Month: October 2019

a deciduous life

I’m sitting in our hobbit-ranch home on the edge of a small Oregon town which is bordered by farms, and beyond that the Chehalem mountains which are aglow this time of year with autumn hues and evergreens. Up to this moment today, the sky has been a clear, glorious blue, which makes the large maple outside our window look like a sacred flame. Rather suddenly the weather has turned. There are bursts of wind, from which there is no shield, coming off of the flat farmland; the sky is a bright gray, like one large flat rain cloud. I’ve opened the window just a little, even though the air is bitingly cold, because I love the sound of the wind in the trees. It’s one of those moments that touches all human senses and places me in the realm of the beyond, remembering God as Creator, and myself at the mercy of His touch.

In just a half-hour of wind, the giant red maple is a third barer than it was earlier today. I feel a kinship with that tree, as it gets tossed about in this unforgiving weather. It reminds me of a conversation I had years ago. I had a smoking buddy in college. After studying all afternoon and into the evening, we’d meet up and walk around the small college town talking about everything and nothing, smoking our cigarettes. We both had ghosts in our pasts, and we never talked about any of that—we kept conversation pretty light and nonsensical, and yet a lot was said in all that was unsaid. A couple times I tried to bring up something real—like faith or love—and I knew right away by his body language that he didn’t want to go there. So I quietly agreed to this arrangement, like smoking without inhaling.

It was the end of fall and the ground was littered with fall muck—the muddy mixture of rotting leaves and pine needles and standing rain water. The trees were mostly bare. I looked down at my shoes a lot during those walks, and I remember seeing the wet leaves matted to my boots. He asked me, “If you could be a tree, what would you be—coniferous or deciduous?” He half-smirked, as though he knew it was a silly question. It was the kind of question one might be asked the first day of an orientation, a dumb get-to-know-you question; it’s ridiculous, but still reveals something about the person’s character.

“Deciduous,” I replied, without pausing. I’d thought of it before. I’d rather be beautiful and glorious for a short season, than the same for all time. At 20, that’s all I’d been doing my whole life, changing and moving and growing. I was intimidated by constancy. Having a career sounded daunting, marriage sounded terrifying, living in the same town for the rest of my life sounded like a prison sentence. I was thrilled and delighted by changeable things, and everything that celebrated it—fashion, art, film, etc—in the way a moth is to a flame, stupidly and thoughtlessly drawn. Of course, that kind of changeableness is exhausting and ultimately unfulfilling.

It strikes me as ironic, as I sit here, looking out at the calm after the short-lived storm, that though my life has been quite different than what I imagined at 20, I have in fact lived a deciduous life. It’s been ever-changing and shifting, but not from my own choosing. Everything about me—shape, color, fruitfulness, bareness—has shifted and moved from season to season. I feel more like a weathered tree, like the maple outside with the tips of its branches exposed. I’m only 37, but I am a bit worn and weary. I often think of Bilbo Baggins describing his weariness as “butter scraped over too much bread”. Exactly. At 20, when I imagined my “deciduous” life, I imagined it changing with adventure, travel, relationships, artistic endeavors; in short, a selfish existence where I called the shots, marked the seasons, changed when I willed. Of course, that never would have come to pass, even if I hadn’t had a conversion, hadn’t met someone that anchored me and helped me be a better human, hadn’t promptly started having babies and pouring myself out. Even if all that hadn’t happened, I would have eventually grown disillusioned, or frustrated with the many changes out of my control, even in a supposed self-driven life.

When I was 20, I didn’t really think about the tree’s seasonable bareness, just its ravishing beauty. But of course now, I see the cycle in its wholeness. I know this period I’m in of child-rearing and successive tasks is just a season. Another season is coming, with its own beauty and hardships. Even though I am weary and feel a bit physically ransacked, I have no regrets—this is the best way I can think of to spend my life. If we as humans are intended to spend ourselves, it’s best to embrace the deciduous nature of human existence; to embrace the seasons with trust in the Creator.

I am with you, for I have called you by name; your labor is not in vain.

