I have not laughed this hard . . .

. . . in months.  Click 'n enjoy.  :)

Open Letter to God

ashes, ashes . . .

At the risk of being irreverent.

The toddler grinning up at me on my way to get ashes had a smushed black smudge all over his forehead, on the right side of his nose, and between his fingers.  Then he tripped on the pew.

Ashes, ashes . . .

 . . . we all fall down.

valentine's days past

I swear that I do do cool things in my life now . . . it's just that the last couple years had such better pictures.

So.  One year ago.  V-day.  I was recovering from a yucky break-up and my friend was itching to get out of town.  We hopped on a train and had the most wonderful layover in a little Italian town that had the best 15-year-old postcards of Leonard DiCaprio ever.  Why?  I do not know.   All I know is that one had a rainbow swirly pattern behind him; the other showed Leo in all his pimply teenage glory; and the other was supposed to be smoldering.  I bought them and eventually sent them to my sister and two friends.  With Vatican stamps.

So we got to Siena, got on the wrong bus, and got a scenic 1-hour tour of the surrounding countryside. Once we got back to town, we headed straight to Piazza del Campo, Sienna's gorgeous shell-shaped square.

This is the same piazza they fill up with sand and hold crazy horse races in during the summer.  The precursor to Nascar, if you will.

Fonte Gaia - the Joyful Fountain - graces the piazza and somehow doesn't get knocked over by the yearly horse mayhem.  Jacopo della Quercia's 1419 creation is now safely in a museum, but a pretty replica stands in its place.

What I love especially is Italian advertising.  See the awning.  "Restaurant.  To Eat."

Just in case you weren't sure.

Next stop: the Cathedral baptistry.  Ornate ceilings washed in blue, gilded arches and Biblical scenes aplenty - taking you back to the time when art made you bend your knee in awe.

Going through the Cathedral museum took us up and out to phenomenal views.  The Campo on high.

The Cathedral next door.

 

Which we then went to see.

We walked in to striped marble majesty and inlaid marble floors - the most wondrous floors you can imagine.  I thought that I had a love affair with the swirling colored mosiac Cosmotesque floors in Rome.  I had not yet experienced storybooks under my feet.

Moving around with head swept high and then turned low, we came across the pulpit - a massive work of stone hoisted on the form of beasts.

Next stop: food.  Only memories survive to record it, but it was amazing indeed.  First we scoured windows until we found crusty bread hot out of the oven with sausage and olives and other savory thingies within.  Then we discovered a restaurant that stayed open just for us, and I ate wild boar drowned in a warm goulashy sauce.  We also ordered a cheese sampler plate, and my friend didn't understand that it was a sampler.  So he ate an entire portion of the rindiest piece on there (he was trying to be nice) before I asked him what the heck he was doing.  We laughed and the rest of the cheese was good.

After filling up, we went up the hill to St. Catherine's house.  No pictures were allowed except for this one.  It was neat to put a visual with all the stories I grew up with as a child.  I always thought it was fascinating that she lived in a little cell for years in her own house and had food pushed through the door (heh, maybe I was a little too introverted as a kid).  I finally got to see it.

On the way up the hill to St. C's parish church, there was a patch of beauty growing in the frosty air.

Happy Valentine's day.

Then how to describe St. Catherine's church?  It is barren - I think it fell apart and was reconstructed at some point, because only in earthquake-ravaged Assisi have I seen a church so bare.  It has the ugliest stained glass windows I have ever seen and never want to see again.  They make E.T. look pretty.  I got this shot in before a Dominican yelled at me.

It's actually one of the nicer ones.  You should have seen what they did to poor Jesus.

The other sticking point about St. Catherine's church is that it has St. Catherine's head in it.  Only her head.  Her head used to be toted around in processions by the village people, and one time they started squabbling over it and they dropped it.  It used to be incorrupt, but now it just looks scary.  Joseph and I couldn't help making an exclamation that sounded something like "what the heck is that and what happened to it?" and then two French ladies yelled at us and then started muttering about youth in French.

But it WAS scary.  Almost as scary as her detached finger in the chapel next to it.  Flannery O'Connor has her theories about the grotesque and Catholicism. Siena kind of proves them.

Moving onwards, we wandered through the city . . .  

Freezing to death, but enjoying being out of Rome.

Oh, I almost forgot . . . I fully intend that my library will look like this someday:

Or I might just put a picture of this in it.

We eventually ended up in the bizzarest bar that proclaimed itself to be "An American Bar."  I'm sorry, but Americans do not put Paint-By-Number pictures of cobras and rainforests on its walls, or varnished giant fish, or pictures of themselves in yachts catching the giant varnished fish.  Nor do we usually have organs and massive fish tanks and tiny bathrooms that reek of bleach and are next to an open outside door in February.  But it was warm and had hot chocolate.  We loved you, little bar.

And that was Valentine's Day, one year ago.

six years ago

In 2004, I saw the Pope and met Mary.


