Just Walking By, And...

I've worked on the 35th floor since October and walked by this framed poster every day without really looking at it. Then one day recently I turned and read it. I laughed out loud!

A Happy Easter Gift

It doesn't get much better than this!

The Holy Land

Chris, Theresa and I are going to the Holy Land! We're SO excited. It will be a pilgrimage led by a scripture scholar and Fr. Kastl from our parish. We attended our first preparation meeting today and came away convinced that this will be a beautiful, life-changing experience. Will tell you more as we progress...

Try Again

I'm trying again, but this time will save every 30 seconds :)! We had a wonderful time last weekend when Theresa and her postulant friends, along with Sr. Rebecca, their formator, came to visit (the picture includes all + two other sisters who didn't visit - I really need to take and upload pics!!). They stayed on their way back to St. Louis from Texas and sold books at our parish.

They arrived very tired on Saturday and went to sell books at the 5:00 Mass, which we also attended. We got home pretty late and ate a wonderful meal that Chris had made. On Sunday they left to sell books at the 8 and 10:30 Masses. I went to hear Theresa speak at the end of the 10:30 - she called up all the postulants and very dynamically told us about the sacrifices they had made (one PhD, a nurse, a violist who played with Yo Yo Ma, a web developer). Then she said they weren't the only ones who were called to give their lives to God in a dramatic way - we all were. Hmmmm... When folks were talking later about the number of people buying books Fr. Kastl said it was due to Theresa making them all feel like slackers! :)

We ate a brunch of calzone (that's right, Shea family, and it's NOT Easter!) and fruit salad. In true family tradition, no one was allowed seconds unless they LOVED it! Later we went to see The King's Speech (save! - almost forgot!) that afternoon and then came home for an Oscar party. Dinner included Elizabeth Taylor's chicken simmered in wine, Ronald Reagan's macaroni and cheese, Robert Redford's olive salad, followed by brownies and ice cream with Jeff Bridges' (he was nominated!) hot fudge sauce. Then we watched the show while playing Oscar bingo, with cells marked off for things like "winner interrupted by music". Such Fun!!

Unfortunately, they left the next morning and we miss them all! BUT Fr. Kastl told them he would like them to return twice each year!

$%@#$!@

SAVE BLOGS! I just lost a looonnnggg one when the site shut down. And now I'm heading to Mass, so will re-write later :).

Mom

I have an almost tangible sense of solidity at my core – a sense of well-being and a knowledge that I’m loved. It’s been there all my life and I know it came from my mother.

She wasn’t a bake-you-cookies, give-me-hugs, what-can-I-do-for-you kind of mom (at least by the time I came around as the surprise! fifth of five, born when she was 40). She was a practical, I’m-always-here-for-you, let-me-at-anyone-who-hurts-you, you’re-more-than-OK kind of mom.

Despite losing my father to cancer at age 8, I know that life is good and I have that core – that unmistakable, irreplaceable core that only a parent’s unconditional love can give. Even though she struggled after his death and dealt with a lot of anxiety, her stability and commitment to us was So. Much. Greater.

I mourn for those poor children and former-children that do not have that core. They must search all their lives to find it. I had the blessing of being able to search for God instead. Today is Mom’s birthday – it is the 96th anniversary of her birth. Thank you, Mom. You were the best!

I'm Back Again!

OK,OK,so I wasn't really back. I have no idea why I can't seem to get my blogging groove back, but oh well, here I am for another post and possibly not another one for who knows :). In looking back over the posts it looks like I went into seclusion after sending my daughter to the Daughters!

I'm sitting in my living room looking out over the close to 18 inches of snow out there. This kind of weather is so rare here! Liz had to go to work Thursday and she and I both ventured out to work yesterday. The expressways are fine, but the city roads are amazingly horrible, and this spoken as a Michigander! There were holes that we called snowholes instead of potholes where steam from a sewer hole maybe had melted away the ice, leaving about a foot deep hole in the packed snow. Liz and I got out of work at 2 (due to 4-6 more inches coming) - Chris came to get us - but we didn't get home til 4!

Sarah has been baking up a storm. Last night she and I made cookies with peanut butter centers, covered in chocolate dough. Yum! She's heading back to Mexico on Wednesday :( I will miss her a bunch!

