Who Needs What?

“Why are you here?” Monsignor asked us during his homily this morning…and then fell silent. I felt the ripple of discomfort ripple across the church, beginning in my chair. We’re used to hearing rhetorical questions from the pulpit, but somehow this one sounded like a real question.

He let us stew for a couple of seconds, like the disciples in the Gospel who Just Didn’t Get It, and then went on. “A lot of people don’t come to church because they say they don’t get anything out of it. But it’s not about you—it’s about God, and worshiping God.”

I’m sure everyone has heard the I-don’t-get-anything-out-of-it complaint, as well as the counter-argument: you get out of it what you put into it. Monsignor’s take is a little different—his point is that such arguments miss the point altogether. The point is God. Church is about God.

And yet the Sabbath is for people, and not the other way around. These two ideas seem to be at odds, but as I got to thinking about it, I realized that they actually aren’t.

Two nights ago at dinner, Alex was telling his daddy all about playing with his little neighbor friend. “Did you tell his mommy thank you before you left?” Christian asked.

Alex froze in the act of spearing a bite of chicken and threw him a puzzled look. “No.” Why would I do that?

“Well, you should,” Christian said. “You should always say thank you when you played at someone’s house.”

“Okay,” Alex said. “But I probably won’t remember.”

“Oh, but this is something that’s easy to remember, isn’t it?” Christian said.

I wanted to say that our neighbor doesn’t really care if he says thank you; adults generally don’t need thanks from children. It’s nice, but it doesn’t change anything. We’re so used to taking care of kids, we don’t expect gratitude. Of course I didn’t say this, because the point wasn’t that the neighbor needed Alex’s gratitude; the point was that Alex needed to be grateful.

One of the prefaces in the Roman liturgy says “You have no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself Your gift.” God doesn’t need our thanks—it doesn’t make him better or holier. We do it because it makes us holier.

So no—God doesn’t need us there on Sunday morning. But we need to be there, to re-center ourselves, to remind ourselves that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s a gift to us. At a minimum, the simple act of sitting butt in a pew forces us to set aside time for someone other than ourselves.

But imagine—just imagine what would happen if everyone came into church with the eagerness and the mental presence that we give to golf or scrapbooking. If we came expecting this to be the best hour of our week. I highly doubt that there would be boring liturgies. Not for long, anyway. People wouldn’t stand for it. They’d leap in and do something about it. What form that might take, I don’t know, but I am sure of one thing: it would change the world.

Published in: on September 20, 2009 at 2:01 pm  Comments (4)  
Tags: ,

God is in the middle

It’s tempting, because it’s so easy.

We live in a culture where everything is reduced to sound bytes. A writer has one sentence to hook a reader or listener; going “in-depth” on the nightly news takes two minutes; each movie shot lasts two seconds, tops.

In a sound byte, there is no time for detail, no room for nuance. Pollsters ask us to offer our opinions: Yes or no? Democrat or Republican? For or against health care reform? “It depends” is not one of the choices. We are forced, by lack of options, to pigeonhole ourselves, when reality is that our opinion lies in the middle, and that we probably never had the information to form a proper opinion at all. Yet the resulting numbers are broadcast as inconvertible truth, shaping the universe we live in.

Once, during a heated debate, a man I know raked some of us over the coals for sitting on the fence—for taking the easy way out, trying to play both sides. Someone much more eloquent than I pointed out that those who sit in the middle are the ones caught in the crossfire. Holding the middle ground hardly constitutes “taking the easy way out.”

I live my life in the middle of two groups of people. On the one hand, I am a teacher of Natural Family Planning, which plants me among deeply conservative Catholics. On the other, I am a liturgist and writer, whose ranks run the gamut of political philosophy, but who, as a group, tend to lean to the left. Many of the people I know on both ends of the spectrum, in both the secular and the sacred political spheres, come across angry, bitter, and blind to the inconsistencies in their convictions. I want to jump in and try to moderate the rhetoric. But I’m afraid of damaging relationships, and I’m also well aware of the limitations of my own understanding. So except among my closest friends, I keep most of my opinions to myself.