I've always wondered if other girls struggle quite as much with Mary as a Mother as I did for so many years.  That sinless creature, thrust in my face so many times when I'd failed myself, seemed more like a rosary-demanding older sister I was somehow competing with.  Competing with in a race where I was running on crutches and she had already reached the finish line and gotten her prize.


Then six years ago, I stepped into San Pietro for my first papal Mass in Rome.  


It was the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes, as it is today. 


Rows of ambulances and transportation vehicles filled the piazza, turning its cobble-stoned triangles into a most unusual parking lot.  


We had came through clenching candles, flimsy cardboard circles and the glossy-booklets they dole out for every papal event.   Shifting ourselves into the hard plastic gray chairs, and we waited in quiet murmur with the sick who lined the front of the basilica.

The pope emerged with a flash of cameras from the back, coming through the milky-gray curtain that always gives you a flash of the Pieta in the back.  It was normal enough.


But at the end of the Mass, the basilica went from brilliance to complete darkness.

Nothing was illuminated but the white statue of Mary with the blue veil at the front of San Pietro, and the soft glimmer of the candles that slowly washed over the crowd from front to back.

A hushed silence filled the dark vast space, and all waited.

Four notes played from the organ.

And then the sound of Ave, Ave, Ave Maria began to well from the stillness.

It was the start of seeing Mary - that creature whose representation was but a small speck at the front of the church - in a new light.

Four months later I slid into the first pew of a white church in France, and looked at the testimonies of fulfilled trust that stacked the side chapels from marble floor to vaulted ceiling.

The journal came out.  Thoughts and petitions, earnest and heavy, poured out with the tears that came with them.  And the heaviness of heart of twenty years lifted as I finally saw for the first time how the darkest moments of my life had their purpose and point.  From the hushed and closed shadows of hurt and despair, she brought her light.

I came from Lourdes and said that it is there that you truly feel the presence of Mary as a Mother.  The healing there, as the woman at the baths told us in broken English, is not for the body but - with a thump to her heart - for the soul.  

That is the beauty of a Mother who never forgets us in our mire.  She waits with her hand extended through our dark, ready to reflect Christ's light onto our broken, aching selves.  She reminds us that no ugliness is too unbearable, if we but have the courage to bring it to the light.  She loves us in healing, and makes love a tangible thing of comfort and hope in our lives.

I went to Lourdes six years ago keeping four people in my heart in a special way.  Three I know the outcome of; one I do not, and perhaps may never know.  Please keep my friend in your intentions today.

once all over again

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." 


- Walker Percy. The Moviegoer.

I find it funny how people consider me a writer.  And perhaps this reveals something very deep and silly and telling about the quirks in my soul.

Because I do love writing.  When I can do it.  That's the thing.  Writing is both the most lovely and the most painful thing in the world.  Somewhere between the place where writing was my one escape, my one way to create beauty in a very distasteful life spot (place 1); and the place where somehow "I am a writer" and it's what I do on "cue" (ha) and "it defines my core" and whatever else I've thrown out there about it to the point where yes, it is my job (place 2) - somewhere along there it stopped being fun, spontaneous, and even meaningful.  And yet, this should be the best time of my life for it.

My aversion to writing has plagued me for the last four years when I walked off a stage with my first diploma.  I've diagnosed it to lots of things.  I write to many friends online, and that satisfies all the wit-releasing I need on paper for the day.  I'm more vocal than I used to be.  I was stuck in two horrid jobs for half of the last four years, and that sucked me into a survival mode which should have made run to my journal more.  But somehow poking at the pain with a pen made it throb even more. I have about 3 journals started and abandoned, with each entry beginning or middling out with "these words are not right . . . my pen doesn't follow my heart. . . it isn't even quite this way."

And maybe that's where the true answer lies.  Because writing demands that you be honest, brutally honest, about who you are and what is going on in and around you.  It makes you a dealer with truth.  Even when you start out not know what that truth is, it puts you a quest among the quarrelsome members of your own soul on a path unseen.

It leaves you utterly dissatisfied if you haven't reached that truth by the time you finish, or if you know - as you always know - if you lack a good light within you as you tread through the mire of jumbled thought.   It makes you work through issues, pull together thoughts that are much more comfortable when untouched and scattered.  The nag to write bugs you all the stronger the more you dig in heels and resist.

For what more is writing than knowing created reality (and its Creator) and turning within and crying out what you've known with your own spark?  In the beginning there was the Word - now that Word is here with us, and He gives our odd ramblings a greater weight and truth than we ourselves realize.

And that is the ultimate tug: entering into oneself with enough honesty to say the word, your connection with what is most meaningful and true, with conviction.  It comes down to your voice; for writing absolutely demands that you have a voice.  Reach down and dig it from the depths where you didn't even know it lies, if you have to - but the voice must be there.  It comes with consequences.  If you do not accept nor like this voice, everything written tastes like a strip of dissolving sandpaper in the mouth.  Those who call art their own calling know this hauntingly.

