lenten thoughts

Lent doesn't start until Ash Wednesday, of course, but my lovely seasonal black book has already started as of yesterday. Every little (insert liturgical color) book starts off with a page urging you to examine your goals for the special Church season. Then the rest of the book has daily six-minute meditations on appropriate scripture for the season, plus a page of tidbits and trivia.

In thinking about my goals for Lent, the usual suspects came to mind. Give up Starbucks! (With, as my boyfriend pointed out, the ulterior motive of saving money). Give up chocolate! (with the ulterior motive of eating more healthily, which I need to do anyway). Joey is very good about pointing out the shortcomings in my shortcuts. So tonight I sat still for a bit and thought about Lenten goals for real. Let me tell a short story first so my thoughts make more sense.

Last Sunday I worked my first recital for the music department. The audience filed past me into the auditorium, taking a program each. One was an old man wrapped in many layers of mismatched winter gear. I couldn't figure out from looking at him if he was homeless or just a little eccentric. Another worker told me that he'd been warned that this guy comes to most, if not all, recitals.

The performer had ordered two vases of flowers, one for the stage next to her and one for the back table near the entrance. The man kindly took a program from me and continued on, but drew up short at the sight of the flowers. "Real flowers!" he exclaimed, and proceeded to bury his face in them, breathing deeply. The joy on his face was heartwarming, even if I was a bit shocked by his behavior.

While thinking quietly tonight, I realized, I want that kind of joy. The joy at things as simple as a vase of flowers in the middle of winter. Not only do I want it for myself, but I want to be able to transmit it to others. I struggle a lot with finding ways to love certain people in my life, especially when overt gestures of love are harshly criticized. The key, I concluded, is prayer. Prayer for them can only help our relationships, and prayer can deepen my appreciation of little gifts and ultimately lead to joy.

I tend to sideline prayer. In a life in which everything is mentally scheduled, prayer just doesn't make it very often into my daily routine. It's hard to find a spare moment, especially when I have the energy to focus. I also struggle with feeling fulfilled in prayer, like I'm holding a conversation with someone who loves me, not just a wall. So maybe I don't try because I don't want to feel so inadequate. I don't want to face nagging doubts about whether God is really there. It's much easier not to try.

But as I've seen, I miss out on so much without a good relationship with God. So, my Lenten goal is to try. Not to feel better, not to necessarily find joy, but just to try.

Happy things

Sometimes you just need to make a list of everything that's going right in your life to remind yourself that life really does rock.

• friends calling and text messaging to offer love and support
• a boyfriend who takes such good care of me
• Rector and RA who genuinely take an interest in my life and want to help
• lots more events during weekends on campus this semester- Ragtime, Chinese New Year Celebration, Brazilian carnival
• (slowly) learning how to dance and look good while doing it
• pierogi at the dining hall
  
• throwing my first party (dedicated to happiness and love, not drinking)
• feeling like the songs I'm playing for guitar class are actually sort of pretty
• having enough self-discipline to sleep at normal hours and not waste weekends sleeping
• lots of apples-to-apples playing
• random memories about special people in my life (Mr. Bird making fun of the afternoon announcements girl, who liked to yell into the microphone and scare him)
  
• singing the salve regina when no one's in my room
• feet of snow, and jumping in huge piles of it
• Joey finding a latin translation attributed to our deceased and dearly loved latin teacher on a polish website
• lovely pictures sent via cell phone from my mom
• quiet library space and time to get work done.

Yeah, life is good.

to be humble

I'm finding that humility leads to being trampled on and used, which makes me think that I've got the idea of humility wrong. How do you put others first while still taking care of yourself?

Note to self

There is absolutely nothing wrong with me that a couple of hours spent with a good novel in a completely empty, quiet, softly lit dorm room won't cure.

More than anything, I miss my huge comfy Queen Anne-style reclining chair that I got for my seventeenth birthday. I also deeply miss the quiet and solitude of my room. It's so strange how you can be around tons of people and feel lonely, but be alone and feel complete. That was an emo thing to say.

I have my first Spanish test tomorrow, and no, I am not ready. I am also deathly afraid I will oversleep because I have been not sleeping well.

Spring break plans are still up in the air. My current favored plan is going to Chicago via train for the first weekend, hanging out with my favorite Northwestern girl, then swinging through a grocery store on my way back and holing up in my empty dorm, assuming I can find a job for the week on campus. There were jobs offered over fall break that paid pretty well. I need the money, and the time alone to do whatever I want (i.e. cross stitch and read happy books that aren't about running the world or war or dead babies) sounds pretty freaking amazing. We'll see.

Brr.

