New Man

I feel like a new man.

This, from the mouth of a shelter-dwelling man who maybe hadn't showered in a week.  When I ran upstairs to get some gloves with which to remove some the old bandages from the arm of another man, his odor rose up the stairs with me, like unwanted company. 

He brought with him a giant cookie cake from the soup kitchen next store.  The friars had baked goods to give away.  One man came into the clinic with an ice cream cake.  Eat it quickly, we told him, laughing at the rich absurdity of it, even in the chilly weeks approaching the official start of winter.  I guess I'd better have a party, he said.  You want a piece?

I stashed the cookie cake in a back room though the official policy is to not be responsible for other people's property.  Too many people in and out, too many things to keep track of.    After he showered and put back on the same clothes, with a new old sweatshirt that came from the supply closet, I gave him back his cookie cake. 

I feel like a new man.

I like to talk about the clinic, and I don't.  I like to talk about some of the things I see, because they're so outrageously unbelievable and heartbreaking.  Even after all the reading that can be done about addiction and homelessness and the underserved.  It is still so unbelievable.  But I also don't like to give anyone any reason to tell me that I'm doing a good thing. 

No.  I slide into and out of that world with an ease that is almost unforgivable.  I drive in, in a safe car that locks and has heat, and I drive out in the same one, as clinic patrons head back to the streets or a shelter, with new prescriptions or instructions or with tokens or bus fare to head to the ER, because their blood sugar is so high that it doesn't register on the glucometer.  It only flashes, "HI," "HI", "HI," and they have ketones in their urine...so they're acidotic and probably need insulin hung. 

I feel like a spectator.  And I am.  Despite the blood pressure cuff I wraps around this man's arm, or the disposable thermometer I put in that woman's mouth, or the flu shot I administer to this man, and this woman. I try not to be a spectator, I pray to not be one, but I am. 

The real work, the nuts and bolts, is done by the nurse practitioners who run it.  They have formed relationships, know most clients by name, know their stories, which could keep keep the average person up at night.  They fill out the forms, follow up, encourage, chide, refer, prescribe.  I read their notes when I can, trying to memorize how they document, the way nurses do, their assessments. 

I feel like a new man.

I carry this home with me, into a world with the stress of looking for a full-time nursing job, my first one since graduating with a BSN.  I can get lost in my own world, some worries petty, some anxieties real.  I carry it around like a laptop bag: there are so many compartments into which I can slide this worry or that one.  Despite all my perspective, which I've been generally good at recognizing and embracing, I still struggle with it. 

I see his smiling face carrying his cookie cake out the door.  Adios, he calls. 

At home, it's warm inside and my dog jumps on me and my kids call out to me.  The kitchen is a mess and normally I'd roll my eyes and sigh.

I feel like a new man. 

His words hang over me, like an admonishment or a prayer, I'm not sure which.  Like something from the merciful mouth of Christ himself.  I can't begin to explain this to my family, so I just sit in the warmth and in the light and in the company of those I love. 

I recently had to attend a support group for people with depression and bipolar illness.  It was for school and my psychiatric rotation, and I chose it in part because it was an area I am intimately familiar with.  But as I looked around at all those drawn faces, I found I wanted to gather them all up to form our own running club.  "Listen," I'd say.  "Running cures everything.  We can run and cry and laugh and feel the adrenaline surge...and we can get better.  C'mon!  Lace up, let's go!"

When I run, I forget everything.  I am lost in this turbulent sea of breath and blood.  It is heaven.  When I can't run, like on a slippery, snowy day like today, I feel a little bit like screaming.  I have to do something else, something indoors, and it never feels quite sufficient.  And as it goes, I did some crazy strength-training workout and now I cannot turn my head to the right, and sigh...

My feet on the pavement are a metronome.  I run up to the nearby cemetery and loop around it.  Sometimes it is empty, and it's just me and the birds, squirrels and groundhogs...and several thousands souls.  Sometimes there are other walkers, runners, bikers.  Sometimes there are mourners.  During my run last week, I witnessed a group of people, heads down, circling a grave.  Further down the road, I saw an older man get out of his car and walk through the rows.  It was that hyperemotional time, when my hormones were dropping and disappearing, and I cried while I ran.  The body, though, has no additional room for any other act that makes breathing difficult.  So I stopped to walk and wipe my face and catch my breath.

I like to think that running in a cemetery makes me less scared of death.  My brother-in-law is buried in another cemetery, close to a statue of the Pieta.  In the aftermath of Newtown, I thought of all the mothers and fathers holding their children, like the bloodied Christ in Mary's arms.  There is no Pieta where I run, but there are crosses and Bible passages, and I feel a strange kind of love there.  Sometimes I say the names of the dead, people who've been gone for decades and decades, and I like to think they appreciate the nod and the heavy whisper.  I haven't forgotten them.  Some day, someone might say my name in the same way, or wonder about me.  What a weird and wonderful way to go on. 

