Another New Year's Eve

As I seem to keep finding myself saying....How did we get here!?! This has been such an incredible year. It seems like it was just yesterday that it was the beginning of 2008...and yet when I think back to that beginning, it feels like a very, very, long time ago. When I think about all that has transpired, about the things I did not know even know about my life then that have completely transformed it now.....well, it's kind of mind-boggling, to say the least.

I did a post last New Years Eve on intentions, my version of New Year's resolutions. The intentions I chose for 2008 were the following:

• To choose "compassionately curious" over judgement whenever possible regarding the behavior of myself and others.
  
• To continue to take the risk of authenticity in all areas of my life.
  
• To do a better job taking care of my physical being...including letting other people nurture me even when that level of vulnerability gets a little scary.
  
• To be consistent in my spiritual disciplines....yoga, solitude, journaling, prayer... those things that sustain me if I sustain them.
  
• To be a better steward of all my blessings, including (or maybe especially) the material ones.

As I look at these it strikes me how many of them have turned out to really be manifested in some pretty big and important ways in my life this year, considering that I really didn't commit the list to memory or hang it on my bulletin board, or do any of the things that one is encouraged to do with the things one is truly intentional about. I can only assume that these were things that I really truly did want, and that God in God's dream for me also saw as good, and thereby the opportunities were provided for me to work on them.

I've been reading back through some old journal entries and blog posts for the year as I often do as a kind of life inventory at year's end. It's always interesting to look back and see the things that I boldly stated and then totally and completely ignored, thereby indicating that I clearly did not or could not know them at the time that I wrote them.

Of course the big events of my life this year have been on the relationship front. The closure of one chapter of my life as XDO and I parted, and moving into what I assumed was going to be a long time of being single and exploring that in a new way for myself. And instead of course I am exploring something else entirely! Going on the BE cruise was such a pivot point for me as things began to disintegrate in my relationship life last Winter. I honestly don't know if I had not had that liminal space with the safety and love of all y'all, to whom I could say what felt at that time to be some pretty unspeakable truths, if I could have claimed myself, if I could have released the tethers with which I had bound myself for so many years, if I ever could have let myself really be free. There just isn't ever going to be enough gratitude....ever.

The other "Big Event" has of course been the so-far unbloggable situation that I have referred to as the "falling shoes." I got in trouble for something that I did that I believe was right and good and some other people did not. I am hoping to be out soon. I am hopeful about that. It too, was an interesting time in that I learned that faith holds, God really is there in the dark and that the prayers of others are a real and tangible force that will hold and carry me if I let them.

I learned a lot about being cared for this year. In taking that risk of allowing nurturing I have found it to be not only just a good thing, but a truly transformational one. It has opened my heart and softened me in some pretty important ways, I think. For perhaps the first time in my life I am not afraid to say, "Help me, please....I need...." And to know I can, and that someone does...well, it connects me with God yet again and reminds me that I am blessed and beloved.

So yes it has been quite the year. Flying by at the speed of grace bringing blessings and changes and transformations all over the place. Oh, and love. We must not forget love. Not just the one that looms so large on my horizon right now....the one that lights up my heart (when it's not giving me panic attacks), but all the love in my life. My friends near and far. Those whose faces I have seen and those who I have not. The people whose love does carry me and bring me God every single day. I literally feel as if I live surrounded in a cocoon of blessedness simply because of those friendships. As this is not something that has always been, I do not take it for granted and I treasure it deeply.

I'm still thinking about my intentions for next year. For now, I simply wish to all a blessed and peaceful 2009.

The First Funeral

It was one of those moments for which God brought me to this place. They were surprised to find a service booklet, a sermon, and, in the daughter's words, "a whole real service." A the end of the sermon, when I invited people to share memories of G, she spoke, honestly and from her heart about her mom, about both struggle and love, tears were shed. Her brother spoke as well, and was more humorous and lighthearted. Two friends also shared, one a friend of the daughter about how G had "mothered" her too in her teen years, and another about simple good times he had shared with G. In all of it there was no doubt in my mind we were on holy ground. When we went downstairs for the reception the daughter spoke to me again about her surprise that this service was so "special" and how much she appreciated that. She seemed amazed that it all came from the BCP and said, "I guess it really has been a long time since I've been in an Episcopal church." The acolyte, who is a really lovely man, and I shared a moment after the service. I always tell him how much I appreciate it when he acolytes as I feel as if I am in good hands up there. He is a cradle Episcopalian and knows what I'm doing liturgically better than I do! He gave me the thumbs up after for a "first time well done" and I told him that from him that really meant a lot. He said we were a good team....I teared up.

I know your prayers once again carried me. As I float off to bed in my liturgical afterglow, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.


