What we mean by love

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." … So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?  - Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday, and I am lucky that many of my friends have spent the day sharing quotes and reflecting on King’s legacy of firm love in the service of justice. I am partial to the quote above, and thought of it when I woke up this morning. I can’t think of a better challenge than to be an extremist for love.

Never satisfied by soundbyte answers, I asked myself this morning "what does love mean?" What does it mean to be an extremist for love? Most people think of themselves as loving, most people think that they are doing the right thing. History fixates on the obviously horrific practitioners of hate, but most people are not that sort of extremist. And yet we, motivated by love, reach wildly different conclusions about how to act justly.

I just started learning a song cycle by Lori Laitman that I will be singing in a recital in April. The last song of the cycle has captivated me – it feels like it was written for my voice, and the poem, like all the poetry in the cycle, regularly moves me to tears (this complicates my learning process, to say the least). The poem, Pioneer Child’s Doll, begins: Here, child, is what we mean by love. 

The poet, Judith Sornberger, described her inspiration in an interview. She saw pioneer child’s doll in a Nebraska museum: The head of the doll was actually an old, beat-up bedpost. You know, the knob at the top of a bedpost. How hard up would you have to be able to love a doll with that kind of head?

Here, child, is what we mean by love:

a block head doll of coarse-grained wood,

eyes two knife-pricks, mouth a crooked stab.

As we are given to love land

that few would covet, where no tree

dares stand up to the sky,

So shall you love her whose grain sack skirt

covers not petticoats, but sticks

whose curls must be imagined in the wood.

And as we break the stubborn sod

of our backs to know what we

can be on this earth,

So by the sweat of your palm

on her brow will you bring

to her flat face a sheen.

We know that love can transform, and we know that we are in need of transformation. About 6 times a day I pray Ignatius’ prayer for generosity: “Lord, teach me to be generous…”. I pray to be loving, to be kind, to be patient, to be fortified and transformed, to be better. And these are the prayers I think of as selfless. Could I sacrifice my prayers and my love to transform others instead?

Could love be the willingness to look at an ugly doll and see something lovely? Could it be the determination to be devoted to that which others would throw away? Could it be beholding the beauty in others? We lament that the world needs transformation, but are the true acts of heroism to see the world and behold in it the possibility of goodness? Isn’t that why we still envision Dr. King’s dream?

Maybe it’s more self-centeredness to imagine that the world hinges on how I see it, that if I look on it with love it will meet my expectations. I’m not sure I know how to pray for anyone other than myself.  A self-emptying prayer that turns me inside out could be the loving extreme to which Dr. King exhorts me.  Perhaps I am called to an outward facing love that wills the other into grace.

Love, grace, God, prayer – these things are the types of wonderful mysteries that we could talk about for eternity and never explain or exhaust.  Dr. King set big, lofty goals that stretch us and our world. For me, it’s goal enough to try each day to discover more of what we mean by love.

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Stuffed with grace

What part of speech is "religious"? If you answered “adjective” you’re right, except, of course, when religious is a noun. Now remember: a religious is religious, but you can be religious without being a religious. Teaching is difficult for countless reasons, but one very time-consuming part of what I teach is that I am constantly clarifying what we mean by words that over centuries have acquired mind-boggling pluralities of meaning. Take Church: I am going to Church, that building on the corner is my Church, she’s part of my Church, I teach Church history. The more ordinary the word, the more meanings it has. Fathers of the Church, desert fathers, our Father, bless me Father for I have sinned, I have to ask my father.  Eucharist is a meal, a sacrifice, a gathering, a thanksgiving. And don’t even get me started on water, the simplest of symbols used in Christian worship. Water gives us life, water kills us, water cleans us, water gets us wet. It’s confusing and comforting – the simplest things in our lives are exploding with meaning. I was talking to a colleague recently about the time my apartment was burgled, and because we both work in theology I pretty quickly turned the conversation to how a concept of sacramentality helped me deal with the loss of objects. Things are important to us. Things, like people, can be stuffed with grace.  I didn’t have to feel guilty mourning the loss of things because my sacramental faith allows me to recognize their meaning. That’s what was on my mind recently when, with a wise and thoughtful group of people, the conversation turned to detachment. I get why detachment is attractive, and brilliant people have promoted it as a path to contentment, but I’m going to take a pass. Give me attachment , a passionate devotion to things, relationships, people, and life. I’ll take the pain when it comes – I’ve known grief, and it has shown me not the foolishness of my attachments but of the blazing heat of my love.  Grace allows the ordinary to be transformed into the extraordinary, and gives us permission to love the thing because we love the grace.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.         It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;         It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;         And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;         And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent;         There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went         Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent         World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.                                      - God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sick Day

After an odd and, frankly, frightening bout of fever and chills last night, I took a sick day today from work and devoted myself to the task of getting better. For those who don't personally know me it's hard to communicate just how extraordinary this is. My mother recently reminded me that I insisted on getting my wisdom teeth out at the beginning of February vacation week so I wouldn't miss any school. My first year at my current job I had a wracking cough for six weeks and didn't take a day off. If I counted all the sick days I have taken since kindergarten, they might number a dozen.

No one is a workhorse without some sort of pathology. We're avoiding something else, we're convinced no one else can do it right, we are unrecovered oldest children. We are hung up on being needed. In a few weeks I will leave my position as PR director of Boston Opera Collaborative after a total of four years on the leadership team. Two years ago I finished my term as President and left the office in the more-than-capable hands of a colleague and dear friend, and I will leave this directorship to an equally extraordinary woman. I need the time, and the organization needs fresh blood and fresh ideas, but it is so hard to walk away.

When I decided not to run for a second term as President I was willing myself into humility. I needed to say "this will go on with out me" and I needed to mean it. That I was dragooned into another leadership position (an experience for which, despite initial reluctance, I am grateful) mitigated the withdrawal symptoms.

