Christ Within

Do you ever feel a rush of adreneline, one that comes upon you for no apparent reason, waking you up in the middle of the night, perhaps, and you can't quite put your finger upon what it's all about?  But a certainty overcomes you that God is about to do something big in your life.  And that big thing might be very ordinary like taking better care of your family or your health, or spending more time in silent prayer, but somehow, you just know that He is working, calling out to you, needing you to carry Him into the world in a deeper and more meaningful way, and every cell in your body responds with "Yes!  Here I am!  Use me!"  You might have been feeling insignificant and useless in life, but now, you are certain that God has a purpose for you, something really special, only you just don't know or  understand what it is.

St. Teresa of Avila

Could it be that He is asking you to become more aware of His presence within you, and to bring Him to others in a deeper way? In this world, we are all called to carry Christ within ourselves, to bring Him to each other and to share His love with everyone we meet throughout the ordinary events of our lives.    The saints and mystics have described this eloquently.

Listen to St. Teresa of Avila:

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ's compassion to the world, yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.” 

And my favorite, Caryll Houselander:

Caryll Houselander

"For the moment, the precious and only now, you alone are the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament into your own little world.  You are the monstrance, the priest giving Communion, the Real Presence, to your husband, your children and your friends; and the reason why, or one reason why, Christ has given himself to you, is because he wishes to be with them, as things are, only through you.  This is an astonishing thought, as every thought about the Blessed Sacrament is, if you bring an ounce of courage and realism to it." 

Perhaps Christ is asking you to bring Him to the food pantry and to offer a gentle touch and a kind word to those who are worried about how they will manage to make a pleasant Christmas for their families with very little money.  Perhaps he wants you to offer a smile to the store clerk who is overworked during the pre-Christmas rush of shopping.  Maybe you are to offer His shoulder to cry upon for a soul who is hurting and in need of a little compassion. What if He wants you to prepare dinner with an extra touch of love for your family today?  Give Christ to everyone with whom you come in contact through your loving words and peaceful actions, your generosity and warmth, your gentle touches and joyful smiles. Strive to keep out anything that threatens to creep into your spirit that isn't purely the love of Christ. 

How will you carry Christ into the world today?  How will you let Him use you for His glory? How will you let others experience Christ through you in each and every moment of your life?  Be the monstrance that contains the Lord and radiates His love out to everyone.  Be the chalice, pouring the life-blood of Christ out into the world.  Emulate the Blessed Mother, birthing Christ into the world.  Feel His loving presence within your very soul and then lavish it upon others without reserve.  And then, allow others to bring the Christ that dwells within their souls right back to you.

Purging the Past, Entering the Reality of Now

Justin,  the de-clutterer, at the beginning and end of his scholarly career

I'm in a purge mode this summer and have decided to go through my house from top to bottom recklessly tossing out anything deemed to be, in my opinion, extraneous.  It was my son Justin, the recent high school graduate, who got me started on this goal toward clutter-free living.  In the week after he graduated, but before he began his full-time summer job, he systematically emptied out kitchen cabinets and junk drawers, extravagantly tossing out nearly everything.  I'd come home from work and find the cupboards practically bare.  And I liked it.  Suddenly everything seemed so clean and bright and I don't miss the things he threw out at all.  Really, I couldn't even tell you what they were!  It just goes to show how little I needed those items I had piled up and saved!  Now I've taken it upon myself to continue Justin's work and I have been scandalously eschewing the unnecessary melange from my home including my prayer journals.

In the few years prior to writing this blog, I kept prayer journals where I recorded my daily prayers based upon scripture verses from the daily Mass readings, a sort of written lectio divina. It was a time of my life where my suffering from depression was deep and the prayer journals served a very helpful purpose in bringing about my healing.  But now, as I read through them one last time before I forever renounce them, I find that I am more than happy to kiss the past good-bye and to accept my beautiful life as God has brought me to it in the present moment.  I am so grateful to find that those old books filled with words of sorrow and the struggle for joy no longer reflect who I really am today.

And yet, those years of journal writing were also years of voracious spiritual reading for me, and whenever I would read something that touched my heart or inspired me, I'd have to write it in my prayer journal so I'd never forget it.  Now I've come across some terrific quotes that I had saved and rather than toss them to the insignificance of yesterday with the rest of the household trash where they would be forever lost, I have decided to share them here on this blog where they will hopefully be a source of inspiration for others...

