So there I sat at five p.m., in the section beside the choir, at my old stomping grounds. As accustomed as I am to the constant jostling for position, it was disorienting to sit alone (well, alone until the baby woke up). But restful, too.

Although this was the Sunday evening liturgy I directed for one short year as a newlywed, the parish repertoire has moved on. I knew very little of it, but I learned, enjoying the sound of a contemporary ensemble that is most of what I would like ours to be, leading a willing assembly actively engaged. (Can I just say…wow.)

There’s something special about that church, and although I love my parish and the community to which I have dedicated the last twelve years, somehow whenever I walk into the building where I met my husband and where I married him, it feels like coming home. So much of my growing-up-in-faith happened within those walls, and sitting there, the memories seemed to leap up in greeting.

There were evening choir practices and prayer circle in the cry room, and the heartfelt hug and prayer of a wonderful woman who could see that something was troubling me in those early months of my anxiety, even though I didn’t have the courage to tell her what it was. There were Sunday morning prayers before Mass, twenty people crowded into a music storage room not wide enough for two to pass each other. There was the day after our wedding, when I stood up to ask for  volunteers for my Life Teen music ensemble. It was the first time I ever referred to myself as “Kate Basi,” and the whole assembly, which had seen us grow together for four years, applauded.

Photo by Niccola Caranti, via Flickr

There were earlier memories than that, even. I remember sitting with my parents on a Saturday evening in the days when the church was arranged “in the round,” and the slanting rays of the evening sun blinded, the light searing my soul, flaying it open. It flayed open again last night as I watched my fourth baby stare, mesmerized, at the warmth glowing on polished wood.

I was awake to the holy last night in a way I haven’t been for a long time. And it was beautiful.

Am I laughing or crying? Crying. Definitely crying.

I’m typing these up on Thursday night as I listen to my poor baby crying upstairs. He’s got the family cold, and is so, so tired, but he won’t nurse, and holding him is like holding a cranky, squirmy, unhappy child who will.not.go.to.sleep, even though that’s all he wants. It wasn’t supposed to be this way…he was almost asleep, despite the noise of siblings crowing as Mommy read them good night stories…but in the last five minutes of his night feeding, Nicholas’s nose started bleeding. I held a tissue to Nicholas’s nose while Alex moved the baby off my lap, and…well, that was the end of that. Poor baby!

(Poor Mommy. I don’t know if I’m going to make it. Surely he’ll nurse now? Surely? Surely?)

(In case you’re wondering, Daddy was not at home to help during the drama.)

Anyway, a few fun stories for your Friday….

___1___

An Easter Story: On Easter Sunday, I sang the psalm at our church–a Gospel setting of Ps. 118 by Grayson Warren Brown. The kids recognize it because we have it on video from Nicholas’s baptism, and before Mass Nicholas was humming it softly: “Be gwad, we-joice.” On this particular setting, the music ends pretty much with the last note of the final refrain, so the whole church was poised in silence as the sound died away, and my daughter, nestled in the congregation with one of her babysitters, shouted, “YEAH!” 850 people cracked up. It was awesome.

___2___

An Easter Image: Speaking of Easter, here’s the Easter Tree, adapted from my book, from the first grade hallway of our school–on the first Sunday of Lent…

and on Easter Sunday:

___3___

Light at the end of the tunnel Eastern end of Newchurch No2 Tunnel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The light at the end of the tunnel: Nicholas is beginning to be trustworthy to go outside by himself. He will do as directed and stay in the garage for five minutes while I go change a diaper or get other kids ready to come out and play, and I no longer feel like I have to watch him like a hawk to make sure he doesn’t vanish. I’m not ready to let him out on his own the way Alex does…but I can see the light.

___4___

The light at the end of the tunnel, 2: Julianna has been going to the bathroom without being told. This is huge.

