Holy Rhythm

With the occasionally crisp, subtle coolness of September in Virginia, my pace usually quickens just a bit in expectant hope. September brings order — the order of days that follow along the tracks of a schedule, the order of deadlines and appointments written in ink. I love order; it gives me a sense of security. Order brings rhythm and rhythm underscores a family in harmony with each other and God.

This September, the week after school started, I found myself staring at a tangle of crossed out “definites” in colors as numerous as the children for which they stood. There was no harmony. We had been walking in chaos and the dissonant noise reached an ear-splitting crescendo. I shut it all down. We completely upended our extracurricular schedule and prayed about some new ventures in new places. Please read the rest here.

The Lesson is in the Mistake

The happiest, most successful, most peaceful people I know are the people who know how to fail. They embrace the chance to try and to fall short. They approach the uncertainty of risk with a hopeful expectation that something good will come, no matter what. People who thrive at work and in personal relationships are people who see that they can be wrong and that those “wrong” times are the times when they learn the most about themselves and the people around them. Truly successful people grow in the freedom to make mistakes.

My child sits for hours, agonizing over his homework. Each problem draws out for an excruciating length of time, far exceeding anything the teacher intended, I’m sure. He doesn’t want to be wrong. This is a computerized assignment, and what he doesn’t know is what happens when he’s wrong. If he keys in the wrong answer, a dialogue box will pop up and tell him it’s wrong. Then he can try again before a final answer is recorded. He knows about the second try and the final answer. He doesn’t know the value of the first mistake.

When he tried and was wrong the first time, he read the first line of the dialogue box. It said, “Sorry, that is incorrect.” Quickly, he clicked the box closed. And with that click, he obliterated the value of failure. If he’d stopped and read the box, he’d know something more valuable than any algorithm he’ll learn this year or ever. He would know that in the mistake, lies the lesson. If he’d kept reading past the pain of “You’re wrong,” he would know that the dialogue box went on to explain exactly how he was wrong and what he should do next time.

I think that we can tell ourselves it’s acceptable to fail, it’s useful to make mistakes and to learn from them, but the reality is that, for some of us, mistakes are terrifying. Mistakes make us vulnerable. Mistakes reveal our imperfections — to ourselves and to the people around us. We hold tightly to our illusion of control, our obsession for order and our compulsion to ensure that nothing is ever even slightly askew. We exhaust ourselves in mind-numbing sessions of challenges where we refuse to access the dialogue box that tells us how to learn the lesson that only the wrong answer will yield.

I have a long acquaintance with perfectionism. We square off daily. I try to grab the demon it is by the neck and tell it in no uncertain terms that I live in grace and that grace allows me to stretch and grow and yes, to fail. I tell the devil that is perfectionism that creativity flourishes in a world where second chances, erasers, and new sheets of paper are plentiful. Sometimes, the demon slinks off to a corner and leaves me in peace to be brave about my day. Other times, I am paralyzed by the fear that I’m doing it wrong. Again.

I rub the shoulders of the child at the homework table. I sit beside him, pray for him (and for me), share with him the secret of the dialogue box, and then, together, we intentionally click the wrong answer. We read the box. We begin to understand how this works. How the failures are redeemed. How the final answer is a better one for the mistake that went before it. This is tricky stuff, this algebra.

But what comes next is far trickier. Life is full of opportunities to try and to fail, to take a creative leap and to fall flat on one’s face, only to begin the draft anew. While I hope that this semester is a resounding academic success, what I hope even more is that he learns at this tender age that it is right and good to be wrong. That’s where the growth is.

Where Love Lives

This time of year — as the academic calendar begins and the last strains of summer’s song fade — the people in my household scatter. College-aged children move into dorms. School-aged children leave and come back and leave again every day, making the case for a revolving door at our front stoop. Even the boy who moved clear across the country made his way home for a brief weekend at the end of August. And then he left again.

