Just Faith, Everyday

I have always felt myself in the middle of things--in between arguments, sides, ideas, always gazing on both and trying to pull together what stands apart, to find what good there may be in the midst of darkness. It’s one thing when this involves friends or family at odds, or my students (in fact I think what makes me a reasonable teacher is this ability, however painful it sometimes is to wield the sword of peace). It’s another when feeling in the middle involves just me, battling with my inner contradictions. Easy to get caught up in it rather than see it as opportunity--as a way to see beyond faults, failings, both within and without. To see the reality of grace. As Advent continues, Isaiah remains my favorite to listen to, as a voice for those who, in between, seek direction. While we succumb to the sorrows of this world, his voice still resounds: the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim fre...

When, try as we may, we aim to plan and schedule, God enters our lives and presents a set of circumstances unexpected.  In fact, there’s a different time table sliding underneath the one we have established, about the way we think things should go versus the way they in fact go. This comes to life for me now as I make sense of what it would mean to try and have another baby.  Having lost before, I know planning is on some level laughable. That shifting time table is barely perceptible but experience tells me it’s there, in the face of my everyday realities: stressors of all sorts, both the mundane and extraordinary. I am trying to control these, since there’s little else I can control. In class we just considered Milton’s line “They also serve who only stand and wait”--which resonates with me and anyone who has ever awaited something or some situation that had no definite outcome.  I have a specific story now, but I know this line means something to so many who have await...

As I suspected, the school year has absconded with my inner peace, and I find myself running from thing to thing, obligation to obligation, duty to duty.  All necessary, and I’m not the only one. Every morning when I head out to bring Isabella to school, and get myself to my office hours, I see there’s plenty of others in my boat: plenty of people going to fulfill obligations, to make good on promises to be or do who they have to be or do. I’m trying hard to make time for what is good and simple and soul-filling: those things which make the hectic part of living out our vocations worthwhile.  Sitting on the front porch waiting for the chimes to ring on a windy day is one of my favorite recent pastimes, as is watching my daughter learn how to dance, or dancing myself--letting my body and my skin feel the world rather than just working my brain, letting these slowly but surely coax that peace back.  Even just the simple act of writing, of sitting still and thinking, has bec...

Today Isabella experiences her first real goodbye. Soon, she starts school, but before moving to this adventure of learning, she and I both have to say goodbye to three years of enjoying a little home daycare run by Julia, a family friend, and say goodbye to the routine of seeing her little friends there and the more spontaneous life of early childhood, the more free-form aspects of everyday play and flexible schedule.  I am sorrowing over this, fully aware at how life will change, balking a bit at adjusting to those changes, but mostly wistful for my daughter’s smallness slowly but surely changing. The trouble is transition, endings and beginnings. Observing how my daughter will experience these. I feel a momentum--and it would seem in all aspects of my life I am finding the need to become vulnerable, to trust, and to see that learning and growing anew is the only way to reconcile my need for reviewing the past, living in the present, and moving forward.  Why should it sur...

Some jottings from my journal, my brain on retreat at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit: these felt like ideas that should affect us in the everyday, in everyone.  On retreat there is a dining area in which silence, save gently playing chant, is the thing. Funny thing, silent meals--things people would ordinarily have lots of repetitive things to say about go unremarked. Like birthday cake. No one’s name is on it--it’s just there as we walk in for lunch one day. What are we celebrating? The everyday. Being here. Without joke, without fanfare, or commentary. A quiet little joy in a small piece of cake. The music keeps me here, at an unremarkable table covered in plastic, the heat rising outside. Content in quiet, because it’s the rule.  I miss Isabella’s chatter, and don’t, at once. I know in the abbey her brand new eyes would see pretty color in the glass, and marvel at echo. She would want to do things we adults consider inappropriate in the setting, but smile at or...

I have written before about the way that suffering tends to make us feel alone, untethered. Varying degrees of genuine concern and platitude can appear in the midst of suffering, which can either create a deeper feeling of loneliness or at best stave it off a bit. The bottom line is, though, that most suffering *is* in fact solitude. It can be shared, talked about, worked through, analyzed--and all this is the blessing of the human condition. We instinctively want and need to share our burdens; we then turn to faith as part of this because when there’s a path we have to walk alone, where no amount of sharing could make any of it bearable, faith becomes the walking stick, the sure guide, the sturdy flashlight in the middle of a storm. Some of our faith experiences are shared, but in most cases, suffering creates in the sufferer an acknowledgement of the soul--of its place in our experience as the go-between the earth we stand on and that place of beyond understanding. Many times I have ...

