Where Love Lives

This time of year — as the academic calendar begins and the last strains of summer’s song fade — the people in my household scatter. College-aged children move into dorms. School-aged children leave and come back and leave again every day, making the case for a revolving door at our front stoop. Even the boy who moved clear across the country made his way home for a brief weekend at the end of August. And then he left again.

It has me thinking about what “home” is in our family. What do they envision when they are away and how do they feel when they return? I cannot shake the memory of a grown child, at once mournful and furious, declaring last summer that home didn’t feel like home any more. He was not altogether wrong. His passing comment, hurled in anger the cause of which I no longer remember, is seared into my memory. We’d lost the easy grace extended to one another that makes a house a place where one can be certain that love is unconditional. I’ve spent the last year trying to make home feel like home again.

Now, sitting at a dining room table scarred by the blessings of so many meals and memories, as we prepare to celebrate the canonization of Mother Teresa, my thoughts turn to the wisdom she had to offer mothers. A tiny nun who made her home amongst the poorest of the poor in the squalor of India, she speaks into my suburban maternal existence.

“Try to put in the hearts of your children a love for home. Make them long to be with their families. So much sin could be avoided if our people really loved their homes. Start by making your own home a place where peace, happiness and love abound, through your love for each member of your family and for your neighbor.”

Those are lofty words, tall orders, beautiful goals. In the quiet of a night, I go to comfort a baby, to feed and change a diaper and rock back to sleep. He knows he’s home. I know it, too, there in the dark, so enveloped in the same world that his beginning and my end are indistinguishable. This is home, a place of laying down life for a child.

The atmosphere of home grows from there, sinks its roots deep into the care of small children where the choice to love and the acts of love are so simple. Just feed the next meal, bathe the next mess, soothe the next hurt. And as you do, you create home.

Then, in the next years, the growing years, we cultivate the community of home. I have found this requires even more discipline on my part, nearly constant diligence. I love my children, to be sure, and so does their father. That is not enough. Care must be taken in the growing years to show them how to love one another. If home is to be sustainable, if it will still be there many years later — not a physical place, but a state of being — our children need to learn how to love each other well. Home is the safest community of all, or at least we hope to be that way. If it’s not, they won’t return to one another and what we built was not home at all, but a mere house on shifting sands.

St. Teresa of Calcutta writes: “It is easy to smile at people outside your own home. It is so easy to take care of the people that you don’t know well. It is difficult to be thoughtful and kind and to smile and be loving to your own family in the house day after day, especially when we are tired and in a bad temper or bad mood. We all have these moments and that is the time that Christ comes to us in a distressing disguise.”

Children must be taught to treat one another with respect and with kind regard. They need to be encouraged to lay down their lives for one another, to speak life into each other’s dark places. Brothers and sisters grow up to be husbands and wives. What lessons have they learned at home about dignity and decency and compassion that they will carry into their new homes? What have they learned about how to treat the other gender and what to expect in how they are treated? Is there gentleness and honor in their interactions with each other in the home of their origin?

We must be Christ to one another — tender, kind, overflowing with mercy — if we are to create home for one another. This is no small task. Indeed, I am quite sure it’s the work of a lifetime. Families are not accidents. They are deliberate acts of God. I may always wonder if God calls me to one cause or another outside my home, but I can never doubt that the people in my family are called to one another. Home is where love lives, and just as every living thing we know, love must be carefully nurtured lest by its neglect it withers and home is left lifeless.

Create a New Ritual

It’s that time of year in the life of a family when calendar squares begin to fill. Pencils in hand (because things change and it’s not quite time for pens yet), we grid in the soccer schedule, the “first day of” dates, the fall birthdays, the auditions, the new lessons. When finished, we stare in disbelief at how full it all looks. Yet that fullness rarely inspires a sense of abundance. Instead, there are alternate feelings of dread and disbelief. Sometimes, there is even fear. How in the world will all these things pull together for a life that is meaningful and not chaotic? May I suggest that the day-to-day rushing that seems so inevitable with growing families desperately needs intentional ritual?

