Small Success Thursday

In the past, one of our themes was "March on, God will provide."  We started saying it whenever money got tight and somehow, things would ease. 

We started saying it as a joke when we were faced with a year of uncertainty; but it kept being true despite all our rational thinking and cleverness and American independent first child like thinking.   We kept being stunned by God's lavish abundance when we were nervous or anxious about money, about anything. 

Despite the daily mana in the desert, the Israelites doubted and grumbled and struggled.  Despite the constant showering of opportunities, good fortune and graces, I too doubted, grumbled and struggled.  Saint Faustina knew what we find so hard, how to trust in Jesus, how to trust in God's heart to take on ours with all our trials, troubles and difficulties.  Blessed Mother Teresa also emphasized how utterly profoundly free falling a trust is required if you read about her passages where she has loved Jesus in the night.  Is it any wonder that the modern saints in this world of relativism, sophisitcation, and technology and nuance, emphasize clarity, charity, simplicity and trust?

God keeps coming back and permeating everything until I surrender.  So today, I celebrate God's lavish courtship of my soul. 

1) My children were imploding yesterday and so I drove to the church near our home and phoned to get appointments.  We went to confession, all of us.  It was like hitting the reset button  on our family dynamics and the surest sign of all of this, was the laughter that permeated conversations after that sojourn to the rectory. 

2) Writing requires submissions and for some reason, I haven't been submitting as of late. You may have noticed more links, more repeats, less humor.  Everything I wrote felt unfinished, unclear or too personal. Not funny, not reflective, not real. 

What was I struggling with?  Revealing too much, romancing too much, not quite getting at whatever it was I wanted to write and not being quite willing to be so exposed.  The more you write, the more you spiral into revealing and at some point, you get a bit shell shocked and uncertain.  Then you either quit or you grow a shell or you repeat yourself so as to not continue to advance an intimacy with the readers or you surrender to the reality that if you want to really write, you will be revealed.   I hadn't wanted to surrender but writing the same thing grew very boring very fast, growing a shell meant not being honest and that wouldn't work and lying was out of the question; so that left the final option.  The Catholic Standard had asked for a story on my son Paul.  I hadn't wanted to do it for the longest time for reasons I could only ascribe as artificial.  Yesterday, I finally wrote it.  Yesterday it was accepted. 

3)  I've begun laying out the clothes at night, the lunch bags at night and putting the tooth brushes and pj's out in the morning when I'm making the beds and it has decreased the level of stress at night and in the morning considerably.  No rash hunting for whatever.  

4) Finished the Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary of Saint Louis de Montfort for this year with going to confession. 

5) Got back on the exercise wagon.  153.  Still shooting for ten pounds by July.  Haven't lost hope. 

Hope all of you have a great week!  See you over at Small Success Thursday at Family and Faith Live!

Too Many

This past weekend, I took my son to a party. I didn't know the family so I stayed. Eventually, the conversation took place. It almost always takes place any time I go somewhere new. "How many children do you have?" And when I answered, “Nine.” The response was, "You have too many." I made a joke and went out to help with games. I am not mad at the person who said this, it happens too often to spend time being mad. But I would not have been at that party if I hadn't been willing to have child number six. And even back then, people said, "Too many."

Eventually, he sought me out and revealed he was one of six. He never explained why I had too many, but I worried one day my children will say, "Too many" to some other mother because they didn't feel satisfied with home. I hope not. I hope they go to school and out into the world and come home feeling filled; that love for them brims over everywhere and there's always time and hugs and attention that is simply theirs and theirs alone. We try. We will fail but we will never cease trying.

"Too many." "Did you plan this?" "I guess it's okay if you can afford it.""What about me time?" all these statements are ways of asking the same thing, "Why didn't you limit yourself with this age of birth control? Why aren't you now?"

