Thanks a lot, Dorothy "Ruined My" Day!

A friend posted a Dorothy Day quote a few weeks ago that snagged my attention and troubled me (in a good way): “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” If you have even the vaguest interest in the Infinite Creator or a passing inclination to get to know Him better, Dorothy’s assertion is at least annoying. There are plenty of people in the world I don’t love very much (no really – plenty), and if Dorothy is right, they are totally ruining my run for sainthood.

Feeling vividly connected to God and ardently in love and drawn nearer to him is pretty easy in the comfort of my pew, or in the still and expectant silence of a winter morning. Heck, even in the middle of a festive gathering of friends I get notions of the infinite and loving (more or less, depending on just what breed of festiveness we’re talking about). But when that one guy who gets on my nerves comes around? Whatever. You’re killing my pious buzz, dude. And that sneaky, catty girl who makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up is definitely exempt from my Thomas-Merton-at-the-intersection-of-the-universe moment.

To add a splash of irony to this hardy stew of hypocrisy, there are others who have been true sources of sadness and sorrow for me, people toward whom frustration and bitterness would be understandable (though still unjustifiable). Thanks to years of literature, movies, and televised professional help, though, I am far more inclined to make the effort (effort, mind you, does not equal success) to extend them reconciliation and mercy from my righteous judgment than I am that obnoxious woman who’s always – never mind.

I believe in respecting people for all that they are. That means both recognizing their shortcomings (contrary to popular belief, we do in fact all have them) and acknowledging their gifts. And yet, faced with a person who irritates me about as much as a pebble in my shoe, I almost invariably linger over the first part, taking my sweet time about getting to the second. In some cases, I have brought procrastination of affirmation to levels most bored teenagers could never hope to attain. And what business have I, who claim to love God and be seeking His will, withholding from any soul the kindness and love that have been poured on me with such gratuitous generosity?

God makes Himself glaringly visible in my life in innumerable ways. One is that, during Mass, even when my mind wanders as far from the Sacrament as Dorothy (not Day) from Kansas, there will come a sharp, sticking thought. Of, say, one such irritating person, perhaps, and then I cannot look at the cross and consider the Body of Christ, the mercy flowing from Christ’s wounds, without knowing that what was done for me was done for all. In the comfort of my pew, I’m suddenly confronted with both my own failings and how loved my personal irritators are.

Of course, there’s no arguing with God when He points that out, and I’m left with just one, unsavory course of action: love these people.

Ugh. Crap.

With deference to Dorothy Day, I hope that the paradoxical reality may be that my love for God and my desire to love Him more are what enable me to love anybody at all; that the two may build each other. I trust it is so. And… fine. I will make every effort to love these brothers and sisters. If I have to.

We Will Run the Race: On the Immensity and Necessity of Education and the Faithfulness of Christ

We're doing a half-day retreat with a few schools' worth of teachers next week.  I wrote this to process my own thoughts on the reading we chose for the theme as I started working on the program.

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingly power: proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching.

For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths. But you, be self-possessed in all circumstances; put up with hardship; perform the work of an evangelist; fulfill your ministry.

For I am already being poured out like a libation, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith. From now on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearance.

2 Timothy 4: 1-8 

Teachers are responsible for the formation of minds and spirits; for the futures of entire generations of children.  They don’t get periods of time where they can lapse. The game doesn't end when the kids leave their classrooms in June, they go on to the next teacher, and the sixth grade teacher needs to be able to count on the fifth grade teacher, who needs to count on the fourth, and so on.  It's a paradoxical profession: the work itself is done solo, but each teacher feels deeply the repercussions of their colleagues’ work, for good or ill. The short and long view must exist simultaneously.

When the kids walk into a classroom, their new teacher might be able to ride the momentum from their previous teachers, or might have miles and miles of ground to make up. In either case, the job is the same: get them ready for the next step.

The objective is to get the students where they need to be. Full stop. As the saying goes, it’s that simple and it’s that hard. It’s hard because a legion of outside -- family, neighborhoods, economic status, friends, previous teachers, motivation, learning difficulties, resources, time, and on and on – cohere and expand each other to make the task seems practically impossible. It’s simple because not one of those things ultimately changes the objective. Both as a profession and a vocation, teaching obligates its practitioners to strive towards the goal, no matter what. All this because nothing, outside of the family, is more important.

So it’s critical – absolutely, utterly critical – that teachers stick to their guns and teach, no matter what; that they run the race and preserve; that they keep the faith in their students’ abilities and in God’s unwavering presence in their ministry; that they perform the work of the evangelist by permitting the Holy Spirit to work in and through them.

In every moment of this immense task, there is unlimited possibility.  If the bottom line is that teachers have to teach, no matter what, and if it is so critical, then there can be no doubt that God is intimately and thoroughly involved in the ministry of education. There can be no doubt that He will give those who take up this vocation what they need, so long as we are willing to really take it up. Whatever we hold back diminishes the results, but the returns are exponentially greater than what we give up if we pour ourselves out -- if we run the race.

Sharp Relief

(Written Friday afternoon.)

The 8th graders are taking their finals in my classroom in the mornings, so I've been teaching in a different room most of the time this week.  Yesterday was my last time teaching in the classroom I've inhabited for the last two years, and at the beginning of class I mentioned this to the 7th graders.

Mistake.   I thought I was sentimental.  Apparently I've got nothing on these kids, especially the girls.

First, during prayer, they produced a lengthy and moving string of prayers in thanks for me and my fellow ACEr at my school, and for our well-being as we move on.

Then they started sneaking up to the board while my back was turned working with other students and writing all kinds of sweetness.  All the while they were telling me how much they're going to miss me and asking if I might come back for their graduation next year.

Then Daniela walks up to me and very frankly, sweetly, sincerely, says, "Ma'am, thank you."

I kept it together just long enough to say, "You're welcome, Daniela," and send her back to work.  Then I went and sat behind my desk and put on my best poker face.

Then Judith looks up and catches the suddenly watery nature of my eyes and says, in Spanish, "Look, she's about to cry!"

They all went, "Awwww!" and got up and surrounded me and hugged me.  And then I lost it.

Then I told them they were jerks, and one of them goes, "But we're your jerks!"

They've been teasing me about it since.  When I got  out of my car with my sunglasses on this morning, Ivette smirked and said, "You know why she's wearing those glasses..."

Today, I taught my last class for the foreseeable future.  I'm sitting in an empty classroom, for once not relishing the peace but wishing for a few more minutes of pandemonium.  I'm pretty positive I'll find my way back to a classroom sometime, but I have no idea how long from now that will be.  This is strange, because if you had asked me even ten months ago if I thought I might not be in a classroom next year, I would have said no way.  And yet, here I go, off to sit at a desk, not working with kids.  It's putting me in a weird state of mind -- I'm not having second thoughts, and yet I am wondering what the hell I'm thinking leaving the classroom.  My heart aches a little.

