Cleaning House

One reason I love having visitors is that it motivates me to clean house.  My tendency to put some chores off until necessary became embarrassingly evident to me a few years ago when my daughter saw me cleaning the toilet and asked, “Is someone coming over?”  While I do clean at other times, somehow, when I know visitors are coming, I clean with purpose and energy, I keep up my momentum, and I get better results.  I love that feeling of everything in its place, floors clean, corners dusted.  I know the house won’t stay this way for long, but for one brief shining moment my corner of the world is right, and I am ready to welcome my visitors into my home.

I would love for my home to always be in order.  But sometimes I find it hard to motivate myself to do something that I know will quickly be undone simply by living.  But a deadline – the arrival of a guest at my door on a certain day at a certain time – has the power to motivate me when my natural desire for a clean home does not.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.  During Advent (from the Latin advenire, “to come”), we are waiting for the arrival of a guest.  Not just any guest, but one we surely want to impress, one we will welcome into our homes, one we wish to honor and respect by making all the necessary preparations.  We are always waiting for the Christ – for his birth, his return, his coming into our hearts and lives.  But sometimes we need a deadline – in this case, December 25th – to motivate us to do those things that prepare us for his coming.  Sometimes we need a deadline to get our homes in order.  The numbered weeks and days of Advent – like the 40 days of Lent – are a gift of limits.  With all the time in the world, we may never get around to the “extras” we need to do to get ready – extra time for prayer, quiet or reading our Bibles, going to confession, going on retreat, spending more time with loved ones, serving those around us.  But with a deadline, we have purpose and energy, we have some momentum, and we get results. 

When Ordinary Time comes around again, we may feel a bit like we do when Cheerios once again litter the floor, the dishes are piled in the sink, the fridge handle gets sticky, and the dust settles back onto everything.  There is always work to be done.  But for one brief shining moment, all was right in our corner of the world.  Our Savior was born, and we were ready.

God and Storms

Do you ever pray about the weather?  “Pray for good weather this Sunday for the church picnic.”  While there’s certainly nothing wrong with praying for this sort of thing, it may create legitimate questions in our minds:  If God would arrange good weather for our church picnic, why wouldn’t he arrange for hurricanes to avoid heavily populated areas, or for monsoons to stop before they become devastating floods, or for rain to fall on drought-stricken farms?  Why not redirect a polar vortex or subdue a tsunami?

Can God control the weather?  Of course.  But does he?

In this way, earth’s storms are not unlike the storms of life.  We can and we should pray about the difficulties and devastations we face.  We must always communicate with, and lean on and believe in, our loving and powerful God.  But we are well aware that he does not always intervene when it comes to “bad weather.”  Could God control every aspect of our lives, create a wall around us, protecting us from every bad thing?  Perhaps.  But does he?  He most certainly does not.

Perhaps it comes down to a question of how God protects us.  There are times in life when we feel miraculously protected – walking away from a car accident, being thrown from a horse and standing up good as new.  But for the most part, we get tossed around by life with scars to show for it – there are injuries, illnesses, heartbreaks, sleeplessness, stress and death – for all of God’s children.  The rain falls on everyone, and some even seem to get more than their fair share.  God does not always shield us from these things.  And yet he remains our powerful protector.  He protects not with a power that interferes with each event, but a power that gathers us in, and pulls us near, and makes and keeps promises about being with us.  It is a power that may strike us as a bit too subtle at times, and yet as time passes, we recognize how awesome, and how essential, and how real it actually is.

As a parent, I do not want my children to suffer, and I am naturally tempted to smooth their paths in whatever way I can.  But even more than I may want an easy life for them, I want a great life for them.  I want them to be great.  And the fact is that great people have suffered.  They have experienced the storms of life without always bailing out into the nearest shelter.  They have learned the most important things by being brought down low.  Storms transformed them and made them strong, wise, clearheaded and serene.  Wounded?  Yes, that too.  But we can be wounded and still be great.  It is much harder to be utterly unscathed and be anything more than mediocre.

God allows bad weather – really bad weather – and he allows life’s storms.  Sometimes the storms are so bad that our wounds don’t heal.  For those times we may simply have to surrender:  “Lord, I know you may not change this storm, but you are always willing to change me.  So if you must, make me great!”

Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) -- The Morning After the Deluge by William Turner, 1843.

Relationship Prayer

Relationships are really hard!  Have you noticed?  And yet our lives are meant to revolve around two basic commands, both requiring a great deal of love:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself (cf. Mt. 22:34-40). 