___5___

That light at the end of the tunnel…is sometimes an oncoming train: Lest we get too excited, however…I thought Julianna had finally outgrown trying to kill her baby brother. Then I found her smashing his face into the Boppy, such that he truly could not breathe. I swear that girl is giving me gray hair.

___6___

Motivation and Inspiration: My grandmother gave me a book for Christmas called Rediscover Catholicism, by Matthew Kelly. For the first hundred pages I was skeptical; it seemed he was talking in generalities and never getting to specifics. But the chapter on fasting really convinced me. I can’t do justice to the thought process behind it, but in a nutshell, the he says that in order to truly be free, we (mind/soul) have to be in control of the body (WANT! WANT! WANT!). Otherwise we’re just obeying physical cravings. The way we achieve discipline is through fasting. He suggests that at every meal, you should deny yourself once. Not a huge thing, just a tiny thing. I’ve been doing it this week, and talk about redefining meals as a spiritual exercise! It really resonates with me, because in the post-Easter return to sweets, I always have trouble with self-control.

___7___

Photo by wstera2, via Flickr

A Seasonal Muddle: Not long ago I was shaking my virtual head on Facebook, reflecting on the weird mixture of seasonal projects I had underway. But I don’t think I fully processed it until yesterday. Early in Lent, I was doing radio interviews on Lent, finishing an Advent bulletin insert, brainstorming a Christmas bulletin insert, writing a rough draft of a book on Ordinary Time, and rehearsing a choir for Easter. I didn’t know which way was up. All I can say is…I have a healthy new respect for those in the liturgical publishing industry. How do they keep their heads on straight?

Don’t we have a picture of Julianna and Nicholas looking at each other just like this?

New Year’s Eve it was 60 degrees and we took a nature walk that turned into a rock climb. Yes, I climbed rocks. No, I shouldn’t have. Yes, I paid the price for my bad judgment in pain. But I got to climb rocks!

(Yes, Julianna really did carry that purse up onto the Pinnacles, Mom. Until she started tripping, and then Daddy carried it.)

Chrissy and Alex on top of the rocks. Christian, Ed and the three littlest ones had already said “enough,” and at this point I called a retreat for us, too.  I knew I had already overdone it and I couldn’t go to the big window, on that spire in the background. I promised Alex we’d hire a babysitter later this spring and have a picnic up there, just him and me.

Grandma and Grandpa B. came in that evening and got to hold Michael for the first time.

And then, the big day arrived.

Our first “formal” family picture:

Thanks to my b-i-l Rob, who took pictures, and to my sister Andrea, who took time to send them to me on a busy night when she was trying to get her grades ready!

***

Shared with 5 Minutes For Special Needs’ Special Exposure Wednesday…because my “special” girl exists in the midst of a family, and not off by herself…

Image by glasgow's finest via Flickr

On Saturday night I was singing Julianna through hair washing (“I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart!”) when Alex turned to me and launched into an unfinished conversation from the day before. “Mommy, we don’t sing that Devil verse at school because it would be wrong.”

I paused in the middle of “If the Devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack—ouch!” (Julianna’s reward verse for getting through the rest of the torture. It makes her giggle.) “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we can’t sing that at church!” He looked appalled by the very thought. Somewhere deep in my gut, I felt a disturbing flutter. “Well,” I said, “I don’t know that I ever sang it at church when I was little, either. But Alex, church isn’t supposed to be all gloom and doom.”

He looked at me like I was completely nuts. “It’s supposed to be…” He couldn’t find the word, but I knew what he was searching for.

BORING.

IRRELEVANT.

I wasn’t about to fill those words in for him.

There are so many ways to skew how we approach God. An acquaintance of mine once told me, “A person’s faith ought to be a comfort to them, not a source of misery.” The point being that faith should never require suffering or challenge you to do anything you don’t want to do. There’s a strong movement in the world in which church is entertainment—I heard recently of a church where the cross isn’t even used, because it might “make people uncomfortable, and we want all to be welcome.”