I got an email from my mom yesterday that read something like this: “You haven’t called and you aren’t even updating your blog. Are you ok?!” The answer (which, being a good daughter, I told her in a phone call last night) is that yes, I am ok, just taking “real” college classes for the first time (not intros) and that keeps me very, very busy, especially with everything else I’m doing on the side this semester. But it’s a good busy, really.

The weather is extremely cold- last night we watched WeatherBug, hoping that we would get up to a whole degree, not just .4 of one. But it’s definitely manageable. I can’t stand being outside much more than the 10-15 minutes it takes to get from building to building, but I can handle that. The weirdest part is when you’re outside, the mucous in your nose starts to freeze, and suddenly it feels like you have very huge boogers in your nose. It goes back to normal soon after getting back inside. I really thought the weather was going to be a lot worse that it has been so far. I was expecting feet of snow, driving wind all the time, and the rumored permacloud (solid cloud wall for months). We have a foot of snow and the natives here are like “wow, I can’t believe we got so much so fast! This hasn’t happened in years!” I mean, schools are cancelled, and have been for a few days. Oh. Ok. Maybe I overdid the worrying. There is also no permacloud to be seen. It’s about half cloudy and half sunny. The wind is bad when it’s here, but it’s not omnipresent.

Maybe I should be thanking God rather than complaining. Hmm.

Of course, Joey is coping much better than I am. Only Joey would complain, when it is literally 1 degree outside, that he got too hot on the way over from his dorm. Yes, in one degree weather, my boyfriend managed to be overdressed. Good grief.

The Dorm Formal Pictures

AAAHH

Life has been SO FREAKING BUSY lately, but maybe things are starting to settle into a routine for the semester? Just so that my loves back home won't think I've fallen off the face of the earth, here's what's going on in my life- maybe soon I can start posting something coherent again.

Friday I fell on the uber-slippery ice and smacked my tailbone, so I spent most of Friday afternoon/evening/night chilling on my futon trying to be comfortable. Joey even ordered in dinner for me. But the upside was I got to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith instead of decorating the dorm for our spirit week, which was a pretty good tradeoff. I love my understanding RA.

Yesterday Joey and I attempted to navigate the public transportation system and get to Target, despite our respective injuries (his foot/shin has been having issues since the March). We ended up spending all of the morning and the first half of the afternoon on this endeavor. It was necessary, but it makes me really really want a car. I got Chick-fil-A at the mall to console myself. It worked.

Last night was my dorm's formal, which was infinitely better than the halloween dance and pretty much a blast. I'll try to get pictures up later. I looked decent considering my mom's best friend wasn't around to do my hair. The best part was that it snowed many inches last night before the dance started but after the plows had retired for the day, so we trekked over to the dance, which was held in a building about ten minutes away, with me wearing sweatpants under my dress, boots, and a parka and trying to keep my hem out of the snow. Good times.

Right now I'm holed up in the library doing homework. In between everything else, little of that has gotten done this weekend. Tonight I'm lectoring at our dorm's spirit week's closing Mass, at which the president of the university happens to be presiding. Apparently there's a wine and cheese reception to follow? I kid you not. They better have grape juice for us little ones.

I think that's everything. OH and I watched ND beat Villanova yesterday in men's basketball, which was ridiculously intense. Tomorrow night Joey and I start our Latin dancing class- I'm pretty excited. Ok, now maybe that's everything. Back to work. :-)

Hesburgh rocks the casbah

Tonight the extraordinary man known as Fr. Ted Hesburgh hung out in my dorm's chapel and shared a few stories and words of wisdom. My favorite:

"Yeah, they've got bright kids, but you're bright kids. Ok, they've got some stuff that we don't, I guess- like dope."
-Father Theodore Martin Hesburgh, on Harvard

The best part is, he has every right to say that because he worked there for a while as chairperson of the board of faculty or something like that. He's my hero.

Good grief, I misspelled the title of my last post.

I'm back (again)- this time from a long weekend in D.C.

Stories and details might be forthcoming if homework allows, of which there is currently a large amount. And by large, I mean ginourmous.

But the upside is, I just spent the weekend touring DC and protesting about a cause I believe in (the annual March for Life was yesterday) with some of the best friends I have at ND. Totally, completely, 100% worth it.

Committments thus far this semester

Subtitle: Not to impress anyone, but so I can look back on my insane self and laugh.

• 5 classes, plus P.E. (none are only freshman now. all were last semester. I just launched myself into real college classes)
• Take Ten- working in a local community learning center to teach violence-prevention and conflict-resolution techniques.
  
