Silent Night

Silence is pretty much the last word I would generally associate with my childhood experiences of Christmas.  Singing, yes.  Laughter (that of my 40+ cousins and second cousins etc. and egg-nog enjoying uncles and older cousins), yes.  Ripping paper as our "let's open one at a time" plan fails yet again, yes.  Silence, not so much.

However, I married a man that values silence or quiet immensely in his daily life and especially in regards to religious celebrations and holidays.  That is certainly not to say that he doesn't enjoy being surrounded by family.  He just doesn't like all the extra distracting noise that often times comes with the Christmas season (especially incessant chipmunk versions of Christmas carols blasting across every radio station).

I tend to get caught up in the noise--it helps provide the excitement I sometimes don't feel as I do chores around the house, or in the case of music, it almost keeps me company at times.  I have to work to value silence and to create silent times in my life.  Once I do, I love it.  I just have to stop the continual whir in my head for long enough to relax, and then the silence is, quite honestly, heavenly.

If you're like me, perhaps you too will find this  reflection by the Bishop of Aberdeen to be just about perfect as I did.

Things that struck me from the article linked above:

• The Kierkegaard quotation: "And even if it were trumpeted forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God."
• Wow!!!  Yet, so true.  God is not a commercial product to be advertised.  He is a person to be known and adored.  I think this phenomenon is why the "facebook b/t Joseph and Mary" video bothers me so much.  It almost trivializes the Birth of Christ to have Him announced the way any party or product would be at this time of year.  God sent angels to sing His praise.  The least I can do is to sing His praise with my family--reading the story of the Incarnation to my little guy, placing our nativity set in a place of honor, and distancing myself from the temptation to materialism that threatens to invade every gift given to honor a friendship or loved one.
• The verse from Wisdom 18:14-15, "When a deep silence covered all things and night was in the middle of its course, your all-powerful Word, O Lord, leapt from heaven's royal throne."
• As a confirmed logophile, I can't even express how beautiful this imagery is!  It rivals anything drawn by the best poets of our language.
• As a Christian, I find so much to reflect on here that in the midst of silence and night, God speaks His saving Word.  And He speaks it with a joy that leaps to take a humble place as a lowly human in a stable.  How much more should I be jumping to seize opportunities for humility and service in my life if this is my model and my Creator??
• The reflections on praying before and after Mass.
• For many years this too was my constant habit.  I craved the time for reflection before and after receiving my Lord and Savior.  Now, we're lucky to get to Mass several minutes beforehand and get JT somewhat settled before the service starts.  At the end, JT is ready to sprint out the door (and so is whichever parent he has frustrated the most during Mass as we try to teach him to be still and quiet during Mass).  I still desire that time for reflection, but I'm not sure that I'm going to get it at Mass while my children are little.  It's starting to make more and more sense why my mom has sacrificed sleep for years to wake up early to pray and work out--if that's really a priority and need in her life, that's the only time it's going to happen!
• "Christ looks for silence."
• This Christmas I'm going to seek to give the Christ-child a silent heart.  A heart that is waiting for Him expectantly and without murmuring voices of complaint, sarcasm, and criticism sneaking in to invade.  And I think that will take more preparation for me in this last week than all my other gifts combined . . .

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Simple Joys

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” - G.K.Chesterton

 This quotation is so inspiring to me as the mother of a 2 year old boy who LOVES to read Dr. Seuss over and over and play the same games and the same songs ad infinitum.  Some days, I can just do the first few repeats and then he gets going on his own without need for further involvement.  Then, there are days (like today) when he needs me to be just as excited as he is for an extended period of time.

Today we started "hard core" potty training.  My dear mommy friend tells me I'm silly as anything to see this as a major undertaking, but patience and endurance have not always been my strong points, especially when the "ick" factor is involved.  However, JT is successfully going in his potty (after 3 accidents and one "use the potty insert to dump water from the toilet all over the bathroom floor" incident during the one moment mommy was distracted cleaning something else around the corner.)  And despite the laundry, I'm really kinda loving it.  He gets so much joy out of being "grown up," and my own repeat enthusiasm is not an act--I'm truly proud of my little man.

Sometimes I feel like I must be ridiculous to God.  I come to Him with such little problems and successes looking for help and affirmation.  But I feel that, like Chesterton's analogy regarding His child-like, unfatigued joy, that Our Lord is also the perfect parent to each of us in constantly delighting in our small steps towards full maturity of heart.

I never get tired of hearing the ones I love say, "I love you;" the repetition of love is never monotony.  So perhaps I need to ask God to transform my view of the dishes and constantly crumby kitchen floor as opportunities to express love, not as sources of monotonous action.  May the God of endless joy help me also to be "strong enough to exult in monotony."

Language and Liturgy

This week marked the introduction of an over-due, full translation of the Latin into the vernacular English for the Catholic Mass.  I love the depth and beauty of the new language!  Responding to "Peace be with you," by saying, "And with your spirit," (instead of "And also with you") immediately helps me to focus on the fact that Christ's peace is interior and transcendent--a matter of the spirit--not a vague hope for physical comfort.