So I begin with these:

From My Monastery is a Minivan by Denise Roy regarding her childhood dream of becoming a priest (much like St. Therese of Lisieux):

"Here I sit, twenty years later, no longer wondering what I'm going to be when I grow up.  I've arrived.  And guess what?  My childhood dreams have come true.

For two decades, I have broken bread, poured grape juice, preached, prayed, told stories, bestowed blessings, taken care of the sick, heard confessions.  I have been a parent.  These have been the sacraments of my daily life and, I suspect, of yours.  These are simple, sacred acts.  These are how we mediate love, as we minister to our own little congregations-children, spouse, family and friends.

I have discovered that it is a great vocation."

From my favorite author, Carryl Houselander:

"For the moment, the precious and only now, you alone are the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament into your own little world.  You are the monstrance, the priest giving Communion, the Real Presence, to your husband, your children and your friends; and the reason why, or one reason why, Christ has given Himself to you, is because He wishes to be with them, as things are, only through you.  This is an astonishing thought, as every thought about the Blessed Sacrament is, if you bring an ounce of courage and realism to it."

And one more journal scribble that I found to be irresistibly worth saving, from a conversation during my daughter's basketball game with the graduate pictured above:

Justin:  "Mom, why don't you talk to some of these other parents here?"
Me:  "Because I don't have anything to say to them."
Justin:  "Yes you do!  Just ask, 'So how's Jesus working for you?'"  ;)

Trust

"In God we trust."  ~motto of the United States

It's the moment of new beginnings, the cusp of a new year, a time when everything is fresh and anything is possible.  I look back on the year just past and find that it was filled with struggle and challenges-what most people would see as opportunities for growth and learning. Unfortunately, my attitude was often one of complaint, grumble and cry.  Most often I felt like St. Teresa of Avila shaking my fist at God and crying, "If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them!"  It was far too easy for me to look on the bleak and dreary side of life instead of praising God for all of the varied blessings he bestowed upon me-blessings as simple as having a house to live in and food to eat and as glorious as waking to a beautiful sunrise and being surrounded by family and friends who love me so well despite how poorly I treat them in exchange for their unconditional love.

Each year since I began writing Imprisoned in my Bones, I have chosen a "word" for the year-something that would help me to focus on God and would help me to grow spiritually.  In the past I have chosen "surrender," "accept,"  "deeper," and "embrace."  It's hard to look back and notice whether or not I have actually lived those words throughout the years past, but I hope that in some small way, focusing on  those words has helped me to become just a bit more faithful to God and a bit more holy.  I've a long way to go as my failures to surrender to God's will and to not only accept it but to deeply embrace it have been glaringly obvious to me.  Instead it seems as if I have fought God and His will for me every step of the way. 

So when we fall the only thing we can do is get back up and try again, right?  My plan for 2013 appears to be just another step in the direction of coming to know and follow God's will.  The challenge is making God's will into my will as well.  I want to learn to rely on God's loving plan for me even when it's difficult to believe that He has my best interests at heart.  I want to be able to patiently watch to see how God's plan for my life will unfold.  And if His plan for this year includes suffering and hardships then I want to deeply embrace it, not with complaint, but with quiet surrender.  I want 2013 to be the year that I learn to completely TRUST in God and His will for my life. 

What follows is a reflection that I wrote for the Roses for Our Lady Christmas Newsletter:

"Our Lady was at the most fourteen when the angel came to her; perhaps she was younger. The whole world trembled on the word of a child, on a child's consent…The loudest telling of His presence on earth was to be the heartbeat within the heartbeat of a child. It was to be a secret and God was so jealous of His secret that He even guarded it at the cost of His bride's seeming dishonor…This proved that God knew our Lady's trust in Him was absolutely without limit. Everything that He did to her in the future emphasized the same thing. His trust in her trust of Him." ~Caryll Houselander

The trust of a child. Our Lady embraced it, lived it, and exemplified it. Think of how she silently accepted the scandal of an unwed pregnancy, traveling across a desert on the back of a donkey while heavy with child never quite knowing where her destination would be, giving birth to the Son of God in a dirty stable with no one to help her, being visited by strangers at a moment when most people prefer the familiarity of family and friends, and then shortly after giving birth, having to get up and move to yet another strange land for the safety of her babe. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t complain when she grew weary, when uncertainty was the motif of the day, when hunger gnawed at her stomach, when shelter and comfort were scarce, when danger and fear were abundant. She just said “Yes, God. Whatever you say; I am yours completely and live to serve You alone.”

