Hate is a strong word. As I type this, I’m preparing to board a plane to Seattle to meet my two-week-old niece. I’ve never seen her, but I already love her. I love my parents, too, and my siblings, and my new husband. I’ll admit, I do love my own life.

Jesus’ warning at the beginning of the Gospel, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” seem like too tall an order. Certainly Jesus wouldn’t expect us to hate our families… right?

I think the key to understanding what Jesus is saying in the Gospel is the idea of seeking God’s counsel that we find in the first reading. The reading from Wisdom reminds us of our human limitations and that, despite the need to cling to things like shelter and our very bodies, there is a cost for those preoccupations. Only God’s wisdom is beyond these limits, and we can only benefit when God sends the Spirit to us, to offer counsel beyond what we can find on earth.

In the Gospel, Jesus tries to help us understand that there is something radically better, profoundly wiser, that transcends our worldly priorities and earthly connections. We can’t really hear that until we are truly free to respond. It reminds me of the First Principle and Foundation of The Spiritual Exercises by St. Ignatius:

The goal of our life is to live with God forever.
God who loves us, gave us life.
Our own response of love allows God’s life to flow into us
without limit.
All the things in this world are gifts of God,
presented to us so that we can know God more easily
and make a return of love more readily.
As a result, we appreciate and use all these gifts of God
insofar as they help us develop as loving persons.
But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives,
they displace God
and so hinder our growth toward our goal.
In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance
before all of these created gifts insofar as we have a choice
and are not bound by some obligation.
We should not fix our desires on health or sickness,
wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or short one.
For everything has the potential of calling forth in us
a deeper response to our life in God.
Our only desire and our one choice
should be this:
I want and I choose what better
leads to the
deepening of God’s life in me.
(David Fleming’s paraphrase of Ignatius’ First Principle and Foundation for the Spiritual Exercises)

I’ve struggled with this “Ignatian indifference,” this sense that we ought not to cling to anything too heartily, lest it limit our ability to respond to the Spirit. Yet, here Jesus is showing us that we need to be able to order things in our lives so that God is first. Only then will we have the freedom to really hear how the Spirit is guiding us, to be truly free to respond to the Spirit, to really hear God’s counsel above the din of human advice. Only then can be be truly free to Glorify God in the way that we are called.

Image of Ignatius from http://www.fordham.edu/images/mission/igstatue.jpg

Angela Batie Carlin is a Campus Minister at Saint Louis University. She received an MDiv from Yale in 2007.

On the eve of Liam’s nine-month birthday, he spent the night the same way he did the night after he was born – sleeping on my chest. At the nine month mark, I jokingly say he’s “been out as long as he was in.”  Nine months of pregnancy is a bit of misnomer though – typical pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks, and in my case, it lasted 40 weeks and 5 days.

As he slept in the dark, rising and falling with my breath, I remembered that first night.  I was too wired to try to sleep, but I was exhausted.  My spouse Evan was sound asleep after sitting up all night with me while I labored.  Liam was bundled like a baby burrito, had nursed well, and according to everything the nurses told me, should be sleeping.  But he kept fussing, little cat like noises rising up from the plastic bassinet at the foot of my bed.  I picked him up, unwrapped him, and held him to my chest.  In an instant, he was asleep, curled up against my body, which had so recently been the whole world.  And as if I had found my missing piece, I relaxed and finally fell asleep.

Nine months later, literally twice as big as that first night, Liam slept on my chest again.  Whether it was because Daddy had to go on a work trip, a cough picked up from daycare, new teeth, or getting ready to walk, he refused to sleep in his crib that night.  The nine months he’s been “out” certainly seemed to go by much faster than the nine months he was “in.” I’ve been dumbstruck with awe and delight more times than I can count in these past nine months.   The first year of human development is a time of rapid change.  Within nine months, he’s gone from being unable to control his limbs to sitting, crawling, pulling himself up, babbling, and showing off his stellar personality.

