In today’s Gospel, we are reminded that Mary of Magdala was the first to witness the Risen Lord, and the first to preach the Good News of the Resurrection. In Mary Magdalene we see a woman who never ran, never wavered; who stood at the foot of the cross when all but one of the Apostles were nowhere to be found; who stood at the tomb when the Apostles thought there was no reason to hope; who stood before the Apostles and preached the impossible to a group of men who thought she was just an emotional woman having a hallucination.

In Mary Magdalene we see utter love and devotion in the face of utter doubt and betrayal; we see bold and wild faith in the face of cowering fear and logic. Mary of Magdala is so often overlooked or, worse, derided and yet she went on to become the Apostles to the Apostles, preaching the Good News to those who would go on to preach it to others. That is a true disciple. Would the Good News ever have made it to the rest of the world if not for this woman of courage and conviction?

We pray today for the kind of bold and wild faith that will move our hearts to act even when our heads tell us to fear. We pray for the kind devotion and love that will transforms our lives from the inside out and inspire us to preach with our very lives even if we cannot preach with our words. We pray to recognize Jesus standing before us in the garden of our lives.

When we are wavering, when we are doubting, when we want to weep, let us look to Mary Magdalene for the strength to hold firm and to speak truth.

St. Mary Magdalene, pray for us. And may the Risen Lord fill us with new life and light to sustain us in the days and months ahead.

The Lord is Risen, alleluia, alleluia.

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Everyone at our parish knew Adele. Maybe they didn’t know her up close and personal, but they knew of her. She was a visible and ever-present fixture at St. Thomas. Her wheelchair with the “Got Jesus?” bumper sticker on the back was parked in front of the first row of pews at every Mass every weekend. When she wasn’t in church, she was praying in front of the Mary statue outside our school or in front of the tabernacle in our chapel or at any number of vigils around the peace pole.

Noah and I got to know Adele when we volunteered to help at the birthday parties our parish sponsored at Reilly House, a residence for people with physical disabilities next door to our church. Once a month we would go over and help residents with their bingo cards or give them a hand with their cake and ice cream. I thought it would be a good opportunity for Noah to learn about serving others, but it turned out to be a good opportunity for both of us to learn about being strong and courageous and joyful in the face of adversity.

Adele was all of those things. Unable to walk and with very limited speech because of cerebral palsy, she never let her physical limitations keep her from doing the things she wanted to do. Through her quiet witness and deep faith – not to mention an unflappable determination to get the rest of us to slow down long enough to figure out what she was trying to tell us — she taught young and old alike what it means to trust in God and keep on keeping on, no matter how much we might want to sit back and feel sorry for ourselves. Adele never seemed to feel sorry for herself, even if others may have felt sorry for her.

Many people in our society — a society bent on creating perfect babies who we assume will grow into perfect adults — probably looked at Adele’s circumstances and figured that hers was not a life worth living, but if you knew Adele, you would also know that her life, with all of its limitations and struggles, was a rare gift.

One weekend not too long ago, we went to Mass and learned that Adele had died. She had been suffering with cancer, something most of us didn’t know because in typical Adele fashion she didn’t want people making a fuss. On the casket at her wake was a Rosary made of pink roses at one end and a barren crown of thorns at the other. That was Adele’s life in miniature: She willingly, perhaps even gladly, accepted the many, many thorns that came with the roses.

Both Noah and Olivia asked to go to Adele’s wake and funeral even though their day-to-day connection to her was confined to little more than a wave or a smile. Olivia took the prayer card and wrote, “I love you. I miss you,” on the back of it. For my children, and most of the children at our parish school, Adele praying in the Mary Garden just outside their classroom windows was a living example of the faith they learned about inside.

Our pastor compared Adele to the prophets. He talked about how prophets usually don’t want to be prophets, how the job is more often burden than blessing, and how a true prophet, no matter how many times he or she is kicked down, gets back up and carries on with the job of spreading God’s word.

Adele was a true prophet, and we all benefited from her willingness to take on a burden that most of us could not fathom. Without saying a word she sent us a clear message about faith, hope and love. A life can’t have more worth than that.

This Life Lines column originally appeared in a March 2007 issue of Catholic New York.

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This is a season that asks us to be patient, to bask in the waiting even as the rest of the world rushes us to deck the halls and play Christmas music. This is a season that asks us to hold things in tension—birth and death, Christ’s arrival in a manger and Christ’s second coming—even as the rest of the world urges us to focus on buying gifts and accumulating things.

