Gettin' smudged

Happy Ash Wednesday to one and all. Or perhaps I should say "Penitent Ash Wednesday". Doesn't have quite the same ring.

Due to a combination of stress about a big liturgy day and passing out at 9:15 last night, I was wide awake at 4:14. Knowing my alarm would go off at 5:35 anyway I couldn't fall back to sleep, so around 5:15 I decided to pray the morning office. I always pray Evening Prayer during Lent, and thought this would be a great way to start things off. Plus, I love the Benedictus.

Well, my brain was in no state to pray anything, so that didn't go great. But I did kick off the season reading my favorite poem, TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday. Here's the final section:


Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Bathed in the glory of God

"But I just don't get anything out of Mass!" That's an excuse that has never held much water for me. There's so much meaning in liturgy over and above what little 'motion' we might get from it. I know, I'm a liturgy dork, so I get paid to say that. I go to more church than most people, and most of the time I don't "get" a whole lot by way of profound, emotional prayer, but I just keep going back!

Tonight the BC mass was my 5th of the weekend. I was in a goofy mood and ran a goofy rehearsal before mass. The choir sang beautifully, the preaching was inspired, and as always the community was engaged and prayerful. The choir received communion before singing the hymn, while the pianist 'noodled' (that's a technical term). As I walked back to my stand and waited for the choir to be ready to sing, I thought to myself: I only get one life, and the one that I am living is so sweet. My friends pray for me, I am surrounded by beautiful music, the people around me talk about things like the Gospel of Mark. After receiving communion I was smacked in the face by grace and I felt, as our closing song stated, "bathed in the glory of God". I suppose you could say I "got" something.

I knew that in just a moment I would be back on, conducting the communion hymn, but I stood very still and shut my eyes and let myself be grateful.

The Dinner Party

A few weeks ago in a fit of artisan-beer fueled friendliness, I planned to invite five friends to the apartment for a dinner party. It's rather amazing that I can fit a table for six in here, but the size of the kitchen was the main reason I picked this apartment, so I should try to use it more often.

Still, six people are a lot to have in this little place, and the morning after I sent out my facebook messages inviting The Five, I started to have some serious misgivings. First of all, I'm not a clean person. Making my house guest-ready takes some serious over-hauling. Second, the place is small and its winter, which means I can't leave the back door open. For some reason, leaving the back door open makes me feel like my place is bigger (and not underground). Third, these friends are more domestic than I am (especially the males). I was worried they would judge me for not having a spice rack.

But I followed through on my promise and had folks over last night. Luckily my guests supplied most of the food, because I was so consumed with cleaning that I hardly had time to prepare anything. The meal's anchor was supposed to be my Mexican pasta salad. That has always been one of my favorite dishes, but every time I made it in the past I would buy more chili powder, which resulted in an over-abundance in my pantry. Some things you just feel like you can't get rid of.

Apparently I had acted on that feeling sometime in the past, because the chili powder is gone. All of the tins of it are gone. I couldn't believe it: After being chased around by chili powder the last five years, I suddenly didn't have any? So the dish was a little bland.

The rest of the menu included delicious veg chili (which is the spiciest thing I have had in ages), banana-cream pie, and lots of wine. We all fit at the table, I had just enough utensils, and we put the Bruins game on the radio after dinner. If my guests judged my terrible decor, they kept their mouths shut. And now my house is clean!

Update on the Italian TV Segment

A friend was kind enough to upload the segment:

TV Coverage of a January Gig

BOC members sang a wonderful event at the Dante Alighieri Center during January entitled "Stelle dell'Anno Nuovo". There was some international news coverage of the event that has made it to the air. I'm sure there's an easier way to embed this video but of course I can't figure it out. Here are the steps to watch it:

Go to www.international.rai.it

Over the the right, find the link for "Italia chiama Italia". Click

Then select "La puntata di 16 Febbraio"

Then jump to about minute 16:30.

THEN enjoy.

I have been spending the beginning of my break at BC, getting caught up on classwork and on fellowship with some of my friends from out that way. Yesterday in one of the cafeterias a student asked if I would donate to a point drive. Point drives, for those of you who don't know, are fundraisers for service trips and other events that involve students donating the "points" (=dollars) on their meal cards.

Unfortunately I live in a world in which you have to spend real money on things rather than spending points, so I couldn't help them out. What is fortunate is that the inquiry implies I could still pass for an undergrad!

What kind of a day has it been?

It was 7pm on a Friday, and my sparkly stilettos were on the floor of an art school bathroom as I tried to scrub bandage residue off my ankles. How does someone get to this point, you might ask? Let's rewind.

Yesterday was community service day at work so I got in very early to take care of some deskwork before I had to be out for the day. In came in to an email from a BOC friend that she had a family emergency and wouldn't be at Alcina that evening. I took a few minutes to chat with her, send a few emails making sure everything was taken care of for Alcina, and calm my stupid emotions because I get all turbulent whenever I hear sad news from any of my friends.

