Month: October 2021

At the beginning of the Covid lock downs we joked about sitting around in our pajamas… I am in the crowd that didn’t go back out as soon as Florida said, "It’s OK!!! Go out!" I remained isolated with Chuck for almost a year. I didn’t go to church for a year! The first time I went to church with mask on, in April 2021, I was freaked out with being around people! I have been going daily ever since, with a short stint of yoga taking the place of Mass. Sometimes we have to choose… and I chose Mass over yoga due to my need to talk with Jesus there in church and to pray the Mass. I miss yoga as it is great stretching. OH! so great stretching and breathing. Now, with 30 pounds too many on me, and both knees swollen and in great pain… I’m starting a diet that includes "no drinking." I became a ""it’s 5 o’clock; time for wine" wino. I was drinking too much after 5 o’clock and eating ice cream sometimes twice a day, and eating too much on my plate. Anxiety does these things to me… My choice: daily Mass, walking every day (as soon as I get my knees back – I have a doctors appointment on Wednesday.) Let’s see: No wine, diet, No sweets, No bread or pasta or white potatoes (you know the ritual.) Get the weight off the knees. Keep praying. Let’s see what good that does!

It’s a choice to stop drinking, to remain positive. It’s a choice not to say anything awful. Not to complain. It’s my choice. And I have to add in No worrying. My friend and I are reading the Bible! I read with my friend Kathy for two years in a row, we read the Bible twice! But now I’m reading from a different perspective. My friend asks hard questions like "Why is God vicious?" I wince when he asks questions like that and I patiently say, "God is not vicious, weather and nature can be vicious". In the very old days, 4000 years ago, People had to explain natural phenomena like floods, fires, earthquakes, famines, rampant diseases… add some you think of. Every civilization has flood stories and they were oral until writing was invented. "Back then," 4000 years ago, the stories were oral. When it thundered when I was a little girl, we used to look up and say, "The gods are bowling." Zeus threw lightening strikes. Mother Earth holds up the rain when she is angry. They weren’t such peaceful gods!!! So I gently remind my friend that in the Bible, written by man and inspired by God, God or priests of God are trying to tame a people who are accustomed to sacrificing virgins and babies to get a rainfall and good crops. "Here let’s give Mother Nature a choice virgin…" Today is not nearly as uncivilized is it? Oh yes it is! Men and women are mean. They shout evil stuff. I get sad when I hear the ugly things about the President or Vice President. I try not to get engaged except to say, "I have one vote… otherwise there’s not much I can do about the border, the Covid, etc…" Like that. Try to be at peace in our hearts. Try to keep ugly words in until I find some weeds… and then spit the ugliness out onto weeds. Maybe our venom would kill weeds…. Hmmmmm. God bless us. Angels with us. Peace in our hearts.

My friend wrote a separate email to me to thank me for offering to help her with sending out group emails. "Of course, I’ll help," I thought and I wrote back to her, "It’s what we do." I’ve said this to people in the past, and within the last year, I’ve gotten some push back. I’ve also said, "We don’t do that," when the argument came to lying, breaking into the Capitol building and spitting on things, or being mean in government like we are being mean in the past year… I might say, "Americans are better than that; Americans don’t do that." What I am expressing is what I think are ingrained values, norms, even ‘institutions’. When I was a small child I think I was taught "this is what we do, this is polite, this is the rule." And we obeyed. When I became a teenager, and I began to sneak around…. it was accompanied with my own guilt and (I was misbehaving due to personal anger against parents). My girlfriends who knew about my sneaking called it "Irish guilt or Catholic guilt." And we laughingly said, "Susie, you need to go to confession….. "

Sometimes when I’m alone, I leave CNN on … one time I watched Sully Sullivan land a plane on the Hudson. Another time, I watched a plane fly into the World Trade Center… So if alone, CNN plays in the background. So guess what an announcer said today…. "The previous administration was precedent shattering;" "the end of shame," ignoring subpoenas indicates "basic norms are being shattered." It went on, but this was enough. Shattering precedent and norms, ignoring institutions and law? And, so what? Ignore the legalities. Run out the clock.

At the very end of a football game the quarterback can "end the game" by taking a knee 4 times and running something like 2 minutes off the clock. It happened in the last Buccaneers football game. The Bucs scraped out a 2 point lead, but there was plenty of time for the opposition to score if that "knee rule or knee precident" wasn’t in place. So the great quarterback Brady, very capapable of playing, took 4 knees. "He ran out the clock and ended the game". Is this the way we play life now? If we delay long enough… We will run out the clock and the other guy won’t get a chance to play? Time to get back to paperwork my friends, and let the world play in the background. God bless us. Angels with us.