It has me thinking about what “home” is in our family. What do they envision when they are away and how do they feel when they return? I cannot shake the memory of a grown child, at once mournful and furious, declaring last summer that home didn’t feel like home any more. He was not altogether wrong. His passing comment, hurled in anger the cause of which I no longer remember, is seared into my memory. We’d lost the easy grace extended to one another that makes a house a place where one can be certain that love is unconditional. I’ve spent the last year trying to make home feel like home again.

Now, sitting at a dining room table scarred by the blessings of so many meals and memories, as we prepare to celebrate the canonization of Mother Teresa, my thoughts turn to the wisdom she had to offer mothers. A tiny nun who made her home amongst the poorest of the poor in the squalor of India, she speaks into my suburban maternal existence.

“Try to put in the hearts of your children a love for home. Make them long to be with their families. So much sin could be avoided if our people really loved their homes. Start by making your own home a place where peace, happiness and love abound, through your love for each member of your family and for your neighbor.”

Those are lofty words, tall orders, beautiful goals. In the quiet of a night, I go to comfort a baby, to feed and change a diaper and rock back to sleep. He knows he’s home. I know it, too, there in the dark, so enveloped in the same world that his beginning and my end are indistinguishable. This is home, a place of laying down life for a child.

The atmosphere of home grows from there, sinks its roots deep into the care of small children where the choice to love and the acts of love are so simple. Just feed the next meal, bathe the next mess, soothe the next hurt. And as you do, you create home.

Then, in the next years, the growing years, we cultivate the community of home. I have found this requires even more discipline on my part, nearly constant diligence. I love my children, to be sure, and so does their father. That is not enough. Care must be taken in the growing years to show them how to love one another. If home is to be sustainable, if it will still be there many years later — not a physical place, but a state of being — our children need to learn how to love each other well. Home is the safest community of all, or at least we hope to be that way. If it’s not, they won’t return to one another and what we built was not home at all, but a mere house on shifting sands.

St. Teresa of Calcutta writes: “It is easy to smile at people outside your own home. It is so easy to take care of the people that you don’t know well. It is difficult to be thoughtful and kind and to smile and be loving to your own family in the house day after day, especially when we are tired and in a bad temper or bad mood. We all have these moments and that is the time that Christ comes to us in a distressing disguise.”

Children must be taught to treat one another with respect and with kind regard. They need to be encouraged to lay down their lives for one another, to speak life into each other’s dark places. Brothers and sisters grow up to be husbands and wives. What lessons have they learned at home about dignity and decency and compassion that they will carry into their new homes? What have they learned about how to treat the other gender and what to expect in how they are treated? Is there gentleness and honor in their interactions with each other in the home of their origin?

We must be Christ to one another — tender, kind, overflowing with mercy — if we are to create home for one another. This is no small task. Indeed, I am quite sure it’s the work of a lifetime. Families are not accidents. They are deliberate acts of God. I may always wonder if God calls me to one cause or another outside my home, but I can never doubt that the people in my family are called to one another. Home is where love lives, and just as every living thing we know, love must be carefully nurtured lest by its neglect it withers and home is left lifeless.

Create a New Ritual

It’s that time of year in the life of a family when calendar squares begin to fill. Pencils in hand (because things change and it’s not quite time for pens yet), we grid in the soccer schedule, the “first day of” dates, the fall birthdays, the auditions, the new lessons. When finished, we stare in disbelief at how full it all looks. Yet that fullness rarely inspires a sense of abundance. Instead, there are alternate feelings of dread and disbelief. Sometimes, there is even fear. How in the world will all these things pull together for a life that is meaningful and not chaotic? May I suggest that the day-to-day rushing that seems so inevitable with growing families desperately needs intentional ritual?

Our children need routines. They thrive in structured time and ordered settings. We need it, too. Routines provide security; they calm the chaos, comfort us and make life at least a little predictable. Beyond routine, we need the richness of rituals. Rituals imbue ordinary time with a sense of grace. Both routines and rituals require discipline. The virtue applied to such discipline is rewarded almost immediately.

