I Can See the Fruit

Big events like weddings give one the opportunity to mark not simply the celebration of a sacrament, but the passage of time and the lines of love and relationship that extend backwards and forwards and laterally.  Each of the threads in and of itself cannot portray the whole but taken together, they reveal the tapestry of a family, what is important, what is not. 

This past week, I was able to see Aunts and Uncles and cousins and friends.  My heart aches because I could have easily spent the whole week with any one of them and felt as sated by that visit as I felt saturated by the whole of it, of wanting to have whole years of time with all of them.  It was glorious and yet not enough.  I liken it to swimming in the gulf of Mexico. You plunge in and wish somehow you didn't have to come up for air, for the whole feel of that ocean is like Heaven, and earth and air seem substandard by comparison in that moment of immersion, unfortunate necessities of life that require one stop and go and reapply sun screen, eat and even rest.   I wanted to sit with everyone.  I wanted to "go and make our visit" as my brother is apt to say, with each of them.  As my cousin remarked in her toast, "This is what Heaven is like," the endless wedding feast with the perfect bridegroom and we are all both surprised and delighted guests and bride. 

At the rehearsal dinner, there were strands of the past with my father reminding me of my grandmother as he sat at the table and said to me, "I don't know what the hell is going on." several times. The evening had been long and he was tired.  But he got the jokes made in some of the toasts, and his buddy from Notre Dame sat by his side the entire evening, soaking in the moments when Dad was present and the sacred silence when he was not.  The Kellys won my heart 1000 times over for that simple being.

My own grandmother spent the rehearsal dinner at my wedding 22 years ago punctuating every toast made by everyone else with, "Well I'm speechless."  She also pestered me to introduce myself to that nice young man I was sitting next to, as he looked handsome.   I told her she had good taste and I planned to marry him the next day.  You can guess what she said next.

My dad's Alzheimer's didn't stop him from really bonding with my five year old daughter Regina.  She served him tea and told me when I tried to interfere (I forget how), "MOMMMM....we're playing a game." which meant leave.  My uncle gave the same toast to my brother he gave at our rehearsal and there was microbrewery beer and fine wine and barbecue and tiramisu and the fullness of it all  made one long for the celebration to simply go on and on and on.  My other brother gave a toast that brought tears to both my sister's eyes and mine, and Danny as always, made us laugh.  He and his new bride were brimming with joy. This has been a feast they have long waited for, so it was perfect that they chose Tobit and the wedding feast at Cana, the best wine was served last.  They had waited 41/36 years for the best wine.  

My other brother reminded me that my uncle was the one singing Donna Nobis Pachem.  I remember being filled with the sound of that song as he sang. These were great sacred moments.  So was the moment when I was surprised to be asked to dance by both of my brothers.  My heart was caught up, just as it had been 22 years ago when I was so overwhelmed by the wedding that I felt as if I danced in a daze when it was time to dance with my dad.   And there are so many memories, most of them about laughing at jokes, about hearing stories rather than telling them.  Blowing out the red candles on a three layer snowy white coconut cake, I could only answer in response to my daughter's "Did you make a wish," "My wish has already been granted." I'd feasted with my mom and dad on my birthday and had all of my family together, singing happy birthday.  What more could one ask? 

Then as now, it was a experience of being earthen vessels, being filled with water that through the mass, through the all of this, praying and feasting, laughing and remembering and forgetting why we forgot that this family, this allness is so very wonderful.  And in the end, through all of this drinkable joy, we became wine.  Now I firmly believe that in all of life, we are to be like the Eucharist, fundamentally transformed internally into love, into more than we could ever aspire if we remained mere hosts and fermented grapes, though still seeming the same to the visible eye.  I also know, being fallen, we often chose to remain mere bread and wine and fail to recognize how much more we could be if we let love define us in all things.

These fat times are important as we return to the ordinariness and fasting involved in bills and diets and laundry and chores, book reports and billable hours, job searches, daily medications, normal schedules and bedtimes.  The leaner times of life are bearable because we know they are not the all of it, even if in the midst of those lean times, we forget about the moreness of heaven and ordinary time, the moreness of the silent sitting with my dad, and the moreness of sheer insanely silly joy as 100 wedding guests participated in a surprise flash mob orchestrated by Danny to toast Anna.  This was a fierce feast of love which, if it did not have the substance of love, the mass, the genuine community and love that these two people both engender in others (It is a known gift of my brother's, to create deeper relationships than people expect that they would want), would be as if a diet of tiramisu, sweet and fattening and caffinated but without substance. 