• Latin dancing class with Joseph.
• Freshman Peer Leaders Small Group (and occaisionally Big Group), Right to Life, Peace Fellowship, Four:7, and maybe Amnesty.
  
• Working 3 hours/ week in the music department, plus weekend events.
• Guitar II- an extra expense, but if I don't continue now, I'll lose what I've learned on the instrument all over again, and I WILL NOT take Guitar I again. Ew.
• Maybe photographing for Scholastic?
• And of course basketball games, hockey games, Chicago trips, and everything else that comes with being a ND student.
• Maybe I should make time for Joey and friends, too.

I'm scared and excited.

Very full weeks

So I know I haven't posted for over a week, and normally this is blasphemy, but I promise I've been super busy. Really. Early Wednesday I left for my Urban Plunge experience in Mobile, AL- an educational seminar on urban poverty in which I was exposed to just about every major charity in Mobile. I got back late Friday night, at which point I ditched my suitcase, threw my toiletry bag in my other suitcase, and took it with me camping near Rutledge, GA, arriving at our cabin around midnight. I hung out with my beautiful Girl Scout friends, then came home early Sunday morning to shower, wash clothes, and go to Mass. Mom repacked my stuff ingeniously such that all of my belongings and a sleeping bag fit into two bags. Then Dad and I were off to the airport, and the rest of the day Sunday was spent travelling back to Notre Dame. Today I bought my books, freaked out at the price tag, re-bought my books using many gift cards on Amazon.com, unpacked all of my stuff, caught up on email, watched Moulin Rouge, and made cappuccino cookie dough milkshakes.

Tomorrow classes start again. Fortunately I have only one class tomorrow, as my other one isn't meeting yet. But this one class happens to be known as Continental Political Thought, and it involves ten large books by authors like Weber, Nietzsche, and Marx. Plans for later in the week include more first classes, breaking it to my Monday professors that I won't be in class on Monday, and a trip to D.C. to walk in the March for Life, a huge abortion protest and rally.

I should probably be intimidated, but right now, I'm too tired.

Random List of Things

• More people at church thought I was already gone than knew that I was still here. Maybe I'm being subconcsiously asked to leave? [just kidding. the real reason is that most of my friends at church are starting to show their old age through memory loss- Greg, I'm looking at you ;-) ]
• I've only seen my blogging pal and writing inspiration Bego in person once, and very briefly, while I've been home. But I've read all of her blog entries while I've been on break.
  
• I discovered while at the cabin in the mountains that it is very very easy to become used to staying up late with Joey and falling asleep against him on the couch when I was just too sleepy to stay up any more, knowing that in an hour or so he would wake me up and make me go sleep in my real bed. Now he's in Florida and I miss that way more than I thought I would. Good thing there are parietals at ND, or I could really learn to live like that.
• I started my very own Blockbuster card tonight. Wait, all that means is I get to pay my own late fees. Crap.
• I've been buying books much more than I've been reading them. I've only finished one book over break. I blame Merton and his denseness and the weirdness of the other book I'm reading.
• BUT in defense of my spending habits, I didn't buy any movies or CDs when out shopping with Joey last night, even though he did. I think it's been a year since I bought a CD, and I've never bought any music on iTunes. I just borrow my friends' CDs and stagger when I open CDs I get for Xmas and my birthday.
  
• Being a Girl Scout lent me a lot of prestige in the mountains, especially in the areas of fire-building, smore-making, and horseback riding. I left the fishing to the boys, though.
  
• Joey spent a Barnes and Noble gift card on a Snoopyopoly game last night, and it's amazing. The most expensive property (next to Go) is Joe Cool's sunglasses.
  I'm such a sucker for all things Peanuts.

How to destroy my self confidence in ten seconds or less

Tomorrow afternoon, I depart with the Boy for some quality time in the mountains with him, his parents, his older brother, and his brother's girlfriend. In the days leading up to this trip, I have been very excited about it, mostly because I hope it will be fun and relaxing and good for all relationships involved.

Then, on the phone with the Boy tonight, he dropped this beautiful comment:

"And there's a hot tub at the cabin, so we can enjoy that..."

The ironic thing is, I asked him when we were still up at Notre Dame whether or not I ought to bring a swimsuit home in my limited suitcase space. We decided no, that was silly, why would I go swimming in December? Yes, dear readers, both of my swimsuits are hundreds of miles away in Indiana.

It's not that huge of a deal, really; I could potentially wear shorts and a t-shirt in said hot tub, or procure a cheap suit tomorrow sometime. But it triggered a whole host of other issues. My legs aren't shaved, I'm out of shape, I've gained a little weight during the food fest that my break has become, etc. These led to feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and general unhappiness, of course accompanied by natural envy of Joey's brother's girlfriend, who is gorgeous and will have no problem looking great in a bikini. I'm worried about how I'll look in a one-piece. All of this sent me reeling into a fanatically depressed anxious introverted mental fetal position. It doesn't take much to push me off the edge, huh?