Before Liam came into our lives, life seemed to be steady and static.  We had settled into jobs and routines, and from a developmental perspective, we were done physically growing.  Things hardly seemed to change, and days often melded into one another.  But for Liam, every day brings something new discover or try: I was with him the first time he saw a bird take flight from our back porch – he startled, then laughed.  For me, it’s like getting to experience the world for the first time all over again.  Liam is teaching me to slow down and pay attention, not only to the world he is discovering, but to the ways he is growing and changing everyday.  It has always been a challenge for me to simply slow down and be present in the day-to-day.  Liam’s rapid growth and development forces me to be present in a way I was never capable of before he was born – just one more thing my little wise one continue to teach me.

Johanna Hatch is a feminist activist, writer, and amateur hagiographer. She currently resides in Wisconsin with her spouse Evan, son Liam, and their mostly blind dachshund.

Humility. This week’s readings come praising and encouraging it—but what is it? Is it taking the last place because you really want the first? Is it not asking questions when things get too crazy and messed up? Is it keeping quiet? Inviting the poor over for dinner? Approaching God and not being overwhelmed?

I find it all quite mysterious. The second reading reassures that our experience of God is and will be something approachable, something that does not come “in a blazing fire and a gloomy darkness.” God is powerful, but God will not overwhelm. Everything is in order. Everything will be all right.

Do you believe that? I have more instinctive belief in the overwhelming, the beyond my strength that the first reading talks about. Every day a little more of the beyond my strength comes into view. Today, I woke up and read a news story about a cab driver here in New York City who was stabbed in the neck by a passenger because the cab driver was Muslim. He has survived, but this is very much beyond my strength. Should I be humble about that? What would that humility mean? In the face of the furor over the mosque potentially being built near the site of the twin towers, is humility the right response? And what would humility mean?

I bring them together, this attack and the controversy, because they stand together in my mind in a very particular way. When I started to hear the arguments building about this potential mosque/Islamic center my instinct was to say, well, I think it might be right to build the mosque, but probably they shouldn’t do it. I was picturing violence in the future. I was picturing the windows broken and the place defaced. I was picturing people getting hurt. And I wanted to avoid that, both because I didn’t want it to happen, and because I used to go down to that area every day, when I had Grand Jury duty. I used to walk around past the restaurants and the discount shops and the African Burial Ground National Monument, all pretty near to the World Trade Center area. And I don’t want that ugly violent shit happening in places where I used to walk around.

And then I see this attack and I realize, it’s not the mosque that will bring what I don’t want, what I fear. It’s already here. Whatever this is, whatever will happen if they do or don’t build it, whatever that means… the seeds of it are already here. Ahmed H. Sharif has already bled because of it. His attacker, Michael Enright, is a college student who spent time volunteering in Afganistan with an organization called Intersections International, which promotes interreligious dialogue and supports the mosque. When Enright was attacking Sharif, he said, “Consider this a checkpoint.”

Try to unpack all that. Just try. It is beyond my strength. I have to tell you, I don’t understand it. I don’t want to look at it. I can’t fix it. I don’t know what it means.

Humility means saying that I don’t understand without panicking, I think, without either despising myself for not understanding or thinking therefore that there can be no understanding, that the whole world is spiraling into doom because I have touched a hungry, aching violence that I cannot understand.

When I was serving on the Grand Jury, downtown there, I felt like I was working in the dark. All you get, on a Grand Jury, is some of the prosecution’s case. I always felt as though there were ten important pieces of information just beyond my reach, as I debated and voted and signed the indictments. The first day we watched this video about the history of Grand Juries, and they related the Grand Jury to the Jewish Sanhedrin. This was during Lent. And around me swirled suspicions, doubts, fears, knowledge of the potential and often actual injustice of the justice system: racism, bias against the poor, etc., etc. And into my ear went the facts.

And so I would go, after a particularly tense or confusing day, and walk around the African Burial Ground National Monument. This monument came to be when, in the course of doing some construction, bodies of slaves were unearthed, and a burial ground discovered. After conflict and struggle about what to do, the bodies were re-interred and a monument built. It begins with a tall, narrow enclosure designed to evoke the space of a slave ship. As you pass through this darkened space, you can hear water flowing around you, in a sort of moat that surrounds the monument. When you emerge, it is into a spiral starting below ground level, with the approximate ages and sexes of some of the people buried there engraved into the floor. As you walk through and around and over these, the spiral moves higher, and you end on a walkway with a wall to one side of you, and on the wall are carved symbols of various African cultures and religions, with a description of meaning below each one.

