We went to a “young adult” gathering in the Baton Rouge diocese last night, and it got me thinking.  So I’m really just thinking out loud (as it were) here, most of this isn’t clearly formed yet, but it has been bothering me for a while.  The meeting itself was fine, they had a change of plan since the speaker had to cancel, so we had dinner, discussed what we would like to see from the young adult ministry (they’re really just getting started) and then had a brief prayer service.  But it was the assumptions underlying the conversation that interested me most.

One was that most “young adults” are too busy with school, family, and/or career to spend much time working on their relationship with God.  They didn’t have extra time for prayer, or service, or learning more about their faith.  They could, however, be counted on to make time for fellowship, if the opportunity were presented in a way that met their tastes.  (They weren’t making this up, apparently it is based on well-researched and published fact about this age group in the Church.)

Which made sense to me, because I feel pretty busy most of the time, as did everyone there it seemed, until I thought about it more.  They wanted things that would appeal to young adults, so fellowship came first, and (according to this research) service came last.  But everyone who showed up for this night of fellowship (and learning, and prayer!) was also involved in some sort of service to the Church.  Everyone, unless you don’t count me, since I only sort of tag along.  There were teachers, diocesan workers, and a guy who plays cello at Mass.  Now I grant that these are not a representative group of Catholic young adults, but they are the ones who are interested enough in Catholic young adult things to show up, and they were all doing service before they started worrying about building a young adult community.  So.  This assumption that what we young adults need (or want, maybe, because do we know what we really need?) is fellowship was my first concern.  Craig was scribbling things about “being rather than doing”, but he’ll have to tell you about that.

Another problem is defining this “busy” which affords us hours to look at Facebook, but only minutes a day for prayer. I think you can see the problem here, so we’ll save that for another day.  (Of course, again, convincing the phantom “young adults” who weren’t present for this discussion that this is a problem is a problem in itself.  Hmm.)

Something else gave me pause when I stopped to think about it.  We spent a lot of time dividing people into groups and discussing how we could minister to those groups.  And I do not think this is necessarily negative – I want a group of families with young children to go to the park with.  There is a special bond that can be found between people who are in the same sort of circumstances of life.  I think this is a necessary sort of community to form.

But that seems to me most of what we talked about doing, and I wonder what (or better, who) is being excluded.  And I wonder if this is partially a product of age-segregated schooling, and that we are just so used to being broken up in this way that we don’t question it.  We think we need something for middle school students, then for high school students, then for college students, then for young adults, then “adults”, then golden-agers.  And while I know perfectly well that high school kids don’t want to hang out with their middle-school-aged siblings, I wonder what we are losing by separating people into age groups.

One of the arguments for homeschooling is that it helps to break down this age segeragation a little.  Rather than spending eight hours a day with children of the same age (and usually the same socio-economic status, and often the same race), kids spend their days with their family, who cover a range of ages, and then with the people they meet on a daily basis, very few of whom will be their age, and who will hopefully cover a much wider range of diversity than your average elementary school classroom.  Why can’t a ten-year-old be friends with a seventy-year-old neighbor?  Craig did this growing up, and the experience has served him very well.

But the concern all this raised for me on the long, quiet drive home last night, was really about how we are cutting ourselves off from each other with distinctions like “young adult”.  It is hard to see the face of Christ in other people.  Even people we love dearly make us angry, refuse to do things the way we would, or just are different from us in ways that make it a challenge to love them sometimes.  And we know their good sides.

Multiply that challenge a hundred-fold for people we don’t know, don’t agree with, and don’t respect.  How can we hope to see the face of Christ in an elderly woman holding up the grocery line by arguing about the price of ground beef, if we don’t know any elderly women struggling to make ends meet?  How can she see Christ in us, despite our impatience, if no young person has every offered to help her get her groceries into the taxi that waits for her outside?

The further removed we are from a “type” of person, the harder it will be for us to love someone like that when we encounter him or her.  And how else are we to show Christ to that person, than to love him as well as we can?  If we are to live out the reality of the Mystical Body, no one can be excluded!  Hands, feed, noses, belly buttons, are all necessary to make Christ whole.  Even that ugly yellow toenail is part of Christ.  It may not be excluded.

