A Crash Course: Gratitude and Delight

The Boy with periodic table bow tie 

and cast members from The Circle of LIfe

The Boy is working for a local musical theater company (its alums include Tina Fey and one of the priests at my parish) which opened its 39th season today.  His paid work is for the marketing and publicity group, but he is also an unpaid assistant stage manager and has a role in the main stage production of Shrek.  Part of his job is to write about the program, and I have really enjoyed watching him chronicle his adventures.  Crash has blogged almost as long as I have (seven years), writing his way into and out of high school and college, but this is a new zone for The Boy.

The first three weeks have meant 14 hours days, but he leaves bouncing and comes home exhausted, but still grinning.  The hard work of getting a show cast and rehearsed and ready to perform in three weeks is done, but he writes that he has learned a lot.  I am touched by his sense of delight not only in performing but in running the small, but necessary errands.  If you ask him what he does, he says he solves "singular problems."  But I'm truly moved by the gratitude he expresses.  I'm incredibly proud of him.

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Summer has many small delights for which I am grateful, too.  Stratoz is writing here about a long day after which he walks to hear God speaking in the flowers, while Robin is writing about rediscovering wonder, and MaryBeth is praying to be still, praying to be.

Ignatian Spirituality: Give whirled peas a chance

Mateusz Tokaski Still Life with Pea

It's July, which means that Ignatian Spirituality is celebrating St. Ignatius' upcoming feast with 31 days of posts old and new.  The theme this year is finding God in unexpected places, and my reflection on encountering God's gentle sense of humor appeared last week.   I loved the layers of puns in the title the editor gave it:  God surprises in peas and teas

“You know I don’t eat anything green,” insisted my youngest son, pushing his plate of mashed potatoes, meat loaf, and green peas away from him with a single finger. Arms crossed, six-year-old Chris glared at me across the dining room table. His older brother stuck a fork in the meat loaf, and startled, peered more closely at his plate and grinned. He, at least, was on to me."

You can read the rest at DotMagis.

Tenth anniversary of the blog

Wordle made from text of this year's posts.

Ten years ago today, I wrote my first post for this blog.  In those ten years I have written 1150 posts, to which visitors have contributed 3200 comments.

There have been more than 200,000 visits to the blog over that time. The most visited day was 10 March this year, the most visited month was March of 2012 (when I was blogging through the Stations of the Cross).

Half my visitors arrive from ISPs in the US or Canada, but regular visitors arrive from France, the Phillipines, Zimbabwe and The Holy See.  The RevGalBlogPals, Ignatian Spirituality's Dot Magis,  and Robin's Beautiful and Terrible send me many visitors.

First post:  Podkayne's downfall

Most popular posts:
Verbing weirds language (why, I haven't the foggiest notion)

What happened to sugar cube replicas of the Forum?  (The tale of The Boy's Latin project, referenced on a list read by many Latin teachers)

Is it OK to plagiarize a homily? Discuss.  (No, of course it isn't...but people google it all the time)

Can you microwave duct tape?  (Lots of people want to know, but the post doesn't answer the question -- which must frustrate visitors)

Matins (about praying late at night and Hurricane Sandy's aftermath)

Column: Before all else give thanks  (with a bit of wisdom from my friend Wayne in the comments)

Tantum Quantum (Ignatian indifference meets reality on a snow day)

Thank you to all who visit, read, link, and share their own wisdom in the comments.  Thank you for helping me find my voice as a writer.  Thank you for walking the roads with me, through laundry and sleepless nights.  Through the Spiritual Exercises and back out again.  And I'm grateful for all those I have met, virtually and in real life, through the blog.  You have enriched my life in so many ways. 

Distraction-proof liturgy

There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town; they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd; and it is possible for those who are solitaries to live in the crowd of their own thoughts. — Amma Syncletica

The photo is of three rocks, set outside a tea house at a temple in Kyoto. The rocks would be set on the path when a tea ceremony was in progress, to keep passers-by from accidentally interrupting the proceedings.  

PrayTell posted my question about materials for engaging young children in the liturgy in their Non Solum feature.  It's a holiday weekend, so there hasn't been much discussion, but the little there has been is fascinating.  I asked about ways to engage children with the liturgy itself, not for strategies for keeping them amused while the rest of us participate.  But of the three comments there, two are about how to prevent children from being distractions (avoid liturgies at which they are present, don't bring loud toys for them).  

Can we distraction-proof a liturgy? Should we?  Push the children aside until they are "fully conscious" of what they are about (are any of us fully conscious of what we are about in this space?)?  What about the cell phones going off?  The man with dementia who mutters loudly during the homily?  Could we silence the hiss of the oxygen tank used by the man in the front row?  And even if we could get the distracting people out of the church, would we stop the train that rumbles by, a mere forty feet away from the ambo? I think not.

Perhaps the deeper question is how do we have Amma Syncletica's undistracted minds living in a crowded church?

Beyond the cry room: Missals and children at Mass

There is a photo of a pew card reassuring parents that their children are welcome at Mass making the rounds on social media.  The card suggests to parents that it is OK to sit in the front, and reminds others that our future is our children.  It made me think how we welcome families with young children.  Having once been ousted from a church before Mass even began, this is an issue that matters to me.

Many years ago, about five minutes before Mass was to start, my 2 year old's movements in the pew that we alone occupied were deemed too loud by the couple a few pews ahead. I note he was not talking, he was not putting the kneelers up and down, but he was putting his books down with a loud clunk.  In a liturgical space designed to amplify noise without a microphone, any noise is noisy. They complained to an usher and we were ushered out.  As I stopped to button his coat in the entrance to the church, tears were running down my face.  I was mortified. I was distraught at being denied communion.  The sacristan stopped me, wondering what was wrong.  I explained, remarkably calmly, scooped up Crash and left. Welcome, it seemed, we were not.

(The irony of this is that Crash now has a reputation of being a stealth altar server.  He moves through the space of the liturgy, doing what needs doing, without fuss.  He almost slips between the molecules of air.)

In my parish, we baptize at Mass, and the assembly is asked to support the parents in raising their children in the faith.  We can certainly make families feel welcome by tolerating the noise they make, and the inevitable wriggling that comes with children. (I can remember telling Math Man that prayer was a full body workout when the boys were very young.) But how else do we help families bring children into the fullness of their faith?

Missals?  We have hymnals and missalettes available (on the back table, not in the pews) for adults but nothing for children of any age.  There is a basket of random books in the back of the vestibule, many of them religious, but with a definite admixture of Disney.  Why don't we have a children's missal tucked in every pew?  Or in a basket on the back table next to the missalettes?  Why isn't there a list of books on the Mass that parents could purchase in a flyer in the back, with reviews by our catechetical staff?

And why aren't there good missals for children, particularly young ones.  This is my missal from when I was very young (and yes, I could still lay hands on it fifty years later, on the shelf with the rest of my missal collection).  The Mass was still in Latin.  It's illustrated by a well known sacred artist, there are sketches to let me follow the action, the facing pages connected the Mass to scriptural sources, with a rich illustration.  It is a beautiful and dignified prayer book, something I'm hard pressed to say about this or this. Why should not children have access to missals that are, like the books used to to celebrate the liturgy, " truly worthy, dignified, and beautiful" [GIRM 349]?  And sturdy -- our faith isn't flimsy!