Gaude, Gaude; Pivot, Pivot

Usually, St. Nicholas’s feast day is a big deal in our home. Usually, we open stockings before breakfast. Usually, these stockings have the traditional chocolate coins, clementines, maybe a small gift or two, and a striped candy cane. Usually, we feast on a supper of Greek roast, mashed potatoes, and broiled vegetables. Usually, we enjoy delicious gingerbread for dessert. Usually, we read The Miracle of St. Nicholas, and I do the voices. Usually, it’s magical.

But this year was different.

This year, for the first time, I have three teenagers in away-school, as opposed to home-school. Sure, they come home every night, but they’re tired and people-saturated, and after a quick debriefing, they retreat and complete homework. They’re also in band and theater and board game club and sports and they have a peer group that appropriately takes up a lot of their social energy. AND they have to GO TO SCHOOL on the feast of St. Nicholas.

With younger children still at home– and it’s already been hard for them to adjust to a quieter house with their siblings away– I refused to let these Advent feasts pass by. We had a family meeting, we rearranged expectations, we set the date for our St. Nicholas celebration this weekend. I shall not be moved! Family feasting shall prevail!

But… (sigh)

I forgot that three of my children were going to birthday parties, and one had closing night of the high school play which was followed by a cast party, and inevitably, we ate Greek roast and gingerbread in shifts. Lame.

But… (sigh)

I asked for this. My teenagers were depressed a year ago, desperately wanting more of a community, hungry for peer affirmation, bored with home-schooling. And around this time last year, I started pleading with God to do something: make me ready to do whatever I need to do to help them through these difficult years, open my ears, move mountains, part waters, heal their wounded hearts.

Remember that scene in Friends when they’re moving the new couch up a flight of narrow stairs and Ross keeps shouting, “PIVOT! PIVOT!” That is the secret sauce to parenting that no one ever tells you. You never arrive. You never do it perfectly. People change, times change, communities change, and so we PIVOT-PIVOT. And sometimes that damn couch is never going to get through the narrow stairway. I think in this new age of parenting I’m going to have to let go of a lot of traditions or expectations I hold onto which I love in exchange for something that looks different but might just be better.

It happens to be Gaudete weekend, the third weekend of Advent, the rose candle, the we’re-almost-there-so-rejoice Sunday. This St. Nicholas feast wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be, but damn, I’m so happy. My kids are busy! Dudes, they are going to birthday parties! In an alternate version of my life, I could have easily resented today with all its driving around and having all of us in different places, but my kids are feasting socially with wonderful peers. They are becoming more confident in who they are through performance and music and sports and peer affirmation. I am rejoicing.

glances

Since I last wrote, one daughter received her first Holy Communion, three children received the Sacrament of Confirmation, I started post-trauma therapy, sold and packed a house, caravanned 2600 miles with a truck of stuff and van of people, and a dear friend passed away. Since school started, half of us have been sick with something, including the toddler (=no sleep for my husband and I). We’ve also been delightfully busy with fun and wonderful things to do: a musical, a Shakespeare play, Trail Life, swing dancing, school dances, homework, parties. Between festivities and illness and grief and trauma work and budding new relationships and new EVERYTHING… I’m tired y’all.

There’s good weariness, like after a satisfying workout or Christmas shopping. And this is for sure a good weariness. This big move (which I will talk about more later) has been fruitful. It’s just a lot. I feel like we built a new house very quickly and now the foundation has to settle.

Through therapy and by necessity through the fast-forward events of this past year, I’m trying to chill spiritually. Not laziness, but less anxiety. The first day of this year, I had a three-hour Confession-session, one of the juicy fruits of which was realizing how much I have felt I needed to EARN love. (thud) I needed to relax and enter into God’s unsolicited love for me. And this year has offered ample time to do so. All I do is pray on the run. St. Thérèse called it “ejaculatory prayer” which, while jarring to our modern ear, is a mother’s arsenal. And if prayer is– also St. Thérèse– a “glance toward Heaven”, then (sigh) that’s all I got right now.