Simple. We're supposed to pour our whole selves out and not leave one drop. Jesus doesn't send any of the 5000 away. Even though He had enough for just his 12. We're supposed to practice loving infinitely here in order to be ready for when we have forever in the presence of the one who is Love. God would not say, "Too many" and so we should not either.

Going to mass, sometimes my husband and I take shifts and I feel the absence of my "too many" so much so, it is more distracting than if I had to manage those too many others that aren't present. As a kid, whenever we went to reunions, I always counted who came and noted who couldn't; and I pined for whoever didn't show. I always wanted everyone; and I was even happier when we could add extras to the everyone that was there. That moreness was in the food and the music and the people at the party and I would wrap myself in that feeling of being surrounded by so many I loved.

So when I got to visit my family in Texas, I still felt the absence of those who were nearby but not able to be with us and still missed that my total joy was not possible because so many of the sources of my happiness were somewhere else. Heaven will eliminate that great separation from everyone we love or have loved or who have loved us. We will be a seamless garment of Christ. Utopia is not a lack of want or need, but a society peopled by souls who rejoice in not merely service but in the opportunity to serve out of love for the One who is Love and it is a state of society only possible through love.

We will all get to be fishers of souls on Earth when we get to Heaven, trying to make sure we get everyone where they need to be by our prayers and our petitions; but that means we must practice catching souls today as well. We can never have too many then, and so we cannot love too many then or now.

Blessed Mother Teresa observed the multitude hungry for love that are everywhere and asked us to find our own Calcutta, and make it something brighter. It is love that never places limits on how long we serve or how long we submit or how long we wait in joyful hope. Love will demand that we meet physical needs of those around us; love will demand that we know them; and love will demand that we serve them willingly. It is the only real choice we make in life, not to love the few we know which in turn will make us unable to bear the moreness of still more others; or to embrace everyone possible, ever expanding towards infinity.

I wish I'd known what to say at the party to the statement, "Too many." but I'm grateful for the opportunity to reflect and discern the answer:
"No such thing."

P.S. For the record, not expecting. Just in case anyone was reading between the lines and getting either excited or nervous.

Peace on Earth to People of Good Will*

*Some reflections from some comments and several discussions.

Peace is the first gift offered man by the angels at Christ's birth, and the first gift offered by Christ upon his Resurrection. Peace is that warm sense of community that comes from knowing that all of us long for the hearth in our homes, that all of us hope to be part of the 5000 fed. Genuine Peace is freedom from sin, not freedom from want or need. We need only look at the lives of celebrities to see that theirs are lives full of everything, except peace or conversely at the women who join the Missionaries of Charity. Their lives intentionally have very little, yet they hold an abundance of peace.

Peace does not come simply from having a military that can take down opposition with force (power); that is the mistake of order for peace; or having a full belly and all physical needs accounted for; the error of satiation for peace, or from the knowledge that no one is better off than one's self; the error of equality for peace. Security, Order and Equality and peace are not synonymous, the three are reflective of peace, but not its equivalent.

Respect for others is insufficient as a means of deterrence when faced with real evil, real wrong; polite regard and courtesy are reflective of refinement, but they are dangerous if manners and good appearances prevent one from acknowledging truth, good from bad behavior. A person can smile and smile and still be a villain; so can a country or a government. Peace is not something we can manufacture with arms or austerity or government programs or extensive systemic charity. It is something we must seek with our whole hearts to receive. If we want peace on Earth, pray earnestly and do good to bring others peace for true peace can only come from the Holy Spirit.

Peace begins in each of our hearts, responding to the slights, insults, irritations and annoyances of others not with anger or hurt, but with humor, gentleness, listening, truth and generosity of spirit. It must be practiced fresh daily and with everyone, even our worst enemies, but most often, it's hardest when required with those we love most. It is easier to love in the abstract where nothing is required than to love in the actual, where sublimation must be practiced; or at least it is for me. Peace means becoming light to and for others.