Yet sweet clarity is there to be found, despite.  Sometimes you have to mutter through your mess inarticulate (gasping through the bouts of self-loathing and doubt) for the reminder that that voice is there to be heard.  That hope is found not through numb retreat, but in the conscious - if momentarily unfulfilled - rest or motion towards the search and activity of this voice.

The irony of this post is not lost on me.  At the end of an exercise to see whether I could still write, I find out that I can.  That I do like it after all.  And perhaps I might even keep it up, if the strictures of an employment that is perfect in some regards and impossibly difficult in others does not snuff out the rest of that spark.

But that is the matter for another post, if I can find the voice to tell the tale.

Sliding in softly

I'm starting this blog back up again. Who knows how long it will last. I reached a point last year when I stopped wanting to spill out everything that was going on inside and out of me. Call it ironic for someone studying communications, but I just wanted to live life with all its pain, joy and craziness and soak it in - not talk about it. My life has been a canvas of very outgoing spots thrown upon the quieter, reflective background that has been my steady standby throughout my life. It was time to be silent for awhile.

When I think that my two years in Italy are over, I feel like a part of me was quietly removed and left behind in a place that slowly tugs and beckons for a return. I deeply, deeply, loved my time there. It was wicked hard. It could be deeply frustrating. I lived through more painful events in my life there than anything that had ever ripped my heart before. But there was the beauty that was so prevalent that you stopped noticing it after awhile because it was so much a part of life. There was that sharp, exhilarating independence in a way that I had never experienced before, where the life that I set was truly my own. Life was so much simpler there. Accomplishments may have taken a smaller scale as well, but nothing could compare to the satisfying sense of casually having a conversation in the language you had finally learned . . . of hearing an Italian tot giggle over and then repeat the words "oops" and "scrunched" that you unconsciously dropped while playing with scarves in June . . .of having favorite chapels in churches and favorite saints to visit . . . saints whom you knew were you own, because you'd unloaded buckets of tears and spilled so much ink on earnest prayers in desperate, heart-wrenching times . . . and then there was the promise of Assisi, now so far away, which holds a greater place in my heart than another other spot on this earth.

Classes were hard. Writing a Masters thesis in 2 weeks was even harder. Explaining the church's position on euthanasia in Media Training, on camera, in Italian, with a babbly teacher was tough too. But there was an ease to it . . .not always, but often there . . . that came from the routine, from the pace, and maybe from the amazing food. Being a resident stranger in a foreign country gives you a unique, semi-proactive observer status. You are there. Fact. And you are a part of it all. You don't really belong, and you know it. You observe and dip in, but you're still not it. And there was a strange security and comfort that came from that. It was ok there not to be perfect. I find that harder to remember over here.

America has processed food and high fructose corn syrup. Starbucks has nothing against an Italian cappucino. I drive my car now instead of tackling miles of road, and I lost my Rome legs, which is my greatest complaint about my homecoming. The little blessings are there too. It is good to be back in America. I missed the sense of having a grand community of people who speak your language - in more nuances than one. Perpetual academics were never my flavor, with a few deserved and lovable exceptions. I missed seeing my family, hugging my nephews and my two nieces - one of whom I didn't even meet until one month ago today. But adjusting has been hard. Harder than I thought it would be. Maybe even harder because everything will feel so normal until something in me shifts, and then I'll realize that I haven't really settled in at all.

I have a new job, doing what I always said I wanted to be doing: writing. There is something rather terrifying to that: to finally have the chance to do what you've advertised as your core for so long. It is very much putting your own self on the line, for yourself, to see what you look like after all. I never thought I'd be writing about space shuttle missions and Hubble telescopes with their kazillion technical systems, but I am. I'm there to infuse the human dimension into the technical mumbo, and that is an idea that I deeply love. I have a great set of people around me, but that hasn't mitigated yet the same feelings of dread that seep back from my work experiences pre-Rome . . . two years of feeling inadequate will wreck their share of damage on you fairly quick and tear deep scars. But I refuse to sink in. I had a dear wise friend of mine say the other day that having to walk on water was easier than walking on the ground because you know that it's impossible and your success doesn't depend on your own strength. I am walking on water now. But I know that I'm doing what I should be doing. And I'm here to do it, even if it does wrench me a bit.

I started this post because I had writer's block all day and was in agony about it. A project still awaits me tonight when I close this browser window, because the first week is all about making good impressions, is it not? But the blessings do come in the midst of it all, because somehow through spinning this all out I remembered that I can write after all . . .and that means I can let myself off the line, for just a little while.

New York has a new archbishop

Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of the conservative National Review online, has written a fantastic article for the National Catholic Register introducing New York's new archbishop, Timothy Michael Dolan.  Not only does Lopez discuss the Church's need for strong orthodox leadership, she emphasizes that the leadership must be - first and foremost - in love with Christ and His Church for their work to bear fruit.  Worth reading.