The sound of cherry trees blooming

There is a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō, a 17th century Japanese poet, about a frog and a pond:

An old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water

On Saturday afternoon Math Man, Crash and I went to see the famed Japanese cherry blossoms in Washington DC along the tidal basin.  I had a meeting in DC starting the next day, and by some miracle, the trees were at "peak bloom" so on the spur of the moment, off we went.  Along with a million other people.

Bryn Mawr's campus has some beautiful old cherry trees on it, and Math Man was imagining a serene walk around the tidal basin admiring the blooms.  It was about as Zen a walk as my first visit to the iconic Ryoanji in Kyoto.  People, so many people, in such a small strip of land.  Horns blasting, buses thrumming, traffic cops' whistles tweeting, helicopters buzzing us.

White blossoms open
to the late afternoon sun
with a sigh.  Beep!  Screech!

We can now say we've seen the cherry blossoms, but we've booked a date to walk around Bryn Mawr on a warm evening, when the trees are in bloom, and experience them.

Column: An act of faith, constantly repeated

Mary Magdalene is venerated as "the apostle to the apostles," first to see the risen Lord, first to proclaim the resurrection.  One meaning of Magdala is tower and I enjoy the sense of Mary the Tower as a complement to Peter the Rock.  The Church may be built on Peter, but Mary ignited it with these words, "I have seen the Lord."

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly on 8 April 2015.

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Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and what he told her. John 20:18

A musical friend posted on her Facebook feed, “Jesus is risen, but the music ministry has collapsed in exhaustion.” I, too, had gone home after the Easter Vigil, wearily joyous after a long week of work peppered with rehearsals, liturgies and three late nights of vigil. Following a night of trumpet blasts, where our voices shook the walls of the church, Easter day was quiet and still.

This morning I laid my breviary on the kitchen counter, and while the water came to a boil and my tea brewed, prayed Morning Prayer for Easter before I went to work. The Church celebrates Easter as an octave, eight full days of feasting, so each morning, the prayers replay Easter. The same psalms. The same antiphons. A sparkling feast hiding within an ordinary day.

Did this Easter change anything for me? Or exhausted from Easter, will I let the brilliant alleluias fade from my consciousness? I find myself wondering what happened to Mary Magdalene, who in John’s Gospel encounters the newly risen Christ in the garden. Can I proclaim with such calm certainty what she did that Easter morning: “I have seen the Lord”?

Last week Pope Francis reminded us that as Christians we are called to be “sentinels of the morning.” We should be people who know how to see Christ, not just on an altar, suspended high in a glittering chalice, but in our ordinary days, planted in the middle of the aisle at the Acme and huddled on a street corner in Philadelphia.

Dorothy Day, who established the Catholic Worker movement in the early 20th century, wrote that many people wondered how she was able to see Christ in the people she served and served with. “It is an act of faith,” she said, “constantly repeated.”

The octave celebration of Easter, with its continually repeating round of prayer mixed into my daily routine, is a powerful reminder to me that Christ is risen, here and now, in the everyday as much as in the glorious liturgies of Easter. And that good news is to be proclaimed again and again, here is Christ, among us. Here is Christ, in need. Here is Christ, come and receive.

It is an act of faith, constantly repeated: I have seen the Lord. And once I have seen him, how can I not bend down to anoint his feet with perfumes, or to offer him a meal, or something to drink when he thirsts?

May the Light we carried into the Church on Easter never be exhausted, but still be found burning in the day and months to come.

The Food Babe versus the Science Babe: Of Beaver Butts and Bullsh*t

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for Slate about the Food Babe's tactics, prompted by the flurry of publicity for her new book, The Food Babe Way.  I pointed out the Food Babe's strategy of "malicious metonymy" whereby she deliberately confuses the source or use of something with the molecules.  So instead of reason you get "because beaver butts," her favorite example being that vanilla ice cream might contain castoreum, a  purportedly vanilla scented natural flavoring extracted from sacs found in beavers (yes, near their butts): "Readers of my blog know that the next time you lick vanilla ice cream from a cone, there’s a good chance you’ll be swirling secretions from a beaver’s anal glands around in your mouth." There is not, and here is why.

