Rube Goldberg mornings

 

I like a good Rube Goldberg machine, I do. Push the marble down the track and zip, ping, zap, eventually the cat's food pours into the dish. Or whatever. But the unplanned machines can be a mess...

This morning I went to put away the clean dishes from last night's dinner. The sheet pan had been set down on a wet soapy counter. It was stuck. I pulled it off. My elbow knocked over my water glass sitting by the sink spilling water. The glass straw from the cup hit one of my favorite tea cups*. Which fell into the sink and broke.  And I cried.

*The tea cup was from the pandemic, depicting all manner of calamities in a classic Delft blue. It always made me laugh.

What do you think of our news coverage?

The little box popped up in the lower left of my iPad screen, “What do you think of our news coverage?”

The article was headlined “Name, phone, address…” and described a Ukrainian mother writing her name and phone number on her very young child before they evacuated. Just in case. Just in case they were separated.  Just in case her parents were killed. She would have her identity, know a bit about her parents, just in case.

What do I think of this news coverage? I am mortified by it. I am unable to keep my voice from cracking as I try to talk to my own child, home on a brief visit, standing in the kitchen — an adult. I want to say that I remember the time he went to a protest where they told him to write his name and a contact on his arm in black Sharpie. Just in case. I want to say that if we were fleeing such destruction that I could see myself standing in the kitchen grabbing the Sharpie I keep in the pencil cup on the counter, writing names and phone numbers on my children. Just in case. But now I am weeping openly, and I cannot choke out the words out to explain why. So I flee the room. 

What do I think of this news coverage? I think that I am weeping again as I write this. 

A Grief Observed

Twenty-five years ago tonight, I collapsed into bed, wrung out, exhausted and utterly unable to sleep. My memories of the day remain fragmentary. Standing in the back of the parish church, reaching out to help Fr. John pull the white pall over Tom's casket; standing at the ambo to read; my father holding me up as the hearse pulled away from the church. Strangely, my memories of the church are as entirely empty, no one in the pews, stark white walls, like the flashback in some B movie.

Back at the house, my former post-doctoral advisor awkwardly trying to comfort me, not knowing what to say, but willing to try nonetheless. My mother, worried about her elderly father holding up. The shattered look on my father-in-law's face, fallen in on himself. Of my finally sitting down in the living room, incapable of mustering another word to anyone, unable to stand. I had not the strength left to weep.

I've been married to Victor almost 20 years, have two incredible sons who would never have been born if Tom's heart had not held that fatal flaw. Still, the joy does not obliterate the pain, does not blunt the memories. But nor can the pain mar the joy of loves present — and past. Both mingle, like the water and the wine, one cup of grace to be drunk. With courage. For courage. In love.

Tonight I have the strength to weep. For what I have lost. For what I have been given. A full measure of grace, packed down and overflowing.

Via Crucis VIII: That our tears might soak the ground

Jesus meets the daughters of Jerusalem. Weep; weep that our tears might soak the ground until this dry and barren land can once again sustain life.

The gift of tears in prayer was one that the desert fathers cherished and that the Eastern tradition continues to acknowledge (the purpose of the tassel on the end of an Orthodox prayer rope is to soak up the tears of one's prayer, for instance). In Ignatius' day, ardent Jesuits hoped for the gift of tears, though as Ignatius, graced at times with this gift, notes in a letter, be careful what you pray for, it might more difficult than you anticipate. Modern mystics who, as Ignatius puts it, "melt into tears," might be a bit more disconcerted than their medieval counterparts. Gabriel Bunge OSB writes beautifully about this gift, set into the context of the desert fathers and mothers, in In Earthern Vessels, while Mike Hayes of Googling God reflects on his open experiences here.

Meditation is from the feature published in the March issue of the Catholic Standard & Times. Follow the meditations under the tab above: Via Crucis: Meditation on the Passion.

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To see a detail from the luminous Stations of the Cross at St. Basil's Chapel at the University of Houston, see here.