I would ask the people buried there for help, while I walked. I asked for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, the intellect to interpret and the heart to understand, and the humility to accept things that are different from what I wanted to believe.

Is that appropriate, or appropriation? Is that the Communion of Saints, or ancestor worship, and is there any difference, really? Is it real, could they help me? I don’t know. I have no idea. These questions are too sublime for me. But it’s what I did. It’s what I could do.

In this matter of the attack, of the mosque, of how to honor the dead and the living and the differences and sameness and the horror and the hope of being in this world—what is to be done? What is right? What is real? I have ideas. I want to see a place that dedicates itself to peace. I want to see people of all groups trying to understand each other, at the mark of a horrifying, violent breakdown of that understanding, a transmutation of interaction into hate. I want us all to pause, to be humble, to take a breath and wait, and I hope whatever is built there and nearby will facilitate such a response. And I think there is a place in all this for a mosque. I think a mosque belongs in a such a story.

But do I know? Do I know what should be done? I don’t know. I don’t know very much at all. I ask for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, the intellect to interpret and the heart to understand, and the humility to accept things that are different from what I want to believe.

Rebecca Lynne Fullan lives and tries in New York City.

It’s not every Sunday that you hear about “wailing and grinding of teeth” – thanks be to God. But this Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 13:22-30) includes this rather unsettling phrase which is only followed by another slightly disconcerting one: “For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” What on earth or in heaven (or maybe a combo of the two) might all of this mean?

In the beginning of this week’s Gospel, Jesus is asked “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” to which he answers, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.” When I was younger, all of this “narrow gate” business seemed intimately linked to an endless list of dos and don’ts. Do go to Mass every Sunday; don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent. Do share your toys with your cousins; don’t talk back to your parents. The narrow gate was indeed hard to squeeze through: sometimes I wanted to sleep in on Sundays or keep my better toys for myself. “Why is Jesus so strict?” I’d ask myself as a child. “Why does he always seem to speak in riddles?” I’d wonder. Even as a child, I was confused as to why God who is Love would lock us all outside as we stood “knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’” Why can’t God just open the door? God is God, God can do anything. Why would God choose not to open the door?

I can’t say that I have found any definite answers to these questions that emerged in my childhood and remain with me today. But I can say that I’ve come to look at them differently. Firstly, if we return to the question that prompts this whole situation – “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” – I think that we might find some hope for those of us frantically knocking on the door. Indeed Jesus, as usual, addresses the people who surround him with an understanding of their socio-cultural situation and the symbolic universe that it helps to construct and maintain. Now, I am no expert on Judaism or any of the other religions operative in first-century (what is now) Palestine, but from my few classes in biblical studies I know that many people of Jesus’ time had a definite expectation of who would be saved and who would not be saved. Sound familiar? Yet Jesus challenges this expectation. He states instead that salvation is hard and that not many will make it through the narrow gate – even those who expected to get through it. In fact, he tells us that those who are first will be last and that those who are last will be first; those people who seem to be obvious getting-through-the-narrow-gate material may actually be last to get through it.

And there is the hope. Hope for us all, especially any of us who know how much work it takes just to inch our way through the gate. Perhaps, then, this Sunday’s Gospel calls us to ponder what it means to be saved. One suggestion it gives us sort of hidden between all of the questions and grinding of teeth is that being “saved” has something to do with being familiar with God for Jesus says, “He [the Lord] will say to you [the frantic door knockers] in reply, ‘I do not know where you are from.’” Maybe that’s a clue. Maybe this Sunday’s Gospel, like most of the Gospels, asks us to grow in our relationship with God and maybe that relationship is ultimately what gives us the grace to get through the narrow gate which is actually much wider than we expected.

Pearl Maria Barros is a doctoral student at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, MA.

Model of Bethel Lutheran Church, Avoca, TX

By Kate Henley Averett

Ever since we decided to move to Austin, I’ve had this nagging question at the back of my mind – should I look for a church there? And if so, what kind?

A few months before the move, I did some research – googling “Austin queer friendly churches” and other similar phrases. I was surprised by the number of options I came up with, from UU to United Methodist congregations to independent churches with hard-to-pinpoint theological stances. But I never went back to any of the websites after that day.