...And now that it is morning of the next day and I am back at the office....here is the sermon from the funeral based on Romans 8:14-19,34-35,37-39 John 11:21-27

Whenever someone dies, for those left behind there is a time of a kind of confusion and shock, a time of pain and grief as we adjust to life without the presence of our loved one in our lives. We miss their earthly presence. Not being able to see and speak with them, to share the daily ups and downs of life, to do the things we have always done together. We may also be left with feelings of things unfinished. Things we wished we had done or said, or things we did not get to bring to some conclusion in our often complicated relationships with our loved ones. They of course are now at peace and are beyond such concerns, though we may continue to struggle with such feelings, because such is way of our human selves.

Of course we will grieve and mourn. We all go through that process in all its parts however it may manifest itself for us when we lose a loved one. It is part of the way we honor our humanity and our connections with one another. Jesus the Incarnate One, fully human among us, himself wept at the news of the death of his friend Lazarus.

But while we go through this very human process of letting go of and missing G in her earthy life, we can also take some great comfort in the promises of our faith. As Jesus told Martha as she grieved the loss of her brother, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” As Christians we believe that by dying and rising again Jesus has conquered death and that it truly is not an end of life, but only as life as we know it. G, as all of those who have gone on before us, live on in a great community of saints. And we believe that we will all rise again in glory together.

And we can also take comfort in another promise that God has made us in Jesus. And that is the one we hear in Romans, the one that nothing can separate us from God’s love. While we are grieving, or suffering pain, or asking difficult questions, this God who loved us enough to become one of us and is close enough to be called “ abba, father” gathers us up, joins with us in our struggles to offer comfort to us and to let us know we are never, never alone. Our God is with us to carry us through and we can call on God to comfort us as we grieve the loss of G.

Another way that we take comfort as humans is through memory. As long as we carry the memories of our loved ones in our hearts they are never very far from us. While I did not know G personally here at St. James I have been told that she added so much to our dinners here through her wonderful cooking, and that both of your parents were vital members of this community through their love of music and involvement with church and community programs. Everyone I have talked to about her has emphasized her zest for life, and more than one person has use the word "character" to describe her. At this point I would like to offer you some time to come and share with us all some of your memories of G. To tell all of us how she touched your life, so that we all might share in those and find comfort in that this evening.

The Countdown

Well it's six hours until my first funeral. There is a part of me that thinks it is patently ridiculous that I am nervous! I have been a priest for almost two years, ordained in general for longer than that! I should be all cool with this! But, I don't generally like firsts and have never liked being the new kid of any sort. Our sweet little receptionist at the day job picked up my mood this morning and asked me what was up. When I told her what I was stressin' about, she gave me her Dove Promises message: Remember your first everything. I think that's a given with this one.

I was here at the office till about 9:15 last night making up the service booklet. I am a great believer in them. Especially when you don't know who you are going to have in the pews. I love the BCP, but let's face it, for the newcomer, it is not exactly user friendly. So I go to the online prayerbook and do a little cut and paste, take out the extraneous directions and things we are not using, add in the readings, and make up a little book and we are good to go.

Then I went over to church to copy, fold and staple. After I ran the first 35 copies, I realized that I had not quite cut and pasted it in the right order and had to go back and do a fix. Then the copy machine at church, which prints about 10 pages a minute on a good day, kept telling me it was going to run out of toner any minute! Fortunately it did not, but by the time everything was cut, pasted, collated, folded, stapled and tucked up at the back of the church it was well nigh on 11, and me with no sermon. And the dog with no dinner. Well me neither, but I was sort of beyond it at that point! So home I went to feed the dog, clean the cat boxes and, really, I was going to, write a sermon. I made two out of three and crashed!

Fortunately God is good, and I somehow got inspired in the shower this morning. So, hair dripping and ensconced in my robe, I wrote a quick outline sitting in the bathroom before I lost all those good thoughts, and finished it off as soon as I got to work. I may post it later, but this one feels like it needs to be preached first for some reason.

I know, as one of you said in the last comments, that every family has history. And of course we as clergy are in the position to know some of it that people have not necessarily shared with us. That makes it an interesting and delicate proposition to preach the word of God to them at a time when they are particularly fragile and in pain. For some reason, in the midst of all my oh-so-human first-timer fears, this feels like a great gift and at the same time an awesome responsibility. I am really counting on God not to let me get in God's way here! Pray for me that I can do that gracefully? Thanks!