Sometimes it is hard to see Christ in anything.  I know that he's always there, but still.  So much awfulness lately.  So much death and violence.  When I run, I am temporarily inoculated against it all.  There is just my heart working overtime and my feet going pound pound pound pound, and I know my running is like a prayer: faith and relief and joy and some sadness.  I believe in it.  I really believe in it. 

I'm Still Here

I was standing in the kitchen this morning, buttering an English muffin, when I had the powerful sensation that I simply had to attend Mass today.  I haven't been to church since July 22, when the Mass I had offered for my friend Tara was said.  And then before that, I hadn't been to church in quite some time.

So I did.  I got showered and dressed and brushed the slight hangover out of my mouth and drove through the rain to that beautiful building.

At Mass, I discovered the priest who had been removed during Lent 2011 was back.  I had read in the National Catholic Reporter that he had been found suitable for return to the ministry.  And I was thinking of him pretty much through the entire hour.  How it must have been to be removed and know what people are thinking of you, and then to return, and wonder what people think of you now?  But I'd hazard to guess that even that pain isn't but a fraction of what the abused child has to endure.

******

I didn't put anything in the offering basket.  I'll probably send a check to the LCWR.  Is it wrong that part of me hopes for a fracture?  For a schism?  Why can't I have my catholic cake and eat it, too? 

I feel wrapped up in the birth control mandate, and the fortnight for freedom, and what I interpret to be a power grab aimed at women religious. 

My Church continues to make me cry.  Really, not most of its people, but its bureaucracy.  Save for one now deceased Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who, in his final dying interview, implored the Church to change, or risk losing more and more parishioners. 

A few choice quotes from that interview: 

-"The Church is 200 years out of date.  Why don't we rouse ourselves?  Are we afraid?"

-"Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our rituals and our cassocks are pompous."

-"A woman is abandoned by her husband and finds a new companion to look after her and her children. A second love succeeds. If this family is discriminated against, not just the mother will be cut off but also her children."

-"The Church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the pope and the bishops. The paedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation."

Sounds like a gracious man truly grappling with the role of the Church in the modern world.  I hope his voice continues to resonate.

******

It's been over two months since Tara died.  Sometimes I think of that and I'm blown away. 

She was cremated.  Her remains stood in a box the the funeral home, surrounded by some pictures.  There were many, many people present, and her husband gave a wonderful eulogy.  As did her best friend.  All of this while her 3-year old daughter, a pixie of a thing, wound her way around everyone's calves as we stood listening.  Listening to words and to music.  And of course, everyone crying. 

Her final decline was rapid.  It's hard to think of someone's three-year fight against cancer and frame it in any way that it seems merciful.  But if there was one thing about it that was merciful, it was that she was transported to hospice on a Thursday evening, and had passed peacefully by 7:30 on Friday morning.

****

I did well for about half of Lent trying not to yell at my kids.  That was my 'sacrifice,' and believe me, if you have kids, it IS a sacrifice.  There is a lot of pleasure in yelling, "What in the name of God are you thinking?"  Or, "If I have to come up there..."  Or, "early bedtimes for all!" 

But, you know, sometimes it becomes too easy, and too natural, and one thing I try (very imperfectly) to keep in my mind is that Tara would want me to try to be gentle with my kids.  And everyone else.  I mean, sure, she'd probably agree that I need to give them holy hell every now and then, but really, why waste too much time with vinegar when honey can work too? 

Still, I started failing about three weeks in.  I should tell you that my kids gave up nothing for Lent.  They did chores for money, and sent the money in to a relief organization in Haiti called Hands Together.  You should have seen their faces when they got back a thank-you letter addressed to them. 

****

My kids and a friend of theirs had their own memorial service for Tara, which was disorganized and involved prayers I'd never heard of.  They dressed in black and held her funeral card and I had to stop myself from stopping them.  It seemed too morbid, but I knew they'd seen me upset and heard me talk about her, to David and to my friends, and they knew when she was still alive that she wouldn't be for long. 

Kids can have the most beautiful and tender hearts.  That's what they wanted to do, in a world that suddenly seemed to contain a diminished level of control.  So I let them. 

****

My eldest has been having a hard time at school, with one child in particular.  It has been stressing her out, and she's been displaying signs of anxiety at home.  Right around the time Tara died, I remember talking with Hannah about her classmate.  I told her, "I need you to stand up for yourself, but I will intervene if I have to.  I'll always be here for you." 

And she said to me, "Not if you die." 

And everything I had been trying to hold in came out like water from the Johnstown flood. 

I Can't Possibily Title This

Do you believe in miracles?

Generally, I do, when I'm not feeling punchy or bitter or faithless. That is, sometimes I believe the hand of God, which is always present, directly intervenes. Stopping the persistent procession of cancer cells, or reversing brain damage; restoring hearing or bringing the clinically dead back to the land of breath and warmth.

This story seems to be one such miracle. When people begin to discuss organ donation, the outlook is pretty bleak. And when a neurosurgeon has no answer as to why a recovery as drastic as this took place, and actually uses the word 'miraculous,' well, I just have to go with it.

