Christmas Time is Family Time. Sort of.

We passed a billboard today on our way to deliver a "you work in retail and it's Christmas Eve" starbucks coffee to my sister. I was in the car with my two daughters and as we got onto highway 40, Fiona says, "Christmas time is family time."

"What?" I ask.

"That's what the billboard said just there. For some church."

I thought about it. I thought about the first Christmas and how it wasn't anything like family time. Mary surely had family; she was young and even if we accept that her parents were dead, she had to live with someone, an aunt and uncle perhaps? There had to be family. Joseph, too, must have had some family. But they weren't with family on Christmas.

Mary stayed with Elizabeth for months tending to her pregnant cousin. But when she gave birth she was alone.

"She was with the shepherds," Fiona points out.

"They weren't family. Shepherds are hired men. Unclean."

"But she wasn't alone," she stresses.

No, I suppose she wasn't. But it had to feel that way. This insurmountable task of giving birth outside the comforts of your home, without your aunt or mother or older sister holding your hand and reassuring you.

Easter, now, it was kind of a family event. Christ appears to his friends. He appears to the apostles gathered in the upper room. Pentecost. Family affair.

But the first Christmas is lonely.

We get caught up in Christmas. I feel like it plays with our minds. Amalgamation happens--we take the best bits of each childhood year and mash them together as if that is what Christmas always was. Daisy said to me that it just didn't feel like Christmas without snow. I told her that she'd actually only seen one or two white Christmases. But you think it's supposed to snow.

You think it's supposed to be a great big dinner around tables with perfect food and great conversation. My brother pointed out that it's really green bean casserole and pasta salad with canned olives and the TV is playing a James Bond movie in the background. You think the kids will open gifts and it'll be the best gift they've ever received, when often they are bombarded with noise and light and working on very little sleep and it's impossible to live up to those expectations. You think that everyone will be happy to be there and then you're shocked to hear that your sister in law finds Christmas very awkward or your sister has a bad cold and a headache and could she just stop by next week?

The people you want to visit with don't come...or are so busy visiting with everyone that you never get a moment with them. Your cousins kids have a fever so she skips the event altogether. All the teenagers sit on their phones the whole time. You chose the wrong bra to wear for an all day event on camera (or maybe that's just me).

But we keep doing it. We keep trying to live with the imperfection and make it work. We keep taking Christmas, this commemoration of God's Incarnation, and spend it giving gifts to each other to celebrate the Incarnation within each of us. It's truly namaste in action: the sacred in me recognizes the sacred in you.

And it is family time. But it's not matching turtlenecks and fluffy white dogs family time. It's messier than that. As well it should be. God came into this world in about the messiest way possible. And we should honor that.

Thoughts on preparing the church for Christmas

Yesterday I stood in the back of my parish church staring at the corner where the creche will go. The platform was set up already and the gold cloth was covering the lauan plywood and milk crates borrowed from the food pantry in the basement. We had trees--boy scout trees--set up the day before by Dominicans. I thought about the two of them chatting with each other, and some quote about how one of them had "tiny awesome Lebanese hands" and I have to hope they stay this filterless and cute when they are priests and give homilies to hungry parishes.

I needed to put up the lights on the trees. This is not my favorite task but I knew the trees were background to the main event. I strung lights together and started hiding the wires in and behind the trees.

This was not my job. That's what I kept thinking. Christmas decorating for 10 years now, and this was never my job. Sometimes I ran around pretending that I knew what I was doing. Sometimes I was more useful, attaching bows to wreaths and getting them hung on pillars. I often work on poinsettias. But I've never done this job.

This is Jack's job. And Fr. Miguel's. And other helpers who get this done while I act busy other places.

It was a palpable emptiness all around me.

I strung lights. I put the candle holders up. I placed the pieces of the creche, Mary and Joseph, the shepherd and angel. Tiny little sheep and a couple of farm animals. The three wise men, those crazy Zoroastrians, those first people grafted into the People of God, got placed to one side. They don't go to the stable or whatever it was, the minimal shelter for animals that Mary cowered in to give birth. They show up at a house. Joseph found them some place to live while the baby was still too young to travel. But the wise men are on their way and we have amalgamated the story into this hazy retelling of the birth of Christ.

