My sister-in-law Amy is one crafty gal. You can check out her skills through etsy.com, the homemade crafty people’s domain! Her “current obsession” is wool and needlefelting. Look at these little chickies emerging from their woolen wombs! What a great gift idea! (I’m not being paid for this advertisment… unless homemade jams or dandelion wine counts?)
It was such a blessing this year for my wife and I to bring our little boy to the March for Life in our nation’s capitol. And this year’s numbers were incredible; over 300,000! All of us from all over the country, different colors, different creeds, all in support of the dignity of human life, born and unborn, womb to tomb. The Boy and his sign got lots of smiles and oooos and ahhhs. He even marched a few steps! As always, the mass media either completely ignored or grossly misrepresented the March for Life this year. For the most accurate coverage and for links to the mainstream media’s poor reporting, read this article!
The “CHRISTMAS HOUSE” is an incredible experience. Nestled on a dark street in a quiet little town called Washingtonville, NY, it is Christmas on steroids. And that’s just the outside of the house… Every room inside is loaded to the gills with Christmas doodads and whatzits. Classic stuff too; trains, little villages, a hall of thematic trees like the Irish Tree, the Sports Tree, the Penguin Tree, and… the Creepy Singing Tree Which Has Lips and Big Eyes (my personal favorite. I’m not going to explain it to you. Just go! You’ll find it downstairs and to the right. Or should I say, it will find you!)
Each year, before heading home from NY, my wife, myself, and a bunch of the family make a pilgrimage to this mecca of music and lights. It’s open from December 20 to the 30th, from 7pm to 9pm.
The CHRISTMAS HOUSE: It’s mind-boggling, it’s sensory overload! The Palmer family will greet you, dressed all in North Pole attire. And donations are gratefully accepted to help offset the electric bill, which I would guess is somewhere around $139,082 a day!
PS – the CHRISTMAS HOUSE happens to be a beautiful family tradition for many in the area and beyond, dedicated to the memory of Christopher Palmer, who LOVED Christmas like crazy, as you’ll see. Check out more info here.
God sure knew what He was doing when He decided that the human species would be able to procreate and raise little humans. For one thing, I see it as His ingenious way of getting the male component outside of their own heads once and for all. Ladies, I imagine you need sweet liberation from your own mental gymnastics of self-seeking fulfillment too, from time to time.
Rebecca and I look back at the now seemingly short 5 years of infertility that began our marriage; the days of waiting and longing for a life to share our life with, of the periods when literally everyone we knew was pregnant, or holding a little one in their arms. Our days of seeking help, of discovering adoption at the embryonic level, of Snowflakes, of more sorrows, of miscarriages and then moments with our little Gracie, so sweet and so sad and so short-lived. We were in the Barren Desert, again and again. We were trying hard not to grasp at children as if they were a right. We still hold fast to the truth that all life is a gift, and the timing is in God’s time.
I think when Future Bill looks back on the small number of posts that went up for January and February of 2009, he’ll be smiling.
Smiling because every long stretch of postless days meant the time was wasted on his family. Yes! Wasted. Spilled out like a precious ointment on the feet of his beloved wife and son! Those were the days of grace; of Grace, and the Boy Wonder to be exact.
I’ve written before about the mysterious powers that a child unlocks in a father’s heart, powers that lay dormant like seeds awaiting the water of life. Well, they keep coming. I feel like the Greatest American Hero, Ralph Hinkley. Remember that show? In the series, he was given a “super suit” but lost the Instruction Manual in the desert. The series moved along and Ralph just had to discover how it all worked. Some episodes had him getting the knack of flying down a bit better, one show had him learn how to become invisible. Pretty cool stuff. I’ve already mastered invisibility…. it’s called “peekaboo!”
Yes, every day is an adventure, and every day Rebecca and I are absolutely blown away by the mystery of this little boy. We’re captivated by his smile, the way his face lights up when we look at him, when I come home from work, when he looks around at Sunday Mass at all the faces, and the stained glass, and the marble columns. And how his eyes flash at the sound of the altar bells when Jesus is coming.