Graveyards are full of indispensable people. Of all the maxims that roll around inside my head, that may be the one I need to hear most. Everything will go on without me. Everything will go on if I am not in charge of everything, if I don't always have my way. When I realize that I am "nothing special" I can be overwhelmed with the grace of knowing I am everything special, that my specialness doesn't come from doing what no one else can do but from the uniqueness of my Creation. I have already been loved into being. Running the world won't improve on that.

So this morning, when I woke at 5:00 am shivering and sweating, I got out of bed, emailed everyone to say I wasn't coming in, sent enough guidance to people filling in for me, and lay down again. Everything would go on without me. I could rest without disappointing anyone and without ceding my power. Life went on while I slept: a reality I can finally accept.

Use Words When Necessary

I’m not really one for New Year’s Resolutions, but the one commitment I made to myself for the last calendar year was that I would write in a journal every night before I went to bed. It didn’t have to be long or profound. I figured that if I didn’t have something worth saying at the end of each day, then the day hadn’t been a success.

I have a hard time pinpointing why I write. On my best days it is because I think I have something to say, on my worst it is because I am desperate for someone to care what I have to say. When I look over my writing on this blog, I see a decline in the number of posts I have written, but an increase in focus: in other words, more of my posts have a point. I usually tell myself that if my post can’t fit one or more of the tabs I already have it’s too rambly to be shared. I need to know what I want to say.

When I was still cutting my teeth in singing, my performances must have been painful to watch. I was stone-faced, unexpressive, dead behind the eyes. I waffled between not knowing what I had to say and being terrified of saying it. If I tried to be expressive and failed, everyone would know I was a failure, and worse yet, everyone would know that I thought I was worth listening to. I was a moderately unhappy late -adolescent, and the idea of anyone knowing that I wanted to express myself was a terror beyond imagining.

As time has gone on I have made progress toward singing with a message, and I struggle to make that message into something I live all day. That we were created by a God who loves us and who is just as real as the suffering that smacks us in the face every day; that we owe something to each other; that duty and discipline are as important as liberty; that beauty matters; that learning has intrinsic value; that the intensity of our emotions is the key to our humanity; that life can be so much fun if you do it right: if that is what I want to say, am I living in a way that shares that all day long?

Like most of us, I fail too often in my attempts to make my actions match my heart. I do not do the good that I want but  I do the evil I do not want. (Rom 7:19) And so I turn to feeble words to get my point across, knowing that the words may help me find my heart and further help me live.

Every boot that tramped in battle, every cloak rolled in blood

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
You have brought them abundant joy
and great rejoicing,
as they rejoice before you as at the harvest,
as people make merry when dividing spoils.
For the yoke that burdened them,
the pole on their shoulder,
and the rod of their taskmaster
you have smashed, as on the day of Midian.
For every boot that tramped in battle,
every cloak rolled in blood,
will be burned as fuel for flames. - Isaiah 9: 1-5

Last night, as I sat at the midnight-now-10-pm mass, my second mass of four over this feast, surrounded by poinsettia and wearing jewelry that makes me think of my family, Isaiah 9: 5 jolted me out of my tired, carol-soaked mindlessness just before I headed up to the ambo to sing a peppy psalm.

Every boot that tramped in battle, every cloak rolled in blood... I wouldn't be the first person to comment on the domestication of the Scripture. I'm not an expert on the prophetic books, and like too many people who have studied Scripture I feel like that precludes me from being moved by passages I don't know inside and out. That verse was so rich that I couldn't help but be shocked - cloaks rolled in blood, boots stomping through warfare: where can the promised one meet us if we don't know such experiences?

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord." - Luke 4: 18-19

If what we celebrate today - the coming of God into the world as a human like us - is tied up with this message of liberation, what does it have to offer us who have not been oppressed. It's trendy to say that we need to be spiritually liberated, or that we are oppressed by our own bad attitudes, but that reads a lot into the message that Isaiah is drenched in: that God is on the side of those who suffer and has come to suffer with them.

In a realistic assessment, my life has seen a share of suffering, but nothing like the suffering of those in Isaiah or Jesus' historical contexts. I wore pearls to mass last night and was well compensated for singing in a warm, neat church and being highly praised afterward. How can I hear the message of deliverance when I'm not quite convinced there is anything from which I need to be delivered? And if I don't practice the art of being reliant on God for salvation, how will I know to whom to turn when I know need?

Christ came in an unexpected form to raise up those who are lowly, to cast the mighty from their thrones, to set captives free. How do we welcome the unexpected when we live expected lives? I am blessed that the times I have known brokenness my heart has turned to faith and hope in my need. That inclination did not come through my own virtue but through grace. That I have never had a boot that tramped in battle or a cloak rolled in blood is also a sign of my blessedness, but it leaves me at times unable to hear the message - or perhaps just unable to hold it in my heart.

My other church

I received an unexpected blessing a few weeks ago. It took the form of an email stating "the campus ministers have decided there will be no 9 pm mass on December 19". I conduct and worship with a collegiate musical ensemble every Sunday at an hour that to me seems impossibly late. I've written before about how they inspire me, and the assembly with whom we worship has become an important part of my spiritual life.

Still, for someone who works early Monday mornings, a standing Sunday night gig can be a drag. I was not-so-secretly happy to squeeze one more week out of winter break. Ever busy, I had two other church gigs in my neighborhood this weekend. After last night's 6 pm mass I dashed home, got changed, and drove to the apartment of two newlywed friends who are also hosting another couple at whose wedding I sang and who now live in Germany.

