by Mary | Jun 9, 2009 | parenting
My post from OSV Daily Take today:
Jennifer over at Conversion Diary has posted a moving interview with the parents of Sunni, a severely disabled little girl who cannot do anything for herself. Their love for her, their acceptance of their role as parents, and their conversion from pro-choice to pro-life in the face of such suffering is inspiring.
“When asked how he created such stunning works of art, a famous sculptor once said that he instills in his mind a clear image of the form and then removes everything that is not a part of it. In a way, God has shorn from Sunni nearly all of the adornments that would be considered part of a basic human life. She cannot act on her own, communicate, or possibly understand even simple concepts. She is left as a nearly pure example of human life without anything to distract us from its elegant beauty.”
Click HERE to read Jennifer’s full interview with Sunni’s parents about what it means to raise a severely disabled daughter in a society that often looks at her and thinks abortion would have been the better choice.
by Mary | Jun 9, 2009 | Italy
I found this cool blog today — Mom’s Night Out — thanks to Michelle over at Bleeding Espresso. I’m already hooked. This blogger mom sounds like an amazing woman, who is, like many of the rest of us, trying to live a good and spiritual life while wrestling with the earthly muck we often find ourselves in.
Go check it out by clicking HERE.
And while you’re hopping around, click HERE and stop by Bleeding Espresso, where you will find amazing photos, book reviews, recipes and all sorts of wonderful stories about Italy — the place I most want to visit in the world. Some day…
by Mary | Jun 8, 2009 | Uncategorized
Lately I’ve been obsessed with balance, or my inability to achieve balance in my life. Something about my interior conversation sounded all too familiar, and then I remembered this blog post from almost exactly one year ago. Maybe it’s just the time of year…
Here’s a “best of” from Not Strictly Spiritual:
Why, you may ask, is someone who writes about Christian spirituality using a Taoist Yin Yang symbol as art? (I also happen to wear a little yin-yang in my right ear lobe — right next to my cross earring.) Well, the easy answer is that it’s all part of the Tao of Mary. My years of dabbling in Eastern philosophy still cling to the periphery of my spiritual life. Not because I’m looking for something outside the Christian Way, but because I find so many elements of Eastern spirituality to be a beautiful supplement to our own practices. The whole notion of Yin Yang — that opposing but complementary aspects of our lives can happily co-exist — is something so basic and, well, Christian, to me. We cannot separate our lives into individual and isolated boxes. Spirituality here, work there, exercise here. They have to overlap and exist in a kind of healthy tension. If they don’t, we end up with everything slipping to one side, figuratively speaking, and suddenly our Yin is left without a Yang, and that’s never good.
I first discovered the ability of Eastern practices to further my Western prayer when I learned Hatha yoga many years ago. Hatha is another Yin Yang sort of philosophy, focusing on the opposing energies of hot and cold, sun and moon. Hatha yoga is about preparing the physical body for a spiritual experience. Not necessarily something mystical but something beyond the norm, whether our “norm” is sitting in a chair with a remote control in hand or driving a car down the highway at 65 MPH with the radio blaring.
Try sitting in one spot — without moving — for just 15 minutes right now and you’ll quickly realize that your body does not want to sit still, and your mind wants to sit still even less. Suddenly you have an urge to move your foot, scratch your ear, stretch your neck. At the same time, your mind is reliving every event it can conjure up from preschool to the present. No wonder it’s so hard to pray. We need to learn to quiet our bodies if we can ever hope to quiet our minds and hear God.
But I digress. Wasn’t this post supposed to be about balancing the secular and spiritual? The point of this rambling monologue is that our lives have to be about balance. We cannot expect, unless we plan to enter a cloister or become a hermit, to go through life without the pull of the secular world inserting itself into our attempts to be more spiritually centered. The key, I think, is to learn to find a way to balance those two vital elements of our lives, to allow the Yin of contemplation and meditation to sidle up to the Yang of work and socializing and whatever else we find vying for our attention.
I wish I could learn to integrate the two in a healthier way. I find that when I’m working on prayer, I want everything to be spiritual — my reading, my podcasts, my conversations, my music. But then, when I realize that my spiritual quest has left the garden overrun with weeds and my treadmill covered in dust, I shift gears and focus on those things. The problem is that the prayer part recedes to the point of disappearing.
So where to begin? I think the first thing we need to do is be gentle with ourselves and realize that this back and forth, two steps forward and one step back, is all part of our human journey through life. It would be completely unreasonable for me, the mother of three active young children, to think that my spiritual life could rival that of someone who lives her life in full-time contemplation. We have all been called to different vocations, and our job is to live that vocation as prayerfully as possible, not to live according to someone else’s calling.
On that note, I’ve decided at the spur of the moment to link to a favorite old column of mine, one that talks a lot about this very subject. If you haven’t already dozed off, click HERE and see what else I have to say. Can you believe I’m still talking? Don’t answer that.
by Mary | Jun 5, 2009 | prayer
All three of my children have attended a wonderful Montessori preschool program in town, run by a Catholic couple who really bring a sense of joy and wonder and respect and peace to the little school. I missed the school’s closing picnic last night because I was off attending a Girl Scout training session. And one of the things I missed most is the closing circle, when all the parents and kids and teachers stand side by side and sing songs before closing with the Universal Prayer for Peace by Mahatma Ghandi.
So I want to share that prayer with you today. (Try to imagine two classes of fidgety 3- and 4- year-olds saying these words accompanied by gently flowing hand motions. Just precious.) May your Friday be filled with blessings.
I offer you peace. I offer you love.
I offer you friendship.
I hear your cry. I see your beauty.
I feel your pain.
My wisdom flows from a higher source.
I salute that source in you.
Let us work together.
by Mary | Jun 3, 2009 | Uncategorized
I was driving Chiara to school the other morning when I noticed a thought for the day on the message board at the local Episcopal church. It said:
What if God is waiting for you to send Him a sign?
The first time I drove by, I smiled at the cleverness of the message and thought about how often we humans demand visible signs of God’s love, interest, attention, existence. I don’t know what we expect — perhaps flashes of light, sky writing, rose petals falling from the clouds — but we expect something. Instead we get quiet, silence, what seems like nothing to our finite minds, even if there are subtle signs present all around us in the ordinary details of our lives.
When I drove by the same sign later in the day, the message started to sink in a little deeper. I found myself pondering it as I drove home, turning it around in my mind. I liked it and I wanted to explore exactly why I liked it, especially since I usually don’t have much use for church message boards, no matter how clever the quote.
I liked it because as soon as I read the message I knew that, despite being clever, it was also true. God is always patiently waiting — for us to pray, for us to trust, for us to listen, for us to believe so deeply that our very lives become a sign of His love.
Unlike the human demand for a sign — I’ll believe if you…get me this job, cure my illness, give me a baby, sell my house — God’s waiting has no conditions attached. He waits. Has waited since before time began. Has waited since before we began. Will wait until after we are long gone.
Just the other day, Chiara was crying because she thought she had done something that would upset me. After a difficult few minutes, I hugged her and said, “There is nothing you could ever do that will make me love you less. I will love you for all time, no matter what.”
And as soon as I said it I knew that the kind of love I was talking about is the kind of love the Father has for each one of us. There is nothing we can do that will make Him love us more or less than He already does. Unconditional love. Unconditional acceptance. Still, I’m sure he’d appreciate a sign now and then.