Teaching is such a weird occupation, at least for me.  It takes everything I've got, provides minimal or invisible returns, and I love it.  Love it.  It consumes most of my energy, time, and thought, and well beyond my oft-stated belief that education is a human right.  It's the act of teaching, the process of writing plans, being in the classroom, dealing with kids, nudging, prodding, pushing, questioning, challenging them, getting to know them, laughing with them, reigning in my impulsive reactions ("What in the hell are you thinking?!"), pulling my hair out, wondering what I'm doing wrong, trying to do it better, catching glimmers of sanity, the mild shock when a kid suddenly looks and acts a little bit older, a little more mature, and the very normal, unassuming, undramatic* little blip of satisfaction, encouragement, and hope when a kid does well.  Every shade on the human spectrum of emotion, every week.

I'm not having second thoughts about the new job, and I am still just as excited about it as I was in March when I got the offer.  I've no doubt it's where I'm supposed to go.  There are (at least) two sides to everything, though, and the flip side of this coin is very much in focus right now.  This blog is named Theophany because of my constant wonder at the ways God reveals himself in the world, and I have encountered him in the most mundane and profound ways in this profession.  For the last three and a half years, even as I've fought the impulse to beat my head on a desk, I've loved it and felt right doing it.

I have one more final to give and some miscellaneous old work to grade.  I need to tear down and pack up my classroom.  And that's it.  Two weeks from now, I'll be taking up permanent residence in an office at Notre Dame, not a classroom anywhere.  It is the definition of bittersweet.

*This, incidentally, is why I sort of hate most Inspiring Teacher Movies

What I am About

"For me," Canada said, "the big question in America is: Are we going to try to make this country a true meritocracy?  Or will we forever have a class of people in America who essentially won't be able to compete, because the game is fixed against them? [...] There's no way that is good conscience we can allow poverty to remain the dividing line between success and failure in this country, where if you're born poor in a community like this one [Harlem], you stay poor.  We have to even that out.  We ought to give these kids a chance."

-Geoffrey Canada, as quoted in Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes. Emphasis mine.

Confession: I have a little bit of what might be called survivor's guilt, or something akin to it.  Statistically, kids like me -- Latinos, children of immigrants, and immigrants themselves -- have a higher drop-out rate than any other group (17%, while white youth are at about 6%, and Latinos make up 40% of all drop-outs).  Those who do finish high school are still less likely to attend college, and those who do are less likely again to finish in four years, if they finish at all.  Meanwhile, here I sit four days from having my Master's Degree conferred and a month away from working for a university (and not in the dining hall).  I've spent a lot of time pondering the fortunate happenstance of my upbringing, the features of my childhood that planted me squarely on the road to higher education.

As far as I can tell, it was pure, unthinking luck on my part.  I happened to have the father I have, to live the places I lived, to have certain opportunities plop themselves in front of me.  I spent most of my childhood, nomadic though it was, in middle-class white neighborhoods, and I got all the perks that come with that.  I am where I am now largely, maybe primarily, because I got lucky as a kid.  Other kids not so different from me are struggling because they lived in a different neighborhood and got a different education.

Second confession, related to the first: that hits me as incredibly unfair, and it sticks in my craw.

There is much debate on why the poor are poor.  I'm leaving that debate aside for now, because it is entirely irrelevant to my point: no one in their right mind or with a mustard seed of compassion is going to blame a third grader if she can't read.  No one can possibly blame the five year old from a working class family because he starts kindergarten already at a disadvantage compared to his middle class peers. You might be able to place responsibility for an adult's situation in life on the adult because, of course, choices have consequences and people do make some truly terrible choices.

The thing is, there are a lot of kids out there suffering the consequences of someone else's choices.  A lot of these kids aren't squandering their opportunities, they don't have opportunities.  That's not okay.

This reality distracts me during faculty meetings and catches my wandering thoughts when I drive down the road.  I high-jack conversations at parties to talk about it.  It's why I'm moving up to Notre Dame and passing on any of several possibilities to stay in Texas near my family (with whom, as you must know if you've read this at all, I am totally obsessed).  Because the piece of dirt a child lives on should not determine what is and is not available to her. As a human being, and especially as a Catholic, there is no way I can sit comfortably in my good fortune when so many children in my own country are effectively being denied a decent education.

Because every kid should at least have a chance.

Spy Wednesday

8th grade got a little off track today.  One of the boys asked what Jesus "did" that saved us, making the distinction between teaching and salvation.  It being a Catholic school, and this being Holy Week, and that being an important question, I tried to give him an answer, which spawned more questions, and so it went.  One boy eventually asked, "Why did Judas betray Jesus?"

Good question, kid (They're full of those).

I've wondered this off and on over the years (the "on" usually being right about this time during Holy Week), and I've never been able to come up with an answer. I can think of possibilities.  None stand out as particularly motivating, at least not to me, who spends much more time wishing the be close to Jesus, but of course I'm looking at it from the comfort of certainty and 2,000 years temporal distance.

And yet, I wonder about that certainty bit.  So many Christians try to make Jesus in their own image -- style him into something that fits their existing view of the world and how things are and how things ought to be.  I'd wager a majority of believing Christians are pretty certain they have the right conception of who and what Jesus is, but of course with all those different variations, someone is going to be wrong.

So, I wonder if Judas wasn't just another of us trying to make his messiah what he was supposed to be, doggonit, and fed up that he wasn't or frustrated with events that weren't going the way he'd have liked, and decided he was going to do something, anything.  And like all of us when we sin, he thought he was doing a good thing. He thought he knew better than Jesus, Christ or no Christ.

I'm not making light of the betrayal, and neither do I attempt to outline mitigating factors of the willful catalyst in the crucifixion of the Son of God.  It's simpler than that -- it's an observation of how alike so much sin is, and the suggestion that perhaps we are not so different from Judas ourselves.

Tomorrow evening, we gather 'round the table and break bread with our Lord, and like every other Mass, there will be John's and Peter's -- and Judas's.

Yes, I'm Alive, Yes, I Still Love Teaching, and Yes, I'm Still Very Opinionated.

My poor mother.  All she wants from me is a blog update, and I fail her daily.  I don't like writing if I don't have something worthwhile to say, which I usually feel like I don't.  Sometimes, I feel I don't have the time to craft something.  Well, that is until I get on Facebook, see a discussion I feel the need to get involved in, and end up writing something I'm actually pretty proud of (in a comment window in ten minutes).

I am proud to be a teacher.  Some of the people I've worked with, some I've studied with, and some of the unbelievable women in my family have shown me what it means to be a teacher.  It disinclines me to make many excuses for my profession.