So now I find myself hopelessly awake at 3 AM, worried to pieces about my ability to be generally cheerful and fun to be around with people I'm apparently not all that comfortable with for days. I'm ok with Joey's parents, but I haven't spent nearly enough time around Eric and Meghan. Yes, you read right, somehow a minor swimsuit incident led to a complete loss of faith in my social skills.

What else is there to do at this point but blog about it, laugh at myself, and hope that someone else will laugh with me? I'm obviously not backing out of the trip based on something so minor. I will end up being ok, probably embarassing myself a few times and never entirely relaxing around Eric and Meghan, but parts of it will be fun. This is one of those beautiful times in life when you bite the bullet and hope for the best.

I spend way too much time organizing my life

I end up going overboard with the whole internet/ connectivity/ online organization thing. I just get so excited at starting new ways to share things- thoughts, photos, opinions, wants. It's silly, but can lead to good things if done in moderation.

That being said, I spent quite some time this evening exploring 43things.com, and its interconnected sister sites, 43people.com, allconsuming.net, and listsofbests.com. This is New Years resolutions to the extreme, and much more. It's all really pretty interesting- people swap opinions on books, movies, food, places, destinations, other users, famous people, and lists. Just go browse around, it's much more fun to look around than to read a description.

I also have decided to give this photo-a-day-for-a-year trend a try. It might actually happen, it might not, but when better to try than the first day of the year? I started a new blog just for these photos- flashbulb365.blogspot.com.

At this point, I know at least Maria, Joey, and my mother are snickering at me, but I love doing stuff like this. It's like looking at the first clean page of a beautiful notebook or filling a plain piece of cheesecloth with stitches. It's so exciting to me. :-P

Yep, I'm ready to go back.

Being home is nice for a while, but eventually exuberance at my return starts to fade, and I remember why I loved the idea of going far away to college in the first place. I love my family and my high school friends, but right now I also love that I will be mostly out of town for the next couple of weeks and then back at school. So it goes.

Love.

Sometimes I find myself in a beautiful state in which I can't love everyone enough. In these moments of clarity, which are the closest thing I have to being in touch with God, I realize how much I love everyone and that if I could maintain this state of love, I could maybe convince others to love too, and the world would slowly become a place in which everyone loved and was loved. And that would be heaven. These moments have been coming with more frequency and intensity. At the same time, though, I know how much I fall short of being able to love like this every minute. When I am touched by this feeling, I want to call everyone on my cell phone and thank them for living, or hug everyone at Mass during the sign of peace and make them feel how much I care about them. I could never keep that up, though, because I am not perfect. So I say that this is when I am the most in touch with God because I think that's who God is, and who God's calling me to be. Phrases like "Everlasting Love" start to make sense, in that moment. And the more times it happens the more I want to find a way to make it keep happening, so that my whole life will be lived for and in Love. To me, God is the one who shows me how to love, motivates me to think that this life is the one I should be living, and forgives me when I can't quite make it there. And from there, everything else begins to make sense. Christ's birth. Christ's sacrifice. The Trinity. The Chrurch. These are all topics for other posts, and I couldn't possibly explain everything now. I want to live like this and share this and be this. I don't know if it even makes any sense, but this mystery in my heart is so deep and true that it has to be right, somehow. And I feel like I have to share it as much as possible.

Top Ten Things That Excite Me at 3AM on Friday Morning

1. The idea of going to the mountains with Joey and his family for good relaxing fun with my second family (I was adopted).
2. A scarf with pockets AND cute tassels. Kudos to my aunt for getting it for me, and Bath and Body Works for making it.
3. The distinct possiblility that I will be attending a New Years Eve party for the first time in my life (as opposed to sitting at home trying to get my parents to wake up for the Big Moment).
   
4. My computer being alive (it was completely unresponsive earlier, but then I realized that while the charger was plugged into my laptop, the other end was not in an outlet).
5. Introduction to Peace Studies with Professor George Lopez. In fact, I'm so excited about this one that I nearly want to run up to Notre Dame and make him start class right now.
6. My quickly approaching camping weekend with my Girl Scout lovelies!
7. Star Wars IV, A New Hope. I watched it with my little brother tonight, and I fell in love with Star Wars all over again. I had almost forgotten how rich the universe is, how complex the characters, how well-coceived the plot! George Lucas, I love you almost as much as George Lopez.
8. A date tonight with my darling boyfriend, who abides even my most withdrawn moods.
   