Our children need routines. They thrive in structured time and ordered settings. We need it, too. Routines provide security; they calm the chaos, comfort us and make life at least a little predictable. Beyond routine, we need the richness of rituals. Rituals imbue ordinary time with a sense of grace. Both routines and rituals require discipline. The virtue applied to such discipline is rewarded almost immediately.

To create rituals in your life that will nurture you, begin with intention. Consider how your ritual will affect your day. Do you need a few moments in the morning to review your plans, collect yourself, to pray quietly and invite God into your agenda? (Hint: you do.) Create a ritual for that need. Awaken 15 minutes earlier. Brew a favorite beverage and pour it into a favorite cup. Sit in a particular chair, one that catches the morning light. Grant yourself a few moments of quiet, alert time that is focused and aware. Do it every day. There, you have a ritual.

After several days of practicing such discipline, your ritual will gain momentum. You’ll find that the morning focus continues to pay itself forward into the rest of the day. Where else shall we establish a ritual? Find something that is repeated daily and imbue it with some meaning and purpose. When you walk over the threshold of your office, do you bless the day and begin with integrity? Every day, can you establish the same movements of intention?

What about the drive home? We live in a traffic quagmire. Can you establish a ritual that divides the time and offers you an opportunity to transition from work to home peacefully? For the first few minutes, listen to news, catch up on the world events that happened during your workday. Then, with discipline, turn off the talking and the shouting and listen to music. Better yet, listen to the Divine Office app and pray Vespers.

Finally, spend the last 10 or 15 minutes in silence. Focus on the family waiting behind the door of your home. Pray about how you will give them the best of you, despite the fatigue that has come with a long day and seemingly longer drive home. Let the ritual carry you from the workaday world to the peace of home.

Similarly, if you take children to school, institute a subtle shift in that routine to bring gentle, grace-filled ritual. In the car or as you walk, informally review together the known plans of the day. This isn’t the time to troubleshoot or seek alternatives or solve the problem of the mean girl. Just get on the same page. Promise to pray for their days and assure them that you will hold them in your prayers all day long. Then, as you approach the sign that tells you you’re in a school zone and to slow down, let that be your family reminder to pray aloud for the day. Keep it short and simple, but do it every day at the same time. Let your rituals reassure, then be prepared to see how much more they can do.

Three (or more) More Books Going

After I wrote about my "three books going" habit, I made it a category on my daybook posts. Try as I might, I'm struggling to get those daybooks up every week, and I'm also reading more than three books some weeks. So there's a backup of book reporting.

Last week, I cleared 10,381 unread emails from my inbox. Ahh. Then, I cleared several years' worth of clothing from my closet. Ah, again. So, today, I'm thinking I'll just write one big post with the books from the last few weeks and reach daybook ah. 

In my hands:

After reading and very much loving A Ring of Endless Light (reviewed here), I picked up Madeleine L'Engle's A Circle of Quiet. I'm taking my time with this one, mostly because time to sit down at home with a book in my hands has been scarce lately. But when I do read, I highlight. A lot. 

On My Kindle:

The day of its release, Mary Beth went out and bought the hardback of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. She binge-read the whole thing in one sitting. Then, she left it in the living room for my other children to fight over--ahem--share. They tried. They really did. They read in shifts and did their very best. But there were six of them in the mix and sharing was not really workable. So, I caved in and bought the book on Kindle. I'm not a Harry fan, so I wasn't clamoring for my time. I decided instead to switch the Harry font to the dyslexia option on my Paperwhite and give Katie a fighting chance to read it with the rest of them. It's slow going, but she's getting through. That means my Kindle time is very limited, because it's not tucked in my purse and at the ready wherever I go. 

I'll take it with me on Thursday, though, when Karoline has a series of appointments to see about releasing her leg from this cast. I'm sure that the wait time will allow me to finish Shauna Niequist's Bittersweet. I have really, really loved this one and when I finish, I'll find her new book, Present Over Perfect, waiting for me in my library because I pre-ordered it ages ago and it released today! Pretty much perfect, I think. Shauna's prose is thoughtful and articulate and her thoughts run deep and true. I think a book whose subtitle is Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living is exactly what my end-of-summer wants.