St. Thérèse of Liseiux

our meet-cute

By January of 2000, I was nearly 18, a senior in high school, and my trajectory towards the Catholic Church was pretty sure and straight. My exterior life—friends, school, the rapidly approaching future—was suspended in mid-air, like an alternate reality carrying on in a thought bubble, while interiorly I was going through an inexpressible alteration. I was sneaking to daily Mass either before school or in between classes. The weekday stillness of St. Joseph’s, St. James’s, and the Grotto were my sanctuaries in every sense of the word.

One morning as I was heading to daily Mass in my ’85 Honda Accord named Bogie (after Humphrey Bogart who, like my Honda, was old and raspy, but so cool), I turned into the parking lot to see more than the usual seven to ten cars. The lot was overflowing. I rolled down my window to ask a parking attendant what was going on.

“St. Thérèse’s relics are here,” he said. I nodded like I knew what he was talking about, but inside I was reeling from the words “saint” and “relics”, having visions of fingernail clippings and femurs.

Why did I go in to Mass that day, then? I do not know. But I did. And in my pinstripe overalls, no less. Why, when I saw the TV cameras and men in funny hats and sabers, did I not turn around and leave? I do not know. Though the sanctuary was over-full, I squeezed by the anxious families in the foyer, slipped through the glass doors, and took a tiny spot alongside the wall. In the front of the church, at the foot of the altar, was a wooden casement surrounded by what I could only assume was bullet-proof glass. It was all very strange. Compelling, but strange.

The Mass began and I was quickly lost, as this was slightly different from truncated daily Mass. After I fumbled through the Gloria and the Nicene Creed, an older, handsome gentleman in front of me with dark, thinning hair and glasses turned around and said, “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” I answered, “No.” With a gentle smile, he said, “My name is Conchi, short for Concepción.” He pulled out a missal, stood beside me, and tried to explain what he could in a whisper. The lady in front of us looked back with a mean glare to hush us at one point, but Conchi ignored her and faithfully coached me through the Mass.

People were starting to file towards the relics. He told me what to do—to kiss my fingers, touch the casement, then make the sign of the Cross. I eyed the TV cameras in the back, hoping I didn’t make it on the news in my pinstripe overalls, then my secret of going to Mass would be out—and not just going to Mass, but doing whatever I was about to do with those relics. I did what Conchi said, mechanically, feeling like an imposter.

It came time for Communion and Conchi asked me if I wanted to go up for a blessing. In all my attendances of daily Mass, I had never gone up for a blessing, but had remained kneeling until it was finished. He told me to cross my arms over my chest, so I did.

I was starting to worry about the time at this point, concerned I’d be late for class since daily Mass usually didn’t take this long. As soon as it was over, I turned to thank Conchi, but he was gone. As I maneuvered my way through the crowd and out of the church, I kept an eye out for him, but I never saw him again.

As I walked by the St. Joseph statue outside, a strange awareness caught me by surprise: I had a sense that there was something over me, like a thin veil covering my face, a substance that I could see through, but that was protecting me somehow, hiding me. I wondered at the time if this was what “grace” felt like, that thing I had read a little about, that thing the early Church Fathers talked about with the Sacraments. Not the vague—though wonderful—grace I had learned about as a Protestant, the over-arching power that Jesus imparts to reach out to us and save us. This was different; it was an actual, tangible something.

The rest of the day passed in a fog; again I felt like I was going through the motions of my daily life: school, friends, play rehearsal, family, while this great secret tectonic shift was happening in the depths of my being.

When I got home late that night, I remembered a little green, musty book I had bought at a garage sale a couple years before, Wisdom of the Saints. I leafed through it and found the last chapter about St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which included an excerpt from Story of A Soul. As I read through this tiny piece of her writing, I was shocked by the amount of Scripture she quoted from memory, as though it flowed out of her heart as purely and freely as her own words. I cannot say what struck me most about St. Thérèse; I don’t remember feeling an immediate kinship with her. I was, however, struck by how she was called to the religious life so young, yet had confidence in God’s loving plan for her.

What I didn’t know at the time was how this little saint would become a companion through my life, a novice-mistress of sorts for my own spiritual life.