With Autumn comes cooler mornings! The temperature doesn’t get to 90 until noon. So now I rush off to morning Mass and pray for all my friends. Jack Harlan used to add a SALPF (say a little prayer for) addendum to his monthly letter and I think it is wonderful to dedicate prayer to someone. Recently cousin Carol’s daughter Jenee was sick with Covid, but I hear Jenee will be cleared for work next week so she has not sunk into bad illness. Thank God!!!! A neighbor told me of two young people (in their 50s) who caught Covid and died recently so we are still fighting the demon pandemic. SALPF those who are fighting vaccination. Let them decide to take on this protective cloak of vaccine. That’s the way I believe. Give me a cloke that protects me, and I’m putting it on. OH! And I am walking again with neighbors who wait for me. I invite them to Mass…. I am not doing Yoga as that is offered at the same time as Mass.

Amidst polarization of our society, lost friends with whom we cannot agree, dissention, anger, we are sure the world is ending. But it probably isn’t. Jesus invites us to settle into his lap like a child on its mother’s lap… Relax and settle our souls in peace. In church I can either gaze up at the Cross, at a stained glass picture of the Last Supper, or at a beautiful statue of Mary. This last Sunday I looked at Jesus serving bread to his disciples. I looked at the face of Jesus, calm, and beautiful. His blessed hands offer bread and wine which he turns into his body and blood for us. He prays in John 15 through 17 so beautifully for us, "Father… I have loved them." In his last moments on earth, he knows he is going to be beaten, derided, betrayed, hung up with nails in his feet and hands to die naked before a jeering crowd. He knows what horrors await him. He knows his own people will allow the horrors out of their own weakness, yet he turns his beautiful face to his Father and he prays for us, his betrayers who turn our faces away. My friend weeps for the awful things our generation does to children, women, migrants. He weeps for the hungry, the enslaved, the homeless. My friend despairs and asks, "Where is God?" My answer of, "He is with us" doesn’t satisfy the weeping heart. Jesus wants us to put our head down on his chest and have full faith. Who knows what luxuries await the bedraggled migrant orphans when they enter Paradise? We certainly can’t fathom the Glory! This place is earth. It’s pretty in a lot of places and pretty awful in a lot of other places, but it’s only earth. God blessed the earth, but we damaged it…. If we would just try to do good. Be kind. Each one of us. A priest told a story: A man fed a robber one night and his friend said, "What are you feeding that creep for?" "If I am kind to him and keep him fed, eventually he will respond. I must have hope he will respond." Get their attention. Feed them. Love them. Pray they will respond. If not to you, then to someone. I might not see the leper I feed healed, but I have hope he will be healed in heaven. I can’t change the world. I can only change myself. Climbing up, lifting my little arms, I ask, "Lift me up, Lord! Teach me to Love!" Thank God.

Elijah ran away from the curses Queen Jezebel poured out. He asked God to take him up, but he couldn’t hear God (too much noise). Elijah just automatically assumed he would starve himself to death. "Run!!! Get away from the evil and die. Maybe then I’ll be OK." Physically and emotionally exhausted from the unstopping, ugly actions of the Queen and her consorts, Elijah ran!. But an angel gave him bread and water and told him "Get up and Go!!!" Oh darn. Gotta get up and go. Angel says so. When he got to Horeb… He finally found… peace. (A still small voice).

God doesn’t fail. He pours out Peace and Grace. There are many references to this in the Old and New Testaments. Think about a giant pitcher full of grace being poured out over the earth. God started pouring Grace out at the beginning when the Holy Spirit Graced the waters. And God doesn’t stop pouring. But what if we are not open? What if we are closed and shuttered against goodness being poured out on us. We are bitter, angry, defensive, protecting ourselves from "being hurt." We look out of our shuttered selves and we see… anger, shouting, muggings, killings, abortions,… We shake our heads and close the shutter. If I sit in church and look around, some of the people have said ugly things about what they believe vs what I believe. They have shaken me to the core with their mean spirited comments about the Pope and the President about whom I was taught to be respectful. Respect seems to have gone by the wayside, but not for me.  I have answered people with my "peaceful" thoughts and I get rejected. I get called names and I get labeled. I say "Don’t label me anything except ‘Child of God.’" But still it hurts. I get depressed and I hide. But that is when I block off the Grace pouring out. God needs me out and open. He needs me to "Raise up my heart… Open your hearts," Jesus says. In the Gospel, Jesus says to the Pharisees, "Moses had to make laws because of your hard heartedness, but here is the REAL law. Love One Another."  My friend, Yes, the world is crazy right now, but there is peace. I find it at the Altar in a Catholic church. You have to find it too. Let us continue our friendship and talking to each other. Let us open our hearts to each other. Let us accept the Grace being poured out. God bless us. OH Wait!!! He does! He has been pouring out that overflowing pitcher of "living water" since Creation!!! Thank You Jesus!