Musings in my Garden on Good and Evil

I have been thinking lately about good and evil. This is probably no coincidence as I have been dealing recently with putting to rest (I hope) the spiritual abuse that took place when I was in high school. While I do not wish to paint the perpetrator of that abuse herself as an evil person, certainly any act of abuse carries within it an element of that which is evil, that is something which is totally “not good,” not of God. We had talked about that part of it often, C and I, as we wrestled with how much of a hold G still had on me after all these years, how her words to me on the stairs still burned in my soul. How those feelings of shame and inadequacy were still so easily triggered in me by the slightest feeling that I was doing something others might perceive as unacceptable for some reason. How even the need to be a “good priest” could set me off on a downward spiral. C would say over and over as I struggled to break free of this, “Clearly this is not of God.” And I would agree, and remain trapped in its grip. No, G was not evil. She was, herself likely abused, and she was using us to get her own needs met in ways that were unhealthy and damaging to us. She was twisted and she was dangerous and it is very unfortunate that she was allowed to run riot in our young lives.

Because it is in such places that evil, or Evil, if you will, I think steps in and takes advantage of the moment. For if God has dreams for us, Evil too, has its own designs, nightmares perhaps, that can unfold if the circumstances are right and the humans are cooperative. And Evil, I think very much wants its way. And Evil, having no qualms of conscience to hinder its path, will use whatever is available in the moment to have those dark dreams and plans come to be in our lives.

Sometimes the timing is just so uncanny it’s hard to believe it’s all just circumstantial. A round was won on that Friday night for freedom, for good, and I think I can say for God, because I know God smiled on it. A great bondage in my soul, which Evil needs to flourish, was released. The dark whispers that held me captive were suddenly no longer powerful, no longer working to keep me enthralled. In a new and very powerful way I belonged solely and utterly and wholly to God. There were no parts left behind, caught in the web of shame and confusion spun those many years ago. Nothing to catch, nothing to trip on, nothing here now for Evil to take advantage of. And sometimes it’s very strange how things “just happen” in time. On that Friday, I became free and found new strength in myself. On Monday that freedom and strength faced an attack. A strike out towards me in those places where I am most vulnerable. It seems almost as if Evil is looking for its wedge, its way back in, or perhaps rattling at the gates to see if there are places where this new knowledge and freedom will not hold. A place where I might be convinced to retreat again to that stairway in defeat, convinced again that she was right after all, that I am irredeemable and bad and everything good in me is sham and artifice.

But surprisingly, while I am angry and frightened, I have not been extremely triggered. Oh, there have been moments when I have heard the Critical Voice saying the expected things, the “What did you expect?” the “Of course!” and the “So who will care for you now!” There have been a few minutes of a slimy voice in my head that said “this is what you get for thinking you could get away….” And one that tried to link these events up as punishment for every sin I have ever committed! But all of that has been the exception, not the rule and it has been mercifully short-lived. There have also been, I have to admit, a few moments of “OK, God, where are you in all of this?” on my part, a few moments of some anger at God about it all. I am not happy about that. I wish I had more faith, more trust, more acceptance that all will be well, no matter what comes.

But Evil doesn’t get its way here. No matter what. There is no going back. Love wins. Truth wins. And that is all there is to it. And I know that God is in this. God is in the clear and present witness of those who are standing with me, supporting me, loving me, praying with and for me here, and across the world for heaven’s sake! God is with me in what I read this morning in Romans: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (12:14-21). God is with me in the strength that I feel in being able to keep pulling myself back from the edge when I want to go to the dark place of worst-case scenarios and what-ifs. God is with me in the timing. If that particular Friday had not come before Monday….I shudder to think of how much worse this would be.

I will be preaching on another passage from Romans a week from Sunday. About how all things work for good for those who love God. That has always been a hard one for me, because clearly that is not about happy endings. We don’t always get happy endings. I may not get one now. But I have something new to say about that passage now I think. It’s not about the ending….it’s about what happens in the midst, God in the midst, with us as we walk and hold that line against the places where Evil would like to seep back into our lives, or maybe create places where none were, or take advantage of natural occurrences and vulnerabilities. God is with us, and Evil ultimately has been defeated, and because of that we can hold the line and in the end, that really is all that matters. Thanks be to God.

To My Beloved RevGals

I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. Philippians 1:3-6

For all of your comments and prayers and encouragement and love, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I feel cherished and held and supported and cared for. You cannot imagine what this means to me. You are all just the best!

Trust and Faith

The tender shoots of new born freedom are bravely holding forth. This is a good and kind of an amazing thing. I am being faced with a pretty big challenge to that fragile faith in myself and my trust in being a beloved child of God. I cannot blog about the details but suffice it to say, a lot hangs on it, and it's one of those things that will taken an excruciatingly long time to reveal itself. In the meantime life will go on, and I must trust in God's unfailing love and the truth of the Scripture I will preach on the 27th from Romans, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose....What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?" That and the power of having faith the size of mustard seeds...which I've gotta say is about how big mine feels right now. I guess I would just be asking you to kind of put me on the "special intentions" prayer list for the next few months and I'll keep you posted when I can.