A few notes: My writing was part of a conversation that spanned a day or two, so I've preserved it as such, removing names.  Also, I have edited out a few choice phrases and rephrased a couple things in my own writing for clarity.  No changes to content.  Please remember this is Facebook, where conventions of writing are applied creatively.



My friend R: YES - Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers
[Note: I have yet to actually read the article; all my comments were in direct response to others.]

R's friend D: "Many more teachers are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. Maybe they'd get more respect if the truly bad teachers were let go."
Girl, I hate this article.

R: haha, must have missed that part when i was reading it between classes this morning. but i've seen firsthand too many schools where AWFUL teachers will never be fired... something needs to change.

Me: AGREE!! If teaching is supposed to be a profession, then the bad professionals don't get to keep their jobs.

D: Here's your problem -- How do you determine a "bad" teacher? Test scores? Because that's currently the way the public school system judges teacher performance, and it's piss poor. Teachers shouldn't be punished for students who are bad testtakers. Furthermore, teachers shouldn't be encouraged to teach to fit a standarized test instead of teaching so that students can learn the material.

And the answer of a drastic teachers shortage in the United States shouldn't be the mass-firing of teachers.

R: no, i'm not talking about standardized tests. bad teachers - the ones i've seen and/or heard about - are the ones who show movies everyday instead of teaching (true story: some of my students have watched Borat and The House Bunny during other classes). they're the ones who are teaching middle school literature & language arts, and cannot even write a paragraph of their own that is free of grammar and spelling errors. they're the ones that have no background in math or science and yet are allowed to teach advanced courses in these areas to high school students. i know that this type of stuff can't be easily quantified, but we need to find a way to increase accountability. i wouldn't mind staying an extra 25 min everyday and eating lunch with the kids once a week.

Me: (R, I'm sorry I'm ranting on your wall.)

Two things - One, As R points out, the teachers at that school in Rhode Island *refused* to put in any extra time because it wasn't in their contract. Contract my hind foot.  It's your JOB to help these KIDS. Teaching is plagued by indifference and an obnoxious martyr mentality (although it also has so many gifted, enthusiastic, giving people), and I have no qualms or hesitation saying they need to get the hell out of the classroom.

Second, the undeniable difficulty in quantifying good teaching does not mean we can shrug and let troops of indifferent non-teachers stay in the classroom. Some teachers are objectively, obviously BAD, and they should not have a job. Yes, many of the current teacher evaluation systems leave much to be desired. Find a better way to evaluate teachers. Do it case by case. No excuses for anyone, teachers or administrators (or students, but that's a separate issue).

Some states are experimenting with new ways of using test scores to evaluate teachers. First, they're evaluating individual teachers instead of whole schools. Then, they're measuring individual student *growth*. For example, if a teacher has a kid who comes in two grade levels behind and then tests half a grade level behind after having that teacher, the teacher get rewarded for the time-and-a-half gains of the student, not punished because the student is still behind. Even if a kid is a bad test taker, she should still show gains. It's not perfect. But it's better than nothing.

My friend B: You're both right that it's not easily quantifiable. But anyone in education can tell you that it's EASY to qualitatively distinguish a good teacher from a bad teacher. Just spend an hour in the classroom and watch what happens. 

D: And qualitative evidence is inherently subjective. Your version of a bad teacher won't look like mine. And who draws the line when a teacher becomes "unacceptably bad"? How many people have to agree?

And Andrea, actually I'd argue that using test scores as a measure of a teacher's ability is actually worse than the current system, because test scores really have ****-all to do with whether the kids are actually learning or not.

And who decides that teachers are obligated to do everything they can to help kids? Last time I checked, parents need to step in at some point. Teachers' employment contracts don't obligate them to become babysitters, psychiatrists, etc. Maybe if teachers are compensated like lawyers and accountants, you can expect them to put in big law firm hours. Until then, to obligate them to do whatever they can to help a student, and branding them a "bad" teacher if they want to actually stick to their work hours, is insane. Their job is to come in prepared, teach lessons, give grades, and manage parents. They aren't nannies or afterschool care providers.

R: sure, the job is to come in prepared, teach lessons, give grades, and manage parents. (a) what about the teachers who don't even do those things? the ones who are unprepared, let the kids goof off for 50 minutes, then bolt as soon as the final bell rings (even though their contracts require them to stay another half an hour)? those are the ones i would like to label as "bad" teachers, and the ones i would like to see fired. or at least given SOME kind of consequences, because there are currently none. and (b) i think this article is pointing out (and i would agree) that the teachers who get the best results are the ones who go above and beyond this job description and actually care about their students and their learning... no way that teachers can be required to do this, of course, but it's nice to dream. 

Me: (Sorry again, R!)

B! I miss you. Well put. Sure, there are problems with subjectivity, but sometimes (...too often) it's SO OBVIOUSLY BAD, it's easy to see a particular teacher needs to go. Yeah, there's a gray area. But we KNOW what good teaching does and what it looks like (and it can look a lot of ways). We're educators -- we're supposed to know how to set objectives and create rubrics for evaluations. Why can't we do that for teachers? You set a standard, you stick to it, and the professionals will work to meet it.

D, you're saying we need to use quantifiable data to assess student learning, but tests (usually) aren't reliable indicators of student learning. I agree on both counts. The solution is to fix the way testing is conducted, used, and thought about (which ABSOLUTELY needs to happen, esp. in public schools), not ditch testing all together. How else can we assess how well our children are learning? That's an honest question; if anyone has a better idea, please speak up because testing it fraught with serious issues. It's also effectively our only option.

Perhaps the biggest problem in education today is that educators don't think of themselves as professionals -- and neither does anyone else. The way many teachers perform and the way they talk about their work, I can't blame the general population. There is one real, credible way to fix that: act like a professional. Act like what you do is more than a set of tasks and obligations to check off. Act like it matters. Teaching is not like any other occupation. Multiple studies in the last couple of years have shown that the single greatest influence on a student's learning is the teacher -- not the school, not the money spent per pupil, not the parents. Teachers don't deal with bottom lines and action items. We deal with people. Children. Not just their brains, either, the whole kid. So I don't buy that teachers aren't obligated to go the extra mile. No, we shouldn't kill ourselves -- we truly can only do so much. But we should be willing to work pretty damn hard.

Then maybe the rest of the country would take us teachers more seriously, eh?

Me (again): R, I think we were typing at the same time. Yes -- there's an ideal, and there's a minimum, and there's all the teachers who don't even try. Great is preferable, but good is still good. Outstanding may be rare, but awful is still awful.

   

Incomplete

This week has been humbling me.

In the last eight days, I have experienced four significant "life FAIL" moments, as my peers and I commonly refer to it.  To those of you still intelligent enough to describe your feelings in full English sentences rather than LOLspeak, a "FAIL" is a moment when something you're attempting, often either a simple task or grand undertaking, fails utterly.  A "life FAIL" is when such a moment relates to something actually important, perhaps with lasting effects or repurcussions.