We briefly did the basic "catching up" small talk and then conversation plowed right into education: Jesuit schools, charter schools, diocesan schools, rigor, standards, you name it. As the part moved from the living room to the dinner table we talked about the homilies we'd heard at our parishes that weekend, about how parishes (and their liturgies) feed people (or don't). The Dream Act, Vatican II, the SSPX, a train station in Stuttgart - nothing was outside our purview. We agreed and disagreed, challenged, supported and edified each other. And I thought "here is my other church".

I hold the sacramental life of the Church in a place of highest honor. It is the Church's public prayer made up of particular actions that give us grace. But I can only be as positive as I am about the communal prayer of the Church - its liturgy - because I have experience of church that is intimate, local, and relational.

People often roll their eyes at my devotion, because "the Church" does this or that that they - and maybe even I - don't like. In my heart the Church is not just a series of pronouncements or dogma or the College of Cardinals. My Church has always been my people: my family, my parish, my school, my work, my diocese.

If you don't 'get' community, I don't see how you could 'get' Church, or liturgy. Two nights ago with another group of friends - not from my Catholic circles and not monolithically religious - a dear friend looked around at everyone hollering and laughing in one couples' basement and whispered to me "this is magical". Magical it was. A group of people who a few years prior were strangers are now like family. This is my other church.

I come across people who want to get the Church out of the modern world. Let us go back into the fortress, drape the nuns in black habits, cover the women's heads and put back the altar rail to guard the table from the faithful. Let's bring the Church back to a different era (one we have arbitrarily chosen as 'the most Catholic' - give us the 19th century with indoor plumbing). While we're at it, let's make sure we know who's in and who's out . There are "real" - pure, elect - members of the Body of Christ, and then there's everyone else.

The people on that side of the culture war shout the loudest because they know they have lost. The world has turned and they are still in the past. I don't want an anachronistic Church, frozen in time. I like my Church in the here and now, around all the tables of my life. I recognize the current of grace in which I swim  because of real people and relationships. No old-fashioned fantasy can compete with the living, breathing sanctity of my community drawn together by the Spirit of love.

Celebrating Christmas

One of the habits I nag my choirs about is singing too much consonant and not enough vowel on any particular word. It’s especially noticeable on words with the “s” sound: one song includes the phrase “this time” repeated on eighth notes, and results in a sputtering hiss upon which even my most sophisticated singers cannot improve.

I faced this challenge from the other side of the conductor’s podium this past weekend, when I had to try to make art out of singing the word “Christmas” over and over. At a certain point I admitted defeat, all the while wondering why I had never before noticed that this word gave choirs so much trouble.

Then I remembered that I conduct liturgical choirs, and we don’t sing about Christmas.

Now, before you get all “war on Christmas”, hear me out. I don’t celebrate Christmas. I celebrate the Nativity of the Lord, the Incarnation, the awesome generosity of a God who became human just like me. I celebrate these realities in the context of a larger year of grace that over the course of a turn of the earth tells the whole wonderful story of our salvation and looks forward to the salvation to come. I try to celebrate these things every day, and the liturgical calendar has given me special days to celebrate them, just in case I forget any part of the story.

When people huff and puff about people forgetting “the meaning of Christmas”, I have to laugh. There are plenty of people who celebrate Christmas by celebrating the celebration. It’s not a commemoration but a celebration, and that’s just how they like it. They didn’t forget anything, and our reminding them is not going to change them any more than their ignoring the origins of the feast would change my observance of the feast.

I sing songs that worship Christmas instead of Christ because it’s gig, and I frankly can’t see much harm in it. I am in the midst of celebrating Advent right now while half of the country is celebrating Christmas. If I could magically force them to wait until December 25th, would that make their celebration the same as my commemoration? We’re not celebrating the same thing.

This post sounds more “us vs. them” than I want to be, because in truth the line between us and them runs through every human heart. But I wish the people who try to fight the war on Christmas would accept that it has already been lost. The holiday has been transformed, and we are left to keep our Christmas as it suits us. We can be aggravated that the word was appropriated, but that is a bell that can’t be unrung. There are two Christmases now.

With every year that goes by I become a little more complacent, but I still maintain my subversive core. At this time of year, it doesn’t yearn to remind everyone that Christmas is about Jesus, or harangue consumers. But it thrills a little to know that I am keeping my Advent and Christmas seasons in my heart and in my faith community, even if the media and the world is suggesting something different. We can keep the traditions and hope that people will join us.

God so loved the world… Nothing anyone can do or say or know or forget or struggle with or insist upon can negate that or improve upon it. All I can do is create small spaces of grace where God can come again. Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.

Remembering the Four Churchwomen

"The church's role is to accompany those who suffer the most, and to witness our hope in the resurrection." - Maura Clarke

On December 2 we remembered the four churchwomen killed on that date in El Salvador in 1980. Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran military during the terrible period of oppressive violence that lasted in that country for more than a decade.

One news report commemorating the event mentioned that the killings of these women opened the world’s eyes to the atrocities being committed in El Salvador. It’s important that we look at the context in which this awful event occurred, and that there is plenty of blame to go around. Conversations I've had this week about these women often turned to a number of topics- the School of the Americas, Oscar Romero, US involvement in Latin American conflicts (with a healthy dose of my guiltiest pleasure: Reagan-bashing).

At what point do our saints stop being people and become symbols? Can we remember these women as individuals in their own right and as part of a grander narrative? I think there’s a tendency in hagiography (particularly when it comes to women) to miss the trees for the forest. We miss the particularity of their holiness by focusing on What The World Learned From Them.

"I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you. Something worth living for--maybe even worth dying for." -Ita Ford

If these women were merely victims caught up in the world-wide turmoil of the late Cold War, if this were only about the lingering effects of European colonization of the Americas, or the American support of oppressive regimes, or a civil war in which few were acting morally, we wouldn’t admire them. Through the memories of those who knew them and through their writings, we find evidence of an integrity that both put them in harm’s way and gave their lives purpose. They knew who they were and what they were called to do, and they didn’t let the world around them muddy the waters.