Can we follow suit? Can we implicitly trust in God’s plans for our lives without ever fully knowing where He might be leading us or how He intends to use us? In the year ahead, can we accept trials and hardships with joy in our hearts, knowing that God’s plans are always perfect even though we often fail to understand how He might be working in our lives? Let’s make 2013 the year where we learn to trust like our Mother, to give our lives completely over to God and to turn to Him in prayer uniting our hearts with Blessed Mary more and more each day.

********************************************************************

( I want to say a special thank you to Nancy Shuman at "The Cloistered Heart,"and "The Breadbox Letters," Patricia at "I Want to See God" and Mary at "The Beautiful Gate" for nominating Imprisoned in my Bones for the "Blog of the Year Award."  You ladies are all so sweet!  And I also offer a long overdue thank you to Karen at "Write to the Point" for awarding this blog with the "Liebster Award" back in October.  Thanks for being such faithful blogging friends!  It is beautiful blogs such as yours and those linked on my blog sidebar that inspire me to continue to write and to strive to trust in God more deeply.)

Ponderings on the Priesthood

While I was still in the hospital after the birth of my fourth son, a woman from church came to give me communion and as she left my room after feeding me the Body of Our Lord, she carelessly said, "Poor thing! Four sons! One day they will all get married and leave you!" I was left a bit dumbfounded, but not enough to leave me without a retort so I shot back, "Who knows? Maybe they'll all become priests and leave me anyway!"

And when my children were small, my only prayer for them was that God would bring them to goodness and holiness. I didn't pray for their success, their intelligence, their popularity, their health or their happiness. Just their holiness. I didn't pray for them to become married or to become priests. I prayed for them to know God's will and to live it.

So when my oldest son, while still at the tender age of ten, announced that he felt called to the priesthood, I was pleased and carefully nurtured his prayer life along, being cautious not to push and doing my best to always let him know that no matter what path he would eventually follow in life, he would always be loved for who he is, my beloved son and God's beloved son, not for what he does with his life.

Now he is actually in the process of applying to the seminary and it feels as though my world has turned upside down. Now why should it feel that way? It's not my vocation, not my life, but still I'd be untruthful if I said that I wasn't a bit unnerved and stressed right along with him as he fills out the application forms and keeps his appointments with doctors, dentists, psychologists and priests for the necessary interviews and poking and prodding required of all applicants to the priesthood.

I can't help but feel overwhelmed by the entire process, by the thought of my oldest son soon to be packing up and leaving home for college of any sort and the worry that it is very possible that his hopes and dreams won't come true and that he won't be accepted to the seminary. I'm challenged by how difficult it is to listen to his worries and his stresses and to not take them as my own.

On New Year's Eve for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, my family and I attended a nearby church that offered an 11:00 PM Mass sponsored by the Rosary Evangelization Apostolate and celebrated by our friend, and family member in our hearts, Fr. Matthew Widder. Fr. Matthew had asked John if he would help as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. John has never participated in this ministry before and watching him offer the Body of Christ to those at Mass, including me, for the very first time, really took my breath away. It was as if I was seeing a vision of his possible future, holding the Body of our Lord in his hands and offering Him to others and my heart felt torn by the mix of sorrow mingled with joy with which it was filled. And then I recalled the following passage from Caryll Houselander's Passion of the Infant Christ:

"A young priest was celebrating his first Mass. In the front of the church his mother and his young brothers knelt. It was easy to know them by their likeness to him-a family of dark, golden-skinned boys, and the mother like them.

When the Mass was ended, and the new priest came back into the sanctuary for the blessing and the kissing of the consecrated hands, the family hesitated shyly, almost paralyzed by wonder and love; and before they could go first (as they should have done) to the altar rails, the crowd had pushed past them, strangers had taken their place. The faithful were flocking around their new shepherd, and his mother and his brothers had become part of the crowd, waiting their turn until the end.

For one moment the young priest looked over the bowed heads into his mother's eyes, and his face shone.

"My mother and my brethren are they who hear the word of God and do it."

Because the priesthood had made him the Christ of the people, he belonged to them; he was their kith and kin, their son and brother, their Christ, their priest at the altar.