To create rituals in your life that will nurture you, begin with intention. Consider how your ritual will affect your day. Do you need a few moments in the morning to review your plans, collect yourself, to pray quietly and invite God into your agenda? (Hint: you do.) Create a ritual for that need. Awaken 15 minutes earlier. Brew a favorite beverage and pour it into a favorite cup. Sit in a particular chair, one that catches the morning light. Grant yourself a few moments of quiet, alert time that is focused and aware. Do it every day. There, you have a ritual.

After several days of practicing such discipline, your ritual will gain momentum. You’ll find that the morning focus continues to pay itself forward into the rest of the day. Where else shall we establish a ritual? Find something that is repeated daily and imbue it with some meaning and purpose. When you walk over the threshold of your office, do you bless the day and begin with integrity? Every day, can you establish the same movements of intention?

What about the drive home? We live in a traffic quagmire. Can you establish a ritual that divides the time and offers you an opportunity to transition from work to home peacefully? For the first few minutes, listen to news, catch up on the world events that happened during your workday. Then, with discipline, turn off the talking and the shouting and listen to music. Better yet, listen to the Divine Office app and pray Vespers.

Finally, spend the last 10 or 15 minutes in silence. Focus on the family waiting behind the door of your home. Pray about how you will give them the best of you, despite the fatigue that has come with a long day and seemingly longer drive home. Let the ritual carry you from the workaday world to the peace of home.

Similarly, if you take children to school, institute a subtle shift in that routine to bring gentle, grace-filled ritual. In the car or as you walk, informally review together the known plans of the day. This isn’t the time to troubleshoot or seek alternatives or solve the problem of the mean girl. Just get on the same page. Promise to pray for their days and assure them that you will hold them in your prayers all day long. Then, as you approach the sign that tells you you’re in a school zone and to slow down, let that be your family reminder to pray aloud for the day. Keep it short and simple, but do it every day at the same time. Let your rituals reassure, then be prepared to see how much more they can do.

Three (or more) More Books Going

After I wrote about my "three books going" habit, I made it a category on my daybook posts. Try as I might, I'm struggling to get those daybooks up every week, and I'm also reading more than three books some weeks. So there's a backup of book reporting.

Last week, I cleared 10,381 unread emails from my inbox. Ahh. Then, I cleared several years' worth of clothing from my closet. Ah, again. So, today, I'm thinking I'll just write one big post with the books from the last few weeks and reach daybook ah. 

In my hands:

After reading and very much loving A Ring of Endless Light (reviewed here), I picked up Madeleine L'Engle's A Circle of Quiet. I'm taking my time with this one, mostly because time to sit down at home with a book in my hands has been scarce lately. But when I do read, I highlight. A lot. 

On My Kindle:

The day of its release, Mary Beth went out and bought the hardback of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. She binge-read the whole thing in one sitting. Then, she left it in the living room for my other children to fight over--ahem--share. They tried. They really did. They read in shifts and did their very best. But there were six of them in the mix and sharing was not really workable. So, I caved in and bought the book on Kindle. I'm not a Harry fan, so I wasn't clamoring for my time. I decided instead to switch the Harry font to the dyslexia option on my Paperwhite and give Katie a fighting chance to read it with the rest of them. It's slow going, but she's getting through. That means my Kindle time is very limited, because it's not tucked in my purse and at the ready wherever I go. 

I'll take it with me on Thursday, though, when Karoline has a series of appointments to see about releasing her leg from this cast. I'm sure that the wait time will allow me to finish Shauna Niequist's Bittersweet. I have really, really loved this one and when I finish, I'll find her new book, Present Over Perfect, waiting for me in my library because I pre-ordered it ages ago and it released today! Pretty much perfect, I think. Shauna's prose is thoughtful and articulate and her thoughts run deep and true. I think a book whose subtitle is Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living is exactly what my end-of-summer wants.