What I don't get is the why. Why are some people granted this affirmative answer to their fervent prayers? And why are some left to try to find the hand of God elsewhere, residing somewhere, though perhaps obscured, in the haze and mad swirl of grief?

I am praying for a friend. A lot of people are praying along with me. When I've visited her, we've had discussions that would normally make me crawl on the floor towards a corner, only to fall and wrap myself tightly into a fetal ball. I hold it together until I get into my car. I suspect a lot of the other people in her wide circle do the same.

Thus far, the answer to the biggest prayer has been no. And it is a no that I chase out of my brain, or drown out with another prayer. I entreat everyone I can -- St. Jude, St. Peregrine, the Mother of God herself -- to intervene. I call the saints, soft and ethereal in their watercolor robes, to petition Christ to reverse the irreversible. I call on Mary, sitting and mourning with Christ's body on her lap.

I am trying to turn that no into a yes. A lot of people are trying to turn that no into a yes.

I try to remember the biggest thing. That the soul survives death. Sometimes when I run, Alanis Morrisette reminds me to remember it: "How 'bout not equating death with stopping?"

But we're talking a young person. With a family. I don't know. The stakes are really high.

I also don't know how to conclude this. Except to say that the litany continues. And today, Thursday, the Luminous Mysteries. In reading about meditations on the Wedding at Cana, we can think about how "no situation of human need is outside the scope of God's healing interest and care."

So in the direst of situations, the human need to be present as a flesh and blood mortal, I continue to speak and ask and plead.

Kind and Present

You might think that because I've been lax in updating that I've fallen victim to the subtitle of this blog. You might think that I've forgotten about God, and understandably so.

This, however, is not the case. I had grandiose ideas that I would attend weekday Mass a few times a week, but weekday Mass is at 8am, and I'm often just dropping my girls off at 7:55am, which would make me about 15 minutes late getting there. Either that, or I'm in stained sweats with coffee/morning breath, having yet to make myself presentable. I'd show up late, thinking the priest would rather have me tardy than not at all, but it's Father Don't Call Me By My First Name Because It's Too Familiar, and so I feel a bit awkward clicking the heels of my slip-ons down the tiled aisle. Click, Click, Click, Yes Father Surname, I'm late.

I have been there once on a Friday, and managed to be only 7 minutes late, but still, I like to be on time. This is almost fully within my control, so barring any meltdowns with my youngest, I should be able to remedy this. I believe it would be to my benefit. And my kids'.

I spent the summer seeing God in my children, primarily when they were asleep. I still see God in them when I peek in on them before bed. But it's hard to see God in my children first thing in the morning. It becomes slightly easier after a cup of coffee, but then becomes difficult again when they begin arguing at the breakfast table.

They're so beautiful, it cracks open my heart just a little bit, making a mess. Children can be achingly lovely one moment, and near demonic the next. It is the nature and challenge of parenting.

One of my most frequent prayers is to be kind and present for my children. Sometimes I'm cross with them. Short. Abrupt. And I catch myself, hopefully then, but sometimes not until later, and I say a prayer for help and guidance.

I am guilty of being that person that cannot wait to be doing something outside of this home. And it's not that I think there is anything wrong with wanting to contribute something to the world outside of the domestic realm. But I think I give short shrift to what I do here, and that includes my children, who I will one day let loose upon this world. Sometimes when I realize the enormity of that, it can quickly overwhelm me. We have so much to teach them, and if I want them to be loving, kind, compassionate women, I have to model that for them. In how I treat others, yes, but also how I treat them.

So it's my mantra. Kind and present. Kind and present. Kind and present.

Have I written before that I'm a better parent when attending Mass regularly? I probably have. I'm probably repeating myself. But it's true. Going to Mass makes me a better parent. I could write a series of blog posts on the reasoning behind this. To be the most concise about it all, the most succinct, I guess I would just explain it as a clean slate. There's no other place where I feel I can sufficiently rid myself of the week's detritus: failures and mistakes and sins.

Sometimes when I take Communion, I feel awash in love. If you know me, you know how hard it is for me to type something like that. I am sarcastic, cynical, negative, jokey. I am uneasy stating that. It is a soft feather to my rough edges.

I hope one day the girls feel the same thing. It may take them 30 years, and it may happen in another church or faith. That's completely cool with me. As long as they realize there is always a new chance and beginning. Always a place to try again. And always a massive love that exists as a guiding force.

It's so lovely outside today that I think I'll take them to the park after I pick them up from school. Because I also see God in them when they laugh. Sleeping and laughing. I'm still working on the rest in between.

Danieal Kelly

She was stuck to the bed of the room she died in. Bed sores infested with maggots. She was 14, with cerebral palsy, and 40-something pounds, having been starved to death by her mother, abandoned by her father, and forsaken by social workers.

Her mother is in jail. Her father is on trial.

And I want to know. Where was God in that room? Was he there? Did he talk to her, as her body metabolized itself, as her organs shut down?

Did he whisper that he loved her? That all would soon be love, and peace and light? That suffering was transient? That mourning would be replaced by laughter? That the kingdom of heaven would be hers?

