin to list for you the things I worried about while I was pregnant. If I was measuring large, it was probably a cystic hygroma causing polyhydramnios. The baby was sleeping, or was he TANGLED in his UMBILICAL CORD and about to DIE?! What if I had put too much half and half in my coffee and poisoned all my babies with DIOXIN? What if I was a terrible mother for reasons unrelated to my butterfat consumption?

As I wandered in this welter of worries I never dreamed that I'd have a kid who renounced the faith. I would spread holy truth in front of them like an irresistible banquet; I would set an example of faith and spiritual discipline; I would pray for them every day, from the minute I suspected their existence. And they would respond -- surely, ineluctably. They were made to respond -- how could they do otherwise?

Well. I'm here to tell you, on the off chance that you shared my certainty, that they can in fact do otherwise. You can have the kind of homeschool where you parade around the house with the Bible when you finish another book therein; you can set the very most faithful example you are capable of setting. And your kids may say, "Nah. Not for me."

Kendra Tierney wrote a post in August about raising Catholic kids and it made me think a lot of thoughts about the things I knew before I had teenagers. It made me grateful, mostly, that I had recently re-read this Elizabeth Foss post. (Go read it. Right now. Really.) The thing about teenagers is that they are doing a big hard job: they are establishing themselves as separate entities from you. They are looking at who you are and saying, "I am not you." From that perspective, it makes a lot of sense that a kid whose parents have always said, "You can't miss Mass unless you have had a limb amputated within the past 24 hours" may become a teenager who says, "Actually, I can."

There are a lot of Christian parents pushing formulas, I think: for result A, try behavior B. But parenting is not cookery and our kids are not our projects. It's a tricky balance, having high expectations while letting our kids know we accept them as they are, but do you know what? If I get it wrong, I want to err on the side of acceptance.

The posts and books and Facebook links about fostering faith in kids are a little like BabyCenter forum advice on getting pregnant. The forum ladies will tell you to have lots of sex! Put your behind up on a pillow afterward! Or stand on your head! (after. not during.) Or try Instead! Also cough syrup with guaifenesin! The reality is that we don't know exactly what causes new life to spring into being. You can shape the environment, sure, but you have to wait for the spark to catch. You might wait a long time. We are not urging our children into lives defined strictly by rules and habits (or we shouldn't be, at any rate); we are urging them into relationship with God. 

We have to wait for the spark to catch. We might wait a long time.

I have been feeling a little bereft this fall: my oldest is gone; I've had the unexpected experience of hearing a child of mine say with certainty, "Nope, I don't believe that stuff." But I went to confession on Saturday seeking freedom from my more stupid reactions to the situation. It's self-defeating to say "so why bother working on good habits?" I don't want to be stupid, or fatalistic, or gloomy. It's important to take the long view, I know.

Still, I can't help looking back with mixed emotions at the younger version of me-- the one who bestowed a conspicuous name on her child with the best of intentions, certain that he would grow to be a man of courageous faith. This is me shrugging off the temptation to be discouraged, choosing to hope instead. Because I have it on good authority: our hope does not disappoint us.

Furnace of Affliction

I almost missed the furnace guy this morning. We had the routine maintenance visit scheduled for this morning, but I wound up taking Elwood to work and forgetting about the appointment, and if we hadn't been delayed by a couple of minutes I would have been on the road instead of backing out of the driveway when the van pulled up. These guys have been servicing our furnace ever since we moved here, so I didn't think twice about letting the tech in and running Elwood to work. 

It was just a cleaning, after all.

When I came home I stopped in the basement. "How's it going?" I asked nonchalantly. "...Not so well," said the guy. "You've got a cracked heat exchanger." It turns out that a replacement heat exchanger for our 25-year-old furnace costs $2200 and is not especially easy to track down. It also turns out that if your heat exchanger is cracked, they shut down your furnace with stern warnings. Like, if you choose to turn this furnace back on, you can only do so after you sign a waiver and they leave the premises. Like, you're not going to want to run it at night, at all, because carbon monoxide is too sneaky for you to take any chances.

I said, "I am hosting Thanksgiving dinner for FIFTEEN PEOPLE tomorrow. Also my brother is bringing his children here tonight and I do not want to send them home either charred or poisoned." 

He said, "I'm afraid you're going to need a new furnace."

So you guys, here is a weird little tidbit about me: for as long as we have owned a house I have been a little stressed out about the furnace. Is its exhaust working right? Is it going to catch on fire? Is it going to fail in this particular cold snap? When it needs to be replaced, will we have to refinance the house to afford it? Would it be more environmentally responsible to look into geothermal? It's not a high-level anxiety that keeps me up at night, but it has been niggling at me steadily for a long time.

This is lesson #6447813 in the  Dread Is Dumb files: God is good. Good in nudging me to schedule the maintenance when I did, good in keeping us safe with a potentially dangerous defect lurking there. Good in helping us to find non-scammy furnace guys whom I trust, who sold us a 96% efficiency furnace at a far lower price than I was expecting. Good as in this morning's kerfuffle was resolved before 3:00 this afternoon-- old furnace out, new furnace in, bill paid. No angst, no decision fatigue, and weirdly, unexpectedly, no stress. It wasn't even all that loud. (Do you hate it when people are banging on your house? It stresses me right out.)

And I am feeling grateful. We had just replenished our house fund (and I mean just, as in last week) after last year's home maintenance adventures, but hey-- we have a house fund. I had been feeling a little uneasy about the mix of people we're expecting tomorrow, but we will welcome them to a warm house.

This morning I woke up at 5 and I couldn't get back to sleep. I was worried about one of my teenagers, and worried that our second car would need new tires, and I finally decided to get up and pray the Office and make pastry instead of lying in bed catastrophizing. The car tires are fine, it turns out. The teenager is much better. None of the things I was fretting about have materialized. When the situation I had been worried about for years suddenly plopped in my lap, God's grace was ample.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow. One of these years I'll get that figured out.