good for the soul

watching and waiting

Hey! I’m over at Catholic New Media Roundup Advent Calendar! You should go over there every day to see what’s going on!


One of my favorite memories from Advent is from twenty years ago. It was early fall, and our second child, Christy, was just a few months old. Our parish announced that they were recruiting families for a Christmas pageant to be held in early December, so I dutifully gathered the flyer and went on with my life. It was to be a full re-creation of what Bethlehem might have looked like 2000 years ago (or maybe, what the set-builders and actors thought it would look like).

As the date for the pageant approached, the pleas for a couple with an infant became a bit more pressing, and finally, my husband and I attended one of the meetings. I had very long black hair at the time, and my husband had a full beard. When the spunky little nun who was running the show saw us she declared that we were the Holy Family and wouldn’t even need any make-up. We laughed, were fitted for our costumes, and took the only direction we’d need for the evening: Joseph, you’re going to escort your wife to the city gates, sign the census, and find a place to stay.

That was it.

As it happens, it was one of the coldest nights on record in South Florida. I handed off Christy to her godmother, and John Joseph and I began the rather uncomfortable trial of finding a place to stay. The market was bustling with people, there were animals everywhere, vendors selling their wares, Roman soldiers and beggars at odds with each other. And everywhere we went, we were turned away. At one point, we tried to get something warm to drink, and we were scorned.

I can tell you we were getting a little desperate to find our kid and return to the welcoming warmth of our own home, but as they say, the show must go on. Finally, one of the innkeepers took pity on us and led us to a stable (conveniently located on a stage in a field behind the market), and the Angel of the Lord appeared, in resplendent glory, hanging from a cherry picker high above the crowd and read the story of the Nativity.

Was it kitschy? You bet. But it was also amazingly well done, and for a moment, I had walked in Mary’s footsteps, and felt closer to her than I had ever before. We were both young mothers, trying to take care of our babies, focused on their warmth and safety at the moment while trusting that our husbands would take care of us and find what we needed.

That common humanity that we shared with the Holy Family that night changed me in small ways. It opened my heart, interestingly enough, to Mary, and to the immensity of her submission to God. Her “yes”  and, we often forget, Joseph’s “yes” , together set the stage, with each playing their parts, for my our salvation.

That pageant changed the way I looked at Christmas. It was no longer an end, but a beginning. Those days leading up to Christmas day became, at first, a period of reflection as I thought about the difficulty of Mary’s journey to Bethlehem. I lived in a constant state of discomfort in that last trimester — how much more did she go through? It became, for me, a deeply personal journey of discovery about my own faith — taken in baby steps, led along the path by Mary and other faithful people who have come in and out of my life  and shared their own journeys.

I can’t say that I understood it all that night. I had a moment of insight, but perhaps that’s all I needed to get me going. After all, the Holy Spirit just needs a chance, right?

Something changed in me that night — perhaps the way I understood Advent. We understand it to be a time of reflection, waiting, and especially reconciliation, but it is much more.

During this season we wait and prepare for the coming of our Lord, but it was my realization that night many years ago as I held my own child up for the world to see, that it was only the beginning. That the mystery of the Incarnation was a necessary step in a grander scheme, and that what we are preparing for is not under a tree in a creche or a brightly decorated box, but in Jesus Christ — that we may know the depth of God’s love.

“In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him” (1 Jn 4:9).

When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the Savior’s first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming. By celebrating the precursor’s birth and martyrdom, the Church unites herself to his desire: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (CCC 524).

And so we wait, and prepare ourselves for the celebration of Christ’s birth, but also, the anticipation of His return.

a little lesson from Mother Nature

My daughter posted this hilarious link of ducklings getting blown away by a gust of wind and I have to say, honestly, that it cracked me up. I replayed it several times, laughing louder each time because it really tickled my funny bone.

It reminded me of that kids’ toy, Weebles, and their tagline, Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.  Then I thought to myself, Self, there’s something bigger going on here. Sure, it’s hilarious to watch the ducks get blown away and then scurry back to their momma duck, only to get blown away again. Epic!

And I thought, waitaminute, it IS epic.

It’s just like our lives, isn’t it? One minute we’re walking along with the pack, each of us intent on whatever path it is that we’re following, and then, out of the blue comes this wind that blows us off course. Maybe it’s an illness, or a lay-off, or an unexpected death, and we roll away, pushed by those forces and left far from the path, a little bruised, a little battered, probably a little disoriented.

This is when the video gets good. You see, the ducklings do two things. First, they get up and shake themselves off, then they seek each other. They look for the momma duck, and they get back in line to resume their path. Go watch that video again, and when you stop laughing watch the ducklings: they seek each other and they get right back in line to follow the leader.

Shouldn’t we do that, too?

things that go bump…

I guess I am absolutely and utterly surrounded by noise. There’s all kinds of ambient noise in my house, and since I have other noise going on, I never really pay attention to the loud hum of the air-conditioning or the ticking of the cuckoo clock in the foyer (yes, from the Black Forest; yes it has a cuckoo bird that cuckoos on the hour and the half-hour — and yes, I will murder it one day).