I find myself struck that the universe can know one child, and another can be forgotten, discarded like trash. Did she at least know one Father, after having been left by the other?

I want to know this. I need to have this answered.

And I feel horrible for even asking it. Because I don't know where God is, and can't say for sure that even in the most deplorable conditions, He is absent. Who am I to say?

I am just someone who hopes that child was held and loved, that she sat in the arms of the Father or Mother, as she slipped from a life she didn't ask for into the eternal one that she deserved.

Lent got off to a bumpy start.

We were informed at the end of the 9:15am Ash Wednesday service that our priest was one of 21 clergy members in the Philadelphia Archdiocese put on leave for suspicion of child abuse.

It was an interesting juxtaposition of feelings. I remember walking into church feeling like I was in dire need of a Lenten season of renewal, but also feeling hopeful and good. And then I walked out feeling sucker-punched.

I don't really have a lot of Catholics in my life that I can discuss this with. I wouldn't exactly call our church community vibrant. It's the kind of church people go to, and then leave. There's no Bible study, no volunteer community, no book clubs, no places for discussion. I checked the parish online bulletin board when I got home, but it was closed due to spam. It somehow seemed entirely fitting.

On my way out that morning, an elderly woman told me she hoped this was all a horrible mistake.

Ditto.

I tried to discuss it with one very Catholic friend, and the 'conversation' left me prickly. In her words, 'she wasn't going to participate in judgment,' and the thoughts that went through my brain following that statement were very uncharitable.

Seriously? No thoughts on what is going on? What has been going on, like, forever? When the entire course of some people's lives has been put on a trajectory of pain? When those who could protect fail to do so?

I think it's all very fine and good not to cast stones, but when you have a situation that involves the systematic cover-up of horrendous child abuse, it changes things a lot. And I think some stones should be cast. I think some stones should be thrown, hard. Or hung around necks, like the millstones Christ talked about.

I didn't go to Mass this past Sunday.

The crappy fact of it all is that I trust no one. And it's sad that I trust the hands of Eucharistic ministers more than I trust the hands of the ordained.

Overdue Update

I find it hard to believe it's been over two months since I posted here. Time seems to be flying in a way that I have trouble processing.

Today, the girls are home from school -- the second day of a stuffy cold -- but they are outside in the mildest weather of the year playing with a neighbor. I should be making them stay in and away from other kids, especially given the very dramatic ways they both arose today. I've been there, as a kid, not feeling my best and wanting to stay home. The air will be good for them, a little bit of sweat too.

And yes, they're going back to school tomorrow.

I have nearly finished The Sign of Jonas, and started the Kathleen Norris book Acedia & Me, but both are currently collecting dust as I once again return to my textbook. The lymphatic system reigns.

I spent the good part of December finishing up a nursing school application and some financial aid stuff. There were three applications in full. One school told me my GREs were too old, and so I'd have to retake them to be considered. I can't type here what I said to that bit of info. Another school has already said no to me, and I'm waiting for my third to tell me what my plans will entail this fall.

I might just have a really clean house, and time to fill with computer work. I've been trying to settle into the possibility that nursing school is not in the cards this fall, because I don't want to get my hopes up.

I've been working rather hard for over 2 years fulfilling these prerequisites, so it stings a bit to encounter a roadblock to my self-imposed schedule.

This was my plan! To be in school full-time this fall! It was going to be perfect, with both the kids in school full-time, and me too!

(Sigh.)

I'm not sure what this all means.

Though I'm not sure about all that 'everything happens for a reason' stuff, it's a bit heartening to think that my way has been stymied for something better. At least, that's what will take me through the disappointment. I'll find out in March.

There is a single bright side to my failure to gain nursing school entry. I will take the summer off from classes. No Microbiology Monday-Thursday for 12 weeks, because there'd be no need to try to stuff it in. I could take it in the Fall and regroup, and try to figure out what's next. There are a few more school possibilities for future applications, but I'd really have to weigh time requirements/benefits.

I'm just kind of spilling here, and thinking out loud.

It just kind of sucks to put in the time and be told no.

The Body

I feel slightly guilty about abandoning Thomas Merton. I have yet to finish Sign of Jonas, though I am halfway through.

It's not his fault. I could laze about in his paragraphs for hours on end. It's just that I've had to put him aside in favor of a recently acquired part-time job and -- of course, ever-present -- my Anatomy & Physiology text.

I love the body. It's gruesome and magical, frightening and miraculous. I'm probably the most exhausted I've been in a while, having issues with sleeping and anxiety, and the feeling of always having something pressing to do. But I don't find myself so tired that I can't work up excitement over what makes us...us.

The kids have all these questions. They hear things in school about God making us, our bodies and minds, as if from waving a magic wand, and they look to me for confirmation. Which I give, in some vague way that leaves me unsettled and dissatisfied. Not Adam and Eve, and all that, as comfortingly simple as it all sounds. I stumble and stammer, mostly because I don't even begin to know what I believe, much less be able to explain it in some coherent way.