I know it’s not a form of life-sustaining prayer. The relationship has to be there, has to strengthen and grow through the sacraments, contemplative prayer, adoration, Scripture, etc. And I’m looking forward to entering into another period like that. But right now, God is balancing me on this highwire. There’s a lot less of me, and a whole lotta Him. And honestly, it’s nice to know that when I let go, He will catch and carry me.

About five years into motherhood, I discovered the Benedictine motto “ora et labora”– pray and work– and it’s been my lifeline ever since. I’ve always had the phrase near at hand to remind me of how to anchor my vocation. I just painted it on the hood over the stove in our new house. It feels a little more like home now. And it’s a reminder that praying in weariness, little glances towards Heaven, is about resting in God’s unsolicited love, offering the little I have, receiving a hundredfold.

2022 ~ Word of the Year

Ok, Pee-Wee Herman, get your giant underwear ready, I have picked a word of the year. Wait for it, drumroll… 

RECEPTIVITY 

No, wait that’s not it… The word of the year is: 

FORGIVENESS 

Ach, that’s not quite right… Yes, I know: 

MERCY 

Can it be all three? Are there rules about the word-of-the-year? I’ve had a hard time settling on just one, as you can see, and I think that’s because I am going into this year with more of a concept-of-the-year. 

Nearly the very first thing I did this year (besides waking up, eating breakfast, etc) was go to Confession. This wasn’t an ordinary Confession, but a healing general Confession with a priest who offers deliverance prayers and blessings. By the fall of last year, the piercing, revelatory light of God’s love uncovered dark cobwebbed corners of my soul. A better image would be wounds that had been scabbed seven times over with grotesque scars. (I have written about that elsewhere, and more about the general confession elsewhere.)  

But January 1, I marched up the church steps, slid into the narrow confessional, and encountered Christ the Healer in a way I never have before. It pulled back the scars from those wounds and laid them bare. But the powerful prayers called off any evil that had laid claim to those dark memories, leaving them exposed and raw, though protected by grace. Just as my baptism didn’t end a conversion, but began a new life and deeper conversion, so this sacrament of Reconciliation blew the lid of some dark shit and led me into a deeper stage of conversion.  

That’s what I’m focusing on this year: inviting God to heal what has festered for so long. That will require receptivity, right? I need to have a spirit of surrender with Christ the wounded Healer. I need to be vulnerable with Him. This vulnerability can lead so quickly to shame that I need mercy, both to claim it and accept it. The Divine Mercy was one of the first images that pricked my heart all those years ago at the beginning of my conversion to the Catholic Church. Now I have to live it, open my heart to it, bathe in its light. And in receiving it, I need to reflect it, to pour it out on those who have wronged me, both intentionally and unintentionally. Thus, forgiveness.  

You can see how I have to have three words this year. So if there’s a life coach out there who’s like, No, you only get ONE ya loser, to them I bite my thumb and cry, Fie! Leave me my three, the world depends upon it. I truly believe this is a new phase in the Church, a time of healing and wholeness. We need to heal so we can heal the Church, which can then heal the world.  

Barf, sentimental hogwash, you say. Trust me, healing is afoot.

Word of the Year

{aaaahhhhhhhh!!!}

In January of last year—2021—my lady-friends at church and I got together for a friend’s birthday. The birthday girl requested we come to the gathering with “a word”. A word-of-the-year: apparently, it’s a thing. I immediately went to sarcasm and thought of every children’s television show with their words of the day: would Word Girl greet me mentally every morning, her cape flowing behind her, with a reminder of my word-of-the-year? It was hard not to imagine Pee-Wee Herman screaming in hysterics with giant underwear on his head every time this word-of-the-year would be uttered. That’s where my brain goes, what can I say. 

aaahhhhhhhh!!!

But the pop-up image of Pee-Wee Herman wearing giant underwear on his head wasn’t the only turn-off to this exercise. I admittedly have a knee-jerk repulsion to female groupings of any kinds—prayer groups, Bible studies, book clubs—which is objectively unjust and something I’m in the process of examining and hopefully rectifying. That being said, my first reaction to my friend’s request was panic and repulsion. But I simmered-the-hell-down and realized the more appropriate and reasonable response between avoiding the get-together and making up a saccharine and dishonest response, was to politely decline word-choosing and be a good listener. 