The Chapter in Which Kate Gets Free at Last

A while back I wrote a post about someone who was significant to me when I was in high school. In that post I talked a bit about how much G was able to hurt me with her cold words and her treatment of me. In the months since I wrote that, I have come to understand that what she did was much more than that. What she did was spiritual abuse, it was soul stealing and it was profoundly damaging to me. For over forty years I have carried not only the pain of the words she said to me, but a part of me has remained absolutely stuck and rooted on the stairway where I collapsed when she said them, stopped in my tracks in part of my growth in a sense. Because what she told me was that I was "not lovable", that I was "not worthy" of any one's love and care. She of course, being the wonderful person that she was, could go above and beyond that and would care for me anyway....she would fly in the face of all the "others" who told her she was "wasting her time" on me, on my "phony, fakey" self whom "everyone knew" would "never amount to anything."

Those words became a part of me, she became a part of me. In psychological terms, she was an introject in my personality. Whenever I was stressed, or something happened that reminded me in any way of her, or my back was against the wall (like any time I felt guilty about anything...which for me is pretty much any time I am less than perfect!), it would trigger stuff about this. She of course was the lead the critical voice in my head, always ready to shame me, to remind me that I am indeed not really ok, not really loveable, despite much evidence to the contrary. I have been working away at this whole thing for years in various ways, in therapy, in body work, and most recently in spritual direction, knowing that many of my issues were connected with G and my relationship with her, that she stood in the way of true authenticity and freedom for me, and getting more and clear of late that what she did was abusive.

Last night I think I got free. I have known all along I was not the only girl she befriended. I knew there were a group of us, and I knew we were all kind of fringey girls. Loners, kids whose family lives were not the best, or who did not fit in socially, or who had "issues" of one kind or another. I also knew she did not want us to know one another, and actively discouraged friendships between us. As we talked in spiritual direction last night, the light bulb finally went on! C had mentioned the possibility of trying to look up the other girls and see how she had treated them, if she had done something similar to them. My first reaction had been fear that if I found them they would say I was the only one she said those things to, behaved that way with, but then suddenly, I knew! I knew as if it were written clearly on the wall before me. It was her perp rap! She said it to all of us in some form or another....it was not about me....We we all her victims. I did nothing to deserve this any more than any client of mine does anything to deserve any of the abuse they incur. None of it was the truth about me. Though it was directed at me personally it was not about me personally. All of the things she said to me were designed to give and keep her in power over me. And it worked. Oh did it work. She has been gone from my life physically for over fifteen years now...and only now does she NO LONGER have power over me. Because today it is done. For the first time since I was sixteen she is not in my head. I am free of her. I expect that there will be backsliding moments. I know this is not a miracle cure. But just for today, I am enjoying life without her and thanking God for endurance, patience and really good SDs!

In the moment when I knew, that fifteen year old part of me that has been stuck on the stairway rose and began walking. She walked away from G down the stairs and out of that school. She started dropping books and shedding things until she was as light as air. She walked and then she ran and she picked up speed until she was flying. She flew into God and she flew into my heart where at least at this moment she safely remains.

Submission and Trust

I am still gnawing away on this whole idea of Lenten disciplines. I finished the Chapter on "Submission" in Celebration of Discipline before church this morning. That was a discipline in itself. Just the title was enough to engender hyperventilating. But he does a good job with it. As I read I could almost hear his, or perhaps the Spirit's calming voice saying, "Yes that's right, just breathe, it's ok, you don't have to do anything now, you are only reading about it." One of the things that Foster said that I found comforting was this: "Jesus calls us to self-denial without self-hatred. Self-denial is simply coming to understand that we do not have to have our own way. Our happiness is not dependent upon getting what we want....Self-denial is not the same thing as self-contempt. Self-contempt claims that we have no worth, and even if we do have worth we should reject it. Self-denial claims that we do have worth and shows us how to realize it.... self-denial means the freedom to give way to others. It means to hold others' interests above our interests."(p.114) This is clearly different from what Foster refers to as the "mutilated" teachings about submission that I learned in my earlier religious teachings. It is partly those earlier teachings that trip my trigger when I think about this whole idea of submission. And it is partly my own will that trips me. I don't like to think about that part as much. But it is there. My first yoga teacher shocked me in about my fifth or sixth week as her student when she told me that my greatest struggle in yoga would be to finally come to peace with the fact that unlike most things in my life, yoga was one thing that I would not be able to succeed at by the efforts of my "prodigious will." That was the first time anyone had ever used that phrase, or accused me of having any sort of will at all, but it sat so true, I knew she was right. Last Lent, I learned some interesting things about that will as a grace-filled gift of Lenten practice. Perhaps it is time for another round.

