2011!

A new year...the chance for new beginnings.

I have some big changes planned for 2011.
I'm ready for all its challenges, struggles, joys, love, and laughter.

...be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
~Desiderata~

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we've got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that Jesus commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition, and then admit that we just don't want to do it." -Stephen Colbert

Wow. Thanks to my friend D for posting this quote today. It is the challenge. The Catholic Church teaches a "preferential option for the poor," but the practicing what we preach? In our every day lives? In the Church's every day teaching?

It's that fallacy of the American Dream, as I tell my students. We want to believe that if we just work hard enough, we can have "it all." It makes us feel proud when we do get "it all"--job, housing, spouse, kids, etc. But it also lets us look at the poor and say, "Clearly, they're just not working hard enough." "I worked HARD for what I have...they should too." It negates privilege. It lets us point finger instead of accepting that we have a responsibility to the other.

It's hard to admit that the world is unfair...to accept that the system is flawed. But it is. And so we need to try to do what's right...to be better...to recognize the divine in the other, the struggle in the other, the good and the deserving in the other.

The Shortest Day

(sleep enveloped me early again last night. this illness, whatever it is, has sapped me of all energy. i head to the doctor today to try to diagnose it.)

For today, a poem by Susan Cooper on this, the Shortest Day:

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

You're asking me to believe....

You're asking me to believe in too many things
You're asking me to believe in too many things

I know this child
Was sent here to heal our broken time
And some things are bigger
Than we know
~~Joseph, Who Understood; the New Pornographers

Still sick. Today brought the chills, the achy-ness, the hit-by-a-truck feeling. This will be short.

I love this song...from my friend Bill's '08 Christmas mix. First off, it's gorgeous. Second, there's an irony to a band named The New Pornographers writing their own Christmas-y song.

Joseph so often gets lost in the story of Christ. He's barely mentioned in the infancy narratives, then he disappears (except for Luke, who gives us the 12-year-old Jesus in the temple story). Today's reading was about Joseph's doubts. Oh, Joseph...the only true human in that Holy Family. But his doubts don't scare him away. Ultimately, his faith saves him. Ultimately, he knows that some things are bigger than we know.

finding your voice

I've been sick for the last few days...head cold with that nasty post-nasal drip. Today, I woke up with that heavy feeling in my chest like the cold had moved to my lungs. I tried to shake it off and headed to a quick dentist appointment. I entered the office, opened my mouth to give my name, and no sound came out!! Lost my voice.

It's genetic...my nana used to lose her voice when she got sick...my mom loses her voice, too. It's ironic, as all 3 of us rely/relied on our speaking voices so heavily. Illness takes one of the biggest and best tools in our virtual toolboxes.

It causes me to be more deliberate though, this lack of voice. I have to get resourceful. When I taught elementary school, calling in sick was really not an option. We had no subs, so the computer teacher would cover and then everyone else's schedules were totally thrown for the day. We rarely called in sick--we needed to be fainting, puking, or dying. A little thing like the inability to talk? You could work around that. I'd clap to get their attention--and they'd clap back and then get eerily quiet. At 7, they didn't try to take advantage of my deficit...they adapted.

I need to transfer some of that deliberate action into other parts of my life. These days, I feel like I have no voice some of the time. I feel like I won't be heard, and so I say nothing at all. And this silence leads me to do the opposite of what my kids used to do...instead of rising to the occasion, I shrink. I freeze. I refuse to act, refuse to adapt. I throw up my hands in frustration. Yes, this instinct has done a great deal to help me--to make me realize I need to change courses, take another path...but for now, in these next few months while I am still in this city and at this job, I need to find ways to clap my hands. I need to find my voice and make it heard.

sleep

That's apparently what I needed last night. I arrived home after a full day--half-day of teaching, faculty Christmas lunch, then drinks and laughs with teacher friends at our favorite bar--and promptly fell asleep. I'm fighting a pretty nasty cold too, so only added to my need for sleep.

Sleep before blogging! I will try to post something extra-long this afternoon to make up for it.

Gifts

I have no gift to bring...
That's fit to give a king...
~Little Drummer Boy

I've been running reflections on Advent and gifts with my girls. The 9th and 10th graders hear the story of The Littlest Angel by Charles Tazewell...which is a fantastic little story that parallels the Little Drummer Boy in a lot of ways.

The Littlest Angel doesn't "fit in" in heaven. He can't quite figure out how to be angelic and be a little boy at the same time. He makes a request for a box that he left at home under his bed, and when it arrives in heaven, he is suddenly a model citizen.

When the time comes for Jesus to be born, all the angels are asked to prepare gifts for the Savior. The Littlest Angel is stumped...but eventually lays the rough, scratched up, wooden box among all the other gifts:

And what was his gift to the Blessed Infant? Well, there was a butterfly with golden wings, captured one bright summer day on the high hills above Jerusalem, and a sky blue egg from a bird's nest in the olive tree that stood to shade his mother's kitchen door. yes, and two white stones, found on a muddy river bank, where he and his friends had played like small brown beavers, and, at the bottom of the box, a limp, tooth-marked leather strap, once worn as a collar by his mongrel dog, who had died as he had lived, in absolute love and infinite devotion.

And the Voice of God spoke, saying, "Of all the gifts of all the angels, I find that this small box pleases Me most. Its contents are of the Earth and of men, and My Son is born to be King of both. These are the things My Son, too, will know and love and cherish and then, regretfully, will leave behind Him when His task is done. I accept this gift in the Name of the Child, Jesus, born of Mary this night in Bethlehem."

God wants nothing more from us than the most precious parts of ourselves. What we love most, God loves most. The very best way to serve God, to give back to God, is to offer that which connects with us at the deepest level. That which brings us joy brings God the most joy.

We want to make it so complicated, so difficult, so hard...so that we can more easily throw up our hands and say, "It's impossible. I can never be perfect, I can never please God, I don't know what God wants from me." But in the end, it's simple. God gives each of us a unique set of gifts to offer our world...and all God asks of us in return is that we share these gifts, that we live into them to the best of our abilities.

Simple, right?