The Questions We Ask

I find myself lately identifying with the people in the Gospels who ask Jesus questions and raise objections to him.

"We only have five loaves and two fishes." 

"He's been dead for three days."

"We don't know where you are going. How can we know the way?"

I think that what is funny about these exchanges -- and probably why I relate to the people who ask them -- is that the questions are always perfectly reasonable, completely logical objections to what Jesus says.

They are exactly the objections we raise, exactly the kinds of things we might ask when we worry if there is enough, when we wonder if there is hope, when we do not know which way to go.

Yet somehow Jesus always exposes these questions as completely incorrect.

"You are thinking not as God thinks." 

Is it any wonder that we don't always have the right answer? In each of his responses, time after time, Christ reveals that we don't even have the right questions.

The good news is that we don't have to have all the answers -- we have a person. A person who has experienced all of our reasonable questions. All of our wondering where to go and how to go and whether or not we'll get there. All of our fears that we are going to mess up and be proven inadequate.

To all of our wondering and our questions and our perfectly logical objections, Christ answers that He is the way. And so we find ourselves in Lent, a time to draw closer to him, to follow this Wisdom that is not our own to a conclusion that we would never have expected. We don't have to have all of the right answers to the questions that life will throw our way -- all we need is Christ.

In Defense of the Mess

I lugged my broken laptop to the electronics store yesterday, hoping for an easy fix. The man behind the counter plugged it in, pressed the power button, and, within a matter of seconds said very solemnly, "It's the motherboard."

This sounded very serious. It also sounded very basic, as if it was something I should know about, so I did the only thing that seemed logical at the time: I pretended to know.

"Oh no, not tha-at..."

He was not amused. "Do you have an external hard drive?"

I figured that if I couldn't remember what an external hard drive was, I probably did not have it. So I confidently said that I did not.

"Here," he said, plunking down one of those incomprehensibly-difficult-to-open electronic packages on the counter. "I'll transfer the data onto an external hard drive." I nodded.

"Do you want to recycle your computer?"

Oh. So that's what a broken motherboard means. I was frustrated. Now I would have to buy a new computer -- and I thought momentarily of the past five years that that computer had seen of my life. What next?

Around the same time, my mom told me her adventures of taking the grandchildren bowling. Because both of my nieces became sick in the car, they didn't make it to the bowling center and didn't get to spend the day as planned. She spent the next day cleaning up the car, cleaning up the house, and helping take care of them.

As I grow older, I can't help but notice how easily these little things come to my mom -- one setback here, one fix there, one step at a time. "Kids throw up," I've heard her say matter-of-factly and with a laugh. "That's just what they do."

These are the messy parts of life: messy cars, messy houses, broken computers, broken motherboards. They feel like interruptions, but sooner or later, you realize that these messy interruptions make up a good deal of life, and the way you handle them determines a lot about your character and your future.

These are the messy parts of life, maybe the "Ordinary Time" that we hurry through, embarrassed at the pettiness of these setbacks.

But they make a lot more sense when you realize that  life is less about reaching a specific destination (not to disparage destinations, of course) and more about loving: it's more about treating the person behind the counter delivering the bad news or the child in the backseat throwing up as more than an interruption.

Then love becomes action, interrupting our very messy, ordinary time and giving it meaning and hope and plenty of reasons to laugh at ourselves.

Things I Learn Only When I Am Sick

I love life. I love pure existence. I love the seeing snowflakes fall gently on the ground and the sound of raindrops and the smell of fresh-cut grass and the feel of ocean sand. I love music and dancing and reading and learning and feeling.

And then I get sick. Suddenly the only thing I love is a warm blanket and a bed. It can be just a cold, or a particularly low-energy week brought on by my low-thyroid, but either way, suddenly existence doesn't seem so great.

But sickness is part of life, and so I've decided to embrace it and write about it because we all get sick. It's so human. We might as well find some meaning in it, maybe even a little joy in it.

Mostly, I would say that sickness has been a school of humility for me. It usually happens when I've been doing too much, or not taking care of myself, and my body reminds me, "You have your limits." Also, I find that all of the things I might be tempted to take pride in -- being a patient person, being a good listener, being a good worker -- well, they don't come so easily when I am sick. Any credit that I was giving myself for being a good person usually has to go out the window when I'm sick; the slightest bit of a cold always reminds me, rather comically, that all it takes is some congestion and I am not really that pleasant to be around.

