Combing Her Hair in the Sanctuary

The silence rests on us, like dust: but it is a dust playing in harmony with the gentle air and the colored light from stained glass. We wait, all of us, in the confession line, and I study the bowed heads and rounded backs of those few who have come early for Mass. Only a few children break with the strongly held quiet: they make jerky movements and strange little squeaks as they clack their Playmobil figures along the pew backs, the walls, the floor, in a practiced desperation of retaining normal noise in this stretched time before Mass.

We wait, and I should be focusing on my inward self, asking for guidance in understanding the state of my soul: there are little things, and all together they conspire against me and weigh me down. I ask for help, a usual prayer; and then my attention is sucked over to the heavy doors as they open, scattering the lit dust in a frenzied dance of surprise. Both doors are opened, as if a procession will enter, and I squint against the light to see what royal person might appear.

Here she comes, resplendent in her wheelchair, a face full of years, children, and suffering with cancer. She, who bore twelve children, is now little bigger than the ten-year-old girls who come to the sanctuary in a rush of ribbons: but she is absolutely still, a mask of white and wrinkle, except for the intense pools of peat which are her very alive eyes.

As she enters, she is attended by her husband, a scarecrow of a man: but a clean, groomed and dapper one, complete with polyester plaid pants that match a plaid tie. He is lanky but strong, and he almost looks like a devotee carrying his queen before him, with such care does he maneuver her over the threshold and gracefully close the doors. The procession of man and wife, patriarch and matriarch, stops at the beginning of the pew rows at the end of the vestibule.

He reaches into the polyester plaid pants, lifting the brown jacket tails up slightly, and pulls out a small comb. Carefully, gently, and with more love than I've seen (it is as if he were twining roses into her hair and planting a golden crown on her head), he combs her hair. It wasn't as if her grey bob cut wasn't neat. It is a work of ritual, of making her feel groomed and ready for the Mass. It is a small work of love and honor: if you saw him, and her, you would know what I mean.

In Honor of St. Cecilia on Her Feast Day

Martyr

Face dried still in paint
Costume’d robes and diadem,
Offered arms caressing
Palm, and instrument of thy death
Thy form encased by an unknown painter,
In rounded, antiquated strokes.

Mouth created in straight lines
No smile to soften legacy;
A linear beauty
Like to blade which pierce'd thee:
Wast thou ever swallow,
Child keeping time with wind?

Black pupils wreathed in flames
Eyes(even in paint) are bright
With the pierce'd Love of Christ:
Thus, the bridge 'twixt me and thee,
Martyr, far above, is Charity.

Melina Novena

Melina and I are about the same age- a couple months apart. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, she is really tall, and I am pretty short(at least I feel like that when she's looking down at me). We both have two girls and one boy. We both have one husband, good ones: But there is something special about Melina- I saw it, or rather with the eyes of the soul did I see it. For some reason, she reminds me of the woman in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, whom we meet when the bus from Hell arrives with the woman's husband who has come to find her. She meets him, she who was a normal woman in life with a house-apron and raw hands from the lye in wash-soap, a joyful woman who fed those who came to her door with food and love. She meets him, garlanded as a queen and followed by her court: all those whom she helped- men, women, children, cats and birds and dogs (the latter yelping and bounding eagerly around her flowing skirts).

I met Melina that day we came to St. Mary's, a little lost and lonely because we'd just moved to Melina's town- she pulled us right into a community of people; and when I hung around the tutorial she was helping run, we just fell into easy chatter. But Melina is no easy come, easy go friend. She kept me and my family at a distance, a distance respectful of the fact that she did not know us. As she experienced us, she prudently became more open: I understood this as the really loving thing to do, in that there was no falsity in her- this was a Woman of Prudence.

Then we graduated to talking on the phone about this or that(we were working together on a girls' group) and I noticed that she would always, consistently, draw the problems to prayer: "Let's go and pray about that and then get together and decide"; or, with something really important or hard, "Let me go to confession and Mass and then I can make a good decision".

I also noticed that she has a very counter-cultural attitude about her husband. She talked to me matter-of-factly and in a strong, femine way about submission: "I need to make sure that I am home for my husband, especially when he's been traveling"; or, " I have to check with my husband and see if he'll allow this". Now, often, I wonder about my slightly different take on the whole marriage relationship - because I respect her greatly; but nevertheless, I deeply respect Melina's desire to be submissive, as Christ is submissive, showing in this attitude a love of humility and servanthood. The actual, practical way this is carried out in any marriage is a complicated and private matter, dealing with the spouses strengths and weaknesses, intermingled essentially with the spiritual growth of each person. It is no easy matter to make principles in this area- so I don't, beyond an imitation of Melina's strategy: Take each thing to God in prayer.

In her habitual recourse to prayer in even the humblest matters, Melina reminds me of a child in the lap of God. This doesn't mean she is a spiritual simpleton, but rather someone who has the strength and balance of heart to know that she cannot rely on herself, but would choose, rather, to rely on God: because she knows her strength is not equal to sainthood. I've no doubt that she would be able to be a very successful and prudent person on the purely natural level, and so it is all the more amazing to see a gifted, balanced person like herself choose to take even the smallest things to God. There is a key to understanding this in her life, and it is a person: her son, James.

Melina has suffered because James has autism, and as hard as that is (hard beyond measure), somehow I think that God knew that this would help make her the tower of faith that she is; and she has no fear of others who may think (I have never heard this said, or anything negative about Melina) that she is 'all about God'- I think she would laugh her strong and deep laugh and say, "absolutely".