Another book that calls to me is Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust. I've lost track of where I heard about it, but I think it was on someone's blog. It is all about trust in God. Complete and total and utter radical trust. The kind of trust that is the perfect companion to submission, if this is indeed a discipline I choose. Submit and trust. Manning says: "In first century Palestine the question dominating religious discussion was, 'How do we hasten the advent of the kingdom of God?' Jesus proposed a single way: the way of trust. He never asked his disciples to trust in God. Rather He demanded of them bluntly, "Trust in God and trust in me" (John 14:1)." (p.5)

There are things stirring. Things to be prayed about, thought about, decided and discerned. Things that will affect my life and lives that intersect with mine. My intention is to use this time of Lent to be very prayerful and deliberate about those things. Not that I think that a mere forty days will be enough time to resolve them....but it's a good time to start....and maybe submission and trust is as good a place to start as any.

Observing Lent

I've started thinking about Lent. Well no duh, Kate! Of course I have, like sometime back in Advent! No NOT that way, not liturgically, corporately, programmatically. Personally. My Lent. My own private little Lent. As in how will I be "observing" this time. Lent and Advent really vie for favorite times in my life. Sometimes Lent wins. Lent is full of anniversaries for me. Lent was the time when I was fifteen or so that I can remember that I really sensed God's presence and I can say "heard" God speaking to me personally for the first time. It was a very powerful experience of the Holy for me. Lent was the first time, during a Holy Week retreat in high school, that I was able to truly imagine, and enter into the suffering of Jesus on the cross and experience at a profound level the love that went into my personal redemption. One Holy Saturday, during an Easter Vigil renewal of baptismal vows, I felt myself most powerfully called back into a loving personal relationship with Jesus after a lost and lonely time of wandering. Last year, my Lenten disciplines turned out to be signifcant in impacting life changes in ways I never would have imagined going in. I preached my first sermon to this congregation on Ash Wednesday. I baptized my first baby on Easter. Lent is a Big Deal. I like to do Lent well. So I've been thinking about Lent and what to do this year. Richard Foster's book is calling me. First I thought it would be Prayer, but, I kept just "randomly" running across references to the Celebration of Discipline kind of everywhere I went. Bloggers mentioned it, it came up in someone else's conversation really out of left field, C's church is having a book group on it....so I ordered it of course. I read the first chapter last night....I'm hooked. Spiritual disciplines. The things that in my convent life I railed against simply because, I think, no one took the time to explain the "why" of them to us. It was simply a "do this, it's good for you." Well tell that to a nineteen year old! Even a fairly compliant one in the 1970s. I have come to love my own little set of them. Have my own comfort with my kind of prayer life and my kind of meditation practice. I see from what I've read that Mr. Foster and I don't see quite eye to eye on all things. I feel a little push back in myself. I need to settle down and get teachable again. That in itself would be Lenten now wouldn't it?

I do plan to post daily. It worked for gratitude, it worked for Adventing. So I think I'll be Lenting as well. Trying to be conscious about "observing" Lent. "Observing." Watching for the signs of God. And perhaps trying to have some discipline in that effort.

Epiphany Comes Again....

The Feast of the Epiphany is a Big Deal for me. It was a day of reconversion of sorts....Several years ago I had come out of a very hurtful church experience. It was long, it was ugly, it was exhausting. We all know the drill. It culminated in my leaving the Christmas service sad and demoralized and in tears wondering if I was really done this time. If I should just hang it up. Give up on God, give up on church. Just go find something constructive to do with my time instead! But I had a friend at another Episcopal church who urged me to come to her church. She knew my struggles, but she told me things were not the same at her place. What, she asked me, other than a little drive time, did I have to lose? So with much trepidation, on Epiphany Sunday, she finally talked me into attending. This is what I wrote in my journal later that Sunday:

Sitting here, two hours after my first service at St. M's. Stomach queasy, feeling shaky and shaken. Tears in church. How many years (other than at baptisms and weddings) has it been?

I am having a premonition of Epiphany. If I go on this journey (to the center of Reality?)...something WILL happen. I am being pulled, drawn, yanked into this....it feels not in my control. I am struck that I have "done church," done spirituality, but I have not allowed myself to be convicted. I am again at that place where I closed the book so many years ago and being asked, being urged, invited, pulled, drawn....to open it, open me again. To be radical. To be fearless in my fear.

