Sometimes We All Need Reminders

Woke up in the middle of the night feeling like I'd somehow flunked a quiz.  Writing/publishing's been slow. Weight's remained steady despite exercise (Consistently) since July 4th.  In short, life felt rather like a dog day of summer.  I'd fallen asleep after rereading "A Horse and His Boy," by C.S. Lewis, and in that early hour of the morning, the chastening of Bree, the War Horse struck home.

Aslan appears.  "Now, Bree," he said, "you poor, proud, frightened Horse, draw near. Nearer still, my son.  Do not dare not to dare.  Touch me. Smell me. Here are my paws. Here is my tail. These are my whiskers.  I am a true Beast."

"Aslan," said Bree in a shaken voice, "I'm afraid I must be rather a fool."
"Happy the Horse who knows that while he is still young. Or the Human either."

Bree needed to learn what the hermit told him, but resisted until Aslan appeared.  "My good horse," said the Hermit, who approached them unnoticed because his bare feet made so little noise on that sweet, dewy grass. "My good Horse, you've lost nothing but your self-conceit. No, no, cousin. Don't put back your ears and shake your mane at me. If you are really humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must listen to sense. You're not quite the great horse you'd come to think."  I thought about my frustration with not getting published or the job I wanted, and the wise words of a friend, about being willing to trust the right position would be there, and not wanting to surrender that bit of the ego.  To which God simply asks, "Why not?"

Sometimes, my self worth gets tied up in my weight, my accomplishments, or even asserting having ten children.  None of these are in any way related to anything other than what I've done or not done.  They have only so much merit as facts about me, for the having and the doing and the weighing are not where the worth lies, however often I misjudge myself.

I thought of our kids.  I love our children not for their ability to run a 5K or grades or even their obedience (when it happens).  I love them because they are.  Just so, my husband loved me long before any of this part of our lives happened and I him, and my parents, before I could do squat.  Love doesn't require us to do, but to be.  God loves us and we can do quite literally nothing without Him, and nothing "for" Him, but to love Him back.  We can only respond to God's love with our own imitation of His generosity and selflessness, with all that we allow ourselves to surrender. 

This morning, in my Facebook feed, a friend posted a quote, "Be so good, they can't ignore you." by Steve Martin.  I thought about that quote and while it's true that one must persist and keep honing one's craft no matter what, it is a calling to be good so as to be noticed and I believed in that moment, that's exactly what in some cases (not always and not all), I'd done.   At which point, the words of the Hermit to Bree hit home once more, after acknowledging he's braver and cleverer than the non-talking horses he's lived with; "It doesn't follow that you'll be anyone very special in Narnia. But, as long as you know you're nobody very special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse."  and Bree still struggles before making it to Narnia with whether horses who talk, do horsey things like roll in the grass.  For him, pride is a constant thorn, because he wants to be special and he's used to thinking of himself that way.   He's used to valuing himself for how he is viewed, and for what he's done.

He rolls in the grass before he gets there, just to make sure he gets one last chance to enjoy himself before getting to Narnia.  While C.S. Lewis doesn't mention it, as he's wrapping up the story, we can know, in Narnia, Bree probably rolled with abandon, because he's finally surrendered that self-conceit. 

I'd made my list of things to do for the day.  I added confession.  Why?  Because that's how I roll. 

Lent is Hard

My daughter came home from a half day and looked at lunch with disgust.  She normally loves tuna salad. I gave her a look and asked,  "What's up?"

"Lent is hard." she declared.  She'd done the water project where you pay a quarter if you drink something other than water every time.  I'm guessing now that we're a week from Easter, the project's appeal had grown old, and I'm guessing, she'd run out of quarters.  

No one likes going into the desert, finding their flaws dotting the landscape of the soul like painful cacti.  We' much rather float in an ocean and skim along the surface, but the goal as C.S. Lewis said, is to go "deeper and deeper in."

Maybe it was the fasting that led me to think of how we like syrup on pancakes, icing on frosting, the crispy skin of chicken, but these things alone, tasty as they may be, lack substance without the food they coat.  We need to get to the meat of things, to the marrow, and for that, we must cease staying where everything is sweet and easy.  