My text is like a bible of the body, and it's impossible not to see the intricate soulfulness of our creation, however it all came to be.

From the continued contraction of the striated muscle of the heart, to the ability of cells to effectively rid our bodies of toxins, to the nerve impulses that all work together to maintain homeostasis. To maintain. To be effective. For our bodies to work.

It's not that I don't see the hand of God in it all. I do. I just don't feel comfortable trying to elucidate on how. I wish I could tell my girls that with some kind of eloquence, especially when they look at me with their big eyes, wanting to be right. Yes, God made us. End of story. Sort of. Because that story is long and varied with twists and turns.

I've brought up the general concept of evolution with them, how we can trace our ancestors back, but that's about it. I think they'd find the fact of Australopithecus Afarensis a bit suspect. I'll leave that to their future science teachers.

I wonder what Merton would think of it all. He writes little about the human body, except for his relatively poor health and the way illness spread through the monastery like a fire through parched woods. I wonder what he thought of creation and evolution, or where he found the intersection of science and faith, if at all.

I do know he'd believe, no matter our source, that we weren't made for ourselves alone.

This Country is Giving Me a Nervous Breakdown

Hi Jesus,

Boy.

Am I pissed off or what?

You know who I'm mad at?

Well, America. Pretty much ALL of America.

I'm tired of living amongst a wishy-washy populace, who can vote one year for sweeping change, and then pretty much vote to fund none of it two years later. People who swallow the lie that their taxes have gone up, when in fact they've gone down. People who are misinformed, incurious, hateful and racist.


I'm tired of the tea party, which I pretty much believe to be a sham. A complete sham. Masquerading as a populist movement, when they throw their entire support to a party that's just as much about big government as the other: it's just a big government with different priorities, and you can bet your butt I don't think their priorities are sound. Not one bit.

My husband told me yesterday that he heard BP is already turning a profit. Only here can a corporation responsible for the death of millions of creatures and miles and miles and miles of coastlines, not to mention entire industries and livelihoods, turn the page that quickly.

I understand that people are hurting. I understand that people want change quicker than it's being dispensed. But turning to the party that actually sought to block the continuation of unemployment benefits? That's the answer? A party that calls not allowing insurance companies to deny people coverage because they're ill socialism?

Once I saw someone driving a truck that had two bumper stickers on it. One read I'm pro-life and I vote. The other said Why should I pay for your health insurance?

And it's a sight I will carry with me, pretty much FOREVER. Because in it lies the juxtaposition that so many people seem to carry as a philosophy, and it tears at my heart. I say to that guy in the pick-up truck, 'You can't be both.' You can't place yourself into a tent that's labeled pro-life (pro-life!) if you have no interest in seeing any of your tax dollars go to keep a mother who gives birth to her child insured, able to go to prenatal appointments so her baby is healthy, and able to give birth and then bring her child in for well visits.

Ah, whatever. I can pretty much tell you he doesn't give a shit. And he's probably more than a little bit misogynistic.

I'm feeling crummy today, Jesus. I'm not so certain that the Democrats walk your path either, so don't mistake my grumblings for that kind of pride.

I ask you to help turn my general bitchiness, anger and sadness into something constructive. Help me to do your work, whether or not I feel our government is helping or hindering. Help me to show compassion for all, even those with whom I disagree virulently. Help me to not want to throw rotten tomatoes at John Boehner's head. The same goes for Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

With love,

Kelly

My Own Gethsemani

I'm reading The Sign of Jonas right now. Merton has let me into his journal, and I get to see life in Gethsemani.

This is an old book, maybe around since the 60s, and the jacket is frayed along the edges. The front and back inside covers have a black and white photograph of Merton walking through what I presume to be the Kentucky woods. His back is sort of diagonally to the camera, his right foot raised in mid-stride. Have you ever wanted to enter a picture?

Yes, it's like that.

Wait! Wait for me! That's my feeling when I see it.

Sometimes I wonder if the restlessness I feel is actually a good thing. If the mild and vague sense of dissatisfaction is merely a sign of things to come. That life on earth can only get so good, and it's what comes after that is the true kick-ass part.

Please don't take vague dissatisfaction the wrong way. I'm mostly happy, mostly content, able to experience and witness and store away these lovely moments, generally with family and friends. But I don't know...there is this undercurrent, always an undercurrent, of wanting and needing more.

And I'm not sure if the undercurrent is God, or a sign from God, or the lingering dysthymia that never completely leaves me alone. What's funny is that I crave contemplation, aloneness -- or, at least, I think I do -- but the whole truth is that I wouldn't know what to do with myself there.

I'm not a still person. Sometimes I have to force myself to stop during those moments when the kids are taking their sweet time, and usually it's because they've noticed something, taken note of something in their surroundings that really requires stop and looking. All this is a good thing, but I get far ahead and have to double back, and I have to pull in that ingrained need to keep moving.

I wouldn't know what to do with still and silent. I wonder if that is something that can be learned. But then again, young children and a vocation for nursing aren't exactly leading me in that general direction, either. My life isn't quite chaos, but it isn't hand signals in dim light by the altar, either.