So what happens to our worship (and I mean that broadly, ranging from personal prayer, to Mass, to serving God by serving his people) when we segregate and separate ourselves from people who aren’t like us?  What does our worship suffer when we discount the children because they are too distracting?  What do we lose when we exclude the elderly who need assistance from a stranger to make it to Mass?  When we give up on a baby before it is born because we know it will have Down Syndrome?  What does our worship lose when we exclude the young, single, poor mother because we are ashamed?  The homeless man because of his smell?  The flamboyant gay-marriage activist?  Whether we like it or not, all these people are part of Christ!  How can we love Christ if we cannot bring ourselves to love them, and how can we love them if we cannot even bring ourselves to talk with them and listen to them?

So by now, almost twenty-four hours after the meeting, I am wondering, not what role the BR young adult ministry will play in my life in the near future (ok, I am wondering that, too), but I’m really wondering what we will have to do to break down some of the divisions and allow the Body of Christ to meet itself and learn to love itself again.  I guess that was worth the three hours we spent in the car to go to this “fellowship” meeting.

Merton is speaking of seeing his father in a hospital bed, unable to speak and disfigured by a brain tumor.  He is 14 or 15 years old, and has no faith or relationship with God to speak of.

“What could I make of so much suffering?  There was no way for me, or for anyone else in the family, to get anything out of it.  It was a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief.  You had to take it, like an animal.  We were in the condition of most of the world, the condition of men withiout faith in the presence of war, disease, pain, starvation, suffering, plague, bombardment, death.  You just had to take it, like a dumb animal.  Try to avoid it, if you could.  But you must eventually reach the point where you can’t avoid it any more.  Take it.  Try to stupefy yourself, if you like, so that it won’t hurt so much.  But you will always have to take some of it.  And it will all devour you in the end.

Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to  your fear of being hurt.  The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all.  It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.  This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.”

–Seven Story Mountain

Which was a little helpful thinking about my Dad suffering, and my Mom now in grief, and one of Craig’s uncles who has been sick and in pain for years now.  And relating to childbirth, as well.  But with faith and by joining suffering to Christ on the cross, it is not so dire.

There is an amazing article in this week’s America magazine.  (The Oct. 5, 2009 issue.)  It’s called “A Fiery Gift: A spiritual case for natural childbirth.”  Susan Windley-Daoust has a deeper perspective on the issue, one I hadn’t considered, and I think everyone (female, or otherwise, and likely to give birth sometime soon or otherwise!) ought to read this.  I think she is absolutely right-on.

The gist, if you don’t care to read it for yourself, is that the process of birth, if left relatively un-tampered with, is a powerful parallel experience to some parts of the journey through prayer to God.  In fact, she worries about the effect missing out on a “natural” birth may be having on the spiritual lives of the women of this country: “But when an overwhelming majority of women in the United States have unnecessarily scheduled or medically augumented births, we must ask: Do we lose a window to God?  A window to the interior life?  When the Holy Spirit initiates a spiritual birth to something greater within us, will any of us be able to say, ‘I’ve been here before?'”

Go to your library, or do what you have to, but read this article.  It makes me want to stop the pregnant women I see every time we go to the zoo (there are always a ton of pregnant women at the zoo!)  and ask if they have considered (really, carefully considered, with the benefit of good information) how they are going to bring their babies into the world.  I am convinced that childbirth is transformative.  I am convinced that God designed it to be that way.  Not easy.  Most things worth doing are at least a little hard.  But transformative, in part in preparation for the challenges the next many years of child rearing bring.  Perhaps, if Susan Windley-Daoust is right (and I think she is), in preparation especially for the spiritual challenges these little ones bring us.  I think she asks a very important question:  What are we, as a community of women, as a church of women, missing?

Lucy is growing up too fast.  Samantha is not far behind.  I have not been looking to their changes, I like them little, but I’m trying to accept that God’s plan for them (I hope!) is that they grow up and help to bring about His kingdom.  And I got a little encouragement here.  With two girls, I can already relate to this, even though they’re so small.  You should read it.  And if you wonder why I link to Elizabeth Foss’s work so much, it’s partly because she is about the only one of my blog list I get around to reading any more, forget writing anything of my own!

