Just Faith, Everyday

On the first day of school I am always in awe and hyper-aware of the ways in which community can have a massive impact on your outlook—on the ways our interactions can make us. Sometimes break us. Mostly create our future selves, but only if we tend to our present ones. This morning, upon delivering my freshly minted third grader, I drove my toddler home to finish breakfast; we then went to get stamps and mail thank you notes and generally start our day. We were to go later to a city park, one of the many good ones in Athens, GA, and in the meantime to the YMCA, another staple of community formation, a place in which I have found people of vast differences in opinion somehow still in each other’s company. I thought as I do often of all the privileges we have, even what seem like the smallest ones: transport, education, food resources, housing. Things the majority of us take for granted. Often I notice, especially in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, those souls awaiting the ci...

Journeys have a way of creating moments of opportunity, and for twenty years in my travels I have rarely been disappointed. Dismayed, perhaps—alarmed, even—but I more often walk away with a perspective I didn’t see coming, and this typically is anything but disappointing. In spite of my anxiety about packing (especially for three)  I am learning my modus operandi is to pack little things as I go along, physical ones and then mental ones, things to trigger or surface memory at a later time. On this last trip I have too many of these little things to mention in this short space, but perhaps a couple stand out worth sharing. Of course one has to do with my brother’s ordination as a Conventual Franciscan friar, an event which gives me much hope. To see the young submit themselves to a greater cause and do real work and sacrifice in a real way should be a source of hope for many, and an inspiration to pick up and do our own parts, to be sure. That by itself is meaningful. During the ...

Part of what I find missing in the world today is a desire to be with others--to really just be with them and to see them as they are and not how you wish them to be. I spent a great deal of time as a child getting in the car and going on visitas with Mom and Dad, resenting it, wishing I were home reading a book or taping my favorite song off the radio airwaves. Sometimes weddings were interesting, because all the kids got to play any which way, and not just sit around and talk, but as many of those as I attended in the 80s, they were still not as often as weekly visitas,  as regular as Mass, wrapped up in a cultural experience. The immigrant experience of sharing was one of saudade , of revisiting (the lost experiences of youth, of another country, of family far away)--not just the visit at hand, so sometimes it really wasn't about the present moment, which was what I think frustrated me as a youth, made me desire to be elsewhere, perhaps the opposite of saudade . Still, it was f...

On earth as it is in heaven. That line has always gotten me. It’s the point in the prayer where I have, since a child, thought about what that line between heaven and earth is—and so many images have come to mind, images that slip into my dreams and into my writings. Is the line that moment the sky opens up on a highway, and the sky and tree line become distinct?  Or the first steps onto a beach, clumsy, enchanted, the sound of the surf entering deep into my head? The taste of something truly delicious and taking time to savor it, really tasting what’s good? Or perhaps the moment of understanding between loved ones, a feeling present? There are too many to describe, and even words fail—you know these moments because many of you have experienced them, even just one.  And for the most part we can all experience them if we find a way, given who we are as individuals, to see what’s before our eyes: the ones in our head and the ones in our barely perceptible self, that soul eye...

If you look long enough—say, for 20 years—you might find a place that feels like home, even if it isn’t. This place might fill your own memories and experiences in a way unexpected, maybe even catch you off-guard with its charm: a place where you can find your favorite foods from at least three different cultures, though not quite your own. A place where your friends come and go with such frequency you don’t realize how much you’re learning from this until years later when you feel their loss with a keener sense. A place where you can count on seeing others commit themselves to something good and where you actually know each other by face—small enough for this. This place also has its faults: its ego, its backwardness, a lifestyle you’re unaccustomed to but willing to put up with just to be close to the beauty and to the goodness that’s left when you finally find a way to look past the bullshit. But you’re cheating on this hometown, visiting with other cities, dreaming of other places ...

I am not sure what to say about guns and children and killing that has not already been said.  I can say that it’s beyond frustrating—indeed, disheartening—to see the kinds of immoral arguments for the maiming of life that those who stand for clearly believe without questioning. I feel myself challenged in my faith to accept these individuals as brother and sisters—and yet I do, and I desire deeply for their conversation of heart. For us to see the same Gospel with the same eyes, not with the dubious trust in metal and commerce, not with this self-interest, not with murder and malice and maiming, but with the same heart these children exhibit when they see a wrong and know it to be wrong (and speak out against the wrong unabashedly).  I am still, at the age of 45, astounded at the ways to which we can disagree as human beings on things that should be clear-cut, that matter most. It’s a God-send, I think, that into my hands—right now— came Arun Gandhi’s book The Gift of Anger. ...

How many times have you found yourself wondering where you got the strength or ability or fortitude to get through something that seems impossible?  I’m seeing this pattern in my life more and more, and part of it comes from taking time for meditation to create awareness of what’s already there. In my middle age I find it striking to learn some things later than my peers, even as I have made it a personal life goal to study the soul and the spirit.  What’s happened is that God sent my way a bevy of people doing the same, challenging me and making me even better, and calling me to make them better by turn. Little by little we’re heightening each other’s creativity and awareness, and that’s meant for me perhaps the best birthday present ever: this sense that my age is a gift in itself. It comes with so many things, this full package. I’ve been hyperaware, until recently, about the kind of things that just make me paranoid and worried about the slightest. I’m trying to insert int...