A Watershed Week

     Ron is coming home today after 8 days away!
     I prayed fervently that the good of the week would outweigh the bad.  But I could not imagine how that could possibly come to pass!  Oh ye of little faith.
     This week has been one of the best of my life.  I have been "off the grid"--almost no phone or computer use, no TV or electronics.
     I spent the week looking into my children's eyes, having real conversations.  At first, they were so unused to real conversations that I had to work on it!  One child could only make one sentence, and then another one was interjecting his or her thoughts on the topic.  So I said, "Please leave the room for five minutes while I finish my conversation with so and so."  The other three would stand at the door and listen to every syllable.  But at least they were silent!  Interrupting, they learned, is not just in the middle of a sentence--it can be in the middle of a paragraph, too.
    So a couple of days later, these four children are standing more erect, smiling a little brighter, carrying the sense that their mother has heard them and understands what they are feeling and thinking.
    But that is just the beginning!
    Mary and Jacob learned to crochet!  Our homeschooling group hosted a crochet workshop.  Jake and Mary have taken off!

I walked up the staircase last night to put Annie down, and Mary and Jake's long limbs were draped over the arms of our armchairs, as they concentrated on their next stitch. How grown up they looked!  Twice and long and four times as capable as the little munchkins I still think they are!
     Clare and Leigh, Mary and Jake have all started latch hook projects.
     We have been reading Pollyanna aloud as well as William Blake poems (thanks for the Blake for Children book, Uncle Joe!).
     And thanks to Martha's feast day, all four children have been wearing aprons and whipping up salads, toasting and buttering bagels and Ezekiel bread, making bean and cheese nachos and mixing yogurt with different flavors.  Four cooks in the kitchen!

We have become a true Charlotte Mason family!  Hooray!

Martha's Feast Day

     Today we celebrated the feast of Martha of Bethany.  I got this idea from Treasure Chest of Traditions for Catholic Families by Monica McConkey. 

Since Martha is the patron of cooking, the book suggests that the non-cooks prepare a meal for the cooks in the family!  

So we started the day with telling/reading the 2 Bible stories of St. Martha and discussing them.  (My kids all picked up on her bold personality, and how she was always telling Jesus what he should be doing!  They liked her spunk).  We discussed how his greatest miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead was upon her faith: "Jesus, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."  Sheer faith!  But we also discussed how awesome it was in the cooking episode how she was corrected by Jesus, and learned.  She is a saint in part because she was teachable.  My kids (and I!) perked up at this idea of being able to be a saint even if you've been wrong. 

Then I told them that in honor of the patron of cooking, they get to cook me a meal!  "Prepare it, set the table, and I'll be your guest.  Then you get to clean it up." 

They were THRILLED.  They got out their aprons and have been cooking since 8 am!  They made Jello and salad and Ezekiel toast with toppings.  Water and napkins at every seat.  

It was the most delicious salad I have ever eaten.  I was crying as I was eating it.  It was so special!!  The kids were just delighted, and so proud. 

(But their clean up job left something to be desired. . . .!) 

A Socratic Faith

     To be a good Catholic, I have to be a good Platonist.
     The world around us, its messages, value system, and goals, are not really real.
     What is really real is beyond us, and only the Socratic fool is able to see and know.
     Reaffirming my faith means saying "Yes" to the apparently "foolish" and going into the deep.
     The deep is radical love, radical humility, radical cheerfulness, radical joy--fueled by an intense proximity to the Source of it all.

the stomach flu

a horrible, horrible thing!
And times 7...WOW!

Top 10 Favorites

My Top Ten Favorite Things from the Past Week:

10. That I cannot talk on the phone or get on my computer because Annie loves to suck on the phone and punch her dirty little hands into the keyboard, and scream her piercing scream if I say no (totally adorable, really and won't last forever!). :)

9. Having a Mom in my home last week who had a severely deformed baby--one of my real fears is having one myself--and seeing the glow of beauty and love radiating from both of them.  A powerful lesson to me, just by being in the presence of this woman.

8. My children being so well behaved and quiet upstairs while I had a homeschool event downstairs that the women never heard them once in 6 hours!  (They did have a babysitter, but still!)

7. Clare giving Leigh swimming lessons, and Leigh really swimming.

6. Clare having to earn her last birthday present due to a punishment for taking out toys while Mary and Leigh were putting toys away (she has to get a "check" on her chart for being "Very Helpful" every day for 12 days), and Clare truly metamorphosing--glowing as she asks, "How may I help you, Mom?"and volunteering work--before my very eyes.

5. Coming downstairs one morning and Clare announcing, "Mom, I started a load of laundry.  Darks."

4. Annie's wave and words: "Bye bye!" or "Hi!"

3. Turning down the offer to speak at the Magnificat Breakfast the November, not knowing why God asked this of me (except that I know I want to give my best attention to my family rather than a public engagement), and being pleased as punch that I know I have been obedient and that it is the right thing to do.

2. Mary taking over the job of cutting flowers and keeping our vases full every day with zinnias from our first ever successful cut-flower garden.  (CHECK OUT THE CARROTS, TOO!)

1. Jake wanting so desperately to do modern history this upcoming year, that he asked if he could read our unfinished history book from the previous period in the upcoming weeks so that he would be caught up and ready (oh my gosh!  Really??!!?).  

You know you have a lot of kids when. . .

. . .you go through an entire can of spray sunscreen in one application of the whole family!

What a wedding!!!!

