ODDBALL AND PROUD

PRISM ON PRINTER PAPER

In the measure that a Christian professes his faith and tries to live it he becomes a “misfit” to both believers and non-believers alike. This happens because the Gospel will not cease until the end of time to be News (Good News) for both Jews and Gentiles alike.

The oddball character of the Christian stems purely and simply from his resemblance to Jesus Christ, the resemblance to Jesus that is infused into a person at baptism and which, passing through his heart, comes out right to the very nerve endings of his being.

Just as the human face is made up of features—the two eyes, the nose, the mouth—whatever the age, mentality, or color the person may be, so the resemblance that a Christian has to Jesus Christ consists in the very character traits of Christ. This is true whether the disciple is intelligent or unintelligent, whether he is called to suffer a little or a lot and whether he is in a high position or a low position in the world.

This character of being a “misfit” is not cause by his being a remarkable man and someone who is noticed nor is it this that entitles him to the name Christian; it is the rejection of and removal from his own life of everything that would destroy its resemblance to Jesus Christ. It is not the dazzling achievements of the Christian that make him different, it is the fact that Christ, always the same Christ, is showing his face through this human face.

Madeleine Delbrêl, The Joy of Believing

IN THE 'HOOD

I FOUND A LOVE

The other morning, after 8 o'clock Mass, I left the church and started walking home. I took the long way, up Micheltorena through the winding hills of Silver Lake and down through Descanso. I passed a couple, standing in their driveway by their respective cars, getting ready to go to work.

"Bye, baby," the gal said. "Bye, honey," the guy said.

I thought of the Eucharist: with me, in me.
I thought: That’s me and Christ.

ONE OF US

WISTERIA, UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Wow. It's Monday morning, I am back from leading a retreat for recovering women in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and I am reeling. From the strength and stories and laughs from these incredible women, the suffering they have endured, their flowering hearts. The atom bomb had nothing on the power of love that was palpable in that circle of women all weekend.

We had the working poor and socialites, the young and the old, women who'd been sober 30-plus years and women who hadn't quite, just yet, put down the drink. We had women whose children had died of ODs,  women with siblings born with fetal alcohol syndrome, women whose kids had been taken away from them because of their drinking and drugging and because they were sober, had gotten the kids back, and raised them, and gone back to college and graduated magna cum laude and the kids are in college now, too. We had mothers whose children were bipolar, or with abusive partners, or having panic attack, mothers with eating disorders, women, like me, who had never been and are never going to be mothers.We had women who had just lost their mothers, women who had just lost their husbands, women who were caring for their aging parents, alone. We had two sets of blood sisters, women who came with posses of their sober sisters,  a pair of ex-college roommates, women who had come to the retreat, in fear and trembling, alone, because they wanted to get better.

And let me tell you something: if you have never gotten that close to the beating heart of the world, you are missing out. If you have never looked into the eyes of a human being who has suffered physical, sexual, and emotional abuse as a child that would have felled a lesser person--and who is telling you, "I have to get better. Because I'm worth something"--you have not entirely lived.

Early Sunday morning, I sat for awhile by the coffee machine with a woman who had come all the way from Washington, D.C., by train and chauffered car. I'd been there when she walked through the door Friday night,  eyes downcast, shaking with anxiety. "I'm so afraid," she'd whispered.

All weekend, we women had shared our brokenness, and out of that collective wound had arisen a strange, rejuvenating hope and strength and sense of purpose, as if we'd been infused with new blood. Now by the coffee machine Sunday morning, this gal said, "I have a great favor to ask of you--would you pray for me?" I said, "Of course I will. You've touched my heart and the heart of everyone here."

And then she said, "I'd like to do one more thing. May I pray for you? Is there something you'd like me to pray, for you?"

I gazed into that dear human face for a second, and then I put my head down on the table and wept. I had given everything I had. It was the first retreat I'd ever led and I'd given literally everything I had: my heart, my body, my sleep. But that this woman, who had suffered so much and come so far, would pray for me? 

I said, "Pray for my strength, if you would. Pray that I'm strong enough to endure the gifts that have been given to me."

Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy-burdened, and I will give you rest.

Healthy people don't need a doctor; sick people do.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

The road of happy destiny.
Best overhead line of the weekend:
"Here's the difference between me and God.
God doesn't get up up in the morning and think He's me."

