PHOTO: SAINT JOHN’S ABBEY
Life’s twists have turned me into a vagabond, and my Benedictine spirit is rebelling. A large canvass tote packed with a change of clothes, calcium pills, and a notebook sits at my bedside, ready to go. My purse holds a toothbrush and phone charger as well as more standard fare. I have deodorant and a Ziploc of herb teas on the nightstand at a friend’s house and have to look at my planner to remember where I need to be the following night.

This morning, I walked into the kitchen of my father’s home, switched on the electric teakettle, and felt an overwhelming need to cook. I wanted to fill the refrigerator with foods like eggplant, sugar-snap peas, and chicken. I wanted to stay put instead of shuttling between the house I am preparing to sell, a friend’s where I crash after I’ve packed a day’s worth of boxes, and the big home where I grew up. I carried a mug of tea into the upstairs bathroom where I sank into a tub of hot water and read a few pages of Anne Lamott before realizing that what woke me at 6am was the same thing that had dogged me for a couple of weeks: My monastic soul longed to stay put. I needed to cook, to pray, and to be faithful to the writerly life. Why didn’t I?

Slogging through a dissolution and filling out close to one hundred job applications has become a convenient excuse. My doctor hinted at the same thing last week when I warned her that lab work would reveal unacceptable cholesterol levels since my eating habits have deteriorated.

“That’s life, Mary. There will always be stresses,” she said as she walked out the examining room door.

“She’s right, darn it,” I thought as I put on my clothes and walked to the lab across the hall where I sat watching blood that would reveal the pizza’s and Easter candy I had consumed fill a small glass vial.

This is a particularly rough patch of life, no doubt, filled with challenges that overwhelm even though I know they will not last forever. Eventually my husband and I will legally be going our separate ways, the house will be sold, and I will not be unemployed. Still, I need to meet these immediate challenges just as I have overcome others in the past: from a place of strength and centeredness. For me that means prayer, writing, and staying in one place long enough to cook healthy food.

One afternoon a year ago, when a group of writers and scholars had gathered for our weekly brown bag lunch at Saint John’s in Collegeville, a wise Benedictine monk dropped a pearl of wisdom: You don’t have to do a lot to get a lot done.

At eighty-eight, he still writes award winning poetry and works with nearby immigrant populations. He jokes that he’d rather miss prayer than a party, but those who know him, know better. His life is lived from the strength of prayer and community, and what needs done is accomplished not because he crams everything in, but rather because he doesn’t. He keeps in touch with the God he trusts and rests when he “runs out of gas.”

I will buy some eggplant and chicken today, spend quiet time in the Presence, and wear the St. Benedict medal that reminds me to put balance in my day. I may not do a lot, but I hope to get a lot done.
© 2010 Mary van Balen

PHOTO: MARY VAN BALEN
Last evening after dinner I decided to see a movie at the old local art theater. As I waited for lights to dim, I pulled a small black notebook out of my purse and began writing starting with the day’s date and time in the top right corner as I always do: “April 12, 2010, waiting for “The Ghost Writer.” I jotted down a few thoughts and suddenly remembered a conversation with a friend I had had the day before. She was just beginning to post remarks on twitter.

“I opened my account, posted one remark and minutes later I had a follower,” she said.

“A ‘follower?’ What’s a ‘follower?’”

“It’s someone who reads your Tweets, you know, someone who follows what you are doing.”

“I don’t do anything interesting enough for anyone else to care,” volunteered our mutual friend who was driving us all to a play.

The three of us joked and laughed about celebrities who kept their ‘followers’ apprised of minute details of their lives. Meanwhile, my friend was busy Twittering, “Going to play. Community Theater.”

“There. I can tell them if it is good or not. Maybe someone else will want to come.”

We arrived at the theater and that was the end of our conversation about Twittering. I don’t know if my friend gave a report to her ‘followers’ after the last curtain fell, and I didn’t think about social networking again until a couple of days later when I began writing in my notebook at the movie theater. I looked at what I was scribbling on the page: Waiting for “The Ghost Writer. Dad seems to be doing well- stayed till midnight – he was sleeping soundly. Check out Mercury in night sky….

Suddenly I smiled. My short comments could just as well have been keyed into a Twitter account. The difference was my notebook remains private. I might go back and reread an entry; it might be a seed for a column or article or find its way into a book. But until it did, no other eyes would see it. On Twitter, who knows, I might have a following!