In the book, Merton writes about wondering if he's in the right place with the Trappists, or if he'd have been better suited for the Carthusians. Apparently, the Cistercians weren't silent enough. (And they're monks! Using sign language!)

Of course, Merton stays. He's chosen his particular version of stillness, and decided that that's exactly where God wants him. I have to believe that this is where God wants me, in the slight insanity of family life with my husband and children, moving among throngs of students, reading and writing, and yes, praying. It's a different form of contemplation, for sure. But every bit as valid and needed.

At least, that's what I tell myself as I put Lillian in time-out for the 80th time in an afternoon.

******

Do you know what I just reread on page 35? "The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary everyday routine."

I think I'm being told to go finish the dishes.

Crossfire of Heaven and Hell

This morning, I put a new pair of socks on Lillian's feet.

"Wow, these are soooooo soft," I told her, as she thrust her feet up in my face.

"Oooooh," she said back. "Are these Hannah's?"

"No," I told her. "They belong to your piggies, and your piggies alone."

She smiled and turned her head sideways, burying it in the couch cushion. This was a moment to absorb and keep and hold. Socks. Strange.

It's been a weird morning, punctuated by news stories that wound and weird dreams and news of upheaval. I took my migraine medication with my Italian roast, but my neck remains stiff and unwieldy.

I took Lillian to school and one of her classmates told me she was going camping this weekend. Everyone in her class was invited because they were 'her family.'

"When are you coming to pick me up?" I asked her.

"In one minute," she said.

"I'd better start packing then. I'll bring the marshmallows." The kids giggled and looked at me, expecting me to continue. Another moment. Gold among the gray.

I really want to go to church this morning. Masses are too early for me to make, but I know a room that's open always and filled with candles and maybe I can sneak into the back pew, if the church door is open there. I need to say 'thank you' and I need to say 'I'm sad, horribly sad.'

And I need to kneel there among the still flames cupped by glass and ask to be steadied. And I need to ask, 'what can I do, Lord, with my sadness, with my anger?'

I don't know what the reply will be.

******

The title of this post comes out of the lyrics to a song by The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers' new solo single "Crossfire." Just saying.

Thoughts

Merton before dawn.
A single light, rare quiet.
I try to make the

body feel what it
doesn't. The brain, register.
Something's amiss. I

reach for it, attempt
to lasso and pull the word
of God. Last night, me

and Judah, Ben-Hur
on the television, Christ
dying and lepers

healed. Judah crushes
his mother and sister to
him, their skin clean, whole.

I cry, always with
the quake, bloody puddles that
drip from the cross, light

flashing across the
wounded sky. Esther gasps, sees,
touches faces and

hands. Judah echoes
Christ: "I felt his voice take the
sword out of my hand."

When Lillian was a baby, I tried to bargain with God.

It was, I suppose, a version of prayer, called in by the desperation of a bedraggled and insanely weary mother.

On a mild November day, I had put my infant daughter in her stroller and taken her for a walk. Fully anticipating her normal routine of screeching after being placed ANYWHERE, I was pleasantly surprised when she feel asleep.

As I went around the block and all over my little neighborhood, bumping along the sidewalk, crunching the fallen leaves, I asked God if he could relieve me a bit, maybe have Lillian take to a bottle; or maybe not breastfeed 50 times a day; or maybe sleep longer that 45-minute stretches at night; or maybe entertain being put in a swing, carseat, stroller; or maybe allow her own father to hold her.

I walked around all day carrying her, her head nestled between my neck and shoulder, and I pretty much ignored the 2-year old I already had by necessity. No one else could pick her up. Her screams signaled that she was actively being wounded, not being held by the father who helped create her.

Things....they were not going well, and I needed a bit of assistance.

It turns out the particular answer to that prayer was no. Or, at least, that's how I heard it. Lillian continued to nurse very frequently, continued to require constant holding (by me only, of course), and continued to have the sleep patterns of someone addicted to speed.

Eventually I just gave up, taking things minute by minute if I needed to.

Somehow we got through, and perhaps that's where I'm wrong about my prayer. Perhaps it's in the strength I still don't think I possessed back then. Perhaps it's in our survival. Perhaps it's in the fact that she did turn a corner...even if it was 6 months later.

(Also, she turned into this....that's a hard face to be irritated with!)

I've been thinking about prayer a lot. I've been thinking about my approach to it. Wondering how to make it more of a part of my life.

Not too long ago, I was trying to find someone a birthday present at the mall. I sat on a bench people watching for a bit, and watched a woman make a loop around me with a rosary dangling from her left hand. Her fingers, of course, at their particular spot on the beads. I watched her mouth move and no sound come out. I know someone was listening, though.

So...help me out. What do you do? Do you have a favorite prayer you say daily? Do you attend daily Mass? I'm not sure my schedule will ever allow that, but I wish that it would. Do you say the rosary? Download homilies to your iPod?

How do you actively weave prayer into the fabric of each day?