Our Daughter is a Daughter

The biggest news, though, is Theresa's entry into Daughters of St. Paul on Wednesday. We were so moved and Theresa was filled with joy. She needs prayers, though, because she's had some really strong allergic reactions since Wednesday. We talked to her today and she was more miserable than earlier in the week.
Theresa, we love you and we miss you! AND we're praying up a storm.

I'm Back!

Who knows for how long... But I miss blogging. I think I will turn off the comments so I can't tell if anyone is "listening" for awhile. I like it better when I'm kind of inside my own head.

I have wonderful news, head! I have a new job! Through the grace of God and "Getting Low" as Robert Duvall would say, I have discovered a wonderful opportunity at my company (which I love) but in a department other than the one I am currently in (which I don't love). The Lord worked with me on it in an amazing way. An example - in prayer several months ago when praying about my current job I felt I should place two dates out there - September 1 2010 and April 1 2011 - by which time I would have another job. If not by the first date, by the second. After searching desperately for jobs and trying to get a plan for starting my own consulting business, I quickly realized the first date was not going to work. I've been so stressed in my current position that I didn't have the focus or the energy to work toward my goal.

I was mentoring a woman at work who got a job outside the company. I was so happy for her, but felt a bit envious since it had basically fallen in her lap. The week before she left she said, "Have you considered applying for my job, Jane?" I said I had in the past, but listed my concerns. She cleared those up and I remember where I was standing when I "heard" a thud in my lap! In a matter of weeks I could be freed from this ungodly environment of stress! Well, I had a few conversations and a few days later heard the hiring manager say, "You've got the job, we just have to work out the details." The date? September 1!

The Good Lord is faithful. I ran screaming to him several times during the storm while he was sleeping in the boat ("ye of little faith"), but every once in a while I sat and watched him sleep. That's progress!

Happy Birthday Part II

An even better article from the National Catholic Reporter that reprints an article by an Italian sociologist:

“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of members of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension. Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”
An editorial from a great secular newspaper in 2010? No: It’s a speech of May 28, 1937, by Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich. This speech, which had a large international echo, was the apex of a campaign launched by the Nazi regime to discredit the Catholic Church by involving it in a scandal of pedophile priests....
The expression “moral panic” was only coined by sociologists in the 1970s to identify a social alarm created as a kind of art, accomplished by amplifying real facts and exaggerating their numbers through statistical folklore, as well as “discovering” and presenting as “new” events which in reality are already known and which date to the past. There are real events at the base of the panic, but their number is systematically distorted. Even without the benefit of modern sociology, Goebbels responded to the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in 1937 with a textbook case of the creation of a moral panic.

Happy Birthday PBXVI

The news about Pope Benedict has been relentless and filled with misleading statements. I came across an interesting article written by an "atheist libertarian" that included:

It's worth asking why otherwise fairly intelligent thinkers get so dementedly exercised over the Pope and the Catholic Church. What exactly is their beef? What are they objecting to?

Very few (if any) of the Pope-hunters were raised Catholic, so this isn't about personal vengeance for some perceived slight by a priest or nun. And despite their current lowdown, historically illiterate attempt to equate a priest fondling a child with a state's attempt to obliterate an entire people under the collective tag "crime against humanity", the truth is that some of these Pope-hunters don't really think child abuse is the worst crime in the world. In 2006, Dawkins criticised "hysteria about pedophilia" and said that, even though he was the victim of sexual abuse at boarding school, he would defend his abusive former teachers if "50 years on they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers". Yet now he wants to put abusive priests on a par with genocidaires.

And another article by PJPII's biographer, George Weigel, where he points out that we as Catholics can now speak our confidently and forcefully after having cleaned house of it's "filth", as PBXVI called it:

Reasonable people whose perceptions are not warped by the toxin of anti-Catholicism or who are not pursuing other (often financially-driven) agendas now recognize that the Church in the U.S. and Canada has bent enormous efforts towards cleaning up what Cardinal Ratzinger called in 2005 its “filth,” to the point where the Catholic Church today can be empirically shown to be the safest environment for young people and children in North America. The paralyzing drumbeat of one ghastly new story after another that went on all during 2002 has not been repeated. What we now have is, largely, the recycling of old material, usually provided to the press by contingent-fee attorneys whose strategic goal is to build a public “narrative” of conspiracy that will shape American courts’ decisions as to whether the Vatican and its resources can be brought within range of U.S. liability law.

