Dorothy Day, pray for us

Yesterday among a million other little things, I had a few minutes to think about one of my favorite saints, Dorothy Day. I have always felt a great affinity for her in part because she passed to eternal life on the day that I was born. I know I'm not the only person in my circle of friends who admires her. Her writing talent, her sass, her commitment to serving others - all of these things have made her a role model for many and have inspired me as I have tried to grow in discipleship.

Dorothy Day was nothing if not radical - and not just in the twentieth-century political sense of the term. One definition of that word is "thoroughgoing or extreme", and that she was. She committed herself wholeheartedly to serving God and other people.

I have written previously about the gap between what I want and what I wish I wanted. There were a lot of years when I thought that the only way to live like my role models was to mimic them: I needed to live a life that looked like Dorothy Day's in order to be a disciple of Christ the way that she was. I'm just beginning to find the ways that I can follow her example by being my unique self, rather than by going through the motions of what my heroes have already accomplished in the past.

We'll only end up frustrated if we try to live someone else's life. No matter how admirable a person's actions are, they are their's alone, and trying to appropriate them is a cop-out. I'm not going to live in a Catholic Worker house, I'm not going to write for a radical newspaper, I'm not going to be arrested - at the rate things are going I'm not even going to make it to any protests any time soon. But I can find ways to be truly 'radical' - thoroughgoing and extreme - in my service and discipleship by committing myself to what I do and to those who I serve.

But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. - Dorothy Day

Road Race, by the numbers

Miles: 4.75. Sightings of Whalers gear: 18. Kids from my high school running in kilts: 3. Drunks on rooftops: 9. Runners behind me with bullhorns: 1 (and believe me, one was enough).

I can't really see the allure of running in costume, but that's probably because running is hard enough for me. I can't imagine adding a pair of wings or a native headdress to my usual running accoutrements. I don't know for whom I felt worse today: the guy in the Buzz Lightyear costume that couldn't have been very breathable, or his girlfriend dressed as Woody, running in jeans.

After the race: latte, shower, TV, pleasure reading, and soon dinner. Lots to be thankful for today! Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Abide with Me

Abide with me, fast falls the even tide
The darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Darkness. Last night as I drove out of the city I happened to be driving just at sunset, which has never been a good time for me. Like a lot of people sensitive to light and seasons, my mood dips when the sun goes down in the late fall and winter. I am helpless against the power of the earth as it turns and tilts.

I need Thy presence every passing hour
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter's power?
Who but Thyself my guide, and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, O abide with me.

Grace. I teach about grace a few times a year, always with a sense of guilt - how can i stand before people and try to explain that which cannot be explained? Grace - friendship with God. Grace - participation in the life of God. Grace - God working in the world, on us and with us.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless
Ills have no weight and tears no bitterness
Where is death's sting? where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still if you abide with me.

Grave. In the darkness of night our world can indeed seem grave, when we are confronted with tragedy and sadness, the pain of those we love and the challenges of being alive in an imperfect world. It may be then that our only triumph is our hope.

Hold now Thy cross before my closing eyes
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

Life. Throughout my life, abide with me. Is this not the root of all our prayer? God, whatever you are, however you come to us, as love, as goodness, as blessing, as grace, be with us. Abide with us. Teach us to hope in you, to serve your light, to trust against our senses and against our despair. Prepare us for the dawn of heaven's morning and remind us that the shadows of this earth are indeed vain and no match for your Light.


[Music: Eventide William Monk (19thC)
Words: Henry F. Lyte (19th C)]

Dreams and agreements

It wasn’t until I was all alone in the dressing room that I started to cry.
What can I say? I’m a weeper, and I knew there was no way that I was going to make it through the end of The Crucible without one of my trademark emotional moments. Most of the emotion was relief: that our gamble of six performances had paid off, that we had put together an artistic product that was powerful and meaningful, that I had learned all of the notes.

How fortunate I am to live my dreams. Making art with people I love is a dream for me (as Willie Nelson said, “the life I love is making music with my friends” – truer words were never sung). Most of my dreams are things I don’t recognize until they have come true. When I started at grad school I wasn’t thinking to myself “I hope I make a life-long friend at orientation. I hope she starts a small opera collaborative and I get roped into it despite initial skepticism. Then I hope that I am asked to be president of that group, work tirelessly with other musicians to keep it running, develop my skills as I learn a few roles, and transition into PR. Finally, I hope that 4 years from now I am standing on the altar in a huge Boston church wearing whiteface and faking demonic possession.”