Thank you from my heart, girls.
Let's carry  it on.

MALVERN

Happy Friday, people.

I am at the beautiful Malvern Retreat House in Chester Cy. Pennsylvania, poised to lead a Matt Talbot weekend retreat for women.

Matt Talbot (1856-1925) was an Irish drunk who was struck sober, became deeply pious, died 40 years later on a Dublin street, and was found to have all manner of chains and cords tied about his body. My way has been a lot easier and softer but I am in deep solidarity with his suffering as an alkie and totally on board with his love for Christ and I am humbled and thrilled to be here.

THE DOGWOOD AND AZALEAS ARE IN BLOOM

The 125-acre grounds have several grottoes, woodland trails, and sets of Stations of the Cross.

THE SIXTH STATION OF THE CROSS
VERONICA WIPES THE FACE OF JESUS 

It was here, on my constitutional just this morning that, folks, I had a "vision!" I looked down at the ground to my right and saw this weird shadow, WHICH DID NOT IN ANY WAY CORRESPOND TO THE OUTLINE OF THE SCULPTURE, of a man, possibly Jesus himself, clearly about to drive a nail into my small person! Check it out!

I moved on to Station Seven--Jesus Falls for the Second Time--and spent quite a bit of time there.

Having celebrated 26 years of sobriety Wednesday, May 8th, I especially treasure this chance to share my story and to spend time with the women who'll be coming.

Maybe the "vision" was God's way of saying Don't forget to crucify your ego and thus let HIS truth, beauty, and sense of humor shine through!

FR. JOE AND THE PASSIONISTS OF SOUTH PITTSBURGH

One especially vivid memory of my February trip to Pittsburgh is the single night I spent, courtesy of Fr. Joe Sedley, at the St. Paul Monastery, Church and Retreat House in South Pittsburgh.

The men at St. Paul are Passionist priests. They serve the neighborhood as well as their retreatants, and part of their charism is hospitality.

Fr. Joe, who is 77, had e-mailed me when he read I was coming his way. “Love to meet up if you have time,” he said. He acted like I was doing him a favor instead of the other way around.

The Saturday afternoon we'd arranged for him to pick me up, he was leading a retreat and drove across town on his break.  His 2004 Ford Focus looked like it had made many such trips; I imagined him fetching anawim of various stripes from near and far as we made our way to St. Paul's.

At the monastery, Father helped me with my bags to the retreat house office, and introduced me to Dottie.  A volunteer with a slight limp, Dottie welcomed me warmly and allowed that she was scheduled for knee surgery in two days.

Then Father showed me around--the dining hall, the chapel, the sacristy to the old neighborhood church.  Here we came upon Loretta Diehl, a petite redhead who was bent over an ironing board with “just a stack of altar cloths!”

“Loretta about runs this place,” Fr. Joe chuckled.

“How long as she been here?” I asked as we toured the sanctuary. In a niche to the side, statues of St. Gemma Galgani. St. Gabriel, and St. Theresa of Avila were bathed in an otherworldly green light.

“Loretta?” Father mused. “Let’s see, she’s been volunteering her services now for over 40 years or so.”

SIDE CHAPEL IN MONASTERY AREA

Back in the residency area, Fr. Joe had managed to score me one of the coveted newly-refurbished rooms.
I settled in and ambled down to dinner: killer spaghetti and meatballs, after which Father insisted upon announcing me like I was some kind of celebrity instead of the person who had done the least work of anyone there to make the retreat and atmosphere lovely for everyone.

I slept like a lamb.

Some of the women had taken shifts, or been up all night, before the Blessed Sacrament. Like the worker who came late to the vineyard, I appeared in the chapel at 6:30 a.m., half an hour before the Eucharist was to be reposed. The first person I saw, sitting quietly to the right, was a freshly-shaven Fr. Joe.

After morning prayer, he introduced me to Fr. Mike Salvagna, who promptly lent me to key to the crypt. “Bring ‘em back to me at breakfast,” said Fr. Mike. Never seen me before. Total trust.