She began making brownies.  No one in the family gave up sweets so I let her go about the business of making them.  It's a fun project and it allowed me to just be with her as she became less irritated about drinking water, and more focused on creating something good.  That's what Lent is for, the sacrifice of meat or milk, money or caffeine isn't so we'll spend all our energies noting we gave that up, we miss it, we can't have it, but so we stop going through our spiritual life mindlessly, and get on with the work of creating something better with our time and our selves.  

By the time we cleaned up, her mood changed.  She plinked a quarter in the box and poured a glass of milk to have with her brownies.  The other children came in and pounced on the treat, and when it was finished, she felt the satisfaction of their praise and her own cooking.   The discomfort of not having what she wanted, turned into something better when she stopped focusing on it, and instead, turned outward.  

After helping her clean up, I looked at the pan of brownies, still half of them remained. Today is Friday, a fasting and abstinence day.  They were tasty walnut brownies with a touch of cherry to the batter.  Delicious.  I want more.  Walking away to the computer, I've come full circle as my brain begs for another brownie with the phrase echoing in my head, "Lent is hard."

Real Food

Everyone understands the difference between diet ice cream and the real thing.

It's true at first for diet soda as well.  But if you drink enough of the stuff, you start to forget what the sugar laden version is like, and come to prefer the not real carbonated concoction.  What we do as habit comes to define us.  

Ergo, if we start to divest ourselves from the real world, staying plugged into the computer and our Ipod and texting rather than talking, having virtual friends with no actual face time and playing simulated instruments rather than sitting to practice on the real piano or guitar, we will eventually grow to think of those pursuits as being really real, when they are not.   We will prefer the virtual simmulated world we can control to the messy organic chaotic experiece of the real which invovles struggling if not suffering as the price of progress.

If you read the Last Battle by C.S.Lewis, he talks about the real Narnia as opposed to the experience all of us have enjoyed over the 7 books, (Silver Chair and Prince Caspian not withstanding).  In the real Narnia, water is really wet, as opposed to here which now in comparison, one understands to be dry water.   Playing Rock Band is dry water to practicing the hard slug day in and day out of mastering a real drum set or guitar.   So also, liking and commenting on facebook, while it has promoted reconnecting with people in a tangential way, is not the realness of going out to lunch or actually encountering other people. 

Today, we struggle not to become a nation full of unreal people who do not have the self knowledge that they are as of yet, not real because they haven't yet surrendered sufficiently to love to become fully alive. They go on about their lives, Buzz Lightyear pre-epiphany of his flightless state, superimposing on the world their ideas of themselves and presuming it is correct.  They drink but do not taste, eat but do not savor, and practice to no effect. 

Why?  Simple.  Real is complicated. Real demands more of us than our fallen selves, absent grace want to or will give.

This weekend, we went to mass en masse, and my younger children ensured that whatever else we were that Sunday, we were real.   Three children sang like angels but also rearranged chairs, complained about how long mass was, and one played glom onto Mom like a skin graft even when she's kneeling while the other two pushed for a turn.   The four year old sat on his brother's shoulders because he kept touching the light switches or pushing over books, the two year old insisted on taking walks in the back foyer every five minutes or becoming completely physically rigid in an arch three point stand of her head and feet while screaming.  

The older set, not to be left out, had a cold war over the sign of peace, and an editorial in one of the songs, where one child sang loudly and well to emphasize that another wasn't singing at all.   "Am I being good Mommy?" one child was asking.  Another was declaring in a loud voice and partially crying, "I'm not being good. I'm never good." and wailing despite hugs, shushes and distractions "Hey, there's a song, let's sing!"  I felt the weight of why are we killing ourselves doing this?  What is the point? What is our purpose? Who needs all this grief?  Did they hear anything? Are they hearing anything?  Did I hear anything?   I could have been sleeping....but then, what we practice...we become...I would have become...asleep...(Sigh I hate/love when that flash of understanding rebukes in an instant what I was happy grousing about only two minutes ago).  

What we profess...we come deeper to understand...my children, me, none of us were perfect...we were here because of our severe imperfection, we were here with all our real realness. Thus it is with the Eucharist, this is the real presence of Christ, otherwise it is not worth our time or our energies, it is real food, everything else we eat, no matter how delicious or virtuous or decadent or wonderful, is dry water.   We were here to become more real.  We were here to eat real food and real drink so we could go out into the world and help make it more real.