The years, the past 10 years, are amalgamated as well for me. Decorating this church with Sister and friends and Fr. Miguel and so many folks. People still came this year, but I couldn't engage the same way. I got things set up. I kept myself from snapping at a young child that didn't belong to me. And I left. Joe suggested we meet in the morning to do the lights once everyone was gone. And we did.

Sal, the janitor, the constant at this parish for me since I joined, figured out we were in the church. Came over. Told us we should have called him. He could have helped. I had to smile.

In all this change and upheaval, in all this that I hate so much, the uncertainty of future and mourning of what is gone while still trying to celebrate what is here and new and real and present, thinking of my friend Zelda shake her head and say, "nothing stays the same, Bridgett" and snapping back, "I'm a Benedictine. Stability. It's supposed to be the same," and knowing in my heart that I don't mean that and stability doesn't mean that and Joe reminding me that we are caretakers of this place, which is a haunting word suddenly, caretakers, to take care, caring for without taking, that this isn't our place, we are just here to pass it on to the next people, Sal saying yet another time that it's only me and him now, always has been, and now it is again, only the two of us, which isn't true and yet somehow feels a little true and lonely and empty and I look around this beautiful magnificent cathedral of a church that I get to go to every Sunday and know it's going to be fine.

You can't take in Christ if you're overfull. No room at the inn? They can't come in.

Well I'm kind of spiritually empty. 

And I'm kind of happy.

Ready.

Amen.

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Time goes on, circling the year, suddenly it's Our Lady of Guadalupe. You decide at some point that a date belongs to a person, because the date of birth is not known to you for sure, or the date of death is too hard to remember. Mike's girlfriend Vanessa has a liturgical date assigned to her. She died on Ash Wednesday, 1996. Had a seizure and fell. I don't know the date. Some time in February. I remember though, because I went to mass that night and it's marked with thoughts of her, every Ash Wednesday is. Even though it is a floating feast.

Fr. Jerry Keaty--didn't know him well enough to know his birthday, and I know he died in June, but I wasn't aware of it the day it happened. But he was buried on a floating feast: Sacred Heart. June 11 that year, my sister's birthday. Sacred Heart--he'd had a heart transplant several years before; officiated at my wedding (he also gave me my first communion, baptized my sister whose birthday he was buried on). His first transplant started to fail on him, but he refused to go on the list again and take a heart from a better candidate.

And today is Jesse's day. He died in the summertime, don't know when he was born. He was Mexican American, but didn't pay much attention to Catholicism. But he had a devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Which somehow is more powerful to me than our bishop having a devotion to her. Here's this young college-aged man, no religious upbringing, openly gay, a risk taker, a party kid, and he cares to pay attention to an apparition of Mary. Cultural connection, perhaps, but his mother's Baptist tradition would have stomped most of that out, I'd think. He probably came to it on his own.

I didn't even know Jesse. He was my sister's friend. But I think of him today, and for the past 10 years on this day, ever since he was murdered in 2004 by Steve Rios, a Columbia, MO, police officer. Rios was trading sex for legal favors--get him out of this ticket, get him off the hook on the drunk and disorderly conduct charge. Rios was married, with a newborn son at home. Jesse became a liability--Rios was using a false name with him, another officer's badge, and Jesse was figuring things out. Rios was taking great risks, and Jesse started telling friends that he was going to confront him because he thought he might be married and he didn't want any part of that. Jesse told folks he thought he might go to the chief of police with the information if Rios didn't get rid of this other charge against him. Ok, so, not the smartest thing to do in a clandestine relationship with a man trained to kill people.

Jesse's body was found a few houses down from my sister's house. She and a roommate identified his body from a photograph. His throat was cut so deeply it nicked his spine. Blood sprayed on the houses. Rios got him into a choke hold, laid his unconscious body on the ground, took out his clip knife, and killed him.

Jesse's friends had bits and pieces and there was this one detective who listened and started to put it together. All of Rios' lies were exposed. He was convicted almost exactly a year after the murder. His legal team got him an appeal and a retrial a few years later, but he was convicted again. It was actually a fascinating tale, but in the end there was still a young man dead and two families broken apart and many individuals whose lives jumped the tracks for several years in the face of this tragedy.

