Sifting through my thoughts...to find where they go

I have tried for mamy years to write things.  I learned to write with poetry, with literary devices that popped the sentences and made them rush out onto the page like confetti and explosions. I was and probably still am to some extent, a Pinkie Pie Catholic --in love with the feasts, with the beauty, with the promise of connection, with all the aching glory of what the mass is.  I desire community, I crave fellowship.

Loving all things Catholic, I found my favorite spots...the daily mass, certain columnists, and a few podcasts that always seemed to be filling rather than full.  I wrote for various places, trying to find a home and lamenting as a writer, of being a b-teamer, because I didn't quite fit any particular slot.

Mommy blogger?  Yes, but more a humor writer.

Mom of a kid with special needs? Well yes, but he's not the sole focus of our lives.

Prayerful person? Well yes.  I pray.  I know God answers. I often know what the answer is.  But that's all a gift, and not my merit or my capacity, it is merely, God invites us to pray, and we pray and we do what we can with God pouring into us the grace to do it better than we could on our own.

Saints? I love them. Not an expert by any stretch on any particular one though I have my favorites.

I wrote and still write like I prepare dinner --competently but with no particular specialty and sometimes without all the ingredients, time, care or success as others.

In recent weeks, life in the bigger world has thrust its biggness onto all of us, and we're called to respond.  Now all the stuff from before, as important as it seemed to me, as fun, or as wonderful as it might even have been, feels like "so much straw."  Like everything before was a warm up, an apprenticeship, and now, the real work begins. 

As Catholics, we can't bubble wrap our lives away from what is, in order to sustain ourselves comfortably.  That's dismissing the crowd to go fend for themselves.  It's saying Catholicism is okay for when it fit into the mold, but when I don't, it's wrong.  That's not following the faith, that's being a mostly agreeable person who actually fancies themselves a better pope than the pope. 

So what does it mean for writing now?  I'm not sure except I'm being pushed, and that's hard because I can still reflexively write the stuff I've done, but it's not something I should do.  The reality of being a Catholic is recognizing there are seasons to each mission, and just as none of my children are toddlers or even young children anymore, that season of life is over.  There will be different fruits in the season to come. 

So what season am I in?  Don't know that yet either, just not what it was.  I still want the fellowship I once felt across the internet with countless voices, but it isn't there anymore.  There are factions, divided by those who love and hate Pope Francis, by politics, by policy, by the mass, by masks, by how we hold the Eucharist and how we say the Our Father, by everything and anything.  We spend a million words on what divides us and why everyone else is wrong.   It's a funny thing to me, because when we do any examination, it's never what the other person is doing wrong, it's what we've done wrong...so I sit there thinking of all that binds us --the same Body and Blood of Christ, the same Holy Spirit, the same desire for living the Faith, and wonder how these individual fiefdoms could crop up like bad weeds to choke the life out of everything.  How do I help reduce the weeds? 

 Begin creating community, breathing on the embers.  Remind everyone of the more that sustains us, the real, as opposed to the personal preferred.  We've been obsessing over the wrapping and not the gift.   I don't know what it means in terms of writing, I only know what it doesn't.  It doesn't mean safe.

It means being willing to lose when you write what is true.

I sat wondering if I'd been an artificial sweetener to the Catholic media, rather than what I should be and I still don't have a full answer to that, only that I wrote what I believed at the time, and that what is, needs to be better than what it is.