Thoughts for Good Friday

Three quick thoughts for Good Friday:

1. I don’t think I can legally use the image, so please click here. I hate fasting days. But if this picture doesn’t sock you in the stomach and make you rethink your entire life, I don’t know what will.

2. Our deacon gave a short homily with a powerful punch on our April-Fools-Day Palm Sunday that encapsulated everything today is about. It closed with these words:

Today, in this 21st century ‘world of ironies’, where:
Death is called ‘Choice’ and
Vengeance called ‘Justice,’ where
Love comes on a contract with an “escape clause,” and
everyone’s glued to their phones, yet, no-one is listening . . .

We just, might-again, ask ourselves,
“Who is the fool?” and
“Along with Jesus, where do I stand?”

Read the whole thing here.

3. I noticed things in the Passion this week that never quite registered before. Like this:

They gave him wine drugged with myrrh, but he did not take it.

Drugged…presumably in an attempt to be more humane about his death sentence. But Jesus didn’t take it. He chose to feel every bit of his Passion.

I offer the discomfort of this fast day, small as it is, for a beautiful soul in my husband’s family who went home to God yesterday. May He grant her speedy entry into His presence, and wrap her family in comfort.

Published in: on April 6, 2012 at 6:00 am  Comments (5)  
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Jonah, Marines, and prenatal diagnosis

Jonah Cast Forth By The Whale, by Gustave Doré.

Image via Wikipedia

Jonah had a really bad attitude. God gave him a job he didn’t want to do– the people of Nineveh weren’t worth his trouble–so he took off in the opposite direction, only to find himself stuck in the belly of a fish. When he proved indigestible (how lucky for him he was spit out near shore!), he did as he was told…but he did it with bad grace. The people of Nineveh repented, and God spared them.

Jonah should have been ecstatic. Who gets that kind of chance to change the world? Instead, he pouted because he thought God had made him look stupid. So he went into the desert to die. When his shade tree died, he threw a little hissy fit, and God said, “How can you get so upset over the death of this little plant, and simultaneously be completely insensitive to the deaths of the people of an entire city?”

This is the story our associate pastor told in the homily yesterday. It reminded me of a column from our diocesan newspaper this week, addressing the story about the Marines who urinated on the bodies of dead Taliban members. I won’t share it all because I don’t have permission, but this part really stopped me in my tracks:

“The irony is so great that we don’t get it. A sterile liquid produced by the kidney and streamed onto a cadaver is morally debated, but the hail of bullets that penetrated those bodies, making inanimate what was only minutes before a breathing, sentient being, does not enter the discourse. War gets reduced to an etiquette that shows more respect for the dead than the living.”

Christian and I spent Saturday morning at a training session to learn how to talk to parents receiving a diagnosis of Down syndrome–part of our local effort to start a hospital visitation program. Right now, the presenter told us, most people are being “surprised in the delivery room.” But very soon the paradigm will shift to almost exclusively prenatal diagnoses, because of the new tests. She reiterated that the Down Syndrome Guild is “pro-information,” not “pro-life,” a position I have always thought was untenable–how can you advocate for people without taking a stand that they are inherently worth taking a stand for?

But as the morning progressed, I began to see the wisdom, or at least the necessity, of such a position. If we come out all guns blazing, laying down a blanket “law” via a prolife message, we will never get the opportunity to witness at all; people will never let us near them, because they will know that we are more about our soapbox than we are about helping them. The fact is that abortion is an option, whether we like it or not. If we hope to be credible witnesses, we have to acknowledge that, and say “Look, we know what you’ve heard about Down’s is scary. Here’s the part the doctors can’t tell you”–without trying to “guilt” people into proper behavior at a time when they’re wounded and bewildered. If we can’t do that, then we can’t be trusted to have a family’s best interest at heart, and we have no right to be doing this work at all.

Sometimes we get so focused on the unborn child that we forget the wounded parents before us. And that’s why I bring it up in connection with Jonah and the dead Taliban. We must respect the dignity of every person–even when they are considering an action we find morally reprehensible–even when the dignity of another life is at stake. The risk to the baby’s life does not negate our responsibility to respect the parent as well.