This God is not the polite God that supports and gently nudges. This God wants more, wants me, wants all. This will require something of me, will change me in a way that I am not getting to be in charge of. This God wants conversion, wants to pull me through the tunnel of my resistance into the center of something that I have glimpsed, flirted with, but never allowed myself to be taken to, given to possessed by. This is new and scary business. And I want it as much as I don't!

Though I am Celtic I really don't claim to be prescient. Well not often anyway. But obviously I knew something was up. Of course I had no clue what! I fully believed that I was going settle into that lovely community and happily live out the rest of my churchy little life with them. And God seems to have had a different desire. Because it was less than ten months later that I was packing to move here and begin the journey that led me to ordination and all the truly amazing things that are happening in my life right now.

Including what happened this weekend! A group of us gathered in a retreat center. No big deal, happens all the time. But instead of talks on prayer or developing our spiritual lives, we learned how to strategize, organize and motivate people from community organizing trainers from Harvard who do work with groups like the Obama campaign and the Sierra club and who are teaching us to do this so we can bring it all to bear on a very exciting, visionary and creative MDG campaign that is taking flight in our diocese. We learned the power of using our stories as public narrative. We learned about collaborative decision-making and how important clear outcome criteria is in that process. This was the church-training level of what I went to in November. It extends it out and opens it up. It extends out and opens up my role in this as well. I have a role on the diocesan team. I am the storyteller. I will document this adventure internally as well as tell the world about us! In addition, my church team seems to think I should lead them into our future. So strangely enough in this project, I am a both/and. Yes I hear you all laughing! Just when I thought I was going to have a little free time. I think I hear God chuckling, too.

It was quite a weekend. From Friday night until Sunday afternoon our only breaks were to eat and sleep. Otherwise we worked. It was hard. It was exhausting. It was intense. I laughed with these people and I fought with them. I cried with them and about them. I loved them and at times I did not! I was angry at some of them for periods of time. I was very glad to go and be there. I was very glad to be done and come home. This is only the beginning. There is a lot of work to do.

These two Epiphany Sundays....years apart in my life, but connected by that God who comes and calls and apparently has no intentions of letting me off the hook any time soon.....

Life Lessons

My memories of high school are nothing like those of most of my friends. There were no pep rallies, no Friday night football games, no sock hops. The biggest event of the year was not prom but the spring concert in which about 90 per cent of the nearly 300 students had an active role as musicians, singers or both. The social aspects of an all-girl’s high school in the late sixties were a bit strange. For many students, school was the place they spent as few hours as possible, then got in their cars and drove across town to meet the guys at the coed schools. But some of my best memories are of hanging out after school talking with a couple friends and one of the nuns down in the music wing, or up in biology lab. Or of being alone in the chapel during retreat watching how the light moved across the altar. Or, after classes, going over to the elementary school where our nuns also taught to spend time with G. I met her my sophomore year. She was thirty-one to my fifteen. We shared a love of books and language. She invited me to her classroom to help tutor, and soon I started staying around after school. She gave me the attention I was starved for, reflected back to me a person I had never before seen myself to be, a smart, quick, funny girl with potential to be more than I had been. She introduced me to Rilke, the poem about "loving the questions" that I still carry in my planner came from her. She talked to me about a God who was different than the one I knew from grade school. She had a pretty close relationship with Jesus and talked about Him as she would a friend, a brother. Sometimes she would even pray with me in words that did not come from a prayer book, and I would feel a sense that Someone was there with us in that moment. She had a group of followers. Girls like me whose sense of self was not so certain, who basked in the attention of an interested adult. Oh, how we loved her. Looking back, I know that she was young and immature, and found in us a way to get some of her own needs for love and attention met, too. Some of us, I’m sure were more vulnerable to her than others. I seemed to have no fences on my heart where she was concerned. So she was able to hurt me badly. And one day, when I was fifteen, she said some very scathing things to me. Things that stunned me and left me reeling. Things that burned my heart so badly the scars have never fully disappeared. Even now, there will come times when I will bump up against the ghost of her damages. For my fifteen year-old self, although the pain was searing and powerful, my need to remain connected with her was just as strong. So I held on. I excused her harsh coldness with me, she was only trying to help me, after all. I apologized to her for the faults she saw in me that had prompted her words. I promised to change, to be a better person, the person she wanted me to be. I forgave her, at least in part, for those things she said, though I never, ever, forgot them. We moved on, and we remained friends of a sort well into my adult life, until she left the convent and abruptly severed all ties with those who were connected to that part of her world.

