a blogging first...

my dear friend Susan, of Musings of a Discerning Woman fame, just nominated me for a Blog with Substance Award!(also, visit Susan's blog. She's one of the raddest folks ever and her postings on her order, Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, are a glimpse into a pretty amazing group of women!)

Anyhoo, apparently I've been asked to sum up my blogging philosophy in five words. which is easy, since i'm pretty sure i don't have one. but if i did, it would probably be: "words about God, life, & self-doubt"

also, i am also going to link to blogs which i feel are substantial, so here goes:

my dear friend amy has a rad blog and can be found at Amy the Show. Check it out if you are interested in well-written reflections on Catholic Workers, God, and other interesting things.

Our Kairos Chicago community is full of amazing people and I feel like everyone should get to know them! Find them at A Fire That Lights Other Fires

Have I told you I have an amazing sister, whose writing will make you both laugh and cry, often simultaneously? Well, I do, and she can be found blogging at both This Is My Catholicism AND The Jesus Plays

Lastly, Sign on the Window is the blog of Melissa, who is connected to the L'Arche Nehalem community in Portland. Her reflections on church, folks with developmental disabilities, and parenting always give me a lot of food for thought.

"america never was america to me"

aware of the immense privileges granted to me just by virtue of being born in these borders, and not others, and with this skin, and not another, i can no longer really "celebrate" this nation. what i can do is celebrate the brave people in, committed to making it better and more inclusive. and i can thank God for poets like Langston Hughes who have called out the lie that America is a great nation for all...

Let America Be America Again
-by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

3 poems from the border...

i'm a little more raw than expected and not able to completely explain my experience yet. but i did have 3 spoken word pieces that came out of my time in Arizona and I thought I'd share 2 of them.
*******************
-hands full of baptism-

the only radio stations you get
this deep in the desert
play Christian & ranchera music, respectively.
floating through the airwaves are stories of redemption
grace,
& love,
both heavenly & earthly.
but only half of them make any sense to me.

sleeping in a desert that's always moving,
yet always quiet,
i only understand half the stories anyways.
the barriers here are unintelligible.
this great nation has woven intricate borders
between us
made of language & idealogy & money & hate
& sealed with barbed wire & promises.
it catches at your heart & keeps you stuck,
like some man-made desert plant
that needs ugly soil to grow.

give me the honest desert,
the space between borders,
where time slips away
& you're not entirely sure
who you are
or
where you've come from.
i want to leave
the land of beer & honey
for a space
where water baptizes survivors & victims alike
& where we remember our dead
in places as everlasting as mountains,
& just as beautiful.

let us not run from the harshness.
let us bleach our souls in the desert sun
until our ragged hearts are clean.
let us walk without stopping
into a land which doesn't belong to us alone
but which contains our ancestors
our friends
our enemies
our future,
a land where the sun beats down
on the just & unjust.
let us step out of the shadows
with dirty faces,
bleached hearts,
& hands full of baptism.

stepping out into the harsh light of truth,
we look like a busted-up army of seekers.
nobody knows we've got a map on our body
that says where we are & where we're headed together.
all we have to do is face the rising sun
to find our brothers & sisters
& ignore every border we see.
from there, we will tell our stories into the air,
until they form a song all their own,
more beautiful than any airwaves could capture,
& more lasting.

**************************
-what i can say when i don't speak your language-

here's a list of things i can say in Spanish:
heart,
love,
water,
revolution,
mercy,
left,
right,
eat,
be,
table,
i'm sorry,
ice cream,
police.

compared to the way words trip off my tongue,
these confines are immense
& reduce me to child-like sentences
& chaplin-esque hand gestures.

but when i look again,
i can say a lot
of what i to tell you,
stuck as you are,
between your world & mine.
i can say:
"i'm sorry."
"your heart is right where you left it."
"feed your revolution with love & food & mercy & water
& leave everything else to la migra.
they're bound to take it anyways."

looking at it that way,
it's all the vocabulary i'll ever need.

electronic kairos

tonight i was trying to prepare something for the Kairos reflection tonight. while it ultimately devolved into a much more enjoyable night of feeding friends and chatting, i was glad for the time to reflect on the intersection of "ordinary" time and storytelling. it's been coalescing in my mind, as we head into Ordinary Time, that within all the work we do and the issues we address, story can sometimes get lost under fact and hyperbole and official excuses.

for example, i have been thinking, as i am sure many have, about the situation in Gaza. not only was there the needless deaths of those trying to get into Gaza with humanitarian aid, but there have been reported air raids into Gaza as well. All of these things are massively horrifying, but i found myself most moved and saddened and convicted by the first-person stories of what happened on the Freedom Flotilla. The first-person stories of what it was like on the boat contained some incredibly touching moments. It can be found here. those stories, while not eclipsing the broad picture of facts and strategies and solutions, throw into high relief the real cost of doing nothing. these people, with names and faces and a story to tell, narrowly avoided losing their lives. others didn't. thinking of these people - the ones who lived and the ones who died - moves me more than facts. i feel like that must be true for more than me.

in planning for the night, i found this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, which also helped me realize the beautiful power of story and the ordinary, even in the face of violence and oppression.

The Words Under the Words
(for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem)
-Naomi Shihab Nye

My grandmother's hands recognize grapes,
the damp shine of a goat's new skin.
When I was sick they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them
covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother's days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America. More often, tourists,
who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.
She knows how often mail arrives,
how rarely there is a letter.
When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,
listening to it read again and again
in the dim evening light.

