Just Faith, Everyday

Being over 40 means having every commercial addressed at you, begging money-spending, hoarding of all kinds of material goods.  It’s both funny and depressing. The music is the touch point, I have noticed: artists which seemed avant-garde in the time past currently hawking some kind of ware.  The online, media version of selling wares, anyhow.  It’s unnerving in part because the target is my middle age, my time when supposedly I am in the flush, in the black, willing to spend. Except I am not all these things. Oh, I’ll buy this and that, to be sure—I’m no angel.  But I choose to live a life more simply, to be Franciscan in my outlook on things, on daily decisions, ordinary, everyday. These commercials do nothing for me, and for this I am grateful and, at worst, annoyed. No, I do not think that Lexus will make me happier, or the new iPhone (I only now just got one, and even so I am skeptical of all this power in my hands).  I equally take joy in knowing that what...

What do I want to be new in my life? What do I need to leave behind? A meditation. I think it might be necessary, as the New Year approaches, to leave quite a bit behind. This has been a miserable year for so many, and certainly a miserable year for our collective consciousness. There is indeed much to fear, much to fight for, much to revile. Leaving behind and letting go does not mean ignoring. Don’t get me wrong on this matter: there’s much harder work yet to do because of the position we are in. It starts with changing minds and hearts on what matters most, and with meeting people where they are, with understanding while holding fast to belief. I have worked too long and too hard on social justice, on true connection with the God who made us, on openness to all as a way toward common good; I cannot and will not let that go simply because the new world order deems ignorance and cruelty and evil, or dismissiveness of others’ held beliefs and cherished rights, permissible. None of this...

How am I to write about these things I have stood for always, in some way; how am I to acknowledge and then help those suffering in fear?  Listen to them.  Listen without prejudice to the truly vulnerable. Place myself *near* the truly vulnerable.  I can certainly take the lessons of direction I’ve received, think through ways to ask the right questions, just as my greatest teachers have for me, to allow others to see their own unique path. Theirs is not mine, after all. Where I have to draw a line is in deliberate and hateful acts of racism, discrimination of any sort which cuts off or degrades human life.  I am appalled that there are people I know who don’t care about or even acknowledge this everyday reality. There can be love even if you don’t agree, even if you don’t share experiences or ways of life. Love is this at least. I think of children and how loved they can be, and how easily they can accept others in that love.  There’s naiveness in this, o...

Every leaf falls at its own pace. Accidents happen, and turn our lives upside down.  We become aware more often in the sudden and unexpected, unless we take time to listen to our everydayness, take time with the pace, not get paced. Recently returning to the Examen , I've found myself far more in touch with something internal and less disconnected from my family, far less likely to jump ahead in time, make assumptions, and let my emotions lead me. Instead, I am slowly relearning how to read myself, my daily situations, and others, pausing long enough to do this, and become more aware. I find so many think their own realities are the real ones, and others fake or wrong, but that’s our human problem—that we cannot see and won’t acknowledge the many facets of truth in reality, and have chosen to live for so long in surreality that it’s too hard to step out of it. That is, until you do step out, and then spend some time being in that space, not counting on the cues and tools that set y...

Getting lost within yourself is an unsettling feeling. What matters is counting on faith that things will happen, and people will get through. That there will be spirit enough to conquer the bad within and without, to cut through chaotic sound and fury, and lead in good ways.  What’s maybe most disheartening is when those around you give up on you.  Then it’s about really counting on the one who created you, trying to know, to grasp at not being alone in the struggle.  Words for me have always been my sanity point—writing itself as a way to make sense of the chaos and reach toward God. When I write, I find a way to draw out of me the many mixed emotions and ideas I have, all tangled together.  It’s extreme mess, this tangle, and all that I love and is important to me is in this mess, so I must, feel compelled, to disentangle. To look at the mess and see it for what it is.  It’s unsettling to see this mess, and feel helpless as to what to do with it.  I feel...

“The way you come to fully appreciate the infusion of the Spirit is to more and more come fully into the moment, where this moment is enough.” RAM DASS “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Mother Teresa I am having a particularly hard time being in this moment, so filled with hatred and violence and insanity—the audacity and hypocrisy of the politics in the world at this moment. It feels all like a joke, a bad one at that, and I want to take the world by the shoulders and shake it, and say, what they hell is wrong with you?  I am 43 years old, know what my parents went through immigrating here, know what the past several decades mean to so many who have worked hard to bring good into the world, and to make their way. But these quotes remind me there is more to life than soundbites, stupid people, and the insidiousness of ignorance, and that my work is yet cut out for me—that I must strive even harder for justice now. It’s exh...

We know things, seek information daily, value facts and data (we even pay for it!). Some refuse to see the actual cost of all this information. We don’t know each other: in some cases we’re trying, but in truth, we’re overwhelmed by the chasm between differences, and all the info in the world can’t help that. If we reach for each other and share willingly, at least, there’s hope for connection, for authenticity, but we have to see ourselves and others as fully human: bad breath, bad habits, sparks of goodness, all of it. Making room for each others’ failings— while striving to make better our everyday situation—is the humble beginning. The challenge comes in doing this for those deemed unworthy (whatever that might mean to you—we each have our prejudices).  Striving to eliminate those prejudices and replace them with real experiences—not fantasies or imagined doom, fueled by all that’s wrong with modern communication—is where the real work of connection begins, and where some of th...

