My Christmas Letter to You, Whether You Celebrate Christmas or Not

Dear and Precious One,

God loves you with a deep and everlasting love. His is the only perfect love you will experience here on earth. All other loves, as beautiful as they can be, are only pale imitations of His true and abiding Love. He resides in your heart, caring for each precious beat of it, whispering to the inmost part of you His words of True Love.

Like all good loves, He listens, too. He waits for your word, longs to hear you utter the smallest of prayers so that He can hear your desire for Him, for change, for perfection. He wants you to love Him in return. He will never force Himself upon you. He will wait for you and love you from afar for as long as you demand it.

He knows how you breathe, how you feel, how you wonder. He also knows your struggles. He meets you with Mercy when you fail to live in the way that He knows is best for you. He asks you to wait for something much better than you can imagine. He sighs with your impatience and anger at Him and loves you anyway.

Your life is so much more than you can even imagine. His plans for you are so far above your ideas as the Heavens are above the Earth. Allow Him, the author of your very soul, to whisper the first parts of His desire
s for you in the silence of your expectant heart.

I will pray each day for you, my brother, my sister in Christ,
Christie Martin

Signer Number 19,986

I had to give them my name, my email, and my zip code to do it. Now it is known to anyone who is making a list and checking it twice that I will not stand by and have my religion defined by government.

You can not mandate the Church out of existence. You can not infringe upon the Civil Liberties of American Citizens. You can not make Catholics and Catholic Institutions second class citizens. I won't stand for it.

Will you?

Go and sign...

The USCCB Vow to Fight This Edict 

First, They Came for the Catholics

Wishing You a Blessed Christmas

When Heaven Met Earth

All Creation Rejoiced

Peace, Peace, and Blessed Peace
Be Yours

Splinters: The Nature of Time

Because I'm of a teacherly bent, my talent is to make complexities simple while pointing down the path to further study. The larger the subject, the more imperfectly it can be rendered simply, Teaching being such a frustrating science. It has been 10 years since God used His Holy 2 x 4 to get my attention, and I'm still unpacking the experience. While talking about everyday matters, I'm suddenly waxing philosophical. My husband likes to call these weird little insights of mine splinters. 



The best way to begin this little insight from my conversion is to assert, imperfectly, that it is almost as if our souls once had clear senses in the same way we have bodily senses like sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. As a friend of mine once put it, "Before The Fall, our souls had eyes." With Original Sin, those senses of the soul became damaged beyond repair. Perhaps in our soul's roiling paroxysms of shame and horror at the advent of personal sins, we each damage these senses further. But it is a mercy of God that we can no longer know the lacerations we unleash upon ourselves and upon reality and the world with the slightest of our sins. We are now numbed to the consequences of sin, thank God.

All of that aside, for a moment, because I could get lost in such essential tangents and never take us down road I intended to take.

One of those senses that is damaged, or muddied up, by sin is our sense of time. Although we live in the Eternal Now, because there is no other time but Now, we perceive now as a continually shifting moment. We feel as if we a slipping from this now to the next now, when in reality it is all one. Part of the damage is our perception of our past and future. Instead of it being integrated into our present, we see each as distinct and somehow fixed. We can dimly see the error of this by our understanding of our ability to affect the future by our choices now, but it is harder to see how dynamic our past also is. Those of us who have gone through experiences like a conversion, which radically changes one's perspective, know that perspective has an immense effect on memory--our only access to the past remaining to us. Radical changes of perspective radically effect history by the explosion of insight into past situations. Such explosions flood our past with new color and light which essentially change that experience for us.

All of time can be reduced to Now. Now is all that matters because Now is all that there is. You are here now, reading this, and somehow you are experiencing every now that you will ever experience in this same moment. That is the nature of Eternity, which we will understand more perfectly when our souls are healed after our slip through death into the perfection of the Eternally Present. When the eyes of our souls are finally healed by the Touch of God at the end of our brief perception of our earthly now, we will see and experience this now so much more perfectly. So, if you can follow me into the end of a prayer while carrying such an insight, you will see that our earthly life hinges upon two moments eternally: Now, and the other vitally important moment when we surrender, ultimately and for all time, to God. How we surrender at our final earthly now that intertwined gift of life and love He has entreasured us with determines how we will perceive our eternal now: eternity itself.

How impossible it is to wrest from language spiritual truth! My frustration has reached it's limits, so I will quit with this now in the hopes that a window has opened upon reality by the briefest brush against the pane. I wish to express to you that it is no mistake that one of the sweetest prayers is an appeal to the sweetest of created beings to pray for us at the most essential moments of our existence: now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
Wresting Truth from Language is akin to this.

Harvest is here!

On the stove at this moment:

2 gallons of grapes blanching for jelly
2 gallons of milk for yogurt
3 gallons of milk for manchego cheese
1 jar of peppers pickling

You can tell it's a drought year because two burners are not being utilized.

It's a girl!

37 pounds
37 1/2 inches...

The adoption was today. We, her parents, are over the moon.

As for Lucia, she says she is, "so very happy!" She saw the judge, ate some cake, and jumped on a trampoline. It's a great big whalloping happy day.

Some joys are beyond expression, as any parent knows.

We have a court date...

The adoption will be on July 25!

Wonder of wonders, she will be ours and we will be hers, by law as it is by love.