But how can I make the world a better place if I don’t say what is given to me to say? I firmly believe that God—and thus truth—is in the middle on almost every issue, both in politics and in the Church. (Almost.) Our world is painted in black and white—in “red” and “blue”— and maybe it is easier to give in. To choose a pigeonhole based on one issue, maybe two, and hitch a ride on the bandwagon. But God is not a Republican. And God is not a Democrat. I reject all attempts to classify the world—political, religious, or everyday—in either/or terms. I reclaim the middle ground. And beginning today, I’m going to take the risk, and say it out loud.

Published in: on September 17, 2009 at 1:54 pm  Comments (14)  
Tags: , , ,

Holy Week Reflections

The Lord GOD has given me
a well-trained tongue,
that I might know how to speak to the weary
a word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
he opens my ear that I may hear;
and I have not rebelled,
have not turned back.

- Is. 50

 

The most important week of the entire year has begun, a week beginning with heady acclamation, descending through humiliation and unimaginable death, and ending in glorious triumph. It is my favorite week of the year, although this year I feel kind of, well, distracted. (Imagine that.)

 

I thought Holy Week would be a good time to reflect on Jesus the man. Chances are, the TV stations will be showing various epic productions of the Passion this week. I’ve never really enjoyed those movies, because Jesus always acts so unrealistic. I think that in our desire to be reverent, Christians often forget that Jesus was fully human as well as fully God. I think if Jesus had acted like he acts in these movies, nobody would have paid the slightest attention to him.

 

Think about the people who capture hearts and imaginations these days. People like Barack Obama. Whether or not you like and approve of him, he is clearly an inspirational force. The world may be different now than it was two thousand years ago, but human nature is the same. People respond to fire, to passion, to humor and warmth. They would not have come in droves, from distances so great that they ran out of food, for anything less. I’ll bet when Jesus told parables, he was darned funny. I’ll bet he took people from rolling in the aisles to breathless poignancy in the space of a heartbeat. I’ll bet people left his presence with tears crusted in the corners of their eyes, from laughter and painful self-recognition, from joy and inspiration.

 

On Palm Sunday, as I listened to the Passion through the walls of the sacristy, where I was nursing, a verse from Mark’s Gospel leaped out at me—a verse I’ve never caught before, despite hearing it many times:

 

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

 

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

 

Is it possible that the Romans, the quintessential villains, were actually trying to show mercy to the condemned? Were they trying to dull the pain of crucifixion, the way that lethal injection is supposed to offer the modern condemned a painless death?

 

And if so, what does Jesus’ refusal mean?


It means that he accepted, and embraced, the full measure of pain. If he was going to be the sacrificial Lamb, he was going to do it without crutches. He was going to drink deep of agony, spare himself nothing…and in so doing, spare us everything. This must be at least a part of what Paul meant when he said that Christ “emptied himself.”

 

This is the man—the God—whose human journey, with its divine ending, we remember this week.

 

Happy Holy Week.

Published in: on April 7, 2009 at 7:40 am  Comments (3)  
Tags:

Teachable moments

“Mommy,” said Alex at lunchtime, “strawberries are red, just like blood.”

 

Wow, I thought. Never thought I’d hear that one! “Yes, Alex, they are.”

 

“Blood is pretty. But I don’t like ouchies.”

 

How could I not laugh at that? “Me, either, Alex. Me either.” Then, remembering his temper tantrums and flying feet, I had an inspiration. “Hey, Alex, remember how Julianna went to the doctor and got a big boo-boo, and we had to be really gentle with her for a while?” (Julianna had open-heart surgery at almost six months old.)

 

“Yeah,” Alex said around a mouthful of grapes.

 

“You know, when the baby comes, I’m going to have a really big boo-boo, too, just like Julianna did. Right here.” I showed him. “That’s how the baby’s gonna come out.”

 

“That’s how the baby comes out?”

 

“Yes.” Then I thought, oh, man, my kid is going to grow up thinking a C-section is the normal way to have a kid! “Most babies don’t come out like that,” I said, “but you had to, because you were so big, you couldn’t come out the way most babies do.”