But all those things happened and it has become a dream for me, even when it has been a nightmare. And although as I look forward in my life there are things I would like to see, I don’t dare hang my hat on those plans because what comes my way tends to be more life-giving than anything I can imagine on my own. What has served me well so far is to get up every morning excited to face the day, and to say yes to as much as I can.

My dream and hope is in that ‘yes’ – to learning a new instrument, to joining a new group, to taking on a new project, to coffee with a new friend. “Yes” is my agreement every day to live in communion with and service to other people. “Yes” is my affirmation that all things can be new, that I can change as the tides do rather than splashing futiley against them. “Yes” is when I throw my lot in with everyone else: yes I will help you. Yes I will join you. Yes I will contribute.

There are times when the only way to affirm our own needs is to say no – or what looks like no on the surface. Likewise there are times that my will does what my heart would not, and “no” issues from my lips in response to a question or action that has at its root a question like “can you help me? Do you care for me? Are you in solidarity with me?” Those moments shame me.

Can you learn this role in a week? Can you send a resume over for this position? Can you plan a prayer service for us? Do you want to join a new opera collaborative? These are the questions that I hear, to which I answer yes. Maybe these questions are a disguise for the bigger questions. Are you alive? Can you change? Are you ready to put your money where your mouth is? Yes.

Time apart

Last night in class we were encouraged to think about when and where we take time to rest. I had had a hectic afternoon. The reviews of our latest opera had been posted at 3:00 pm, and it was my task to distribute the information via email and online postings. I needed to be in Cambridge at 4:00 pm, my computer kept freezing, and everyone wanted to virtually chat and celebrate our reviews while I scrambled to get the info up. When asked later in class about taking quiet time, one of the situations that appeared when I was imagining my rest was “any time my computer is off”.

I've got a lot of irons in the fire, a lot of people I try to stay in touch with and a lot of people who rely on my to stay on top of certain tasks. Choirs need to know call times, students need homework posted, BOC needs the website kept up to date. If I make a mistake, a need to respond to a dozen emails sent to point it out. Then there's the fun stuff: twitter, facebook, my website, this blog.

I take on responsibilities because I care about people. I want to be around people, to collaborate with them, to serve them. But when I am trying to balance virtual contact with too many people I lose sight of persons, and the love I feel for the unique individuals right in front of me. I am reminded that I want to be hyper-involved by the times that I am not, when I have trimmed the distractions to a reasonable amount, or eliminated them completely.

I grew up in what I like to call “the house that technology forgot”. You can still hear a busy signal if you call there (remember the days of taking the phone off the hook?) and the dial-up internet can only handle one thing at a time (and some things it simply can’t handle). From my childhood, I’m used to that sort of isolation. I have a laptop at work that I only bring home on weekends because I don’t want the distraction of a million tasks every evening. If you want an easy way to get to bed early, hide your computer.

I used to get off on the thrill of non-stop productivity, but that thrill has passed. If mental health is built on the balance of introversion and extroversion, then I need to be unreachable for a while to preserve my sanity. If someone really needs me they can call – but if it’s after 9:00 pm, my ringer will be off.

Seasons

A few years ago I spent three weeks in Malibu at the beginning of the summer. I returned refreshed to a Boston that had suffered a brutal heat wave in my absence, and was often asked how the weather was. Although I'd never needed a hat or gloves, and I'd never sweat through my clothes, I hadn't been totally satisfied with three weeks of 70 degrees and sunny. I didn't have the nerve to confess this to my friends and family, but I had found that monotonously idyllic weather boring.

Years are funny things. They're long enough that we can't really comprehend their span, but short enough that they can seem to pass quickly, and we give a lot of meaning to this number of 365 days. In New England we get a little of everything in each turn of the earth around the sun - snow & freezing temperatures, humidity and blazing heat. Although the warm weather seems terribly distant each February, we never really go long enough without a particular season to forget what it is all about.

I think that's why I have always liked the liturgical calendar so much. Every element of Christian living is given it's due at least once a year. No matter what the seasons of our lives are we are called to ponder the whole experience during the course of the year. We celebrate new life and the Resurrection even if our own lives feel like an unrelenting penitential season. When life is joyful we still pause for sorrowful remembrance and contrition. We go through it all - and then we cycle around and go through it all again.

This weekend I finally packed up my swimming and biking gear from triathlon training this summer. I went into fall with good intentions for keeping up with those sports, but the demands of work and music have left me no time to even find a gym with a pool, never mind swim in that pool once I've found it. I keep saying "I miss swimming", and I do miss the feel of the water on my body and the rhythm of my arms stroking through the water. But what I really miss is the season: bright mornings leading into days that would be longer than the nights, early breakfasts in my friends' kitchen, running my towel through the dryer in the sunny laundry room before I stuffed it into a backpack and got back on my bike.