People often seem to think of our Lady aggrieved, slighted when this happened to her! I think she and her son looked across the heads of the crowds to one another with just that understanding and gratitude that shone on the faces of the young priest and his mother."

And so I pray that if John will be accepted to the seminary and will prepare for priesthood, that my heart will be as open as that of the Blessed Mother and the mother in this story, that I will understand that this offering up of my son for the good of others is the greatest blessing a mother could ever know. Please hold John in your prayers as he continues this process of discernment and application. And for some really good reading about a mother's hopes for her son, I encourage you to visit the Archdiocese of Milwaukee blog where one of my favorite local writers, Karen Mahoney, courageously shares her hopes for her son, Erin.

Secret Trust

I've been asked to speak about the Blessed Mother at my parish this coming March. It's part of a monthly program called Church Chat where "experts" speak about an aspect of the Catholic faith in a question and answer format. When I was first approached to speak about Mary I was so thrilled that there was to be a session about her that I quickly said yes. Of course, unlike the Blessed Mother, my yes's are never really final and peaceful, they always seem to be followed by a great deal of anxiety, and this yes was no exception. I soon found myself panicking over what I should say and the possibility that someone might ask a question that I'm unable to answer, after all, I'm certainly no theologian, I'm just a mom! Besides, I'm most comfortable hiding behind a keyboard, not standing out in the open and speaking to others.

I tried to back out and suggested that they ask someone who really knows what he's talking about and has the ability to inspire, like Bishop Hying. But, everyone knows that the Bishop is terribly busy these days, so my suggestion was downplayed with that excuse and the affirming words that "everyone has great faith in you and is confident that you will do a good job." So, I'm going to speak about Mary this March and you can be sure that I have been praying to her day and night pleading for her assistance and will go on praying to her until that talk is behind me and the people who attend will have gained some new and wonderful insight into the Blessed Mother and why Catholics are so devoted to her.

I'm sure it also helps to read and study all that I can get my hands on about our wonderful Lady, so with that in mind, I recently took my beloved copy of Caryll Houselander's The Reed of God off the bookshelf and have decided to make it an Advent tradition to re-read this enchanting little book each year. Her words, her wisdom, are achingly beautiful and resoundingly true, and the way she sees inside of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the working of the Holy Spirit within her is so inspiring.

Maybe I can just read The Reed of God at the Church Chat session and let Caryll Houselander do all the work! I certainly could use a little of the secret trust that she speaks of in this segment from the chapter Fiat...

"Our Lady was at the most fourteen when the angel came to her; perhaps she was younger. The whole world trembled on the word of a child, on a child's consent. To what was she asked to consent? First of all, to the descent of the Holy Spirit, to surrender her littleness to the Infinite Love, and as a result to become the Mother of Christ. It was so tremendous, yet so passive. She was not asked to do anything herself, but to let something be done to her. She was not asked to renounce anything, but to receive an incredible gift. She was not asked to lead a special kind of life, to retire to the temple and live as a nun, to cultivate suitable virtues or claim special privileges. She was simply to remain in the world, to go forward with her marriage to Joseph, to live the life of an artisan's wife, just what she planned to do when she had no idea that anything out of the ordinary would ever happen to her.

It almost seemed as if God's becoming man and being born of a woman were ordinary. The whole thing was to happen secretly. There was to be no announcement. The psalmists had hymned Christ's coming on harps of gold. The prophets foretold it with burning tongues. But now the loudest telling of His presence on earth was to be the heartbeat within the heartbeat of a child. It was to be a secret and God was so jealous of His secret that He even guarded it at the cost of His bride's seeming dishonor. He allowed Joseph to misjudge her, at least for a time.

This proved that God knew our Lady's trust in Him was absolutely without limit. Everything that He did to her in the future emphasized the same thing. His trust in her trust of Him."

Mass for the People by Caryll Houselander

It's such a blessing to have a friend who knows you well, who perceives what will move you and who shares things with you understanding that it will touch your heart. I have a friend like that in Fr. Jim Kubicki, SJ, who, while on retreat, came across a story by one of my all-time favorite authors and the subject of many of my past blog posts, Caryll Houselander, and he promptly sent the story on to me for my enjoyment. Not only was it a moving story written by her creative hand, but the subject matter was also near and dear to my heart; it's the story of a priest offering Mass. I tried to find the source of this story online but had no luck, so I will share some of my favorite passages here and I pray that the words will touch your heart as deeply as they touched mine.