We should never be without hope in our relationship with God – we know a lot about his unconditional love – how he eats with sinners and goes after even one straying sheep.  We may neglect God or even betray him, but he will always run out to greet us, place rings on our fingers and serve us meals of celebration to enjoy with our friends.

But what about our human relationships?  They seem to weaken and break so easily, and sometimes we lose hope.  We no longer know who is right or wrong, who is truly being stubborn, or whether the damage can ever be undone.  For those times, I want to share this beautiful prayer by Joyce Rupp.  It is called “Prayer for Peace in a Relationship”:

Dear Mender of Hearts, you are friend of all and foe of none.  Your goodness is seeded in everyone, including those with whom I struggle.  Enter into my heart and soften its hardness.  Erase any ill will and anger abiding there.  Help me to reach out with openness, to speak when I prefer hiding in silence.  Teach me how to listen with loving ears and to not cling tenaciously to my opinions.  Instill hope of reconciliation in our hearts and help us not give up on one another.  Be the Patience within us that resolves issues.  Be the Love among us that seeks forgiveness.  Be the Faith amid us that strengthens our bonds.  Be the Truce between us that brings us peace.

Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, ca. 1511

The Coffee Cup

See the updated version of this post: The Coffee Cup 2.0 published in July 2016.

There’s an old story about Dorothy Day and a coffee cup.  It’s a story that’s gone around a bunch of times, told by many people, all representing Dorothy in their own way.  Like the game of “telephone,” in which the message spoken by the first player at the beginning of the game is completely warped by the last player at the end of the game, the coffee cup story has actually morphed into two distinct versions of what most certainly was one actual event.

In both versions of the story, a Mass was celebrated at Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker House in New York City.  Apparently, instead of a chalice, the priest chose to use a styrofoam coffee cup.  The two versions of the story developed around Dorothy’s reaction.  One account says that Dorothy was perturbed, even horrified, by the idea of using a coffee cup in the celebration of the Mass.  It wasn’t fitting; it dishonored the Lord.  This version of events says that after Mass, Dorothy found the coffee cup and carefully buried it in the earth behind the house, bringing some closure to what Dorothy felt was an error in judgment and a bit of scandal in her House.

The other version of the story says that Dorothy was profoundly touched by the use of the coffee cup.  A small, white, styrofoam coffee cup is the cup of the people, the cup of the poor.  It was perfectly fitting to use it in the sacrifice of the Mass; it honored the Lord.  Whether or not Dorothy buried the cup in this version of events is unclear.  But what is clear is the idea that this Eucharistic cup embraced the plight of the poor.  The coffee cup brought together the suffering of Christ and the very real situation of human poverty.

One interesting thing about this story is that from what I know of Dorothy Day, either version could be true.  She was what you might call authentically Catholic.  She embraced the liturgy in all of its meaning and symbolism.  She understood it; she lived it.  But she also embraced the poor – their marginalization, their pain, her own responsibility toward them.  She understood and lived that as well.  Dorothy Day was not predictable or classifiable.   She was just Catholic.  She was just faithful. 

In our contemporary American Church, where would Dorothy Day fit in?  Would her reaction to the coffee cup place her in a certain “camp”?  I doubt that either side of our polarized Church would be 100% comfortable with Dorothy.  And I doubt Dorothy would spend one minute worrying about it.

After writing this, I did some digging (not literally) and it seems that the most likely “true story” is somewhere in the middle (as usual).  Jim Forest, a close associate and biographer of Dorothy Day, writes that after the “coffee cup Mass”, Dorothy said nothing but simply buried the coffee cup (and the sandwich plate that was used as a paten!) in the back yard.  She was always happy to have a Mass and did not criticize the way the priest chose to celebrate it.  But as in all things, she wanted things to be right.  I also found this striking commentary about Dorothy, also by Jim Forest:

“We live in a post-Christian world.  Christian activity and Christian belief are not normal, even among Christians.  Most of us are constantly trying to conform ourselves to the people at the front of the crowd, so that our religious activities aren’t too ridiculous and too embarrassing and too isolating.  Dorothy Day was able to work through that and to find the place where she would be free to be a believer.  And when you are with one of those people, it hits you pretty hard.”

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For an updated version of this blog post, with memories by Jim Forest, click here.

Love Is My Name

“To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.  Love is my true identity.  Selflessness is my true self.  Love is my true character.  Love is my name.”

-- Thomas Merton