I have no desire to send a constant string of notes about what I am doing or thinking into cyberspace for anyone to read. I am a recorder of my life and thoughts. You are reading my blog, so I am not adverse to sharing my musings, but not minutia. Not constantly. I love email and Skype is wonderful for keeping in touch with family and friends around the globe, but I hover on the fringe of a generation that craves sharing and consuming vast quantities of information. Recently, my brother-in-law revealed two things that made him feel old: His state Golden Discount Card arrived in the mail just a week before his sixtieth birthday, and he purchased hearing aides.

My wakeup call came at the movie theater when I realized I am not interested in disseminating photos and information to a gaggle of friends on Face book or MySpace. I am content with blank-paged journals or small black notebooks, the Moleskine brand, that its manufacturers are pleased to say were used by Hemingway and Picasso as if my words and doodles immediately become weighty and worthy of an audience when captured in those pages.

My former editor is probably laughing in his grave. He reminded once, after years of emailing my column to him rather than visiting in person, that once I had written about cell phone and email’s downside: constant availability and lack of personal contact. Never say never. I may find my tweeting voice yet, but for the moment, I still like fountain pens and hardcopy books and will leave tweeting to the information generation and birds…
© 2010 Mary van Balen

WOMAN’S HEAD, BY KATHRYN HOLT, PHOTO MARY VAN BALEN

Years ago, my daughter sculpted a woman’s head for an art class but forgot to make a hole in the base to allow the escape of heated air. The piece exploded in the kiln, and she was irritated at her oversight. Her instructor, ceramicist Tony Davenport, had a different opinion.

“Don’t worry,” he said as she glued together large pieces that remained. “This may be the best thing that happened to it.”

Kathryn wasn’t sure how to take his remark. Did the hours painstakingly dedicated to creating the head count less towards its artistic merit than the accidental explosion? As days passed and she looked at the head with its gaping holes, her perspective changed. Lines where pieces had been rejoined and empty places suggested not only struggle and pain, but also survival. The head emanated a hard-won dignity.

Are we not the same, embracing life with energy and hope, sometimes successfully meeting challenges and opportunities, sometimes not? Life takes unexpected turns that break our bodies and hearts into pieces. At times we can put them back together; at other times we are left with gaping holes. We are blessed when people, like Kathryn’s professor, can see beauty and opportunity where we see ruin.

We make choices and mistakes that change the course of our lives in major as well as minor ways: What job to accept, who to marry, where to live, how to eat, what to say, where to study. The list is endless, and as Robert Frost writes, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back,”* each choice leads to another. Like Kathryn’s sculpture, we are the a mosaic of life and our responses to it.

Tony took a creative effort, a mistake, and its results and helped my daughter make something meaningful from them. Our Creator helps us embrace life, whatever it holds, and fashion something meaningful. We are disappointed, but we have hope. We are hurt, but we heal. We are overwhelmed, but we rise again. We are blessed and we give thanks. We are broken, but we are beautiful.

*
“The Road Not Taken”
© 2010 Mary van Balen

PHOTO: MARY VAN BALEN
One sunny afternoon, a friend asked me if I had taken photos of the pear trees in her neighbor’s backyard.

“Just yesterday they were all bloom. Today the tops are greening with leaves. The beauty of a tree covered with flowers is fleeting.”

From the second floor room where I write, I see dogwoods beginning to bloom. They look almost golden, as do the flowers and tassels that dangle from the sugar maple tree. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay:”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

My friend was correct: Springs blossoms drop soon after they flock trees in white and pink. Frost’s poem begins with ephemeral golden moments of April and moves to ponder the transience of much earthly beauty. Yet, as Frost’s poem suggests, when one beauty or good is gone, another takes its place: Flowers are lovely, but leaves provide food for the plant; dawn is rosy, but we live in the light of day; Eden was lost, but as we just celebrated at Easter, the gift of Divine Love and life is given to all. Nothing gold can stay, but would we want it to? One thing must give way to another as we grow. We must die to live again.