(Fr. Jim is currently in Rome and will be sharing parts of his Roman adventure on his blog "Offer it Up." Please pay him a visit to follow along with his experiences!)


excerpts from Mass for the People by Caryll Houselander:

"The priest was on the side of life, he had no other work, no other raison d'etre but to give life, and the life he gave could not be killed. He was not outside of the world's love because he was a priest and alone, he was the heart of the world's love, its core, because the Life of the World is born every day in His hands at Mass.

Father O'Grady made the Sign of the Cross. "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen," and bowed down under the burden of the sins of the whole world. His own sins were a heavy enough load, and now he bowed under the weight of all sin. But when he straightened himself up from the Confiteor, the burden of the whole world's sin, and his own with it, had fallen from his back, and his shoulders were strong. For it was Christ who rose up and went up to the altar-Christ who had seen evil naked, face to face, Christ who had been brought down to the ground, under the world's sin to sweat blood into the dust, and Christ who had overcome the world.

He lifted the unconsecrated Host, light as a petal on its thin golden paten, and with it lifted the simple bread of humanity, threshed and sifted by poverty and suffering. He offered the broken fragments of their love, made into one loaf.

He lifted the wine and water mixed in the Chalice, and with it offered the blood and the tears of his people to God.

And God accepted the offering, the fragments of love were gathered up into the wholeness of Love and nothing was wasted.

Slowly, exactly, Father O'Grady repeated the words of Consecration, his hands moved in Christ's hands, his voice spoke in Christ's voice, his words were Christ's words, his heart beat in Christ's heart.

Fr. O'Grady lifted up the consecrated Host in his short, chapped hands, the server rang a little bell, the sailor, the handful of old women and the very old man bowed down whispering "My Lord and my God" and the breath of their adoration was warm on their cold fingers.

Father O'Grady was lifting up God.

A cry arose from all over the world, "Come down from the Cross if you are the Son of God!" "Save yourself and us too if you are the Christ."

But Christ remained on the Cross. His fingers closed on the nails. The Crown of Thorns was in flower, the five ribs like the five fingers of the world's pain gripped His heart, and His heart broke open and the river of the world's life flowed out of it. A crimson flood sweeping His heart and brain and flowing into the tips of His fingers, swept through His Mystical Body. Through the eternal heart of Rome, through the lonely mind of her august Shepherd, out into the least and lowliest of men, and the last little infant howling at the touch of the waters of Baptism, the blood of the world's life flowed into the finger tips, which stretched out on the Cross, measuring the reach and stretch and extremity and ultimate possibility of love.

The world strained at the nails, wrenched and dragged, the Cross was shaken in the earth, bent like a tree in the storm, dragged earthward by the weight of man's body, but it was rooted in rock, and the Cross was built to the shape of man, not man to the shape of the Cross. The world's suffering was built and fitted to the size of each man, and the Cross stood.

"Come down, come down, come down!"

But Christ would not come down from the Cross.

The little server rang his silver bell.
The people bowed down low.
Time stopped.
Fr. O'Grady was lifting up God in his large, chapped hands.
Christ remained on the Cross.
The blood and sweat and tears of the world were on His face. he smiled, the smile of infinite peace, the ineffable bliss of consummated love."

A Lovely Quixotic Gesture

"God created the beauties of this world as signs of His love, He gives you stars as a lover gives his beloved gems, He throws flowers down under your feet as a lovely quixotic gesture of His divine folly and extravagance of love, He makes them look and feel and smell lovely, so that through every sense you have got He will press His suit on you. Not to rejoice in such advances of heavenly love is black ingratitude; every petal that opens on a rose in your garden should be for you a fling of the heart to God."~Caryll Houselander

I wanted to go deeper...and He is giving me many opportunities to do just that, so many in fact, that I have already lost count and have resorted to listing without number...this week I am flinging my heart and praising God for...

~children falling ill like dominoes, requiring my patient care as I brush their fevered brows and whisper words that soothe, and the joy of watching them recover to full, robust health.

~patience with self when continually corrected by boss who had been silent for so long. Did I need her attention? Maybe so, for I'm learning to improve my efforts and to quiet my pride.

~a coworker who silently observes me over the years, bravely takes my hand and keenly notes that my disposition has changed from raging denial to quiet acceptance of my life. I hadn't known that the change in me was so obvious and was warmed by her willingness to share that with me.