In my earbuds:

Truly, most of the reading action is happening on audio! I'm logging 7-10 miles a day these days walking and the girls and I have taken some long car trips. So, lots of listening. 

First, with the girls. We listened to From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler on the way to Charlottesville last weekend. We all enjoyed it. I remember loving it as a kid. I only liked it this time around. But my little girls were definitely enchanted by the idea of hiding out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several days and we are planning a trip to the nearby National Gallery of Art really soon.  

On the way home from Charlottesville, we started Miracles on Maple Hill, and this time, I remembered why I loved a book the first time. We haven't yet finished. Probably, we will listen to the remainder on the way to the beach in a couple weeks. Then, I'll need to have another ready for the rest of the trip. Right now, I think my plan for them is Saving Lucas Biggs. I am a huge fan of Marisa de Los Santos' adult fiction. (I really need to devote a whole post to her.) I bought Connect the Stars, by Marisa de los Santos and her husband David Teague, for Katie last year, and she liked it. If the duration of our last car ride to the Outer Banks is any indicator of what's to come, this book will be just the right length on audio, after we finish Miracles on Maple Hill. Or, maybe we'll listen to Thimble Summer and I'll take the hardcover Connect the Stars with me to read on my own... I'm just not sure.

Just as Karoline finished the Harry Potter series, Sarah picked it up. She's alternating between reading on her own and reading along with the Audible version. She's bingeing in a big way and I have to sort of laugh a little when she's walking around the house playing to audio out loud and driving me a little crazy with the constant noise. She's her mother's daughter for sure. I know I could insist on earbuds, but really it's probably better she not have them in all the time. I'll have to sacrifice my quiet for her passion, I think.   

In my own listening, I finished a "re-read-listen" to Emily Freeman's Simply Tuesday  (via Audible this time around) and I just loved it. It hit me right where I am and I felt like I'd had several long phone conversations with a warm and wise friend. Then I listened to Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, by Anne Lamott. I really like this book and I've marked several pithy quotes in the Audible app. I highly recommend the book, especially if you feel like your life is unraveling a bit or if you've lived with people who struggle with mental health issues or addiction. I do not, however, recommend the Audible version. It's read by the author, so it's hard for me to say that her inflection and cadence were all wrong. After all, they're her words. She can say them exactly how she wants them to be heard. But as much as Annie is a beautiful poet and a philosopher, I just don't think public speaking/reading is her gift.

After Stitches, I started listening to Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age. This is a topic about which I am passionate. I watch how handicapped my children are as they try to  navigate relationships in a world dominated by digital communication. I mourn for the lost art of conversation. I literally lose sleep worrying about what this all means, particularly as a I launch a whole bunch of kids into the stage of life where they are meeting and engaging with people who will become life partners. So far, this book is meeting me where I am, with some very specific observations that are spot-on regarding the crisis (yes, crisis) and some strategies for solutions. Well worth the listen.

I'm also listening to Last Child in the Woods. This was an impulse buy, prompted by one of many walks in the woods this summer. I've read this book, but I feel like I might have lost touch with its message. I'm revisiting it to be re-inspired because I need the woods and it's never good if I spend more than a few days away. 

Oh! And speaking of audiobooks... I recently discovered Overcast, an app for listening to podcasts (without using gobs of data). Because of Overcast, I've started listening to podcasts again. I'd taken a couple years off--just too much input. Recently, I'm catching up on Anne Bogel's fairly new podcast, What Should I Read Next. The conversations are so engaging and I usually find several book recommendations I'm wanting to try. This morning, though, I was utterly enchanted. If you're a fan of audiobooks, you have to listen to her Episode 31, with Adam Verner. He's a narrator for audiobooks and his insight into that art was fascinating. I highly recommend all her podcasts. Your "To Be Read" list will never end. 

Okay, that's it for now. I need to post this before I have to add to the list again to keep it current:-).

Curated Clicking with Your Coffee

I'm not a fan of mindless clicking (my family will scoff at that understatement). I am, however, profoundly grateful when the web delivers something that makes me better, or smarter, or truer to the me my Maker wants me to be. Here are some links worth your time this week. 