The Advent wreath serves as a visible sign of God’s impending arrival, a growing glow and sense of anticipation as we prepare to celebrate again, as if for the first time, God’s willingness to break into our world and live among us as one of us. Light beyond all bounds. Light that never goes out. Light that burns within each one of us.

Each time you light the candles on your Advent wreath this season—day by day, week by week—may it be a reminder to step outside the frenetic pace of the world and set your life to a slower rhythm, a sacred cadence that gives you room to breathe in God’s goodness, to revel in the waiting, to look into the darkness all around you and find the Light that can never be extinguished.

You can get a monthly subscription to Give Us This Day by clicking HERE. Why not get one for a friend or family member this Christmas?

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Why do you remain a Catholic?” That was the challenge issued to me on Facebook a while back. Never one to refuse a good challenge, I pondered that question anew even though I had wrestled with it before in relation to various crises in the Church, particularly the sex abuse scandal. Why do I stay? I had originally thought the new answer to that old question would be easy. But, as I reflected on it more deeply, I realized that my truth is not that simple, because it would imply that the sex abuse scandal is the only thing that makes me wonder sometimes why I stay. And, quite frankly, abuse is just one thing among many that can make this faith a challenging matter.

Don’t get me wrong. My Catholic blood runs true blue and has for all of my 53 years. I love the Church deeply, but sometimes the Church makes me crazy. You know how your family can make you crazy? Yeah, like that. There are days when I want to run away, change my address and take up a new identity. Family can do that to you, and the Church is my family, the Church is my home, and since I’ve worked for the Church for 30-plus years in one form or another, the Church is also my business. When you spend that amount of time with anything or anyone, it can sometimes make you want to run screaming from the room. And yet I haven’t run. I haven’t changed my identity. I am here, not without some fairly regular whining, but here. Firmly planted, whether I am giddy with the joy of faith or grumbling in the pain of darkness. But why? Why not walk away and be done with even the most minor frustrations? Why not find an easier path or maybe even “create my own religion,” as some tell me they have done, where I crop out the hard stuff and fill the frame with only flowers and light?

Because life is never just flowers and light, because there will always be frustrations, there will always be something to whine about, something that doesn’t go according to my plan, and I cannot imagine getting through my daily dose of drama without God ever present in my corner, without Jesus always in front of me, without the Eucharist providing food for the often difficult journey.

When the crowds around Jesus start to have trouble with some of his difficult teachings and begin walking away, he asks his closest followers if they, too, will leave.

“Lord, to whom shall we go?” Peter answers. “You have the words of everlasting life.” That remains at the heart of my answer today. Always I identify with Peter, who never fails to screw up but somehow gets it on a deeper level. He doubts, he denies, he runs away, but Jesus sees through it to the faith that lives inside him. I pray Jesus can do the same with me, see through my mistakes and missteps and failures to the faith that is sometimes shaky, often lukewarm, but always present. For my entire life my faith has been the air I breathe. Like the beating heart we don’t question until it starts to fail, my faith has been beating inside me for 53 years, often without my taking the time to stop and admire its steadfast rhythm and life-giving power. Until someone asks me, “Why stay?”

Like Peter, I can only say, “To whom shall I go?” If not here, where? If not this, what? This is where Truth lives. This is the Way. This is the Word to which I cling. Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega—with me, with all of us, until the end of time.

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When it comes to teenagers, you expect a certain amount of eye rolling and apathy, but put those same kids in a faith formation class for an hour and fifteen minutes at the end of a long school day and right at the dinner hour and you’ll see a level of teenage disinterest that could make you wither on the spot. That’s what my husband and I faced when we stood before the 21 high school sophomores we teach at our upstate New York parish.

The scene was nothing new and nothing unexpected. We taught most of the same kids last year since they’re in a two-year program that will culminate in confirmation this spring. However, I’m willing to wager that their apathy isn’t necessarily related to a surge of teenage surliness but rather to a lack of foundational catechesis, and I say that while having taught many of these kids in fourth and fifth grade. I have used every trick in the book—from group activities to stump-the-teacher sessions to outright bribery through baked ziti and brownies—to get these kids to hear me when I talk about the Mass, about the Gospel, about our beautiful Catholic teachings and traditions. Yet every year, when they reluctantly return to class, I find I’m grateful if even half of them remember the Our Father.