Peace comes from knowing that our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, and that God loves us despite our incapacity to hold onto this gift He freely offers us, absent our cooperation with His grace. Confident of this, His Peace comes from going about our lives trying to live out some fraction, some snatch of the Gospels, what Jesus taught and urged and still asks us to do.

If you long for peace within and beyond your homes, pray the Rosary. If you want that peace in your hearts and in the world; practice the beatitudes, wash the feet, serve in the Calcutta that surrounds you, that you see. Poverty is everywhere, and not just in the form of physical dire need, but in the closed hearts, the darkened spirits of our family, friends, classmates, aquaintances and neighbors. Christ in disguise for one, is obvious to another; that is why we all are the body of Christ. And we should work tirelessly hoping that everyone we see, we will meet again in Heaven and greet as the true friends Christ intended us to be.


Wishing all of you His Peace.

Not Quite the Lesson Mother Teresa Intended I'm Sure.

So today, I’ve got a toddler crying because she doesn’t want to go to the potty even though she’s practically twisted her legs into a pretzel. Carrying a screaming three year old to the bathroom that is all the time kicking isn’t a joyful mother moment. At the same time, I hear the tell tale crash of a breakfast plate by a fellow toddler followed by the on the spot news reporter play by play by the very earnest but not necessarily helpful four year old. The baby has also chosen to voice his irritation at all the racket.

Sitting her on the potty, the phone rings. I’m ignoring it as I’m in no mood to talk to anyone, nor do I want some telemarketer to hear a symphony of caterwauling children as I decide whether or not time is running out on a once in a life time offer to buy tracts of undeveloped land in North Carolina. My newscaster son nevertheless brings me the phone. “There’s a spill of orange juice in the kitchen.” He tells me solemnly, “And it’s Dad.” The cell phone has begun ringing as well.

Currently, I’m reading Mother Teresa’s “Come Be My Light.” It details her intense suffering of spiritual darkness as she persevered in helping the poorest of India for decades. Over time, she learned to embrace this gift of the silent God as His answer to her prayer to be the one to “carry Jesus into the darkest holes of India.” To truly be able to do this, she had to know the darkest holes herself. That the darkest holes of poverty were not found in the slums of India or anywhere else, but within the terrified soul that either does not know or fears there is no God.

It was a sign of her perfected faith that she underwent this great purification while on Earth. Most people did not know of her deep pain, her daily struggle with her faith, as she took it as God’s command that people should Not know. She wore her smile as a cloak to hide her suffering. It was her gift back to God, in return for His. She understood that acting in complete Faith required nothing less than absolute surrender and she gave it. She covered that suffering with a sense of humor and a generous smile. It was a shield and an invisibility cloak that rendered her transparent, so that only God shone through.

“Hello?” I cradle the phone with my neck as I’m now cleaning up from the successful pottying, handing out a few m&m’s and mentally preparing to get out the mop, fix my son’s medicine and a bottle and maybe get myself a diet coke.
“Hi Sher. The school called, we’ve got a sick kiddo. ”

Mentally trying to pull together how I’m going to shod and dress for the weather the four and under set in less than thirty minutes, navigate the icy drive way and get our daughter, drive back home, drop her off, run the toddler back in for another forced potty march and then shuttle back to the school for 2:45 dismissal, it overwhelms. I start to rant. “I want an invisibility cloak, a ring, something to mask all of this craziness.”

“Wha?”
“The Cloak. Mother Teresa’s cloak. I’m smiling.”

“You need to work on it.”
“I know.”

“You can’t be gritting your teeth.”
“How would you know? I’m on the phone.”
“I know.”

So I began the trek. Loading the four children, something prodded me to go back in and make a bottle and a complete diaper bag. I even got an extra outfit in case we didn’t make it back home in time for a potty break and snacks. I never pack snacks. I’m trying to put on the joyful smile even when one of my daughters starts to flop and refuse to get in the car. She wants to throw shovels of ice instead. I’ve brought a new music CD for them to listen to, though I’d rather hear the news. Faking a sing songy voice of enthusiasm, amazingly, they all get in the car and we’re off. I can hear Mother Teresa telling me, "Honey, you're still gritting your teeth."

