So Are the Rest of Us too Tepid? Or is it Just Me?

This past week, several friends in the Catholic blogosphere lost their spots as featured regular columnists at a national paper I sometimes write for and respect.  However, as the third person fell, I had to wonder, why are they being dismissed?  All three live their Catholicism, one is an intellectual, one is a humorist, and the third, an evangelist/mother.  All three had an edge to their writing, such that sometimes, it cut, meaning it spoke to the heart and challenged.  

I loved all three for their ability to be so fearless.   As someone who sometimes struggles with writing everything I think for fear of injuring people, I admire their tenacity, their willingness to speak and be unafraid.

However, with the third firing, it brings the question, are the rest of us (and I will mean primarily me) being too tepid in our witnessing to the faith online?  Am I avoiding the harder issues, the ones that rankle the soul because they demand I think and wrestle with convictions and find courage?  You know, the biggies like politics, marriage, abortion, social justice, Pope Francis, right and left wing thinking in the Church, birth control, priesthood, the true nature of the Eucharist, the real consequence of prayer, all that stuff.   Am I too comfortable being a comfortable Catholic blogger?   Ought I to do more and if so, what?

The coward me answers, I have such a small corner of the internet.  It's a happy perky mostly Chocolate coated candy bar type of experience.  Such musings may be sweet and easy to consume, but they don't have as much nutrition as the three authors I admired.   My writings have peanuts by comparison.  It will hold you over, but it's never enough to make a meal.  Why mess things up?

Because we aren't called to a neat and tidy life. As I told my mom the other day, if there's a hard road, I find it and take it.   She'll love reading that in my blog. Loving me as a child and as an adult must be the equivalent of a roller coaster experience where you keep thinking, have we had enough fun yet?

I go back to my original creed in writing.  Truth has to lace everything, even charity, if it is to be true charity, just as charity has to lace every truth, so it may be received.  However, it will mean I must not be afraid to use both charity and truth in equal parts.  What is it I'm supposed to write?  I know relevancy in writing is determined by the willingness to bleed on the page, to think about those things that matter, and to risk something beyond approval.  Answer: ask the Holy Spirit to lead on, and follow.

I hate that I've answered my own question, but it's the lesson I keep learning.  Study more, get back to work and buckle up.

****and then, real life interferes giving me the perfect Chocolate moment...my teenager is pretending to be an elephant and tormenting my five year old by snorting imaginary boogers in her hair.   Sometimes, humor is healing. Sometimes it reveals how far we have to go even on the everyday issues before we can get to the big ones.

A Little Story

Everyone knows the story of Joseph and Mary going to Bethlehem and being unable to find a place to stay.  Everyone thinks they'd recognize the dire need of a husband with his wife, heavy with child.  However, we need only look back to the poor mother who lost her two sons in the water of Hurricane Sandy to see, we are frightened creatures who often shut doors we should not.  Yes, all of us are just as capable of saying, "there is no room at the inn."

How do I know? 

This past week, we lost a baby at what would have been 8 weeks.   Honestly, I'd spent the first three weeks of knowing saying to God, "You've Got to be Kidding!"  I'm 46!  We have no room in the van.  We have a large house but there's no room in the house!  I tried playing kid tetris, shuffling children in the bedrooms.  I didn't want to wrap around the idea that our lives would be reordered yet again, that at least three more years of diapers loomed.   Taxes, college, carseats... it wasn't my most generous moment as a woman of faith or a mother. 

But I was very grateful for the gift of the wisdom and teachings of our Church.  That let me march forward, take my vitamin, schedule the appointment with the doctor and go on with life.  I'd come around I told myself.  And every once in a while, there was a bounce in my step, a giggle under my words as I managed the brood and their needs.  But also every once in a while, there was the feeling of the bite of the world.  "I'm overwhelmed." I told God.  "I know we're supposed to love in abundance and be lavish and generous and open to life like you...." but then my voice would crack in my head, "I'm not you!"  and the world felt very dark indeed.  I kept opening and shutting the door in my heart even as I held the child in my womb.  I would have to wedge it open.  

God was very humorous, "So Sherry, ten was fine but eleven too many?"  "Okay."  (It was hard to argue).  But it was still only duty, not a joyful one.   I'd be fighting this for a while I could tell despite many resolutions in my head to not fight.  And then I felt honestly, rather lost.  This was not a happy place to be, to know that my will was fighting even as I obeyed.  There was never a danger to this baby, she was always coming, but then Tuesday, I saw her. 

Her heart was slow....like mine.

I was miscarrying.   Suddenly every step, every heart beat forward was one step away from a healthy child, to a dying one.  Suddenly, I was willing her to stay alive, begging her to stay.  I've had two other miscarriages, but this one hit harder than the other two or maybe like labor pains, I've forgotten. It's probably a mixture of both.

Like any mother who must walk to the end of a miscarriage, I felt all the crazy unfamiliar hard musings. We hadn't even told anyone yet.  How to explain a loss we hadn't yet pronounced as a gift? Sadness...I held her but not as fully in my heart. We should have screamed about her to the world. We should have celebrated her while she was here! There was shame over the twinge of relief that the part of me that didn't want more, didn't have more...embarrassment at not wanting more of God's heart in my life....and hurt at the real knowledge that when the knock came to my door. I didn't answer, or at least not well.  Guilt --could I have done something or not done something to keep this one here? 