It’s one thing to decide to leave the Catholic Church. It was, in some ways, the hardest and most emotionally wrought decision I’ve ever made, even though at the end of it all, the decision was made because I truly felt like I had no other choice. But it’s another to take the step to find a new, non-Catholic faith community. Because even as I say, “I’ve left,” I have a hard time picturing myself claiming some other tradition as my own.

And then again, I have a hard time picturing myself going through life without a faith community of some sort. Last week my wife and I visited her grandparents in west Texas and went to see her family’s church. It’s a beautiful stone Church that stands strikingly against the dry, flat landscape, a building lovingly constructed by the community’s own hands under the guidance of my wife’s great-grandfather, who served as pastor of the Church for many years. We looked through the archives and saw the confirmation pictures of her grandmother, her mother, and her aunts and uncles, and everywhere we looked there were names and pictures of great-uncles, cousins’ kids, and various other relatives.

What a marvelous thing, I thought, to be a part of a community like that, where your family history is so intertwined with the history of the church that even the building is like a member of the family. I want that. I want it for myself. I want it for my future children – I want them to have a community that loves them and that cares about their well-being and that will join my wife and me in nurturing them. I want them to have a community that feels like home to them, but also a physical space where they feel at home, where they feel their own history intertwined with the community’s history and know that they are an important part of a greater whole.

All this is hypothetical at this point, as I don’t have kids yet and don’t plan on having them while I’m living in Austin. But if I’m going to get to that place some day, where I feel comfortable settling into a non-Catholic community with my family, I get the sense I shouldn’t wait until the time comes to start figuring out what kind of church community I want to call home. But it’s easier to put the decision off for a little while. Because until I’ve started looking elsewhere, I feel like I haven’t left the Catholic Church entirely behind, and even while I recognize that spiritually and psychologically it’s probably not the healthiest space to be in, I find it comfortable. I’ve already made one extremely uncomfortable spiritual decision this year – must I make another one so soon? How long can I allow myself to cling to my past before I have to force myself forward?

Kate Henley Averett received her MDiv from Harvard in 2008. She recently moved to Austin, TX, where she is soon to begin doctoral work in Sociology.

One of the first cards we received upon announcing my pregnancy was from a friend-couple who simply wrote, “Thank you for letting us be part of your village.” Sometimes I wonder if the common phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child” really means, “It takes a village to be a parent.”  After Liam was born, both Evan and I felt an intense need for community, especially with other parents.  This was our first time taking on this challenge, and we needed our friends and family around us.  I’ll never forget the kindness of those who walked into the tornado of the first few weeks of Liam’s life and made dinner, unloaded the dishwasher, and wiped off the counters without even being asked.  They each reduced our anxiety and allowed us to focus on our new child.

Since we were among the first of our close friends to have a child, I felt the need to seek out “mommy-friends,” other women who were going through roughly what I was. Even with great local resources like “mother-baby hour” at the hospital where I delivered and an abundance of local playgroups, it can still be difficult to forge a true “mom-mance” as a writer on the parenting website Babble.com recently termed it.  Indeed, finding a parenting friend you can confide in can be a lot like dating – simply having kids the same age isn’t enough to bind you together.  Thankfully, I was able to forge connections with a few wonderful and generous women so that we didn’t have to take this journey alone.

My need for a village became more acute, or perhaps was exacerbated by, a creeping loneliness that I was eventually able to discern as a symptom of post-partum depression.  I think it took so long for me to realize my post-partum depression because it wasn’t a stunning shock to the system, but a slow creeping amongst lost sleep, mixed feeling about being away from my child, job stress, and the continuing physical readjustment of breastfeeding and no longer being pregnant.  One of the biggest lies that depression, post-partum or otherwise, tells us is that we are alone.  But once I took the risk to begin to open up about it – to my spouse, my midwife, and those wonderful and generous “mommy-friends” – I was finally able to realize the glorious truth that I was not alone.  Friends and acquaintances shared their own stories of antidepressants and breastfeeding, sent helpful links, and uttered the words I longed to hear: “I’m here for you.”

