Tag Archives: Catholic

The Red Bottle of Perfume: A Christmas Story

Posted in Holidays, traditions by

On Christmas day 1990 my mother was released from the hospital. Not because she was healed, but because there was nothing left to do. Her long battle against cancer had been fought. She was dying.

That day was the last full one we had with her – on December 26, she said her final goodbyes and allowed herself to lapse into a coma. Her body kept itself going for 11 more days, but she was no longer with us. On January 6 – the Feast of the Epiphany – shortly after our family had returned from Mass, she quietly passed away.

There is a picture from that last Christmas we had with her. It’s one that I can hardly bear to look at because it always makes me cry.  Partly because of how sick she looks in it – and she was so sick – but also because in this picture, she is holding a bright red bottle of cheap drugstore perfume. It was my present to her that year.

I still remember buying it from the drugstore down the road from my house. I picked it because I liked how shiny the bottle was; it had smoothly curved lines and looked, to an 11-year-old, very sophisticated.

On some level, I must have known it was the last gift I would ever give my mother. It was clear that she was ill beyond the point recovery. But I don’t remember ever thinking that way. In my mind, I was buying her a Christmas gift that she would get the chance to use.

In a sense, this is one of the most heart-breaking memories of my life, thinking about how incapable I was of understanding the fact that she was dying. It is painful to relive the disbelief – shock, almost– that you feel in the moment of the death of a loved one. It seems like death, even when you have watched it slowly approach, is rarely easy to accept. Certainly, at 11 going on 12, I couldn’t accept it. I held on to hope all the way through to the very last moment.

***

On the other hand, what a miracle. What a miracle that spark of hope was.

This ability to hang on to hope, to grasp tightly to our chests the belief that all will be well, through even the most hopeless of situations is one of the best aspects of our humanity.

It’s also part of what makes the celebration of Christmas so enduring, and so endearing. The human spirit gravitates toward hope, and hope is what was born on what we remember as Christmas night.

In our modern Christian dialogue, we refer to Christmas as the birth of a Savior. But that isn’t what we see in the nativity as we know it. In our nativity story, a baby is born in the lowliest of circumstances to a homeless couple with no political, economic, or social standing. This baby has come to us through miraculous means, but he enters the world as powerless as a person can possibly be.

And yet, in this baby, a latent potential is already recognized. In him, the stories tell us, the hope of a nation rests. In him, the prospect of salvation lives.

***

Hope is the essence of our Christmas story. It is what allows us to believe that in a helpless

Continue reading →

My Girls, in Church

Posted in Children, Humor by

I walked the Walk of Shame this morning. Or, at least, I walked the 35-year-old Catholic mom version of it. My family was at Mass, and of course it was a quiet moment because it’s always a quiet moment, when my littlest little person announced to everyone who could hear her (at least half of the congregation) that she had to go pee pee. She pretty much does that at every Mass we attend, so it wasn’t as embarrassing as it could have been. But this time, she decided to expand the discourse on her pottying needs.

“Mommy!” she shouted. “I have to go pee pee. But ‘dis time, I gonna close my legs so I don’t get pee pee everywhere. Ok, mommy? OK?”

I wanted to laugh; I wanted to cry, but I was so frozen by embarrassment that I all could do was furiously whisper for her to use her (bleeping implied) inside voice.

To which she replied, loudly, “I talkin’ loud like ‘dis Mommy… I talkin’ loud like ‘dis… I TALKIN’ LOUD LIKE ‘DIS, MOMMY, BECAUSE I WANT TO TALK LIKE ‘DIS!”

At this point I had almost reached the door, where safety lay, when I sensed the presence of my older daughter jogging up behind me. I looked over my shoulder. She was holding her crotch.

“Mommy!” she shouted. “I’m holding my crotch because I have to pee too!”

So I grabbed her hand, hung my head, and made my ignominious exit.

We completed our pottying exercise almost without incident. I say almost because just as we were approaching the doors  to go back into Mass, my younger daughter broke away from us running, looking back at me to shout, “Mommy! Dere’s a girl here with PINK HAIR! It should be BROWN, Mommy!” And then she sprinted away toward the open doors of the sanctuary, with me yell-whispering for her to freeze while I ran after her dragging my older daughter — who was agog at the pink-haired girl — reluctantly behind me.

Our very noticeable return was, fortunately, at the tail end of the service. So people hardly even noticed when my younger daughter started singing “Peace and harmony, in all the world! Peace and harmony, in all the world! Pe-eace and Ha-armony!” It’s a good thing people didn’t hear her, or they might have gotten the mistaken impression that she had actually benefited from the homily which was about, well, peace and harmony in all the world.

Instead, she was just repeating a song from one of her favorite TV shows, Peppa Pig.

 

On War and Peace

Posted in Random by

Over the past week I have been reading about two things: Syria and World War I. The crisis in Syria is everywhere, headlining the news and popping up in church, on social media, and even in overheard conversations at the gym. I couldn’t avoid it if I tried. WWI comes to me by way of an audiobook mystery novel, which has turned out to be a much more worthwhile read than I anticipated when I chose it as this week’s soundtrack for my long-distance training runs.

Because I am a Google addict, all the reading I’ve been doing has had me link-hopping through the last century, from the War to End All Wars, to the war that came after it, to the creation of Israel, to the current conflicts in the Middle East, then back to the Holocaust, and then back again to the invasion of Poland (which, as a former Wujek, is close to my heart) until one night I found myself weeping silently in bed at a 1939 photograph of a young Polish girl kneeling over the body of her sister. The endless internet access given to us by the iPhone can be a great or terrible thing.

It hasn’t been cheerful reading. It hasn’t made me all that proud of my human DNA. It’s hard to keep believing that love wins and that people are essentially decent when it feels like we have spent the last 100 years with the collective fingers of humanity hovering just above the DESTROY button.

In bad times, stories about the helpers — the people that Mr. Rogers tells us about, the people who are, in fact, always there when life is at its worst – usually bring me moments of clarity when I know that goodness overcomes evil. But this week, those stories just haven’t been enough. I can’t stop thinking about the mud of Passchendaele, or the cold of Auschwitz, or the heat of Iraq, or of all our empty repetitions of “never again.”

This is one of those times when the world is too much with me and I feel overwhelmed by the weight of our cruelty toward one another. I feel overwhelmed, but not overcome.

This weekend at Mass, in a ritual as simple as the closing prayer, our priest reminded me that even when it feels like we are just a pebble in a rising tide, and that there is nothing we can do to stop the forces of violence and suffering, we can never be overcome. He ended Mass with the prayer of St. Francis.

He reminded me that I can be an instrument of peace. That where there is hatred, I can sow love. That where there is injury, I can forgive. That where there is discord, I can bring harmony. That where there is doubt, I can inspire faith. That where there is darkness, I can bring light and that where there is sorrow, I can bring joy.

He reminded me that even if these changes happen only in my own heart, I can make them happen.

The prayer of St. Francis may seem on the surface like a submissive prayer, but really it is a prayer of empowerment. It is a prayer in which we open ourselves up to love, so we can use that love to conquer pain and darkness. It is a prayer that gives us a strength that can’t be weakened, not by anything.

***

The Prayer of St. Francis

“O Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace!
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sorrow, joy.

Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not 
so much seek to be consoled as to console; 
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive; 
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; 
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.”

The prayer is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, but was most likely written by a French priest shortly before WWI.