life in death and death in life...

My mother's most fascinating life story is of her near death experience. She was an older teen, living at home...perhaps 17 or 18 years of age. She remembers being in the kitchen and saying to her mother, 'My heart has stopped beating'. Her mother insisted that was a ridiculous statement. But to Susanne, it was true: She began floating upward into the sky, irresistibly drawn towards the Light. Smelling salts and slaps brought her back to earth. I asked how she felt: 'Disappointed' was her reply. She had been happy and safe in the warmth and peace of the interrupted journey, and wished it could continue.

Recently, I received a long, poignant email from a friend who was heavy laden with the loneliness of loss...four friends, from near and far, having passed recently. 'Driving through a waterfall of tears' is how the grief fell on him. I feel that time in my life coming at me like a train - hijacking my intentional journey and slapping me with an about face. Tonight, news of another death from our California church family. Surely, this lovely lady is in a crystal place of light in God's love...light years from earth's sod.

But, what of us - those in the middle...between our making and our remaking? The juxtaposition of 'here' and 'there' is often too much to comprehend or bear. At times I rail, Why is it that we are left here...sometimes with lead footed heaviness... weary of being encapsulated in the imperfect state that traps us - a state perhaps most accurately defined by the unknowns of our exit details.

When my father died, I rejoiced for his separation from his painfully ailing body, so that he could be the radiant person he was made to be. So perhaps tonight I weep not for beautiful Dorothy, but for someone left behind who loves her. And for us, also left behind in a place we were not made for...in a life that we love and live, but that seems, sadly, light years from my mother's interrupted flight to freedom in the heart of God.

fall leaves...

"Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance!"

-- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

video d'resistance...

Fr C is soft on Lucy...but it doesn't turn out quite as he expected:

by popular demand...

The latest video of Lucy and Bat Girl. (She does have circles with the bat symbol on both sides of her body - very fitting, we think.)

Note the starting position, with the little trouble maker draped across Lucy's jugular.

good work...

My mother always encouraged her four daughters to 'put your shoulders back' - a vehicle for lauding the importance of good posture. I couldn't do it. It never felt natural or right at all. Later, I would hear from others, 'hold your chest high'. Ditto there, for what seemed to me to be artificially manipulating the human body and perhaps the human spirit as well. Then there was 'Picture a string pulling you up from the top of your head'. Well, perhaps we're getting closer here.

Our daughters model good posture for the rest of us, a result of vocal studies. There is a lifting of their torsos out of that place of bodily solidity - the hips/abdomen - that naturally aligns everything in its path as it grows and stretches into proper position. To me, this technique doesn't artificial but rather very organic and natural in its action and result. I do it, when I remember to! And it just feels right.

When our children were young, I walked an inner tightrope between wanting them to know how wonderful and amazing they are - and not overly praising them for good work done or stressing how proud I was as if it is the latter that makes them the former. "I'm so happy for you" would sometimes be on my lips after an accomplishment. I'm sure I didn't balance the implied tension very well at all. But I didn't want them to think of the performing parts of life (from school work to recitals to degrees...dinners prepared and fabrics & paints, sewn and applied) as something that was to impress others or define their worth, but rather as some good work from and for them. Something to relish, enjoy and be grateful for. And also to ponder in that, in the mystery of how it interlaces with life. Something natural. "You're wonderful" was always in my heart because it's true - but in a much more cosmic sense than we know.

Wendell Berry's 'Good Work', (from What Are People For), offers a somewhat spiritual interpretation of good works that puts the natural back into a what is sometime an artificial concept in life:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair. It graces with health. It heals with grace. It preserves the given so that it remains a gift. By it, we lose loneliness: we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; we enter the little circle of each other's arms, and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance, and the larger circle of all creatures, passing and out of life, who also move in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

weeping for wonder...

The spiritually profound O Magnum Mysterium by Morton Lauridsen.

UST Alumni Singers, both incredibly able and obviously popular (over 80,000 views).

Below, proof that a group can be seamlessly one, even when comprised of solo quality voices, one of which is deliciously featured here in Unusual Way (from the musical Nine, Maury Yeston, composer). Arrangement by their director.

saving fuel in Wonderful W...

I just loved the serendipitous proximity of the high gas prices news header and the photo above it!

overheard this morning...

"What was I saying when I so rudely interrupted myself?"*

- from an interminable ENFP

Oooo, I found a website that not only links to prayers for each Myers-Briggs personality type (ENFP: "Oh, Lord, help me to keep my mind on one thing at a....OH! Look at the birdie!!!"), but also suggests a style of prayer best-suited for the types. Augustinian, for NT's.

*Fr C isn't allowed to comment...as he already did.

somewhere... there's a beam down there to land on...

How is this humanly possible???

UNCONSCIONABLE

Just read in Yahoo news that - growingly persistent warnings aside - the known estrogen mimicker/hormone disrupter BPA is actually just peachy-fine for lining our food cans (including infant formula) and hardening our babies' bottles. This in stark contrast to other studies done by...you guessed it: scientists who are not in bed with the government agency or the chemistry council.

You may read an opposing and illuminating view here. Or, perhaps better yet: download/read the PDF of a thorough and riveting Vogue magazine article - 'An Inconceivable Truth'*.

If there is any question of risk - especially for babies, something should be BANNED until the safety can be 100% proven (pardon me while I seethe: 'Are any of these cr*$$* chemicals 100% provably safe???'). Unfortunately, while protecting big business, 'we' seem to approve things that are not acceptable with greater ease (and some bribes/bucks) than it takes to question or dislodge them later. It's all about money and CYA. (Cases in point: aspartame, mercury fillings & vaccines.)

Before I use some words that will ban this blog from the 'sphere, let me just say: I am not a sheeple and I refuse to go back to any regularly scheduled programming.

*This IS a magazine article. Therefore, there are bits of other articles on some of the pages.

Addendum: As standard news goes, the Washington Post's article is superior, IMHO. Their articles are not always accessible online, so here it is:

WASHINGTON — A chemical commonly found in can linings, baby bottles and other household products does not pose a health hazard when used in food containers, according to a draft assessment released Friday by the Food and Drug Administration.

The report stands in contrast to more than 100 studies performed by government scientists and university laboratories that have found health concerns associated with bisphenol A, or BPA. Some have linked the chemical to prostate and breast cancers, diabetes, behavioral disorders such as hyperactivity and reproductive problems in laboratory animals.

Exposure to the small amounts of BPA that migrate from the containers into the food they hold are not dangerous to infants or adults, the draft said.

"FDA has concluded that an adequate margin of safety exists for BPA at current levels of exposure from food contact uses," regulators wrote in the draft report, which will be reviewed Sept. 16 at a meeting of members of an FDA advisory committee studying the safety of the chemical.

The chemical industry and the agencies that regulate the use of BPA, the FDA and the Environmental Protection Agency, have deemed the chemical safe, largely on the strength of two industry-funded studies that found no problems. The American Chemistry Council welcomed the findings of the new report.

"FDA is the premier agency responsible for the safety of our food," Steven Hentges, an executive of the group, said in a statement. "FDA’s thorough analysis confirms that food contact materials containing BPA can continue to be used safely."

FDA critic Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, said the agency lacks sufficient data to declare the chemical safe.

"Clearly their effort was to minimize people being concerned about this," Zuckerman said. "It just seems that whenever there is an opportunity to look at a new important issue, they just seem to be siding with industry’s point of view."

BPA, in commercial use since the 1950s, is in many everyday items, including compact discs and automobiles. One federal study estimated that it is present in the urine of 93 percent of the population.