But the realness of the struggles that were both known and unknown in the pews, of all the crosses thus far endured, and all those yet to be carried, the long wait, the long loneliness that I know my brother ached from, praying and hoping for the vocation of husband and someday, he hopes, father, of the mass, of the true nature of the sacrament, anchored the feast and made it more.  Staying at my aunt's house and seeing her grown up children, loving every snatched conversation, seeing that one day, my home would be as hers, filled with pictures of family that now were starting their own, I could see the fruit yet to come.  Being at the mass and seeing all the family and friends past and thinking of those not there because they were now enjoying the real wedding feast, I could see the fruit of the table at which we all hope to dine, the gifts of everyone that came in their faces that mirrored the joy of the bride and groom.  

To Danny and Anna, God bless you and keep  you.   Prayers.  See you at the next feast.

Why I Took On the Fall Festival

"Sherry, you're nuts but in a nice kind of way." a friend said who agreed to provide baked goodies for tomorrow. I get that a lot.

So I thought, given that the event will happen and things have finally slowed down a bit, I'd explain how it is that a mother of nine took on planning a festival for 400 or hopefully, a lot more.

In 2008, I learned I was pregnant with our ninth child and honestly sat for a month and a half asking God why again, rather than giving thanks. It wasn't my proudest moment as a human being, let alone a mother.

Then we found out our youngest had Down’s Syndrome and nine children seemed suddenly like a walk in the park by comparison with facing an unknown "permanent" as one woman called it, handicapping condition. We were offered unbearable options. Then we learned our son in addition to everything else, had a heart condition that would need a major operation to correct some time after birth. Suddenly Down’s Syndrome seemed a cakewalk to staring down open heart surgery on a newborn. As I said at the time, any sentence containing the words "needs open heart surgery" in it, was a bad sentence.

So we progressed through the pregnancy but it was hard. There was a quiet in my mind that wasn't a happy quiet or a peaceful one. I knew I needed to reenter the world. The principal of our school talked of needing a chair for the Fall Festival and I felt as if a rope had been tossed with which to pull myself out of my dark heart full of feelings so I grabbed on tight.

Last year, the Fall Festival was wonderful and amazing and funny. The only person who used the first aid was me, and that was to lie down and rest, being ten days post-partum. This year, approaching it without the aid of Percocet or compulsory naps, it's a bit more daunting but that same rope has kept me discovering new people and pushed me to be more open to the community that demands all of us be cracked open, the Church.

To set this feast for all who attend the school and all who use the parish is a great privilege and to know all the men and women who have put in the hours to help bring it to being is also a great honor. I only hope it succeeds enough to further the cause of the school and secure a spot as a tradition that will grow and grow until it becomes a generational experience of being part of Saint Martin's.

The Fall Festival is a rare opportunity for the families of this school and Parish to come together to play. I hope it is a time when all of the faculty, staff, parents, children and parishioners can forget themselves in the timelessness of simple games and good food in good company and next year, I hope we can expand it so it goes until 4. Then we could all clean up and close with a bilingual mass.

Because all of these people are united beyond the barriers of school/parish, immigrant/citizen, English speaking and other, in our stewardship of our families and by our love of what the whole Parish is about, the Eucharist, our Faith, our Church.

So that's why. And yes, I also love it so I'm a bit crazy, but in a good sort of way.

October 4th, 1988

When I was stuck in New York for a month, recovering from an emergency surgery in the fall after college, a family friend who was also a Catholic priest, invited my mother and me to attend the feast of Saint Francis, held on October 4th at an Episcopal Church in the village. The liturgy included dancers and choirs and a parade of exotic creatures including amongst other things, a donkey, elephant, llamas, fish, snakes, birds, and a congregation of pet owners.

We sat behind a woman who had two daschunds. The first was in her arms, an obviously smaller and older dog that needed to be comforted in the presence of so many other animals. The second pet, a youthful brown pup, tried to get her attention. He stood on his hind legs. He yipped. He begged. She wasn't interested in switching the old dog for the younger. Making it through the parade of all God's creatures Great and Small and the readings, he was mollified by the occasional doggy treat.

However, the homily ran long.

The dog was tired. The dog was bored. The dog wanted to be petted and picked up and had done every trick he could think of, including licking the hands of those of us sitting behind him. Since we weren't receiving communion, this didn't pose a problem. He rolled on his belly for us to give him a rub. Alas, sitting so close to a priest, he wasn't likely to find that cradle raised Catholics would be able to divert themselves too long in his direction, even if it wasn't a Catholic mass. Admittedly, I felt freed up to pet him after Fr. C did. But we couldn't give him what he wanted, the seat of honor in his owner's arms.

Finally, in frustration, the dog peed on the church floor. It was long, it was deliberate and to make sure she knew it, he yelped to get his mistress to turn her head before he started.

Fr. C. turned to us and said, "Original Sin affects us all."

Happy Saint Francis of Assisi Feast Day Everyone!