Throughout the struggle, our church community, one of our first villages, has been a constant, loving, reassuring presence.  Liam was the first infant baptized in our community, and in our new worship space.  The community definitely sees him as “our baby.”  Every Sunday at the Sign of Peace, a crowd gathers around us – grandparents longing for faraway grandchildren, mothers of grown children commenting on how much they had loved the nursing relationship, old men reassuring us how delightful his baby noises are, always making sure that we know that we are an important part of this village, not to be separated or excluded.  It is through their kindness, and the kindness of all the friends and family who make up our “village,” that the love of God is made visible in a very real way in our lives. Through their goodness not only to our child, but to us as his parents, we are given the grace to be the best parents we can be.

Johanna Hatch is a feminist activist, writer, and amateur hagiographer. She currently resides in Wisconsin with her spouse Evan, son Liam, and their mostly blind dachshund.

This is an excerpt from a retreat talk, incarnations of which Jen has given at retreats in Northern and Southern California.

Hearing about the Assumption of Mary has made me wonder about why Mary has such an important place in our tradition since I was a little girl. This leads me to confess my struggle in my relationship with Mary. For a while, I didn’t think that she and I would get along very well. The way I saw Mary depicted in much of Catholic life–artwork, homilies, prayers–brought together an image that was overwhelming to me. I wanted to understand why she was so important to people in our tradition, especially women, but I didn’t feel like I could relate to her. My relationship with Mary has shifted over time, helping me understand that the Mary of our tradition can hardly be pinned down into one image that stands alone and for everyone. Rather, the images of Mary in our tradition are expansive enough to embrace women and men who bring a number of joys and sorrows into the mystery of the Body of Christ.

The first time I started to really think about who Mary was was the Christmas after I turned 13, when I was given a solo in an arrangement of “O Sing of Mary” for my high school choir’s Madrigal Feast. I took my responsibility quite seriously, reflecting on what our director told us about Mary being our age when the Angel of the Lord appeared to her, when she said yes to becoming the mother of Jesus. I don’t think I understood that most 13-year-olds during Mary’s time would have been thinking about marriage and motherhood, and I was struck by what a daunting task that would’ve been.

During the Advent seasons that passed as I grew into a young adult, we sometimes would sing that song in Mass on Sundays. “O sing of Mary, pure and lowly, Virgin Mother undefiled. O sing of God’s own Son most holy, who became a little child. The fairest child of fairest mother, God the Lord who came to earth. The word made flesh, our very brother, takes our nature by his birth.” And I started to feel overwhelmed by Mary again, but this time in a different way. I wasn’t sure what it meant to be pure, and I was fairly certain that I’ve rarely been lowly in the quiet sense. My personality is a big one, I’m always up for debate, and I’ve never fit the demure images of Mary that I’ve seen in Catholic art.

So I took a break from Mary for a while. I didn’t say Hail Marys during my individual prayer time anymore. I figured that it wouldn’t be honest of me to pray to a Mary that I wasn’t sure I believed in.

And then I met the Mary of the Annunciation, who was more complicated and challenging than I had ever seen her described before. Her words, “Let it be done unto me,” are the most compelling expression of faith in things not seen that I have found in all of Christian Scripture, especially given her circumstances. In that short passage, my image of Mary shifted completely. No longer was she the quiet woman with an almost expressionless face, the way she was depicted in a statue outside my kindergarten classroom. Rather, this was a Mary with anima, with spirit, with agency. She was poor, and I eventually learned that this is the kind of lowly to which the song and the Gospel of Luke refer. And she was an unmarried Jewish girl living under Roman occupation, a member of an oppressed minority, when an Angel of the Lord presents her with a choice, the response to which no less than alters the course of human history.

Later in the story, she “made haste to the hill country” to be with her cousin, Elizabeth. When we meet Elizabeth, we must remember her story, as well. We later learn that she was past the age of childbearing when she found out that she was pregnant with her son, who would become John the Baptist. Her husband Zechariah is so surprised that he is struck dumb when he hears the news. Yet here the two women stand, neither having anticipated that they would ever be in the situations in which they find themselves. And in their shared vulnerability, Elizabeth names Mary. “Blessed are you…the mother of my Lord.” The child within her moves, passing on to her the knowledge of the child within Mary.