My grandmother's voice says nothing can surprise her.
Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.
She knows the spaces we travel through,
the messages we cannot send-our voices are short
and would get lost on the journey.
Farewell to the husband's coat,
the ones she had loved and nourished,
who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.
They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother's eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of His name.
"Answer, if you hear the words under the words -
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones."

In this "ordinary" time, I'm committing to finding the story in the ordinary. This Sunday, we'll here again the very extraordinary way that our Savior performs the ordinary act of feeding people. There was a story there, but there's a story every time we feed people who need it. There are stories in the ordinary work we do. i want to commit to finding those stories, collecting them, and bringing them as presents to the One Who Writes Our Stories.

...sometimes, things just line up and it seems like you can just see beyond into myth and meaning...

i have this tendency to have epiphanies in weird places, like the shower or on the treadmill. today i had both, and i realized how much i've neglected to update this blog with all the things changing in my life. i've been going with the flow, one foot right in front of the other. and that doesn't leave a lot of time to stop and reflect except, apparently, in the shower or on the treadmill.

it occurred to me (in the shower, natch) how far i am from the person i was even months ago. i am systematically dismantling my fear. i am looking head-on at my shame and my regrets and my fear of the life i want, and i am learning to be compassionate with myself and doubly-compassionate with my neighbors. i fail more than i succeed, but i've never been so committed to trying to make it past my automatic rejection of risk and anything that might show that i'm a person of value, a person with gifts.

in a little less than 3 weeks, i'll be headed to Arizona. i will spend 2 lovely days with my cousin Beth and then i will settle down into the risk i'm running joyously, fearfully head-long into. i will spend a week in the Sonoran Desert, doing what I can to aid migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States. this is the first time i can think of that i've been willing to risk much for a cause that i know will put me at odds with people i love. it's the first time i've been willing to risk this much to go where i think Christ is, without any illusions of being successful. i will not stop migrants from dying on the border. i will not heal the rift that exists between Americans and migrant Mexicans in Arizona. i will not repeal an unjust law. i cannot fix this. all i can do is be faithful and just a little bit braver than usual. i can feed people. i can give them water. i can make sure that they get their basic needs met for just one more day, until they move on from us. for one week, i can be part of a group of Samaritans, except instead of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, we'll use the physical and ideological desert between the United States and Mexico. that's a lot for just one week. i think i can do it, but not alone. please pray for me, for us, and for our migrant brothers and sisters.

later this summer, i will make another frightening and beautiful leap into the unknown. i will begin living in an intentional community centered on the property of my parish here in Chicago (St. Gertrude's). i've long believed that, no matter what my economic/work vocation is, i am called to live in intentional community. however, outside of my brief time in the JVC, it's a call i've found convenient to ignore. it's a scary thing to try to live with others and even scarier to try to use that living together as a time to build something bigger than ourselves. the people i'll be living with are some of the most wonderful, dedicated, Christ-like people i know. and i know that they will make it a joyous journey, even when it may be difficult for all of us. when i lived in Portland, i also knew i wanted to be in community, but it was so easy to put it off and not honor that call. having a group of people to whom i feel accountable and who's vision and example are truly inspiring.

it would be easy to spend time ruing how little i did to live the life i wanted in portland. but i am having so much fun now that those regrets are just an echo of what they could be.

i'd originally thought of making this a fundraiser letter and sending it out individually. but this beautiful community has helped us raise a lot of funds. also, it seemed more important to reach out and explain to people why i'm doing what i'm doing. i know that a lot of folks i've talked to have concerns, borne out of love, about my time in Arizona. As most folks know, I'm not a giant fan of conflict and not always super-great at explaining myself. But I am totally committed to talking to anyone about why I feel called to spend time in the Sonoran desert and what I hope to come out of that time. Feel free to Facebook or email me about it. I'll reply as quickly as I can. Thanks for all the support, prayers, and love you've given me on this journey towards this life i love. i couldn't have done it without you.

scrap-of-paper poem

[found part of this written on a teeny piece of paper in my purse today. i love when i keep things around.]

sometimes i think i'm in love,
but it's really just the blues,
sudden and explained.

i get thrown off-kilter
and everything looks beautiful
and loveable,
just because i think i'm not.

those blues
bleed into melancholy
and i could keep myself down
for days on end.

it's so much easier to think
that you've caused it,
that my heartache comes from
somewhere other than
this swollen, beating thing
in between my own ribs.

i'd pick love
over the blues
any day.
but sometimes,
a girl
just doesn't get to choose.

an oregon poem

-gorges-
-4/23/10-

as i laid down,
head cradled in hands,
your peaks and valleys
washed over me.
mountains beyond mountains
crowded in
behind my eyes
and i missed you
with all the longing
your native sons and daughters
might have felt.
but that is their story,
not mine,
and it has many more tears and
grief
than this one.

regardless, we share those mountains
and those riverbeds.
their heart's land
is my heartland, too.

i remember standing,
arms outstretched,
on the top of a mountain,
with my feet planted firmly in snow
and my head lifted up to
the bright May sky.
i could search this world over,
and not find a better way of explaining
what roots me
and makes me grow.

there are no mountains here,
and, somehow,
it's beautiful anyways.
i don't want you to think i'm ungrateful.
but my children will not be flatlanders,
and my ancestors won't be gone from that place
for good.
i've only taken them with me here,
so i can bring them back again.