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Last week I did something I hadn’t done before. I removed a blog post. Why? Because it was ill conceived and poorly constructed. And, I have come the point in life, or the age, in which I think it is not only a good idea to admit my mistakes, but it is necessary. Necessary? Yes. Because if we stick to our mistakes and if our egos are too fragile to take correction, then we have just added a traffic jam to any meaningful conversation. Meaningful conversation is one of the treasures of life. I enjoy a good conversation about as much as I enjoy reading. And I enjoy reading quite a bit.

As Craig Ferguson (comic and naturalized American citizen) likes to say, in America you get a second chance. And a third chance. And if you are tenacious, as many chances as you want.

I should be more cautious, I suppose. Boy, that’s difficult when words just want to burst and spill all over the page. My oldest son Michael, who takes after his mother in this, had a comeback line that has become part of the idiom in our family: “I’m just saying, is all”. This became a regular defense when he said things that irritated his brother into a brawl. “Just saying” has started many a war, many a romance, many a confession.

And many a needed conversation.

In this age of political correctness, where great swaths of topics are off limits lest you be considered unenlightened, we need to keep the conversation going. We need to think things through and articulate what we think. If we do not, we will be silenced by those who grab the microphones and talk their way into power. Then I’d really be in trouble. The gatekeeper of my words is usually off duty or taking a nap. Words slip out. Whole heated monologues and arguments break loose from my unrestrained tongue and untethered fingers.

There are still places in this world where that quality would land me in jail or in front of a firing squad. So before our freedom of speech slips away because we stop exercising it, let’s keep the conversation going.

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It Makes Us The Right Size

One of the best arguments I’ve ever read for kneeling in prayer is from Mary Karr's latest memoir Lit. Here’s a paraphrase of the passage:

Why kneel? The author asks while attempting to work out her recovery from alcohol.

Because it makes us the right size, replies her sponsor.

On the list of reasons I have removed myself from the parish in which I spent years being very active is the fact that they removed the kneelers and preached that if we kneel during the consecration then we are removing ourselves from the community!! They justified our lack of kneeling at the consecration and after communion by teaching that kneeling puts us in a penitential and “lesser” position.  Well, duh!!

If we don’t have enough sense to be penitential and acknowledge the glaringly obvious that we are “lesser” than the Almighty, then we have a really skewed and screwed up philosophy of theology.

A classmate of mine from college once wrote that we are a ‘Resurrection People’.  Well, yes we are, but, in order to get to the Resurrection we must go through Good Friday and the long loneliness of Holy Saturday. If anyone doubts this, just live a little. Is there anyone who doesn’t go through Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays in their life?

We need to go through the many trials and difficulties of life in order to be a person of depth, of heft, of intelligence and, perhaps most importantly, compassion.

Another myth perpetrated among us baby boomers is that we are entitled to not only childhoods free of conflict and difficulties, but adulthoods of one victory after another, because we deserve it.  I admit, I never understood what ‘deserve’ means.  But I do believe in the abundant and overflowing gifts of grace and joy and love and beauty that surround us, fill us, carry us through. If we have any sense at all, we will be grateful and humble enough to be thankful, and yes, get on our knees once in a while and acknowledge that we are not the source of all this wonder, we are the recipients of gifts we could never earn.

We need to get to the right size and recognize and rejoice in the many resurrections that are graced to us, not because we deserve them, but because we have a gracious and generous God.

PS:  What does this have to do with writing?  Well, just try writing anything: an essay, a short story, a novel, with characters who live one happy moment to the next and never come to terms with their Good Fridays.  Who would read it.  Who would care?

Where The Heart Is

I spent last weekend at a writer’s conference.  The leaders call us a "tribe." Interesting appellation. This morning in an editorial by Roger Cohen of the NY Times called Modern Odysseys, he writes of his impending return to London after living thirty years in New York. This leads to reflecting on his mother’s terrible homesickness that drew her into such a deep depression she almost took her own life.  She was born in South Africa—in a sunny warm, dry climate, but after her marriage she moved to London—damp, dreary, cold London. She ached so much for her "home" that despite her love for her family, that ache almost overcame her love.

I am part of my own Diaspora. On both ends. I moved across the country nearly twenty years ago with my husband and four children. We left family, friends, culture and climate. Three of my four children live far enough away from home, in Boston, Nashville and Austin, to require planning and traveling for a visit. Our youngest child promises that as soon as he can he’s moving as far away from the Texas heat as his career will take him.

For the first several years I longed, ached, even, to go "home." To family, yes, but also to climate. I missed dearly the four seasons that circle around New York. The beautiful autumn leaves, the snow, the gradual dawning of spring and the relatively short summer. I have had to adjust to mostly summer with a sprinkling of winter, and to some that might sound like a great idea, but I have learned how tied to the four seasons my body, mind and spirit had become.

