Woman on the edge

"She's a woman on the edge," I hear my surgeon say, as in scooting onto the operating table, I missed the mark and nearly went spilling onto the floor. She, the anesthesiologist and I had been talking about quantum mechanics on the way to the OR. I'm dressed in a Bair Paws gown (a very funky outfit that allows them to plug you into a warming hose and stay warm before surgery - it reminded me of when I was small, living outside of Chicago, and would stand in my nightgown on the hot air vents in the living room floor to get warm on winter mornings) and am wearing a silver hat also designed to help me retain heat (the nurse called it a Jiffy Pop hat and it's an apt description). The 6-ft plus anesthesiologist is holding my IV high in the air, towering over both me and the surgeon. We must have made quite a procession.

I was trying so hard not to be nervous, but when they hooked me up to the monitors, my secret was out. My usual pulse rate is between 60 and 65 - in the OR? 102. The last things I remember as I went under, were my surgeon holding my hand, and of praying the litany of the saints. Next thing I know, I'm in the recovery room - with a big sticker on my gown that said "Star Patient". I still don't know what I did to deserve that, since I proceeded to feel very "high maintenance" in the recovery unit. Suffice it to say I was glad of modern chemistry and medicine, and of a good friend willing to sit there through it all.

The team at home was sweet in their own ways. I woke to find a tray placed on the bed next to me, with a bowl of mashed potatoes and a cold drink (no napkin - we're talking men in the kitchen). Math Man had to go to back-to-school night for the mandatory choral meeting, so the boys reminded me how to use the cordless phones as an intercom system, in case I needed anything.

Since I'd sworn to the discharge nurse I would not get up without a spotter, when I needed to use the bathroom, I called up Barnacle Boy - who very gently took my arm. Then he pops out with "I don't have to say in there with you, do I??" "No sweetheart..." all the while thinking of those years not so long ago when he'd come popping right in the bathroom door without knocking, or decide to chat me up while I was in the shower. I think he's growing up!

Later, Barnacle Boy decided that the cat sleeping on top of me was photo material, grabbed my camera and clicked away. This morning I looked - the cat is indeed cute, I on the other hand look like something the cat dragged in.

The Psalms are in our bones

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times 25 September 2008]

This piece had its formal genesis in the reflection I wrote a couple of Sundays ago for the RevGalBlogPals. I couldn't let go of the images of Gannet Girl grieving, and simply decided that I should not. The night after Tom died, I woke up crying in the night. My mother held me, repeating over and over again that she knew there was nothing she could to take away the pain, but that she would be with me. The psalms don't necessarily bring comfort or ease in grief, but like my mother, everyone who prays them, is with me, and with each other. Can we be with others in their inconsolable grief?

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At the sight of her tears, and those of the Jews who followed her, Jesus said in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart, “Where have you put him?” They said, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. — Jn. 11:33-35


A friend lost her son last week, dragged from a long awaited retreat in silence into a maelstrom of pain. Over and over people told her that they could not imagine her grief. Perhaps what we really meant was that we did not want to experience her grief ourselves.

Returning to Bethany to find his friends Martha and Mary mourning their brother Lazarus, Jesus did not fail to imagine their grief, to experience this pain, though He could, and would, wipe it away in an instant. Jesus wept.

My friend sought the psalms in her grief. Not the green pastures and clear streams of Psalm 23, but the penetrating, inescapable love of Psalm 139. “If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there,” she prays.

Father Joseph Gelineau, S.J., whose now familiar psalm tones regrounded us in our own ancient chant traditions, said in his introduction to the Grail Psalter, “[the psalms] force us to widen our hearts to the full dimensions of redemption."

The psalms give us a way to voice the anguishes we have not experienced, the joys that might have never been ours, the fears that besiege and beset those around us. They force us to widen our hearts, and like Christ with Martha and Mary, be willing to go beyond acknowledging another’s pain, and imagine it. The psalms let us weep with each other.

In this way the psalms become for us more than the sacred songs of a generation long past, they are our own voices ringing in the wilderness of everyday life. As Andre Chouraqi, a distinguished Jewish theologian and linguist, noted, “We were born with this book in our very bones … 150 poems … 150 mirrors of our agonies and our resurrections.”

Literally, of course, the psalms are the skeleton upon which the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church’s daily work of prayer, hangs. On a deeper level, I find this image of the psalms as bones reminds me that these “150 mirrors” are not a superstructure shielding us from the difficulties of each other’s lives, nor are they an exoskeleton that bounds our growth.