~a warm, sunny Saturday morning drive to work and a quick stop at the car-wash, removing winter grime from the car (with a prayer that He'll remove the grime from my heart just as easily!)

~Saturday night pizza with the works!

~the monthly Holy Hour for vocations in our beautiful Seminary chapel, voices joined in prayer for a common cause.

~oldest son who calls after leaving the house to warn me that the walks are icy, knowing that I will be out the door shortly.

~the profoundly poetic words of Caryll Houselander.

~sons who teach me how to download music on the computer.

~younger friends who look up to me (me-can you imagine?) as a role-model for parenting advice.

~husband's strong yet gentle hands loosening the knots in my neck and shoulders.

~hearing words of thanks from a neighbor for a simple note and jar of jelly that was given during a time of need and learning that such a small gesture brought much needed joy during a time of grief.

~petting our guinea pig, Daisy, and being rewarded with purrs of appreciation.

~early morning solitude and silence while the family sleeps.

~teenage son who wears dress shirt and tie to Sunday Mass even though we wouldn't have required such formal dress

~knowing that on St. Valentine's Day and every day, I am loved beyond measure by the Lord.

On Holy Communion

I have been ravenously devouring the words of Caryll Houselander in the past few months as I make my way through all of her books. This passage from her autobiography, A Rocking Horse Catholic about her second Holy Communion after a long bout with psychological illness speaks to my heart today...

"On the night before He died, when He instituted the Blessed Sacrament, He gave Himself for all time into the hands of Peter-and into the hands of Judas. A further reason why this way, the way of Communion with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, is of such great value to those who are tortured by psychological suffering, is because it necessarily involves other human beings; someone must bring Christ to the sufferer, someone must give Christ to him. There are other ways, too, by which Christ has made Himself man's gift to man; the Mystical Body is planned for that. But this way, through sacramental communion and the Sacred Host, is at the heart of the mystery of God's love, and from it flows every other communion and Christ-giving between men.

It is because the psychological sufferer is always cut off, isolated by his self-torment, from his fellow creatures, that this is so valuable to him. God must be brought to him by another man; only God can reach that centre of his soul that must be touched if he is to be made whole, but God chooses to come to him in Communion only if he will receive Him from the hands of a fellow man."

How beautiful that we can only receive God through the hands of another human, and yet how terribly difficult this can be! For in our awareness of our sin, don't we feel most unworthy of not only the presence of Christ but also of the presence of our fellow human beings whom we most often sin against with our words and our actions?

Like Peter I want to cry out "Depart from me Lord, for I am sinful!" (Luke 5:8) And then I hide my face behind the crook of my arm, unable to bear the beauty of the Lord that is being offered to me. And Jesus gently pries my arm away from my face, and looks deeply into my eyes. He whispers "Don't be afraid, and don't hold back. It is precisely because of your sin that I am here for you."

How blessed we are that our Lord chooses to come to us, to live within us and to unite us to those from whom we often pull away because of our wretched sinfulness. It is only through His love given to us by others that we can taste heaven right now, here on earth.

God Bless Us, Everyone

I recently saw a bumper sticker which read, "God Bless the Whole World." I felt my face light up with a smile as I realized that I was reading the perfect prayer. After all, I sometimes feel as if I could spend hours listing all of my intentions before I even begin to pray: God bless the sick, the homeless, the lonely, the dying, my family, my friends, my enemies, my neighbors, my co-workers, the Church, my brothers and sisters in Christ, my brothers and sisters of all faith backgrounds, those with no faith, those who've asked me to pray for them, myself...Asking God to bless the whole world just covers them all and then some, doesn't it? And more than that, what we're really asking for with this simple prayer is for everyone to recognize that Christ is alive in each and every one of us, and if only we could see Him, could realize His presence in each person we meet, then God truly would be blessing the whole world.

I'm on a Caryll Houselander kick this Advent and the following passage speaks so poetically of the Christ Child in all of us...

"In some He is newly born.

In some He is a child.

In some He is homeless.

In some, He is ignored, unrecognized, mocked, betrayed.

In some He is hungry; in some He is naked; in some He is helpless.

Here are examples, but they are not exhaustive: indeed, they are only hints at the countless manifestations of Christ in man...

In many people Christ lives the life of the Host. Our life is a sacramental life. This Host life is like the Advent life, like the life of the Child in the womb, the Child in the swaddling bands, the Christ in the tomb. It is a life of dependence upon creatures, of silence and secrecy, of hidden light. It is the life of a prisoner.