I sat in church this morning, the 3rd Sunday of Advent superseding the feast, staring at the Mary altar arranged with roses, cacti, and candles. I thought about sin and what we do to each other to hide what we have done wrong. How many times we lie to get out of trouble. Blame other people. Threaten and bribe and promise and run away. How deep despair and anxiety must be to lead someone to kill to protect a secret. May I, may each of us, never find ourselves at that depth. Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

The Tree Lot

In 2006, my parish was part of the yearly priest shuffle. Our pastor left for a different thing and we were joined by a brand new pastor--he'd been an associate, but this was the first time he was pastor anywhere. I have to think we were kind of a plunge into icy cold water.

I was on parish council, just so happens, in a last-ditch effort to stay engaged, to stay Catholic. I was still about a year away from finding myself to my monastery, but being elected/chosen for the council was a big step for me. And I was so very happy to be on the council with Miguel arrived, because I sort of had a front seat view of what was going to happen.

What happened was change. Not all at once, but things changed. I was glad to be part of the change because it was well-articulated, justified, and beautiful. Sister was a big part of this change as well--and many others who played small roles like me.

I helped clean house (literally, I mean, in the sacristies). I made some banners. I collaborated with strong women I hardly deserved to be collaborating with. There were hard times but what I remember is the good.

One of the changes was Christmas decorating. Sister put me in charge for some reason. Christmas Eve was on a Sunday that year, and I remarked that it wouldn't happen again until 2017. "Well I won't be here by then!" I remember Sister, and Fr. Miguel, both declaring. And I remember feeling a little bit wistful about the future, because I already sort of knew that I would be.

We doubled our poinsettia order. We moved the creche and replaced the one we'd been using that had baby Jesus and his broken hands. And we ordered trees from the scout tree lot on our parking lot like we were told was done.

That last sentence? It went badly. I look back on it and I'm totally bewildered even now why it went the way it did. Sister and I went to pick up the trees and we were treated badly. Thank goodness Sister was there as well because I needed another sane(r) witness. The Bridgett inside me, the one who fired her florist three days before the wedding? That Bridgett took over. Jake and I took those trees from the lot, from the men who had treated us like stupid children, and recycled them down in Carondelet Park. Then we drove to North Broadway and bought the last two trees on a wholesaler's lot.

The people who ran the tree lot were dead to me.

Not a very Advent-ish thing to feel.

Nine years later, here we are. Our parish has been caught up in a late-year priest shuffle. It's hard not to take this personally. In addition, Sister is gone, doing good things for her order. We have a new priest and I'm not on parish council. The time of my life is different--I'm not a stay at home mom ripe for the volunteering. I'm a full time middle school math teacher with aspirations and three kids going 5 directions and my life is a lot richer and a ton busier.

So I don't have a front row view of what will change. I went to a meeting tonight that left me empty. I can't make this what it's not. Change has come and it's so very hard for me this time. The hardest. I can't be what I'm not and I don't have the time or limitless energy required to be everything I used to be plus everything I am and need to be now.

But what I can do is get trees for the church from the boy scout lot.

I can surprise the heck out of the guy with the white beard when I tell him we want to support him this year. They're having a hard year, it's their biggest fundraiser, and some of their trees were stolen. So buying 5 trees for around the creche in church is a nice gesture and he was happy. So was I.

I can laugh with the woman who meets me at the lot this evening and shows me the trees. I can be honest and broken-down in the best ways when I tell her that it was time for a change. What I mean is that it's time for me to let this go too.

Then I came home and texted with friends and tried to sort all the feelings.

Change is hard. But I don't have to be.

Pregnant

Pregnancy is a strange thing, I think I can add "especially in these times". We can know we are pregnant incredibly early on now, thus setting ourselves up for an incredibly slow boring time of waiting.

On a cellular level amazing things are happening--and we can see none of them. When quickening finally happens, finally, we can tell something is really happening that isn't just weight gain and nausea. There's something going on.

We still don't get to see. Yes, with ultrasound machines we can see fuzzy gray blobs that look like science fiction characters. Technicians can tell if our babies have spina bifida or cleft palate. But what I saw each time was just fuzzy gray blobs. And I didn't really see--I viewed a projection on a screen. I didn't hold or see or observe something with my eyes that I could relate to without a woman in a white coat telling me what I was seeing.