Integrity is the quality we need from our modern saints. To stand firm among the swirl of our complex world, to remember one’s mission while being bombarded by competing values, to keep the spark of divine love alive in our hearts while being told that we should fill our hearts with only ourselves, that is to be holy. We may think that we have something new going on here, but wasn’t Jesus also caught up in a complex political and social environment, and put to death for refusing to deny who he was?

The four churchwomen followed Jesus by not denying who they were, even though the path they were on led to martyrdom. Their conviction is admirable (or foolish, depending on how you look at it), and shouldn’t be ignored when examining the bigger conflict in which they were caught up. It’s a horror that simply living an honest life of service can lead to a brutal death. We do a disservice to the women’s memories if we focus only on the salaciousness and drama of their death and fail to notice the simple holiness of their lives.

We're all sinners, everyone of us, and a radical change is needed for all of us. - Ita Ford

[I will never be a successful blogger if I don’t lose this habit of thinking things through before I post about them. What good does a post about the four churchwomen do two days after the anniversary of their killings? If I don’t cut out my processing time I may never be a successful blogger, but I just might turn into a writer. ]

The Power and the Glory

There is a type of Christian spirituality that is heavily focused on the strength and majesty of the second person of the Trinity. It has spawned movies and music and mega churches, and on occasion results in an unfortunate idea that the followers of Christ are as exalted as Christ himself.


Even when this spirituality doesn’t lead to that rare but icky Christian triumphalism, I still don’t get it. It’s not that I don’t believe that Our God Reigns, Is An Awesome God, Praise Him etc, but that it just doesn’t do anything for me spiritually. So I was excited tonight that cycle C gave us the Lukan Gospel for Christ the King.

For whatever reason, I’m more comfortable with a God who deals in ambiguity, who came to glory by way of the cross. We worship a God who turns our expectations upsidedown, whose coming into the world not only saves us but confounds us. Maybe it’s because I’m one of those obnoxiously “complicated” people that I take comfort in the complicated story of Jesus and paradoxical existence of Christ. Our Awesome God wasn’t a Superman Jesus wearing the disguise of one who suffers until the time came for him to change into the King. He was always the King, ruling through service and reigning through love. We await his return when he will teach us the truth about power and glory.

Because of Prayer

For someone as Church-y as I am, I came somewhat late to prayer, or at least to talking about it. In college I was too cool for prayer: you could be contemplative or you could be active, and I knew what side I was on. I didn't have any of the incense-laden moments one might describe as prayer, and I saw that sort of talk as the purview of athletes pointing to the sky after a homerun on the one hand, and of the simperingly pious kids who judged ones spirituality on how many hours they'd spent in Eucharistic adoration that week on the other. Plus, I wasn't convinced I knew how to pray, and despite all appearances I really do try not to talk about things I don't know anything about.

That's why it was so shocking to me a few weeks ago when this thought popped into my head, the kind of thought that if I heard anyone say it out loud I'd either roll my eyes or throw up a little: If I have succeeded in anything in life, it is because of prayer.

I still don't know anything about prayer. I know that I am only able to perform because I am used to seeking out what is real. I know God best when I am dealing honestly with reality. So when I'm put in front of people to sing or act or speak, and I am expected to give them something real, I can fall back on the habit of searching for truth rather than for the easier fiction.

I know that I am only able to minister because I have experienced love in my life, then examined it and called it by name. When I am called on to be a loving presence, I am well served by this diligence in learning love. Prayer involves listening and paying attention, and when I fail at loving well I can use those habits to seek out and seal up the cracks in the armor of light. When I don't give myself time for silence and stillness I fail more often than not, often in spectacular, hideous ways that make me feel like someone I don't know. I need to check in often with that which is most real if I have any hope of staying real myself.

I don't know anything about prayer. I'm scared to write about it but I can't stay silent. If I have succeeded at anything in life, it is because of prayer. That doesn't mean I write my request on a slip of paper and God answers me with a magic trick. I think it means that I am willing to keep searching and to accept how high the stakes are. It means I listen and I pay attention. It means I give care to remembering who I am so that I can live fully as a one Created rather than as a caricature. I think it means I have re-tooled my definition of success to include all those things that build up God's Reign. When I am successful it is because I have allowed myself to collaborate with Creation, entering into the Goodness for which we were made, assenting to the Beauty we can only glimpse when we open ourselves to the glory we've named God in the rush we've named prayer.

A cold and broken hallelujah

Every year my mother takes great delight in ‘changing the clocks’, because rather than fuss with the hands on the clocks in the great room she actually switches the clocks, pulling out the winter clocks and stuffing the summer ones away. With the time change coming even later than usual this year, I have spent the last few mornings stumbling around trying to get out of the house in the dark, going so far as to walk directly into a door late last week.

Leaving my late afternoon class a few days ago the teacher commented that starting soon the sun would be going down closer to the beginning of class than the end. I looked out the windows of the new class building as dusk fell at dismissal time and thought “for someone who gets sad in the fall, I’m doing OK. The sun is setting and my mood is all right”.

Then I got in the car and put on Rufus Wainright and that all changed.

The first time I remember having an emotional response to the autumn was while I was still in elementary school. I felt nostalgic and a little melancholy and very confused about why these feelings had seemed to come from nowhere. Even now, away from the town where I spent the autumns of my youth, the smell - rare in the city - of burning leaves takes me back to that revelatory afternoon on the swingset, a little amazed that the seasons could affect me so powerfully, and a little, well, sad.