I don’t have my thoughts all in order on this topic yet; I can’t help feeling there are holes in my logic that I haven’t yet identified. So I’ll be interested to see your thoughts.

Published in: on January 23, 2012 at 6:47 am  Comments (8)  
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Life, Death, Life

On December 30th, we got a phone call early in the morning: a new arrival in the family, a gorgeous little boy, very nearly a mirror image of our own little guy. Two cousins, a month apart, destined to be mistaken for each other their whole lives.

Twelve hours later, a friend passed away.

Sharyn was one of those people who breathes calm into the world. You don’t ever know how they do it, you just know that serenity surrounds them. Grace. You come into their presence feeling crazed, sure that the world is precariously balanced on your shoulders, and something about the way they look at you, listen to you, interrupts the stream of freak-out-ness (yes, I’m making up words. Deal with it.) and injects a quiet into your soul that wasn’t there a few minutes before.

This is a trait I’ve witnessed in a few people of faith, and nowhere else. And every time I see it, I think, Someday I want to grow up and be like her.

There are people in your life who are simply there, as inevitable as the sunrise, taken utterly for granted. You may not see them often, but when you do, you pick up right where you left off. Sharyn was like that for me. She was one of the core members of the choir that brought Christian and I together; she sang the day we got engaged, and she sang the day we got married. After we left Newman, we saw her at the music store whenever we went in for church or studio business. A world without her seems inconceivable, and yet I haven’t wept for her, because a person so kind surely has to be fast-tracked into the presence of God.

We celebrated Sharyn’s funeral on Saturday. Three, four hundred people, gathered beneath lit garlands and beautiful red-foliage swags and hanging lanterns. I sang with a choir patchworked together from several “generations” of Newman choirs. Christian and the kids came in time for Mass. They kept waving at me with smiles so sweet that I couldn’t help smiling back, thanking God for the bounty of the blessings in my life, which this occasion so clearly spotlit.

Michael spent Mass sleeping in a friend’s arms, except when he and I retreated to a barricade behind the organ to nurse. He didn’t care for this venue, and into the post-Communion silence he let loose a howl of outrage that echoed around the church. I felt quite self-conscious until I thought how Sharyn would have smiled at that sound. She would have loved the juxtaposition of new life upon the passing of her own. And although the knowledge that she’s left us causes a pang, and for her family leaves a hole that can never be filled, in some ways I think this was her last, best gift to us: to start the new year with such a beautiful reminder that life is, indeed, eternal.

Published in: on January 9, 2012 at 7:45 am  Comments (10)  
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I can’t be glad

I had another post mostly written, all about royalty and riches, but when I came downstairs this morning, the headline on the TV was gleaming, “THE KILLING OF BIN LADEN,” and I realized…it can wait till tomorrow.

“Apparently they announced it at 10:30 last night,” Christian said.

I wandered over to the TV and watched for a minute. Christian went outside and picked up a paper, old-fashioned in the totality with which the front page focused on an enormous image of his face, the headline sixty-point: BIN LADEN DEAD!

There are probably many people rejoicing this morning, but I can’t. Glad that he’s no longer able to lead…yes. Glad that the head of al Qaeda is no longer head of al Qaeda…yes. But glad he’s dead? No.

When they executed Saddam Hussein, I couldn’t be glad about that, either.

I can find nothing but sadness in this situation. I know we live in a broken world, but it’s heartbreaking to realize that it’s so broken that faith can be twisted until a person believes he (or she) is justified, called even, to kill others. It’s heartbreaking to realize that the world is so broken that execution is the only (truly or perceived) viable option for dealing with a person such as bin Laden.

Is execution justified? Can it be justified? I don’t know. Is war ever justified? How would the world have been worse if the Allies hadn’t banded together against Hitler? What does God really think about these things?

I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t be happy that someone is dead by someone else’s hand.

Not even Osama bin Laden.