FROM THE CRYPT
IF MEMORY SERVES, RIGHT HAND SIDE, SECOND UP FROM BOTTOM
IS HORSEHAIR SHIRT AND SCARY BARBED IRON PENITENTIAL ITEM

Over breakfast, Fr. Mike and I enjoyed a delightful chat, after which he shot back to his room and re-appeared with much incredibly helpful material and several CDs about his healing retreats.

Mass for us retreatants was to be held in the chapel. But first, I wanted to see those statues again. So I walked through the sacristy toward the main church, where, unbeknownst to me, the 10 a.m. parish Mass was about to be celebrated. A priest I hadn’t met was looking out the window and gathering himself. He probably could have done without a stranger traipsing through his sacristy before Mass, but if so, he didn’t betray that by the slightest sound or movement or body language. He neither acknowledged me nor ignored me. He included me. He incorporated me. His face is stamped on my memory. Not the features, but the quality of the gaze.

After Mass, I got to sit in on Fr. Joe’s last talk. He was a wonderful speaker: funny, deep, and with a delivery all his own. I was spellbound and could have listened to him for hours. Instead, true to form, he turned the podium over to me for 15 minutes. I got up and basically cried, after which several dear women, I’m sure inspired entirely by Fr. Joe’s home-spun holiness, bought my book.

It may not seem like much, that humble monastery. We left its walls and returned to the “real” world. But  back in L.A., assaulted by the usual news of abused children, torture victims, the bombs built by a pair of brothers, my mind has returned again and again to those homely scenes:

Fr. Joe, praying before the Blessed Sacrament.
Dottie, welcoming the stranger.
Fr. Mike, trusting the resident alien.
Loretta, head bent to the endless work of pressing and folding and stacking altar cloths.
An anonymous priest, his weary face raised to the light.

Upon this rock I will build my church. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

THE SUPPER OF THE LAMB

Someone, I can't now remember who but thanks, recently recommended a book called The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. The author is an Episcopal priest, husband, and father named Robert Farrar Capon.

I liked the book a lot. It's quirky and opinionated, and in the best way, rambling (Capon spends several chapters telling how to make a meal for 8 four different times out of a single leg of lamb: Main ingredient: "1 leg of lamb (The largest the market will provide. If you are no good with a kitchen saw, have the chops and the shank cut through. Do not, however, let the butcher cut it up. If he does, you will lose eight servings and half the fun." Like that).

There's an ode to baking soda, a jeremiad against electric serving knives, an exegesis (generated by his wife's learning to make spaetzle) on the excellent advice to either fast or to eat to your heart's content but on no account to engage in the kind of angst-ridden persnickety calorie-counting that drives ourselves and everyone else crazy.

On being an amateur cook:

"There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of a loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom would break it to bits—witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little, and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling."

At one point, he instructs the reader to set aside an hour and deconstruct an ordinary brown onion:

“Then look. The myth of sphericity is finally dead. The onion, as now displayed, is plainly all vectors, risers and thrusts. Tongues of fire. But the Pentecost they mark is that of nature, not grace: the Spirit’s first brooding on the face of the waters….:

For somehow, beneath this gorgeous paradigm of unnecessary being, lies the Act by which it exists. You have just now reduced it to its parts, shivered it into echoes, and pressed it to a memory, but you have also caught the hint that a thing is more than the sum of all the insubstantialities that comprise it. Hopefully, you will never again argue that the solidities of the world are mere matters of accident, creatures of air and darkness, temporary and meaningless shapes out of nothing. Perhaps now you have seen at least dimly that the uniquenesses of creation are the result of continuous creative support, of effective regard by no mean lover. He likes onions, therefore they are. The fit, the colors, the smell, the tensions, the tastes, the textures, the lines, the shapes are a response, not to some forgotten decree that there may as well be onions as turnips, but to His present delight—His intimate and immediate joy in all you have seen, and in the thousand other wonders you do not even suspect. With Peter, the onion says, Lord, it is good for us to be here. Yes, says God. Tov. Very good."

MY LIFE SHALL BE A REAL LIFE

ANCIENT BOWLING SIGN
ECHO PARK, L.A.
THE VIETNAMESE CREPES AT XOIA MAKE ME FEEL EVER MORE SPIRITUALIZED!

...[W]e, living and growing personalities, are required to become ever more spiritualized, ever more and more persuasive, more and more deeply real; in order that we may fulfil [our] Divine purpose.