A new environment was really good for all of us. It opened us to seeing and living life in new ways. But the heart is not as easily convinced as the head, and longings don’t need to be reasonable. Some things are part of our DNA, or so it seems. Cooler weather, sacraments, a fascination with the mystical, are all part of my package of both Irish and Catholic heritage. We don’t leave our genetic stamp at any border; we carry it with us wherever we are. So many generations of northern European genes show up in my fair skin and blue eyes that yes, I do think my roots go back the hundreds of generations of ancient, mystical, imaginative and dream sensitive religion and culture of Celts and Gaels and Scandinavians and Normans who invaded and mixed with folks on those damp, lush, green islands in the north Atlantic.

We don’t stay still.  We humans have a great need, hunger, curiosity and instinct to mix, move, and shake things up with other cultures and places.  And so we have the capacity to make home wherever we choose to plant ourselves.

After twenty years here, this is home. I love the great big sky of Texas.  I love the sunrises and the sunsets and the cloud formations that look like giant mountains in this plain. This is the home where our children were raised, where we have friends, community, work. This is where our children gather with their spouses and children for holidays and celebrations—where our "tribe" meets.

We like to bemoan the loss of community in our peripatetic age as a sign of what’s wrong with our world.  But really, it’s always been this way.  People move.  They make new homes. They adjust. They grow. They are still part of the "tribe" that connects us, but that tribe grows with each generation.  We get "bigger"; our hearts get "bigger", so, our concept of home gets bigger.  It’s where the heart is.

A Good Season

It's been a good season. The kids—and grandson- and the one on the way- are healthy—our work is getting out in the world.  Our youngest son is stepping into his acting career with a bit of style and good graces. Serendipity is one way of putting it—events and people winding around to meet him and offer him new doors in which to make a grand entrance.  He’s always had an abundance of confidence and a sense of destiny—so far it seems he was right. When he was a toddler he told stories about how he and Jesus hung out in heaven before he was born arranging this family and plotting his path.  Having lived longer than he, I hope he always remembers these moments of grace when life throws up the inevitable obstacles.

Over the years I have discovered that getting through tough times—times of struggle and doubt and pain—that the act of remembering the good seasons, the abundance and blessings, joys, laughter, just plain peace and contentment, can act as a lifeline to hang onto when we feel battered.  There comes a point, or several, when we understand the De Profundis Psalm 130:  Out of the depths I cry to you o Lord.  Lord, hear my prayer.

Sometimes, though, when things are going well, blessedly, even, there is a small warning, a caution, to not get too excited or expectant, because you just never know when the crash will come.  The great equalizer.

But, geez, what kind of a grouch can dip into that pool of emotion every time life is good?  That seems rather ungrateful doesn’t it?

I do it all the time.  It’s an insurance against feeling too good, too confident. Yesterday, when I had planned to get this post out, I had a roller-coaster day.  The morning sent me several e-mails from readers who (dare I say it?) loved my short story in The Rose and Thorn Journal.

Now everyone loves praise, but, years of training against being “too big for your britches” kicks in and some imp pokes my confidence and warns me to just wait, something bad will come and you’ll be back to where you started.

I had one of those events handy—I couldn’t reach one of my sons.  Didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t, answer his phone.  He was always so good, so prompt, at returning calls.  So naturally, gearing up for disaster since I’d just been blessed with good tidings and praise, I pictured him on the side of the road, upside down in his car and unconscious.  So I couldn’t write.  I couldn’t eat.  I could only worry.  Now that is something I know I’m good at.

I’ve got to get a new hobby.

Memento Mori

Tempus fugit, memento mori. Last week I attended one memorial service and one funeral.

The week before, I visited my father in New York. He lives in a nursing home since his stroke nearly four years ago. He celebrated his 91^st birthday in March. His range of motion is either bed or a wheelchair and the weekly trips my brothers manage for him in a handicap van. He is hooked up to a feeding tube and cannot bathe himself or attend to his own personal needs. But his mind is good. He still has his sense of humor and dry wit. He is still himself. He just is not able to do the many things he once took for granted.

Every once in a while a picture flashes behind my eyes. I am on the Q 5 bus just pulling out of Jamaica Station, on my way home from Mary Louis, the high school I attended. I am 15 years old and I am very aware of my youth, of my agility, my muscles and my will to life. I feel a forward motion. It is a blessed moment, granted to me in the middle of a very difficult year. And every once in a while it pops up to remind of something: Hope. Joy. Strength. Good fortune. Gift. Blessing. Gratitude.

When I bend a few too many times wrestling my grandson into his diaper and my back is nostalgic for the flexibility of youth, I need to remember that this is one of the many ‘deaths’ we pass through along the way.

When I was in my late twenties and adult life was not turning out quite the way I had pictured it once upon a time I read something about stages in life and what I was experiencing was called ‘the crash of ego’. They got that right! Adult life was hard work: building a family, paying bills, caring for children, nurturing a marriage and somehow in all that trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t quite get all that—all the struggle and the worry and the joys and the little/big things were forming me, shaping me, teaching me who I am. Oh.

I had to let go, let die, some of the things I expected and some of the things I thought about myself and how life should be. I had to learn to trust in the little and big resurrections that are an essential part of life. That are life.

Life is filled with deaths of every description. But, we need to remember that life is also filled with the graces of resurrection that sometimes we have to be quiet and prayerful enough to find.