Published in: on May 2, 2011 at 6:35 am  Comments (15)  
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Reflections following a life-threatening illness

I’ve said before that one of the goals of my writing is to offer encouragement to families receiving a diagnosis of Down syndrome. When you’re new to the world of Trisomy 21, there’s so much to absorb, and unfortunately it’s virtually all negative. It’s not a conspiracy—it’s just the nature of medicine. They study the pathology of things; anything to the contrary is subjective and emotional. In other words, human.

 It’s the human face that I want to put on the experience of parenting a child with Down syndrome, in order to counterbalance the overwhelmingly scary information that is all you get when you get the DS diagnosis. I try to focus on the laughter, the warm fuzzies, the beauty of life with DS.

 So how do I reconcile optimism with the need to be honest?

Because let’s be honest, without modern medicine…breathing tubes, feeding tubes, a slew of pharmaceuticals, and exceptional doctors and nurses…Julianna would be dead now. Twice. And she’s only two.

 It’s not something you want to think about when you’re standing at the ER admission desk. The woman behind the desk takes one look at your daughter and leaps to her feet. “Give her to me,” she says. “I’ll take her back while we do paperwork.” She’s hardly panicking, so it’s not till later that you realize what her haste means. About the time the EMT comes out wearing a grave expression and says, “Mom, come back with me.”

Suddenly all the choices I made that day flash before my eyes. Errand running. Sitting out on the swing, hoping that if I ignore her horrific crying, she’ll go on and go to sleep and get some rest. Nursing Nicholas on one side before going to the ER. The time wasted getting Alex dressed before we could go.

 Having a child with special needs is stressful at times. For some parents and situations, it’s probably most times. But the experience changes you—for the better. Parenting the special needs child is a purifying fire, to be sure, and walking through fire is never enjoyable. But love is not limited to the whole and the “perfect,” and those who begin life whole and perfect may not remain that way, as J.K. Rowling observed.

 Of course, philosophical reflection is small comfort when you’re spending two weeks in the hospital for something that other kids could kick in five days. These last two weeks, I have come to understand why kids with Downs didn’t live long in generations past. By early Tuesday morning, the simple act of breathing was draining Julianna’s body. Without the vent, she would have exhausted every scrap of energy she had left, and then she would have died.

 So, joy and love, tempered by realism, is the message of the day. The thing is, every child causes you pain and anguish and frustration and hair-pulling moments. Every child also causes you unparalleled, heart-catching wonder and joy, moments of tremendous beauty and thankfulness. It’s just that some children cause frustration by biting or throwing tantrums, and others do it by getting sick and landing in the hospital for two weeks. My point is that a child with Downs (or any other special need) is more like her typically-developing siblings than she is different. The challenges are there, but if you focus on the black clouds, you’ll miss the rainbow superimposed upon them.

A reminder I need today, in the midst of post-hospital backlash and an infant who finally succumbed to the germs floating around, and got sick.

 Sigh.

Published in: on May 18, 2009 at 5:22 am  Comments (1)  
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Heaven

What is your concept of Heaven?

 

Mine is very simple, and, well…selfish. I’ve had bad eyes since the second grade. I dream of opening my eyes in the morning and being able to see…without glasses or contacts. I’m too chicken to go for Lasik…and anyway, my eyes are so bad I’m not sure I’d qualify. So when I imagine Heaven, that’s my first thought: sight.

 

When someone passes away after a long illness, we tend to think in terms of what is no longer “wrong” with them: “She’s no longer in pain. He can walk now. He is finally able to live the way God created him.” We know we’ll get our bodies back at the end of time, but in a “glorified” state. We tend to assume that that means everything that was wrong with us on Earth will suddenly be fixed.

 

But a few weeks ago, I heard something that made me stop and think. Fr. Richard Hogan, who does the video clip on theology for our NFP classes, said something along these lines: When we get to Heaven, we’ll be able to put our fingers in the holes in Christ’s hands and feet and side.

 

That one simple statement opened up a whole new line of thinking for me. When Christ appeared on Earth after the Resurrection, he wasn’t suddenly “whole” again. He retained the wounds of his Passion. So the marks of our human journey stay with us through eternity. And after all, it only makes sense. Our bodies are the way in which we experience God, come to know God, come to follow God. How could we take away that which we have been, that which we have experienced, and still be the same person?