When I look out at these kids—regardless of age, regardless of whether they’ve gone to Catholic or public elementary school—I assume I am seeing 75 percent as future ex-Catholics.

Read more HERE.

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That post appeared on Not Strictly Spiritual on Jan. 21, 2014, in response to a sex abuse story that was circulating in the news at the time and making me ask myself that very question: Why do I stay? I originally planned to re-post that link on Elizabeth’s Facebook thread as my response to the new version of that old question and be done with it. Easy peasy. But then I thought, no, that’s not my truth because it would imply that the sex abuse scandal is the only thing that makes me wonder sometimes why I stay. And, quite frankly, abuse is just one thing among many that can make this faith a challenging matter.

Don’t get me wrong. My Catholic blood runs true blue and has for all of my almost 53 years. I love the Church deeply, but sometimes the Church makes me crazy. You know how your family can make you crazy? Yeah, like that. There are days when I want to run away, change my address, and take up a new identity. Family can do that to you, and the Church is my family, the Church is my home, and, since I’ve worked for the Church for 30-plus years in one form or another, the Church is also my business. When you spend that amount of time with anything or anyone, it can sometimes make you want to run screaming from the room. And yet I haven’t run. I haven’t changed my identity. I am here, not without some fairly regular whining, but here. Firmly planted, whether I am giddy with the joy of faith or grumbling in the pain of darkness. But why? Why not walk away and be done with even the most minor frustrations? Why not find an easier path or maybe even “create my own religion,” as some tell me they have done, where I crop out the hard stuff and fill the frame with only flowers and light?

Because life is never just flowers and light, because there will always be frustrations, there will always be something to whine about, something that doesn’t go according to my plan, and I cannot imagine getting through my daily dose of drama without God ever-present in my corner, without Jesus always in front of me, without the Eucharist providing food for the often-difficult journey.

When the crowds around Jesus start to have trouble with some of his difficult teachings and begin walking away, he asks his closest followers if they, too, will leave.

“Lord, to whom shall we go?” Peter answers. “You have the words of everlasting life.” That was the reason I gave in my original blog post on this topic, and it remains at the heart of my answer today. Always I identify with Peter, who never fails to screw up but somehow gets it on a deeper level. He doubts, he denies, he runs away, but Jesus sees through it to the faith that lives inside him. I pray Jesus can do the same with me, see through my mistakes and missteps and failures to the faith that is sometimes shaky, often lukewarm, but always present. For my entire life my faith has been the air I breathe. Like the beating heart we don’t question until it starts to fail, my faith has been beating inside of me for almost 53 years, often without my taking the time to stop and admire its steadfast rhythm and life-giving power. Until someone asks me, “Why stay?”

Like Peter I can only say, “To whom shall I go?” If not here, where? If not this, what? This is where Truth lives. This is the Way. This is the Word to which I cling. Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega — with me, with all of us, until the end of time.

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And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.”

Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her.  – Luke 1:35-38

Happy Feast of the Annunciation!

(Annunciation window in Lady Chapel of St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Delmar.)

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For too many of us, Church becomes something belonging to someone else, a place we visit but don’t always choose to live. When we start to see Church not as a location but a state of heart and mind, that’s where transformation begins.

This past week Bishop Edward Scharfenberger of Albany had a great column that tackled that very subject in such a beautiful way.

The link to the full column is at the bottom of this post, but here’s one of my favorite quotes:

…We might say that the Church is not so much a place that people come to as a way of being who we are. If we are truly the mystical Body of Christ — and that is what “Church” means, in its most fundamental way of being — then the Church is really a crystal cathedral, not a stone fortress, where the walls are transparent and our hearts go out to neighbors, since the Spirit of God cannot be locked in a chest or mummified in a museum.

Yes, the Church is all of the above — and more. Yet, it is none of the above completely or exclusively. No description or experience of it can completely exhaust the meaning of the mystery. We are always on the way of getting there and we are always more than what we seem to be at any point in time, for Jesus is always with us, within us and around us.

Isn’t that a great description? Very Thomas Merton-esque, and that’s always a good thing in my book. Click HERE to read the entire column. What does Church mean to you?

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And now suddenly the world has decided to take notice. Secretary of State John Kerry said President Obama acted “expeditiously” in response to the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Um, no, he didn’t. There was nothing expeditious about the reaction for the people who have been executed, for the children who have been kidnapped, for the women who have been raped, sold into slavery or killed in brutal fashion, for the fathers who had to watch it happen before being executed themselves. Their blood is on our country’s hands. Because we did nothing. Because we were silent. And silence is compliance. 