Ah, it’s been a while.  Things have been slightly crazy.  Dad had his third chemo treatment, and that is still going as well as can be expected.  He’s tired and sick, but still in good spirits.

Craig’s mom needs prayers now, too.  She had a biopsy done Tuesday and will find out September 9 if is it something they will have to treat.  In the meantime, she’s recovering from the biopsy and the anesthesia, and trying not to worry too much about what the test results will be.  When it rains around here, it pours!

Part of the reason I’ve been so slow to post is that our computer was stolen two weekends ago when our house was broken into.  Fortunately, the only took that and the change jars I was collecting for the girls.  Unfortunately (?) that means they took less than our home owner’s insurance deductible, so we were on our own for replacing the computer.  (Which, I don’t think I mentioned, we had only had for about three weeks.)  But Deus providebit, and one of the priests from Craig’s school, who knows lots and lots and lots about computers, heard what had happened and built us a new desktop from pieces he had laying around.  Which is how I am now able to write this for you to read.  God sure has strange ways of going about things.

I’ll be updating the homeschooling things soon, but I seem short on time lately, so that is what has been neglected.  Some of the time has been going to rearranging the house, including trying to get our front bedroom in the sort of condition to be used as the homeschooling room.

But you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with “pirate prayer”.  On a rare (these days) occasion, I drop by other Catholic homeschooling mommy blogs (if you know of other good ones, I’d love to hear about them), and I found a jewel today.  Here it is.  Enjoy.

[A note:  I started this post on June 14, 2009, and finally was able to finish it today.  That explains the time differences, if anyone would have noticed them!]

I hope I never forget those afternoons last May when we were going without air conditioner.  (We mostly made it until June, by the way, but I’m not strong enough to do without when it’s getting up over 90 degrees every day!)  I’d be trying to get the girls down for a nap, and it seemed so hot, and just a little breeze would come in through the open window, and it felt so cool and refreshing…how I praised God for those little breezes!

I had occasion to remember those afternoons yesterday while I was helping my father-in-law shovel dirt/tree shavings from a pile the size of our living room into wheelbarrows to deliver to various gardens around the house.  It was too hot, and just the time of day when we probably should have been inside, or at least in the shade, but my father-in-law doesn’t believe in leaving for later work that can be finished now, so I was out helping.  And here and there we would get a cool breath of wind, and well, I would almost fall down in rapturous praise.

Silently, of course.

Because my father-in-law, though respectful, is not a religious man.  (Unless you count the cult of LSU in some way, which I do not.)  He does, however, have a great appreciation for nature.  He and I share a yearning for mountains and forests, wild things as yet untamed.  He brings what he can of this nature into his gardens, where he spends hours digging, potting, transplanting, mulching, and doing all those little things which I hope I’ll learn as I try to grow my own little patches of paradise.  It is not worship, I don’t think, but there is certainly sacrifice involved!  For me, as I think I’ve said before, gardening can be a very spiritual experience, a chance to slow down and appreciate the wonderous creation God has put on this earth for us.  I had to wonder, as I tried not to swoon from joy during one of those welcome breezes, what does my father-in-law feel out here?

Because it seems to me that if there is anywhere that it should be easy to meet God, it must be in nature.  Of course you can meet Him in the Eucharist, in other people, in great art; but I think that in these sort of places, you more often have to be looking.  God can give you the flash of knowing, like Merton on the street corner in Louisville, but I have to think that experience would be hard to take when you are not disposed to try and see other people as your brothers and sister.  Out in His creation (as opposed to our concrete creations – there’s another post!), where He made the rules, there are fewer hangups – no race, to gender, no strange clothing or hair colors.  No maniacal drivers to dodge.  No repetitive, square, bland, (and did I mention repetitive?) buildings.  Everything sings the praise and glory of our God, every creature joins in extolling how wondrously it is made, how carefully its designs fit together with its surroundings so that all survive and thrive.  It is a simple kind beauty, in the way, I think, that we speak of God as “simple”.