All those appointments. Those waiting rooms. The "I want you to go in for some tests" followed by "oh never mind." Or "I suspect this might be twins" followed by, "hmm, maybe not."

The world passed around me every time I was pregnant.

My first pregnancy ended in an early miscarriage. There was a heartbeat, then there wasn't. Nothing to see here, folks, move along. A lot of pain and trauma and there I was two months later reading too many things online about my chances next time and maybe I should just adopt? I forced myself not to get excited about my next pregnancy. I remember the Christmas I was pregnant with Fiona, sitting at my mother-in-law's house opening gifts that implied that all would be well this time and we would have this baby and yay!

I was too shell shocked to be happy. The waiting was too hard. I didn't know the ending and so I couldn't be a part of the process.

My next pregnancy was a kicker from the start. I was healthy, the baby was healthy, I got my head on straight and we were going places. And I spent 4 months of that pregnancy kneeling over the toilet and the last 5 months preparing with great anxiety for a VBAC delivery that I couldn't wrap my head around without hyperventilating.

Daisy's labor was 52 hours of waiting and observing my body do the work to bring her to the light. Fifty-two hours is too long a time to do anything. You don't want to lie on the couch and watch samurai movies for 52 hours. You don't want to go to an amusement park for 52 hours. Trust me, you don't want to do anything for 52 hours on end. Waiting. And hurting. And waiting. And watching the sun go down and the sun rise in this endless day of waiting.

Billy's pregnancy? I was a pro by then. Found out he was a boy, didn't want any surprises. Had him named before he was born. Scheduled a c-section because 52 hours of labor followed by a c-section is some bullshit. Drove myself to the hospital in a light dusting of snow. Had myself a baby. His pregnancy blew past me in some ways, and suddenly I'm holding this 9 pound person that I made, that I grew up from cells, while I did other things like drive kids to preschool and cook dinner and chat with neighbors on the stoop.

I've had Advents like all my pregnancies. Some have been hard and empty. Some have been hard to engage in.. Some have been filled with too much work. And some--most, actually, blow past me and suddenly it's December 23 and I'm sitting in my living room staring at the tree and listening to Bing Crosby and where did the time go?

A perfect Advent would be hopeful. It would be expectant. It would be joyful and exciting and peaceful and deep and perfect and meaningful and memorable and filled with grace. And there are moments of that perfect Advent in all of my Advents--there are moments of that perfect pregnancy in every pregnancy as well. But I bring to Christ what I have and who I am each year.

However I do it, though, a baby is on the way.

Baruch, Hard Work, Desire, and No.

Today's first reading was from the prophet Baruch. I smiled when the reader said, "the prophet Baruch" because Baruch really isn't a prophet. His book is with the prophetic works, but he's really just a secretary. He followed Jeremiah and wrote down what he said. Rabbinical literature works this over, and in a midrash about him, he laments to God that he was not given the gift of prophecy when so many other followers of great prophets (Elisha, who followed Elijah, for instance) did become prophets themselves.

God answers that there is no need of a shepherd if there are no sheep. The people were in exile and did not need the words of a prophet.

So Baruch got passed over. He wrote down all those words and followed Jeremiah around and put up with all that, and never got the gift.

A few weeks back, I posted on Facebook that I was thankful that hard work had paid off. I was speaking about my math certification test, which it appears I passed, after studying calculus for 4 months and cramming for trigonometry. I passed it after a great effort to teach myself something I only vaguely remembered. It was hard work. And it paid off. I was so very grateful it did.

A blog friend, Linda, posted that she was glad I had phrased it the way I did--that I was grateful that it had paid off this time. Because oftentimes hard work does not pay off. The underdog team does not always come out on top like in the movies. You don't always get the job or the raise or the promotion. You don't always win, even if you worked hard. Even if you worked harder than anyone else.

Another friend is posting on facebook these days about her sister who is fighting cancer. I read the posts every day and think about the people I know who haven't won that fight. And they worked hard. They didn't just go, "welp, it's been a good run" and lie down and die. They fought. And they didn't win.

