Point of Reference (Birthday Reflections)

I was born on Holy Thursday, a fact I didn’t realize until just a few years ago. I have always loved Holy Thursday, the pageantry of the Mass on that night, the meaning of the Last Supper, the humility shown in the washing of the feet, the celebration of the priesthood, the end of what is always a long Lent, the summation of our faith in the gift of the Eucharist given to us on that night, the solemn act of departing in silence, and spending quiet time with our Lord at the altar of repose.  Long before I knew that it coincided with my birth, I loved it, and apparently, God knew I would, so He gave me the day as a birthday gift.

This year, my birthday falls on Holy Saturday, and is overshadowed by the preparations for Easter.  We are cleaning the house, and I will be baking and decorating and assembling Easter baskets for the kids.  At sunset, we will have a bonfire and chase away the darkness, renew our baptismal promises, and sing the Alleluia songs.   The focus will not be on my birthday, but on the day we were all given a chance to be “born again”, as the Bible-belt saying goes.  My birthday can wait, as it should.

It took me a while to realize this, of course.  Humility is not a virtue that comes easy to me. I was reminded of that again this past week, when I got terribly upset because my husband asked me to write out a list of what I would like for gifts, rather than just “shopping from the heart” as I’d hoped he would. I minced no words in expressing my disappointment and hurt.  Of course, it was not really about the gifts at all.  It was that strong desire we all have inside to just be loved and wanted and the center of someone’s attention, if only for a little while.  The center of attention.  Exactly the opposite of humility.

I recognized in a very painful way last year that so many of my anxieties and emotions are brought on by a lack of humility.  Since that time, I have tried to be more mindful in practicing this one virtue from which all other virtues stem.  It has been a challenge for which I was not well prepared and has been a series of triumphs and failures. Much as the Israelites were winning the battle as long as Moses’ arms were held up, I have found that when I really work at humility, I am winning the battle for peace and love in my home.  When I relax, the battle is no longer in my favor.  Thankfully, I have the saints and our Blessed Mother to help me lift my arms back up, and the confessional, which is where I placed myself on Holy Thursday this year.

When I awoke on this Holy Saturday, I reflected upon the many birthdays I have been blessed with in my life. Fifty-two of them so far.  That’s a lot of reflection.  Most, I cannot even remember.  A few, I recall, were terrible, like the one when I turned forty and was still childless.  That was a bad one. Then, there was the one when I drove from Missouri to Kentucky with two three-year olds in the backseat, moving them away from the only home they’d known to a new life in a new place.  That was a stressful and anxious one. There was the birthday when I submitted my letter of resignation after a 20-year career in the workforce, a gift to myself that came 10 years later than I’d planned.  There was the birthday marked by a pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Accompanied by a supportive husband who understood the importance of the trip to me, and the three children I never thought I’d have, that birthday was an act of thanksgiving to God for 50 years of answering my prayers in ways better than I could have imagined.  And there was the birthday I had last year, spent in pandemic lock-down, when the only pilgrimage I could make was to the forest outside our door.  God blessed me that day with sunshine and wildflowers because He knows that second to family and faith, it is His creation that I love most.

It was in this reflection that I realized that birthdays are nothing more than simply a point of reference for our lives.  When I leave this world, my birthday will be meaningless to me.  While I am in in this world, they are a point from which I can look forward with hope and look backward with gratitude.   They are the stepping stones along a journey to my final destination, if only I can remain humble. And in between each stone grow wildflowers and children and a marriage and a family and a realization that all along, I have always been the center of God’s attention.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It Started With St. Joseph's Day

St. Joseph's Day, 2019

It all started on St. Joseph’s Day, six years ago.

That was the day that I took my first step into incorporating liturgical living into our family life.  It was a spontaneous act, spurred by the influence and inspiration I was finding in relatively new bloggers who were sharing with the rest of us how they lived the Catholic life at home with their kids. 