Every year I think maybe this is the year I can write about seasonal depression, and despite always writing a bit that springs from it, I can never quite write about it. For a while it was because I was embarrassed and ashamed, but that’s not really it any more. Now when I try to write about it I become totally stuck, because I just don’t understand it.

Can I live with that mystery? I have no idea why, at this time of year, every goodbye and disappointment I’ve ever had becomes wrapped up in each sunset. I don’t know why the way the falling leaves match the stripe of yellow down the center of the road makes my eyes well up through all of October. Maybe this is just when I mark the passage of time - New Year’s never really did it for me, but I can mark the time by each somber, sensitive fall.

Tonight’s sunset, marking the bridge between the commemorations of All Saints and All Souls, really threw me, even though I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other people talking about nothing that had anything to do with sadness or darkness. Without my knowledge or will thoughts crept in of those who are on the other side whose closeness we celebrate these days. There’s a reason so many cultures remember their dead this time of year. I beg the forgiveness of my Southern Hemisphere/Equatorial friends, on whom some of the fall-in-New-England imagery might be lost.

The evenings get dark and I do too. Even though I can’t explain the darkness, I fear a part of me has started to take comfort in the yearly ritual of staring out the window at sunset, brooding, or as Hopkins writes in verses that could have been written for me “grieving over Goldengrove unleaving”. Despite the heartache there’s something oddly beautiful about being pushed and pulled by nature, year after year. I didn’t always know what I know now: that this will pass, and that April will see us all alive again. Despite Eliot’s claim that April is the cruelest month, I know the cruelest is October, mixing memory and desire even as our dull roots grow duller, well aware of the long sleep that is coming next.

I have spent some stretches in very dark places, and my spirituality has been shaped by that. Life is hard; it’s a blessing anyway. We are confronted with incomprehensible suffering; God exists anyway. Sadness can stretch us across herself like we’re prisoners on a rack; we worship anyway. In our cold and broken halleluiah faith breaks forth, quietly resolute, sometimes too weak to even be a sign of determination, just there, in a silent confidence that defies the present pain.




Spring and Fall: to a Young Child
--G. M. Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Keep turning it 'til it fits

When I was quite young I had a puzzle of Bert and Ernie that I really liked. It was a young child's puzzle with only a few thick cardboard pieces and often my mother would help me put it together. If I would get stumped with what piece went where, she would instruct me to pick up a piece, try it in a certain spot, and "keep turning it 'til it fits".

Somehow that expression made it into our familial language, and I still think of it frequently, much more often than I think of that flimsy puzzle that has surely outlived its usefulness just as surely as it still lives in the corner of the basement my mother reserves for memories.

I wonder if our lives are puzzles, and we spend most of our lives trying to get the pieces to fit. Few of us live in a constant state of disshevelment, but most of us know the feeling of playing whack-a-mole with our lives: when we finally get one thing in order, another pops up.

So we keep trying to fit our pieces in together. As soon as we find the right place for prudence, prayer becomes displaced. Then we get charity just as it ought to be and the jigsawed edges of chastity protrude from what should be the puzzles' smooth edge. There's a part of each of us that knows what the puzzle is supposed to look like and isn't satisfied until it is just so. A part of us knows that holy = whole.

It has been suggested to me before that since I work in ministry I 'teach virtue'. That could not be farther from the truth. Teaching virtue is impossible: virtue lies in all of us, and at best I walk with people as they uncover it. But finding our virtue is not so much a clearing away the clutter but turning traits the right way, making foul tempers into zealousness, shyness into contemplative patience, mouths inclined to harmful chatter into those that blabber the goodness of God.

I doubt the work of our turning ever stops. Is an outcome of original sin that we are never put together quite right this side of eternity? If in my minds eye I can see what the puzzle should look like - or even if I can't - I can keep feeling my way to its completion. No discouragement or apparent failure can stop me plowing forward, piece by piece, if I just keep turning it 'til it fits.

We are unprofitable servants, we have done what we were obliged to do

When you have done all you have been commanded,
say, 'We are unprofitable servants;
we have done what we were obliged to do.' (Luke 17: 10)

I distinctly remember the first time I noticed these verses, which must have been two Cycle Cs ago. They left a strong impression, both because they captured so perfectly a sentiment I share, and because they seem harsh and counter-cultural. I almost felt guilty for agreeing with the idea that we don’t deserve a pat on the back for discipleship or moral behavior.

This is the type of attitude that gives Catholics a reputation, and I don’t care. Obligation is an important part of our lives. There are things we do simply because they are that which should be done. I run into a lot of people who think the purpose of religion or worship is to make us feel all warm and squishy inside. I’m not wise enough to say what the “purpose” is, but it ain’t that. To congratulate ourselves on our faithfulness is not the same as to affirm the grace of faith. We can be content with our faith and our deeds and still be unprofitable – perhaps we can never truly exceed what we are obliged to do because God’s expectations of us are so high?

Paul writes in today’s reading from 2 Timothy to “to stir into flame the gift of God that you have...For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control” (1: 6-17). We are endowed with great spiritual gifts, every one of us, and we choose whether to stir them into flame or to cower and let them decay. Claiming our gifts is dangerous business, because it makes us agents in the world. Our power, inspired by love and tempered by self-control, makes us capable of doing every good thing that God expects of us.

The first reading today is from the small-but-mighty book of Habbakuk. The prophet cries out to the Lord, lamenting the destruction and violence surrounding him. The Lord responds:

Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,
so that one can read it readily.
For the vision still has its time,
presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;
if it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late. (2:2-3)

Living in hope gives us a vision of what the world could be, with all people responding to the invitation of grace and living together in love and charity. We write this vision on the tablets of our lives, doing our best to manifest the hope that lives inside of us. This is what is expected of us, and may even be what we’re made for. Our labors toward the fulfillment our mission and duty may give us plenty to be proud of, but are nothing more than what we are required to do.