This lady-friend group continually challenges my repulsion towards lady-groups with their sincerity and generosity of spirit. And this was no exception: as I sat and listened to their honest, and non-saccharine responses, my heart softened. I understood more the purpose of the exercise, and in that moment of emotional receptivity, a word floated into my head: healing. 

I was pregnant, due that May, and I had approached and begun this pregnancy with the intention of learning to trust God more fully. There were a lot of knowns and unknowns to fear with this pregnancy. I had been praying for complete and total healing, but also that God would help me trust Him more, whatever the outcome. St. Gianna Molla’s mantra of whatever God wants was purposely on my lips, even though there was fear in my heart.  

I swallowed my pride and suspicion and told my friend later that week what my word-of-the-year was. She was a physician, a mother of four, and a recent convert to Catholicism. She explained that she wanted to know her friends’ words so she would know how to pray for each of us. And later that year, she would—unbeknownst to me—begin a novena to St. Gianna Molla towards the end of my pregnancy when things got scary. It would be Gianna’s feast day when I was finally released from the hospital. Only then did my friend let me know about her novena, and it had been the first time she had ever entrusted a prayer to the intercession of a saint.

It is experiences like these when I feel God lighting a loving flame to melt one more hardened, sarcastic piece of my soul. My friend requested vulnerability, which I systemically responded to with suspicion. But through the vulnerability of my friends, my own heart was softened so that I could hear the Holy Spirit whisper, “Healing.” That year—2021—really was a year of healing, but in more ways than I could have anticipated. God needed to prepare me, needed me to have my eyes wide open and my heart attentive. Even though the prayer for healing was already on my lips, I needed to entrust that to the body of Christ, these lady-friends with open hearts. 

my new old love: BOOKS

{I originally intended to post this at the end of 2019, but it got lost under a stack of drafts. This is my 2018-19 reading list!

I am a jilted reader. For one, I am a very slow reader. I read out-loud in my head, sounding out every word. I do the voices. I have to underline things and make notes, otherwise I won’t remember what I just read. Sometimes I’ll be reading for a good ten minutes before I realize I’ve been thinking about an old “Friends” episode and completely missed what happened over the past five pages. So you can imagine how difficult it is to read with lots of distractions (i.e. children) around. My husband, on the other hand, is an incredible reader. He has an amazing ability to tune out everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) when he’s reading. He has an astounding memory: if he wants to share something he read, maybe even years ago, he can quickly thumb through the book and find the passage he wanted. Me, on the other hand: people will talk about a great scene, character, dialogue, or fact from a book, I’ll respond and ask what book it’s from, only to find out that I have actually read that book! (Only, I clearly didn’t actually read that book….)

I wasn’t always like that. I used to love reading. I would run into things because I was reading so much of the time. But somewhere around the age of 10 I just kind of stopped, unless it was assigned reading (which I usually skimmed). Of course, during my conversion I read a ton of books about everything Catholic, ate those up like candy. And then for years I was reading picture books to my children (which I love because, you know, all the voices).

I mostly struggle with fiction. It has to really grab my attention, otherwise I start getting distracted by all the useful things I could be doing with my time. I could quickly name the fictional books I have read in the past 16 years (which is when I graduated college and no longer had required reading): Anna Karenina (read that on my honeymoon and into my first pregnancy), Eleni (read that while nursing my first baby), and the High King series (read those while pregnant and nursing my fifth baby). The first Harry Potter book, and half of the second. Yep.

I’m much better with non-fiction. It feels less like a waste of time. If I’m learning something, acquiring factual (or mostly factual) information then I can justify a good read. Over the years this had been sporadic spiritual reading (I Believe in Love, My Mother Zelie, Advent of the Heart, 1000 Gifts, various Al-Anon literature).

But something happened to me a couple years ago. It was … I don’t know… maybe a mini-crisis of faith? A new batch of challenges popped up quite suddenly and all at the same time and I didn’t have a vocabulary for it. I mentioned this to a friend, something about beauty and aesthetic in the Church and the role of women– none of which was said coherently, so his fluid and fitting reply could only have been the Holy Spirit using that golden moment to open a floodgate.

