How do you measure a year?

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear...
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure... measure a year?

Happy Anniversary to Me :)

All Souls

We have a tradition in our community on All Souls Day, (which we are observing today instead of two days ago): we read the names of every sister who has died in community, beginning with our founder Mother Ruth. Next come the names of all our relatives and close friends who have died... for example, my mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, etc... and finally the names of all who have died in the past year for whom we have said or sung requiems. 

It's a long list.

Names that were high points of mourning several months ago suddenly bring tears again, even though they have not been specifically on my mind since we laid them to rest. Why go through all that? Why live in the past that cannot be changed, only remembered with pain or nostalgia?

Two reasons I can think of off the bat: one... these people were important to us. My litany of names may mean nothing to the sister standing next to me, but she holds me in prayer and comfort, just as I hold her when her names are read. It's something tangible we do for each other, we remember together, pay tribute together, pray for their souls together.

The second reason was mentioned in the sermon Saturday (the part I never got to in my post yesterday.) We ask the saints to pray for us, and we, in turn, pray for them. Is this foolishness or the mysterious reality of the timeless nature of creation? I cannot answer that for you, of course. (I can barely answer it for myself.) But I know that these people I have loved live on in me... some in my DNA, some in my memory, some in their teachings that moved me forward on my own path to God.

Remembering the dead is nice, but it is not enough. I thought of my grandmother today, who always worked the polls on election days. Both she and my grandfather were working class Democrats and took great delight in announcing at supper "I voted a straight Democratic ticket." If my aunt and uncle, the Republicans in the family were there, there would be heated discussion about choosing a candidate on his own merits rather than his party. I was a child, and listened to these discussions with little interest, yet they stayed with me... even as I voted today. 

When Kennedy won the presidency my grandparents were dead. They would have had to choose between voting for a Democrat or not voting for a Catholic, and I have no clue which allegiance or prejudice would have won out. Today the issue is partly religious, but much more about race. Those who struggled hard in the 50's and 60's to bring Civil Rights to all of America see this election as a culmination of their efforts. My vote will be one that supports those efforts as well. My dear friend Robert Dubie was a freedom rider in the 60's. His was one of my names read at mass this morning. They live on in us. Of that I have no doubt.

In Memorial

I have a friend who's writing a book about 9/11. Well, I'm not exactly sure it's about 9/11, but it's about depression in the aftermath of great disasters, and she saw a lot of depressed people in the aftermath of that one. She was my spiritual director at the time, and we met every month. 

It's been seven years today. I can still remember where I was and what I was doing when I was rocked by the news. I say rocked in retrospect. At the time I was calm. I am usually calm in crisis situations and only fall apart later. 

The problem with my reaction to 9/11 was I could never fall apart... not in the weeks or months that followed, not when I was finally forced to go down there and look at the big hole in the ground, still smoking. I felt something... horror, I think, when I saw scraps of paper still clinging to fire escapes east of Ground Zero, months after the attack. Last year I actually contributed to another friend's art project with that image... the view of a fire escape from below, with a scrap of debris, the actual debris, hanging from one of the rungs.

Seven years and I am finally beginning to feel something. 

I'm almost finished with the book Three Cups of Tea. If you haven't read it yet, (It's been on the Best Seller List, for goodness sake!) It's about one man's passion to bring education to the poorest and most remote villages of Pakistan. Greg Mortenson was in Pakistan when the towers fell. He'd been traveling to and from there for years, building schools one village at a time. He had first hand knowledge that it was not Muslims, nor the people of those countries who were the extremists who had done this.

I was sickened by a lot of what happened after 9/11... fundamentalists crying Armageddon, politicians swooping down on New York City, suddenly their city, to wave the flag, promise retaliation and justice for this heinous crime against our people. I couldn't help thinking: what about our own crimes against the marginalized people of the planet? Wasn't this act of deliberate destruction a symbol that we were not especially innocent? That somebody felt they needed to get our attention regarding our increasing wealth and comfort at everybody else's expense? But that was certainly not a popular opinion then, and is still not. This is America: Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Except it's the white race that's been free and the other races expected to be brave. For the first time in history a black man has the opportunity to become president. If some crackpot doesn't try to kill him. Crackpots abound. They do not all wear turbans.

paradox

We celebrated our community's "Foundation Day" yesterday. It was my first as a life-professed sister of the community; why that made a difference, I'm not sure exactly. I've been treated like a member since my acceptance as a postulant. But it was different. I told one sister, I used to look at the bricks, now I am one.