Yes.  This past week = life fail.  And boy howdy, has it brought me down a few pegs.  Not that I was particularly high before, but I was getting comfortable in my confidence on some things and it was leading to complacency.

Complacent no more, I heave a sigh and turn eyes upwards and wonder aloud, "Really??"

But then, who have I to blame?  You may have noticed I said earlier that I experienced four life fails this past week.  That's not true.  I brought those moments upon my own head.  None were intentional choices on my part.  It was all mostly bad calculation and poor allocation of scarce resources, not wanton slacking off, but the effect it the same.

This same week, this prayer has popped up over and over.  It came into my head last Tuesday afternoon and repeated like a refrain.  It came up in a conversation with one of my roommates.  It was in an article I read a few days ago.  This past Friday, our principal used it as the opening prayer to our faculty meeting.

I've been mulling it over.  I've been mulling my own falible nature and the shortcomings that make me subject to multiple life FAILs in a short time.  My incomplete self, my incomplete efforts, my incomplete life.  The fact that all those things are going to stay incomplete.  It's depressing at first, until you read the thing.  I know I will never come close to all the things I want to -- ought to -- be, and "there is a sense of liberation in that".

The funny thing about realizing we are incomplete and subsequently surrenduring ourselves to God's will is that we actually become more complere in that action.  In surrenduring, we gain the strength and ability to keep fighting.

To keep propheting that future we will not see.

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

-- Archbishop Oscar Romero

The Gym Floor Moment

[I wrote this a couple of weeks ago in my private journal (Yes, I type my journal.  I often misspeak at first, and I like being able to revise until I'm actually saying what I mean.  In fact, I often discover what I mean in that process.), and decided it was the sort of thing I could post here -- heck, maybe even should.]


Today's nugget from my "St. Teresa of Avila for Every Day" book:

"God so places himself in the interior of that soul that when it returns to itself, it can in no way doubt that it was in God and God was in it."

I don't think I've ever talked about the moment I met God, to anyone, ever, and I'm not really going to here, either.  When the subject comes up, I tend to say things like:

• "I had one of those 'conversion experiences' people talk about."
• "God just shook me and made me listen."
• "Well, it involved adoration and lying face-down on a gym floor in Ohio."
  
• "Something happened."

I leave it at that.  If people try to get more from me, I shrug and say I can't really explain it.  This is true, in two senses.  One, I'm not sure I'm ready, even over six years later, to talk about it.  It's far too intimate a thing to chat about over coffee.

Two, I've never found the words to describe what happened that night.  It was utterly out of the realm of all my experiences up to that point, as unprecedented to me as a daisy in the arctic -- imagine suddenly seeing the brilliance of the noon sun when before that you've only ever seen fireflies. 

But I can say this, simply and to the point: in the very early morning hours of June 22nd, 2003, I knew God in a way I had not on the afternoon of the 21st.  In fact, I had not really known Him at all before that.

Imagine breathing for the first time and only then discovering there was something other than the feeling of drowning.

Even now, more than six years and a lot of valleys later, I have not forgotten one particle of the experience, a moment so powerful it wiped out all my life before that; before I knew Him, before Love overcame me and I found myself with no alternative but to bumble my way desperately forward.  It was my defining moment.

I am agonizingly aware of how far I have to go.  Certainly I am no saint and my experience pales compared to Teresa's.  The Gym Floor Moment, though, has framed all the rest of my life, the meaning of my existence, my purpose for being.  And I -- a girl with no certainty about anyone or anything on this earth at all -- have never, not once, ever, doubted it at all.

I cannot deny the sun's existence even as I feel it pouring life into me.

A Teacher's Quasi-Rant on Poetry and a Glance Towards God

"Poetry without rhyme is like tennis without a net."

- Robert Frost

I have a confession to make, before God and all.  I, an English teacher and one deeply enamoured of her subject matter, hated poetry for much of my life and still feel a great deal of contempt for large swaths of the stuff.  It is often silly, banal, syrupy stuff by which mediocre writers find justification to puff themselves up and act superior, because they are poets, darnnit, and if you don't like it, you just don't get it.

Bollocks and hogwash, say I.  Be a man, fess up: you just don't know how to clearly and articulately make a point, so you are obscure and call it art.

(This, incidentally, is nearly identical to my argument against and condemnation of much modern art.)

In college, I finally found a poet I liked -- loved, even.  Then came the "click" that Shakespeare was in fact all poet and only partly playwright.  I had to give the genre another shot.  What I discovered was that I loved the play of words and how great poets, rather than string together random thoughts in whatever self-satisfied format they darn well please, work within the constraints of a class of poem and make it sound good.

I showed my 8th graders Willy's Sonnet #18 yesterday.  When I told them they'd be reading and understanding Shakespeare by the end of the period, I theatrically asked them, "Do you believe this?!"

In one resounding, monotone voice of utter disinterest, they replied, "No."

But understand it they did, and some of the girls were just beaming and squeeing at the unadulterated romance of it.  One boy asked, "Why doesn't he just tell her she's hot?", and before I even opened my mouth to respond, a girl called out, "He could have, but he has to work to make it all fit like that and sound so good, so she's obviously going to like it better."

Yes, exactly.  Forcing thoughts and words into specific parameters forces us to think, to find the best possible way to say aloud what lies in our hearts.  The results are downright magical sometimes, enough so that this formerly adamant opponent of the genre now gives some of it a respectful nod -- and even an occasional read.

It goes back to my fascination -- yes, perhaps even obsession -- with language and how it functions.  I like prose because it is utterly flexible, allowing everything from one word statements to sentences like the one I just read in One Hundred Years of Solitude that literally went on for two pages without an endmark, but poetry obliges deeper consideration.  And, like almost everything, it echoes how God gives us both limitless freedom and unmovable boundaries.

You had to know I would bring this back to the whole "theophany" thing, didn't you?

As a reader, I'm still not crazy about poetry, but as a teacher, I'm trying to give my students some appreciation of form's potential to reveal Truth, because that same potential lies in all writing. 

Apprently, it starts with getting my girls to go all mushy over a summer's day and my boys to envy Willy's abilitty to make the girls go all mushy. 

You take what you can get.

Nine Eleven

There isn't much for me to say about today.  Eight years after I wandered dazed through the halls of my high school wondering why no one else looked the way I felt, I think I have sort of integrated the event into my life.  I find in my heart a hollow spot, like a mausoleum or a memorial, where the sorrow is as deep as ever, but had to be scarred over to be able to get on with life.  My memories of those days will never fade, I think.  I remember, and I pray, and I always, always will.