9. That a lovely pair of ankle-high water-proof suede Lands End boots I've had my eye on just went on sale. With the help of a gift card (from the same aunt who gave me the above-mentioned scarf), I will be able to purchase said boots for approximately $2. Now I need to figure out where to ship them to (home and have to find room in my luggage for them? or ND and hope that someone will take them from the nice UPS man for me?)
10. My cold finally letting go of its grip on my nasal cavities. Trust me, this is a very, very good thing.
    

Amusing tidbits

My Christmas, aside from the usual good food, time with family, and early Christmas morning, involved several uniquely humorous moments:

• The guy in the front row of our Christmas Eve Mass spontaneously raised his hand and his wife's hand high in the air every time our pastor mentioned that we were happy to see all of the visitors present.
• I got a new aunt and a new uncle in one week (on different sides of the family, and both from slightly scandalous eloping type things)
• The family cat loathed the sight of my extremely pet-loving aunt, and flatly refused all of her friendly advances
• Mark won a video game after playing it for two days straight (which he has never done)
• The cat, who was finally allowed to look at the Christmas tree, ignored the ornaments completely and nibbled on the needles instead. Silly kitten.
• Just because it was my second Christmas at the Boy's house, and I had met everyone there several times except for one person, didn't mean that I could escape comments such as "I like this one better than the last one." Nearly 14 months is a pretty long trial period from my point of view. Good to know I passed the test.
• I realized halfway to the Boy's house that I probably would get arrested if I hit a police road block because I was carrying wine from my parents to his. I later refused to carry more wine from his parents to mine.
  
• My mom, at a local natural history museum, commented loudly about how an ancient Roman surgical tool looked exactly like what is used today to clear out excess ear wax in older patients.
  
• I learned how to knit. Ok, that's not amusing, but I'm proud of it.

Now go share that smile on your face from reading this post with someone else. Merry Christmas!

Prince of Peace

At times I wonder how I can be so educated in my faith (13.5 years of formal Catholic education and counting) yet so clueless. Perhaps this somewhat rambling self-examination is out of place in the silence before what promises to be a happy Christmas morning, but I am wide awake and thinking.

Tonight at Mass I proclaimed (in a rather nasily, congested way) the traditional Christmas vigil passage from Isaiah, which includes the words, "The Prince of Peace... will rule with justice and peace now and forever. The love of our God will make this happen!"

My (somewhat predictable) quandary is summurized in this eloquent poem, which I found on Kristy's blog tonight:

A Christmas Ghost-Story
By Thomas Hardy

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,

A moldering soldier lies—your countryman.

Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,

And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans

Nightly to clear Canopus: “I would know

By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?

And what of logic or of truth appears

In tacking ‘Anno Domini’ to the years?

Near twenty-hundred liveried thus have hied,

But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.”

To put it bluntly: what happened to Christ's peace?

I believe the traditional Catholic answer would go something like this:
God, who continually tries to bring us into closer relationship with Him, intends for Peace on Earth/ the Kingdom of God to come about not through any imposed method, but through God working among humanity. Christ came to show us how, and the Holy Spirit fills us to enable us to work for our own peace. God wants us to choose to re-create ourselves through His grace. Christ brought the salvation we seek, but not in the form of a traditional ruler: our servant-king offers us peace as a gift to be chosen.

That all makes sense. At some level, I think (at least I hope) that I accept it. But it's all too easy to look at human history since Christ's coming and ask if we've improved at all. I think it would be hard to answer positively. The easy road is to look at the sharp contrast between the true Christian way of life and our world today and despair of the two ever coinciding.

Is it possible? Well, it hasn't happened yet, so it's easy to say no. Faith calls us to say yes, and to work towards the realization of that possibility. It's not so much that I disagree that it's possible; what gnaws at me is the gap between the possibility and the realization.

"... will rule with justice and peace now..."
This is the part I struggle with the most. Where's the now? I see the possibility, the hope for the future, but the now?
The answer that comes to mind is that the Prince of Peace can rule over our hearts now, and through that process His Peace can spread to the rest of the world. Thus, I come face to face with the unavoidable personal nature of my abstract questions: my personal relationship with God is the key to how I can offer Christ's peace to the world. It's also unavoidable that our relationship is not what it should be. My common, honest excuse is that prayer is awkward and I am busy. But it seems that if I'm going to go through with my current course of study (political science/ peace studies) and choice of career, things are going to have to change in this area of my life, so that it is no longer an area of my life but truly is my life. I suppose I've known that all along.

Merry Christmas. Welcome, Prince of Peace.