A post where I become just as judgmental as the people I accuse of judging

I keep seeing things on my Facebook homepage that are annoying the ever-living crap out of me.

Friends with things they like that make my nose bleed.

Friends that like If I need to be drug-tested for my job, than you need to be drug-tested for welfare, or

If you can afford alcohol and cigarettes, you shouldn't be on welfare, or

I have a stick up my ass when it comes to government-sponsored safety nets, and where's my hand-out?

(Okay, I made that last one up.)

And my eyes kind of glaze over and I want to punch something.

Look, I know there are people who abuse the system. But I also know there are people trying to make it. And I can only think of these things in oversimplified terms, much like those Facebook 'likes' that I despise so much, because I don't know what the answer is.

I have zero idea -- how we can make our economy productive and provide jobs with benefits that pay a decent wage or how to make parents do their job or how to ensure that people have good food to eat or a safe place to live. Zero idea. How to turn blight into beauty or garbage-strewn empty lots into gardens where flowers don't get stolen.

But I also kind of just think in my head, would you want to trade places? You have to pee in a cup but that guy collecting doesn't. Time to turn that into status update!

I think that's one of the myriad of reasons I loved the book Take This Bread. The food pantry the author started fed everyone. Even the people who were probably cheating, even the people who inevitably took more than their share, even the loud and belligerent and drunk and high. Everyone.

The other is that it just fits my idea of Communion. A loud, messy, imperfect table, full of personalities and flaws, but always the power of love and redemption accompanying the chaos.

It wasn't some kind of feel-good venture. It was hard work. And it constantly tested, this concept that we help all who show up. Tempers flared, angry arguments were had, people were frightened and uncomfortable. This business wasn't for the faint of heart.

And I just want to ask these friends, why do you begrudge? Why? Why take a crazy complex economical and sociological problem and turn it into some kind of flip statement that makes you sound borderline envious?

Because I know that things aren't always right and fair and equitable. But I also know who has and maintains a greater share, of everything. And it's most certainly not the poor.

A Grave Sin?

Dear Jesus,

I'm exhausted. This, of course, coincides with two things: the ending of summer session and the renewing of my blessed fertility cycle. (Do you see how lovingly I painted that last thing? Because I really did not want to paint it so lovingly. I am currently a horrid wretch, thanks to a boatload of hormones swimming about like Dana Torres on steroids.)

Right now the kids are having a tea party, leaving me with a moment of silence. Or, relative silence, because they are singing Paramore songs at the breakfast table while drinking lemonade from ceramic cups. But it's downstairs, and not right next to my ears, so...relative silence.

This morning, since I didn't have to open a chemistry text, I opened the latest issue of the National Catholic Reporter, and it fired me up. I wonder when was the last time my church actually resembled your ministry. I know there are parishes here and there that do. I know there are women religious and priests and lay people across the world who do your good work hourly, with hearts bent on equality and justice.

And of course, it's mostly Rome that angers me. You know, putting the attempted ordination of women in the same league as child abuse. Heaven forbid we let those crazy women in, those who feel called to serve you in the same capacity as their brothers. A 'grave sin,' supposedly.

Bullshit, I say to that.

And I quote: "Women, and those who attempt to ordain them, were classified as committing crimes against the sacraments. Such crimes are metaphysically serious in that they constitute any action that desecrates the Eucharist. Not only can God not work through the body of a woman; now, it seems, women's bodies actually defile the Eucharist....

"The latest act of codified violence against women leads me to ask: Why shouldn't Catholic women allow God to act to God's fullest potential in them? Why shouldn't they seek ordination or create lay-led Eucharistic communities that will truly nurture anyone who seeks the peace, community, sacramental nourishment, and social justice that is sorely lacking both in our society and in our church?"

And Jesus, you don't even have to come down and answer that for me. You don't need to make the wind whisper it to me or send me a letter from heaven. I know the answer: because it takes the power away from men.

Mercy Sr. Teresa Cane had an editorial in the paper that illustrated just this point. She writes, "A group of sisters in the Midwest were having their community assembly. Out of courtesy, they invited the bishop....the bishop wrote back and said it must be in a parish church and not at the motherhouse, you must have altar boys come in to assist me, and no sister may carry the cross in the procession. They prayed about it and decided not to have the liturgy."

Gee, I wonder why. Talk about a party pooper.

I don't mean to be flip. I'm just not really sure what else to do with my anger.

Keeping women from the fullest displays of their worship strikes me as about as outdated and patriarchal as not allowing us to vote. Women not being allowed to carry the cross? We do it every single day all over the world.

A while ago, a friend wrote a blog post about religion, and wrote that she believed Catholicism struck her as a bit cultish, with so many people who disagreed with the church being unable to completely leave it. I responded that there were many, many people who were actively trying to change the church. But also that for many, Catholicism is like their cultural heritage. Sometimes, I feel like I can no more shed it than I can my genes from Calabria. (Not that I'd want to Grandma, don't worry!) I'm Italian, Irish and decidedly Catholic.

But I don't know what to do with myself. So many reasons to to run!