St. Rose Phillipine Duchesne was sent to St. Louis and on to St. Charles as a missionary. She had wanted to be a missionary to the native people of America since she was a child. This was one of her huge goals. She was finally chosen, at age 71, to go west to Kansas to work with the Potawatomi tribe. She wanted to teach...but even though she worked hard, she never could master their language.

Baruch was never a prophet.

My high school soccer team never won a single game my whole junior year.

St. Rose didn't get to teach the Potawatomi.

And many of us will die after valiant efforts to beat the cancer that kills us.

We will fail after hard work. Inevitably we will. So where does that leave us? What do we really want to win? What do we really want to achieve? Our goal is God and the work to achieve that isn't hard. God shows us the way and there's no way to fail if we only try. If we only say yes and live our every day lives in small perfect beautiful ways.

It certainly isn't as hard as calculus.

Quilting Homeward Bound

When I was 17 years old, I had a boyfriend I liked very much, named Troy. We had been dating for about 9 months when I headed off to college 900 miles away. I took what could fit in the roof carrier we put on top of the family minivan that drove me away from Texas forever. Well, sort of forever. I would be coming back, but not to stay.

I didn't know that in August, though, and one of the items I squeezed into that roof carrier was my graduation present from my grandmother, an antique sewing machine, an off-brand Singer with gold filigree and a single running stitch, forward and backward. Its motor would overheat if I used it for too long at a stretch and it always smelled a little bit like burning, but we got along just fine.

I brought fabric with me, too. A red cotton with tiny white stars, thinking of the nights when Troy and I would sit on the back of my car down at the Brazoria County Airport and stare up at them. A green floral print. A white that had a bit of a sheen to it. What I knew about fabric back then could fit in a thimble. But I got what I liked and brought it with me to college.

I remember sitting in my dorm room at my built-in desk making these blocks. They were called "Homeward Bound" and that was my hope. I was homesick often that first semester away. I spent many weekends at my aunt's house. And I made these blocks. Red, white, green, thinking of Christmas, the long break I would spend back in Texas with my family and friends.

That's not the way it worked.

I did go home, and I gave Troy this quilt. I had a nice time but it was wrong. It was different. In 4 1/2 months everything seemed to have changed. This is not a rare experience, but I was surprised that it happened to me. I went back to college discombobulated and spent the spring semester wrestling with what to do.

I broke up with him. Obviously. Again, not a rare experience, but I was surprised it had happened to me. In the autumn of my sophomore year, I started dating Jake and that was that.

I went home at Christmas that year, and there in a cardboard box in my room was this quilt. He'd given it back to me. We never spoke again. I took the quilt to St. Louis with me, and treated it badly. It faded in the sun on the porch of Jake's first apartment. Our dog liked it a lot. It slowly but surely fell apart, especially along the seams of the white sateen.

I should have thrown it away. It was an amateur effort, compared to quilts I made later. It was ratty and tacky.

But it reminded me of something that wasn't there anymore. My first really serious relationship with a boy, and this was the only remnant.

So last Advent, I spread it out on the guest bed and thought it over. I patched it in places with the same color scheme. Patches left over from quilts I'd made for neighbors and friends and children. I backed it in a red toile and put it into circulation again.

My middle daughter fell in love with it. She used it on her bed, she dragged it around the house and curled up on the couch with it. And here, a year later, it is a rag again. Shabby and torn, every single original white square with threadbare rips and holes.

"I think I'm going to throw that away," I tell Jake one evening as I stuff it back in the blanket drawer in the living room. But we both know I won't.

I will patch it up again, covering the bits of old with bits of new. Take something broken and try to make it whole again.

That might just be my grandmother coming out in me--I still have that old overheating sewing machine--but I think it's something more. I think it's something the Benedictines understand about God and I try to emulate. Fall and get back up. Keep trying.

Practice on more quilts and get better at it.

Learn from failed relationships and do better next time.

Learn more about fabric and don't use cotton sateen in quilts you're going to take on picnics.

Learn more about yourself and don't try to be what you aren't.

Patch it up and let someone love it.

 Patch yourself up and let someone love you.

We are all homeward bound. By the time we get there, may our souls be like this quilt, made new over and over as we let God work in us and through us. I'm not the person I was at 17 when I made this. I'm patched and redesigned and worked over. Not necessarily beautiful in the end, but interesting and full of stories and texture.