Tag Archives: family life

He’s NOT Wearing Green

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Life is beautiful; It is a gift even when it is lived in difficult circumstances.  It is always a gift.  (Pope Benedict XVI)

One of my rarely broken rules of this blog involves not invoking stories which include what could be construed as unflattering tidbits about my husband, Tom. You see, I’m pretty into harmonious marriage. For the sake of making a point which I feel is valuable, I’m letting that one go today. He’s working so many hours right now, maybe he won’t notice, ha?

Tom and I, at our anniversary dinner. It wasn’t 6:45am when this was taken. Ha!

As you likely know, today is St. Patrick’s Day. I got up a few minutes early so that I could dig out some appropriately green clothing item and still get to 8am mass on time. Like any sane long married couple, we usually start our days best when NOT sharing bathroom space first thing in the morning. I like sleeping in and Tom likes seeing zero other humans, so it usually works out.

 Use of blow dryers is frowned upon in the wee hours, as is casual conversation.  Tom is NOT a morning person.  In fact, my irritatingly cheerful “Good morning!” used to be greeted with “Is it, though?”  I outed my handsome guy on that one, and he’s curtailed it.  I’m proud of him, as I know it’s not easy being married to me, especially at 6:45am.

Today, my mistake was pointing out that he wasn’t wearing green.  “Do you think I give a rip about wearing green?” he barked. I retorted by pointing out that his Irish grandmother is looking down disapprovingly at this move and steered him to the area with the green golf shirts just begging to be chosen.  My idea was summarily and immediately rejected. 

Transparency is important here.  It’s tax season for my favorite CPA.  When I went to bed well after 11pm, he was still in our home office working.  Also, we’re on the verge of WWIII, it costs $100 to fill up a tank with gas, the pandemic refuses to end, and his Dad has end stage colon cancer.  This moment in history is a difficult one for so many of us.  Some of the reasons we share, and some are our own crosses.

Voracious.  That’s the word I’d assign to myself where reading is concerned.  I definitely read my fair share of beach smut, but I am also drawn to historical works—fiction and nonfiction.  Many of my favorite books are based on the stories of ordinary heroes who stepped into the gap for the sake of others at some of the most cruel and terrifying moments of World War II.  For much the same reason, I am inspired by the stories of the saints.  The tie that binds the most inspiring people I’ve read about is hope.  They were hopeful folks, which allowed them to be fully present in the moment.

Hopeful people show others the light.  They are sacrificial and kind.  They raise money for one small family fleeing the Ukraine.  They show up with Starbucks on a rainy day.  They clear a stranger’s sidewalk of snow or offer to take a friend to the airport.  Hopeful people are upbeat, cheerful, sanguine and they keep the faith.  Interiorly, there is something inside these heroes.  I’ll call it grace.  This grace allows folks to somehow intuit that they start the world spinning again towards peace, towards compassion.

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. (Colin Powell)

The Lord isn’t calling most of us to do something as dramatic as say, St. Maximilian Kolbe.  He was a polish priest who volunteered to die in place of another man (who had a wife and children) at Auschwitz.  However, Jesus might be calling you and I to be beacons of hope. 

Are you feeling down?  The absolute best solution that exists is to be present in the day you’re living and think “what can I do to make someone else’s day sunnier?”  Then, just choose one small, optimistic thing.  Call your Dad.  Buy coffee for the fireman you see at Panera.  Teach a first grader how to play “crazy 8’s”.  Pray a decade of the rosary for a friend—then tell her!  These signs of hope send goodness into the world, and it is transformed.  The same goes for your own heart. 

I’ll give you a personal example.  At the beginning of the year, I was having a particularly blue week.  I then learned that several of the regular volunteers at the Merciful Help Center (a food pantry and so much more) near me were all out with Covid.  I offered to fill in for a day doing whatever was needed.  The hours that I spent that day simply making phone calls to folks in need were nothing special—or so I thought.  The truth is, that day left my bucket filled.  When we focus on what we can do for someone else, the Lord has a magical way of using our compassion for the good of folks in our path to other ends as well.    

Hopefulness expressed outwardly is a big fat “Get behind me, Satan.” 

The world is full of overwhelmed people.  The danger of surrender to the collective consciousness, to the attitudes that surround us have long been a warning siren.  Mark (chapter 8) tells us “Do not go into the village” for what I personally think is this exact reason.  The polarization created by technology is absolutely an existential threat to us as well in this same way.  We can no longer agree on truth. 

The solution I propose is this.  Focus on being the best friend you can.  Don’t wait to be invited.  Notice.  Listen.  Smile.  Give more than you take.  Make the time. 

This past fall, I heard a great talk from a Dominican Sister.  My takeaway from that talk was the pairing of these gems spoken by our Blessed Mother.  They are out of wine…do whatever He tells you.

In other words, if you spot someone whose eyes are are dead today, if it’s your own heart that’s battered, (or even if it’s just that your husband doesn’t even have the good sense to put on a green shirt on St. Patricks day, because life is just A LOT) first, notice who’s “out of wine”.  Then, listen to Jesus and do what He says. 

