I know, probably most of you are sending die, evil woman, die! looks at your computer screen right now. I’m ahead of the game, but I have a good reason. I think Lent is the great misunderstood season, and it is possible to approach it with joy–as perhaps you can tell from the image to the right. Today I’d like to share a short excerpt from my new book, Bring Lent to Life, and…I’m hosting my very first giveaway! So let me begin by asking: have you thought about “what you want to give up for Lent”? Read on!

The problem with simply giving something up is what I call the Mardi Gras syndrome: You’re sacrificing sweets for Lent, so the day before Ash Wednesday you have four bowls of ice cream. (There’s a reason it’s called “fat Tuesday.”) And on Easter Sunday you celebrate the end of the fast with two chocolate bunnies, a couple dozen handfuls of jelly beans, three slices of pie, and a cinnamon roll.

Kind of misses the point of the fast, don’t you think?

Fasting should change us in some way–move us to a place of greater holiness. It shouldn’t be something we do to torment ourselves for a while, only to revert to our former selves when it’s all over.

I believe it’s time to think beyond the ordinary Lenten penance. Why not give up a  specific sin instead?  In many ways, sin is a habit, a pattern of behavior. Selfishness, irritability, unkind words, gossip, gluttony–each of us struggles with the same sins again and again. Instead of choosing a specific item to forgo, why not choose one sin particularly troublesome to you and spend Lent focused on breaking its power over you?

This can be a great exercise for kids too, although they may need help, and that help must be given carefully. It’s important that we, the parents, not tell children what sins we think they need to address. True conversion happens from the inside out; it cannot be imposed by authority, however loving.

Penance, when heartfelt, is frequently a very private action and very difficult for people to share, even with those closest to them. Respect this. If a child is unwilling to share what he or she is giving up, that’s OK. As a parent, it’s tempting to feel that we must know everything our children are up to. But it’s also possible that a child (especially in the teen years) may want to be free of a habitual sin but is too afraid to admit it to his or her parents for fear of punishment. If your children are sincere enough to choose to work on something for Lent, rejoice, and allow them the freedom to make good choices of their own volition.

(Excerpted from Bring Lent to Life, with permission of Liguori Publications. Click here for more excerpts.)

Okay, folks, it’s time for a book giveaway! If you like what you see, leave a comment here between now and Feb. 5th and be entered to win a signed copy of Bring Lent to Life!

For extra entries, help me spread the word! Mention Bring Lent to Life on Twitter or Facebook (and mention me so I know about it!–Facebook: Kathleen M. Basi, Twitter: @kathleenmbasi). Better yet, refer people to this post. For each one you’ll get an additional entry. For every day you tweet or FB it, you get additional entries. On Feb. 6th my lovely little ones and I will do an old-fashioned, low-tech drawing and announce a winner.

Any questions? If not–go!

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.

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.

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…

Photo by jameschew, via Flickr

Anne Rice once wrote that Christians are either Christmas Christians or Easter Christians. In other words, they find their faith centered around Incarnation and gift, or around suffering and redemption.

But I realized something on Christmas Eve, in between the annual welling of tears during Adeste Fidelis and nursing a baby in the sacristy throughout the Liturgy of the Word. She’s not entirely right; she missed a category. I am an ordinary time Christian.

I love both Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter. These central events of Christianity are packed with profound beauty and insight. I know the themes and connection points backward and forward. I tear up whenever I write about them, awestruck by the beauty of what I’m putting into words. But the reality is that on the days themselves, I hardly ever feel the profundity and the awe.

The high feast days can’t hold the weight of the expectations placed upon them. They’re supposed to be idyllic family times, lots of anticipation and the thrill of gifts (at Christmas) and egg hunts and candy (at Easter). On top of that, they’re supposed to move us to renewal of spiritual commitment.

But no one day can do all that–at least, not for me. Maybe occasionally, maybe by chance, maybe for a moment. Perhaps this is because I’m a choir director, and my job on those occasions is to be on top of the minutiae: making sure everyone starts and stays together, making sure the sound is properly balanced and adjusting microphone placement and levels if it isn’t, communicating corrections to members, making sure we lengthen or curtail the music to fit the ritual at hand. If I was sitting in a pew, or even following someone else’s lead, I wouldn’t have so much of my mind occupied by busy work, and perhaps I’d be a bit more present to the moment.

For me, faith and renewal belong to prosaic times. Faith ignites and inspires when glimpses of the divine pop up within the boring routine of daily life–sometimes in a church building, but more often outside it, when what I hear on Sundays and high feasts illuminates my humdrum everyday. My “yay God” moments come on ordinary days, during ordinary tasks involving ordinary externals. Spiritual insight flames most clearly when the profound truths we celebrate on Christmas and Easter come together to show me something about an unremarkable Tuesday morning, something I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

And it occurs to me that this is “right and just,” to quote the new translation. Because we don’t live in the high seasons–we live in an ordinary world, and if faith is to have any chance of changing us, and through us, the world, it has to live there too. It has to surround our ordinary moments, whisper holiness into them, fill them up with purpose and meaning. More importantly, it has to direct our actions and thoughts–not just on Sunday, but every day. It has to become who we are, inseparable from what we think and do.

I am an Ordinary Time Christian. No longer will I feel inadequate or deprived when the high feasts don’t live up to the spiritual expectations placed upon them. Because God is everywhere at all times, and I will seek him where he is to be found.

Shared with Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday at Michellederusha.com

Image via Wikipedia

We sat in the front pew at church yesterday, our first Sunday to attend Mass as a family of six. It had been a long night; Michael decided to nurse every two hours, which meant for every just-over-an-hour I slept, I was up for half an hour. I was kind of a zombie. And in my groggy state, one word jumped out at me.

Stillness.