There’s a kismet that follows me around all my days that is often fodder for these writings. Though clarity on these expressions of grace doesn’t happen often, when it does, I have to share. It’s typically when I am down and out--for any reason--that something or someone either touches me on the shoulder or swats me on the head, depending on how delusional I am.  This go around, I got a swat by none other than Rumi, à la Coleman Barks: a poem called “The Guest House.”  Waiting for me after weeks of having put the book down, my bookmark was in the page, and the poem there spoke directly to me in the moment.  This kind of breakthrough happens for me with the Bible or with material I’m reading or discussing for class, or a conversation with friends or family, or some sort of discovery while I research, that sort of thing--but this came up to me and engaged me in a most unusual way, as I felt particularly drawn inward by sorrow, by rumination of what ifs, knee-deep in discern...

Were you there when the sun refused to shine? Something about last night was expiation and epiphany at once for me, inexplicable (though I’ll try here, it will be a laboured effort--forgive me for not quite getting the right words together). A year ago I was in pain, physically and emotionally, on this same night: Good Friday. This year, in an instant, in a song, in the sharing of sacred space with my family and friends, I felt something heavy lifted off of me, borne away. This moment, mysterious, moving through me like nothing else--transformed. Finding joy where you don’t expect it sometimes seems a given; some joys seem sweeter when you do find them out of place: a flower growing, pushing itself up through everything to find air; the scattered rays of sunlight through darkly clouded sky; the last parking spot yielded to you.  Then finding joy in the midst of ceremony, allowing it to walk up to you and make its acquaintance--that’s something else. On a night like Good Friday, wha...

We had the conversation the other day. I looked up at the calendar in the kitchen and realized--then said casually out loud--oh, it’s the second anniversary of Buster going to heaven. What’s heaven, Mama? Looking at her little face, I found myself confronted with one of the most interesting little perplexed looks I’ve seen on her in awhile.  She wanted to know.  She was determined to know. I wasn’t sure I could do this, but took a deep breath and dived right in: It’s where Buster is now, enjoying lots of snacks and playing with squirrels, I said. So they have lots of treats for doggies? Yes, Isabella. And cupcakes? Yes, probably. And flowers? And houses with front and back porches? Yes, all kinds of beautiful things, Isabella. A pause.  Can we go there? Well, no, not for a long time, I think. And it’s very far away. Can we go there by plane? No, Isabella, no, it’s too far for that! And you can only go there one time--you can’t come back. (I was already laughing a little i...

How can I find calm in the midst of trying to do everything at once? On any given day to clean out dishwasher while eating breakfast, then go work out, go to appointments for myself and Isabella, manage tantrums, make lunch, grade papers, bake cookies, make dinner, give bath, read bedtime books, prepare writing workshops and class discussion, prepare bags for the next morning....and on and on, in a cycle, with little to no appreciation but a paycheck (which is nice, and pays the bills, but doesn’t fill my soul so much as deplete it when rote). Maybe there’s something to be said for the humility needed to complete such days that turn into weeks. This level of humility tempters. Nonetheless, somewhere in the midst of making all these decisions and accomplishing all these goals there needs to be time to will the one thing . Time for a little refill. So this year it’s fasting from anger: taking a step back when my three-year-old drops and mashes Playdoh in weird places or writes on t...

This recent snowpocalypse: an impossibly outrageous three days stuck inside, anticipating electrical failure and dangerous traveling conditions, powering down, disconnecting. Turned me inside myself for a look at the better of life. My better self. Turned me solely to my imagination, immersion in it. Giving myself to imagination on the level of toddler at play means wild abandon, release of control, no matter what the situation. Stepping away from the different kinds of noise in my life has allowed me to spend some quality time with my mind. To listen instead for the chimes at the front porch, a bit of wind whipping through leafless trees, or the crunch of icy snow, that muffled sound of the air as it comes down, the sleet pattering the windows, as I nod off in the chair, listening. My mind turned to creating for its sake--writing for myself, doodling and painting, becoming like a child. Pausing long enough to really see the pattern of day-to-day existence influencing my identity ...

Shepherds, why this jubilee? Why your joyous strains prolong? What the gladsome tidings be Which inspire your heavenly song? Gloria in excelsis Deo. --- In our house, Christmas carols have continued long after the tree has been put up, and decorations carefully filed away, and all chocolate eaten (well, not all, yet). In fact, they’ve continued daily in the car with my favorite collection, upon Isabella’s insistence that we always start each ride with “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” and at some point encounter “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” also known as “Angels We Have Heard on High.” I’m finding it harder this year to let go the season, in part because of what has transpired in my life of late, and mostly because I am a Christmas person, meaning everything that’s a part of the season--the anticipation of Advent, the upwelling of music and feeling each week leading up to the day--does it for me. In truth, I write this still within the season as a Catholic; I’m not ready for Va...