Being Prodigal

When we’re just plodding through Ordinary Time, I don’t expect to hear one of the Greatest Hits readings. But it’s the Twenty-Fourth Sunday today, and one of the parishes where I sang this weekend read the long form of the Gospel, including one of the Top-Ten Parables: the Prodigal Son.


People who get fussy over this sort of thing like to point out that it should be called the “Prodigal Father”, because it is the father whose lavishness we celebrate. But the son is lavish too, just with the wrong resources. In the narrative he gets all the action (in more ways than one), he goes on an “emotional journey”, as they say. He is the main character.

He remains the main character because it is he to whom we are meant to relate. We are the sinful and broken in need of forgiveness. Blessed are those of us who have known a love that celebrates our arrival no matter the circumstances and welcomes us back into home and heart. Not everyone knows that acceptance, and I am fortunate beyond measure to have friends and especially family who love me despite my selfishness and faults.

Although my experience of being loved helps me to believe in a God who loves, the core of my belief comes from turning the parable on its head. I have also had cause to be the father. There has sprung up in me a mercy that is not self-satisfied pardon, nor an absolution that congratulates itself on its own benevolence, but is a love that simply overpowers any offence. If I, a sinner, can feel that love, then I do not question that God can do that and more.

Set Me as a Seal on Your Heart

During my summer of crazy tri-training I had a little phone trouble. There were a few days when I wasn’t getting notifications of messages, so when trying to organize my standing swim-breakfast date with Brendan and Nicole they left message after message and I thought they were blowing me off.

It seemed reasonable that they would want a morning off from me stomping up the vine-covered back stairs at 7:30 to eat their English muffins, so I went straight from the pool to class and didn’t think too much about it. Around noon-time I checked my email and saw about 15 different messages from them. Where are you? Are you ok? What did you do this morning? We went to the pool and looked for you.
For some reason I take great comfort in the image of Brendan, dressed for work, standing at the front desk of the pool in the humidity and heat, asking our favorite lifeguard to check the bottom of the pool.

Those two were married yesterday, in a liturgy that was sacramental in every sense of the word. Over pasta and breadsticks about six weeks ago we put together a ritual that included four languages, three blessings, two pieces by Handel, and a procession to beat the band.

The Gospel reading was the Beatitudes, and as I listened to those words read while my beautiful friends stood side by side, and our other friends and their families surrounded them in joy, my breath was taken away by how perfect everything was. They already live the Beatitudes, they already live the Good News. They are peacemakers who hunger and thirst for justice. They are pure of heart and merciful. The truth that was confirmed in the light of that Gospel passage isn’t displayed in piety or lofty speech, but in the work those two do for other people, the love they show their friends, and that they went out of their way to look for me at the bottom of the pool.

Yes, there is a special grace involved in their sacramental marriage. Still, even before the vows, the air in the church was simply crackling with grace. By doing good work their whole lives they have surrounded themselves with other generous and loving people, and the power of the community’s love was nearly tangible.

Because I’m so practical (and cynical) I know it seems a little incongruous that I am often talking or writing of love. If love were only the romantic, indulgent kind displayed on all of the wedding cards that I browsed the other day, then I doubt I could be bothered for very long. But because of God and the people in my life I know fierce, diligent love. I know productive, gritty love. I know relentless, inescapable, sustaining, thrilling love. I have learned Father Zosima’s lesson that “active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared to love in dreams”, and led by the example of the people in my life I have tried to plunge into that love.

Nicole and Brendan let me tag along on their adventures in goodness, and I am so grateful. This morning I congratulated them once more and sat on the Common with a few of our other friends from our volunteer year. The sun was shining and the breeze was cool: a perfect September morning. We talked about work and family and told dumb jokes, and then I went off to noon mass. Sitting in the pew (a rare occurrence) I had trouble focusing, thinking about the previous day. In my distractedness clarity hit me like a ton of bricks: my whole life is a sacrament. The outward signs of grace are not objects - not my apartment or car or job. Relationships manifest grace, and I have better ones than I deserve.

Set me as a seal on your heart,
as a seal on your arm;
For stern as death is love,
relentless as the nether world is devotion;
its flames are a blazing fire.


Deep waters cannot quench love,
nor floods sweep it away.

Song of Songs 8: 6-7a

That is enough for me.

“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,
for I do not have space to store my harvest?’
And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
There I shall store all my grain and other goods
and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,
you have so many good things stored up for many years,
rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’
But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves
but are not rich in what matters to God.” - from Luke 12, today's Gospel

Sometimes I worry that I am a hoarder. You’re probably thinking that there is not a lot of ambiguity in that designation, that it should be pretty easy to know whether I am or not. And anyone who has been to my itty bitty apartment, or seen me on one of my merciless clutter purges, or knows that I only spend money on books, food, and wine, knows that letting crap pile up probably isn’t among my compulsions.

I wish that made me rest easier about today’s Gospel. Even if I don’t accumulate stuff, I am often tempted to store up treasure for myself. The things I hoard are intangible: affection, esteem, opportunity. There is a fear that we all share, an uncertainty that is part of being human, and we all find ways to fight the fear off by building up reserves of what we think we need.

Yesterday was the feast of St Ignatius, whose famous Suscipe concludes “Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.” I wish I were able to mean those words. Would God’s grace been enough for me if I had to do something that caused people to not like me? Would it be enough if I abandoned my self-centered charm? Would I be satisfied by divine love if I made a choice or commitment that closed certain doors to me? Rather than putting all of my eggs in God’s basket, I have spread them out over countless baskets, just in case…

If we are going to hold the saints up as our idols, we need to be realistic enough to acknowledge the cost. One of the most treasured quotes from Pedro Arrupe reads: More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God's hands. He offered that reflection after a stroke that rendered him unable to speak. Perhaps to truly surrender to God involves a destruction, a shattering. After all, surrender is a war metaphor.