We set off for our service opportunity around 9 and arrived at the senior center not long after that. The idea of the service day was to give the students a chance to engage in "ministry of presence" as we call it, just being with the clients of these agencies and keeping them company. Groups went to different elder care agencies all over the city. Most agencies have a volunteer coordinator or activities director, and when we arrived ours was nowhere to be found. The woman at the front desk seemed somewhat annoyed to see us, and I explained who we were and why we were there as I watched the bus pull away.

Without going into too much more detail, I will give you the extent of our interaction with the activities director: She got there late, asked me to introduce our group to the agencies clients, and then disappeared for 3 hours. NOT HELPFUL.

We survived the morning with a few awkward moments, and of course my guys were great. We got back to the school around 12:50 completely famished (I'm used to eating lunch at 11 am!) and there had been a communication error and there was no food.

Anyone who works in ministry knows as food goes, so goes the day, and luckily we managed to pull together a popcorn chicken situation which didn't help me very much but was good for everyone else. I had a half a plate of rice and a bag of chips in hopes that would fill me up a bit.

The rest of the day was a daze because I was a. tired from the morning and b. still famished. You know that feeling when you come down with something really quickly and you go from fine to sick in about 10 minutes? Those 10 minutes were from 1:35-1:45. I left work as soon as I could and stopped at Au Bon Pain on the way home to buy a ton of food. I went home, put on sweats, ate 3 meals worth of ABP, and started getting caught up on 30 Rock.

But there was a problem: I had been asked to speak at Alcina in the place of the woman who couldn't be there that night. So I was exhausted and felt like junk, my hair looked terrible and I had nothing to wear. The hair went up in rollers and I started rifling through the closet for a dress that I hadn't already work 100 times for BOC stuff. I chopped my ankles up with the razor (hence the bandage residue) and hoped that tons of eyeliner would distract people from the fact that I was not quite in the shape I should be to wear the dress I did.

I'll tell you the truth, when my term as president ended a few weeks ago, I was excited to not feel on display at productions anymore. I could wear what I wanted, come and go as I pleased, and no one would recognize me from curtain speeches. Last night I had to take one for the team, trying to make myself presentable at the last minute and pulling a dress from the archives to engage in what I always considered the president's most important task: Telling audience members where the bathrooms are.

Opera and Catholicism (my two favorite things!)

We interrupt the NOLA recap for two important announcements.

1. Alcina opens tonight. Go see it.



2. This news item raised my blood pressure before 7 am:

Catholic symbols stir diverse feelings at BC

First, I doubt that the reactions were as varied as the media wants them to be. BC is a Catholic school, and most people get that. I'm always amazed at how people can miss the forest for the trees on things like this. The school's Catholic identity is part of the mission statement, and people are getting their knickers in a bunch over crucifixes? If a professor really thinks that Catholicism is so contrary to the spirit of intellectual inquiry, why did they agree to do their intellectual inquiry at Boston College in the first place?

As a Catholic I have often found that people want to call me out on things like the Crusades and Galileo. And we're the narrow ones? The time that Catholicism spent in the fortress is unfortunate indeed, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The idea that Catholicism is incompatible with scholarship has been steadily disproven throughout the ages. I'd like to put some of these disgruntled professors in a room with Alcuin, Jerome, Thomas Aquinas, and the director of the Vatican Observatory and see who the serious scholars are then.

I will admit, that ugly new Ignatius statue outside Higgins? That is offensive.

Edited to add this quote from a friend: And when a mosaic of Dorothy Day is a problem for you, you don't know what's going on.

NOLA Day 2: 2/6/09

Our first morning there I made sure to rise early enough to have time to figure out how to use the coffee pot without an audience surrounding me. After a quick breakfast we all loaded into the vans and headed over to the offices of the St Bernard Project (located, appropriately, in St Bernard Parish). Da Parish, as it’s called, had quite a bit of damage from Katrina but not the complete devastation that certain areas of New Orleans proper suffered. We were split into two groups and sent to two different houses that the St Bernard Project was in the process of re-constituting.

The biggest obstacle that many homeowners run into is that they have to go through a mold remediation process in order to be allowed back into their homes. One of the houses that we worked on was in the middle of that process, and a part of our group spent hours in protective masks scraping, treating, and priming the studs so that the houses could pass inspection.

My group spent the morning cleaning up roofing tiles from a front yard. This house was in a small neighborhood which, like most of the neighborhoods we saw, had inhabited houses right next to ones that were still in bad shape. As we worked in the sun loading up bags and tossing rubbish onto the back of a truck, at least five people stopped to ask where we were from and how they could apply to have their house worked on. One woman in a school bus pulled over because her brother had been told that he had a month to rehab his house or it would be torn down.

We had two Americorps volunteers who work for the St Bernard Project who supervised and helped us during the day. (They were also the ones who pushed us to lift two sheets of drywall at a time on our last house of the day, but we ended up fond of them anyway). That organization was crawling with Americorps volunteers, which got me thinking back to my idealistic days as a full-time volunteer.