Jake, Mary, Leigh and I in Napa Valley!

Time with Aunt Melia!!

A happy mother and daughter!

Praying for Aunt Kimmy in the church the day before the wedding. . .

A GORGEOUS BRIDE!

A raucous party, including a special feature: James Brown (R. Kreiling) and the famous flames (Melia, Kim and Kathryn)!

What a send off!  Throwing lavender at Mr. and Mrs. Miller!

What a truly joyous occasion.  I cannot get the image of beautiful Kimmy in her wedding dress out of my mind.  I've never seen someone so beautiful!!!

                                                                                            (Thanks Melia, for most of these pics!)

Napa Valley

All I can say is--heaven!!
Thank you, Kimmy, for bringing us here!

Daughter of God

     In the past 2 days I have heard reference to 5 people in my family being "geniuses."  That's a heck of a lot of geniuses.
     Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't.  But I get a little unsettled, thinking, "Am I the only lame-O, non-genius in my family!??"  I get this same unsettled feeling when I hear gushing reports about how people in my family are saving the world, saving the people in the world, or ending poverty/discrimination/hardship etc. in the world.  It's hard for me to stay steady--how is being a housewife and a mother measuring up in any significant way?
     The truth is, I am a daughter of God.  I once had a book with this as its title: "I am a Daughter of God."  It was about Carmelite spirituality.  I stared at the title on the spine of the book for a year.  The title was enough for me!  I did not even read the book!  I began praying, becoming in my heart what I knew I was called to me--such a daughter, myself.
     What the world needs is not a book or a DVD or a global forum or a talk show or money or a concept.  What the world needs is DAUGHTERS and SONS of GOD: it needs people who are so filled with joy and contentment that they shine.  It needs people who have learned to readily forgive.  It needs people who know how to give when they will not receive anything back.  It needs people who live their lives in communion with those close to them: daily life lived out hearing, responding, sharing, serving, laughing, relaxing, working together.  This can happen in any living room, in any kitchen, and with anybody whom you happen to live.
     Dignity in being loved and claimed by God, FORGIVENESS, and a joyful shared life: these are the ingredients to what I consider the most blessed life on earth.  I am delighted that I feel called to one day achieving this blessedness.  I believe that it is more powerful than a life of making books and DVD's and money and talk shows.  Those books and DVD's and money and talk shows are trying to help people embrace their dignity, forgive or overcome hardships, and live well together.  They are only valuable if they are working, and they are only working if they enable people to achieve this kind of blessedness.
     I know that I am not a genius and that is okay with me.  The real question, what is the life well lived--what is the BEST life?  It is true that I choose housewifery and motherhood and friendship over working to end suffering on earth.  I hope that in so doing, I can in my own particular way be a window through which peace and love and joy flood the world.
  
  

favorite appoach

My favorite approach to hard people is: "Thank you God for this wonderful person!  I love them, love them, love them!  And, help me to pour mercy over the part of them that is not yet right."  Enough prayer this way (sometimes, A LOT is needed) helps me not take the part that hurts personally.  That helps me resolve my ambivalence: rather than having HALF a heart of mercy, God grants me a FULL heart.  

marriage retreat

Ron and I are hosting our first ever marriage retreat in our home this weekend: Fri. and Sat.  I did not think it would happen; I did not push it to happen.  But a friend asked about the materials we had put together that I had previously mentioned, and one thing led to another, and voila!  It has fallen in our laps, and Ron and I just look at each other in amazement.  How did this happen?  We are both looking forward to it, nevertheless!

An insipid "Christianity"

There are 3 pillars of Christian faith--3 aspects that I think are essential to authentic life with God.  In the early Church, for example, all 3 were understood as crucial for the Christian life.

A.   Acceptance into the Family of God (separation from old ways and basking in the love of God and relishing being loved)

B.   Embrace of the Cross

C.   Indwelling of the Holy Spirit

  

       In our culture today, we have a watered down Christianity, where only the first is dabbled in.  Most Christians who leave the Church and most people who do not enter it in the first place do so because Christians are insipid in the living out of their faith--two thirds of what should be there is missing.  They are seeing vice and sin and no real living out of the Cross and no real impact by the Spirit. 

       Christians get tripped up and stuck.  We enter into the first vestibule, the adoption into the family of God.  We like that—there is much to gain.  In this vestibule, we lick our worldly wounds, we find reprieve from the sins of the world, we feel loved. 

       But inevitably, it is time to move onto the Cross.  The time comes to learn about how to suffer and not retaliate, how to be falsely accused and not defend oneself, how to be deprived, and not insist on our own way.  It is time to stop feeling sorry for ourselves for not getting what we want or think we deserve.  It is time to find Christ in our lack, and be with Him there.  It is time to give the world a gift in our suffering, as Christ offered His life for the sins of the world.  We have to learn to be glad in our sufferings and act as priests who, by the power of God, transform humiliations, torture and death into dignity, joy and life. 

       Most people do not ever make this step.  Again, it was requisite in the 2^nd century.  But today, it is considered beyond us.  The powers of evil have so overtaken our culture that we cannot even see that we are supposed to be living with Christ’s cross.  We are just mired down in anguish, sadness or despair.        

     Christians leave the faith because they wonder why life is so hard for them, why God is not rescuing them or sparing them.  It is time for that person to learn to embrace the POWER of the Cross in his life.  It is time to move into the second vestibule, the school of Christ's Cross, and learn to transform others and bring love and new life into the world by offering up suffering for the world.