Write Now!
This blog started as a 'Lenten Writing Project', where we wrote each day in Lent. Now that Summer is here, let's keep up the discipline of writing with a weekly writing challenge! A prompt will be posted each week and anyone is welcome to join in and post their writing here or participate just by reading it.
Every writer has their own special light to add to this blog and all of your writing offerings are appreciated, whether poetry, prose, essay, thoughts, lists or comments and encouragement.
Anna: with the spiritual gift of prayer
ReplyDeleteI listened to my sister each Sunday of our childhood, saying the Lord’s Prayer, the creed, the prayers of the church, saying each word with such practiced cadence and theater. Fake, I thought. I watched her – with envy – as she danced up the aisle like Miriam in a white shiny unitard, full of thanksgiving and prayer. Her hair swept back in a bun, revealing her swan-like neck and elongated everything, like a beautiful iridescent jellyfish floating around the sanctuary. Accolades, compliments from all the seniors in the congregation. A few un-Christian stares from the boys in confirmation. Later, she would also compose her own prayers of the church as an assisting minister. White robe, hands upstretched. She was a renaissance of blossoming creativity to the church, family and friends. Now that we are both adults, we have both evolved past sisterly jealousy and have found that our identities are both separate and the same – Gemini twins connected by song, dance and art. Now I can recognize that what I thought was fake – too good to be true – was indeed true. She has the spirit of a young shepherd boy named David when she talks to God through art and prayer.
Nani: with the spiritual gift of Magic
One usually doesn’t associate magic with saints, but when you enter Nani’s world, an old lady who suffers from arthritis and a host of other ailments, becomes – from her wheelchair - a 16 year-old cheerleader doing the splits on the football field before your very eyes. Perky, funny and able to make everyone feel that they are the most treasured, special person in the world. She carries in her pocket the ash-spirits of her foremothers, which are some of the source of her power. Talking to her mother to mother is like confiding in an all-knowing, all-accepting goddess of offspring. Having raised 5 children herself, no story is too horrific that she doesn’t have a word of empathy. At the seemingly most inappropriate moments, she bursts out with a signature laugh and says “wonderful”. Your child pooped in the middle of church while wearing a shoe for a hat? No clucking or predictions of future outcome. She just laughs and says “wonderful”. And then shares a story of hers that is worse. Coming into her house is like entering a magical world of laughter, music, loudness, wit, ideas, cuteness and fun. And you will be fed with lots of butter and sugar. And love.
My Mentoring Saint
ReplyDeleteby Marlene Obie
My own Saint Mary, like her namesake, cannot be fully depicted with mere words or pictures. This aunt, who was in many respects my mother for 6 years, would have laughed and objected firmly if she had heard me declare her a saint while on earth
How do I count the ways her influence has shaped me? Who would I be now if not for the tentacle of her heart that reached out and gathered me into her household? If I qualify for being somewhere close to “normal”, I owe it to the years I lived with Mary Shirley, Uncle Lowell and Cousin Darlene.
Working at a local dry cleaners and keeping our family in sync, handling our individual sets of personalities, schedules, and crises required., as I now know, amazing conductor skills. Clad in her chenille bathrobe which had an interesting pattern of singe added to the back by the kitchen gas heating stove she stood by drinking her coffee in the morning, she managed to get us all off to a good start. (I take full responsibility for my own last-minute flustery departure to school after dawdling over my daily bowl of raisin bran.) After she walked home from work at noon each day and prepared lunch for us all, she began the dinner preparations before returning. Sometimes when Darlene and I got home, we’d find surprises under the dishcloth on the stove, like cinnamon rolls.
Her favorite story to tell on me was when I altered her intended unsaintlike behavior. Although I don’t actually remember her resorting to physical punishment with either Darlene or me, there was a day Darlene somehow stepped over Mary's line of control. When Mary turned to pick up a belt to use, Darlene seized advantage and bolted out the door, jumped onto her bike and sped down the street. Mary put the belt down and went back to what she was doing, with anger showing in her pursed lips. I knew Darlene was going to get it whenever she returned, so I took hold of matters. Eventually, Darlene came warily through the kitchen door and Mary immediately moved to pick up the belt where she had laid it. “Now where is that belt?” she asked. “I had it right here.”I confessed then that I had taken it, and when she asked why, I said, “I didn’t want you to hit her with it.” She then broke into laughter which deflated her anger. I think Darlene then got a lecture and possibly grounding. Mary continued to relate the event for years to come.
Although she was no longer a practicing Catholic, she encouraged Darlene and I going to the Lutheran Sunday School with the Thorsons who lived across the street and sometimes she came to church herself. She did also always make it a point to come when Darlene and I were part of a service or program and she made sure we were presentable and fed before we left the house. Although she didn’t talk a lot about religious faith, I saw her living it out day-by-day in the ways she related to other people. She was friendly, loyal, forgiving, and accepting of everyone she had contact with. Although she might not like someone’s actions, she tried to understand what was behind the behavior. She stood her ground though on matters she considered “the right thing to do”. During one of our last visits, while she was caregiver for her husband, we were discussing getting through the difficult parts of life, she said “You just have to have a lot of patience.”
My dad told me once that I looked like her. I hope I am like her inside as well as on the surface. She had her flaws, as all of us do, Yet she was a miraculous gift from God that keeps on giving to me. (Have to stop – tears in my eyes.)