I learned so many things at the Academy that were never on anyone’s lesson plan. About the ability of ill-used words to damage a fragile spirit, about the importance of using one’s power wisely, about the need for gentleness, and compassion and empathy. I also learned about the need we have for connection and the lengths we will go to find and maintain it, no matter what the cost. On the positive side of the ledger, I learned that when my heart was broken, God was there, and in my deepest shame, God loved me still. I learned that even in my worst despair I was not really alone. Sobbing alone on a stairway at fifteen, though, I would have traded it all for a regular old high school day.

God in the Details

I seem to be on a nostalgia roll lately. Maybe it’s reading Jan and Gannett Girl's memoirs, or maybe it’s all the memories stirred up by the Pope and his apparent attachment to the Roman church of the past, but I find I have been taking my own trips down memory lane. As I remember myself in those early years, I think my greatest desire was to be approved of by the adults in my world and, if not liked, then at least left in peace by my peers. I did what was expected, thought lots and said little. Despite my run-ins with the priests over confessions, I still had total faith in the Church and her teachings. It would no more have occurred to me to question some facet of Catholic doctrine than it would have to ask if the sun was going to rise the next morning.

One thing I did question though was where I was going to high school, thereby creating more family conflict than anything I had done in my short life. For some strange reason I had decided that I needed to go to the Academy. All girls. Expensive. Upper class. Not the expected thing for the daughter of a sheet metal worker and housekeeper who lived in the lower class section of town and went to the German Catholic church. The kids from my school went to the diocesan Catholic high school if their parents could afford the tuition, or, if not, to the public high school. My father in particular was incensed by this ridiculous notion of mine. What, he demanded, was I thinking? Just who did I think I was, some rich kid who had nothing better to do than learn to walk around with books on her head? And just who was going to pay for this, he wondered? The public school was free, the diocesan school subsidized by the parish. The Academy was private, and we could not afford it. He talked to me, he even had the Pastor talk to me! But I was determined. In retrospect, I have no idea how I even learned about the existence of this place, let alone why I thought I should go there. It was out of my realm, beyond my world. I was the child of the working poor, blue collar. This place was for the daughters of the doctors and the lawyers and the businessmen. Truly I did NOT belong. But I had decided. I was going and nothing was going to stand in my way. So I contacted them about scholarships, found out there was indeed an accademic competition, entered it, and, I think, largely on determination alone, won a partial tuition scholarship and off I went.

To say that it changed my world would be a gross understatement. The sisters that taught in my grade school were primarily farm girls educated minimally to teach. They were mostly kind, sometimes smart, but they had never taken me an inch beyond the world I already knew. At the Academy, the sisters had Master’s degrees, sometimes more than one. They opened worlds of literature and language, art and music, philosophy and theology that I never dreamed existed. They saw in me a hungry mind and fed me well. I was introduced to de Chardin and Buber, Hammerskjold and Plato, Aeschylus and Dylan Thomas, Bach and Vivaldi and Munch. We went on trips to Chicago to the art and science museums and Minneapolis to the Guthrie. We sang great choral music and we sang it well (or else!). I learned to play the violin. I learned to think and reflect and question. I learned to dream of a bigger world than the one in which I had been raised. We had a chaplain of our very own. We went on retreats in which we were encouraged to think seriously about our own spiritual lives. I met women who were smart and funny and educated, and despite the fact that they were nuns, had traveled to interesting places and had wonderful stories of their lives and their faith they were only too willing to share. In truth, I found them much more interesting than most of my classmates, and developed crushes on some and true friendships with others. They challenged me to think about a future for myself that might include more than motherhood, or the blue collar world I was raised in. Again to the complete bafflement of my family, for whom the completion of high school was a new phenomena, so far accomplished only in my generation, I announced that I was going to college! My parents,who were getting used to their changeling-child by this time, shrugged and gamely filled out family financial aid forms. It was only years later that I could appreciate the real sacrifice they made. My father was an intensely proud and private man who hated to ask for any kind of help from anyone, and having to share his personal information to get that aid must have pained him deeply.

As I reflect on this, I have a sense of awe and immense gratitude. There is so much about all of it that is mysterious. Why I thought I had to go to a school that was obviously "not for me" and how I was able to persist in convincing everyone of that fact, and manage to get myself there amazes me to this day. I cannot even begin to imagine who I would be if I had not gone to the Academy, and my life had stayed contained in the small circumscribed world in which it began. Clearly God has a hand in all of this, as in all of our stories. "Surely it is God who saves me...."