And I do think that there is a joy to be found in humility and in limitations. Humility, at its core, is freedom. There's an old-school prayer called the Litany of Humility that says as much. It's a beautiful prayer, although when you first read it, it sounds a little bit harsh. It is all about how humility is deliverance from a desire to be more than what we are. That desire to be more than what we are, to rely on ourselves completely, to control our lives and what others think of our lives completely -- that desire is ultimately not going to bring us to true freedom. True freedom is a freedom to be small and rely entirely on God and give ourselves completely to him and to others. And it gives levity to life, too, forcing us to learn to laugh at our smallness, to take ourselves less seriously.

Nothing reminds us that we are not what we want to be, we are not without our limits, more than sickness. The truth, the core of our existence, is we are entirely reliant on God's love. And that realization is ultimately freeing and liberating, even though I wish it came with fewer sneezes.

Winter

What I wanted to write:
"Winter is awful. But -- here's the bright side, folks."

What I actually am thinking:
"Winter is awful. There is no bright side, and if I slip on the ice, somebody's going down with me."

What the (slightly) more reasonable part of my brain decided to write:

There is this scene from the movie Cinderella Man that sticks out in my head, even years after I have seen the movie. It takes place in the winter, during the Great Depression, and Russell Crowe's family is hungry and worried. And at one point, one of the children looks up to his mother and asks why all these bad things are happening. Her answer isn't very philosophical.

She turns to the child and says, "Sometimes life is just hard. For no reason at all."

For some reason, every time I am trudging in the snow, I remember that quote and I remember that sometimes life is just hard. Sometimes it's just cold outside, and you would like to grin and bear it and find meaning in it and be joyful and loving, and maybe someday you will be like that, but right now -- right now, it's okay to just be cold.

To look back on all of your blessings. To think forward to the spring when things will be blooming again. To be generous to those less fortunate who have to spend the night in this weather. And to simply trudge on through the snow, with a quiet, undramatic faithfulness to our daily duties that still gives us a sense of peace even in the winter. We can be still and still faithful, even when our footing is unsure, even when the wind is blowing.

And in that quiet, simple faithfulness, we discover that faith, hope, and love are all still there, even in the winter, not because of anything we do, but because God is there, making up for what we lack.

That quiet, simple faithfulness makes us available to God and free for the next step. We follow him through the winter-y moments with a simple faithfulness, and that simple act of surrender draws ever deeper into his love, emptying us of ourselves so that we can be filled with something more, dying to ourselves so that we can bear more fruit.

For those of you who love the cold -- enjoy the last few weeks of real winter. For the rest of you who are like me: trudge on.

Stars in the Trees

About this time a few years ago, my niece and I were walking in Charlottesville up to the Corner, where I had promised her a treat. I was holding her hand as we walked through the Grounds of UVa. It was a beautiful winter evening. There were Christmas lights on the trees, but I hadn't noticed them. I was worried about the street crossing and the people and the time and whether or not I was going to be able to finish my paper that was due the next day.

And suddenly, she stopped dead in her tracks and forced me to stop too. "Look, Auntie Barbara!" she said with awe and wonder. "There's stars in the trees!"

I looked up and saw the trees on the Corner, lined up and lit up for Christmas. I wondered for a moment if I ought to correct her, to explain that there were actually filaments and bulbs made up of plastic and electricity in the trees. Instead I paused and looked at the trees and saw that she was right. For a moment, I saw the world the way a four-year-old sees it, and I saw that her way was a little bit more accurate than mine.

"Oh. You're right," I said quietly.

Christmas is a good time to remember the wisdom we learn from children, the wisdom of living in the present and receiving the gift of the present moment. And then it can be a time of being still and seeing things exactly as they are: not as we imagine them, not as we fear them.

Poet Marie Howe has an exercise every year that she teaches her poetry students. She says that she tells them to simply write down three things that they see every day. And it's funny, she says, how difficult it is when they first start, to avoid comparison and metaphor, and to simply see things as they are. But after a few weeks of this careful observing, she says:

"Then this amazing thing happens. Clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff, and it thrilling. The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, the maple tree, the blue jay."

Everyone feels the change, the shift within themselves that has taken place when they finally begin living "the sacrament of the present moment."

That is the space where life happens, where gratitude happens, where poetry happens.