On the other hand, there is a strong reaction to all this which focuses myopically on formality, on sacredness—to the point where it’s viewed as disrespectful at least, and perhaps sacrilegious, to crack a smile, to play an upbeat song, or to speak above a whisper.

Believing that God lies squarely in the middle on this topic as almost every other, I find myself continually frustrated. But to see the dawning of POV #2 in my own child brings me to a whole new level of soul disturbance. God created us as people who love laughter and companionship. And since we’re created in God’s image, doesn’t that say something pretty important about God?

At first, casting about for explanation, my mind settled on the strict regimen of behavior expected at parochial school. But as Alex stood beside me during Mass yesterday, his nose pressed to the shiny lacquer of the piano his daddy was playing, looking at reflections of his face and the ceiling in its depths—and more importantly, as we tried to scold him into paying attention—I realized that we bear a large portion of the blame, too.

Not so long ago, I read somewhere that when we’re trying to make the liturgy “relevant” for our young people, the opposite of boring is not entertaining, but meaningful. That’s what I want for my children. Alex shows some really wonderful early signs of reaching that goal—he’s trying to listen to Paul’s brutally convoluted rhetoric and make sense of it, and when he doesn’t (which is every week, of course), he tugs on my arm and says plaintively, “I don’t understand.” I love that about him.

But I think as his parents, we have a huge role in this too. Guidance and formation might happen without us…but it’s not very likely.

“Alex,” I said, “you know, Jesus didn’t walk around being all solemn all the time. He loved to laugh and tell jokes. Jesus was a human being, too.”

Two little ones screamed for attention then, and we never finished the conversation. But maybe that’s okay. Because this isn’t really a conversation that ever gets “finished,” is it?

I don’t remember it being this noisy, either. We’re used to a community of 700 who filter in, whispering, buzzing, getting children settled, but we’re not prepared for the noise that two hundred people can make.

A woman in white wheezes in to the church, and I’m tempted to rush forward and grab her by the elbow, she seems so close to collapse. It sounds almost, but not quite, like the noise my daughter makes, the one that sends us scurrying to the ER. But she perches on a stool just inside the doorway and greets the next five newcomers in a voice that could summon the dead, stopping every few words for a breath that sounds downright painful. “Where is your inhaler?” demands a round woman, putting her hands on her hips.

“In my purse,” she responds.

“Well, get it out!” They laugh; the breathing is settling down now.

We head into church to sit with our friends near the back (everything else is already full). Beneath the sun-streamed windows across the aisle, a man with a khaki sport coat and pointed gray beard leans over the pew behind him, dropping a line of wallet photos with pride for the benefit of someone in the next pew.

On the near side of the church, three men sit domino-style in the center of three pews. From front to back, their bald spots are a perfect match except that one tried to hide it with a comb-over, which now bisects it.

The four of us exchange bemusement; none of us have ever heard this much noise before Mass. I think of individuals in my home parish who would have a thing or two to say on the subject of disturbed prayer, and I can’t help laughing, for this is small town community at its finest.

The deacon comes forward and begins with prayer intentions by way of an introduction. They go on for fully three minutes: the sick, the dead, the government, the military, and so on, lists of names I don’t recognize. My eyes wander to a window depicting the fourth joyful mystery, the presentation in the temple. The vivid colors gleam in the sunlight, but I can only see the bottom half of Mary and a hint of the blankets in her arms, because the choir loft lops off the center of the window.

At last, the deacon concludes: “Please stand and greet one another.”

As if they needed any encouragement. Now the crowd noise vaults to stadium levels. Faintly, because I’m a musician and they’ve proven that musicians can pick individual sounds out of chaos when others can’t, I hear the muffled plink of the electric keyboard introducing “Gather Us In.” We try to sing, but considering the continuing din of conversation, it feels very strange. The passage of the priest, deacon, lector and servers mutes the din by about a third. For the first verse, we are a choir of four in the penultimate row, but by the time verse two begins, about 75 percent of the conversations have stopped, and people have begun to sing. Mass has replaced chat time at last.