Emotionally, it was huge. (I cried.) The four sisters who live at Melrose, the convent in Brewster, came down mid morning for the day. Those four extra voices at mass made such a difference. One of them, a gifted musician, made our little organ do cartwheels. The service was lovely, the preaching was excellent, we were all together. Emotionally huge.

But... maybe it was huge because I was absolutely wiped out from being up in the night. One of our beloved elders has just come home from the hospital. Her surgery was Thursday and the insurance companies won't allow long hospital stays anymore. She can't get up by herself yet, she's too wobbly, and I just happened to be on beeper duty this week. The beep beep beep went off at 12:30 and again at 5:00. Uh oh... Diarrhea. I was (am) a mom. I've had my share of cleaning up poopy pants, it's not a big deal. Still, it took a while... changing sheets, cleaning up, finding new night clothes. She was a doll through the entire process, cheerful and helpful, apologetic and embarrassed, yet she let me help her do what needed to be done. I didn't think much about it at the time.

In her sermon, our celebrant spoke about the concepts of holy time, holy tools, holy place. When King David decides he's going to build God a Temple, God says "Did I ever say I wanted a house?" It was not God's need, it was ours. We have a distinct history of making altars, tabernacles, places of special sanctification. From early standing stones to mighty cathedrals, we have needed to differentiate between the ordinary and the sacred. Also with our tools... the special vessels for mass, special vestments. And with our time. Here we recite a fourfold Divine Office: Lauds, Noonday, Vespers and Compline. We set these times for prayer aside from the rest of the day, and when the warning bell rings, we stop whatever we're doing and gather in the chapel. It would seem that the larger truth: that all time is holy, all ground is holy is being ignored. She said no... we understand that on an intellectual level, but we cannot comprehend it, not really. So the defining, the comparisons, the degrees of sacredness we assign... all give us a framework for awareness. Layers of mystical awareness.

Jacob, on awakening from his dream of angels says: Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. We may assign certain times and places as sacred, but God is everywhere and shows up unexpectedly and we know it not. Until later. An afterthought. Oh... that was holy ground. That was holy time.

And so it was for me as she spoke. I thought about the early morning hours, literally up to my elbows in excrement. That was holy time. And I knew it not.

As she continued her thread of the mystical layers of awareness, she said that once in the center, with God, that's not the end. We must keep moving, and come back out to the outer realms. These holy times are always temporary... temporary resting places so we can renew, replenish, but keep on keeping on. And, she said we can be temporary resting places for others.

I thought about that, tried it on to see if it fit. Had I been a temporary resting place for my sister in distress? Maybe. But the larger truth was that she was the holy ground and my time with her, cleaning her bottom was the holy time. Paradox... don't you just love when that happens?

catching up

What has been done has been done... what has not been done has not been done... let it be.
That is, until tomorrow. (They don't mention that in the night prayers.)


Yesterday we celebrated Sr. Mary Christabel's 50th Anniversary of her Life Profession. Already overtaxed to our physical limits, we took on yet one more big bash... inviting the world to a little tea party yesterday afternoon. It was a lovely affair: all the Melrose sisters came, laden with a large crudité platter and little cucumber sandwiches. We had our own offerings already assembled: three more kinds of sandwiches, baby quiches, baked brie, champagne punch, and a large assortment of cookies and sweet things. A fair number of our guests stayed on for Evening Prayer and our little chapel swelled with music like we haven't heard since "the old days". To say Sister Mary Christabel is much beloved would be an understatement, and it was evident as many eyes misted on the final hymn... our "Life Profession" song.

Since we are short-handed these days, planning and preparations for much of what we do is left to the last minute. There was a time in my past life when this would have driven me up the wall. Now it just seems to be the way of life. Don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:34) As with many of the familiar Bible quotations, that particular passage has taken on a whole new meaning.