Instead, they hold up for us what we need to see in our own lives, in the lives of those around us. They support us while we grow, through these shared experiences of joys and sorrows, virtues and transgressions.

As I prayed Psalm 139 this week, for my friend and for her son, it brought me back to the dark hours of a Holy Thursday more than 20 years ago. I sat in a hospital waiting room, facing the news that my husband would not live to see the morning. My breviary had disappeared in the chaos of the night before, but the psalms turned out to be in my bones and therefore my memory. When I could not hope, Psalm 30 could hope for me: “At night there are tears, but joy comes with dawn.”

The psalms still give voice to my griefs, my joys, my angers, my failings, my triumphs — they hold me up. They are my very bones. Through them we hold each other up. They are our very bones.

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Lord God, deepen our faith, strengthen our hope, enkindle our love: and so that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command. We make our prayer through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
— from Evening Prayer I, 30th Sunday in Ordinary time, Liturgy of the Hours

Home

...and relieved of my previously circular worries. Now just my head is going in circles...

Circular Anxiety

Tomorrow I'm scheduled for surgery. It's not huge, it's not life-threatening, it should be life improving - but it's general anesthesia. I'm anxious -- not about having the surgery, about not having the surgery. I'm anxious that it will get postponed at the last minute and I'll have to be anxious all over again. And what anxiety would that be...that it would be put off again. And so on ad infinitum...

Time to take up a contemplation on redemptive suffering...

All Who Hunger

The photo is of my mother - dressed in her First Communion finery, putting a crown of flowers on a statue of Mary. The veil was almost floor length on me (I was much shorter than my mom at the same age - or ever for that matter!)

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times 18 September 2008]

“Sir,” they said, “give us that bread always.” Jesus answered: “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not be hungry; He who believes in me shall never thirst.”
Jn. 6:34-35

Thinking back, I imagine my mother just wanted to reduce the odds for my father. She was teaching the CCD First Communion class on Sunday mornings, and taking me along meant my dad only had to chase after three little ones — not four. At 6, I, at least, could be counted on to sit quietly in the back of the classroom and read.

When spring came, bringing with it first confessions and Communions, I asked my mother why I wasn’t making my first Communion, too. “You’ll learn about it all next year and make yours next spring,” she comforted me.

“But I learned all about it this year,” I wailed. Which is when my mother discovered that instead of amusing myself with Dr. Seuss in the back, I’d been listening to her. I had learned along with her students, and like them, I was hungry to meet Christ in the Eucharist. Now. At 6, waiting another year seemed impossible.

An interview with the pastor convinced him I’d been paying attention, too. Forty-three years ago this week, on the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary, wearing the same veil my mother had, I received my first Communion with little fanfare and great joy at the regular Sunday Mass.

A few months ago, I stood as a sponsor for a young woman convert. Standing before the community who had shared daily Mass and morning prayer with her for the last year, she received her Lord for the first time. Afterward, as I knelt beside her, I struggled to remember my own longing for that moment, for the only bread that would satisfy.

Later this summer, two consecutive Sundays found me too far from civilization to be able to get to church. Mea culpa, I missed Mass. And miss it, I did; my hunger took me quite by surprise. So when a fellow scientist (an astronomer at the Vatican observatory, no less) leaned conspiratorially across the dinner table at a conference the following weekend, and said, “I found a parish with a 7 a.m. Mass — want to go?” I was ready. Even if it meant a two-mile walk each way — since neither of us had a car!

Here on my home ground, with five parishes within a few minutes drive, I can go to Mass and receive the Eucharist every Sunday and any day I wish. In the midst of such riches, I had forgotten how to hunger. It took an unintentional fast to help me rediscover it.

Alfred Delp was a Jesuit priest executed by the Nazis in 1945. He was beaten, sleep deprived and starved, of food and of the Eucharist. Two months after he was arrested, friends bribed a guard to bring him bread and wine to celebrate Mass with. In a letter smuggled out with the laundry he wrote, “[t]he experience that a piece of bread can be a great grace is a new one for me.” Physical hunger opened him to “discover ever new sides to God.”

This summer, God took advantage of my absence from the celebration of the Eucharist to remind me that there are graces to be discovered in hunger, as well as in plenty. Now, when I begin each morning with the Augustinian community, I can remember again what it is to long for life and its very source, as we pray together:

O Sacrament of love, sign of our unity, bond of our community, whoever longs for life, has here its very source, let him come here and believe, united with You and live. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood, will live in Me and I in him.