At first I caught the names Houselander (whose effect on me I’ve written about elsewhere), Edith Stein, and a slew of “vons”. The year that followed was enormously important for my whole being- my mind, heart,and soul. I rediscovered a love for reading. And not just reading, but contemplative reading, reading that inspired my interrupted prayer life. I know this is old news for most people, but it awakened me right at a time I needed it.

This past year I finally read a book that has been recommended to me for years: Sigrid Undsett’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Chances are, you’ve already discovered this treasure, but if you haven’t… READ IT. I’ve never read a novel that encapsulates what it means to be a woman in all her stages of life as this book. Undset possesses a deep understanding of humanity. Her characters remain unchanging in their unique personalities, though altered by their life experiences.

Another book that I read this past year that I would recommend as a life-changer is Love Alone is Credible. I know people have some hang-ups with Hans Urs von Balthasar, and though I’ve heard the reasons, I don’t understand how anyone could not appreciate this poet-theologian’s explanation of anything trinitarian. His work has changed the way I see God and the way I understand how He sees me, if that makes sense. And Adrienne von Speyr’s Handmaid of the Lord is a rich companion text (and I’ve written about that more). It doesn’t directly relate to Love Alone is Credible, but her reflections on the life of Mary fit beautifully alongside Balthasar’s meaty text.

In brief…

My 2018-19 Book List

  • Kristin Lavrandsatter by Sigrid Undset
  • Handmaid of the Lord by Adrienne von Speyr
  • A Key to Balthasar by Aidan Nichols
  • Love Alone is Credible by Hans Urs von Balthasar
  • The Privelege of Being a Woman by Alice von Hildebrand
  • Into the Deep by Abigail Favale
  • The Passion of the Infant Christ by Caryll Houselander
  • Humility by Dietrich von Hildebrand
  • That Nothing May Be Lost by Rev. Paul Scalia
  • Awaking Beauty: The Art of Eyvind Earle

mystery scar

Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed.

Save me and I shall be saved.

For you are my praise.

Jeremiah 17:14

I have a long, gnarly scar on my shoulder. It even has a couple crossbars like a jacked-up railroad. The fun thing about scars is the stories behind them. I have an especially grotesque one on my left arm that’s a weird conversation starter. (“Wow, what happened there?” “Oh this? I had a huge-ass mole removed when I was 16.” “Was it cancerous?” “Nope. Purely cosmetic. Vanity, vanity, vanity.”) But I have no idea how I got this new one. Even stranger, I didn’t notice it until just a few months ago, this long, gnarly scar that deserves a better story than, “Yeah I don’t know what happened.”  

This is what I want to say if someone asked me about it: You know it’s funny, this scar is a manifestation of the hidden scars that have just recently started surfacing, forcing my prayer and attention, making me an emotional, crumbling mess, and inconveniencing the hell out of my life. But that would probably make for a dismal conversation starter. 

The thing is, part of me wonders if it’s true. 

With this mysterious scar, I feel more like a character created within magical realism whose spiritual wounds begin to manifest themselves outwardly, etched in her skin, deforming her body, where she can no longer hide them or—worse—lie to herself about their existence. 

Something happened to me when my last baby was born. The torrent of afterbirth—which was especially grotesque this time around— was followed by a metaphysical torrent. A few months later, I wondered if I was in some kind of bizarre post-partum depression, when I reconnected with a friend who told me a harrowing story of a car accident that had unleashed past trauma during her rehabilitation. I learned that it was neurologically possible and even common that present trauma could indeed activate memories of past trauma. These weren’t memories or feelings that I had forgotten; it was more like I had separated and parsed the traumatic events out and stored them in different parts of my brain. I can pinpoint moments in the past twenty years when a memory or two has been jostled into my consciousness, usually because of a trigger (damn, I hate that word right now because of how over-used it is, but I mean it in its true, psychological sense). 