And although many would fuss about the disruption of individual prayer, though some might suggest that this is an example of community usurping worship, I find my heart swelling with gratitude. Gratitude for a place where the community of believers is so strong that they can’t seem to stop reinforcing it. Gratitude for the reminder that underneath my acquired big-parish snobbery, I’m still a small-town girl at heart.

My freshman year of high school, a non-denominational organization called Youth For Christ rocketed into prominence. I thought that meant it was for all Christians, and indeed, it seemed to cross boundaries. The most popular kids in school and plenty of the invisible majority walked the hallways wearing snappy black T shirts that proclaimed, “Jesus loves U2. Jesus: if you still haven’t found what you’re looking for.”

One night they brought in a high-powered speaker. They filled up a large room with teenagers: in folding chairs, standing at the edges and the back. I don’t remember much about the talk itself, except that it scared me. It was about “almosters,” people who are almost good enough for Heaven, but not quite, and who thus will burn in fiery damnation for all eternity.

I started thinking of my faults, of the sacrament of Reconciliation, and what would happen if I forgot to confess something. I got more and more scared…but alongside the terror grew another, quieter sense of discomfort, one I couldn’t put words to.

Then came The Altar Call. You know: “If you want to profess Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior, get up and go to the back, where we have people waiting to speak with you.” And suddenly, the shuffling chairs, the whispers and sniffles and scraping sneakers all around me, made me realize something that cut the legs from beneath the fear.

We were being manipulated. Manipulated, in the name of religion.

That moment of clarity changed everything. I sat in my hard folding chair with my eyes closed, my arms folded, and prayed. Prayed that I wasn’t imposing my will on God’s. That if this was truly from God, that I would be open to it, even if it felt wrong. I kept praying as the speaker backed off his altar call: if you feel like you want to make the profession, but you need help to do it…if you feel moved, but need more information…if you simply want to ask questions…

At this point, I felt a stab of disgust. I realized he wasn’t going to be satisfied until the room was empty, until every person had gone to get “saved.” And I knew, with absolute certainty, that this wasn’t how God worked.

I sneaked a peek. The holdouts were me and one other girl—also Catholic. At this last, shameless call, she gave in.

I did not.

When it was all over, the last holdout and I went to the leaders to express our displeasure with how non-inclusive this experience was, and asked if we could bring in somebody to offer another perspective on being not quite good enough for Heaven. Oh, no, they said, we’re not going to get into doctrines of individual denominations. That’s how you tear groups like this apart. I hadn’t really expected a Protestant to buy in to the idea of Purgatory, but still, it irked. It wasn’t until hours later that I realized why: their entire presentation represented a sliver of Christianity, and not the whole.

I never went back.

It’s tempting to impose the more mature faith of my thirties on my fourteen-year-old self. Of course I didn’t have it worked out then like I do now, just as I’ll have it worked out better when I’m sixty than I do today. But I do believe that experience sensitized me to emotional manipulation in the name of God. Maybe that’s why my TEC (Teens Encounter Christ) two years later fell so flat, and made me so suspicious of retreats in general: that entire weekend felt like a giant emotional manipulation.

I know that many people have found their faith bolstered by such experiences. No doubt true conversions have happened off of altar calls employing fear tactics. God can use any circumstance to achieve His purposes.

But mostly, I think it harms Christianity. Because when you get back out into the real world, that amazing little thing called intellect kicks in, and you start to see the flaws. You realize that you’ve been manipulated. And then what? What saves a fledgling faith when it realizes it is based on manipulation?

True faith is based on love, not fear. True faith is not contrary to reason, but incorporates it. True faith recognizes that God doesn’t take sides, that He exists in the middle, above, and all around every point of view in our petty human concerns.

