In Da Zone

If you're enough of an old fart---and I guess I am---it seems kind of odd to contemplate something like a "Jesus'n'Mary Zone" in the sense of being able to be "in the zone."

But it certainly seems a real phenomenon, if not usually described that way. Where everything is flowing correctly, presumably (to a person of faith) because you've explained where your problems lie and turned over the solution to Our Lord and his Mom. Things start working out in what is clearly proper fashion, sometimes with very improbable solutions---stuff you couldn't get away with, if you were writing your life as fiction.

I've never managed to be there longer than about two days on a good run; I wonder if saints manage to stay there longer than that at a stretch?

I think maybe it's one of those things where you have to be absolutely in the moment, inside what's happening---and the minute you're aware enough of the situation to know you're there, you're not in the moment anymore, you've stepped outside and become an observer. Which is why you can't really sustain it.

Other opinions or observations cheerfully taken, though. I'd love to see these pages become a discussion forum.

Post-Baptismal Ponderings.....

I suppose there's always a let-down after that much anticipation.

Part of it was being dragged into the mundane almost immediately, with the discovery that someone had stolen my camera from my bag of clothes that I had to change into sometime during the service.

And part of it was just the sheer exhaustion of the Holy Week schedule, with school and work on top of everything that was happening at church.

People who don't know their history tend to refer to the US as a "Christian country" in the idea that the founding fathers meant this to be a specifically Christian setting. (In point of fact, a reading of colonial history in only moderate depth will show that to be patently untrue, almost a direct contradiction of their stated intent.)

But one of the things they note is that "back in the day", schools didn't have "spring break", they had "Easter vacation", and that's true, if "the day" is understood to be the 1950's, not the 1850's. The implication was that the vacation was for Religious Purposes.

But Protestant tradition barely observes Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The rest of Holy Week mostly goes begging for attention, and the idea that Easter is more than one church service and new clothes is long gone from most churches.

Giving kids the day off for Good Friday I think wasn't about letting them go to church so much as letting the teachers go; back then it was a norm for many small businesses, retail businesses to close for some portion of Good Friday, whether the whole day, or closed at noon, or even closed for the classic three hour observance (noon-3pm). Even many larger businesses closed, and of the ones that did not, most would allow some of their workers who asked for it to take off to attend church services on that afternoon.

But at least as I remember it, that one was mostly a church service for grownups, not for children. Partly the length of it; partly the solemnity of it---it went beyond the patience of a child.

In a truly Christian world, seems to me an Easter vacation geared to Religious Purposes would actually start during Holy Week. Leastways that's my take.

Then again, I'm a historian. And in much of the United States, at least, the history of "Easter vacation in school" has far less to do with religious events (mostly focused on a non-school day, Sunday) and far more to do with "might as well cancel school for a couple of weeks since all the students will be staying home to help with the planting anyway."

Of course, part of the "let down" isn't really "let down", it's just change.

Change from being the "new kid", in some ways the center of attention, to "just one of the family." Just another parishioner.

Which is actually a quietly warm fuzzy feeling. :-)

To Pray Like a Child

So much for weekly posts, eh?

It seems that my life is a yo-yo: up, down, up, down. I have noticed that there's something of an inclination to try to avoid the downs by pushing to exhaustion; I've also noticed that that actually seems to hasten and deepen the down. Nothing seems to send me spiraling downward as fast as cumulative sleep deprivation.

Talking to my friends more often helps.
Talking to other people helps.

Accomplishing difficult tasks competently helps.

Helping other people helps.

And even having to think about what to write, having to write here, helps. I need to work on that weekly bit.

* k * k * k * k *

I find that learning prayers in other languages is a wondrous prayer device. To get them learned requires me to repeat them often, and to *think* about what I'm saying.

And the occasional phrase seems to just roll off the (mental or physical) tongue, and gets stuck in my head, just as phrases I was learning as a child used to do, whether normal "child" learning or absorbing repeated things other people were trying to learn.

[There may not be anyone still living besides me who vividly remembers me walking around all day, repeating endlessly, but I was mistress of both "LMNOP" from the alphabet song and "voolay voo, m' dear" (voulez-vous me dire) from my mother's "Learn French" records.] :)

These days, trying to learn the padre nuestro (our father), the stuck phrase seems to be sanctificado sea tu nombre.

It writes its own tunes that it plays in my head. It whispers. It orates in all the pomp of a 19th century politician.

sanc
ti
fi

CA
do

SE

a

tu

NOM

bre

!