Since then, I’ve been on this speed train of healing. The timing was right, I guess. The funny thing—GET THIS—is that when I found out I was pregnant this last time, I was justifiably terrified, but really wanted to practice total trust, and prayed for complete healing through my body. This was, hilariously, the most traumatic birth yet. My body is shot, folks. No more babies for this super-uterus. But God was most certainly healing me, yet in a more whole way, a way I didn’t see coming and didn’t know I needed. He was preparing me for mercy. Labor ripped me open, and with that came a torrent of healing grace.  

So this scar… It’s a reminder to be honest, to resist wanting to quickly patch this all up and move on. It’s also a reminder that the past is a part of my story, and I’m beginning to see how it’s not a source of shame, but a sign of grace. 

the art of friendship in a virtual world

Now let me be totally honest and admit that I’ve never been awesome at friendship. I think there’s some understandable reasons for that, but some bad reasons too for which I’m admittedly culpable and through which I’m working. That having been said, even I know that the new social rules and habits that quickly normalized with the coronavirus pandemic suck. They suck real bad.  

I live in Oregon, one of the few states that is still mandating mask-wearing. I’m not interested in starting a mask-wearing debate, whatever-I’m-over-it, and it’s common sense that if I sneeze into my mask instead of your face, there is less of a chance I’ll share my germs. Social distancing is also sensible for limiting germ-sharing. I don’t really think these habits are debatable on the grounds of effectiveness. However, are they worth the mental and emotional costs from which our society is clearly suffering? To that, I would have to say no.  

I try not to watch the news—I more often listen. But from what I have heard, there’s been much less said about the increase in signs of mental illness in our general population, most disturbingly among teens, than the hospitalized and death count. I’m not a nay-sayer; I know Covid is killing people, and it’s tragic. But I think down the line we’ll suffer further consequences of the social cinching we’ve been pulling through society. I see the effects of it now, the way people are scared to interact: I’ve seen social interactions begin with suspicion and end in aggression; I’ve witnessed social interactions begin shyly, with an awkward thrust of a hand in an offered handshake or halted hug, then end with joyful relief as a real conversation ensues. When I was in labor, when a new nurse entered the room, I would slip my mask on quickly and wait to see how they felt about the mask mandate—either they would smile and encourage me to remove it if I wished, or they would enforce the rule, even correct me in the proper way of wearing it. It made for an added social awkwardness in an already stressful encounter. 

And there’s the vomitous mess of social media. It just hits allllll my insecurities. I quit Pinterest after one night when I lost track of the time and realized I had grown more and more dissatisfied with my life seeing all the things I didn’t have and wanted, the beautiful hair and face I wanted but didn’t have, the clean showroom house, etc. I nearly sprang back from the screen in self-disgust, and vowed to leave Pinterest forever. I recently quit Facebook (for a lot of reasons), but I would let it either ruin or make my day, depending on the number of social interactions I’d been granted through their algorithm. If one of my posts was ignored, I felt totally alone in the world. Yuck. 

In a neighboring town, there are signs littering yards with encouraging messages like “Don’t Ever Give Up” and “You’re Not Alone”. I hope they’re effective. But these signs with feel-good tropes are like manifested text messages or tweets, leaving their virtual world and joining the real world on real paper in a real yard. The one that always catches my attention is “You Matter”. Do I? Do I matter to you? If I knocked on your door truly in need, would I matter enough for a moment of your time, face-to-face? Or would you, out of fear and suspicion, turn me away? Would you, after you heard my political and religious beliefs, cry ‘hater’ and slam the door in my face? That’s what would happen virtually, and I’m not sure we know how to respond any other way right now. We’ve forgotten what authentic human interaction looks like.

During the Covid lockdown, one of my more social-media-savvy lady-friends from church started a messaging chat-group and a video-chat. It was a blessing in so many ways. We chatted and prayed through a friend’s delivery of her baby, shared recipes, laughs, and hardship. It was a way to “visit” each other when we couldn’t really visit each other. We’ve continued it even though we are certainly able to see each other face-to-face now. Out of the busy-ness of family life, it’s been an easy excuse to keep it up. Yet I find the same insecurities I experienced via Pinterest and Facebook creeping up even through these seemingly healthy mediums. The big answer is that, yes, I have some friend-wounds to work through. But also, it’s a relief to know I’m human: I find myself craving face-fo-face encounters. 