Opera singer? What was I thinking?

I have had a very busy few days, with our latest opera in tech week and a number of exciting auditions that have me running all over, seizing the day. I was driving back into Boston today, running through the list of things in my head that I needed to get done and realizing that most of them are bizarre production related things that would be foreign to non-opera folk. This thought literally ran through my mind: "Opera singer? What was I thinking?"

Could it be that this question is one reason so many opera singers are so mental? Walk into any school and you find a number of educators whose parents were also teachers. Daughters inherit their fathers' medical practices, sons learn the law at their mothers' knees. Because a musicians' vocation is accompanied by a rarer gift, far fewer of us enjoy the sense of entitlement that comes with having inherited our lifestyle from our parents. We flock to big cities and gobble up new experiences, all the while feeling like kids playing dress-up, wondering when someone is going to notice that we don't belong in the world of professional music.

To whom do we turn for advice? Families aren't familiar with our world, friends count our callings as hobbies, while we contemplate questions: How much of me is my voice? Is something of me lost if I am not hired for a while? Is there something else that would be a better use of my time? Is it selfish of me to do what I love?

How does one answer questions of identity without a sensible profession on which to hang their hat, or when many people think their calling is simply imaginary? Even though going to a liberal arts school set me back vocally when I got to conservatory, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything because BC was not going to let us graduate without starting to figure out who we were. In my religious language I discovered myself as a being created out of love with a large capacity for goodness and share in a mission. I learned to be comfortable with my history and with my present, which has served me well in that it has kept me from being ashamed of entering new worlds.

So to answer the question, I'm not sure I was thinking at all when I 'decided' to do music. I doubt it is a decision I could have made without the grounding that comes from knowing who I am and where I come from, and the security that those things won't change no matter where I go or what I do.

Navigating the maze

Every other Monday night I meet with a prayer group for a one credit class. Usually I am tired or preoccupied enough that I am annoyed about having to go. Then I am ashamed of being annoyed about having to go.

On All Souls' Day we were supposed to pray the labyrinth outside the library. I was missing rehearsal to do this and was concerned about that, but had sung at a very emotional mass earlier that day and was looking forward to processing some of that in the labyrinth. The lights weren't on outside the library so we ended up meeting inside the Jesuit residence where we were to pray a 'finger labyrinth', tracing the maze with our finger rather than with our feet.

I was pretty pissed. If you've been keeping track, I had gone from annoyed to ashamed to concerned to dolorous to optimistic to aggravated - and this is all before prayer.

So I grabbed my paper maze and stomped off into the halls of St Mary's to find a place to sit. An early music group in the chapel was preparing for a concert going that evening which most of my classmates found really soothing, but like most musicians I find it hard to get zen while listening to music. The halls were noisy, side rooms were full, chairs were uncomfortable - I finally parked right by the front door in a chair with plenty of light, even though the sound from the chapel was distracting and I knew half of the people coming in the door. Whatever, I thought, let me pray and get it over with.

As soon as I started running my finger through the paths of the maze I was overwhelmed with want - an emotion that I, like a lot of people, have been taught to put away. It's tasteless to want, and wanting implies you think you deserve what you want, which would be even more embarassing if anyone found out. But my want bubbled over: I want my feet to touch the floor in chairs, I want to sing straight tone without going flat, I want it not to smell like old people in here, I want life not to be so hard, I want to not be sad at sunset, I want all music to be in tune, I want to sing, I want to hug people when I see them and not have it feel so pretentious, I want life to be easier. Dissatisfaction was swirling around me. And here I am supposed to find God?

It felt right to sit with my desire. And it hit me: this is where prayer happens. When I am distracted by people walking by or by a tuning theorbo, that's where it happens. When I have flown through 7 emotions in the course of a few hours, that's where it happens. When I've finally got my feet balanced in a way that I can be comfortable - not forever, just for a while - that's where it happens.

I will never be quiet or placid, at least not as a way of life. The lion's share of my prayer will not be in calm moments. My prayer will be in the stormy moments of my life, which is precisely when I need it. God finds me when I least expect it and all I can do is welcome God in, whether I'm annoyed, ashamed, concerned, dolorous, optimistic, or aggravated. I have often been told emotions are what separates us from the beasts, and I am becoming more convinced that we can pray through most, if not all of them.