Wednesday I took my son to basketball practice and went to the adoration chapel to clear my head, to cry, to complain, to pray the baby would be okay, that somehow, this would all just be a blip, a hiccup in the pregnancy.  I didn't get to make that prayer.  I fell asleep. Three times. (It's warm, it's quiet, it's peaceful and as a dear priest told me, if you fall asleep in Adoration, you're just like the apostles, and perhaps God knew you needed the rest).  As I was preparing to leave to go back to the gym, I found a guide for adoration I'd never seen.  Reading it, I felt like I'd somehow missed what I was supposed to do in Adoration...rather like how I missed what to do during this pregnancy.  

Then Thursday, I went back to the doctors.  The baby did not have  a heart rate anymore.  She was smaller than she'd been on Tuesday.  I could see the difference.  I remember seeing the screen with her heart rate on it, and knowing then, the heart rate was wrong before they'd said anything.   The dramatic in me likes to think she died when I was sleeping in Adoration, that even broken and failing, I'd brought her to where she should be.   And in doing so, she did the same for me.  

I can't promise my heart will remain a stable stable for the rest of my life, but for only 8 weeks, she was a masterful instructor in the purpose of Advent.  I'll remember her, and therefore her lessons. We are to be a people waiting in joyful hope.  That is how life and being pregnant should be, a source of light and warmth in a thorny cold dark world of business and tasks and difficulty.   We told our children. We told our parents.  We named the baby, Kateri Joy, Katie Joy for short.   It fits her, it fits the season we are about to celebrate and I think her name is musical.  One of my daughters liked it so much, she said she'd name her daughter the same.  She has never voiced the idea that she would have children before. 

When we get to Heaven, we will be asked, "How many did you bring?" like the servants who were to invest the talents and multiply the Master's fortunes.  I now have another lobbyist in Heaven to get all of us there.   She's an expert at wedging open the doors of hearts. 

P.S. The perfect P.S, her due date was July 14th, it is apparently, Saint Kateri's feast day...I just found that out.

Fast, Pray, Serve

When I first picked up "Eat Pray Love" and read the beginning, the catty part of me sat there thinking, "What does this woman have to be miserable about?" Her husband loves her, she has a career that allows her to fly to exotic locals and will pay for her to spend a year navel gazing. Nice work if you can get it. She just didn't want to be tied down anymore at 34, but this is a real life and real lives are often very messy. I kept plodding forward. However, after reading the whole thing, I exercise my option not to see the movie.

Rather like the first leg of her journey in Italy, the nutritional content of this book is the equivalent of a large fragrant excellent Naples' pizza. It's tasty. It goes down sooooooo easy, but a steady diet is not good for you. To make sure I was being fair, I did a little substitute test. How would I feel about the spiritual advice or musings of a male author who decided after ten years of marriage, "No dear, I don't want to be married anymore, it's too much for me. Now I'm off to eat fried chicken and drink beer for four months, followed by sleeping and reading philosophical junk until I find myself, at which point, I'll finish finding balance in my life swimming in the Caribbean and taking up with some hottie there who thinks the sun rises and sets on me." Momentarily, I toyed with penning a satire, "Drink, Sleep, Sex," the story of a man's creating himself as an island on an island. Bleah.

But the book and the movie are the current stuff of feminine culture; a chick flick which explores the world of a woman exploring herself through the world. Because this is a story based on real life, it remains problematic both to dismiss as mere Hollywood whimsy (because it isn't just that), or to attack it for it's flaws as a theological journey. It's one soul's journey that from a Catholic perspective, went awol; a pilgrim's distress, lacking GPS, thinking it is making progress.

The main character crafts over the course of a year, a god that demands nothing but that she smile with her liver or smile at her lover, depending upon the day. Such counsel is a far cry from "Take up your cross and follow me," but it was never intended as Catholic theology, and thus should not be treated with such high comparisons. Thinking and embracing the concept of "God is in me AS ME." is not the same thing as accepting the reality that "We are created in God's image."

I don't doubt that there are women who will find this idea of a god that demands nothing of the soul, attractive --they may not have the resources to engage in a 12 month hiatus from reality, but I can see the spiritual danger of exchanging a God who requires we sublimate and sacrifice and love first, for one that demands nothing but that we be satisfied in our belly today.  The idea of finding God via appetite, via your wants is an inverse of what Catholicism demands; that we learn to see Christ in disguise, in others and then, to wash their feet, to feed the hungry, to offer one's self up.

At the end, I felt sad for Liz, her ex-husband and for those who view her experience as emancipating rather than simply well written transcontinental indulgence. The desire to be closer to God is at the core of any sincere faith.  That sincere desire makes her story meaningful. The struggle not to be distracted or discouraged or misled is the story of every saint. Absent God's mercy, the rest of us are often revealed in our daily struggles to be flailing and always threatening to become epic tragedies as a result of our blindness, pride and unwillingness to be pushed beyond our own perceived capacity to love.  For those us still on this journey, the how of becoming intimately in love with God,  is more apt to be uncovered via a tried and true method of fasting, prayer, service. The journey probably won’t sell many books or become a blockbuster movie, but it will lead to more lasting joy and permanent peace than any bowl of pasta, chanted mantra or Brazilian lover could ever bring.