"While in low concentrations castoreum reputedly tastes of vanilla with a hint of raspberry, I’ll admit I’ve never tasted it. Not because I’m particularly disgusted by the source—I eat animal products and am inordinately fond of the fermented genitalia of Theobroma cacao—but because of its scarcity and cost. Enough castoreum extract to replace the vanilla in a half-gallon of ice cream would cost $120. Worldwide, less than 500 pounds of castoreum is harvested annually from beaver pelts, compared with the more than 20 million pounds of vanilla extracted from the ovaries of Vanilla planifolia orchids each year. Perfumers, not ice cream manufacturers, are the real market for castoreum. So while beaver secretions just might be in the expensive perfume you dabbed on your pulse points or in the aftershave you splashed on your face—did you just touch that with your hands, yuck—rest easy, there is no chance that the pint of ice cream you picked up at the store contains it. Not at the price you paid for it." -- read the rest at Slate.

The Science Babe took on the Food Babe yesterday in Gawker - neatly taking apart each of her standard tropes, with references to others who have done the same. The Food Babe wasn't happy and shot back.  Her response to the Science Babe, who has a long history of debunking her claims, begins with a nasty ad hominem attack.  But none of Food Babe's rant changes the science, or the history.

No Food Babe, nitrogen is not an additive to air in airplanes mixed in by evil airlines (up to 50% oh dear!), we breathe 80% nitrogen all the time.

No Food Babe, the microwave was not used by the German army in WW II, even Wikipedia knows it was invented after WW II.

Yes, Food Babe, that "MSG free tomato soup" you tout on your blog contains 400 mg of glutamate and a lot of sodium, which makes?  Monosodium glutamate.  MSG.

And did you know that Food Babe recommends high daily doses of oxidane, laced with 2-methyl-5-(6-methylhept-5-en-2-yl)cyclohexa-1,3-diene?  Write her now and demand that she confess to drinking chemicals with gross and hard to pronounce names.

Eat naturally, but eat knowledgeably.

Vigils, again

In the early hours of Holy Thursday, 28 years ago, I sat vigil in a darkened hospital lounge.  My breviary and I had been separated early on, but I prayed the hours from memory, scraping the psalms from a battered Bible found on a table in the hallway.  I came back again and again to the scene in the garden, "take this cup" alternating with "I will drink it if you say so." I shook with the cold, or perhaps the shock of it all. The sounds of the hospital were muted, and I was aware of how helpless I was, though Tom was in surgery just a few yards away, there was nothing I could do. He surely did not know I was there.  But I could pray, I could keep watch.

This year, in those early hours, I was awake again, curled up on an air mattress in a dim hallway at a local shelter,  wrapped in a sleeping bag.  Cold. And keeping vigil — again.  The little ones were restless, many of them with colds.  A baby woke up every 30 to 40 minutes, the mothers' voices, hushed, exhausted and taut. And I woke, too.  There was nothing I could do, a stranger in the middle of the night is no comfort to a crying child when their mother is there.  But I could pray.  I could keep watch.

I have an icon of Christ in prison on my desk at the moment.  He slumps on a bench.  Alone, exhausted, pulled taut between heaven and earth. I wonder who was keeping watch at that moment, surely his mother was awake and praying. What were the women who would so faithfully remain with him the next day doing?  I imagine them awake, too.  Being present when there was nothing to be done. Except pray.  And keep watch.

To keep vigil is a powerful lesson in "being" rather than "doing."

Keeping vigil

I came to church tonight to stay.  I came early and sat at the foot of the altar, looking back at the rose window of Our Mother of Good Counsel, enjoying the light washing the walls with soft, deep colors, and the stillness.

I stayed through the briefing for the Easter Vigil, taking blocking notes for Crash, who will be an altar server, but tonight is still at Wonderful Jesuit University, madly writing papers.

The light had left by the time I headed to the old school on the parish grounds, stopping to grab my sleeping bag on the way.  I'm taking a turn as portress at the shelter here, keeping vigil over the Body of Christ, in these little ones and their mothers. Tomorrow night, I'll be back here, on the other side of the parking lot, keeping vigil again with Christ, in a chapel filled with light and flowers, a stark contrast to the toys and paper cups stacked on the plain table here tonight.

This space is no less sacred, no less imbued with God than the chapel whose walls I can see from my station at the door.  Stay here with me, I hear Christ saying, remain here with me.  Watch.  Pray.