PHOTO: NASA – “THE INCUBATOR”

Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
Acts 10, 34-35

Peter prefaced his story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection with a declaration of God’s inclusivity. As Easter is celebrated around the world we do well to remember that message. Jesus grew to understand it as he prayed and faithfully proclaimed God’s Kingdom. He announced that sinners and tax collectors would enter the kingdom before some of the religious leaders and those considered righteous. He had conversations in public with a Samaritan woman, and one of his most remembered parables featured a nameless Samaritan as the hero, not the priest or Levite who walked past a victim of violence lying beaten and dying beside the road.

Jesus ate with sinners and healed the child of a Roman centurion, actions which announced as clearly as his words that God’s healing love was for all, not only for the Jews. In our world torn apart by fear, ignorance, and violence, Christians must preach Divine inclusivity with their lives as Jesus did. When we are tempted to choose comfortable ignorance rather than disturbing truth or smug self-righteousness rather than open acceptance we should stop and reflect on Jesus’ life and remember how he died. He forgave those who crucified him and embraced the criminal hanging beside him. His resurrection is a promise of eternal life for all and an invitation for us to join in proclaiming this good news as it echos through the universe.

Happy Easter!
© 2010 Mary van Balen

Out of my distress I called on the Lord;
the Lord answered me
and set me in a broad place.
Ps 118, 5

The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told yo, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale.
Lk 24, 5-11

I love the phrase from the Psalm: “…the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place.” When I read it, my breaths are deeper, the air is electric with promise, and my eyes are ready to see what they have not seen before.

I once had friends, Dave and Jeanette, who lived on land perched high on a ridge. When visiting them, I stood a long while outside beside the single outbuilding and gazed over the hills that braided themselves below as far as I could see. My eyes felt good, like they were meant to look far and not have their vision stopped short by rows of buildings as is was in the city where I lived.

My eyes felt healthy and alive. Like a runner’s muscles stretched and ready to leave miles of road behind, my eyes took in the vista and opened my soul to what lay beyond.

I have the same feeling when I read that the Lord has set me in a broad place. God has placed me in a Divine milieu where I can see far, see what I could not see from my own place. God’s vision bestows an openness that allows the unimaginable to be true. From the “broad place” anything is possible. Standing in it is exhilarating.

The women in the gospel found themselves in a “broad place” on that early morning. They were standing in the same physical place, but suddenly they were seeing it with God’s eyes. What had seemed impossible was true. Everything in their lives changed in that moment. The eyes of their souls looked far.

As anyone who experiences such a moment and tries to share it with another person knows, such reality is met with disbelief. I am sure the fact that those who had the experience were women didn’t help. Today many still dismiss women’s intuition or experiences as “emotional,” as if that alone were enough to make their words inconsequential. Peter had to see for himself, not believing the “idle tale.”

The women knew. They had been put in a broad place and were transformed.

© 2010 Mary van Balen

PHOTO: MARY VAN BALEN ” Crucifixion” Scholars’ Lounge, Alcuin Library, Saint Johns University

When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.”
Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Jn 19, 30

“It always rains on Good Friday,” my mother used to say. Often she was right. It was appropriate for the day we remember the suffering and death of Jesus as well as our sin that contributes to the ongoing pain and evil in the world. The Stations of the Cross were a regular Lenten prayer every Friday while I attended Catholic elementary school. Then, after Holy Thursday liturgy, the altar was stripped down to bare wood, the crucifix was covered with purple cloth, and in solemn procession, the priest carried the Blessed Sacrament to a side altar. The bare church sent a chill through my body. During Good Friday services in place of bells, a wooden mallet struck a small board, its hollow sound echoing off the walls.

On Good Fridays I am aware of emptiness – Jesus closed up in the tomb, not yet risen, a hole in the world where he used to be. I imagine the men and women who followed Jesus, who believed in him, waiting through that darkest night. What were they feeling? Did they speak to one another, or did each keep silent watch, folded into themselves with their private thoughts and fears?

Once, walking through the woods on Good Friday night, I stepped on a board that had been left near a narrow creek, perhaps for use in crossing the water. One end of the board leapt up when my foot came down on the other. It seemed tense, eager. I stopped and looked around; the woods were unusually quiet. It’s creatures still. All creation seemed to be waiting. Waiting for something to challenge the emptiness that threatened to swallow it up. That is Good Friday’s gift: awareness of the hole in the universe and in our souls while Jesus lay in earth’s bowels. Awareness of our need and the desire for God to meet it.
© 2010 Mary van Balen

PHOTO: MARY VAN BALEN
Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;
our God is merciful.
The Lord protects the simple
when I was brought low, he saved me.
Return, O my soul, to your rest
for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
Ps 116, 5-7

Holy Thursday liturgy is filled with beautiful readings. Exodus recounts the first Passover; 1Corinthians depicts the Last Supper and focuses on the breaking of the bread and sharing of the cup, the institution of the Eucharist. John’s gospel also tells of the Last Supper but presents Jesus as servant, washing the feet of his disciples and instructing them to do as he did: humble themselves and serve others in his name.