What I am more concerned with how to handle today with my students.  They were 5 and 6 when it happened; it is an impression for them, a vivid dream they're not sure really happened.  And, more bizarre to me, as the years go on my students will of course have been even younger.  I a few years, they won't have even been alive.

Which, to me, underscores the importance of remembering it myself.

Lions in the Meadows*

Every summer of my life (25 summers now), I've visited my family in California, and my siblings have joined in the pilgrimage as they have gotten old enough to do so.

The journey is always dictated by habit. We do something once, we do it every summer there after; we go to the same places following the same itinerary, eat at the same places, watch the same movies. Summer vacation in California is kind of like watching the same movie over and over, and that actually is what makes it so glorious.

Each summer of the last ten or so, a side trip to Las Vegas is included, much to the glee of my littlest siblings (alright, and me -- I'm a sucker for tacky gift shops, giant Coca Cola bottles, and glittering lights).

This year, though, we inadvertently added a stop to the cycle. This happens; the movie evolves now and again. We parked on the wrong side of the MGM Grand, and so had to walk through it to get to the giant Coke bottle. Along our bee-line to green-bottle bliss, we passed MGM Grand's lion habitat, a spot I hadn't known existed. It was open, bright, and lush; lots of things for the lions to climb, waterfalls crashing dramatically-yet-gently into a little pool, quite idyllic. Two lions, a male and a female, lounged just on the other side of the inch-thick, slightly green glass, drowsy and showered in sun from the massive skylight.

All around them, pressed to every inch of the perimeter, were tourists from God knows where -- everywhere, probably -- thee people deep holding up children and cameras, standing on tip toe to get a view of the lions. The sleepy felines, meanwhile, remained totally aloof.

The female lion perched at the top of one of the water falls, gazing about occasionally but mostly vegetating with her eyes closed; beautiful. The male lion was sprawled out on top of the frosted glass that covered a walkway through the middle of the habitat, presumably to another section. Dozens of people had crammed themselves into this space, a space meant for people to pass through not linger in, to see him and take vague silhouetted pictures.

I count myself in this number, of course.


And I was fascinated. Not so much by the lion, actually, though being a mere two inches and a flaw in glass-making craftsmanship away from those paws and jaws was pretty awe-inspiring. No, I was really interested in the people who came to Las Vegas, the middle of the dessert, presumably for some gaming, some food, some shows, and perhaps some less family friendly activity, and were now captured, in rapt attention, by this massive, powerful creature (who had absolutely no use for them, by the way).

I often lament how disconnected we've become from good ol' Mother Earth. Greening industry and saving the planet are all the rage, but I don't know how many of us spend much time actually appreciating the planet we live on (sorry, Planet Earth doesn't count) or the other creatures who inhabit it. We -- humans, that is -- are God's crowning jewel, but can you imagine Adam's reaction when God showed him the first lion?

God: Here, check this guy out! You might want to give him an especially good name, I don't think he'll be too happy with you otherwise.
Adam: (squeak)

It was both amusing and heartening to see all those people so enthralled by a pair of lions. I've started to think (realize might be the better word) that God meant for us to feel connected to every other living thing on the planet, not in an Earth mother crazy kind of way, but in an awareness that we come from the same place and those other things were made for our good. It's evident, especially when we meet those creations in such unexpected places -- like lions in a meadow.


*"Las Vegas" is Spanish for "the meadows".

Brilliance (Mine) and Guardian Angels (God's)

I know I posted some of these pictures of my black eye before, and I know y'all probably don't want to see more. But, I can't stop thinking about how it happened.

It's not a big deal at all. I'm 100% fine and so is my eye, even if my pride still stings a little. That's exactly the thing, though: it's not a big deal, though it very easily could have been a huge deal.

(Morning after, quite swollen)

What happened was this: We have a weight lifting thingy in our house. I was taking the weights off the bench press bar, thinking that the bar itself was heavy enough to stay down when the disc weights were off one end. All three of my male housemates, who have weight lifted for real for years, say they've done exactly the same thing (which makes me feel better). They also said that works most of the time, "unless you're dealing with a cheap home set".

Which, evidently, is what we have.

The instant I slid the last weight off the right end of bar, the weighted left end plummeted to the floor, swinging the right end of this 50 pound solid steel bar up through the air. The left end slammed into the floor and the right side swung around and fell into the window. I stood stunned, thinking, "Wow, that could have really hurt me."

Two of my girl roommates were standing behind me. "Oh my God! Andie, did it hit you?"

"No." ...I don't think so, anyway.

"Did it break the window?"

I checked, then turned to them, laughing. "Nope! What a close--"

"You're bleeding!"

"What? No I--" I touched my forehead. Sure enough, they were right. They whisked me off to the kitchen, cleaned me up, and helped me find preemptive pain killers and an ice pack. We marveled that it didn't hurt at all -- I still barely felt it -- and how much worse the whole situation could have been. It was starting to sting, but I felt totally lucid and my eyeball istelf was (and remains) fine. I went to bed.

All the next day, as I deflected my students' questions about my shiner, my mind kept wandering back to what a nearly miraculous thing had happened, or perhaps not happened. I truly don't mean to make a big deal out of the whole thing or read too much into it, but had I been leaning even half an inch further forward -- which I had been a second earlier -- well, suffice it to say I don't think I would have gotten off with just a sweet shiner.

(Swelling down, colors becoming flashier.)

As I mulled all this over, I remembered the time my baby sister, at about two years old, escaped out the sliding door and was missing for about five minutes, until our mom found her in the middle of an intersection with cars coming at her from three or four sides.

(Tiny Baby Melissa, wearing everything in her dresser.)

And I remembered the time my best friend and I in my Grand Am were almost rammed by an SUV. And all the other times, as a kid, when I should have been seriously injured. And all the close-call stories my dad told me. And plenty of other stories in which, had one thing been a millimeter or a half second off, the ending would have been decidedly less happy.

I'm an odd sort of Catholic, probably because I wasn't really raised Catholic per say, and where some people have devotions rooted in childhood, I barely have an awareness. It's taken me years and conscious effort to get to know the Blessed Mother and make her a part of my life. Guardian angels, frankly, sat for a long time in the same place in my brain as fairies.

Like my faith in God itself, though, I am beginning to find the existence and presence of angels an undeniable reality.

See, I don't believe in luck or coincidences. That I and so many I know have skirted disaster so many times does not mesh with pure chance. Like so many other things, my rational brain forces me to look elsewhere for an explanation. It makes perfect sense that the same loving God who made us and redeemed us would keep us safe from our own brilliance, and would do so through whatever means He knows will serve us best.

I could easily have broken something not easily fixed, either on me or the window, or gashed myself wide open. I should have, in fact. If you look closely at those pictures, you can see several neat and parallel scrapes along my eyebrow from the threads of the bar brushing right by my eye. Could we explain this away with simple chance? Sure, this one event, but that leaves... well, pretty much the rest of my life to account for.