This is the basis for my faith. What experiences have shaped yours?

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This is the Eucharistic chapel at our local Newman Center. It sits outside the church proper, completely walled off, with a door that remains closed at all times, and many would say that for those reasons, it was designed “wrong.” And yet when I think of holy spaces—places where I find God, where His presence wraps around me and fills me up, this place is at the top of the list.

There are other holy spaces in my world, places where the silence catches my breath and lifts the pressure from my mind—my parents’ farm, the top of a mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, where we ate lunch one day on vacation. But these are outdoors. In all the world, the only manmade place that has ever helped me feel the presence of God this clearly is this small room.

To come here to pray requires effort. I must traverse miles of busy four-lane road past by stoplights, businesses, schools, even Planned Parenthood. Twist around old, beat-up apartment houses, into the shadow of towering parking structures. There’s virtually no free parking, so I even have to plan the time of day. And perhaps that effort prepares my heart, lays it open to be touched.

In this place, I have knelt before the simple wooden Tabernacle, my soul raw with anxiety, racked by questions and doubts too frightening to share with anyone but God. I have leaned my head against rough stone walls that catch the ends of my hair, seeking stillness of mind to hear the still small voice of the Lord. I knelt here on my wedding day.

In this place, the light filters through stained glass and a telescoped skylight and becomes a tangible thing, the presence of God, the touch of the Holy Spirit. You can’t touch it, but you can feel it.

May God bless the hands that built this space, the minds that designed it, and all those who retreat here to find peace and understanding.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been singing a lot of Carey Landry’s songs to Julianna lately. God hasn’t yet invented the kid who doesn’t like “and if the Devil doesn’t like it, he can sit on a tack—ouch!” But I save that for the tasks she really hates (like having her hair brushed) because the anticipation of that verse keeps her happy until we get done. It’s a reward for getting through her “chores.”

The other song I sing to her is “Oh how I love Jesus.”

Julianna, do you love Jesus?
Oh yes, I love Jesus.
Do you really love Jesus?
Yes, I really love Jesus!
Tell us why you love Jesus.
This is why I love Jesus: because he first loved me.
Oh, how I love Jesus
Oh, how I love Jesus
Oh, how I love Jesus
Because he first loved me.

I was tagged in a meme last week, entitled “five reasons why I love Jesus.” And it brought something front and center that I haven’t really wanted to look at in the light of day.

I really don’t connect with Jesus.

I believe in God; I whisper to the Spirit or to the triune deity throughout the day; I know the importance of Christ’s sacrifice, and Holy Week is the center of the whole year (although this year, because we’re not involved in Triduum liturgies, I feel rather adrift and disconnected). But when people say “I love Jesus,” my insides tense up. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to fundamentalism, the way fundamentalists probably react when Catholics talk about the Eucharist. I know I’m supposed to love Jesus and connect with him as an individual, one like me; that was the purpose of God made man, after all. But I never have been able to do it.

This has never bothered me. Until recently.

Last week, when I was driving home from the writing conference, I listened to a CD of a religious talk my grandmother had sent with me. In the course of listening to these four women speak about their love for Jesus, for Mary, I recognized something lacking in myself. For the first time, I began to long to feel that connection.

I think my problem is that the Jesus of the Bible is underdeveloped as a character. He says a lot of things, and they reveal him to be both charismatic and somebody that you probably longed to smack, because he was so contrary and difficult. What you don’t know is what he felt, how his psyche changed over the course of the years. With a person, you can get some of that from body language. In a book, you have to get it from the writing. And it’s just not there.

I can only extrapolate about Jesus; I can only project myself on him. And that is a recipe for trouble, in my not-so-humble opinion. That’s where people start making God over in their own image, and thinking they’re called to be hateful at military funerals.