We have a group of homeschooling moms here, and someone coined the phrase, "Melina Novena", expressing both a little humor, but primarily a little awe and respect for this joyful and normal person, who is inside a passionate and unusual lover of Christ. She does not talk about herself in an inordinate way, and she takes criticism more humbly and better than anyone I have ever met. So it isn't that she doesn't have faults, but I somehow see that because her life is centered in Christ- He seems to be the measure by which she sees everything in her life- that she will, in the end, be perfect. This is my hope for my friend- and myself- and all of us.

Musing Between the Solstices

Sometimes we are asked to look outside our little track, our rationalized, sleek zones of understanding- of those things which we cannot comprehend this side of death. Sometimes it is the suffering we see in others or the suffering we go through ourselves- and sometimes it is simply loving and knowing another person who does not agree with us.

How do you love a person whose very sight upon life and death is diametrically opposed to yours? How do you suppress the desire, the apparent NEED to change them so that they fit inside your track? How do you do this without psychologically punching them into submission? How do you maintain your own sanity, the features of your own face in the face of another?

This kind of meeting, the crashing of different minds, is frightening to us all. Our beliefs are questioned, and beaten up; our dogmas must bear the brunt of relentless waves, and like a wave-break wall, will either stand the test or crumble into the sea, taking our security with it. We are frightened when we are not sure of God, and of how we understand Him. We are frightened most especially the more we have constructed our own belief system, independent of a communal tradition. We are all, all of us, religious. People believe in something, inevitably: themselves, the sun, the fact that they can think, anthropomorphic gods, or the true God. So it is not the fact of ‘religious’ or not, but rather the kind of religion that makes the difference.

There are people who are not frightened, though. These live on opposite ends of the metaphysical spectrum: either they are ensconced in a religious and cultural tradition which is more like Plato’s Sparta: an entity of individuals melded together by the welded iron of laws and eyes, a nightmare of certainty- or they are Saints.

Saints. They live an exaggerated life inside, they are idealists and ideologues: but of Love, not politics. They are embedded in society like jewels in a cotton tapestry, they are those who dream big of loving a God who loves them, with everything the four loves (agape, eros, storge, philia) can offer. They are extremists, and they have no fear, except for the original sin of pride. So they work to become the nada of St. John of the Cross- to become the humblest and the most forgotten: and thus are they drawn to those considered nothing in the eyes of the rest of society, those in the gutters. They see the Lord of Heaven and Earth suffering in the trash heap. In the quest to forget self in the great ocean of God, they look to their Ideal, Christ who “humbled Himself, leaving all glory behind, taking the form of a servant”. In this, the beautiful synchronicity of the Lord becomes apparent: as they humble themselves, and lose their only fear, they become more like Christ, like God. But they do not know this. They only know Love: and bear with joy the suffering and the meeting of those who hate them because their very existence of Love makes anything else held dear look empty( those who are clinging to other things cannot bear the bright light shone on their emptiness).

A saint turns an open, loving and fearless face on the other who does not see the way they do: they are totally free, because they are the power of God, the power of love. They are already lost to self, they have nothing else to lose, and yet their souls are carried quietly and safely in the arms of God and they are more themselves than they would be if they clung to their atomized existence in this life. A saint faces the other and looks at them: really sees them. Most people only see each other through their own need-filters, their own selfish clingings, their own scars and fears: they do not truly see the other, and so they are blind. A saint sees because Christ has cured them of blindness by enabling them to die to themselves. They have no filter save that of the love of God.

We are in the time of the year of the saints. The Church placed the feast of All Saints’ today, November first: why? We are in the waning of the physical earth, the low point on the swing between Summer and Winter Solstices. Here, the Chinese say, the veil between the natural world and the supernatural thins to a point of transparency and openness. Perhaps this is true, as in many cultures of the world, one can see attempts to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of closeness to the unseen in the different religions: Halloween was, before the Church stepped in, a veritable festival of the attempt to appease the entities in the darkness in many cultures. Beginning with saint-missionaries like Bishop Patrick, the Church stepped in to bring Christ’s power and the reality of redemption from the darkness, right at the high point of fear: All Saint’s Day. Halloween actually is ‘Hallow’s Eve’- the vigil Mass for the feast of All Saints. Yet, it is still an uncomfortable time for many people, where death and fear is celebrated and made a joke, where modern-day occultists try to bring back the glory days of evil. But the Saints march in this dark night, in their fearless love, reminding us that death is but a reminder and a visible proof of the supernatural realities: for who has not seen a corpse and known, known in the center of one’s being, that something is gone: this is a visceral and spiritual experience of the reality of the soul as part of yet separable from the body.

And “the death of His holy ones is precious in the sight of the Lord”. Strange, but not when one thinks about it: at the death of a saint, the veil between that soul, who has lived exaggerated love for the love of God, and the Beloved, is finally torn and complete unity becomes possible. Many saints, like St. Therese of Liseux were seen to pass through the veil, to yet be in the body but seeing and experiencing already the reality on the other side. One only has to look at the ethereal, uncorrupted face of St. Bernadette in her glass coffin to understand. It is a look beyond human beauty.

So as we live through these days of the thinning veil, and many of us feel the disturbance, the darkness, we can turn in joy to the saints; we can then begin, on November 2, (All Souls’) to become the saints we are all called to be: we can pray for all souls without fear- and ask to love with the exaggeration of God, because it is His gift and His gift alone. We can do nothing but use our free wills to be willing: and look at this life from the immense perspective of eternity, rather than looking in fear or in ignorance at eternity from the narrow perspective of this life.