Spiritually, I have learned that whenever one seeks to deepen one’s faith life in practice, the level of challenge responds. Having fastened a joyful smile to my face to stare down the struggles thus far, the front tire promptly blows out equidistant from virtually anywhere that might have been remotely useful. I am on a freeway ramp. I cannot leave, I cannot get out and I cannot drive.

Calling my husband, no answer. Calling Tripple A, I get disconnected. Calling the school to explain the situation, I hang up in mid call as a policeman is knocking on my window. He has called a tow truck and summoned a second car so as to transport all four of my kids and me to a gas station. “It’s a good thing I hadn’t picked up my whole family or you’ld need a paddy wagon." We spend the two hours at the dealership and a woman who is sitting there waiting for her car, can't believe I'm smiling.

"I've engaged the cloaking device." I think as I shrugged, "It's not so bad."
When my husband arrives to pick up the kids, I mentally send Mother Teresa a message. "Hey, I didn't grit my teeth this time."

Been Talking to Mother Teresa about Many Things

Thursday is my Rant day. Last Thursday, I got an Annoymous comment where the person told me "Shame on her and Shame on me." for supporting Sarah Palin. She said we should be ashamed for the lies she tells and that I apparently support. The person did not state the lies, nor what I should be ashamed of, nor have the courage to give their name and thus I declined to post the comment.

Now I like healthy debate, so I agonized about not posting it. There were people who disagreed with my politics and did so with great respect, and I did post the one that I received in this vein. But the idea of having engaged in unfair censorship bothered me. Granted, this is my soap box, but I dislike when one side just shouts down or shuts out the other, so I worried I was committing the same fault. Having felt lately to pray to Blessed Mother Teresa, I asked for guidance.

Immediately, my kids interrupted the prayer with a fight. "MOMMM...She called me Stupid!" my son cried.

Reflexively, I responded. "It's never nice to call people names."

The immediacy of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit never ceases to amaze me. The fact that I did not publish the ugly response troubled me no more.

Speaking of Mother Teresa, here is a letter she wrote to the Supreme Court --I only just found out about this and felt compelled to post it here. It is the year of Paul, people are much less afraid to speak out on important issues like Abortion.
People like Mother Teresa however, never lacked courage to say what was true.

Mother Theresa of Calcutta’s Letter to the Supreme Court (1994)

Here is the letter that Mother Theresa wrote to the Supreme Court for reconsideration of Roe v. Wade.

This amicus brief was filed before the U.S. Supreme Court in the cases of Loce v. New Jersey and Krail et al. v. New Jersey in February 1994, by Mother Teresa.

I hope you will count it no presumption that I seek your leave to address you on behalf of the unborn child. Like that child I can be considered an outsider. I am not an American citizen.

My parents were Albanian. I was born before the First World War in a part of what was not yet, and is no longer, Yugoslavia .
In many senses I know what it is like to be without a country.
I also know what is like to feel an adopted citizen of other lands. When I was still a young girl I traveled to India .
I found my work among the poor and the sick of that nation, and I have lived there ever since.

Since 1950 I have worked with my many sisters from around the world as one of the Missionaries of Charity. Our congregation now has over four hundred foundations in more that one hundred countries, including the United States of America .
We have almost five thousand sisters.

We care for those who are often treated as outsiders in their own communities by their own neighbors—the starving, the crippled, the impoverished, and the diseased, from the old woman with a brain tumor in Calcutta to the young man with AIDS in New York City .
A special focus of our care are mothers and their children.

This includes mothers who feel pressured to sacrifice their unborn children by want, neglect, despair, and philosophies and government policies that promote the dehumanization of inconvenient human life. And it includes the children themselves, innocent and utterly defenseless, who are at the mercy of those who would deny their humanity.