I think I have a pretty good relationship with my “deepest desire”, as Ignatian-speak calls the truest callings of our hearts and souls. I experience the same confusion and bad decisions as anyone else, but in general I have what I want and I do what I want. I have started a life that suits me, and when I do not behave as I want I do my best to alter that which needs to be changed. At the end of most days I can reflect and say “I have done what I want”.

But looking at the young volunteers and the brave choices they have made I was pretty well humbled. I think I am reaching an age of preoccupation with the road not taken. I have to wonder if that is inescapable now – will I always look at other lives and see reflected in them the permanence of my own?

My “real” adult life has arrived and swallowed me up, and I have enjoyed the ride so far. My path is unique and promising, and I treasure it. But I see other people living the lives of sacrifice and radicalism to which I aspired and wish that were my call. I am in a good place, one where I can both do good work and be happy. Still, sadness – no, nostalgia – flares up when I glimpse the widening distance between what I want and what I wish I wanted.

Next up: Day 3 - Urban Immersion

NOLA Day 1: 2/5/09 – The Flight

I sprinted from work to the airport on Thursday afternoon to meet up with everyone for the flight to New Orleans. We were flying through Houston on Continental (which, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure still existed). The longer leg of the flight was uneventful, but jetting from Houston to New Orleans things became more interesting.

One of the flight attendants asked where we were from and what we were doing down there. I made the comment that some people seemed surprised that there were a bunch of college kids who were going to New Orleans to volunteer rather than to party, and she replied “oh believe me, I know!” A few minutes later she returned to talk to her new do-gooder friends and saw that one of our party was reading from a Bible.

“You’re a Catholic group and you are reading from the Bible? I thought they taught you not to read the Bible.” Oh boy, I thought, as I caught snippets of the conversation from the row behind me. I was too far away to jump in and bail anybody out, but close enough to hear the whole evangelical disaster unfold. “Why do you worship Mary?” she went on to ask. This flight attendant came back with tracts from her church a few times, the last of which was explicitly anti-Catholic and was entitled “Rome vs. the Bible”.

I find that behavior annoying at any time, and I find evangelizing particularly annoying when a person knows that their target is already part of a religious tradition. These tracts compared quotes from the Catechism with quotes from the Bible, a perfect example of the erroneous assumption that Catholics are “Catechism-thumpers” the same way that other groups are “Bible-thumpers”. Catholic theology is all about context. Picking one line out of the 1992 Catechism and ignoring the nearly two millennia of theology that came before it misses the message.

But that’s another homily for another day. It’s enough to mention that airline staff should not be criticizing our religion when we are held captive at 30,000 feet. Another of the attendants was also aggressive, pretending to put my theology textbook in the trash and then demanding to know my age when I told him that the book was “wicked expensive”.

Perhaps most disturbing of the trip was reading an issue of Cosmopolitan that was borrowed from a student. Most magazines are designed to make women crazy – we should gain enough confidence to enjoy the magazine, but enough insecurity to buy another one next month. I can live with that, most of the time, but this issue of Cosmo really took the cake. I knew going into it that Cosmo is filthy, so that wasn’t much of a shock. What perturbed me was that in this issue there was also a long article about all of the different ways women have been killed or hurt while traveling. You can’t on one page encourage young women to get naked and make themselves physically vulnerable to strangers whenever they want and on the next page advocate against driving at night.

I told all of the young women on the trip they weren’t allowed to read that magazine, but I’m not sure they followed my decree. We touched down in New Orleans, rented a few vans, and arrived at Corpus Christi Parish around 11:30.

Next installment…our service day.

Notes from NOLA and the way home

I returned late last night from a service trip to New Orleans. The trip was life-giving and refreshing and I hope to write in detail about it in installments. But lets begin from the end: the thrill of touching down in Boston.

Every time I get back to Boston I am excited, even if I am coming back from something special. After a wonderful weekend away with some BC students, doing service, making music and enjoying the weather, I still got a little rush seeing the snow on the ground and the familiar sights of Boston from the airplane window.

Spending time away gave me a lot of time to reflect on what I do and on the paths I have chosen over the last few years. Time away from my routine is always a blessing because it allows me to evaluate my days and to see other people whose lives I admire (and whose lives are very different from mine). The things that seem inevitable from day to day start to feel more like choices, and the messy wonderful life that waits for me back home seems like the blessed paradoxical mix of a plan and serendipity.

When we touched down yesterday I was heartbroken to leave my new friends in New Orleans, to leave the sun and the quick community that builds on a trip like that. But I was eager to get back to my community at home and to the people I have committed to serving day in and day out. This is where I have hung my hat, despite snow and blunt Bostonians and interminable winters. My people are in New England, not New Orleans, as are my work and my heart.

January auditions - the abridged version

As a lyric soprano of below average height, sometimes I feel that the only way I could catch the an audition panel's eye would be to spontaneously combust.