Is that part of the beauty of prayer, that we repeat these phrases, like “that is enough for me” even when our heart isn’t in it? Lots of people call us hypocrites because we pray “Thy will be done” or “peace be with you” and then go off and behave in the silly, destructive ways we always do. I’m not sure it’s hypocrisy – I think it’s hope. We are hopeful that someday we will conquer ourselves, or be conquered, and be able to truly mean the things we pray for. All of our prayer is a plea for transformation. We want nothing more than to arrive at the day when God’s grace is enough for us, even though now we let all our little wants get in the way of that larger goal.

Augustine wrote How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be calling him into myself? And still he prayed. Knowing how hard it is should be no excuse for stopping. It is dangerous to offer our memory, our understanding, our will, our freedom as Ignatius did, because someday God might take us up on our offer. When the things we think define us are stripped away, may we find consolation in what we think is desolation. May we understand more fully that our hearts are made for love, restless until they rest in God. May the barns and silos we can’t help but fill with ourselves not come between us and the grace for which we are destined.

If you're not outraged...

Once upon a time, like a lot of idealistic young people, I lived and died by the bumper-sticker creed “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention”. After a little time and a lot of experience, my bumper sticker is more likely to read “if you’re not outraged, you’ve probably developed a good self-preservation mechanism”. It’s not to say that there isn’t still plenty in this world worthy of lament, but that most of it is not the result of nefarious individuals but of huge systems impervious to our outrage. As I discovered the first time I was crossed by Bank of America, sometimes there is no one responsible, and no one to be mad at, and the anger only hurts ourselves.

Even with individuals I find it hard to maintain anger. Like a goldfish fooled each time by the tapping on the glass, I can easily be won over by a pleasant exchange with someone, even if previous exchanges have been less than pleasant, and even if I am convinced that they are one of those rare nefarious individuals mentioned above. Perhaps it’s because I am so frequently in need of mercy and forgiveness myself, but I am usually pretty willing to start over again with someone even if they’ve irked me in the past.

A lot of people mention Jesus’ anger when they are trying to justify their own. That’s a nice idea, but come on, this is Jesus we’re talking about. Yes, he went recognizably bonkers over the money changers in the temple, but he was also the Son of God. I better be sure my motivations are as pure and my anger as righteous when I start flipping tables.

Is it called growing up? Is it called settling? Is it called getting over it, whatever it may be? I’m not sure. But because I am more willing to let things go now, I give even more attention to the handful of things I am not willing to let go. There are a few incidents in my history that I refuse to forgive or forget, the claws and barbs of which I refuse to release from my gut and my psyche. I have made a conscious decision to keep being angry about these, so they must matter.

One was being told in elementary school that I couldn’t be an altar server because I was a girl, and the other was being told in high school that I should quit singing because my voice wasn’t worth listening to. They involve such wildly different things, but to me they are so similar that I have almost conflated the two incidents into some epic thwarting, an unidentifiable outside voice telling me something about me that I knew was false.

The comment in high school was really crushing. Not only had I shaped a fair amount of my identity around my vocal talent, I also had the intuition to know that this was what I should be doing. Singing was who I was, and had been since long before I had any outside feedback that my voice was “good” or “pretty” or “sweet” or any of the other adjectives that get thrown around. Singing was something I had always done, and part of how I expressed myself. Whether my voice was pretty or sweet had nothing to do with the most important fact which was that my voice was mine.

The issue with altar serving raises whole issues of gender that I’m not sure I am ready to get into here. What I am willing to get into, and what should embarrass me more than it does, is that even as a child I had a strong and bizarre devotion to the liturgy and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. The same way that I will now read any book, attend any lecture, or take any class that has to do with liturgy, when I was a child I would take any opportunity to be involved. It was bad luck that I was in a parish (and perhaps a diocese? I’m not sure) that still prohibited “altar girls”, and I remember being so astounded that I couldn’t even be angry or upset.

One of my earliest memories is of someone at day care telling me that blue was “a boys’ color” and having my now-typical reaction of “that’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard”. I never believed there was anything ontologically different about me because of my gender. There was nothing I deserved or didn’t deserve, nothing I was capable or incapable of, simply because I was a girl. So to be told that this element of my identity that I truly believed to be inconsequential was going to affect another person’s decision about what I could do was an absurdity that passeth all understanding.

In retrospect, neither of these things was truly enraging, more dumbfounding: somebody thought they knew better than me about me, and that somebody was wrong. Everyone has things that they are wired for, and to have those natural inclinations denied or disparaged truly violates the natural order of things. I suppose I hang on to these insults and slights because I don’t want to forget what it is that makes me who I am. I don’t want to forget that no one can tell me what I am capable of or what my aspirations should be. It’s good to let things go, but equally good to know what we should hold onto, what's worth being mad about.



I have avoided putting a “gender” tag up on the blog for a while, because I don’t want to get into something so controversial. But maybe it’s time.

Getting out of the way

A few years ago I sang with a musician who I really respect and who tells it like it is. At the end of my coaching he asked me “why do you sing like you think you’re worse than you are?”

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I just completed six days in an Institute for Arts and Worship. You would think, having spent nearly a week dealing with two of my favorite things that I would be writing prodigiously. Instead, I’ve found myself totally blocked. There are many new ideas bumping around in my head and not a lot of direction as to how to piece them all together.

One insight from the week that stuck with me was that there are many similarities between worship and art. Both require honesty, vulnerability, communication, and trust. Both are expressive and both can be a little bit radical.