Waves on the shore, there it is again.

But for a one line prayer, a perpetual prayer, you could do worse than "hallowed be thy name". Much worse.

Days of Strength

This last week I've been more conscious of being held in Mary's hand.

Not to say everything's gone smoothly: it hasn't. But that doesn't seem to be a factor, really.

Not only have I been more conscious of a sense of peace, of not being in control, of having surrendered control, but paradoxically that's put me more in control. It's made it easier to make choices that don't have to be dead right, don't have to be perfect. They just have to be the best choice for right now.

I've also been more aware that as I seek people, places and situations which are my answers, so may I be someone else's answer.

To have someone choose me---improbably, in context, someone they don't really know---to talk to about specific problems in their life, or places where they're feeling inadequate, when they had no way of knowing that their road is a road I've travelled, that I would be someone who might have a word or two that could help.

It's funny: we notice when other people seem to us to have been sent by God to be an angel in our pathway, expressly to help us out. But it's rare that we're given the gift to notice that we ourselves may have been sent to be standing in a particular place, at a particular time, because God knew someone was going to need us to be there. Not to do anything dramatic---not to put out a fire, rescue a baby, do CPR, but just to say the right words to ease someone else's mind, to feed someone else's spirit.

When you can feel God working in your life, that conveys a certain peace, a certain joy.

And like everything else in life, we tend to take it for granted when it happens, when things are going well. But like perfect spring days, a baby's laugh on a summer day, the rush of first falling in love, it's not a feeling that's going to be sustained. And it needs to be cherished when it happens.

Partly because we do---I do---far too little appreciating the good moments while they're happening, although I get better at it as I get older. But also because the memory of the warm moments feeds us when we're in the cold and dark..........

Coming Down the Home Stretch

Coming into the last month of the RCIA process, now. It's becoming surprisingly moving.

I'd thought of the process as (to steal a computer term) "background processing." Not unimportant, but not a focal part of my spiritual or parish experience. I've long since made an internal commitment to St. Gabriel's parish and to the Roman Catholic church and moved beyond that.

Sure, it'll be nice when I'm allowed to take communion. I miss it.

But I'm already participating in parish life, already a lay reader and can see deeper involvement coming. And I'm still not all that sure how much difference human-imposed labels and processes will make in my spiritual life and development. But it's a "gotta-do", so I quibble not.

More focal to me is the more immediate growth and healing that I need to find in the aftermath of (technically) divorce and more specifically, family breakup. Living alone is alien to me, and soul-destroying by nature. It was tolerable when it was "something we both have to go through."

But now it's not; now it's only me. I'm blindsided by the caliber of the pain that invokes. As when driving down an unfamiliar country road in a first class gullywasher, I cannot see where I am going, and it's frightening. Does my life not have a direction? Yes, it does, and it's not windblown and accidental. Where I am going now, at least for the time being, is of my own choice. And yet that doesn't mean it's "what I want to do": I've become one of those people for whom what they choose as a life path, dearest to their heart, simply isn't on the menu. Not one of the available choices.

So choice becomes about "what's the best of what's left" on a good day, or "the least worst of all the bad choices" on a bad one.

There are all sorts of statements about "growth experience", "what God has in store for you" and so forth that I can throw about as well as the next guy. All sound very facile just now. That doesn't mean they aren't true; it just means that they are of no use whatsoever to someone in the stage I'm at right here and now.

I have come this far the last year and a half or so by:

• suppressing pain (knowing that it would only tolerate being suppressed, unexpressed, for just so long)
• using anger as fuel to provide and focus energy to function
  
• hanging on to Mary just as tight as I can--often with my eyes closed--and trusting her to lead me where I need to be

The first is failing, as I knew it would, but I'm still trying to duck the pain that is part of healing. The second is gone, except for the flares that are an inevitable part of the pain-and-healing process.

The third is still there. Still working.

Dios te salve, María; llena eres de gracia.
(Dame de tu gracia, madre.)
el Señor es contigo.
(También conmigo, por favor.)
Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres,
(Bendita sea mi madre.)
y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús.
(Bendíceme, Jesús.)

Santa María, Madre de Dios,
(y mi madre, también)
ruega por nosotros pecadores,
(ayudame en mis dolores)
ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.
(siempre y en la vida eterna yo oro, madre.)

Y todo el mundo dicen, juntos:
Amén.