My nuns in the convent last year often prayed to their guardian angels, and often had the kids do so as well. A few weeks ago, in a situation where I was concerned about my safety, without thinking I called on my guardian angel and instantly felt assured and secure. My point (finally) is that I'm finally paying some attention to my angel and hoping to get better acquainted.

That, and giving him some public recognition for keeping my graceful tail out of trouble and my eyeballs intact for almost twenty-four years.

The 500th Post, or "On the Gifts of (the) Spirit"

(I wrote this Thursday, January 15th, but am only just posting it now.)

It's 7:30 a.m. I just got to school, and I have already been to Mexico (yes, the country) and Wal-Mart today.

When I got to school, I took a moment and glanced at my blog feeds, discovering this really wonderful video Paul posted.

And, because I am not quite mentally... normal, to me these things fit together.

Fret not, I'm going to attempt to explain. First, I need to back up.

I finally ordered a digital SLR last week. The days following saw me obsessively watching UPS's tracking site. The UPS man didn't show until Wednesday night about 6:30, when we were at dinner. When the doorbell rang, I quite literally leapt up, threw my chair back and ran to the door faster than I've run in at least six months. I came back with my package and the jitters, and one of my housemates said, "I would never have expected that from you."

"Well," I said, "I've wanted this for years." I looked down at the beautiful brown box and shrugged. "I love taking pictures."

Despite my overwhelming glee, I went to bed early. Two of my housemates are going on a ten-day mission to Mexico in April as chaperons for their students. This weekend was a pre-mission retreat, and they loaded the buses in Mexico at 6 a.m., so I volunteered to take them over the border. In the midst of my anxiety over getting my Volvo back into the United States, I could not help but smile and be stirred: it was an hours before daylight, but there was so much life, energy, and enthusiasm on and around those buses.

This brings us to the part where I’m thinking about Beethoven (watch the video) and sitting back in my teacher chair, suddenly struck by the power of passion.

I strung these events together in my head, and 1 Corinthians 12 leapt to mind: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit”. Generally, that’s applied to purely spiritual gifts. In that moment, though, I pondered that those gifts extend far beyond the invisible, mystical spirit. No, perhaps I should rephrase that -- the invisible, mystical spirit extends way beyond what we think it does.

You look at Beethoven and what he did, and you see extraordinary brilliance driven by other-worldly passion. You look at my housemates the other adults on that trip, and my coworkers, and you see depths of dedication fed by unearthly patience. You look at a dork like me and you see school-girl giddiness inspired by an unending wonder of everything around her.

We’re not a body with a spirit, or a spirit with a body; we’re both at the same time. That’s why we take certain physical postures to pray, and why a song that stirs your soul gives you goose bumps. It seems to me that saying “the physical world” and “the spiritual world” isn’t really accurate. They’re aspects of the same world, like the up-and-down and side-to-side threads of a loom. You’re not living a full life without something that drives you. I know it’s a cliché, but clichés exist because they are often true.

God gives us gifts in the form of abilities and talents, of course. What good would those gifts be, though, without one other: simply giving a damn about something. Anything. Maybe it’s a Mother Theresa like drive to serve, or maybe it’s a love of marine life. Maybe it’s your friends or your children. Hopefully, it’s a couple things. Isn’t having the drive more important than having the talent? What has ever been accomplished without passion?

Beethoven had passion. Anyone who teaches, or works with kids at all, better have passion for it, even if it’s often shrouded under exhaustion and frustration, or get out of it. Parents are passionate about their children. Heck, even the relatively meaningless hobbies we have – taking pictures, knitting, doodling on napkins -- serve the purpose of giving us meaning. All of it puts a ribbon of significance into everything we do.

Which is kind of the point of this little nook of cyberspace. There’s a lot of theophany going on, both as vast, encompassing, and stunning, and as frequently unnoticed as the sky. I suppose I’m a cloud watcher. Sometimes things take forms and shapes that force me to take a moment and sit back in my chair, and just take it in.

Oddly enough, this time coincided with my 500^th post here. Funny, eh?

Wanderlust

Wanderlust, I am slowly realizing, is going to rule my life. Wanderlust, and a love of photography, too.


I think most of you, Dear Readers, know my dad was in the Air Force for my whole childhood (coincidentally, until the day I got to Notre Dame this past summer). We moved around a fair bit. College was the longest I'd ever been at one school. And as a kid, I pretty well hated it. I wanted nothing more than to just stay in one place, to be at a school for more than a year -- to feel normal. To have roots. Such was not my fate however, and I bemoaned that loud and clear (my parents will tell you). As a kid, my plan was to nail myself to the ground and stay somewhere as soon as I could.


In high school (all three of them), I got into photography. I was -- and am -- enchanted by the play of light in all things and deeply touched by photography's power to impact individuals, communicate ideas and information, and make things happen. For a while, I was pretty bent on doing it as a career. The idea of traveling all over for a job and doing something important at the same time was hugely appealing. Before the end of my freshman year of college, however, I realized that I lacked two things necessary to do that for a living: the raw talent, and the drive that would make me willing to put my job before everything else, including family. You can only learn and practice so much, and you can only give up so much in favor of something else.


Funny enough, at the same time and I think in part because of my fascination with photojournalism, I began to realize that despite nearly two decades spent digging my claws into every place we lived and throwing a fit every time we moved, as a quasi grown up I had no desire at all to settle anywhere, doing anything.Instead, I felt compelled to reach both as far and as deep as I could. Every time I picked up an issue of National Geographic, I felt antsy. Those images are compelling, and they are compelling because they are of real places and things. Looking at them, there was a palpable sense of wanting to go... elsewhere. Everywhere.


This is how I ended up moving to Texas and living with nuns. My first choice was something more conventionally missionary -- orphanages in Africa and the like -- but I felt staying close to my teeny little siblings was more important. Thank God, too, because that year was far and away the best collective experience of my life thus far, and it in turn led me to ACE, which I am also loving. An it's how I ended up with roughly 9,000 pictures in my "My Pictures" folder in the year and a half since I got a digital camera.

However.


I still want to go to all these places and see these things myself. I really, really, want to. And I'm looking at ways to do it.

Of course, I have almost two years left before I'm done with my current wacky life adventure (living, in an only half joking sense, in Mexico), and who knows what will come down the pike for me between now and then. The Spirit has had a clear hand in all the shenanigans I've gotten into thus far. I trust he's just cackling with delight at what's to come -- and where's to go.

I'm also hell bent on buying this, ASAP.

(All photographs from the National Geographic Society's Photo of the Day, a daily staple in my life.)

My Sister (w/ a little update)

My sister and I are pretty tight.


