Actually, it is the hallmark of the strong.

from A Right to Be Merry

I’m loving these sweet nuns so much!  I’ll miss them when I get to the end of this book.  Perhaps I’ll just start the book all over again!  Did I ever tell you that we have nuns here?  Augustinian Sisters originally from Malta.  We had a convent at our parish in Illinois, too, but they kept themselves apart and we never knew them.  Our sisters here, though, are intimately involved in the lives of the parish families and it has been such a blessing to us to know them.  Sister Theresa comes every Thursday for bible study.  All five of them came for Davey’s retirement.  They never fail to speak to us at Mass or to welcome us into their home if we happen to stop in during the week.  We all love them and this intimacy has had the happy effect of making religious life seem that much more accessible to the children.  Nuns are people, too!  They tell funny stories, they make mistakes, they teach us tunisian crochet on a whim… and they love.  Nuns rock!

I was working full time as a babysitter for the three children of a woman who had just opened a store across the street from her husband’s pharmacy. One day, the children and I were playing in the living room. I looked up from our game and noticed a crow perched on the deck railing. It seemed to be watching us through the big glass doors. That’s unusual, I thought, and I walked over to the doors to see what rodent, perhaps, it was hoping to dine on. There was nothing there but the crow, who cocked his head and continued to look at me steadily. Now, I’d seen enough Alfred Hitchcock movies that I wasn’t real keen on actually going out on the porch to chase it away. So we just watched each other. It was a good twenty minutes before it flew away.

A couple of days later, I was driving home from the same job. The road I traveled to get back to the highway was wooded and there wasn’t a shoulder. I drove up on a crow standing at the edge of the pavement and I didn’t bother to change course for him; birds always fly out of the way in time. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I passed, and that crow still sat complacently at the edge of the pavement. It hadn’t flown, though it had been only inches from my tires. And it, too, appeared to be watching me. Okay, I thought to myself, this is getting kind of weird.

There was no google in those days. If you wanted to find out about something, you had to go find a book, which meant a trip to the library. Back then, even small libraries were well stocked with a broad selection of research materials. What I needed to know about was these crows. What did it mean if a person was being stalked by crows? In a book on the nature symbolism of Native American Indians, I found an answer even more perplexing than the question: crows were an omen, a sign of things to come, neither good nor bad.

I have to tell you now that my mother thought it was somehow wrong to “force” a parent’s religion on a child, but she wasn’t anti-religion. I think she hoped a little that we would find a faith, for she used to tell us that when we grew up, we could try different churches on and find the one we liked. The very idea of that was so daunting, though, and I latched onto these crows and ran with them. I read book after book on various nature-based religions, the most compelling of which was a wiccan book called The Spiral Dance. Those ideas stayed with me and influenced me for a couple of years, and maybe they still do, somewhat, as I see in the Blessed Virgin everything that drew me to the wiccan goddess. In any case, those ideas had the very real effect of opening me up to the God I’d all but rejected, so don’t knock it.

(Milking time again!)

Our family home was right across the street from St. David’s Episcopal Church, and when I was eight years old, a new minister moved into the adjacent house. His six year old daughter and I became best friends and I spent many a Saturday night at her house, and many a Sunday morning in her church. That is my first conscious memory of liturgy, and I liked it. I liked the rituals, the candles, the singing, and the community, even without knowing anything about God. Later, I worked at the same church building for a Reformed Jewish community, but by then, I was old enough to know that I didn’t belong, that the community and the traditions weren’t mine, and I felt a little lonely. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way, but it was probably the first time I recognized my loneliness for what it was.

I can look back on other incidents from my childhood now and see in them my longing for a real God, but also, I can see that He was always seeking me, too. I remember, more as impressions than events, a sunny day in bed, a sick day, with a children’s bible and my favorite stories of Jesus calming the storm and Peter walking on water; a Christmas, all of us feeling poorly, laying on the living room floor, watching a movie about Jesus; names on an elementary school blackboard, a list of the special children who rode the special bus to CCD on Wednesdays after school. One day, when I was in middle school, a classmate asked me in the lunch line what religion I was. I didn’t know, but I asked my mother after school, which is how I found out I was a baptized Catholic. I was the only one of my sisters and I asked her years later why she’d done it. She just shrugged and said it had seemed like the thing to do at the time.

(Time to milk the cow. If you don’t mind, I’ll come back and tell some more later.)

Tonight, we hover on the cusp of Winter. All day, a storm slipped along just to the West, dragging chillier air behind it, and all day, we patiently waited for the change to come. We watched the sky and the fallen leaves for signs of weather, and we made sure all was ready for our livestock. We ate dinner. We milked the cow. We gathered tomorrow’s kindling and firewood. The chickens gathered indoors long before their appointed time, and we secured them against predators and weather, took one last long look around, and then we, too, sought the shelter of home.

Not a minute after we closed the doors behind us, the rain came, and I hear the wind still, blowing through the chimes on the porch. Tomorrow we’ll wake to much colder temperatures and a biting wind, and we’ll smile and put on our boots and keep on anyway.