There are ceiling fans on. The TV’s playing for the sake of it. Computers have fans that are too loud to be normal. A dog snores softly in a corner.

And because the weather has finally decided to change, a house that makes all manner of scary settling sounds.

I don’t suppose I am conscious of these sounds during the week because my head is filled with other kinds of noise…worries, responsibilities, distractions, chores…you name it. But on the weekend, when I slowly begin to release the noise in my head, I become aware of the not-silence in the house.

It’s a comforting cacophany, those ambient sounds. They speak of security, and the known, and the intimacy of the home front. When I get up in the early morning — before the sun comes up, those background sounds come to the forefront and keep me company in my prayers and my other morning routines even as I make my own noises, opening and shutting doors, running water, the random phrase or prayer uttered out loud in distraction.

I like the idea of being a heartbeat.

a different kind of beautiful

On Friday I went on a little adventure to a local state park, Stone Mountain, and took a hike. I spent some time by myself, sat in the shade, thought, prayed a little, and wrote a little. This is the companion piece to Friday’s post:


Besides the beautiful and life-affirming daisies that I encountered on my walk, there were a number of very beautiful damaged trees — trees that had evidently been hit by lightning strikes, or perhaps other things within the environment. Bugs, soil erosion, who knows, had affected them. Some of the trees, in clusters, had to “learn” to grow around the obstacles and get a stronghold in whatever way was possible.

More than the daisies, my eyes were drawn to these trees. They stood out, and the casual passersby might think they were eyesores, and even wonder why the park didn’t remove them in order to restore the vista to a postcard scene.

I am thankful for their testimony. It’s easy to be green and lush when all the conditions are perfect — but what is that perfection? Are not all the trees in the cluster exposed to the same conditions? Yet one gets singled out for the lightning strike, and that changes everything.

It damages the tree, certainly, but then something happens — the tree adapts. And in adapting it becomes something else. Because of its strength it survives and changes — perhaps subtly, perhaps more dramatically. The result, though, is usually the same. The tree stands out — its scars are beautiful because they are present. It stands out — not because it is an eyesore but because it has a character that separates it from the sameness of the other trees. Each scar, each broken branch, each exposed root has character, and depth, and a history of suffering … and strength. And still, in spite of its crooked form, it stands among the others.

To me, those are the most beautiful trees of all.

Look, Mom! I’m not here today…

I’m playing in Dulcinea’s sandbox today. I’m talking about the night that Linda and I made some really ugly rosaries and burned our fingers with nylon twine. We were new to the whole process and made a lot of mistakes, but it had a happy ending. I promise!

I have a rosary that my bestest ever BFF, Linda, made for me many years ago. One evening we found ourselves sitting at my kitchen table drinking wine and making all-twine rosaries for Rosary Army. We were just learning how to make these rosaries, and to be honest, they were turning out … well … not very pretty. [read the rest here]

The delightfully charming Sarah Reinhard has once again opened up her very merry and very Mary blog, Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering, to guest posts, and guess what? I sent her football-shaped little Oreos to bribe her for a slot.

She’s so easy that way.

Of course, it might have been that I held her cowboy hat hostage for a month, but she’s the one that left it behind (I just want to set that record straight, especially now that my post has gone live).

So run, don’t walk on over there and see what else is cookin’ at her blog.

“Don’t you think daisies are the friendliest flower?”

Today I did something a little out of the ordinary for a Friday morning — I went to Stone Mountain and took a leisurely hike up the mountain trail.

Leisurely is code for I had to stop a couple of times because it was pretty steep at the end and I kinda appreciate staying alive.

Anyway, thoroughly delightful. I wandered around and took pictures while catching my breath and continuing up up up.

As far as hikes go, it’s pretty short … about a mile. But the terrain is uneven, and rocky, and there are places where it’s sandy and slippery, and others where water is running down, so for a middle-aged out of shape broad, that mile was a hike. Of course, it’s a lot faster coming down.

The morning was fairly cool and there was quite a breeze blowing, especially at the top.  In fact, I couldn’t have asked for a lovelier day for my little excursion. It gave me a lot of time to think, when I was inclined to think, but mostly, I let my mind go blank and just be. Kind of nice not to think about anything at all.

Of course, that just usually leads to more thinking, and I noticed a couple of things.  I went with the intent of photographing the Stone Mountain Daisies, which are still blooming even though it’s a little late already. As it happens, there were plenty, overgrown, even, but my favorites are the ones that just kind of sprout out of nowhere.

As I would crouch down to get close for a couple of the shots, I realized that they were facing the morning sun, straining, almost yearning for the light. I looked carefully at the next batch, and sure enough, they were facing the sun. It’s hard not to see the obvious there, right? We can learn much from the natural world, and those pretty little daisies, simple, sweet, and so cheerful and carefree (indulge my personification) taught me a lovely little lesson.

“Learn from the way the wild flowers grow.  They do not work or spin.  But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them.”(Matthew 6:28-29)

The pretty little daisies were showing me the way — to look up, brightly, into the Son.