What a strange thing to wake up thinking you’re in another place.  How travel can, with time, engrain in you a sense of home, a permanence about space that stays in your mind, becomes a part of your senses in such a way that even if the place is not your final destination, it feels like it is, or was.  Having two homes to me means this: to feel a pull like tide between these two places.  I come to my Georgia-home-I’ve-created and, especially at night when I dream, suddenly think I hear my father rummaging downstairs, or my mother turning open the blinds, and if I’m really straining, smell that brine from the sea on the breeze. My senses are really into it this year, drawing me into a deeper contemplation about the reality of home as much as its feeling.  There’s meaning to it—  something so life-defining it’s difficult to overlook or ignore—and it causes in me a desire to meditate on how home-space, in its flexibility as I get older and modernity digs deeper, is...

Grief is such a difficult thing to overcome: it wraps around us like some constricting creature, causing us to do crazy things, to reduce to our basic instinct.  It’s impossible without the movement of the Spirit to make sense of anything this world throws at us. The violence and hatred, senseless death (as if any would make sense, but especially the ones we could prevent). So much sorrow. I pray for an understanding which would allow peace to settle on every heart and soul in the world—a peace that comes from a right place, from THE right place. That hatred would disappear as a result. That’s a pretty big dream, though. Hate won’t disappear altogether until humans take the brave step to look—and enter— deep down inside and confront where hate comes from: stop it in its tracks from within and without. Stop making rash judgements, and look and act with the love of the Creator, who gives us grace and free will in equal measure. Until we use these gifts in a way which opens up relatio...

Listening to Alabama Shakes every dang day for weeks now, I come back to some of the same lyrics: I feel so homesick Where's my home Where I belong Where I was born I was told to go Where the wind would blow And it blows away, away… I feel far from home, and while some of that is being away from my parents’ home, and they from their ancestral homeland—I write about this, for goodness’ sake—it’s also about forming home, being at home with myself and my little family, and seeing the afterlife as  a home, though it feels severed for me right now. Music has been a kind of saving grace for me these past months as I slogged through working and being a mother at once—and these things both pushing me away from centering and being at peace, and pulling me toward a better practice of time. It’s been an unbelievable challenge, and I find myself still dealing with the ramifications of so much of the year: the tear in my body healing; the tear in my heart from all the losses, also healing, some...

The rooms of my house, should they be visited by strangers and aliens, would act as  a time capsule of my life. Regularly I sit and meditate on how far I have come, on how much I have traveled in time, just looking at pictures and tchotchkes.  It’s encouragement, these reminders that though suffering is imminent, omni-present, getting through is possible.  That I’ll learn something along the way I may never have had I not had my experience. This kind of idea though, wrapped up in the notion of free will and borne on the downslide of experience, of a breaking of innocence, is cold comfort to those who suffer intensely.  Those I know who have lost children to tragic circumstance got through, are still getting through. How do they do this?  To live with grief so close, it sits on the skin; it remains in the breath; it lives in the heart. Both a weight and a lifting.  How else are we to think of the loss of someone young, relative to his or her experience of th...

I am infuriated at the way in which politics, media, and general fear and hatred cycles have made life in this country a difficult one to live.  However—I have known this was around me all along.  In these past weeks, I have seen Trump signs overtake lawns within a mile of my house; in these past years, not one, or two, but THREE armories have thrived within three miles of my house (you read that right:  three within three, in which you can get an AK with relative ease and pointlessness); this past couple of weeks, the Georgia legislature decided to railroad all sense by pushing the “open carry” law in MY classroom (that’s right: come this Fall, I and my colleagues have to worry about whether students will read the syllabus and where the kids with guns will sit in the classroom so that someone sitting less than a foot from them won’t be tempted to pull the gun out of the holster in front of them—as I feel this a legit concern). I. Am. Tired. Of. This. This is NOT the Chri...

Don’t fast. Not from love, not sharing a memorable time with your beloved, not opening your heart to each other, talking about losses kicking at your heart, or the difficulties of your days; not from those parts of everyday existence which bring joy, which reconnect.  I will admit somewhat ashamedly that I did not fast from meat last night, a Friday during Lent.  For the first time in over half a year my husband and I put down our concerns of the moment by moment care of littles; of money issues, our car reaching 205,000 miles (and that pesky check engine light); of my students driving me up a wall and his clients’ craziness—and we sat, at a table, just the two of us, threw caution to the wind, and talked about all things we hadn’t been able to with joy. We considered the big changes in our lives—the birth of our second little bit, the blending of our new little family, the loss of our beloved Fr. Tom (who we miss now with a keener sting, during Lent).  Slightly buzzed fr...