Friday night and Saturday were my busiest days: a zillion baby quiches, preparing chicken salad, egg salad and cream cheese & olives for sandwiches... chopping, shopping, organizing, cleaning up. On Saturday I had some unexpected help all day (Thank you, Joanna), and as I look back I doubt I could have done it all alone.

I rally well in crisis situations; it's one of my strengths/weaknesses gifts/curses... there are always two sides of every coin. But I collapse hard after the big push. Today is Monday, our rest day. So why am I not resting?!?

Because what has not been done still needs to be done at some point, no matter what the prayer says. I missed my best friend's birthday yesterday. I have thank you notes to write, a grocery order to figure out, my to-do list from last week still has to-dos... my to-be-filed basket is overflowing...

All in all though, the undone things are few. I may take a walk, see a movie, even have a nap this afternoon. Tomorrow will be another difficult day. As Matthew and Scarlet both would say: I'll worry about that tomorrow.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day is significant as the day to honor the men and women who lost their lives in the service of our country. It used to be a huge observance... with parades, flag ceremonies, graveyard visits, poppies in lapels... not so much now.

For one thing, the most recent "wars" where these men and women have been killed, have been bitterly contested. Viet Nam was the first war to show all the gory details on TV every night. Intelligent people began asking: Why? Why were we sending our brave children overseas to do battle in a tiny country they'd never even heard of? Of course, the enemy then was "Communism." Enemies change. Arbitrary lines on maps change. Agendas change. And we've outgrown some of our valiant naivete in matters political. Or at least that's the spin.

As a child I remember Memorial Day more for the rules and regulations... no white shoes before the date, and always make a trip (the week before) out to the graveyard to paint the urn and plant red geraniums. But in 1991 this holiday took on a new personal significance for me.

I had been away for the weekend, actually only overnight on Sunday, but I hadn't checked in on my mom since Saturday afternoon. I arrived at her apartment Sunday around lunch time and let myself in. She was asleep on the couch. I'd taken to checking her breathing every time I found her asleep, since by then she'd had at least three minor strokes. All was well. She was breathing, so I didn't wake her. I cleaned up the accumulation of dishes in her kitchen and made her some lunch.

When I brought it in, she still hadn't heard me puttering around in the kitchen, so I patted her shoulder to wake her up. Nothing. I shook her. It was then I realized she was stiff as a board. Her eyes were open, she was breathing, but nothing else was going on. It took me some time to process this information. I talked it through out loud with her.

"Mom, something's wrong. Wake up. You aren't waking up. I guess you don't want this lunch I made. I'm going to go call the doctor now. You wait here. Well of course, you will. You're not moving. Okay, I'm just going into the other room to call now. I'll be back."

The ambulance came and she went to the hospital. She never woke up. She died a week later.

For me it's not the date. The date changes every year. That year Memorial Day was much later, because she died on June 6th. It's the holiday I remember.

what day is it anyway?

Like most people, we sisters can get a bit mixed up. Not just the aging ones either, although their sense of time is way off the scale. "What day is it anyway? is always a good conversation starter... again and again throughout the same day. Yesterday's timing was funny... though quite logical in its outcome.

We were scheduled to celebrate a memorial at mass to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. February 15th was his birthday. The sister at Morning Prayer misread the ordo and read his collect instead of the correct one for Epiphany. However, the sister who sets up the priest's books for mass had marked the collect for Martin Luther (aka Father of the Protestant Reformation) instead of Martin Luther King. Okay, we got to hear the right prayer, just not at the right time.

Next, the priest appeared in the crimson vestments of the martyred saints. Well... that makes sense in a way. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; he just hasn't been declared a saint. The correct color would have been white if we'd been celebrating a feast day (which we weren't) or green for a regular mass.

This kind of attention to detail could be considered one of those hills of beans we protect and defend so violently. Does God care what color the priest wears to celebrate the mass or does God want us to love each other and cut each other some slack? Yet for some sisters there is a right way to do things... by the book, and the book says...

It won't help that next Monday will be the national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (which, by the way, will be the 13th anniversary of my move to New York City.)