The Host life may be lived in prisons: in prisons of war, in internment camps, in almshouses, hospitals, workhouses; by blind people, mental patients; in people who have to be wheeled about, washed, dressed and undressed by others; who are literally obliged to offer themselves to God in the hands of other people, like the Host in the priest's hands at the Mass."

~Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Just yesterday, I held the Host in my hands, not only at Mass, but at work as well: I was visiting with a mother and her one-month-old son in my office, signing them up for WIC (Women, Infants and Children) benefits so that the mother could have some formula for her baby and healthy food for herself. She had struggled unsuccessfully to breastfeed her baby and so resorted to feeding formula, but now, she was out of formula, and, showing me the empty baby bottle, said she didn't know what she would do without the help that WIC provides.

I took the baby bottle, washed it in the nearby sink and made a new bottle of formula for her so that she could feed her hungry baby while we talked. She went on to share her worries with me about her finances, and the fact that she had applied for cash assistance and food stamps from the State but has been waiting for six weeks and still has not had a response about whether or not she would qualify for the benefits. Being fairly new to this country (just like the Holy Family in Egypt) and not completely proficient in English, she was trying to figure out what her next step should be to provide for herself and her son. Now, she was out of money and out of food and was grateful for the assistance that WIC would provide.

As I looked through my resources to help her find the nearest agency that could help her with her concerns, I could see that she was anxious to finish her appointment with me, because instead of taking her son out of his car seat and holding him while she fed him, she simply left him strapped in his seat and held the bottle in his mouth. She confessed that she was in a hurry because she had a doctor appointment across town and didn't want to be late. But, baby was not enjoying being fed like this; he wanted the warmth of his mother's arms and the nearness of her heart while he ate.

So, she patiently unbuckled him from his seat, undressed him from his winter bunting, and began to feed him with love. Only he wasn't interested in eating just now, and he began to fidget and squirm. I offered to hold him while she looked over the list of resources that I offered her.

With my hand firmly on his bottom, and his little face nuzzling my shoulder, I gently patted the small of his back, and out came his undigested milk, all over my shoulder. Mom fussed and apologized, but I just had to smile. It had been a long time since I wore spit up on my shoulder! I remember reading a Mother's Day poem about a special place in heaven for mothers whose shoulders carry a faint fragrance of sour milk, and I felt honored as I realized that there had been another baby just like this one; a baby who was poor and cold and hungry; a baby whose overfull stomach most likely emptied its contents on His mother's shoulder many times...

"We know by faith that Christ is in our own family; it is He whom we foster in our children. When you tell your child a story, when you play a game with your little son, you tell a story, you play a game with the Christ Child...A woman too weary for articulate prayer will find that for her the best of all prayer is the unspoken act of faith in Christ in her children. When she knows that she is setting the table and baking the cake for the Christ Child, her soul will be at rest...

An old man whose love for his fellow creatures endeared him to them all confessed that whomever he met-before greeting him out loud-he greeted Christ within him in secret. Such a practice as that, begun darkly in faith, would soon teach us to believe, too, just as genuflecting before the tabernacle teaches babies to believe that God is 'in there.'"

~Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

God is in there...in that baby with the undigested milk, in the mother rushing about to appointments, and even in the nutritionist trying her best to serve and care for young, struggling mothers and their children. And, so I ask God to bless Himself in us, to help us carry His love to one another, to Himself who suffers so much from the burden of our sin. In this season of Advent as we prepare to give birth to God who gestates within each one of us, as we silently wait for Him to be born anew so that we can show Him to the world through our kind actions and our gentle love, I repeat the words of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol and I ask Him to please, "God bless us, everyone-God bless the whole world."

Little Orphan Annie/Hands That Will Dip In Any Water

"I will never forget you, I will not leave you orphaned, I will never forget my own."

~from Isaiah 49

When my dad passed away four and a half years ago, I felt a bit orphaned. Although I was forty years old at the time, and had been without my mother since 1999, it wasn't until this time without my dad that I felt truly alone for the first time in my life. It was a strange feeling, and even now, it seems almost silly to write it out. Here I was, a grown woman with a husband and five children, perfectly capable of caring for myself and others, including helping to care for my parents in their last years. How can an adult be an orphan? Isn't that title reserved for little children who lose their parents? Yet, orphaned was a perfect word to describe how I felt in my loneliness for my parents, in my sorrow for my past mistakes and resentments toward them and in my lack of appreciation for all that they had done for me in my life. Why is it that we often fail to really see the love that we have been given until it is gone?

