"Night:" At the Hour of Death, Music Gave a Glimpse of Beauty

 (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

I choose winter's dark days to read with my high school freshmen the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. My students come to high school with a clear understanding of the Holocaust, having spent a full academic quarter in eighth-grade social studies learning about this dark moment for humanity, when state-sponsored genocide erased the lives of millions. But reading the remembrances of a young man who spent a year at about their age with his father in the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald makes the Holocaust true to my students in ways history books cannot.

Although I have read this memoir dozens of times, I remain deeply moved by a particular section: when Wiesel tells of a young man of his acquaintance, Juliek, a Polish Jew who played the violin in a death camp orchestra and then, in the moments before his death, plays Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major, op. 61 2nd Movement.

Yearning: Shakespeare and the Rest of Us

Tomorrow, I will teach my high school students Sonnet 18, which is perhaps the most famous of William Shakespeare's intricate love poems. As I was preparing the lesson this afternoon, I was struck by how Shakespeare's words call out across cultures and centuries to our own hearts. This happened when I listened to this reading of the sonnet by David Tenant, the Scottish actor best known in this house as the tenth embodiment of Dr. Who. 

You May Find Yourself...You May Ask Yourself

"You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. You may find yourself in another part of the world.
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

This Talking Heads' song, "Once in a lifetime," was running through my head in the early evening as I searched for Locktown Road in Flemington, New Jersey.

"Everything Becomes Sign:" Even at the Swim Club

The Presence of Christ is everywhere: even at our suburban swim club. Tuesday afternoon, my husband and I laid in lounge chairs in the shade beside the pool. Several yards away, a mother spoke quietly with her son, while her three other children waited beside us. I have come to know these children a bit during my daily visits to the pool this summer. "He has a time out," the six year old explained to us. "C. woke us up from our naps when he was told not to. The five year old piped in: "I couldn't get back to sleep."

St. Anthony in the Parking Lot

Tonight after dinner I drove to Target to buy some much-needed pants for our 12-year-old, as well as Halloween candy for tomorrow night. Someplace between my house and the store, I lost my wallet. I headed home. I looked around the kitchen and family room. My husband searched the minivan. No wallet. So I drove back to Target, about 20 minutes away, praying out loud to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost objects.

Dear St. Anthony, please come around. 

Something's been lost and can't be found. 

I checked the parking lot. Maybe my wallet had fallen out of my pocket? No luck. So I reported the wallet missing at customer service, leaving them my home phone number. I considered that if someone had found my wallet, the odds were good that he or she was an honest person and would find a way to get it back to me.

Beginning Day In New Jersey: Living the Real, Today and Every Day

Today our School of Community hosted New Jersey's first Beginning Day and it's beautiful to experience how the Holy Spirit is knitting us all together from various parts of the state. Often, we schlep into Manhattan or Staten Island or Brooklyn for CL events. That is fun in its own way, but it is also gratifying to know a life of our own is forming on this side of the Hudson. The School of Community in which I participate began as a group for college students, and has been an adult group for the past two or so years.

We held the day, which is a time for prayer, singing and reflection, at the Rutugers University Catholic Center. (I pulled this photo from its website; it doesn't show the snow everywhere today) We ended with a Mass celebrated by Father Jeff Calia, C.O. parochial vicar of the church next door, St. Peter the Apostle. More than a dozen adults, including three priests, gathered.

A big part of today was listening to Father Carron's video from the Beginning Day held in Italy a few weeks ago. He encourages us to "fix as presence the present things." This means we should strive to be more attentive to the reality around us, and to be attuned to the Presence that called all our reality into being. This is work.

God in Laundry, Illness and Unwashed Dishes

 (A Little Dirty Laundry: painting by Tilly Strauss)

After returning home yesterday evening from an event at our local pool, I spent much of the night awake with a sick stomach. My husband slept on the downstairs sofa while I traversed from our bedroom to the bathroom. He awoke me this morning to let me know that a travel baseball game has been rescheduled for this morning. He was leaving now with L. And, he told me, the washing machine died.