I've often heard the matter of language within liturgy and prayer debated.  Some will look to Christ's parable which contrasts the eloquent, boastful rabbi vs. the simple, sincere sinner and say that all prayer should be simple and child-like.  Christ Himself said that we must be like little children to enter the Kingdom of God.  Yet, while I would agree that rhetorical value is not to be valued over authenticity within prayer, I also think that beauty (including beauty of language) and specificity in the portrayal of truth can be an aid to prayer by engaging our emotions and our intellect in our worship.  I enjoyed some of the reflections of Fr. DeSouza on this topic.  He compares the following prayers:


For example, at Mass today we have this properly translated prayer: Stir up your power, O Lord, and come to our help with mighty strength, that what our sins impede the grace of your mercy may hasten. Compare that to the previous version: Father, we need your help. Free us from sin and bring us to life. Support us by your power.

The new translation is INFINITELY superior for reflection. I think I could use just that prayer for my reflection for the whole day . . . the power of God, His desire to assist us in our weakness, the way our iniquities prevent us from receiving His grace . . .  The first one gives me my same old complaints, a vague concept of sin vs. life, and a line about God's strength that sounds equally applicable to a Spanx commercial.  Thank God for the people who have diligently worked over the course of several years so that we could be drawn into deeper contemplation of the mysteries of our Faith!

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Thanksgiving: Labor, Laziness, or Liesure?

Reading Pieper's Liesure the Basis of Culture today, I stumbled upon the following quotations from Thomas Aquinas:
"The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult."  "Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more meritorious; it must be more difficult in such a way that it is at the same time good in yet a higher way."

I'm the sort of ENTP personality that only discovers truth in the way that other people discover grave injury; truth tends to broadside me like 2x4 and then in the smart afterwards I recollect that this new idea has a profound influence on my life.  And thus, this strange person before you approaches Thanksgiving with a myriad of new thoughts . . .

I tend to approach life according to the fallacy of "harder is better."  My husband honestly had to stop my effusion of ideas for Thanksgiving dinner and forbid me from making half of it.  [Ironically, the things that remained on the list to be made from scratch are all his favorite foods.]  In my mind, I'm not truly "hosting" Thanksgiving dinner if I am not in the kitchen all day creating a culinary masterpiece.  Naturally, I also think this would be a grand weekend to potty-train JT.  If harder is better, than my break looks like a perfect recipe for success.

Yet, Aquinas argues that this attitude is warped.  Pieper explains, "The highest moral good is characterized by effortlessness--because it springs from love.  The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love."  My notion of "loving" my family is more focused on the effort involved than on creating the proper environment of rest and relaxation when my family arrives from a tedious trek down the coastline all day.  Alice vonHildebrand would say I'm missing the "theme" of the moment by setting my schedule to a pace beyond that which would best answer the needs of the ones loved and expected.  This is as if my family were hoping to listen to Handle's "Water Music" and were met instead by the "William Tell Overture" on full volume.

Yet, in his reflections on leisure, neither does Pieper desire that I be lazy and idle around the house all day.  In fact, before our maniacal society made frenzied work the ideal, unnecessary labor was seen as the product of restlessness stemming from laziness.  Kierkegaard went so far in condemning this acedia to define it as the "despairing refusal to be oneself!"  Perhaps, our society no longer understands true leisure so we are lazy in our "time off;" many of us can't handle the ennui of leisure as nothingness, so we find ways to make ourselves busy unnecessarily.  At least the work makes us feel more "ourselves" than sitting passively in front of a tv does.

So, I have bought paper plates to replace the fine ones and delegated 1/3 of the dinner to others . . . now, how ought I spend a day in leisure with my family?  Let's turn back to Pieper:

"Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude--it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end or a vacation. . . . leisure implies (in the first place) an attitide of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being 'busy,' but letting things happen.  Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality."  Leisure is receptive to life.

We are to "let our minds rest" as we contemplate the beauty of our family and friends gathered around.  We are to take on an attitude of "contemplative 'celebration'" of the world around us, and ultimately, of the Creator who also rested and looked upon this world and called it "good."  Pieper says that feast-days (religious and semi-religious like Thanksgiving) are not a mere break from reality, they are an opportunity for us to express a deeper connection with the reality in which we find our source and final destination.


Thus, our celebrations, our leisure, are justified and drawn from divine worship.  Thanksgiving then becomes not a celebration of a single historical event or even of a surplus of material goods that may be consumed; it is a celebration of God and His Providence which is above measure and which expresses itself variously in plenty and in famine.  Leisure lies in the realm beyond the utilitarian.


I'm a mom.  Work in some way must be part of my "labor of love" for my family.  But, I hope to stay focused on what is best about that day--celebrating "being" with my family, not just "doing" the things glorified in every holiday magazine as appropriate.  Perhaps I will go and crunch through leaves and sing songs with my little son; perhaps I will shut off the tv and engage my family in conversation so that I may more authentically love and know the people God has placed in my life.  And certainly, I will not feel guilty about using paper plates.


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Another Lost Generation (poem)

A poem written sometime earlier this year after reading too much Eliot and thinking excessively about the things we have lost in this era of technology and information.

Another Lost Generation

The music of the spheres is only heard in silence.
Remove the ear buds that will never blossom;
Tear down Babel and relearn how to hear.

Do they even know honor?
A true crossed heart and hope to die?

Under your hands the world is barren
     The seed won't flower.
     The bread fails to rise.

Do we know the way the gentlemen ride
so early in the morning?
Do we know the reason Helen cried
and filled the dawn with mourning?
Do we remember the worth of a new friend
and the old friend worth bright gold?
Do we remember the gift to Baucis
when Philemon's hands are old?

Morals and ethics not reinvented,
Permanent bonds not re-extended,

Powerless, severed from the source of Generation;
Weaker,
Groping fingers click the sign of the eternal sphere
Disrupted.


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