 

Anyone who reads this blog for a week knows how passionate I am in asserting that there is nothing “wrong” with my daughter. Down syndrome is simply part of the fabric of how God created her, and God doesn’t make mistakes. It’s our perception that distorts something out of the norm into something “wrong.” Shortly after Julianna was born, Christian and I received a note stating that “there is no Down syndrome in Heaven.” I started spitting nails. (I’m very good at outrage. J) There will be Down syndrome in Heaven, and MD, and cerebral palsy, and ADD and ADHD and autism. Those conditions are an integral part of the people who have them. If you take my daughter’s DS away, she wouldn’t be “Julianna the way God intended.” She’d be somebody else.

 

But if those conditions will stay with us into Heaven, then doesn’t it follow that all the other “marks” of our human journey will stay with us, too? Missing limbs, skin cancers… bad eyes?

 

I’m no theologian. If by some chance someone reads this who can offer a more informed perspective, please chime in! These are just my own reflections, which I share as food for thought.

Published in: on February 26, 2009 at 11:07 am  Comments (7)  

A Farewell to Gene

 

A plain, cedar box. Unfinished, without attempt to ease the transition from faintly glowing mauve to blond. No sculpted lid, no shining metal handles. A box with a few ropes attached for carrying, a box just deep enough to hold a body, and not an inch more.

 

Today we said farewell to Gene Speichinger. Last night’s vigil was supposed to begin with a rosary at 4:30 and end with a prayer service at 6 p.m. But so many people came to pay their respects to his family that the center aisle was still full at 6:15, when the funeral director finally asked everyone to take their seats. The carefully-laid plans for the evening morphed into something much less structured and far more beautiful. This morning, at the Mass of Resurrection, the crowd was around 650. Afterward, every table in the parish hall was set up for the luncheon, plus a couple dozen tables I’d never seen before—on the stage, in the low addition on the west side, behind the dessert tables, tucked into corners, in front of the outside doors.

 

My first, very catchy, thought is: “If you have to go, this is the way to do it.” But Gene’s life, and his death, make it perfectly clear to me that those words express exactly the wrong attitude. Grief has nothing to do with the person departing, and everything to do with how we react to it. We’re all going to miss Gene, in varying ways and to varying degrees. But there is beauty in this process, too.

 

The last four days have been such an inspiration to me. I wrote a simple story on Thursday, which Christian forwarded to the Knights of Columbus, and for the next twenty-four hours we watched as the total hits on this blog skyrocketed into uncharted territory—by a factor of three. Not because of me, not because I’m a spectacular writer, but because of who this man was, and how many lives he touched. Deeply touched. As the process of leavetaking has unfolded, I’ve come to realize that of everyone who knew him, I knew him least. Our connection with him was so small—connection at a single point, Julianna—and the web of his influence spread so infinitely, not just away from us, but to a height and depth that I couldn’t have imagined.

 

When a man like that dies in his sleep, how can we feel anything but deep, profound gratitude on his behalf? We can’t. It’s us we’re grieving for. For what we’ve lost. Not for him.

 

This is the way death should be; this is what we should aspire to, what we should live our lives pointing toward. Yes, you read that right: we should live our lives focused on our death. To the multitudes who squirm at that idea, who think we shouldn’t talk about death with our kids, I say: It’s not morbid to try to live so that death becomes a beautiful thing. It’s morbid to make death into the enemy—to refuse to talk about it, to turn it into a spectre wearing a black cloak and carrying a scythe. You can stick your head in the sand, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re all going to die—you, me, our kids, our grandkids. We don’t get to choose the manner or the time of our death, but we can choose how we arrive there. Wouldn’t we all like to have 650 people at our funeral? Wouldn’t we all like to have made that kind of difference in the world?

 

Christian and I took the kids this morning. Bringing them seemed the only fitting tribute to this man, for what he gave to us. As always, Julianna, the point of connection, was far too young to have any idea what was going on. But Alex…well, his first funeral may well be the most beautiful one he ever attends—free from grief, able to see the celebration for what it truly is. A few years from now, he won’t have any idea who Gene was, and he probably won’t have any memory of the Mass. But he’s always going to connect funerals with scores of people, with the Knights’ honor guard, with the sound of an entire church lifting its collective voice in song. And if that’s how he begins to understand death, then he’s getting a big, big head start on the rest of us.