So standing there, wondering these things, shovel in hand, mother-in-law’s straw hat on my head, those little breaths of wind brought me more refreshment than relief for my steaming body.  They carried to me, for those whom I love who doubt, a little breath of hope.

Happy feast of St. Dominic, especially to those of you affiliated with the Order of Preachers!  (And those of you with O.P. leanings!)  Here is the little prayer from our Picture Book of Saints:

O God, let St. Dominic help Your church by his merits and teaching.  May he who was an outstanding preacher of truth become a most generous intercessor for us.  Amen!

This is a great story, a beautiful witness, so I thought I’d post if even though Craig sent it to some of you already.

By William Wan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 29, 2009

They’ve been mistaken for Jedi-wannabes headed to a Star Wars convention. They’ve been investigated by police, approached by strangers, gawked at from cars and offered gifts of crumpled dollar bills and Little Debbie snacks.

After trekking along more than 300 miles of dusty Virginia country roads and suburban highways, six Franciscan friars reached Washington on Tuesday, having seen it all during an offbeat modern-day quest for God.

For six weeks, the brothers walked from Roanoke with only their brown robes, sandals and a belief in the kindness of strangers to feed and shelter them.

The sight of six men in flowing habits, trudging single file on the side of the road, prompted many to pull over and talk, even confess. People on their way to work described their loneliness. College students wanted help figuring out what to do with their lives. Children, mistaking them for the Shaolin monks in movies, ran up to ask the friars if they knew how to beat up bullies.

“Dressed like we are in our habits, it’s like a walking sign that says, ‘Tell us your life’s problems,’ ” explained Cliff Hennings, the youngest of the friars at 23.

In every instance, the friars made time for conversation. They shot the breeze with a gang of drunk bikers, dispensed relationship advice to the brokenhearted commuters and bore witness to one and all, yea, even to the Chik-fil-A employee dressed as a cow.

The pilgrimage was the idea of four young friars just finishing their training in Chicago and working toward taking lifelong vows. Seeking to emulate the wanderings of their founder, Saint Francis of Assisi, they wanted to journey together as a fraternity, ministering to one another and to strangers, while depending on God for every meal and place to sleep.

Joined by two older friars supervising their training, they picked as their destination a friary in Washington, D.C., called the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land — a symbolic gesture, because the actual Holy Land was too far away.

Then last month they drove from Chicago to Salem, just outside Roanoke, parked their van at a church and set out on foot.

They tried to live by the ascetic rules Jesus laid out for his 12 disciples: “Take nothing for the journey — no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.” The less they brought, they reasoned, the more room they could leave for God. The friars did make a few modifications, carrying a toothbrush, a wool blanket, water and a change of underwear (“a summer essential,” one explained), as well as one cellphone in case of emergency.

Some rules, however, had to be made on the fly. They had agreed not to carry any money, but just minutes into their first day, strangers were pressing dollar bills into their hands. So they made a pact to spend what they received each day on food, often high-protein Clif bars, and to give the rest to the needy.

They walked 15 miles their first day and found themselves at dusk in front of a fire station just outside Roanoke. One of the friars, Roger Lopez, a former fireman himself, knocked on the station door and asked whether there was somewhere they could sleep. As they talked, the friars spotted a giant trampoline out back.

“It seemed like such a good idea at the time,” said Lopez, 30.

The six spread out on the trampoline as if they were spokes on a wheel. But soon they realized gravity was against them, pulling everyone toward the center. Some tried to sleep clutching the side railing. When one person rolled over, the rest bobbed uncontrollably like buoys. No one got much sleep, but the firefighters did send them off the next morning with corned beef sandwiches.

Since then, they have slept on picnic tables outside Lynchburg, basement floors in Charlottesville, even on office tables at a food pantry.

One night they were hosted by a man with tattoos on his arms, an unkempt ponytail and all of his front teeth missing. He had pulled up in his beat-up Jeep and offered to let the friars stay with him in an old one-room schoolhouse in Nelson County.