A few weeks back, at Mass, I was holding the wee lad, and found myself… swaying. Finally, swaying. Ahead of me, a young couple stood, friends of ours, each holding a child, and swaying. And ahead of them, yet another woman, swaying. Like a forest of trees caught up in a great wind, there we were. Mommies and daddies, caught up in the Wind of the Spirit of Life. For years this sight caused a deep pain in our hearts, and now suddenly, we’ve entered into the Dance… into the Sway, the Truth, and the Life that God wishes all of us to enjoy.
It gives me pause to consider those still waiting, still hoping for the gift of children or of the gift of a spouse to build a life with, and to share a life with too. These are words and experiences to deep for tears. All I can do is hold and treasure this life, appreciating the utter gratuitousness of it all. Everything is a gift, everything is a grace.
The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.
– Caryll Houselander
When we were young and questions rolled from our lips in long, curling arabesques about the earth and sky and our own origins, we may have once asked about one of the greatest mysteries – the mystery of God’s origin.
“Who is God’s mommy?” the child whispers. And an answer may have come quite confidently; “God doesn’t have a mommy. He always was…”
For most of us, that response may have…
a) perplexed us,
b) sparked another question, or
c) opened a wide road that seemingly had no end, and even now we may still be walking it.
The answer, of course, is true….. and false. The infinite God certainly had no beginning. That would merely point to One greater than He, and that One would be God. We discover through philosophy (our reaching up), and through Revelation (His pouring down) that God is pure Spirit, the fullness of all Being, and source of all that has being. He is not bound in time and space, nor is He made in it. He makes it, lets it be. But in His love, the Author of all things chose to step into His own story, into time and space, and became one of us!
On January 1st, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. To some, this title of Mary is an enigma. How can the immortal God have a mortal mother? Did God have a beginning? Again, the answer is no, and yes. God loves paradoxes. St. Paul says in the second reading for this great Solemnity that when the fullness of time had come, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” (Gal 4:4-7)
To some, it’s scandalous to think that the Transcendent One should come into our world of flesh and bone and blood at all. But the Incarnation of Jesus, the Word of God becoming flesh, has shown us a great wonder, and cured us of a great wound: the wonder is that everything is holy now, for He has graced the world of air and water and earth with His presence; the wound was in our thinking that the two were ever really separate.
So God is born of an earthly woman, and cared for by an earthly father. Why? His actions, as always, are teachers. God seeks to reawaken us to the beauty of the family. The family has from the beginning been part of His plan to make us whole, to show us Who He is, to give us a place to grow and to know and to love Him through others. St. Paul continues, “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” This is the scandalous love of God, that we use such an intimate Aramaic phrase (literally daddy) to address Him! Even more, we honor the humble virgin Mary as His own Mother, and through adoption, as ours!
Mary’s motherhood of Jesus, Who is One with the Father, is a mystery that can only be known and lived in the heart. The paradox seems like a contradiction to the mind, but in the heart paradoxes fit. As the readings for this feast continue, we hear from Luke, who is believed to have taken much of his infancy narrative right from the lips of Mary herself. We find her taking with her gentle hands this great paradox of being the Mother of God and placing it in the sanctuary of her soul. Luke writes “And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” And so should we.
We need to return as well to a deeper appreciation of the family. Mother, Father, Son, Daughter. These are the titles of all of us. Each of us bears one of these names. These titles point with fingers of flesh and bone straight up and into the Transcendent Mystery of God Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God, as Pope John Paul II has said, in His deepest identity is not a solitude, but a family! Our first steps on this road of self-discovery begin in the home; in that little pool of life that is our family. It’s a communion of souls, always three (like a micro Trinity) or more, but it’s sometimes splintered into fragments because of sin or circumstance, or both. In its pure form, it might resemble an upside down triangle; a man and a woman whose love rises up from a single point of contact, and forms a new plane of existence, and supports that new line with their lines outstretched in a selfless gift of love.
Imagine a world of families like the Family that is God?
“As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.” – Pope John Paul II
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, pray for us and form us into true sons and daughters of God! May our families reflect the inner life of the Trinity, and glow with the warmth of your home at Nazareth.
Our son loves to laugh and smile, but just when we think it’s our funny faces or noises that are the cause of it, we’re given cause to think again. He’s like the ent named Quickbeam from The Lord of the Rings; it’s simple things that stir up joy in him; the pattern on a couch cushion, a light fixture, a sneeze, a toot (of course, those are funny even if you’re 90). These are the things that make him laugh and smile. The reality is, he has no clue who we are…. at least not yet.