My solution for Tom was pretty small. It won’t solve what ails him that I ran a couple errands specifically for him today or that I have pork chops waiting for him when he gets home (because no tense German guy wants corned beef after working a 14hr day) even if it is St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe, though, a little part of him will be assuaged by love.

Trust in Him.  In defiance to all that is difficult or even evil, be hopeful today.  In optimism, there is victory. 

St. Patrick, Pray for Us!

The Great State of Arizona

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Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona, AZ

George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian and author, has written several extraordinary books.  One of these marvelous works is titled “Letters to a Young Catholic.”  In it, Weigel covers what it means to live a faith filled life for those of us who are curious, searching, or even doubtful.  His account is remarkably lucid, and much of what he said resonates, leaving me with a distinct sense of gratefulness for my faith tradition, and hopefulness for the future.  I recommend the book heartily to all.

Having just returned from a rather spectacular long weekend with my family in Arizona, I find that Letter 12 of this book rings particularly true.  The title of this particular letter is “Chartres Cathedral, France—What Beauty Teaches Us.”  The point that Weigel makes here while taking the reader on a tour of a place he cites as one of the most striking that exists is that beauty is a powerful antidote to self-absorption.  Like Weigel upon visiting Chartres, there is for me something overwhelming and ethereal about the “Red Rock” area of Arizona that it renders me speechless.  Like him, I had the sense as I spied for the second time the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona that I was praying without words simply being present.  The chapel was created by artist and sculptor, Marguerite Brunswig Staude.  She imagined it as “a monument to faith, a spiritual fortress so charged with God, that it spurs man’s spirit Godward!”

Oh, how she succeeded.

Beautiful places, in particular, draw me out of myself.  Sky so blue there isn’t a bright enough crayon to capture it, surrounded by imposing red thousand foot high rock walls all around me, well, they help me realize that the master sculptor has created something so marvelous I simply could never grasp it.  There’s no way to tire of this kind of magnificence.  My 8 yr old son called it “crazy”.  My 15 year old said “I think I took 50 pictures here, Mom.”  My 12 year old simply sat with his jaw open the entire time we were in the Oak Creek Canyon area.  Tom had me ask a stranger to get a photograph of the five of us in the midst of it all, and then, after a round of golf on a mountainside course with our kids he said, “I want to stay another day.”  Says Weigel,  “Beauty is something that even the most skeptical moderns can know.  People know that they know what’s beautiful.”

All of this and experiences like these, of course, are God’s grace at work in my life and yours.

When I was a girl, my parish school was teaming with the smiles of Franciscan sisters.  It seems truly ironic now how I thought they were the loveliest people with the most unfortunate and misguided beauty sensibilities.  I wondered, quite frankly, who chose the brown? The irony is that I remember too walks outside this time of the year with Sister Julie Marie and my entire class at St. Lawrence.  She would point out the many old trees lining the side streets near our school which were so brilliantly glowing red, orange and yellow.  She didn’t have to tell us how beautiful they were, we couldn’t miss them.  That would be like forgetting to notice the sunshine.  When we arrived back in our classroom, she would always say, “God is beauty, huh?”  Turns out those gals in brown knew everything about beauty.

In Weigel’s book, he reminds us of St. Augustine, who famously takes himself to task for taking so long to confront his doubts and conform his life to Christ.  He “exults in his surrender to the God who is beauty itself” pens Weigel.

Late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved thee!  You were within, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.  In my unlovliness I plunged into lovely things which you created.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.  You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness.  You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.  You breathed your fragrance over me; I drew in my breath and now I pant for you.  I have tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for more.  You touched me, and I burned for your embrace. –St. Augustine

If every day was a vacation day spent under the blue skies and sunshine near Phoenix, surrounded by smiling children and a peaceful husband, happily disconnected from his laptop………….well perhaps I would not feel as grateful for the lesson, or the need to recall it later.  Maybe then beauty would simply be part of me.

Perhaps then, I wouldn’t need the Chapel of the Holy Cross, or Slide Rock State Park, or fall trees filled with bright leaves, or stained glass windows glowing in the sunshine, or Hail Holy Queen played by skillful hands on an old church organ, or sunset over lake Michigan.

I’m not sure about you, but this human soul has a knack for self-absorption, for getting lost in the everyday.  There are countless antidotes, but since I even like my cough medicine to be cherry flavored, it won’t surprise anyone who knows me to learn the antidote I prefer is the one easiest to swallow.  The next time I am lost in “Shellyville”–self-assertion, self-absorbed world with sentences that all begin “I am”– will someone please remind me to get out my photo album from the October break trip to Arizona?  That should remind me who I am—and who God is.

“Like Augustine, we burn for the embrace of the Beauty that is always the same and always new.  That burning, which God himself has built into us, is the beginning of every prayer.”  –George Weigel

AMEN.

P.S.  Did I mention I had a great vacation?  Tom, Nick, Drew, and Zach…………you guys rock my socks off.  Oh, and God?  Yeah, you really seemed to find your groove artistically when you got busy with the state of Arizona.  Just saying.  Nice work there.  Love you.