Faith of Our Fathers

With all the activity over in Rome this past week, I have been doing some reflecting about that “pre-Vatican Catholicism” that Benedict seems to want to return the church to so very badly. I knew that church well. I grew up there. When I say I grew up Catholic, I mean: I. Grew. Up. Catholic. The city I lived in was called “Little Rome.” There were seven hills and each one contained a Catholic institution of some sort. When I was little there were at least six motherhouses for nuns, a seminary, two monasteries, a Catholic men’s college, a Catholic women’s college, five Catholic high schools (girls, boys and coed), and more churches than you could count. It was the seat of the Archdiocese, so we had the Cathedral and the mansion for the Archbishop and all the Diocesan offices as well. There were the Catholic Daughters, the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Order of Foresters, Sodalities and more. Of a population of about 50,000 in the early sixties, about 60% was Roman Catholic. I really didn’t know anyone well who was not Catholic. Oh, there were a couple girls in my dance class who were “Protestant,” (whatever that was) but they were highly suspect, and I clearly remember having a sense of not being supposed to get too close to them.

So of course I went to Catholic school. And as part of Catholic education there were things that were taken for granted. We went to Mass every day. When I was in sixth grade I remember for some reason figuring it out and determined that at that point I had probably been to Mass at least 1600 times in my life. We went to Confession every first Friday, as a group from second grade on, starting with our “first confession” prior to First Communion and continuing until we graduated eighth grade. In Lent we made the Stations of the Cross every Friday. The sixth through eight graders sang all the funerals.

The Mass is a big focus for Benedict. He has given permission for the churches to return to the Mass I attended as a child. The one performed in Latin by a man with his back to the people. I don’t know how many churches want to or will do this. It seems strange to me now that anyone would want to. Because when the liturgy was “given to us” in English by Vatican II it was a Very Big Deal. I was twelve. Sixth grade. We had a wonderful and talented priest at that time in our parish who wrote a beautiful English organ Mass. In order to introduce it to the parish he had the sixth graders present it as a choral drama. The “presider” of course was still a boy. It was, after all, the mid-sixties. But I was asked to read the lessons! It may well have been life-changing. To be part of a service, not just an observer, awakened, I think, a sensibility in me that did not have full articulation until much later. What I had always known from being that tiny person in the far away pew, watching the back of the priest as he communed with God in what we had been told was “God’s language,” was that there was something about what happened in the liturgy that was holy and transcendent. I got the mysterium. I knew without a doubt that God was God. He was there in His celestial heaven surrounded by the heavenly hosts and all the saints. And I knew that when the little bells rang, and the priest lifted high the host and chalice, that Jesus was here, really present in His body and blood. And that, somehow, that was God, too. And I knew that when I went to the rail and ever-so-carefully took Him on my tongue (being careful never, ever, ever to let Him touch my teeth, this was Jesus after all), I was somehow taking Jesus into me. And then it didn’t matter so much that the priest was up with God talking one on one in God’s language, because I had Jesus in my heart. I knew this when I was eight. I remember.

There were such strange disconnects. Much of the church at that time was about rules. We fasted from midnight before communion (even little kids). So the school day began with breakfast after Mass. Jesus, Rice Crispies and chocolate milk form the background of my grade school years. A lot was about fear. I had a meltdown the night before my first communion because I thought I had committed a mortal sin after the confession times were done and so could not receive my First Communion! I actually threw up I was so upset. My poor mother had to soothe me. After patiently explaining to me that saying the word naked isn’t a mortal sin, she told me to “go make a good Act of Contrition and I’m sure it will be ok.” When I was about nine a priest refused me absolution because he thought I “was not sorry enough” for whatever sin I had confessed. And when I was thirteen, the pastor apparently thought monthly confession was not enough for the likes of my sorry soul and he made me make a solemn vow, in the confessional, to confess weekly. When my dad found me sobbing in shame and consternation on my bed afer I'd come home, he wangled out me what had transpired. After dad had a talk with the pastor, I was told I could be "dispensed of my vow." I still remember the roses on the rectory carpet as I knelt there before school on Monday morning repeating after that priest whatever words he told me to say that would "dispense" me. And yet my refuge was the church. The place I would go to hide when playground life got to be too much for my sensitive introverted little self would be the front pew by the Mary statue. I would talk to her and her Son Jesus, and things would always get better. And then there was playing Mass. I’d gather the dolls and the bears and get the Wonder bread and Welches and guess who would be the priest? It seems so presumptuous and audacious. How I went from the distant man with his back to us, to me and the dollies and stuffies floors my adult brain! How I did not think I would be struck down dead with lightening is beyond me! But it seemed the most natural thing at the time. We played house and I was the mommy, we played school and I was the teacher, we played church and I was the priest.

Of all the things that shaped and formed me I think the church of my childhood is one of the most powerful. I steeped in it so long the stains will never leave my soul. Like all the things that shape us this has both its glories and its shadows. As I grow into my own priesthood both are emerging in interesting ways.