He graciously offered to go to the laundromat this afternoon, between the game and a 5:30 Mass, but could I please sort out which dirty laundry is the priority?

I finally settled back into sleep. About an hour later, our teen barged into the bedroom without knocking to let me know he was heading to work. He told me how the washing machine has died and that when he returns he will help me sort laundry.

I fell back to sleep again. I just woke up and was startled by the sight of our first floor as I headed downstairs. This is not my life as I imagine it.

Swimming Laps and a Self in Search of Mystery

My goal this summer is to swim a full mile, the way I regularly did as a child on swim team. Yesterday afternoon, I made it halfway there. While the swimming is important to my physical health, I know that accomplishing this goal will not fulfill me.

That is because we humans are made for the Mystery and our longings are inexhaustible. Have you ever accomplished something really big and felt a sense of sadness? When I finished my first year of teaching in June, I felt sad to say goodbye to my students and I thought about ways in which I could make this coming school year even better. This is how we were made. We were created, are being created, not to have a sense of fulfillment, but to have longing. That longing, I believe, is Christ calling to us and nothing, nothing can extinguish it.

My Spirituality and My Shmutz

The other day as I was baking oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips, I decided to clean under the oven. Talk about an archeological dig. I found a package of dental floss, two forks, 37 cents, a Valentine's Day card from 2009 and lots and lots of shmutz. (For those of you unfamiliar with this wonderful Yiddish word, shmutz is a little dirt, not serious grime.) In this case it was black, oily stuff that landed on the floor beneath the oven.

And it got me to meditating about all the shmutz on my soul. These are encrusted parts of me that block me from really experiencing reality. We've been talking a lot about this confused "I"  in School of Community, as we read Father Julián Carrón's Fraternity Exercises for 2011. He urges us to first take a look at ourselves in action.

Seeking Christ in a Day of Detours

You know what it's like, right? Sometimes, nothing goes as planned. Well, today, in the midst of one of those days, I gave myself a proposition: imagine Christ spending the day with you. Because He is.

On today's to-do list were a series of errands designed to get the boys ready for their sleepaway camps tomorrow morning. At 11 a.m. I left the house with L, our 11 year old, to pick up copies of the boys' health forms from their dad's office. I headed into downtown, which was filled with construction vehicles of every description, detours and make-shift one way streets. With no place to park, I told L. I would drop him off, then circle the block. He was to wait for me on the steps to his dad's office with the forms. So circle I did. I saw L. standing on the steps with nothing in his hands. Where were the health forms? Seems he misunderstood what I said; he thought I was going to park and then go into the office with him. So I circled the block again. This time, he was outside on the steps, holding a manila folder. Hooray! The health forms!

Christ Keeps Calling Us

 This post originally appeared last June at the Why I am Catholic blog. I wanted to give it a second chance at readers.

This morning was one of those mornings. Nothing went well at home after the boys left for school and I felt bogged down by minutiae. Folding seemingly endless laundry, preparing for a teacher-training class tonight, mopping up from a bloody nose one of my sons had on the kitchen and bathroom floors, hauling in a huge bag of dog food from the back of the van, losing a piece of writing I had spent hours on, making sure I had paid for my sons' summer camps, realizing we didn't have phone service because we had forgotten to pay the bill, seeing one son had left a book on the couch that he was supposed to bring to school and on and on. I was irritable. I was self-involved. I really just wanted this part of the day to be over.

Happy Birthday, Beloved

 "To find an exceptional man means to find a man who brings about a correspondence with what you are longing for, with the need for justice, truth, happiness, love. Something truly exceptional is divine: it has something divine in it. If not, it really doesn't bring us closer to God. "Exceptional" is synonymous with the word "divine." Julián Carrón

Today is my husband's 47th birthday. We met nearly two decades ago, at a Thanksgiving dinner in Statesville, North Carolina. We will have been married 18 years in September. Those of you who have met my husband know he is a loyal, funny, smart, devout, handsome and hard-working. And a fabulous cook.

Who brought him to me?

To truly love and  be loved by another is to get a glimpse of divine love.