Just Faith, Everyday

I just got back from a small load grocery trip, to make my husband some tacos. I get all excited about the possibilities--the avocado, the cilantro, the lime, those flavors melded together. Makes me think of my favorite Mexican restaurant in town, owned and operated by immigrants who are now newly populating our area--of the humble simplicity of the food, the pride with which it is presented. Makes me also think of the little faces of children in the after school tutoring program, awaiting parents’ arrival from the chicken factories, fidgeting grimy shoes and smoothing well-worn skirts, hungry for their simple snack of a cookie. What struck me as I wandered the aisles was not so much the sharp pain in my back from sitting at work for too long, but the endless variety and choices that lay before me. To make this simple and humble meal, I had two choices of avocado, four choices of onions, mounds of cilantro and limes green as a summer field--in the dead of winter. I had something ...

Twenty-some hours on a train makes for plenty of opportunities to reflect, and as I travel on the next-to-last day of this decade, I’m reflecting on resolve--not necessarily resolutions. In music, the resolve helps lead into harmonic change in a song, and perhaps in life, I’m experiencing a desire for harmony. Looking out to the swiftly rolling countryside I meditate on the answers, on the way to achieve harmonic change in my life. Only God could have brought me to this point in my life! As the rails hum and the wheels of our train glide over them, unbeknownst to us warmly sheltered in our cabin, various bodies of water and mountainous wide expanses grace our windows. Each vista touches my memory--of the times I had taken this train before, or of places like these. The darkness of the trees as the sun sets--their trunks against the pastel December sky--brought to mind my childhood in New England, of beach trip afternoons or countryside drives, of a time when my thoughts and hang-up...

You know, as I sit and grade at a Barnes and Noble and contemplate a mother-son discussion going on next to me over superheroes, I realized something powerful: that no guidebook or online resource or expert can teach the values of curiosity and patience. As adults we lose this grace so easily, and I think it has become a part of my prayers to relearn this. I want to see as a child sees, especially at this time of the year--but I also want to guide the child. Maybe this is the desire inherent to our relationship with God. As His children, we are called to share our curiosities with him, and maybe He will patiently answer. A thought as we meditate this third Sunday of Advent--Gaudete!

As the years go by, I think about all the ways life slips by. I see ads and TV shows geared toward me now, reminiscent of 1980s nostalgia; it reminds me that in the midst of watching the Brady Bunch as it began to rerun, and watching MTV become an obsession, and wanting to be fashionable as a pre-teen, and all the ways my mother chose counter to fashion that frustrated me. Looking back now, I can see she was thinking humbly for us, creating women of subdued taste. I think of the many ways the 1980s shaped my life--the many ways I learned about what it meant for my parents to live across an ocean from their own parents. For my mother it was the ultimate creativity: she not only had to deal with a stubborn husband and no mother to turn to, but create a home space familiar to her, as familiar as she could get it. In the stores, she did not find allspice or cumin seed or the sausages she craved, so they sent for spices and went out to a farm to kill a pig and create meals for a winter ...

Anyone know anything about this organization? http://www.childfund.org/

http://flagpole.com/Weekly/Features/TheHomelessShelterThatIsHomeless-1Jul09

http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/weekend-competition-define-faith/ Good to see such an open forum on faith in the NYTimes--reaches a wide audience! Note the blogger toward the top of the page who uses Richard Rohr to help define faith. The link there is an interesting one: http://thisibelieve.org/essay/21932/