Things to Be Thankful For In the Winter (A list begun by Brenna)

The flies die;
Frozen cow poop is easy to shovel and doesn’t smell bad;
The milk is refrigerated before we get it back to the house;
It’s fun to have fires in the woodstove;
We get to use all of our blankets;
Hot cocoa tastes best after you’ve been out in the cold;
The coldest winter days are also the most beautiful;
Family outings for sledding and skating on the frozen pond;
Cows in furry winter coats;
Long evenings together;
No guilt about not weeding the garden;
Free workout carrying water buckets to the livestock;
Flannel sheets;
Babies in footed pajamas…

What else?

And less importantly, Tommy is getting that tooth pulled tomorrow morning, and I’d appreciate a little remembrance, too.

But if you’re short on prayer time, focus on my friend. She needs the heavenly lovin’ more.

Thank you!

Of course the car was meowing.  Doesn’t everyone’s car meow?  I had to laugh because I’d been hearing that meow and had dismissed it as impossible.  Cars don’t meow!  Now, of course, I directed another child to pop the hood, where we found a little gray kitten stowed away atop our battery, and very frightened.  “It’s Scrawny,” a little one said with delight.  Scrawny was a little stray they’d coaxed out of a tree earlier, and I picked her up by the scruff and deposited her on the ground, hoping she wouldn’t climb back into the engine compartment.  “Come on,” I said, gathering my excited crew.  “She’ll be fine, and we have to get inside!”

I looked over my shoulder as we walked away, but Scrawny was nowhere in sight.  Back up into the engine, I thought with a sigh.  But I was wrong.  That little gray cat followed us into the church!  We didn’t notice at all, but a few minutes later, we’ve been told, the ushers were trying to catch her and usher her back out the door!  We didn’t see our kitty again until the Mass was over, when we found her in the arms of Tommy’s godparents.  She’d already been renamed Saint Cat, short for Catherine, since they’d found her in the church.

The sweetest part of the story?  Their own cat had died the day before and they were so pleased to give our scrawny gray kitten a loving home.

This all goes to show that you just never know when you may be doing God’s work and even a kitten under the hood may be a part of His big plan. 

During Lent, our church started a Renew catechism study program to help Catholics learn more about their faith (and it’s amazing what practicing Catholics do not know). As Easter arrived, a goodly number of participants were feeling kind of sorry that our Thursday morning study was coming to an end, and that we wouldn’t be meeting together again until the fall. I was, too. Even though we were only halfway through our study of the Sacraments, we were not permitted to continue with it since that would put us off schedule with the rest of the parish. So we picked a new bible study.

We’re using Come and See: The Synoptics, and I’m very pleased with the layout of this bible study and the thoroughness of the questions. It’s Catholic, too!

We do have a lovely Baptist woman in our group, and I think she keeps the rest of us on our toes. She’s not hostile to our faith and I believe that she will be Catholic herself in a couple of years, but she comes from such a different faith background and asks so many questions that we really have to know our stuff.

Though I really enjoy the bible study portion, the thing that most edifies me is being able to offer hospitality to these other people. By opening our home and our lives to our guests, we bless them, to be sure, but I think we bless ourselves more. Hospitality is not about a perfect home or gourmet food; it’s about people, and it flows from a spirit of love, and that is the essence of Christian charity. Offering hospitality brings us closer both to God and each other.

Thursday is by far my busiest day of the week, but it is also my favorite.

Do you offer hospitality on a regular basis? Or do you worry about inviting people into your less-than-perfect home life? (Believe you me, all of us have less than perfect home lives!)

“And who do we have here?” asked our Father Kevin.

“This is my second youngest, Penelope, and my third youngest, Rosie,” I said.

He bent over and shook their hands. “It’s very nice to meet you,” he said to them.

Just then, two more appeared in the doorway. “Oh,” I interrupted, “and there are my oldest and my youngest, Brenna and Tommy.” He didn’t even have time to say anything before I was announcing, “and that’s Megan and there’s Delaney.”

His eyebrows shot up in surprise. The deacon looked at him sympathetically. “There’s more,” he warned.

I bobbed and weaved, trying to find Jonny in the crowded vestibule beyond through the bodies of my children, then shrugged. “Only one more,” I said. “Jonny appears to be missing.”

“I’m the second of eight,” offered our poor Father.

I have a feeling he’s going to make the effort to remember their names, though. He just seems like that good sort of person.

And a bonus? His homily was pretty good, too. Not good in that he’s a great story-teller and I was entertained, but good in that I felt challenged as a Christian. I hope this is the norm for him; too many priests, I think, deliver feel-good homilies and hope we’ll find the meat in it.

“No, I only have seven,” I grinned.

She laughed. “How many places can you get away with saying only seven?”

She only has six. Such a slacker.

Is that how we live a crucified life?  By just embracing what comes and living it all with a smile and a prayer of thanksgiving?

Last night, I found myself trying to care for a screaming toddler who needed to be changed and dressed for bed.  He fought and kicked and screeched and cried, and I, in my exhaustion, might have chosen to be cranky and irritable myself, but I didn’t.  I smiled and pinned on his diaper.  I sang lullabies and slipped flailing limbs into pajamas.  Then I lifted him, zippered him, hugged his small heaving body, and wondered aloud, “Is this how we live a crucified life, broken and poured out for others?”

Bearing my own cross with patient endurance.  Helping to carry the crosses of others whenever I can.  Maybe that’s all there is to it, and yet, I think there is more, for Christ carried His cross and then he was crucified.  These are words I’ll be pondering for a very long time.

I thought you might like to ponder them, too.