In my earbuds:

Truly, most of the reading action is happening on audio! I'm logging 7-10 miles a day these days walking and the girls and I have taken some long car trips. So, lots of listening. 

First, with the girls. We listened to From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler on the way to Charlottesville last weekend. We all enjoyed it. I remember loving it as a kid. I only liked it this time around. But my little girls were definitely enchanted by the idea of hiding out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several days and we are planning a trip to the nearby National Gallery of Art really soon.  

On the way home from Charlottesville, we started Miracles on Maple Hill, and this time, I remembered why I loved a book the first time. We haven't yet finished. Probably, we will listen to the remainder on the way to the beach in a couple weeks. Then, I'll need to have another ready for the rest of the trip. Right now, I think my plan for them is Saving Lucas Biggs. I am a huge fan of Marisa de Los Santos' adult fiction. (I really need to devote a whole post to her.) I bought Connect the Stars, by Marisa de los Santos and her husband David Teague, for Katie last year, and she liked it. If the duration of our last car ride to the Outer Banks is any indicator of what's to come, this book will be just the right length on audio, after we finish Miracles on Maple Hill. Or, maybe we'll listen to Thimble Summer and I'll take the hardcover Connect the Stars with me to read on my own... I'm just not sure.

Just as Karoline finished the Harry Potter series, Sarah picked it up. She's alternating between reading on her own and reading along with the Audible version. She's bingeing in a big way and I have to sort of laugh a little when she's walking around the house playing to audio out loud and driving me a little crazy with the constant noise. She's her mother's daughter for sure. I know I could insist on earbuds, but really it's probably better she not have them in all the time. I'll have to sacrifice my quiet for her passion, I think.   

In my own listening, I finished a "re-read-listen" to Emily Freeman's Simply Tuesday  (via Audible this time around) and I just loved it. It hit me right where I am and I felt like I'd had several long phone conversations with a warm and wise friend. Then I listened to Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, by Anne Lamott. I really like this book and I've marked several pithy quotes in the Audible app. I highly recommend the book, especially if you feel like your life is unraveling a bit or if you've lived with people who struggle with mental health issues or addiction. I do not, however, recommend the Audible version. It's read by the author, so it's hard for me to say that her inflection and cadence were all wrong. After all, they're her words. She can say them exactly how she wants them to be heard. But as much as Annie is a beautiful poet and a philosopher, I just don't think public speaking/reading is her gift.

After Stitches, I started listening to Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age. This is a topic about which I am passionate. I watch how handicapped my children are as they try to  navigate relationships in a world dominated by digital communication. I mourn for the lost art of conversation. I literally lose sleep worrying about what this all means, particularly as a I launch a whole bunch of kids into the stage of life where they are meeting and engaging with people who will become life partners. So far, this book is meeting me where I am, with some very specific observations that are spot-on regarding the crisis (yes, crisis) and some strategies for solutions. Well worth the listen.

I'm also listening to Last Child in the Woods. This was an impulse buy, prompted by one of many walks in the woods this summer. I've read this book, but I feel like I might have lost touch with its message. I'm revisiting it to be re-inspired because I need the woods and it's never good if I spend more than a few days away. 

Oh! And speaking of audiobooks... I recently discovered Overcast, an app for listening to podcasts (without using gobs of data). Because of Overcast, I've started listening to podcasts again. I'd taken a couple years off--just too much input. Recently, I'm catching up on Anne Bogel's fairly new podcast, What Should I Read Next. The conversations are so engaging and I usually find several book recommendations I'm wanting to try. This morning, though, I was utterly enchanted. If you're a fan of audiobooks, you have to listen to her Episode 31, with Adam Verner. He's a narrator for audiobooks and his insight into that art was fascinating. I highly recommend all her podcasts. Your "To Be Read" list will never end. 

Okay, that's it for now. I need to post this before I have to add to the list again to keep it current:-).