There’s something powerful about this kind of vulnerability, which allows us to know another and to truly be known. It cuts through the concerns of the world outside and into the core of our being, naming with just a few words exactly who we are called to be. It offers a prophetic conviction of aspects of American culture that encourage the kind of rugged individualism that prevents us, as women and as men, from entering into deep relationship with those with whom we share the everyday-ness of our lives, that stands in the way of us entering into solidarity with those who suffer the consequences of such individualism. This kind of vulnerability gives power to the most authentic of friendships, the most loving of romantic relationships, the strongest bonds of kinship, the most humble of spiritual connections, between two people.

Maybe that vulnerability that Mary and Elizabeth shared is the place from which Mary draws the strength to proclaim the Magnificat during her conversation with Elizabeth. Hearing the Magnificat at a time in my life when I was nearly convinced that my Catholic community had lost sight of its commitment to the poor brought me back in touch with the importance of Mary in my life and in our shared tradition. The Mary of the Magnificat is bold and prophetic, proclaiming a message that calls the structures as they stand into question, giving us pause for reflection about the implications of our actions on those around us. This is a Mary that I’d like to get to know again.

Image: “From This Day” by Jasmine LeeHang-Austin

Jen Owens is a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, and a co-editor of From the Pews in the Back. She looks forward to growing an intentional community in Kensington, CA, this academic year.

Sometimes my life gets humid. The air all full and heavy, and I can’t even feel the water that’s weighing it down, but I know it’s there, making it hard to push through. About a week ago, the storm broke, and I was suddenly articulating all the suspected wrongness of my life, all the confusion: not getting into a PhD program, not pretty enough to do theater, too scared and busy to write enough, too bogged down with work to find a place to sing, too poor to help my parents when they get old, too freaked about my maelstrom of religious questions to really commit to being in or out of church, too nervous in the face of injustice to really make a difference in anything, anywhere, anyway, and too weak, too fragile, too mortal to do anything but try to hang on as my life zooms right by.

I know most of these things are lies. Even as they bubbled over my lips, I knew they were lies, or distortions of the truth. F.E.A.R., my dad calls it, False Evidence Appearing Real. But still, it was a storm, and I in it. And somehow in all of this Charlotte started telling me about entropy and chaos, and how you feel like entropy’s destroying everything, but it’s also creating everything, that it is the overall tendency of the universe toward disorder that creates the order and the patterns that we see around us.

And then inside I began to feel a question pressing out, a question about God. “Which one is God?” my inside insisted, “the chaos or the order?” My outside was embarrassed, and hesitated to say this out loud. Charlotte was trying to tell me about science, and here I had this question about God that is totally squishy and intuitive and not scientific at all. But my inside kept asking, and this is what I heard, inside, in reply:

You have to let go of everything you think you know. Why on earth do you think you’re dating a maybe-atheist? You have to let go of everything you think, especially about God.

But it didn’t say God, of course. It said me.

I laughed out loud, surprising Charlotte, because after quite the span of silence and dim rooms in my spiritual world, I get this very positive statement, I get this voice, this first-person God-me voice, and it says I have to open my hands and let go of all the ideas about God. You’ve gotta admit, there’s something funny about that.

The problem is, I have no idea how to do it. I’m not even sure what it means. I’m not even sure that I like it, I mean… ideas about God are my thing. I write about them. I read about them. I look at them on the wall and I take them down off the wall and I fetishize the holy hell out of them and then I think some more and I sigh and I write and I feel it down to my toes and I feel nothing, blank, and then I sing church songs to myself while I’m walking down the street, and then I think about these ideas about God some more.

Let go? How?

This past Friday night, Charlotte and I were at the beach. We walked down to the ocean at night, once it was totally dark. All I could see from the road was this walkway into the dark, the railing that leads you onto the sand. I felt a shiver of unknown, like there could be anything waiting. I felt anticipation, excitement, an urging forward.

Please, I thought, when I die, it should feel like this.

We walked onto the sand. There were little hooks on the railing named after the 7 dwarves, with one missing—you had to fill in the blank yourself. I put my flip-flops on Happy’s hook. Charlotte chose Bashful’s.

We walked, barefoot now, onto the dark beach. So dark, and the sky crested above and filled with stars, stars I miss in the city. So dark, and the sea rising out of the dark, dark out of dark, with just the ghostly white tops of the waves appearing out of what literally looked like nowhere, but wasn’t nowhere. It was pulsing with presence that I couldn’t pin down at all. Dark sea.