The other day, as I was driving to a friend’s house—to actually sit in her kitchen, have coffee, let our noisy kids play together— I thought of the Visitation. Mary went in haste to see her cousin. She didn’t think twice about it; it was an immediate response to the news that her cousin was in need and vulnerable. This act of service was an outpouring of love and the Holy Spirit’s presence within Mary. And I began to wonder whether I have been listening closely enough to that still, small voice; am I attentive to my brothers and sisters in need of friendship, especially now in this age of isolation? 

If I—I, admittedly terrible at friendship, quick to cut my losses and run instead of engaging—find myself craving authentic face-to-face encounters, then how many people out there are starving for friendship? Real friendship. Not the half-engaged, distracted comment-bomb-dropping of social media, or the awkward nods in the grocery store of people peering out from behind their masks, but real friendship that seeks to truly know, understand, and love each other. And with all things like this, I can’t just let this be a thought or idea- like a nice trope floating in cyberspace that people can thumbs-up or ‘heart’ (or poo)- I need to act, in haste.

Icon of the Visitation

lap of luxury

My family sat down to watch All Creatures Great and Small last night, the new series on PBS starring Nicholas Ralph and Samuel West (shout out: West played Prince Caspian in the old-school BBC Narnia series, oh yeah). It’s a show that my teens as well as my younger kids can appreciate, and it’s been rare lately to find a show we can all enjoy together on our traditional movie night. 

In the episode, there’s a scene where the housekeeper, Audrey, has just seen the men out the door. The 60 seconds which follow are an indulgent fantasy: Audrey sits down on the couch in front of a fire. She pauses there, smiling at the golden retriever curled up at her feet, then gleefully opens her book (an old, lovely one, the kind that crackles when you open the front cover). And that’s it. The story moves along from there. It was delicious to watch. My mind sort of stayed there in the parlor with Audrey, wistfully thinking how luxuriant it would be to sit in a quiet room— a fire seems a bit indulgent, not necessary, but delightful nonetheless—with a good book, uninterrupted.  

And that’s where I’m at in life, the kind of busy-ness where sitting in a quiet room with a book looks like the lap of luxury. I know very well that’s a near-impossibility for me at this stage in life, and to be honest, if I woke up tomorrow morning and my family surprised me with a day-alone-reading-by-the-fire, I know exactly what would happen: I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. On the rare occasion I do have a quiet morning or afternoon (so very rare, mind you), I feel almost overwhelmed by all the things that I could be doing or should be doing that I sort of freeze. If I were granted a day-alone-reading-by-the-fire by a genie, this genie would also need to clean my house, do the dishes, scrub the bathrooms, and organize my garage (and quite possibly a few other things) before I felt the freedom to sit on a couch with a book.  

My mind is usually so preoccupied that I forget words. That’s right, just words. Whole nouns will escape my memory. My mind sometimes reads like a fresh mad-libs page with blanks substituting actual nouns and adjectives. Sometimes I find myself saying things like, “I need to go that place to do that thing,” or “Hey, fruit-of-my-womb, can you put that thing in the thing with the thing?” I’m lucky enough that my children and husband can, for the most part, anticipate my meaning. My head is an overstuffed sandwich with mustard oozing through the bread and the pickle sliding out the side. While sometimes I want (and do) just pause and cry, or sneak away to the dog-park for a cigarette (P.S. I don’t have a dog), I’m also overstuffed-thankful for my life. Like, really. I love hanging out with my family. 

I recognize that sometime in the not-too-far-future, I will be home alone, and I will sit on a couch with a book, or rather a stack of books that I’ve been meaning to read for decades. I won’t be as put together as Audrey from All Creatures Great and Small; instead of a wool skirt, stockings, and cardigan, I’ll be wearing the synthetic soft elastic clothes of a modern and confident middle-aged woman. Instead of a dog, there may be a cat or two. And I’ll probably sigh—even for just a moment—as I remember bygone days when my home was a madhouse.  

crawling out of this cave

Well, hello there.

It’s been a long time. Too long. But today, the Feast of the Visitation, marks the 20th anniversary of my baptism, confirmation, and reception into the Catholic Church. A good day to start writing again.

