A Corporal Work of Mercy

May 15, 2013 By 2 Comments

I was nearly two weeks late, so I already knew the answer, but I took the test anyway, in the bathroom of my dad’s house in Louisiana. We’d driven down from Virginia, two solid days in the car with our children, ages seven and two.  My sister drove her two days from Kansas.

The long drive isn’t the only reason our reunions have become increasingly rare. Since I left more than ten years ago, I don’t go home often. Except in dreams.

It was New Year’s Day. Standing there in the dim light, staring at the positive result on the test stick, hearing the competing voices of my sister and children in the next room, I felt as if this might be just another garbled midnight transmission, a dream of that first positive test, eight years ago now, in the bathroom of our first house in South Bend.

The kind of dream in which nothing is as it should be. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Jessica Mesman Griffith, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments

Deliver Us from Evil

May 14, 2013 By 13 Comments

Guest Post

By Nancy Nordenson

The day after the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, I sat myself down and considered my role in the tragedy. Now bombs have exploded in Boston and I’m asking myself the same question.

Of course no bomb was built in my kitchen and no gun was loaded under my roof, but could I have done something to help stop either of those events?

I’m thinking back years ago to a crisis in the church where my husband and I were members. A leader had fallen. The congregation gathered one evening to figure out why things had gone so wrong and what we could do about it. Fingers pointed, heads shook. Then Crystal spoke up. A woman in her late eighties, hunched over from osteoporosis, she had lived a life full of good work, particularly among international students.

“I blame myself,” she said. “I didn’t pray for him enough.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Relationships Tagged With: , , 13 Comments

The Marrow of Prayer

May 8, 2013 By 4 Comments

Early this year, Spanish researchers published a peer-reviewed paper considering the evidence of social learning in Middle Pleistocene hominids as indicated by patterns of butchery.

In the study, part of the Bolomer excavation under the auspices of the Prehistory Museum of Valencia, researchers examined bones to find that breakages during butchering to extract marrow occurred at unlikely places, indicating a specific intention, knowledge and practices transmitted through the generations from parent to child, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

I tuck in my three-year-old at bedtime under a mural I painted for him of mountains and trees and animals from his favorite storybooks: Owl Babies, Curious George. I turn the lights off, and brighten the dimmer three clicks, just enough to see. Aslan—the lion from the Narnia books I can’t wait to read to Sam when he’s a couple of years older—emerges from the dark with a slightly punk-rock mane on the wall just above my son’s pillow. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Relationships, Shannon Huffman Polson Tagged With: , , , , 4 Comments

Rodeo and the Church Calendar

March 15, 2013 By 5 Comments

Despite my Christian upbringing, I didn’t grow up with the church calendar. Easter was a single day affair involving plastic eggs hidden in hill country pastures and Sunday school handouts with coppery brads to swing a construction paper stone away from an empty tomb. The graphic was always neat and tidy—flowers and grass and “He is Risen!” written alongside.

I knew the story of the suffering, but the celebration made more of an impact.

So between Valentines Day and Easter when my elementary school started serving fish sticks at the end of each week, I asked my reluctant classmates, “Why do you eat fish on Fridays?”

“It’s bad to eat meat on Fridays,” my friend Adrian told me.

“Why?” I asked. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Jessica Eddings-Roeser Tagged With: , , , , 5 Comments

Can I Offer Up My Suffering?

March 8, 2013 By 12 Comments

“Pain is an evil, suffering is an evil. We mustn’t desire it. We don’t desire it for others, so why should we for ourselves?”

These were the words of my spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon, early in our twenty-five year relationship. (For background on our relationship, see this post.) I’d come to our monthly session after a couple days of a migraine. “I’m not good at accepting pain,” I told him.

“I’m not either,” he said, continuing with the words above, then adding: “We have to admit that there are some things we can’t handle, and accept our inability to accept!”

He went on: “Christ’s suffering on the cross is a mystery. Why is suffering necessary for redemption? And how is suffering redemptive? We don’t know. Jesus’s agony in the garden is passed over too quickly in most theology. Probably Christ prayed ‘let this cup pass’ for a very long time; he didn’t slip right into ‘Thy will be done.’ He didn’t desire this suffering; he didn’t see it as redemptive.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Peggy Rosenthal, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , 12 Comments

The Way of a Pilgrim

February 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment

When it comes to music, I am a lover of routine. My iTunes playlists are at least 2 years old, I haven’t bought a new album in months, and if you looked at the number of plays my Neko Case “Live at Austin City Limits” album has, you’d see that I’ve listened to it hundreds of times.

But it’s not only music that bears my signature love of repetition. Most days, I would rather read a cookbook than pick up a new novel. I return to the same poems, the same pages of Gilead, and the same Neko Case record; and if my husband wants to watch something other than another episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, I’ll quickly get on Facebook and let him watch alone.

My father once told me that I was his “cautious” daughter: that I made sure of things before I tried them out, that I was the only child of his who actually looked both ways before crossing the street. That surety came before chance. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Allison Backous, Faith Tagged With: , Leave a Comment

Looking at the Real

February 19, 2013 By 3 Comments

A Guest Post by Brian Volck

Monks, I’ve found, having spent some time with them over the years, make good company—rewarding enough, in fact, to spend my birthday with some of them on one of my visits last year.

It was the ideal holiday for an introvert, but I came for more than silence and solitude. I wanted a stiff dose of contemplative prayer—straight, no chaser—what the late Walter Burghardt called “a long, loving look at the real.”

The gift of contemplation is precisely that—a gift, neither earned nor grasped—but there are habits, cultivated over time, to better receive that gift, to keep the self from forever stepping in the way like an attention-starved child, to still the mind’s nervous tic of racing in every direction but deeper.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith Tagged With: , 3 Comments

Silence Wounds, Silence Heals

January 15, 2013 By 1 Comment

It was there all along.

Troubling me.

It hurt me and aroused my sympathy for that boy, that young man, the Reb’s firstborn son being groomed to replace, one day, his father as head of a Hasidic dynasty.

A father who tested this son, his future, his sect’s future, every Sabbath afternoon before an audience of devoted followers. They looked with awe on their rebbe and his son, their future leader, who never failed to catch the mistake his father would slip into the lesson he offered from the head of the table around which men and boys gathered for a light meal, the mystic’s meal, for at that hour they had little need for physical nourishment. The Sabbath’s waning hours: by then the faithful were nourished almost entirely by the soul. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Richard Chess Tagged With: , , 1 Comment
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