 

Thankfully, he was too distracted by the reference to his own birth to ask how most babies come out! He chewed thoughtfully on a chicken nugget for a minute. Then, “Mommy,” he said, “when you get your boo boo and the baby comes out, can you give me a horseyback ride?”

 

Fast-forward to that evening, when we were all driving to choir practice. “Daddy,” Alex said, “I want to tell you something. When Mommy has the baby and has a big boo boo, she can’t give me a horseyback ride, because if she does her boo boo will break open and there will be blood everywhere!”

 

I started laughing so hard I cried. Christian frowned sideways from the driver’s seat. “That’s a pretty good description,” he said. “What’re you laughing at?”

 

“I’m laughing,” I said, “because that’s word for word what I told him!”

 

After I related the rest of the conversation, with its “where do babies come from?” overtones, Christian shook his head. “I don’t even know why you get into these things with him,” he sighed.

 

The answer is that I don’t want sex ed to be a conversation held behind closed doors, as if it’s something shameful or embarrassing or essentially unclean. A topic to be dealt with once, and then, with relief, avoided, trusting in fear to keep their behavior in line.

 

I got “the talk” in grade school, when one of my classmates asked me a question I didn’t understand. Mom took me in my bedroom, closed the door, and started drawing diagrams that served only to embarrass me—so much so that I blocked it all out, and had to have the talk again when I actually reached the proper age. And it wasn’t until Christian and I learned Natural Family Planning that I understood why and how my body did what it did. By that time, sex had so many layers of baggage built up around it that it took me six years of marriage and some counseling to dig back down to the initial truth, which is this:

 

Sex is holy. It is part of who we are as human beings, one that we can use in a holy or an unholy way—just as we can use the gift of language to build up or to tear down. It shouldn’t be cordoned off, relegated to a place behind closed doors where even God is told to butt out.

 

I want better than that for my children. I want them to grow up with and into a healthy understanding of sex—which does not mean that I want them to “experiment” or “explore” or whatever other words the basic sex ed courses use as euphemisms for completely inappropriate use of sex. What it does mean is that I want them to understand the underlying beauty of the gift, which I hope will then lead to respect for themselves and their peers, and to an appropriate use of the gift.

 

So I look for teachable moments, where I can incorporate concepts at an age-appropriate level. The first time it happened, I was trying to explain to Alex, then just barely 3, that there was a tiny baby we couldn’t see inside my tummy. He said, “How did it get there?”

 

“Wellllllllllllll….” I said, as my brain screamed, Oh, crap! And then it came to me in a flash. “Mommies and daddies have a special hug they can give each other,” I said. “And sometimes, when they give each other that special hug, God puts a baby in the mommy’s tummy.”

 

Only time will tell if this approach fulfills my hopes. Parenting is not a science, exact or otherwise. J But there’s a story I’d like to share that illustrates the varying ways we can view the human body. Two priests were walking down the street one day when a prostitute passed by them. One averted his gaze, knowing he couldn’t look at her without impure thoughts; the other met her eyes and wept for sorrow at the way she was hurting herself.

 

Both responses are appropriate, depending on the mindset of the person in question. Me? I’d be in category #1. But I would love to see my children living in category #2.

Published in: on March 6, 2009 at 6:24 pm  Comments (3)  

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 (5)  

Bedtime Theology

Alex was tucked into bed. We were finished with prayers—including those for his friends and all the babies, born and unborn, that we’re waiting for. I had turned on the night light and started the CD, and I was closing the door when Alex said, “Mommy?”

 

I paused. “Yes, honey?”

 

Silence. He was looking for a reason to keep me there. I leaned on the doorframe and waited.

 

“Mommy, why does God make bad people?”

 

Whoa.

 

I re-entered the room and sat on the bed beside him, feeling very much like a mother, and not like Kate-faking-it. “Well, honey,” I said, thinking fast and talking slow, “you know how you lost your books tonight because you wouldn’t come upstairs when I told you to?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Was that a good choice or a bad one?”

 

His eyes flickered in the darkness, as if to say, Is this a trick question? “Bad,” he said.