Rest day and other (probably) unrelated trivia

Rest Day... ahhhh.

During the holidays, and especially this year, with Christmas and New Year's falling on Tuesday, our normal Monday rest day got discombobulated. We had a partial rest day on New Year's Eve, but another sister and I had volunteered to create the party hors d'oeuvres, so we were busy most of the day. And... as much as I appreciate a half-day's rest any time I can get it, it's just not the same thing.

I awoke at 5:30, (my normal time for rising) looked at the clock, smiled and rolled over back to sleep. I had silly dreams... I dreamed a man I know wanted to marry me. It really didn't matter that he's married, I'm a nun, and he's years younger than I. Some of those issues arose in the dream. Then I dreamed that I was supposed to go to sewing school as part of this new marriage endeavor. I had my choice of wedding dress design, upholstery, or something else. In my waking world I hate, hate, hate to sew! I'm no good at it, have no patience for it, and would do any number of crummy jobs before I would ever stoop to sewing for a living. Somehow that, too, came through in the dream, and I woke up.

On my day off I like to sleep a little later than usual, but not so late that I've wasted too much of a day to do exactly what I want. So I'm up. When I went to the kitchen for coffee, I had a craving for grilled pimento cheese sandwiches. It's been years since I've had one. My second husband and I had them a lot when we were first married. Today is actually the anniversary of my first marriage. Who knows how all that stuff manifests in the psyche to create a dream? It's a fascinating mystery. My daughter-in-law wrote me yesterday that she had jokingly added Jesus Christ as my spouse in her electronic address book. I shot back a pretty crass note, especially for a nun. When I related the story to my sisters last evening, there was dead silence in the room. Uh oh. Sometimes I feel like I'll never live up to this new calling. Sometimes I feel like I've been living it forever. The split personalities just don't match. Welcome to my world.

The two's have it

It's hard to believe it's been two years... feels like more than that. I never knew how much I loved to write before this blog, and... (as I've mentioned before) my daughter-in-law can take the credit for getting me started. Loyal readers can take the credit for keeping me going when stumbling blocks of various sizes threatened to put the fire out. Even annoying anonymous commenters can take the credit for keeping me on my toes when I'd just as soon be flat-footed. It's been a great two years. Here's to a couple more... cheers.

potato salad gospel

We're getting ready for our 4th of July picnic... barbecued chicken, potato salad, cole slaw... the standard stuff most Americans would eat on the 4th. My first husband taught me how to make potato salad, just as someone else had taught him. He said one of the secrets was to boil the potatoes in their skins and peel them after they were cooked. Today I used red potatoes, so I only peeled half of them, to give the salad some color. He was also a stickler for green onions instead of white, and I always follow that rule. He used sweet gherkins, though, and I prefer dill, so in that sense I've altered the recipe and made it my own. We do that in many aspects of our lives... not just cooking... take someone's cherished idea or tradition, change it just a bit, and make it our own.

The followers of Christianity have certainly done that through the ages... sometimes for good, and sometimes not. Doctrine as arbitrary as a preference for dill over sweet has caused cruelty and untold suffering for those caught in the middle, as well as those defending either side. I wish we could just give it a break, this constant need to be right, this constant need to convert others to our version of right.

Independence Day: "We hold these truths to be self-evident... that all men are created equal." except when those men (or women) aren't doing it the way we think they ought to. Then we damn them to hell. So... will I go to hell for using dill pickles in my potato salad? Maybe, but only God knows that... not all the sweet gherkin advocates.

Happy Birthday Dear One!

On September 4th, (NOT the 2nd as I originally posted) my very first (and only) granddaughter was born... That was twelve years ago. The darling girl I had always wanted, she came home from the hospital dressed in frilly pinks and bows. My son and his wife named her after my mother, so she has inherited all the "Helen" things I kept when my mom died. She also got what was left of my once precious doll collection... a doll my dad brought back from France at the end of World War II. I never got to play dolls with Helen, though, because I moved to New York City just three months after her birth. Now she's too old for dolls. She's into ballet and boys and already looks like a teenager. But what a beauty... Happy Birthday, dear one. Your Grandma loves you to the sky.