Unknown hands pick him up to carry him. Food comes right to his tiny mouth just when he needs it. He can barely see things that are just a few feet away from him. He’s wrapped, rocked, cleaned, comforted, and cuddled by a love unknown to him.
I was thinking the other day as I was feeding the wee lad, it’s the same thing with us and God. So often, we have no clue just how close this Heavenly Father is to us…. just when and where He is comforting, cuddling, cleaning and caring for us. Even when, in our tears and cries, He seems absent, He’s just a few feet away, and only our undeveloped vision keeps us from seeing Him.
This fatherhood thing is doing wonders for the prayer life. I can see in our love and care for this beautiful baby boy and for his unborn sister Grace, a tiny glimmer of the love of God for us. I wonder if that too was part of His plan?
“Become who you were born to be.”
I’ve always loved this line, taken from a scene in Peter Jackson’s film “The Return of the King.” In a darkened tent where the army of Rohan encamps on the side of a mountain, Elrond speaks a word of challenge and invitation to Aragorn. He is the descendant of a royal line who has for too long wandered and waited for his vocation to be actualized. In this scene, the Ranger from the North takes up his forefather’s sword and takes hold once and for all of his high calling. He rises with a new name, Elessar, and a new mission.
Since the adoption of our son last month, I’ve been feeling the weight of a call; of a new vocation. I think something was activated in me just a few weeks ago, something that has perhaps lain dormant until now, like a seed that was planted but never cracked open until God knocked on the thin shell of my heart and whispered “Let there be life.”
It’s the glowing ember of fatherhood, which was nearly snuffed out in these past years of trial, of purification and waiting. But now it’s stirred by the breath of the Spirit and the gift of this adoption. In our sad experiences of miscarriage and loss, and in the midst of our unborn baby’s condition in the womb, I have always felt this vocation growing. Our prayer for a miracle for Baby Grace continues, but it’s as if in this time I were looking through a clouded glass, slightly removed, distant in a sense from this new act of “fathering.” I know in my heart I am a father, but until now I’ve been standing in this “Waiting Room,” pacing about, back and forth.
A mother’s vocation seems to be woven and spun so early, as the little ones are knit together in the womb. For a father, the world is like a second womb; he must wait to receive the new life in its second stage. (I think our Heavenly Father waits at the world’s end to receive us all. And what a happy, expectant Father He is! I wonder if God is pacing the halls of Heaven overjoyed for that moment when we are born into the Light of that Unending Day! Maybe all of the angels get cigars when someone enters Paradise?)
Right now, a child sleeps just feet away from me. Unbelievable. My vocation has made its “quantum leap”… has passed a test and is being given a new one. I feel this inspired instinct, this primal proclivity to guard and protect, to sacrifice and to serve my family at a new and deeper level than before. It’s amazing! And I can see the design here, the plan of God that allows us massive opportunities for grace. Life is meant to be, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, an “an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” It can begin in the self-gift of marriage, and continue for a couple in the gift of children.
Thank God for this plan, the plan of fatherhood and motherhood, of self-gift and self-emptying love! Like the vocation to celibate love, to spiritual fatherhood and motherhood in the priesthood and religious life, the vocation of marriage allows us to break free of the bonds of self-gratifying gravity and into the Great Wide Open of Selfless Love. It is this kind of love that makes the world go ’round, and that builds a culture of life and love.
May we all become what we were born to be!
So we’ve had a wee bairn in the house for sometime now. That’s Scottish for “little one.” And after five years, cries fill the house, and we are singing 80’s songs put to new words, like “We’ve been waiting… for a boy like you… to come into our lives… yeah waiting, for a boy like you, to make us feel alive…”
And then we tag team bottle time, and snuggle time, and we gaze into the little pools of this other little person’s eyes…. and we see they are “impregnated with distance” in the words of C.S. Lewis; his eyes are full of light and of a future full of walks in deep woods and sword fights and drawing maps of Grandpa’s land in Maine, of leaping from cliffs into cold water, and singing the Clancy Brothers songs, and a host of other adventures. Sure, the weight of glory that’s been set upon our hearts with him is beyond measure. What greater thing is there in the world than to be given stewardship over one of His little ones? We have fallen head over heels in love with this squishy wee babe. Thank You God.
The Heart of Things 