Friends

You know what I’m glad for?  I’ll tell you.  I’m glad for my Tuesday morning prayer group.  Where else could I get introduced to an up and coming saint and no one thinks that is hilarious. Or childish.  Or naïve. Or superstitious. Or unsophisticated. Or un-cool. I’m glad for these wonderful women for so many reasons, but one of those reasons stood out for me this morning while I was praying.  I have a couple of saints that I have considered my friends over the years. St. Anthony has been a staple since Aunt Jule had such a devotion to him, and as a bonus, he’s in charge of finding lost things.  I lose things all the time, so I call on him almost daily.  Over the years I have assigned particular saints to my children to watch over them. Long before my daughter named her son Jude, I had often called on his intercession for her.  My oldest son also loses things often, so St. Anthony got the job of watching over him.  For the next oldest son, I asked St. Joseph to be his guardian since they are both craftsmen.  And my youngest son has always had St. Francis since it is his middle name and they share a love of animals.

I now have another saint friend. When one of the women in the group asked us to pray for the intercession of Blessed Brother Andre for the healing of her brother who had cancer, he had yet to be canonized.  We asked for his intercession when we met, and also in our own daily prayers.  As of this time, her brother’s cancer is in remission and his future looks bright.  Blessed Brother Andre is now Saint Andre, but I still call him Blessed Brother Andre, ‘cause that’s how I picture him.  He was a humble fellow in his monastery in Canada.  He had a great devotion, or friendship, with St. Joseph. In his humility, his reputation for holiness grew. He had menial assignments around the monastery—he was not a scholar or a teacher, just a humble ‘ordinary’ man who performed his tasks with great love.

Due to my near total immersion in Catholic education, I did not have pop stars for my role models when I was a kid.  I had saints.  Which has often been a hindrance, I do admit.  There they were being all holy and good in the midst of the very same temptations we live with today. They chose a different path so I knew what was expected of me: to turn away from the allure of sin and be holy.  And when I fell—oh so often-- I had them to turn back to help me get on the right track.

We all need friends to navigate our way through life.  Some of them just happen to have lived in different places and times than we find ourselves. That’s why we have the ‘communion of saints’ to call upon and ask them to pray for us.  It’s like having a whole bunch of aunts and uncles banging on the door of God pleading our case.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Gratitude

I belong to a marvelous writers group.  We call ourselves Salon Quatre (adding a little French somehow makes us more literary).  In less than two years Bill has published a book about a young Marine’s experience in the Pacific theatre of World War II (whose story is featured in the HBO series The Pacific). Drema has twenty publications of her warm and witty stories of growing up in the coal country of West Virginia and has won a nice handful of prizes along the way. Judith has continued to write her compelling poetry and has taken her ambitions to a new level—and will, in a bittersweet way, be moving across the country to pursue her dreams. Then there’s me, who comes to you every week here at Grace Notes and is getting closer to the finish line of a novel that has been churning around my brain for quite a while now. While driving to our first meeting since our summer break I was filled with gratitude to be part of such a group of writers and dear friends.  My ‘career’ path has taken so many more turns than I could have expected since the days of eating lunch in Marillac Hall at St. John’s when we talked about our futures, our plans and whatever issues that piqued our young minds before we were launched out in the wider world.  I didn’t realize at the time how important those lunch meetings were.  But now I do.  We met over common interests, common geography (school, liberal arts majors, having lunch in Marillac Hall because that’s where many of our classes met) and a buzz of the electricity of youth and ideas and philosophies that are some of the best prizes of tuition.

In the order of priorities of the pleasures in life, I rank great conversation and exchange of ideas pretty darn close to the top, just a tiny notch below reading, which is as important as breathing and sleeping to me.

My ‘career’ such as it is, has always incorporated the world of ideas, meaning, connection, history, philosophy—oh, you get the idea.  If I had to work on an assembly line I would probably get fired for trying to start conversations with my fellow workers.  I would linger over lunch just to keep the conversation going.  If I didn’t have intelligent people to talk to I think I’d bust.  Really, I’d pop a blood vessel or the top of my head would burst open in frustration.