I was still a relatively new mom. My oldest child was four years old, and I was toying with the idea of homeschooling because we didn’t have the option of sending our kids to a Catholic school (among other reasons).  But I had no example to follow, no upbringing that incorporated the faith into daily living (aside from grace before meals), and no idea how to make being Catholic something my kids would understand, let alone enjoy.  Raising children in a community where Catholics are the extreme minority made me even more determined to bring our faith into our daily life, and I knew making it fun was imperative.  I didn’t just want our children to know they were Catholics; I wanted them to WANT to be Catholics.  So, I did what I’d done two years before, when I was looking for a community that understood the experience of infertility from a Catholic-perspective. I started searching the blogs for the community that I couldn’t find next door, only this time, I was looking for experienced, devout, Catholic mothers who were teaching the faith in fun ways to their children.

That was in 2014, when blogging was still a “thing” and the blogging community was strong, and networked, and we were all learning from one another in more than 30 second sound-bites. With a little searching, I found blogs like Catholic All Year and Shower of Roses and Catholic Icing, among others. I dove into them, reading post after post, and was blown away by all that they were doing with their kids to live fully the liturgical life. Still, I hesitated, mostly because living liturgically the way those families on the blogs did just seemed so overwhelming and beyond my capabilities. My boys hated crafts and coloring sheets, I did not feel like I had the time to do so many of the things that I saw and admired on the blogs, and I just barely knew the faith myself, yet these blogging mothers were so well catechized.  So, I read about it a lot and did very little.

But the seed had been planted, and the Holy Spirit was watering it in my soul. It was on March 19, 2015 that I remember driving to pick up my two little boys at preschool when the thought suddenly struck me that it was St. Joseph’s Day, a Solemnity no less, and I, once again, was completely ignoring it.  It nagged at me, much as the Holy Spirit does sometimes, and I couldn’t shake the thought that I should at least do something to honor this Patron of our Universal Church and encourage a devotion in my sons to this model of men.  Still, it was already 2 p.m. and I didn’t have time to make or prep anything; however, I did remember reading that it was a tradition to eat cream puffs (zeppoles) on St. Joseph’s Day.  So, with only a few minutes to spare, I drove past my kids’ school, and went a few extra miles to the grocery store, grabbed a packet of eclairs from their bakery shelf, and then rushed back to the school to pick up the kids. It felt a little crazy, and much too unplanned for my comfort, but at least it was something.

When we arrived home, I made dinner, then told the boys that I had a surprise for dessert (since it was Lent, they found this very perplexing).  I cleared the table, put a statue of St. Joseph in the middle of it, unwrapped the eclairs from their cellophane wrapping, and served them on a plastic Disney plate. The boys were ecstatic.  Suddenly, they loved St. Joseph’s Day, and suddenly, I did, too! I snapped a couple of photos and shared them on social media to commemorate our first baby steps into liturgical living.

St. Joseph's Day, 2015

That was the beginning of a new way of learning for my husband, myself, and our kids.  As feast days would approach, I would research them and plan little ways to celebrate them.  And although our children focused mostly on the treats they were receiving, or the fun parts of the day, they also began to associate the activities with various saints, liturgical seasons, feasts, memorials, and solemnities.  But perhaps more importantly, I was learning along with them, and living the kind of life I wish I’d had as a child being raised in the very progressive post-Vatican II church of the 1970s.  In so many ways, sharing the faith with our kids in this way has felt like a second chance for me to learn and experience so much that I missed out on as a Catholic kid.  It has truly been a win-win.

St. Joseph's Day, 2017

This past week, for the sixth year in a row, we celebrated St. Joseph’s Day again.  Six years later though, it has now evolved into an all-day celebration.  Instead of a last-minute trip to the grocery, my son and I cooked in the kitchen together, making our own cream puffs side-by-side. 

St. Joseph's Day, 2021

My husband, a true carnivore who looks forward with great anticipation to Meat Fridays, took off work early so that he could put pork chops on the grill.  My other son, who loves working with wood just as St. Joseph did, worked in the garage on a craft made from pieces of cherry wood that he cut and sanded, turning each piece into a pretty little candle sconce. 