There is a tendency to be fussy with our liturgical worship and prayer, dressing it up in inauthentic ways to feel as if we’ve prepared enough. I was relieved to hear John Bell, our keynote, announce that our worship should be free of gimmicks, as gimmickry is one of my biggest pet peeves in liturgical planning (and I’ve yet to find a diplomatic way to point it out when I see it). Much like in art, the nonsense we use to dress things up often ends up getting in the way of the Thing.

I, of all people, should know, master that I am of getting in the way. I have been working all month on Carmina Burana, a piece I find extremely difficult, and which, therefore, scares me to death. Practicing has been going well, but one movement was still giving me grief this week. I was singing scared, singing like I couldn’t do it, getting in my own way. Not only was I not making expressive art, I wasn’t even singing in tune. I dreaded going to the practice room, and my dread was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So after a week of being pushed and stretched a million ways through the workshops at this Institute, I decided to let it all hang out in the practice room, to decide what I wanted to say in this movement and just let it out. No thinking about technique or perfection or control. Lo and behold, it was pretty close to perfect.

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Why do we pray like we think we’re worse than we are? Are we afraid to let it all hang out, to cede control? Do we think that we won't be able to do it? Do we worry if we dig too deep to express ourselves most authentically that we’ll dig up something we – or God – can’t handle? We let our liturgies turn into variety shows – or morgues – rather than daring to be the Body of Christ gathered in prayer. If that gathering is not our goal, why bother?

Getting out of the way is challenging, especially when we are comfortable with our impediments. Fortunate are we that we don’t need self-conscious gimmicks or to become someone else in order to pray. All week I fought the good fight at this institute, listening to effusive enthusiasm from others about their prayer experiences in dance, improv, collage. My experiences were no doubt holy, but nothing to go home and write a poem about. I felt pressure to find my bliss in one of these less familiar prayer forms, and it was making me a little grumpy.

During our final worship together we sang one of the hymns that I know inside and out. I closed my eyes and sang my prayer with a confidence that I was offering my most honest worship. God met me there, when I was being most myself, rather than when I was trying on other guises. I trusted enough to sing and pray as I was, not believing I was worse (or better) than I am. I wasn’t in my own way, and as the singing ended I concluded just as the hymn did – lost in wonder, love, and praise.

Hope does not disappoint

If I were more serious about blogging, I would look ahead to the week’s readings and write about them before we hear them, but as it is I tend to hear them, be inspired, and take a few days to mull them over, ending up about 48 hours behind the lectionary when I decide to comment on it.

Yesterday was Trinity Sunday. This feast always sneaks up on me, possibly because it comes in the shadow of Pentecost. It celebrates one of my favorite theological ideas: that God is dynamic, mysterious, varied and engaged with us in every possible way. I cannot imagine being satisfied with a lesser God.

The second reading for the Solemnity was from Romans, containing Paul’s famous statement we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Some people look at that and see only danger, the danger that comes when people manipulate scripture to use it to keep people down. Yes, people have looked to that as an excuse to afflict and to keep the afflicted in their place. But when I heard it proclaimed this weekend my ear was drawn not to the beginning of the statement but to the end, that hope does not disappoint.

I have become well acquainted with hope in recent years. I rarely hope in a particular object or outcome – those indeed disappoint, and often. But I have settled into a hope that believes all will be well, that the worst of our lives are not the final word, and that there are myriad resurrections possible thanks to a God who died and rose.

For me, this is not pie in the sky stuff: My most intense experiences of hope have come in experiences of honestly accepting a grievous reality. Knowing that life can be tragic and still believing that life can be good has produced a new strength in me. This hope is not eagerness or anticipation - more a conviction that goodness and love are our ends. Like any virtue this hope is tested and surely will continue to be, but now it helps me face the day-to-day with a different attitude toward the bad. There are plenty of things that disappoint me, but hope has yet to be one of them.

Every closet has a skeleton

Every closet has a skeleton. Everybody has a secret. We’re all damaged and no one shows it.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve been watching too much TV, but I am increasingly disgusted with the overly negative melodrama that passes for art these days. More and more I find a deliberate, pushy darkness in literature and in drama. I’m sick of wallowing in how bad we all are, and I don’t think the solution to the world’s ills is to glorify or to rejoice in our shortcomings.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the world is all sweetness and light, and I do believe that we are all damaged and most of us either don’t show it or don’t deal with it well. We’re sinful people, and you can think that my perspective is totally shaped by my Catholicism, but it has mostly been shaped simply by paying attention.

But I believe that sinfulness is not the end of the story. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and was reminded of a talk I gave on reconciliation years ago. As I was writing that talk I started to wonder biggest challenge of the sacrament of reconciliation is not saying our sins out loud but letting go of the secret pride we have in being damaged. This is what I wrote at the time:

It’s easy to approach God, in the confessional or elsewhere, with the conviction that you have a sin that is the most horrifying ever, or that you have a pain in you that nothing will ever make OK. There is a certain sense of hubris in this belief that you have the market cornered on sin and darkness.

But none of us do. We enter the confessional and announce our sins and it doesn’t shock the priest and it doesn’t shock God. We have to let go of our sins and our pasts and allow God to transform our lives. I don’t think the hard part of the sacrament is the naming of the sins, or whatever penance we might receive: it’s accepting forgiveness and letting go of our sins. For our lives to be transformed we have to submit not only to God’s will but God’s mercy & forgiveness.

Yes, every closet has a skeleton. But there is also the possibility that those dry bones can have life put into them again when the time is right.

A few months ago I wrote about singing with a message, and I knew at the time that the post was a bit of a cop-out, because I felt like something had changed and I had a message, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. How boring the rest of my life would be if I had it all figured out, but I think I am getting an inkling. There is no need for my message to be about darkness and disorder – there’s enough of that to go around, enough people reminding us that we’re all damaged and don’t show it. Maybe the message lies on the other side of that: we’re all redeemed and don’t know it.