If you follow my Facebook author page, you’re probably sick of me posting stories about this by now, but I can’t help it. At the end of my life, I cannot look back at this horror and know that I didn’t do at least some small thing to stand in solidarity with my brothers and sisters — and all those who are persecuted, no matter what their religion — in Iraq. That is why last night, I printed out a copy of the Arabic letter N (meaning Nasara or Nazarene) that was used to mark Christian homes in Mosul so ISIS would know where to look for the people they needed to kill. It’s a small gesture, insignificant in terms of helping anyone, but it is a reminder to me that there but for the grace of God go I. It is a sign that those poor people — the ones whose lives were not deemed worthy enough of a mention by almost anyone other than a handful of Catholic bloggers and small (mostly Catholic/Christian) media outlets — are not alone. We stand with them, and we pray for them and with them as they face this unthinkable horror.

With the onset of national media coverage as the killing spreads beyond Christians to other non-Muslim religious minorities, more horrifying stories are coming to light and, with them, horrifying photos. Yesterday, as I read news reports, I happened upon the photo of a man holding up his daughter. It would have been a lovely father-daughter photo in a perfect world, but in this world the little girl had no head. ISIS had beheaded her. I saw a photo of a woman having her throat slit. I saw a photo of a half dozen Yazidi children who managed to escape the terrorists only to die of starvation and thirst on the mountaintop where ISIS stranded them. (Just a few of the thousands who are currently at risk of the same fate). Dennis told me to stop looking at the photos because he saw how upset I was getting, but I couldn’t. I needed to look. If I looked away, I might be able to convince myself things weren’t that bad, and they are that bad and worse.

Now every time one of my daughters comes over and asks for a hug — and it has happened a few times since yesterday afternoon — all I see is that father and daughter, and it makes me hold onto my children and silently thank God for my good fortune and pray for those who are not so lucky. And it makes me repost the stories, the tweets, the pleas for peace and aid so that others can’t look away either.

There is very little we as individual Christians, individual Americans can do to stop the madness, but we cannot look away, we cannot be silent, we cannot let a religious cleansing unfold and do nothing. We cannot turn our backs on genocide, not in Iraq, not anywhere. So let’s mark our homes with the same Arabic “nun” ISIS used as a death mark and show our solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Iraq.

After the initial cleansing — the one in Mosul that the world ignored — some Muslims, in solidarity with persecuted Christians, turned the death marks into a statement of unity:  “We are all ن.” (We are all Christian.) And they are right. Because no matter what our religion, we must be united against unthinkable evil in our midst. Because this will not stop with the cleansing of Christians and Yazidi.  Are we willing to be marked on their behalf?

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“Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

“Grace finds beauty
In everything

“Grace finds goodness
In everything.”  – U2, Grace

Grace is one of those elusive things. We say we want it, we kind of get it in a indefinable sort of way, and yet it can be hard to grasp, like trying to catch a cloud. We all need grace to get through this life, to get through this day, and grace comes from God, an unearned gift just for being God’s beloved. But we kind of have to want it and seek it and watch for it, or we’re very likely to miss it when it’s in our midst.

The words to the U2 song above were new to me when I heard them two days ago. (Thank you, Dennis, for sharing this lesser-known U2 song with me.) Grace seems more urgent to me as I get older. I even wear the word “grace” (over there on the right) around my neck every day (Thank you, Cathy A.), along with my Om symbol (no commentary on that, please) and my alpha and omega cross with the Chi Rho in the middle. For me it’s a lovely trifecta — grace, the mystical sound of the divine, and the reminder that Jesus Christ is our beginning and our end.

As we enter into the high holy days this week, the Triduum that will take us through absolute darkness and desperation to ultimate light and salvation, don’t forget to look for the grace present in your life right now. If you can find grace, you, too, will be able to see beauty in everything, even the cross of Good Friday, even the cross in your life today, whatever it may be.

Here’s one of my favorite lines of this song, a line that can slip by unnoticed (like grace) if you’re not paying attention: “She travels outside of karma…” Contemplate that this morning. Grace travels outside of karma. Grace does not punish or seek an eye for an eye. Grace heals, grace saves, grace loves – always.

“Because grace makes beauty out of ugly things.”

Here’s the YouTube video so you can hear the whole thing:

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