St. Joseph's Day, 2021

We invited a few (non-Catholic) friends over, and our two parish priests, and all sat down to a feast together, telling stories, and predicting whether or not St. Joseph was going to send us some sunshine on what so far, had been a very gray and cloudy day (he did).

As the sun set that evening, we finished up the dishes, swept the floors, lit the candles in our brand-new St. Joseph’s Day sconces, and said our family rosary.  The four-year old, wiped out from a day of non-stop activity and no nap, leaned against his dad and was sound asleep before the second decade.  In the candlelight, our statue of St. Joseph stood illuminated, looking down from the mantle upon our little family.  Later that night, as I kissed my oldest son goodnight, he leaned forward and said, “I wish every day could be like this,” then he drifted off to sleep, no doubt dreaming of cream puffs and the love of St. Joseph, and as he did, I recognized that my dream was already coming true.

 

On Finding My Tribe

LIFE takes us to unexpected places,

  LOVE brings us home.

I’ve moved around a few times in my life.  My earliest years were spent in the southwest, where I can remember spending Sunday afternoons on Hopi Indian reservations, watching the Butterfly Dances and dancing alongside the Hopi Indians as a happy youngster, searching for the black-and-white painted Pueblo clowns moving amongst them.  As I reached school age, my family moved to the south, where I picked up a southern drawl and wondered why my parents didn’t put a rebel flag in their yard like all the neighbors.  My coming-of-age years were spent in the mountains of Kentucky, living in a very isolated region among people who could not relate to living anywhere else, and who had no desire to do so. Later, married life took my husband and me to the Midwest. There, we lived outside St. Louis, but my work took me into the Ozark hills and a culture very similar to the one I’d come to know in Appalachia.  Ten years later, we returned to the hills of Kentucky, where I am now, and where I hope to remain, God willing.

I share this because I have been thinking a lot lately about those who feel that they have not found their “tribe” and are searching for just the right place to live.  The mindset seems especially rampant now, post-election, as both conservative and liberal-minded folks look for a place where they “belong”. And I admit, I have thought about it a lot as well.  It is very tempting to want to move someplace where more people think like us, live like us, maybe even look like us. Would this be the solution to my discontent? Do I just need to find my people? Is it time to circle the wagons?

It’s called the “siege mentality” and it happens when we begin to feel threatened, isolated, or oppressed because of what we believe or how we choose to live. More than just the “grass being greener” folly, the siege mentality often develops when we have been victimized, ostracized, or marginalized because we took a stand to fight and found ourselves standing alone.  It makes us want to run until we can find a group willing to stand with us.   It’s not that this is necessarily a bad thing; we all desire a community to which we belong and that helps us feel validated to some degree. Such is human nature.  However, I only wish to issue a word of caution that this kind of thinking can too often mislead us into making some very big life decisions based upon an illusion of happiness.

Before I was born, my father as a young man moved to the southwest in search of adventure and to satisfy his desire for wide-open spaces.  Six years later, he’d had his fill of it and missed the changing of the seasons and rainy days and growing tomatoes, so he moved back east with his young family in tow.  Six years after that, he decided he wanted to go back home, and live in familiar lands with familiar people again, so he moved us back to his hometown and swore he’d never move again.  Forty years later now, he never has.  It took him 13 years and nearly 2,000 miles of distance to realize that he was happiest where he’d started. 

My story is a bit different.  I never felt a strong desire to move around, perhaps due to being involuntarily moved around as a kid.  But when presented with the opportunity to move to the Midwest, I was excited, not so much because I was not happy with where we lived at the time, but more because we were moving to an area where there were more Catholics, the “Rome of the West”, no less!  And frankly, I was looking forward to living for the first time in a place where I was not the religious minority.