The realization among serious Catholics that this is not 2002 and that things have changed dramatically since 2002, has led to a far more confident effort to fight back against misrepresentations such as those the Times perpetrated on March 25. There is a danger here: to recognize that this is not 2002 cannot blind us to the fact that there are wounds that remain to be healed, reforms of priestly formation that remain to be completed, bishops whose failures remain to be recognized and dealt with, new norms for the selection of bishops to be implemented, and accounts rendered as to why the Vatican, prior to Ratzinger’s taking control of the issue of clerical sexual abuse in the late 1990s, was sometimes sluggish in its response to scandalous behavior by priests and deficient leadership by bishops.

Assuming, however, that Benedict XVI has set in motion processes that will lead to all those lingering issues being forcefully addressed, a serious question can now be credibly posed: Are those most vigorously agitating these abuse/misgovernance issues today genuinely interested in the safety of young people and children, or are they using the failures of the past to cripple the moral credibility of the Catholic Church in the present and future? That question would have rightly struck many people as a dodge in 2002. It cannot be credibly regarded as a dodge today, because of what the Church has done since 2002 (and, indeed, since the 1990s, when the plague of abuse within the Church began to recede).

The Empty Tomb

The most fantastic claim. Either the tomb was empty. Or it was not. Either I believe the 500 witnesses, the 11 apostles who died martyrs' deaths rather than deny it was true, and 2000 years of enduring good works... or I do not. I choose to believe. Hallelujah!

Christmas Beauty

We had such a great Christmas! Four are still here! Theresa left for a week to go to Boston, but returned yesterday til Sunday. I took today off, took the tree down, we all went out to the Brook for lunch, then we came home and did our own home-made Dancercize in the living room for about an hour (well, OK, I didn't go the whole hour - but I think Sarah went for 1 1/2 hours!). Sarah spent some time creating a list of songs crescendoing from warming up easy listening to crazy African drum beats. Now we're going to play games followed by a trip to the dollar theater to watch Paranormal Activity (if we can talk T into it - she hates scary movies!).

Kissing the Face of God

"God's sign is simplicity. God's sign is the baby. God's sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendour. He comes as a baby - defenseless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will - we learn to live with him and to practise with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him." Pope Benedict XVI

A Last Minute Gift...With Meaning

An opportunity for a last minute Christmas Gift! Liz has set up a fund to help cover the cost of books and supplies for students in Agua Fria, the mountain town where she did her Peace Corps service. Click below to send a payment via PayPal!! She has a nice certificate that she can send you to use as a gift (co-workers, family members, neighbors, etc.) if you'd like. But since she's traveling back to the states this week, you'd better email me (janen7@cox.net). THANKS! (PS - if you use the link below, the shipping address may be confusing - just enter your own address - since you're not purchasing anything, shipping isn't needed, but something needs to be entered.)

Gifts

Option 1 $10.00 Option 2 $25.00 Option 3 $50.00 Option 4 $100.00

O Come O Come Emmanuel

Oh Holy Advent

I wanted to share a beautiful Advent reflection on this Advent eve - from my favorite blog.

I shed tears of gratitude and joy that you have come round again, O Advent, to shake us from our torpor as early night comes, and the match is struck, and the message is brought home once more; that we are forever in the absence of light; it is beyond us and exterior until we make it welcome and bring it, like a lover, within. Welcome into our deepest void, welcome into the parts of us touched by human frost and stunted. Welcome, O Light, beaming glorious, into remotest apertures of our souls, rays aglow, warmth permeating where we have left old fires unattended and embers to wane, and our abysses to grow chill, and uninhabitable. Welcome light; dispelling illusion, and chasing old ghosts to rest.

With the sunset tonight, the promise is renewed; the story begins again. The beginning; quiescence, empty and void. Then movement; an annunciation; a Word -one boundless, vibrant “yes” that shakes creation; “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my savior!” Soon there will be dreams, and silent wondering, and a gathering, and a starry night rent with song. The Word Present penetrates lonely, lost humanity, and enters into the pain and fear, the tumult and whirlwind; and He sets His tent with us not merely dwelling among, but literally with us; with hunger, with the capacity for injury and doubt -with enough vulnerability to be broken- and within this espousal, everything is illuminated!