It’s a word that seems to go with Advent: For you, O Lord, my soul in stillness waits. It’s something that so many of us aspire to, strive for, the chance to be “quiet alert” in the presence of God. To set aside the noisy bombardment that overstimulates our brains and deadens the soul, and simply be: be aware of the connection to an invisible dimension, be open to a voice that speaks in the quiet.

And I realized how rarely I attain stillness.

When it comes, it sneaks up on me, a breathless, fleeting moment that I’m usually ill-equipped to appreciate. Last Saturday night when my parents, Michael and I arrived home from the hospital, the house was quiet, its other occupants off at a concert. I caught my breath. “It’s so quiet,” I said. I’ve never thought of my house as quiet, but after living in the hum of a hospital for ten days–fluorescent buzzing, air systems rumbling, monitors beeping, voices everywhere at all times of the day and night–my living room felt like a tabernacle of restful repose. But I didn’t stop to enjoy it. There was too much clutter to be filed and organized, and a family to prepare for.

This, I suppose, is why I crave the solitude of nature, far from the noise of traffic and the sight of manmade things. Stillness equals rest. It reorganizes the mind, untangles the pathways, allows us to see more clearly and approach life with serenity.

But I don’t think we find stillness very often. And I don’t mean physical stillness, although that’s probably true, too. I mean stillness of the soul. I think we all seek it, but don’t find it very often. We can blame modern life–ipods and a sound byte culture, too many technological toys, too many social networks–but you might as well rail against the sun rising; barring an apocalypse, all that stuff is here to stay.

Life in a religious order often sounds very appealing to me: the rhythm of morning and evening prayer, the focus on contemplation and the search for God, the lack of little commitments yelling “Mommy do this” and “Can I have” that. But I imagine it’s a grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-of-the-fence kind of thing, and motherhood is my vocation in any case. I’m beginning to see that the divine call for all of us is to seek what we may never, or at least rarely, attain.

And maybe, after all, it’s the seeking that’s most important.

I loved this hallway, with its lower-plum and upper-pastel-spangle decor.

I hate this hallway now. I’ve never stayed on it so long. I’ve stayed on it so long this time that I can walk out of the hospital on my own two feet instead of bumping along in a wheelchair to a waiting car. So long that my incision doesn’t even really hurt anymore, unless I try to do too much for too long. So long that I’ve had to go exploring to find where the cafeteria is. So long that two days of sixty degrees have given way to St. Nicholas Day snow. So long that I’ve missed a piano recital and picking the Christmas tree. So long that I’m about out of clothes, and contemplating washing socks and underwear in the sink using, um, shampoo? Bath soap?

And not once have those rat-a-tatting carts bumped over my threshold. They just rattle right on by.

This is not how I would have chosen to end my days in this hospital that has witnessed the birth of all four of my children. But it’s good, in a way, because every irritant, every setback, every nurse- or doctor-conflict, every “I’m so sick of looking at this stupid hallway” that crosses my mind, erases the shimmer of false nostalgia. And heaps upon the mountain of God messages telling me it’s time to stop bearing children and focus on raising them. I still feel guilt over that, like it’s somehow sinful. But it’s not God’s opinion that worries me on this account…it’s other people’s. I’m pretty sure God’s being as clear as He can be without taking out a personal billboard on the interstate on my behalf.

The thing I’ve always loved most about this hospital, and still do, is the overt religious component. People all over the e-verse have been promising me prayers ever since the drama began, but it was last night, when I got ready to leave the NICU and go to bed, when Michael’s nurse bent down and said, “Let’s pray over him,” that I really felt the prayers for the first time. She traced the cross on his forehead and whispered a prayer for healthy lungs, and then together we traced crosses over his chest. And I knew somehow at that moment that in the morning he’d be better.

And he was.

The sign in every room says “fear not, for I am with you.” I love to preach at people about hard times, and how they’re good for the soul, how much soul-stretching helps you grow. I consider myself an expert in this after all the various dramas and traumas of infertility, anxiety, RSV, open heart surgery, pneumonia…our family has known more hospitals than most. But for days, I’ve resisted the words “thy will be done.” “Fear not.” How can I not fear? How can I say “thy will” when I am absolutely NOT okay with “thy will” that is contrary to “my will”?

Tonight, as the city darkens from gloom to murk outside my window, for the first time I see the glimmer of promise at the end of this particular trial. And the fact that I can gripe about being bored and irritable, instead of falling to pieces and weeping, is one of the best signs there is.

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?

(Mt. 25)

“Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.”

(Lk. 12:48)

Not long ago, I came across a blog post that asked, “How big is your plate?” She was reflecting on busyness and how we prioritize our commitments. How to set limits, to say enough is enough, I can’t do any more. I thought of my mother telling me, “You can do many ministries consecutively, but not necessarily concurrently.”

Among people of faith, there’s a strong predisposition to encourage women to focus on the vocation, or ministry, of motherhood, and to lay the rest of it aside until that commitment is largely fulfilled. But as I was pondering last week, if we’re given gifts—talents (how interesting it is that the word should be translated that way!)—are we not meant to use them all? And if we simply ignore them for a couple of decades, aren’t we, in effect, burying them?

That is the question each one of us faces. Where do we draw the line between giving back/paying forward the gifts we have been given, and thinking the world can’t possibly get by without our particular charism? One is stewardship; the other is pride. And it’s really easy to stray across the line.

A few years ago I probably would have built a big soapbox and tried to tell the world how to tell the difference. But like another blog friend, the more I learn about God, the less certain I am of anything except that absolute certainty is more likely to be a harbinger of pride than stewardship. I can’t claim to know where anyone else’s line is drawn. I can only do my utmost to stay on the right side of it in my own life…and to correct course when it becomes clear I’ve wandered into the path of oncoming traffic.