However, what I found was that in this Catholic stronghold, the people were not as friendly as those I’d known in the south, where everyone calls you “sweetie” and “blesses your heart”.  My husband and I felt spoiled to have dozens of Catholic churches to attend that were within 50 miles of our home, yet, two years later, we were still trying to find a parish where our more traditional Catholic beliefs were supported.  Once we did, we found that after having children, the more orthodox crowd (and priest) at the Catholic church where we’d been attending, did not take too kindly to unruly toddlers disrupting their prayers, and so we began church-hopping again.  And at nearly every church we attended, we were disappointed when pro-life events were poorly attended, by the pro-Obama bumper stickers in the church parking lot, and by a general lack of hospitality afforded those who were obvious strangers.

So, after ten years, we moved again, and just as my father did, we landed right back where we’d started.  Here we live today, in the middle of the Bible belt, in an ocean of strong Christian evangelicals and a speckling of lukewarm Catholics.  We belong to a large Christian, but not Catholic, homeschool co-op that allows me to scratch out the line about “Sola scriptura” in their Statement of Faith before I sign it.  We attend a Catholic church that struggles to remain Catholic, but at least where we can receive the sacraments validly and welcomes enthusiastically my family and accepts our behaviorally challenged children as they are.  Our social circle is composed primarily of homeschooling families and a few others, none of whom share our faith. Like me when I was a child, my children are growing up without Catholic friends and without being exposed every Sunday to the true beauty and reverence that the Holy Mass deserves and should offer.  Our life here is certainly far from our ideal but we make it work.

What that means is that my husband and I must work even harder to catechize our children at home.  It means we must make a greater effort to find opportunities to expose them to the beauty of the faith by taking road trips to visit cathedrals or attend ordinations or beautiful Catholic weddings.  It means inviting our priests over for dinner regularly and asking them to hear our confessions on the back porch because our Catholic church was built without a confessional.  It means using a solid, Catholic curriculum for their homeschool education because the closest Catholic school is 100 miles away.

But more than anything, it means that we must find a way to accept that God has put us where he wants us even if it does not seem ideal.  Even if I can think of a million ways that it could be better.  I could worry about my sons meeting “good Catholic women” to marry someday.  I could worry about them leaving the church because of the Protestant environment in which they are growing up.  I could feel upset about my fellow parishioners who scoff at the way my family chooses to practice what they believe is an “old fashioned” form of Catholicism. There’s no shortage of things to be depressed about if I dwell on them.

And dwell on them, I have. After living for a couple of years where we are today, I was restless and questioned if we were in the best location for our family and our faith.  For a long time, I did not think I belonged in this small town of people who seemed nothing like me.  However, experience had already taught me that no matter where we go, no place will meet all my expectations.  So, we decided to stay for the long haul.  

And it was only after I accepted that fact that God began to lead me to my own tribe.  And to my surprise, they were not the Catholic community that I for so long had wanted to be a part of. Instead, he showed me that it was my Protestant brothers and sisters living all around me who would be the ones I could look to for encouragement and example.  It took my experience of living in both a Catholic stronghold and the Bible Belt to realize this.

Right now, it is their example, and not that of most Catholics, that I am admiring.  They are the ones voting for life when it really counts, forming militias and taking a stand when out-of-state protestors arrive on their doorstep, and still going to church every Sunday despite COVID-19 and governmental threats. They are the ones showing up for Veteran’s Day services and flying the American flag proudly in their yards. They have nourished their faith from generation to generation by teaching their children to learn from the Bible, memorize the commandments, go to church every Sunday (wearing their Sunday best, of course), and respecting the Biblical authoritative structure of the family. These are the things I see our Protestant brothers and sisters doing that are making them great evangelizers in this historic moment for our country. 

For a long time, I didn’t think I’d ever find my tribe, and wanted to move to a place where people were more like me.  Little did I know that God was waiting to show me that the place I needed to be was right where I was all along, surrounded by people I never would have guessed would be the ones I needed to be around the most.