I think that's one of the reasons why the Church insists on Advent, and doesn't do the retail world's "Hallow-Thanks-Christmas." The quiet space of Advent draws us out of our busy-ness and into the sacrament of the present moment, into the realization that the world isn't only made up of plastic and electricity: the physical world is always pointing us to something deeper than itself -- though we are physical creatures and must begin by paying attention to our physical world.

Advent is the place of paying attention, the place where we stop -- "look!" as my niece said -- and only when we stop and look can we begin to approach the Nativity scene and see something more than a poor family with their baby in a manger.

Pious Old Women

Today I was forced to think about two things that are kind of scandalous about being Catholic in 2013:

1. Relics.

2. Pious Old Women.

First, relics. "This is a tiny piece of a bone of a saint." Or, "This is a tiny piece of a cloth that once touched a tiny piece of a bone of a saint." I've often wondered about how to react to relics. It is so foreign to our modern minds to even think about death, much less to keep bones around where you can see them.

Second, perhaps part of the hesitation with relics is that they are so often beloved by that other difficulty, that is, pious old women. You know who I am talking about. The old lady who comes half an hour early to church to pray the rosary loudly (and perhaps to tell you that you should be a nun). The woman who says uncomfortable things quite comfortably. 

And so it took me by surprise today to find myself in line at the Basilica behind a number of pious old women waiting to venerate a relic of St. Peter. Again I was struck by the strangeness of it, how different it was from anything I would encounter on a daily basis, how almost-comical it would be if I didn't believe that it was true: here's a piece of a bone of the man who walked on water.

And again I was struck by that same "other-ness" of the pious old women with their flip phones taking pictures of it. I smiled to myself wondering if they had a whole album on their tiny phones of tiny relics, and maybe they flipped open those phones during Thanksgiving with their families as they told their niece that she was dressed like a hussy and she shouldn't do that because -- "Look at this relic."

But my cynical sense of humor was interrupted by the Monsignor who happened to be having a conversation at the end of the line with just one of those women, one I know rather well. He didn't have the look of panic on his face that most people have when they speak with her -- the look of "How am I going to find a way to get out of this conversation?" He didn't have the look of someone who was secretly laughing at her piety, as she went on about the time that she once sang in a chorus that sang for the Pope's visit. He didn't have the look of someone who was condescending to speak to her -- and he might have, considering that this is DC, the name-dropping, networking city, where important people attend Mass at the Basilica.

No, I looked at his face as he attentively listened and smiled at her, and I looked at the faces of the pious old women in front of the relics, and I saw the same expression. The Monsignor, too, was venerating a relic.

And that's when I really realized how Christianity places such a radical emphasis on the beauty of each human person the entire person, body and soul. Even the tiniest part of that person. Even the oldest person. C.S. Lewis once said, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” 

So today I said a prayer of Thanksgiving for pious old women and for all that they challenge us to be. 

Paying Attention

God never said it would be easy, did he? Ever have just "one of those days" where all of the smallest things go wrong? One of those days where you are pretty sure that you are not adequate to the task, not really able to do all the things that you want to do, all the things you are being asked to do?

I've learned to pay attention on those days most of all. Grace will show up. It will show up in a thousand little ways, just when you discounted there being any hope of it at all.

I sat down in the middle of the afternoon on just one of those days, feeling defeated. There were a million things to do, and had I done them? It was only 1pm -- how was I so tired already? I felt myself comparing me to other people -- that person would know what to do, this person would never lose the energy. I wanted to say a prayer, but no prayer came. I would just have to be faithful, to trudge on.

And then I got a text from a friend who said, "Remember: you are loved. To infinity."

I could have dismissed the moment as a sweet thought, maybe a warm and fuzzy thing. But something told me to hold onto that thought for a moment longer. To pay attention. It was more than a friend texting something kind -- although seriously, what a wonderful friend. It was a moment of grace in a moment of discouragement. We have to hold onto those little moments. We have to believe that those moments are God speaking to us through others.

Sometimes on those days, it comes in a simple breeze that reminds us of the Holy Spirit. In the smile of another person. St. Vincent de Paul said that "Love is inventive even to infinity." God is always there, breaking through, trying to tell us that he will see us through those days, telling us in a million different ways -- through prayer, through others, through the beauty of nature, through music -- grace is there, inventive even to infinity, determined to show us that we are loved, and we must be looking for it, we must be waiting for it, waiting to be surprised by this love that is breaking through even when we have "one of those days."