So, in a sense, my sisters and those we serve are all outsiders together. At the same time, we are supremely conscious of the common bonds of humanity that unite us and transcend national boundaries.

In another sense, no one in the world who prizes liberty and human rights can feel anything but a strong kinship with America . Yours is the one great nation in all of history that was founded on the precept of equal rights and respect for all humankind, for the poorest and weakest of us as well as the richest and strongest.

As your Declaration of Independence put it, in words that have never lost their power to stir the heart: “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” A nation founded on these principles holds a sacred trust: to stand as an example to the rest of the world, to climb ever higher in its practical realization of the ideals of human dignity, brotherhood, and mutual respect. Your constant efforts in fulfillment of that mission, far more that your size or your wealth or your military might, have made America an inspiration to all mankind.

It must be recognized that your model was never one of realized perfection, but of ceaseless aspiration. From the outset, for example, America denied the African slave his freedom and human dignity. But in time you righted that wrong, albeit at an incalculable cost in human suffering and loss of life.

Your impetus has almost always been toward a fuller, more all embracing conception and assurance of the rights that your founding fathers recognized as inherent and God-given.
Yours has ever been an inclusive, not an exclusive, society. And your steps, though they may have paused or faltered now and then, have been pointed in the right direction and have trod the right path. The task has not always been an easy one, and each new generation has faced its own challenges and temptations. But in a uniquely courageous and inspiring way, America has
kept faith.

Yet there has been one infinitely tragic and destructive departure from those American ideals in recent memory. It was this Court's own decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) to exclude the unborn child from the human family. You ruled that a mother, in consultation with her doctor, has broad discretion, guaranteed against infringement by the United States Constitution, to choose to destroy her unborn child.

Your opinion stated that you did not need to “resolve the difficult question of when life begins.” That question is inescapable. If the right to life in an inherent and inalienable right, it must surely exist wherever life exists. No one can deny that the unborn child is a distinct being, that it is human, and that it is alive. It is unjust, therefore, to deprive the unborn child of its fundamental right to life on the basis of its age, size, or condition of dependency.

It was a sad infidelity to America 's highest ideals when this Court said that it did not matter, or could not be determined, when the inalienable right to life began for a child in its mother's womb.

America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.

It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society.
It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered domination over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.

And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.

Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.

The Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany recently ruled that “ the unborn child is entitled to its rights to life independently of acceptance by its mother; this is an elementary and inalienable right that emanates from the dignity of the human being.” Americans may feel justly proud that Germany in 1993 was able to recognize the sanctity of human life. You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth.

I have no new teaching for America . I seek only to recall you to faithfulness to what you once taught the world. Your nation was founded on the proposition—very old as a moral precept, but startling and innovative as a political insight—that human life is a gift of immeasurable worth, and that it deserves, always and everywhere, to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect.

I urge the Court to take the opportunity presented by the petitions in these cases to consider the fundamental question of when human life begins and to declare without equivocation the inalienable rights which it possesses.

***********

Lastly, her most famous quote on the matter, "It is poverty to say that a child must die that you may live as you wish." is one that no one has ever been able to refute.

For those who say, it's been over 30 years, get over it, "No." We must never tire of speaking out against injustice, against wrong, even if no one seems to be hearing the message.

I always wanted to tackle this issue with humor. But How?

Well in Houston, there are no Zoning laws. So I always thought the perfect solution would be to open up a daycare and a maternity store and a baby clothing boutique all next door to every clinic that provided abortions.

Personally, I'd have lined up the babies to play outside all afternoon everyday as part of the business and have piped Twinkle Twinkle and Rock A Bye Baby outside the store just to make sure the message wasn't missed. The name of the materinity store, "Unexpected Joys." The daycare, "Mommy's Little Angels" and the baby store, "Best Baby Gifts."

Yes, I know I don't fight fair.

It's probably why God didn't allow me to become a business major. Too much mischief.

Lead us not into temptation.