The Eucharist is central to my spirituality. When my life is filled with stress and hurt, when I cannot feel God with me and wonder if I am forgotten, I long for the Eucharist. I cannot explain why or how I believe, but I do.I know that in sharing the sacrament with the rest of the people of God, I am filled with the life of the Holy One in a way that brings me strength and hope. It has nothing to do with scholastic laboring to explain away the Mystery with words like “transsubstantiation” or “accidents” and everything to do with Divine Longing and Love.

That is why I chose these verses from today’s Psalm instead of the readings that paint the more familiar pictures of the Last Supper. God IS merciful and protects us all. When I am distressed, without hope, and physically exhausted, God renews my heart. When I swallow the bread and feel the wine warming my body, I know I am loved.

The gift of self, which Jesus gives to us in so many ways, especially in the Eucharist, is Love spilling over. It is God’s life becoming our own. When I am out of love, patience, hope, or energy I know I can rely on the Holy One providing me with God’s own.

The Eucharist, the example of love and service, the protection of the People of God all point to the reality of God’s unending love. I proclaim with the psalmist: Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
© 2010 Mary van Balen

PHOTO: MARY VAN BALEN
The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary by a word.
Morning by morning he wakens–
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
Is 50, 4

Any one who has been been a teacher knows the power of her word. The problem is the teacher never knows which word is the one that speaks a powerful message or which student will be moved. Well planned lessons may not touch the students as deeply as an honest comment rising from the heart in response to a moment. Sometimes, when a teacher feels least successful, she has spoken a word that has changed a student’s life. She may never know. Only years later, perhaps, when a student returns to thank her for something she said or did does the teacher realize the difference her work has made.

Isaiah speaks of the power of a teacher’s word to sustain the weary, and he continues, giving the source of that power: Truth. Each morning God wakens the teacher in Isaiah, opens his ears, and speaks. The good teacher listens to the Lord as his students listen to him. The teacher hears God’s truth and so has wisdom to share; wisdom that strengthens in times of trial.

Like the teacher, we are called to listen to God’s truth, to ingest it, let it transform our hearts so the words we speak, the lives we live sustain those who are weary and hungry for God’s Love.
© 2010 Mary van Balen

THE LAST SUPPER BY BOHDAN PIASECKI

After saying this Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me. The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking.
Jn 13, 21-22

It is good to know that Jesus’ spirit was troubled; not that I am glad it was, but that I am encouraged that it could be. Sometimes Jesus is presented as the all-knowing God who knew that when these torturous few days were over that all would be well…so no need to be troubled. It was all in the script.

I prefer Jesus to be more like the rest of us. He had to trust the One Who Sent Him, just like we do.In the hours after the last supper with his disciples (I chose the painting I did because it includes women. I can’t imagine this meal with out women disciples present.) he would sweat blood as he prayed in the garden and ask God to remove the end that he could see coming. Later still, he called out from the cross, quoting Psalms and asking why God had abandoned him.

Jesus’ spirit was troubled at dinner because, among other things, he knew that those closest to him were going to betray him. One, literally, would turn him over to the Pharisees and priests. Peter, also like me, who was quick to passionately declare his love and commitment to Jesus would deny him, and most of the others would run in fear when push came to shove.

Yet, in the end, Jesus trusted. He trusted God enough to face beatings and death on a cross. He trusted Love enough to sit and have dinner with his friends who would prove so weak in the next twenty-four hours. He trusted God’s Kingdom enough to wash their feet as an example of what they were to do…when they regained their courage.

Jesus, when my spirit is troubled, when what I see coming is frightening, or when those I thought I could count on bolt in my darkest times, help me trust you, the One Who Sent You, and the Love that came to reside in my heart. Help me embrace those around me in your love and move forward into the unknown sure that you are with me.
© 2010 Mary van Balen