It's funny, in the parental genetic roulette, we ended up very physically distinct from each other. I was never a particularly teeny child, but she has been utterly minute from day one; my dark curly hay stack of hair could hardly be more different than her well-behaved straight locks; likewise her multicolored eyes to my dark solid irises; she has her mom's nose, I have our dad's. I don't think people look at us and say, "Ah! You are sisters!"

Sadly, she does seem to have my teeth (which I eventually grew into, with the help of orthodontia, so there's hope for her yet).

I do believe that people spend time with us and see there is clearly a common root between us. I mean, really, how could two such bizarre characters exist otherwise, if they were not sprung from the same place? At her age, I was equally obsessed with the written word, as great of a dork, comparably creative, and very nearly as weird. She's gaining on me in her introspective tendencies. Every time I go home, our mom makes some comment about how she's more and more like a mini-Andie every day.

Fish Face was born about eight weeks premature. The night before she was born, I dreamed our dad came into my room, woke me up, and told me not to go to school in the morning. He was taking Mom to the hospital and would call me to check in regularly (I was nearly thirteen and quite used to being home alone with my younger brother for a while). In the morning, I told my mom about it, and she laughed and said something along the lines of, "Well, let's hope that doesn't happen. It's too soon."

The next night, I had the exact same dream, like a movie being replayed. I awoke in the morning long after I should have left for school and panicked until I found Alex blissfully chowing down on cereal and watching cartoons. And I realized the second time, the dream had not been a dream at all.

I dreamed my sister's birth a day before it happened, and two months earlier than it should have. Make of that what you will.


There is something special about my sister. And I know everyone says that about children they love, but there is truly something very particular about her. If I believed in reincarnation, I would say she is the oldest soul I've ever met, and yet also the most hopeful and searching one. She has always been so, from her earliest days spent in an incubator. My ties to her are not stronger or deeper than those to my brothers; they are thicker. They transmit more.

Mark Shea has posted a few items lately about odd occurrences that can only be explained by the Holy Spirit, which reminded me of that dream, which got me pondering Melissa herself. I am always in awe of the incredible gifts I've been given in my life when I stop to think on them, and even more so the ones that just keep growing and giving more and more. My siblings all fall under that category. Such wondrous things are not made by our kind, but by the One who made us.

Little update: Mr. Shea just posted an e-mail I sent him about my dream in response to his posts.

An Odd Nostalgia

Back to those pictures Dad sent me.

A long time ago, I noticed an odd phenomenon with my littlest brother and sister. However much I adore them in their present form -- and I do, my friends, roommates, students, and vague acquaintances get rather sick of hearing my endless stories of how stinkin' funny and brilliant they are -- there are times when I look at them in their ten and eight year old bodies and think, "I miss baby you".


I think parents can relate to this, and other way-bigger siblings. I am by no means as important in Melissa and Charlie's lives as our parents are, but because of our significant age gap (about thirteen and fifteen years, respectively), I have always been more of a caretaker than the typical older sister (like I was for Alex, who is only four year behind me). Along with that, I clearly and distinctly remember loving the ever-living daylights out of them from the moment I saw them, especially when they smiled at me like that or drove me up the wall by repeatedly sitting on the dishwasher when I was trying to load it and laughing at me when I yelled at them.



They were other, different individuals then. Both of them have always been busting with their own personalities, and they still blow me over daily, but when they were babies there was just something... different. Almost magical, if you'll excuse the sap. Maybe they were just unbearably cute.


And now they're big, and smart-mouthed, and clever as all get out, and I am more glad every single day I have them. But there are moments, not at all uncommon, when I wish I could rewind them and have them be the teeny little pudge balls they once were, mischief and glee and pure life flying like sparks from a sparkler from their eyes and laughs.

From Serpants to Stallions

[I wrote this about two years ago when I was going through the roughest phase of my life thus far -- quite the spiritual, mental, and emotional battle for a while. This is one of the handful of things I wrote during that time that hold some truth, rather than pure emotional release.]

And you said i know that this will hurt,
But if i don't break your heart things will just get worse

This God thing gets more and more complicated all the time, sometimes everyday. Where once it seemed sufficient to feel joy in His presence and to be content with my life, now the notion begins to creep into my mind that the Lord of Abraham is not all about brownies and hugs. I "knew" that, we all "know" that, but it seems most of us have this concept that when hard times come, God's role is to shoo them away, to make them not so, to blink them out of existence because He is the God of all Goodness and Love. His job is to carry us through to the good times again.

A few months ago I would have said "Well... yeah, of course", but now I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a flaw in the attitude, the thinking that that's based on. I don't doubt for a moment that God's ultimate plan for us is to be "happy" (although that's an incredibly insufficient word for the kind of freedom and joy we're promised), to be with Him in Heaven and just celestial choir our brains out. While on Earth, however, it seems everyone wants "happy" now. Which is fine, and most of us get it. The general attitude towards suffering seems to be "God will lead me through this, and after it I will be better for Him". The object is to get it over with and go on being "happy", and I'd say for 98% of our lives, that's more or less accurate.

Maybe, though, sometimes God is not in the process, He's not there getting you "over it". Perhaps once in a long while, He isn't the least bit interested in making us feel better. None of that "footprints in the sand" sentimentality; instead, God is in the suffering itself. It may be that in the time we think we most need rescue, when we feel our darkest hour yet is bearing down on us and we are most willing to be plucked from harm, that He instead stands by and says, "No. I'm not getting you out of this one. You're going to sit right there and it's going to hurt like hell, because this is what you need right now."

It's like spiritual chemo: the chemo itself yields the results, not the process of surviving it. It's excruciating and the side effects make you wonder if it's worth it at all, but somewhere in you, a cancer is slowly dying. And God never abandons us, even when we're so hurt that in prayer, we can only ponder our anger. He throws at us the raging storm or the blazing fire and makes no efforts to defend us from the pain -- but He's there. "You will fall apart," He promises, "but I will not let you fall away, and in this sorrow, you will be better."

My Letter to the Sisters

[On the occasion of my departure at the end of my term of service, read to them last night after supper.]

“These desires are supernatural. They arise in a soul on fire with love. Such souls want the Lord to see that they aren’t serving him for pay. They try never to motivate themselves to serve God with the thought that they will be compensated with glory for anything they do. Their only desire is to satisfy their thirsty love. It is love’s nature to express itself through service in a thousand ways.”

-St Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

My Dear Sisters,

These last few weeks, as they ripped right past me, I realized that I feel no (alright, almost no) apprehension about graduate school, not even at an institution like Notre Dame – actually, I enjoy bragging about that a wee bit. Rather than having nerves about opening the next chapter, I am quite preoccupied by the pangs of closing this one.

Ever since I arrived here in August, my abilities as a word smith, meager as they were to begin with, have failed me. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve tried to put into words all the remarkable things I have witnessed and lived here in the St. John Bosco community, indeed within the Salesian community, but nothing I produce begins to do it justice. The quiet, miraculous wonders I’ve seen in the last nine and a half months are far too subtle and too extraordinary for my linguistic bumbling – I might as well be trying to recreate the Rocky Mountains with mashed potatoes.