It’ll be fairly easy to explain why I haven’t written much in the past year, but it will take some time. It will take some time because I am currently caring for a newborn. You heard me right.

So bear with me as I catch you up, most likely over several posts. And in the meantime I will also update my profile to reflect that I am now a mother of seven children. To quote Maria vonTrapp in Sound of Music, “Seven?!!” Yes.

Glory be!

with the women at the tomb

It’s Holy Week, the last week of Lent— and the third week of Oregon’s social distancing mandate because of the coronavirus pandemic— and the third week without Mass. It’s so strange to think of not going to Mass during Holy Week. I was doing okay with it. I was like, yes Lord, tell me what you want me to learn from this Eucharistic fast. And, as usual, my stamina began to give way. Fortitude is not my forte. I went to Confession (thank God we still have that) and afterwards found myself weeping like a Magdalene at the doors of the Church (“Where have you put my Lord?”), knowing Father was saying Mass just twenty yards away—our Lord was so close, but I couldn’t touch Him or see Him, let alone partake of His Body and Blood.  My eldest daughter, who was with me at the time, looked perplexed as I sobbed all the way home.

I texted a friend later and she had some very wise words that gave me peace and strength. She said my tears were a gift from our Blessed Mother on the eve of Palm Sunday, a gift to know a part of her sorrows as we begin Holy Week. Her beautiful words reminded me of something I had recently been pondering.

Just a week into the Oregon quarantine, my birthday present from my husband arrived one month late from the Ukraine. The timing couldn’t have been more providential. It was an icon of the resurrected Lord in the garden with three women looking on from a short distance away. It’s an icon I’ve been wanting for a while; about a year ago, while praying through the Consecration to Jesus through Mary, I was moved by the story of Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John when, while weeping at the empty tomb, she recognizes Jesus’ voice calling her by name. Though I’ve heard and read that story many times, it struck me deeply as I imagined myself at the empty tomb, as I imagined Jesus calling me by name. Ever since then, my devotion to Mary Magdalene has grown as I’ve realized more ways I feel connected to her. This icon was the closest I could come to that beloved story in the Gospel.

But the icon offered so much more than what I had initially seen in it. As soon as I unwrapped it, my 13-year-old artist-daughter noted how fitting an icon it was for this strange time we’re in without Mass: we, like the women in the garden, gaze at our risen Lord, but are unable to get much nearer.

Prompted by her introspection, I meditated on the icon for a time, alone. I realized the three women were in the same shape that, in other icons, Christ’s hand takes as he makes the sign of the Trinity. The two standing women are turning towards one another with their hands gesturing towards the risen Christ. But the third woman, who I assume is Mary Magdalene by her posture, is kneeling and reaching towards Jesus. Everyone is dressed in white with accents of red, symbols of purity and the Spirit. Their white clothing is almost transparent, signifying the temporality of this world, but their faces and hands are solid, signifying the immortality of the soul. The icon is split unevenly down the middle: the side that Christ stands on has more depth, and seems to be higher ground, while the side the women are on is less defined and more flat. Christ’s hand reaches out towards them, palm-up. He is not going towards them, but greets and beckons generously; he does not look as though he’s there to dry their eyes, but stands matter-of-factly, as though His risen body is His testament, the proof of His love for them.

I’m not sure where I’m going to hang this icon; for now it is beside my bed so it is the first and last image I see in the day (besides my husband’s handsome face, of course). It has been a true gift for my heart during this time away from Our Lord’s table, and a reminder not to squander it (which I’ve definitely done at times). Ideally, love and desire should increase, a gratitude for the unique mystery of the Eucharist should strengthen, and awareness of my brothers and sisters throughout the world who live without the Sacraments readily available should take root in my heart where an on-going prayer for them can manifest.

What will Easter be like without a Eucharistic feast? I don’t know; probably sad to a degree, maybe anti-climactic. It’s good to feel that loss, to hate going without. But it will be a good spiritual exercise to remember our Blessed Mother and the women at the tomb who, though they could not touch Him as they could before, were overjoyed that He was truly risen.