“He looked like he had just gotten out of prison,” said Hennings, but the man turned out to be a Native American healer. The friars stayed up all night talking to him. He told them Native stories and played his double flute. They chanted Latin hymns in return and told him stories from the Gospel.

Such moments of grace became a daily occurrence for the friars. Sure, some passersby gave them the finger. One guy even leaned out the window to add a sprinkling of Nietzsche (“God is dead!”) to his vulgarities. But most encounters were meaningful, even profound.

Just outside Harrisonburg, a woman in her 40s with a young daughter pulled over in her old Dodge sedan to talk to 25-year-old friar Richard Goodin.

She’d recently caught her husband cheating on her. He had kicked her and her daughter out of their house, she told Goodin. Now, like the friars, they were wandering through the wilderness, unsure of their next meal or their next move.

As they talked, the woman’s daughter rummaged through the car and gave the friars a soda. Then she found a chocolate bar and offered that. As the conversation began winding down, the daughter said there was nothing more in the car. The woman reached for her purse and told Goodin, “I want to give you what we have left.”

She pressed $3.52 into his hand, which he accepted reluctantly.

“I realized she wasn’t giving this to us or to me,” Goodin said. “I think she heard us talk about trusting in God and she wanted to try to trust in the same way. She was giving that money to God.”

He and the other friars have thought about the woman a lot. Last week, they thought about her as they walked along Lee Highway in Fairfax, where Mary Williams and her three kids pulled over in their minivan and offered to take the brothers to a Chik-fil-A.

“It was the oddest experience sitting there at Chik-fil-A with everyone staring at us,” said Williams, 45. “The high point was when the guy dressed up like a cow came out and gave us all high fives. He was in costume. They were in robes. A lot of people were wondering what was going on.”

People had much the same reaction Tuesday as the friars crossed the Memorial Bridge and wandered past the Lincoln Memorial. In an instant, tourists went from posing in front of Lincoln’s statue to posing with the Franciscans.

Their plan was to spend one last night wherever God provided and then arrive this morning at the monastery near Catholic University. They hope to spend the day there, telling the story of their journey and the goodness they encountered to anyone who wanted to listen.

Their message will be simple: “Anything can happen when you live in the moment, one step at a time,” said Mark Soehner, 51, one of the mentors to the young friars. “But to find that out, you have to be willing to take that one step.”

Craig has started teacher orientation again.  This summer flew by, especially since we were out of town most of the month of July.  His return to work, and my non-return, have raised a number of questions for me again.  “Can we really afford to live on one income?  Why did we get such a nice car so now we have those payments to keep up with?  Where can I spend a few less dollars?  Can I really handle two little girls all day?”

Meanwhile, we’re trying to build a homeschool library, eat more locally and organically, and be generous where we can.  Of course, in the midst of my worries, the liturgy came through again.  Just as I was thinking, “How on earth are we going to do this?”, the lectionary brought up the feeding of the five thousand (twice!) and the Bread of Life discourse.  I say, “This is a problem!” and again God says, “Trust me!”  On the heels of our traveling, just as I was starting to get my head reoriented to running a household, and so just as the worries began to build, there was my answer in Scripture.

And this is where I think my *attempted* prayer routine is going to pay off.  The Liturgy of the Hours has never spoken to my heart in the past, but now when night prayer asks for rest to renew our tired bodies, I’m there!  The Psalms are somehow always appropriate, and time and again the daily readings sneak up on me with just what I need to hear, whether I think I’m ready to hear it or not!

So from the depths of the screaming toddler, the sound of the washing machine, buzzing computers, and splashes at bathtime, the Word of God speaks softly, but clearly, as long as I am willing to make the time to listen.

The news so far for my Dad is good.  He is in the hospital and they did one dose of chemo (apparently there are four doses in each round, and they expect to do six rounds total) and that went very well, so they expect him to handle the treatment pretty well.  Mom says he looks and sounds better than he has, so that’s good news, too.  He should be home Thursday or Friday, and then he gets a couple of weeks off before the next round of treatment.  Thank you so much for all the prayers, I know they are helping!