There are characters in literature—let’s take the obvious bloggers’ example: Elizabeth Bennet. Everybody identifies with her. Everybody feels like they’d recognize her if she entered the room. In other words, we know her. But how do you get to know somebody who picks fights with people, confuses his friends, refuses to answer their questions straight, and you never, ever, EVER see what he’s thinking?

What am I missing? I try to love Jesus in the people around me, by caring for the least of these in whatever way I can. Is that, really, all it boils down to? Or do others who talk about how they love Jesus have some spiritual direct line to Heaven that I’m missing? And if so, how do I hook into it?

Do you go through stages where you keep talking about the same topic again and again, wrestling with it until you finally resolve it? For me, lately, that topic has been how to teach sexuality to my children. There’s such a tightrope to walk between doing too little and too much. Talk about it too little (or too late), and kids will learn all their attitudes from peers, movies, TV and ads. That’s disastrous, considering the way modern culture has both trivialized sex and labeled it as indispensable to life and happiness. But hit it too hard, and kids are likely to develop an unhealthy attitude equating sexuality with sin.

My oldest is five years old. I’m very far from an expert. But this I do believe……

I’m posting today over at Catholic Mothers Online, and it’s definitely more ”Catholic” than what I usually write. But Catholic or not, I think most parents worry a lot about this subject. Come on over and chime in!

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It is sometimes suggested that what I describe crosses into irreverence. It is called banal, feel-good, happy-clappy, and so on. People I deeply respect in all other areas use the word “beauty” to mean “high church,” unable (or refusing) to acknowledge that beauty crosses aesthetic lines, finding itself equally at home amid chant, praise bands, contemporary ensembles, solo cantors and classically-trained choirs.

Only in the constant frustration of trying to moderate the online rhetoric do I finally realize how blessed I was to grow up in a small, rural parish where there was little pretension and a great openness to all forms of beauty in music (even though, being a small parish, we were incredibly limited in what we could do). It wasn’t until much later that I realized how strongly so many people equate God with solemn, humorless sternness. I’ve never understood it. Why must reverence equal silence, holiness equal formality? Why do we shush children, try to make them behave (defined as sitting still and being silent, things utterly not in their nature, things which cause them to yell “church is boring” and help them not at all along the road toward understanding what’s going on and becoming active in participation)—why, when Jesus very clearly said “Let the little children come to me” and “whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it”? Why do we use worship as another venue to drive wedges between people, to separate them into groups that can be labeled “Us” and “Them”?

Don’t get me wrong. You know how I crave silence, how I find God in it. I think the lack of silence in modern life is a real problem, one that people are reluctant to address. And certainly I’m not suggesting that we should abandon the pomp and grandeur of high church. I know, without a doubt, that the ideal held up by the aforementioned people has real power to lift the heart to God, when it’s well done. But so do other forms. Look around the world. God created kangaroos and slugs, mountains and valleys and deserts and oceans, skin in black and white and all variations in between, and inspired people in all of them to create unique forms of beauty. How can we claim that there is only one way to worship the God who created such diversity? When any of us try to set up our own personal preferences (whatever form they take) as the only way or even the best way, we put God in a box.

Well, thank God He won’t stay in that box, that’s all I have to say.

What I experienced in that dream would be hard to achieve this side of Heaven. But it reminds me yet again that the human race, in all its diversity of custom and culture, truly is good.

Today I am grateful for all the things that support the song of the people of God:

hand drums and drumsets

electric guitars and keyboards

pipe organs and glorious trained choirs

chants and Renaissance polyphony (okay, so that last doesn’t support assembly song, but it can still lift our souls)

Handel and Haugen

Pope Gregory and Rich Mullins

for the inSpiration that touches all artists, whether they choose to make good use of it or not

for the constant renewal of the Church in the gifts of its members

for the constant tension between embracing what is good from contemporary culture and holding on to truth—however imperfectly the balance is held

for online arguments that remind me never to take for granted the blessings I’ve been given

Counting to a thousand with the Gratitude Community at A Holy Experience