Did you know that there is "Refugee Team," made up of athletes who are without a country to call home and would otherwise be unable to compete? This is a beautiful story of a swimmer who swam for her life and is now swimming in Rio.

Instagram totally copied Snapchat, but Instagram's copy is better. “Good artists copy; great artists steal” – the famous words of Picasso, revived by Steve Jobs, ring true today as the world complains that Instagram’s new Stories feature copied Snapchat.

When I think of lessons learned in 2016, one of the foremost will be, "Don't think you have to have all the pieces in place and all the questions answered before you just do it. Just do it." Shauna Niequist elaborates and expands, "it’s the paddling that makes you stable, not the other way around. You’ll never stay up unless you start paddling." Read it all. Her words are so good. 

Are you feeling confused, disappointed, and a little overwhelmed by the election? There's a 10--point plan for sanity here. 

I think sometimes we're all way too focused on obedience. What we really want is self-discipline. There is a difference between being self-disciplined and being obedient. The intent of completing an act varies from a self-disciplined child and one who is obedient. The self-disciplined child will complete an action, regardless of who is watching. 

Do you have a little one? Thinking about sending him to preschool or kindergarten, but your heart is tugging to look at something else? The Not Really Kindergarten Post is worth a few moments this August day.

God in the Darkness

It will come as no surprise to frequent readers to learn that I have lately struggled with depression. I'm certain I'm genetically predisposed to such bouts, and that predisposition has been fed copious amounts of environmental stress to trigger a dark season. For the longest time (and it has seemed the longest time), I kept operating under the assumption that there was something I needed to do or say or pray to turn on the light. Slowly, I have begun to recognize that it is better to know that this season isn't one to be pushed away under my own power and that God is with me in the dark. I really am feeling better, but it's still more than a little murky most days, a delicate balance of light and dark. Sharing (in person) with people who walk this way, too, often helps me to understand better myself. We wait together for the sun to rise.

I recently spoke with a woman in her early 30s who was surprised to find herself in an extended period of darkness. She and her husband had suffered a job loss, a pregnancy loss, and a move resulting in loss of support — all in the last two years. She goes through the motions of a practicing Catholic, but she feels as if God has abandoned her.

“When the calendar changed,” she said, “I thought now it will get better. Now God will show up in a new year. Now He’ll make good things happen and we’ll know He’s real and He loves us and maybe we’ll understand His plan. Now, I’ll feel God. Then, something else happened and I felt nothing but alone.”

It is a rite of passage perhaps to learn that life isn’t happily ever after and that extended periods of darkness are just as likely as extended periods of light. Perhaps the dark is precipitated by a series of unfortunate events as in the case of my friend. Or, perhaps, it’s the dark night of the soul that settles when one feels the loneliness that comes with at once knowing God exists and feeling distanced from Him.

Mother Teresa, who will soon be canonized, experienced prolonged bouts of profound feelings of abandonment. She confided, “Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love — the word — it brings nothing. I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.” Yet, she is remembered as a woman of cheerful service. How does one reconcile the darkness within in order to bear light to the world?

With that first dark night (and maybe with several that follow), it is entirely possible to stumble around futilely wondering why the Lord of light has abandoned you there. In the black, in the pain, in the unrelenting questioning, the key to survival is to recognize that the times that are hard beyond imagination are not devoid of God.

God is there in the darkness. He’s just as present as He is in the light. You don’t have to know why it happened or how it ends or whether it’s all going to work out in a way you consider favorable. You don’t have to hear answers to your questions. As Ravi Zaccharias so succinctly put it recently, “Having the answers is not essential to living. What is essential is the sense of God's presence during dark seasons of questioning.”

Essential.

When something is essential, it is absolutely necessary. We cannot survive unless we know God is present in the black. Something slowly dies within us unless we can rest in the presence of God even in darkness. What is needed on our behalf is not the wit or the strength to find the switch and turn on the lights so that we can see Him. On the contrary, we can have peace in the darkness only when we learn be still with Him in the dark.