Technology Overload

You know you're technologically overloaded when you finally get invited to create a Google telephone number, spend WAY TOO MUCH time trying different numerical combinations that spell memorable words, finally find the telephone number to rival the one you grew up with - PLeasant OH SHOOT I forgot!! - submit it, and then several weeks later when you realize you haven't used it once, you wonder why you ever got one in the first place because you don't see any purpose!!!

BUT I did just find out that when you forget your Google Voice number you can go find it on the website! 918-200-WIDE (I know, I know - all the interesting words were taken!).

Uh-oh...

Prayers for Honduras

The Wall Street Journal reports on Hondurans prayers for a miracle offered to "La Morenita". Let's join them!

I've copied most of it below (mostly for Liz's sake) since WSJ articles are hard to reach:

In the past three months, a slew of Latin American presidents, foreign ministers, ambassadors and even a Nobel Peace Prize winner, have failed to find a solution to the political standoff that has split Honduras. Now, many despairing Hondurans say, may be time for a little divine intervention...

So every day, more and more Hondurans are calling on the Virgin of Suyapa, a 3-inch statuette of the Virgin Mary, made of dark wood and nicknamed La Morenita, or the Little Dark One, for help. Over the centuries, La Morenita, which was found on a hillside in 1747 and now makes its home at a small whitewashed colonial church near the capital, has been credited with sundry miracles, from curing kidney stones to ending a brief war...

If anyone can put Honduras back on the right path, believers think, La Morenita is the one to do it. Over the centuries, she is said to have cured the blind and made cripples walk. It is said that she appeared in white robes to aid Honduran soldiers during a bloody conflict. The challenge now is to get Mr. Zelaya and his foe, Mr. Micheletti, to settle their political differences...

Legend has it that the statuette was discovered one February morning in 1747 by a laborer named Alejandro Colindres who was out clearing a corn field the day before. But darkness fell suddenly, and the farm worker went to sleep by the side of the road. When he rolled over, there was something poking at his side. Half asleep, he threw the object into the night -- only to find it poking at him yet again in the morning.

It was the tiny statue of La Morenita.

Her first supposed miracle took place in 1768, when Capt. José de Zelaya, perhaps an ancestor of the ousted president, was suddenly relieved of incurable kidney stones. Grateful, the captain had a church built to house the Virgin. Pilgrims -- some saying the Virgin had visited them in the night -- arrived from across the land. More miracles were reported.

By the 20th century, the Virgin of Suyapa was Honduras's most loved symbol. Songs were written to her, daughters named after her. In 1969, La Morenita was even given the battlefield commission "Captain of the Armed Forces" when Honduras went to war with neighboring El Salvador after violence broke out in the stands in a World Cup qualifying match. The brief, bloody war took four days and cost 2,000 lives. A draw, it went down in history as the "Soccer War." "We were outnumbered," said Ms. Díaz. "But the patroness appeared in a white gown to our soldiers, guiding them along, giving them food and water."

The pastor chimed in with an anecdote of his own. It was last February, and a family of three from near the Guatemalan border made the grueling journey across the mountains to visit the figurine. But the church had already closed that day. When he returned, "the church doors were open and they were all inside praying to her," said the priest who insists it was none other than the Virgin who let the pilgrims in. "I had locked the door myself."

Last Sunday, parishioners gathered for the first Sunday mass since Mr. Zelaya's surprise return to the country. Two policemen on motorcycles circled the basilica, their rifles pointing toward the heavens. Inside, the church was overflowing with worshipers. Many stood before the altar, waving framed portraits of the Virgin as an assistant sprinkled holy water. Father Ruiz led the services, dressed in long white robes and a green cloak. "With all of the uncertainty now in the country, we beg for your help," he said.

Honduras, Father Ruiz whispered, is like the baby held by King Solomon, in danger of being split in two by its current president and its ousted one. "Maybe the Virgin should be president. She is only 6 centimeters tall, but she has greatness," said the priest, gazing out the window of the church.