Published in: on January 26, 2009 at 2:28 pm  Leave a Comment  

Gene

One year and 354 days ago, Christian and I found out that our newborn daughter had Down syndrome.

 

It is news to make you reel. It was more than an hour before we caught our balance enough to start thinking who we needed to call. I’m not even sure we started with our parents. I think the first phone call was to our pastor, because we knew there were families in the parish whose children had DS, and he could tell us who they were. Msgr. must have gotten busy right away, because that was Friday morning, and on Monday when we arrived home from the hospital, there was a letter in our mailbox from Gene.

 

Gene was a hospitality minister at the parish, someone I knew by face and name and ministry, but nothing else. I didn’t know he had a grown daughter with Down’s, the 3rd child of four. I did not know, although I might have guessed if I’d ever thought about it, that he was one of those unprepossessing, soft-spoken people who stand in the background, emerging only to touch a person in their moment of greatest need, and make all the difference.

 

That was what Gene’s letter did for us. Multitudes had offered, “My (fill in the blank) has a (fill in the blank) with Downs, and I’m sure they’d be happy to talk, if you want to.” He just stepped in and did it.

 

Dear Kate and Christian,

 

Congratulations to you on the birth of your daughter. With loving parents as co-creators with God, she has to be beautiful. Because she is born with Downs Syndrome, you may cry a bit (I did when Meghan was born), but I can assure you that your tears will turn to joy. All you have to do is return the love to her that she gives to you.

…

Trust in God, your co-creator. He will take care of you. He assures us of that by telling us that “even the hairs of your head are numbered.” Believe in Divine Providence. As Pope John Paul II said, “In the realm of Divine Providence, nothing happens by chance.” I certainly found that to be true in my life. Everything turns out for the good, though at the moment of happening one may not see it that way. God has blessed you; He will continue to bless you—that is my prayer.

 

“She’ll be the love of your life,” he told us the next weekend at church—and over and over again during the last two years. Since Julianna came to us, Gene has become a weekly fixture in our Sunday mornings, seeking us out in the church, the gathering space or the parish hall. “How are you doing?” he would ask, his lined face crinkling into a smile infused with serenity and absolute certainty that we were all doing just fine. It was a totally different question than when anyone else in the world asked it, lacing it with deep solicitude and sympathy. Several times in those early months, I nearly broke down, just hearing his faith in me pouring through those words.

 

The next question was always, “How’s my girlfriend?” He would hold her, snuggle her, even in the early months when she cried if anyone but Mommy or Daddy touched her. He pronounced her name the Spanish way, with an “H” replacing the “J,” and he called Alex “Allejandro.” I never knew why…he was as Anglo as could be…just assumed he had some connection with the Hispanic ministry. Several times, we talked about having another child. “I’m so glad you want more children,” he said. “So many people are afraid, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

 

Frankly, we were afraid, but there was something so peaceful in the way he spoke that I felt my tension ease. I asked how old Meghan was when her younger sister was born. “Twelve months,” he said, and when my jaw dropped, his face crinkled again. “So you two better get busy!”

 

Over time I began to seek him out instead of waiting for him to find us. It was as if he and our family became gifts to each other—gifts that stayed with us throughout the week in between those encounters. We never took time to get together outside of church, but we spoke of him often between ourselves.

 

This past Sunday, choir warmup ran late, and we had a prelude and a piece to re-teach to the assembly before Mass began; Sunday school was not open, and so Alex, Julianna and I ran back and forth several times trying to find out what was going on. My third trimester hips were buckling beneath me, my lower back spasming, and although I think I saw Gene in passing, I didn’t have time or energy to stop and talk. It never occurred to me that I might be missing my last chance.

 

Gene passed on unexpectedly last night, and the world is a poorer place for it. But Heaven is richer. May God grant me the grace to pass on his legacy of love.

Published in: on January 22, 2009 at 4:41 pm  Comments (1)  
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