My Son Has a Super Power

You simply have to read this post by the Attack of the Redneck Mommy blogger. Her son has a super power: invisibility. He is disabled. His disability is visible, so he is unseen.

I want to drag into the glare of honest criticism as a mom of a special gift like my son a few points.

1- You can use any excuse to laugh or rail at the disabled. The more shallow of you use the fact that the child's looks or sounds or drools makes you exempt from being decent. The more subtle of you use the fact that mommy is an annoying Republican as your excuse. When you laugh at the Trig jokes, mothers like me hold our children a little closer. We are protecting them from the likes of you because we know how easy it is to delete the word "Republican" from your excuse and insert any other word--for me it might be "Catholic" or "blogger" or even just "annoying." Once you cross the line of decency, it's crossed. It isn't funny. Not even when the mommy is.

(You may want to brace yourself for this one, folks. It's a hard truth.)
2 - It has always been a capital crime in our societies to be disabled in some way. We used to expose our special children. Our more modern and enlightened evolutionary impulses insist we abort them before they are born. We who have given our special children a stay of execution for various reasons (for some, yes, it was a mere matter of timing) know, deep inside, that the world is appalled at us. Your laughter stirs a fear in us mothers that is directly related to this unacknowledged knowledge.

3 - My son is singing the Kyrie in this moment. In this very moment when I am very near tears at the heartlessness of the world toward him, he sings in Latin, "Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy." It is one of many reasons he is such an incredible gift to me and to you, ugly world. My son who will always struggle, who is the ultimate outsider, who is such a gift, he gives me hope for you and yours.

From The Attack of the Redneck Mommy (go thou hence and read)

My son has a superpower.

He is invisible.

Most disabled people are, you know

They are born with it, alongside twisted limbs or broken minds.

My son, he can’t walk, or talk, or eat

He can’t hear and he will never fly. But

He is invisible.

You may not have seen him. But he saw you

He smiled at you. A smile

Bright as a ray of light shining through a cracked window.

He looked at you.

Hoping you would see past the invisibility tattooed on his skin, cloaked around his wheelchair.

He stood beside his siblings

His cousin and he smiled. For you.

You didn’t see him.

Or you wouldn’t see him.

Was it the drool on the side of his mouth which

scared you off?

Was it the twisted way he held his hands?

Or the way his head flops slightly to the left?

He smiled still

As you overlooked him, tossing pieces of candy into the bags

Other children held out.

His bag, empty

Invisible.

He smiled still as his aunt explained why he sat at the bottom of your stairs.

“His legs don’t work.”

He smiled when you refused eye contact with him and handed a piece of candy to me to give to him.

Refusing to touch him.

Refusing to come out of your warm bright homes to see him.

My invisible monkey boy, he smiled for you.

I stood beside him, willing you to see him

Wanting my pride, my love for him to be a beacon for your eyes.

Wishing for your eyes to land on him and see his value.

To see him.

For him not to be invisible.

House after house

We tried.

Door after door, princesses, vampires, Spidermans

 they all wished they had super powers as they begged for treats

My boy,

he tricked them all.

He still smiled

even when you didn’t see him,

couldn’t see him,

wouldn’t see him.

Everybody should have a superpower.

Nobody should be invisible.

If I could pick a power

I’d use it to shine the light on every person with disabilities,

I’d make you see.

My son. He is NOT

Invisible.

I see you, kid.

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A Life Worth Living

Mommy

Into the Silence

Holy Thursday

Virtual Tour of the Sistine Chapel

For those who may never visit Rome, here is a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel that brings this creation a little closer.

All this art is still ours, even if we never see it. Knowing it is there, as a gift for all, is akin to the beauty I imagine out at the farthest reaches of the Universe, slowly spinning clouds of glowing stardust, icy frozen and translucent worlds, all beautiful and all a part of the greater gift. Even if I never see it, the universe is better because it is there.

Click here for the tour...

An agony of the soul...

Rozanne and my young friends, please do not read any further.

My heart is breaking not only for the persecuted Christians of Iraq but for the heard hearted of the West. We who watch television to be entertained by images such as these during our nightly rounds through the channels, who hunger for the close up when the fictitious forensics team speculate not only who did it but exactly how, all for our grisly and perverse pleasures; we who have no more compassion left that television writers must have an animal killed senselessly in our fiction for us to even bat an eye!  We in the West are amazingly wealthy in material goods. Our most impoverished live better than kings ever did in our history, and yet we are so impoverished in our souls that we watch eagerly for the slaughter and splatter marks because we feel so little otherwise.

This is the precious face that will turn the channel for me, this little one will ensure I never let the horror of our entertainments ever again into my home. This is the face I see when you have your little jokes about the ignorance and intolerance of Christians or when you complain that the Church is full of sinners and so isn't good enough for you. I will chew on my tongue and swallow the outrage of this image of death at the hands of those who really do hate, as I politely and hopefully move a bit in my pew to make room for you. I sit in the hypocrite and sinners section myself, next to my own overblown pride!


Oh my Jesus, accept into the abode
of your most compassionate heart
the lives of those slain at your very altar!



365

Do not be afraid of whatever there is for you. You already have it in you to face it. Do not listen to the voice of the world that tells you all the things you need to be afraid of. In the Bible, God says in 365 different ways, "Do not fear." That's one for each day of the year. Live your life. 365. He means it.