My Mother's Hands

"For years I have been haunted by a single line in an unpublished poem which seems to me to be very close to a definition of sanctity:
'Hands that will dip in any water." (an unpublished poem by Joan Bartlett)
I have seen the hands of a foster-mother chapped and bleeding from continually being dipped in hard water in frosty weather and have thought to myself that the stigmata are not, after all, reserved for a few rare mystics." ~Caryll Houselander, The Passion of the Infant Christ

The above passage from Caryll Houselander gave me chills the first time I read it, and it continues to chill me each time I read it again. If this is the definition of sanctity, then I am certain that my own mother is in the Kingdom of Heaven with a halo upon her head. You see, for years after my father's diabetes and back injury left him unable to work, my mom supported our large family by working in a factory, a job she despised, yet took on due to necessity. Each day, she had to work with chemicals, dipping her bare hands in the solution which detrimentally affected her health for the rest of her days. The result of working with this chemical caused nerve damage that left my mother's hands with a constant painful burning sensation, and her hands were so swollen and without feeling that she could barely hold on to anything without dropping it. It was rare that she would be seen without an ice pack between her hands to bring a little comfort from the burning sensation. Despite visits to many specialists, it wasn't until the last few years of her life that the brain tumor that had resulted from the chemical nerve damage was found; it was the brain tumor that eventually took her life.

She dipped her hands in any water to support and love her family; to live her calling from God. It was those same hands that held and comforted me as an infant, that spanked me when I misbehaved, that soothed my fevered brow during many illnesses, that fingered countless rosaries during hours of prayer, that lovingly refinished antique furniture bringing it to a smooth and glossy sheen that I can never replicate no matter how hard I try, and that cooked and cleaned for my benefit and for the benefit of my eight brothers and sisters. She was without a doubt, a saint, and if anyone had ever questioned that fact, they had only to look at her swollen and pain-filled hands-her own form of stigmata- and they would know that these were the hands of a truly holy mother.

Today, I look for the stigmata of motherly love in many other hands, and I find it in the friendly wave of an elderly parishioner at the sign of peace, in the firm handshake of our pastor after Mass, in the gentle squeeze of my daughter when she's feeling loving, in the calloused hand of my husband as he works to fix up our old house, and in the nervous trembling of a first-time mother in my WIC Clinic as she hands me her newborn baby to hold. These hands are all signs of the continuation of my mother's love for me. These are hands that will know pain in one form or another, yet through the pain, they will bring love to the world around them.

The "hands that will dip in any water" are the hands of His love that will always surround me and will never leave me orphaned.

...To be continued...Little Orphan Annie/My Father's Eyes...

Read You to Sleep

Snow silently falls during dark of night leaving behind a shimmering, glistening blanket in the morning sun.

Out you go to cover yourself with that white wonder; rolling in it, sliding in it, building a friend of snow with Santa hat and stick arms, until you are completely worn out by the enchantment of cold and white.

After a hot dinner and a warm and fragrant bath, you curl up beside me, your head on my shoulder. I hold you close, your damp hair chilling me. I draw the blanket a bit tighter around us, and I read to you about your day...

"Snow falls, and once again the wonder of childhood is upon us. At first a few separate flakes float down slowly, one by one, then more, faster and faster, filling our eyes with dazzling, dancing whiteness. The movement is more mysterious because it is silent: dancing, wild dancing, with no sound, like voiceless singing! If it made even the tiny tap of hail it would seem to fall into our world, but the silence is absolute; it is we who are walking in another world, a world in which we are ghosts. The falling flakes touch our faces with unimaginable lightness and melt on the faint warmth of our blood, at once elusive and intimate." ~Caryll Houselander-The Passion of the Infant Christ

I feel a new heaviness in your head and hear a quiet rhythm to your breath. Glancing up from the book, I see your drooping eyelids succumbing to the peaceful words and the quiet love in my voice. You simply cannot stay awake for one...more...word.....

Sleep well, my dear, and dream of snow dancing all around you. Tomorrow we will read again of the glory of God's love for you in the joys of nature, in the beauty of life, and in the sweetness of friendships. Your whole life will be a never-ending story of the heavenly delights that await you as I read you to sleep.