We walked onto the part of the sand that was wet and packed together from the earlier tide, and suddenly Charlotte stopped, and pointed at my feet.

“Look!” And I looked, and there, everywhere we stepped, glowing blue lights appeared and danced under where our feet had been, sparkling and winking into life. Like fireflies. Like fairy lights. Like the sand making a new sky, a new array of stars under our feet.

I have never seen anything like it. They glowed and shimmered and we gasped and marveled and danced. We stomped our feet and turned in circles and laughed and threw our bodies around to distribute our footprints, staring at the glowing ground, euphoric with the mysterious beauty.

After a time, we approached the sea. Apprehensive of its vast invisibility, still we approached. “Just to pay our respects,” I said. We stepped and stepped forward, slowly, quietly, til the ocean came and, ever so gently, washed over our feet.

“I want to do something, to say something,” I mumbled, “but I don’t know what.” After awhile I stretched my arms wide over my head to the sky, and then folded and bowed toward the sea. I did this a few times, never deciding why, and then we turned and walked back.

Back over the beautiful glowing magic sand. Back in the dark. Back to the dock and our
flip-flops hanging on hooks for dwarves.

Let go? How?

Maybe just like this… in the glow, in the dance, in the dark?

Rebecca Lynne Fullan wants you to know, if you are wondering, that the glow is apparently caused by the bioluminescence of tiny organisms! And that the dwarves included were Dopey, Happy, Doc, Sneezy, Bashful, Grumpy. Know which one is missing?

I’ve spent the past three weeks on break from classes with my family in Southern California. The intent was in part to work a bit at the parish in which I grew up, but more than anything else, to rest in the company of my family.

Slowing down is a difficult thing for those of us who struggle with our culture’s urging to be constantly going, going, going. So often we internalize it to the point that it is no longer the voice of a depersonalized other pushing us along, but rather, our own. Recognizing that I am one of these people and that self-care is something I struggle to do by myself, I felt a prompting to renew my commitment to attending daily Masses.

I tried. I did. But I often felt disappointed. That my fellow Mass-goers refrained from actually making physical contact with one another during the Sign of Peace, that they remained in their pews and waved rather than shaking one another’s hands and learning their neighbors’ names. That half of the priests assigned to our parish used their homilies as opportunities to chide and wag their fingers, rather than to encourage and inspire their hearers to become more faithful Christians.

So I stopped. And I made time to pray on my own. But I felt like something was missing. And I shared that concern with one of my spiritual directors, who reminded me that none of us is safe from hypocrisy and pride. Is it fair to God and to my worshiping community for me to deprive them of my presence at Mass because I have so busied myself judging the people around me? Is it fair to me that I don’t get to experience Jesus in the Eucharist as often as I might because what a priest has said in a homily has upset me?

Don’t get me wrong, members of our worshiping communities have a lot to work on, and I advocate using what we have to make these communities the most welcoming and hospitable places we can. But I also know that I am not such a together person that I do not need to spend time with God in prayer in community. Because I am just as broken and fearful as the person next to me in the pew who is too afraid to shake my hand or the priest in the pulpit who is too afraid of what might happen if he were to preach something more hopeful in his homily. And I believe, at least for now, that the Eucharist can heal what is broken in me, in us.

The language of the Mass gives me the grammar and the vocabulary to communicate with God when I am too tired or too unsure of myself to find my own words. Participating in Mass isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s the one that is most comforting to me in my brokenness. It connects me to roots that run deep, that bind me to my family, living and dead, in my hometown and around the world, that remind me that I am not alone. And the particular words we use for God—Lord God, Father God, Heavenly King—these remind me that my work is needed in our church, that I need to learn my lessons well, to use the gifts and the opportunities with which God has blessed me to argue for other words, more inclusive words, more egalitarian words for God that better serve the whole community.

So this week I pray that we would be able to open our hearts to find the ways we are called to love and to forgive each other, to open our eyes to see the pain that those around us are in, to open our ears to listen to how God is calling us to be of service to one another. I pray that we can experience the kind of love that frees us from the fear that binds us, so that we can live into the kind of freedom that Jesus came to share with us.

Jennifer Owens is entering her second year of doctoral studies in systematic theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. She is a co-editor of From the Pews in the Back: Young Women and Catholicism.