 

“That’s right. God makes everyone and lets them choose whether to do good things or bad things. When people make a lot of bad choices, they make themselves bad. But God doesn’t make bad people. Do you understand?”

 

“Yeah,” he said uncertainly.

 

“That’s why we take things away when you make bad choices. We want you to grow up to be a good person. Does that make sense?”

 

“Yeah,” he said, but I could tell he was fading off to sleep, so I kissed his cheek again, repeated my good night, and stepped softly out into the hall.

 

“Mommy, I wuv you,” he called through the door.

 

“I love you, too, honey. Sleep tight, little man.” As I went across the hall to get ready for bed, I thought, Holy cow! All religious formation takes place at bedtime.

Published in: on February 17, 2009 at 2:57 pm  Leave a Comment  

Samuel

His name was Samuel. A child who heard his master calling him in the middle of the night.

 

He was a good, obedient boy, and he responded with alacrity. But his master kept telling him, “Go back to bed. I didn’t call you.” The third time it happened, Eli finally clued into the truth: Samuel was hearing his true Master. He told his young charge to answer, “Speak, Lord. I’m listening.”

 

As I listened to this story this morning at church, it struck me that it could only happen to a child. I think about the way Alex views the world—everything is new to him. He doesn’t recognize the conventions, the connections. That’s what early childhood is—learning the connections. Sun, moon. Lightning, thunder. Parent, teacher. Authority—love.

 

Samuel was too young to understand what was happening. He heard a voice of love and authority, and connected it with the only such voice he knew to be nearby. Before that night, I’m sure he knew about God, but he never knew God. Like all children, his understanding was grounded in the concrete. Sometimes Alex wakes up in the morning and tells me that our next door neighbor did or said such-and-such during the night. He doesn’t understand the concept of dreams yet, much less the idea that God can speak to us through them.

 

That concept is hard for adults to grasp, too. But I do believe that God speaks in dreams. How else can I explain waking up in the middle of the night with a seed of a melody, or a fragment of text, running laps around my brain?

 

The beautiful thing about a child, though, is that he doesn’t wait to understand what’s happening. He doesn’t hold himself back and groan, “Oh, I’m too tired. Just tell me in the morning.” Well…kids do that to parents all the time. But there’s something compelling about those kinds of dreams. So Samuel accepts with complete trust what is happening. He hops up and responds to the voice in the only way he knows how.

 

But what I wonder is what he heard after he said, “Speak, Lord—I’m listening!”

Published in: on January 18, 2009 at 3:17 pm  Leave a Comment  

Advent Reclamation Project: Week One Report

Today is the second Sunday of Advent, and now that we have a few days under our belt, it seems like a good time to report on how our Advent Reclamation Project is going.

 

Point One: the Advent Calendar

 

Advent Calendar

Our Advent Calendar

Yes, it’s a Santa house. So sue me. We looked at everything available online, and tried to talk ourselves into one of the religious ones. But I’m not big on saccharine baby Jesus figures with blond hair, wearing holier-than-thou expressions. He was a baby, for crying out loud. Fully human. He didn’t know he was God when he was three hours old. Besides, what goes into the calendar is more important than what it looks like.

 

The calendar sat on the counter for two weeks. Alex wanted to play with it every day. By the time December 1st rolled around, he knew exactly what it was for and was all a-flutter. (Note: Initially, when I envisioned this project, I wanted to make it a true Advent Calendar, IOW Week One, Sunday through Saturday; Week Two, Sunday through Saturday, etc. But such a thing does not appear to exist, so we accepted the inevitable.)

 

The morning of December 1st, Alex opened the chimney door and pulled out an ornament and a slip of paper that said: “Make Christmas cards for grandparents.” Other highlights of the week: shopping for a shut-in (service), making a manger for baby Jesus (soul prep), decorating the house and a day trip to St. Charles for a train show (pure fun).