Since Judith is moving across the country, the nature of our writers group will be different.  Ah, but here is something else to be grateful for: e-mail and ‘meeting’ rooms where we can deposit our latest work and continue the critique & feedback process that has contributed greatly to the progress each of us has made over the last two years.

Ain’t life grand?

Food Sober

At this week’s Slimming World © meeting, I reached a landmark in weight loss---I won’t tell you what it is because, well, just because. But it is a good feeling. I can now shop in my closet to wear clothes that have been hanging there since I let the weight sneak in. Some of the clothes are even baggy. Now, that’s a great feeling. I was chatting with my friend Trina at the meeting and she had a fabulous idea. We get stickers for weight loss, which is great. (I don’t think we really ever get over getting a gold star to attach to our work.) Trina suggested that we get stars for maintaining goal weight, like the folks in AA get a chip for so many months or years sober. We called it Food Sober.

We all have coping mechanisms, things that we use to protect ourselves against whatever pain or trauma we have experienced. Some drink, some gamble, some shop, some smoke, and some of us eat.

When I was growing up I didn’t care much for food. Really. I pretty much lived on milk. My father said I was a bargain. I was healthy, rarely got sick, and I didn’t cost my parents much in food. As long as the milkman kept delivering those gallons of milk (I am one of six kids) I was happy.

So, what happened? Well, it’s sneaky, you see. I have four children and of course you have to have snacks in the house when there are four kids. They were active, healthy, robust and lean children. They burned all the calories they took in. I, however, wasn’t out playing capture the flag or hide and seek with them.

When we moved to Texas I discovered tasty seven layer dips and chips and various Southwest foods.  We had lots of social events to attend. Plus, it’s darned hot in Texas. And you have to drive everywhere.  So who’s gonna’ go out and walk in 100 degree heat when the car is in the driveway and I can turn the A/C full blast?

That explains some of the transformation. That got me to plump (pleasingly, so my husband tells me).  The real problem came in the last few years. We had several family and personal traumas to get through. Seemed like shotgun blasts one after another. I didn’t take up drinking (I really don’t like headaches and vomiting). But it looks like I took up eating. Not on purpose. Just ‘cause. Just ‘cause the sauce on the chicken marsala was so tasty, and here, try this delicious cheese cake. Just ‘cause when I couldn’t stay asleep a cookie or two in the middle of the night seemed to help. Just ‘cause the food was so tasty and, dammit, I need something to make me feel better.

It’s all a process.  I think you have to be ready, have some kind of wake up call, or hit some sort of bottom to change your life. In getting on the wagon of healthy eating I have discovered more about myself. I am more conscious, more aware, more honest, and--- thank God, food sober.

Blaze of Light

[For Sophia Ann] There’s a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter which you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah! Leonard Cohen

In the beginning was the Word. Gospel of John

And God said…Book of Genesis

When I taught Adult Ed courses on spirituality and theology, one subject, theme, if you will, that I kept coming back to was: God spoke us into being. Our name thundered in a mighty whisper and here we are. Romantic view of conception? Perhaps. But it resonates with me. Resonates as in resounds somewhere deep within. Deep within beyond my conscious mind. Further back. Then further back from there.

As far back as I remember (and I have some very early memories), words have fascinated me. The way they bounce around your mouth, play with your tongue, escape over your teeth. The way they look on a page. The origins of words and their associations in history that thread us together through time. The language we speak now is built on many languages and cultures mixing words while they mixed the gene pool. And the simple reality that sounds bind us together or separate us dependent on what they mean and the manner in which they utter forth. What power.

Now, I am a slow writer. Thoughts, memories, words, ping around me and make connections while I try to compose. If I am lucky, and patient, words will just pour from my fingertips onto the ‘page’ like water from a fountain. But, often, I just wait. Oh, I’ll scribble—that is jot down all sorts of non-sequiturs and lines of songs, nursery rhymes, and bits of conversation that pop up in my mind like jack-in-the-box—but something else has to happen in order for me to write something that feels true.

And that something feels like a blaze of light. Well, not always a blaze, sometimes a small lit candle or the proverbial light bulb. But there is heat and warmth and illumination. There is a yes, and if I am mindful, an amen.