There is something sublime about the life you sisters lead. The world is sliding further and further into a mode of thinking where selfishness if the norm. The idea that life not only can be lived for the good of others, but should be lived so, is increasingly foreign. The suggestion that there is right and wrong, even good and evil, is scoffed at. God is not ignored, he is exiled from our history. In the midst of this, you, my dear sisters, quietly love. In place of self-interest, you have self-sacrifice. Instead of material gain, you seek souls. Rather than hold grudges, you give pardon. In short, you love, truly.

I think I figured out why I’ve been having so much trouble putting words to the things I’ve seen and the lessons you’ve all taught me. It’s because what I’m seeing is no human feat. What I am seeing is Jesus, Himself, living, walking, and acting on this Earth. You are, in some sense, the Word made flesh. By your life, your vows, and your sacrifice, you make the Incarnation present and felt over and over for incalculable numbers of people. Words cannot begin to capture something so near to God’s heart.

So, finally, I get to the point of this letter. Before I fling my things into boxes and bags and move forward from this chapter of my story, I must thank you for letting me take part in your story. It’s a cliché for a volunteer to say she got much more from her experience than she gave, but it’s also a truth. I am so grateful to you all for the life you’ve chosen, and for letting punks like me join you in your work. Words, once again, fail me as I try to explain all I’ve learned and gained in my time among you. I am thoroughly and deeply changed, and equally as thankful for your support and friendship. Although I’ll be leaving you soon, it will be a long time before you leave me.

Thank you.
Love and God’s peace,
Andie

I Have Kelp in My Face

My cousins and I go to the same beach in Newport every summer and stake out the same spot about one hundred feet from the pier.  We always seem to go as the tide is rising, which means the waves get bigger and meaner as the minutes pass.

 

When we're feeling adventurous, we'll swim out a little and bob in the waves, or body surf, or sometimes be pummeled mercilessly by a particularly solid wall of water.  When that happens, to me anyway, I usually loose track of how far below me the ground is, or where "below me" is in the first place, and when my feet happen to bring me to standing again it takes a minute of blinking, wiping sand from my face, and prying hair and kelp out of my eyes before I can look around and see where on Earth I am and how far I've been pulled from our family's collection of beach chairs.

 

At the end of our half day, my kids scattered one by one in all directions.  Some took a moment to hug me and say they'll miss me, and others had their friends take a picture of us.  Odds are fifty to one they have no idea how comforting that was, what with me leaving and all, and especially after some of the days I've had this year.  I came back to my classroom, looked over our checklist of end-of-year formalities, and carted a couple boxes of stuff up to my room in the convent.

 

I walked back into an empty classroom.  It was almost startling after nine and a half months of this room being stuffed with my kids' junk and the walls covered in colored butcher paper.  The sound of the keys as I type echos slightly, which I suddenly remember it did at the very beginning of the year before I put up posters and filled my desk with paper trays and pen holders, back when there weren't squirmy junior high bodies of various sizes in here almost all the time.  My first year of teaching is over, my first students are gone, and I suddenly feel much the same as I do standing on Balboa Beach with sand and salt in my nose.

 

What the heck just happened?  Where am I?  Where'd everybody go?

 

I suspect it will be a little while before I really wrap my head around this last school year, but some things are certain: I am so, so glad and thankful I got to work with these kids, got to know them, had the chance to teach them.  As often as I would have loved to eject them from my classroom (with a rocket, preferably), more often I wanted to laugh with them and hug them.  They did a lot more for me than I did for them, that's for sure (including giving me at least three new grey hairs).

 

As they each scampered away from me (can an almost-six-foot seventh grader scamper?  Sure.), I felt a little pull at the heart, but no sadness or loss.  One thing I've learned this year is that 90% of the time, "goodbye" doesn't mean anything.  My kids left something with me, and whether they like it or not I left a little with them, and that web will last for years and years, and stretch longer than we'll even realize.

 

To say anymore, I'll need to start seeing straight first.

A Confession, or "I'm a Big Fat Fallen Hypocrite"

I've been reading this young man's blog for a couple of months now, since right after his wife received a double lung transplant in April. He's the fellow in the video giving the summary of their whole story up to the transplant. The very, very short version: his wife, Tricia, was born with cystic fibrosis. About a year ago, she was placed on the transplant list, which was when they unexpectedly found out she was pregnant. Given less than a 50% chance for either of their survival, Tricia carried the baby as long as she could before an emergency c-section (about 4or 5 months ago).

Last week, both mother and baby were discharged.



Now, what does all this have to do with me being a hypocrite?

I've mentioned that I was accepted to a graduate school program at Notre Dame. During the application process, I kept saying "I'm okay with it either way, I just wanna know!" Very at peace with the whole thing. Sure, I was anxious to know what was going to be next on my winding road, but I was leaving the direction of that path in God's hands. I was quite impressed with myself and my trust in God's plan.

Well, big fat fibber I was.

What I haven't mentioned is that I was on the waiting list for about two days. I opened my e-mail, saw "Status of ACE Application", and immediately frowned. If I was in, it would have just said "Welp, You Don't Smell Too Bad. You're In!", or something. The e-mail was very positively worded and encouraging, but it wasn't an acceptance.

After all my prattling on about accepting God's providence, my response to this was consuming adolescent annoyance. I was mad, not at any particular entity, but just because not only had I not gotten what I wanted, I didn't even know what I'd gotten. In essence, I spent two days pouting.

Compare this with Nathan's prayer as he faced down the very real possibility of loosing both his wife and daughter, and I'm a big ol' weenie.

My reaction to being wait-listed surprised me. Truly, I would have been fine with not being accepted. Evidently, I would not have been entirely okay with it, at least not to start. Is that normal? Of course, but as I sulked in the chapel the morning of the second wait-list day, I swear I could almost hear God laughing at me.

Alright, God, point taken. You're right and I'm a weenie. As usual.

In the cosmic scheme of things, neither being wait-listed nor my reaction really matter. Perhaps I needed to be reminded that I'm flawed and fallen. Many have observed how easy it is to rely on God when the going gets tough, if only because we feel we have no other option, but in every day life we want to think we're in charge. While I don't believe in a control-freak God who controls our every motion, I do think He's in every moment, and every moment works towards His big plan. I believe that, but will be the first to admit that in practice, that doesn't always show.

And so, class, what do we take away from this lesson? Well, you take whatever you want, Dear Reader. A chuckle at my weenieness, or a pensive "Hmm..", or a deep thought, it's fine with me. I would request, though, that the next time you see me pouting you feel free take the liberty of smacking me up-side the head.