 

Yes, liturgical purists, we put up Christmas decs on the 5th of December. I used to fight this battle tooth and nail. I didn’t want one iota of Christmasy stuff up until at least the 19th of December. We were going to be Advent people, and save Christmas for Christmas. Trouble was, I enjoyed neither Advent nor Christmas, when Christmas came. I spent Advent griping that everybody else was putting up Christmas stuff, and dreaded the year when I would have to give in because I would have children old enough to be interested. Now that I’m here, I’m thrilled to find that the secular is enriching my spiritual Advent, too.

 

Point two: the manger for Baby Jesus. 

 

The manger waits to be filled

On Dec. 2nd, we covered a Florsheim box with gold paper, then used my cutter bee to shred some used paper and store ads. (It’s a green Advent in the Basi household.) This week, we have added and taken away “straw” depending on behavior. Our goal is to have a nice, deep bed of straw to lay Baby Jesus in on Christmas Eve—a bed built of kind deeds and words. So far we can’t get past a nice dusting on the bottom. Alex keeps doing things like smacking Julianna across the face with his Superman. Ah, well. J

Point Three: The dinner ritual—Jesse tree and Advent wreath. 
Our Jesse Tree

Our Jesse Tree

Two pieces of poster board, some pencil and crayon, and ornaments printed from the Domestic Church. I pulled down the related Scriptures, which are beastly long for children, and simplified and shortened them. It was a hack job, and every night at dinner, as I am reading, I edit further. Then Alex puts the ornament on the tree with Scotch tape, Christian lights the wreath, and we eat dinner.

 

We’re very happy with our experiment, thus far. We’re not particularly doing any less this year. The difference is that it is all planned out in advance. It’s amazing, what a difference this makes. In years past, we stumbled through Advent with this sack of rocks suspended over our heads: you have to get this done, and this, and this…and good luck figuring out how. This year, we’ve been able—so far—to focus more on the purpose of the chaos. And that, after all, is the point of Advent: to focus on the Reason for the Season.

Published in: on December 7, 2008 at 7:13 pm  Comments (6)  

The two-edged sword

http://www.bu.edu/chapel/services/sermons/documents/sharperthanatwoedgedsword.doc

I’m working on song texts again today, and in looking up this passage online (because I was too lazy to pull out my Strongs Concordance), I discovered this sermon from Robert Cummings Neville at Boston University. I encourage you to read it. I’m printing it out to share with Christian as our prayer for the evening. I don’t know yet what my weakness is–deep self-analysis is not something I have much concentration for these days (oh, how I need a silent retreat!)–but that’s why I’m printing it out.

Published in: on June 7, 2008 at 7:28 pm  Leave a Comment  
Tags:

The eyes of God

For the first four and a half weeks of her life, Julianna woke up slowly, her eyes slitting one at a time, and only after a long warmup did they open all the way. At times, I felt a little shiver when I saw those eyes on me. Such a frank gaze, so uncomplicated—and so piercing, despite its gentleness. More than once I thought they were God’s eyes staring straight through me, down to the core of my being.

It is a totally different sense than what I experienced with Alex when he was her age. For Alex and I, looking in each others’ eyes was the long gaze of lovers memorizing the contours of each other’s faces. With Julianna, it is humbling. Unsettling. I squirm as her gaze lays bare my selfishness, my pettiness, my unwillingness to suffer. I recognize my own failings when I look in the eyes of this child who has endured more in her first month of life than I endured in my entire childhood.

During her week-long stay in the ICU, she was drugged, and we barely saw her eyes at all. But since she came out from under sedation, my daughter is like a different child. A few minutes ago, Julianna woke up and started crying. I went to the blue-barred hospital crib and started patting her little bottom to try to lull her back to sleep. Instead…POP! Those little eyes snapped wide open, and she stared fixedly at me out of deep charcoal-gray orbs. It was shocking to see how round those eyes are…how alert she is at six and a half weeks old, after sleeping for a whole week. And for one fleeting moment, it was like looking in a mirror. I saw myself staring back at me from those eyes, those eyebrows.

And still, they were God’s eyes.

God’s eyes, staring out of my eyes.

After all the curses I have flung at Him in the last few days, still He gives me this beautiful gift.

Clearly, I still have a lot to learn about God.

Published in: on March 21, 2007 at 4:07 pm  Comments (1)