Jesus, I know you don't wear Prada. The particularly brilliant red of the Pontiff's shoes reminded me of the red doors of the Episcopal Church. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

Or a breakaway church? But how to find one of those? I'm afraid there is no listing in the yellow pages for Alternative Catholic Churches.

I've entertained attending services across the street. They fly the rainbow flag.

I'll pray about it. Now that I don't have to memorize equations, I'll have more time.

Thanks for listening.

Love,

Kelly

I felt ridiculously better after Mass last Sunday.

This, despite 3 cell phones going off. Let me break down for you how this sounds.

1. You hear the muffled ringing, in someone's pocket or purse.

2. You hear the flustered fumbling of that person trying to get their phone out.

3. You hear the suddenly amplified and amazingly shrill sound fill the entire building, as the ringing reaches up to the painted heavens on the domed church ceiling.

I'm not sure how better to translate the 'please turn off all electronic devices' entreaty prior to the beginning of Mass.

Somehow, though, the Holy Spirit managed to weave its way around my annoyance and find a point of entry. Somehow we've managed to hang together this entire week. And it feels good.

I loved the Gospel reading, but I'm uncertain of its meaning. Martha and her sister Mary, welcoming Jesus. Martha, the workhorse, sweating in the kitchen, gets pissed when she sees Mary just chilling by the feet of Jesus. Why isn't she helping me? Martha thinks? Why is she just sitting there?

When Martha questions this, and brings Jesus into it, he tells her that her sister has chosen the better path. Listening has trumped service. Contemplation has trumped dinner prep.

I admit to being confused by this. On one hand, I can understand how contemplation has to be part of the spiritual life of a person. On the other hand, I wonder what the lesson is, exactly. Should Martha have taken her seat on the floor? Let her anxiety go about feeding someone whom she loves greatly?

As someone who enjoys having company, I could feel her stress. If I don't do it, who will prepare the meal? But Jesus essentially told her she was fretting about all the wrong things.

I admit to feeling bad for her.

So ultimately, I'm not sure the moral. We serve others. We contemplate. But we're supposed to know which is preferable when? Should Martha have trusted that somehow the meal would get made?

Can you help elucidate this for me?

If I were smart, I'd have gone to church this morning. 8AM Mass, dragging the kids and all. It would have been just us and a few elderly folks, I'm certain. If I really could pick, I'd only take Hannah with me. Lillian likes to test me. Last Sunday, she kept kicking her feet on the wood to make noises, and also kept lounging about on the pew like it was a poolside chaise lounge. I know she's four and I can't expect too much. But still, the reading and homily was about the Good Samaritan, and I like to focus. (Even though the focus sometimes is a stark reminder of how much I suck.) Case in point...difficult people. Jesus instructs us to love our neighbor, to show them mercy as the Samaritan does to the man who's been beaten and robbed and left for dead. I don't know how to apply this to difficult people.

I mean, I know how I'm supposed to apply this. I know I'm supposed to be kind to them anyway, even though they might drive me absolutely batty, that I'm supposed to show them love and mercy even when they are complete a-holes. This, my friends...exceedingly hard.

Anyway, a digression there, but a worthwhile one. I'm all upset. The class I'm taking is ridiculously hard, an advanced science course condensed into a nightmare 6-weeks long. I'm stuck and not getting these concepts. That's bad enough. Add to that the notion of being forgotten by the online community I've been writing with for almost 6 years? I'm feeling rather lost and sad, and singularly self-focused. Church is good for ridding oneself of this.

I have to pass this course.

I don't have to blog.

I want to be a nurse.

Is there a Patron Saint of Chemistry? Because I'm going to ask a favor, that you invoke this person and their brain, that they may take pity on me, suffering through my last chemistry class. I'm in tears for many reasons this morning, and sitting in front of my online homework problems certainly is not helping, because I have zero idea on how to complete these problems.

I wish I could shower in holy water.

I also need to go home. Like it's a drug, I need to go home and get some wide-open air in my veins. I need to sit by the pond and play with my nephew and see my parents. I think it's because I feel like such a kid right now, helpless and lonely.

Pray for me, okay? I don't need an A. I need to pass with a C for the credit to ultimately transfer. I got an 87 on my first test, but my optimistic bubble was burst when I saw the difficulty (and calculus-laden) quality of kinetics and equilibrium constants. I never took calculus. For good reason.

Anyway, I should have gone to church this morning.

Please help out and vote

It's been a ridiculously long time since I've posted. Summer is hectic, and chemistry is even more hectic. I knew I'd be losing my mind, so things are going as expected.

In the meantime, could you do me a favor and vote for Blessed Sarnelli Community on Facebook? My in-laws occasionally work with Fr. Kevin, who does really good work with Philadelphia's homeless community, by, you know, actually feeding them.

If they remain one of the top 200 vote-getters through Chase Community Giving, they will receive $20,000, which is a HUGE deal.



If you're on Facebook, it takes a second. Please help out! Just search for Blessed Sarnelli Community, located in Phila, PA, on the Chase Community Giving Facebook page. Thank you!!