This is not mere pious fluff. This is a terribly practical job; the only way in which we can contribute to the bringing of the Kingdom of God. Humanitarian politics will not do it. Theological restatement will not do it. Holiness will do  it. And for this growth towards holinesss, it seems that it is needful to practice, and practice together, both that genuine peaceful recollection in which the soul tastes, and really knows that the Lord is sweet, inwardly abiding in His stillness and peace; and also the suffering, effort and tension required of us unstable human creatures, if we are to maintain that interior state and use it for the good of other men. This ideal is so rich, that in its wholeness it has only been satisfied once. Yet it is so elastic, that within it every faithful personality can find a place of opportunity and development. It means the practice of both attachment and detachment; the most careful and loving fulfilment of all our varied this-world obligations, without any slackening of attachment to the other-worldly love.

And if we want a theoretical justification of such a scheme of life, surely we have it in the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation? For does not this mean the Eternal, Changeless God reaching out to win and eternalize his Creatures by contact through personality? that the direct action of Divine Love on man is through man; and that God requires our growth in personality, in full being, in order that through us His love and holiness can more and more fully be expressed? And our Lord's life of ministry supported by much lonely prayer gives us the classic pattern of human correspondence with this, our two-fold environment. The saints tried to imitate that pattern more and more closely; and as they did so, their personality expanded and shone with love and power. They show us in history a growth and transformation of character which we are not able to grasp; yet which surely ought to be the Christian norm? In many cases they were such ordinary, even unpromising people when they began; for the real saint is neither a special creation nor a spiritual freak. He is just a human being in whom has been fulfilled the great aspiration of St. Augustine--"My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee."

--Evelyn Underhill, Concerning the Inner Life

Link to a PBS piece on Underhill.

BACK OF AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON'S ANGELUS TEMPLE
ECHO PARK, L.A.

MY FRIEND PATRICK
SOON TO BE APPEARING AT THE LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE
IN
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
FRIENDSHIP IS THE ULTIMATE SPIRITUALIZATION

THE NEW EVANGELIZATION

Recently I gave permission to re-post a piece of mine.
"367 likes!" my contact person e-mailed back.
"That's great," I replied.
And ever since, I've been thinking: Wouldn't it be great if just one person liked Christ?

THE STRANGENESS OF EVERYDAY THINGS

I am thinking to share some of the objects that have brightened my heart as of late.

Above, for example, is my new parrot green teapot, purchased at the April Bauer Pottery sample sale.

The other day I discovered a store called OK on Silverlake Blvd. with all kinds of small, cunningly displayed objects like slinkys, 19-dollar cast iron nail clippers (small and black, so cool) from Japan, tiny bowls of recycled glass (different pale milky hues of amber, gray, green) for your fleur de sel or whatever (I don't actually use fleur de sel but I pined for those bowls), and bone or tortoise toothbrushes from Italy. I just love that stuff and splurged on a tea strainer with a bamboo handle and a toothbrush.

That way I don't get tea leaf shards all over my new teapot and the sink and thus avoid the near occasion of swearing.

ACCA KAPPA CLEAR TOOTHBRUSH
WHY DOES A NEW TOOTHBRUSH MAKE US SO HAPPY?

I have also acquired a new orchid, courtesy of Linda (actual name Erlinda, last name unknown) from St. Francis of Assisi. Linda has temporarily taken over from Lucy, who is sick and convalescing in the Philippines, as the hand-off person for the free copies of Magnificat I get each month as part of my writing gig. (Last month I gave away nine and kept one, which I promptly lost! So now I'm gonna give away eight and keep two, just in case). Anyway, I went up to Linda's house to make the drop and it turns out she grows pots and pots of orchids. So she gave me one to take home--wasn't that lovely of her?

CYMBIDIUM
ALL GLORY TO GOD

CURRENT KNITTING PROJECT
(MISSHAPEN LAP RUG/SHAWL/GIANT TEA COSY)
YARN DONATED BY MY FRIEND CHRISTINE M.
NOTE SILVER BAG, PLUCKED FROM THE DISCOUNT BIN AT DEAN

I know people are starving, and killing each other, and that all the sorrow of the world continues unabated.

But I don't think loving tea strainers and little glass bowls and orchids is frivolous.

I think love of every kind helps keeps the sorrow at bay.