spirituality

the only constant

amybiancolli Albany, beauty, random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized 8 Comments

⊄

A little over two weeks ago, I said goodbye to my job with the Times Union. In nine days, I start another one with the nonprofit webzine MadinAmerica.com. 

So I’m in limbo. And  limbo feels strange. Limbo always feels strange, hovering between the last leg of the journey and the next one, between the past I know and the future I can’t, between all the rich and crazy chapters that came before and the Lord-only-knows what and how many lie ahead. And by “limbo” I don’t mean either ye olde celestial abode for the unbaptized innocent or the bendy Caribbean dance I have never and will never attempt. Not with my knees. That’s a future I can see. I also don’t mean to imply that there’s anything negative in this limbo, that I’m hanging out in some nasty patch of oblivion and neglect.

I’m just not where I was or where I will be, and I can’t see around the bend. But can I ever? Isn’t something beautiful or odd or agonizing or potentially batshit always up ahead? Life dishes out the unexpected no matter what we do to guard against it, and no matter how many months in advance we make our dental appointments. I can say I’m about to start a new job next week, and right now that’s the plan, but what if a meteor slams into my roof? What if lobster-shaped aliens land in Albany and beam me onto a giant ship filled with corn and boiled potatoes? Don’t laugh. It could happen. Weirder things have.

Acting on faith, whether your creed is a question of religion or life itself, means making plans in the hope they might be realized and the understanding they might not. “Hope for the best, expect the worst,” as my surrogate dad Dan used to say, and let me tell you, he knew both. “The only constant in life is change,” said Heraclitus, whom I did not know personally. Or as my late husband Chris used to put it: “God can only help us in the present.” Not back there in the before-time. Not up ahead. Right here, as this second spills into the next one.

All we have is now. All I have, as I type this, is the chirp of sparrows in my tiny, leafy backyard and the sun that dapples the grass. I have my health. I have my hands. I have my nutball cats on the porch. I have my wonderful son working on a piece of furniture in the basement. I have my amazing daughters in Brooklyn and Detroit. I have the sweet man I’m blessed to call mine preparing to come over in an hour. I have my neighbors, my family, my pals, the bustling, friendly streets that I call home, and all the many gifts that fill this interesting corner of the world.

I look up at the sky and watch the clouds drifting east. I hear crickets. I hear a jet moving north, then a mourning dove sings its eulogy from the huge silver maple arching above me. Then a flutter of wings somewhere. A mewling sound from some agitated little scamp, probably a squirrel. Leaves rustle. A grackle lands on a bush, then flies away. The mourning dove sings again, the clouds cover the sun and drift on again, and the crickets just keep at it.

This is limbo. This is change. This is the moment that is no longer, and then this is the moment that is no longer, and then this and then this and then this. It’s all fleeting. It’s all cause for gratitude. So I look at the life behind me and say, Thank God. I look at the life ahead of me and say, Thank God. I look at the life before me now and say, Thank God.

And then, once I say it, it’s behind me.

faith, fear of death, and fatheads

amybiancolli random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized 17 Comments

Lately I’ve been dumbstruck, and not in a good way, by some of the sentiments expressed on social media regarding:

A) God

B) Faith

C) Death

According to certain factions in conservative Christianity, we who are worried about COVID-19 should just calm down and stop whining about masks and stuff because, to quote one adherent of this view, “Living in fear of death is no way to live life.” This particular fathead referred to people upset about the mounting death toll as “the Corona SS” and then added, just for good measure: “I’ll be happy to tell you about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ if you fear death.”

Okay. Okay. (Fans face in futile attempt to calm down.) Okay. FIRST OF ALL, I have to state flat-out that NOT ALL CHRISTIANS ARE FATHEADS. Not all of us are anti-science, and not all of us are convinced that the best response to a pandemic is to pretend that it isn’t happening and then tell everyone who’s trying to take precautions that they’re all Godless Nazi twits who should shut up and find the Lord, and, you know, SO WHAT if thousands upon thousands of people are dying horrific preventable deaths.

Excuse me, but THIS MAKES ME WANT TO JUMP UP AND DOWN SCREAMING UNTIL MY DOLLAR-STORE READING GLASSES FLY OFF MY NOSE.

Okay. (Fans face again.) Okay. I would like to take this occasion to state flat-out that I believe in:

A) God

B) Jesus and

C) Masks

Yes! All three! I know, shocking, isn’t it? Even more shocking, I am a huge, HUGE fan of:

D) Fearing Death

Let me explain myself. (Clears throat, pulls mic close to mouth.) I believe that the Someone Out There who made us actually wants us to live — and wants us to want to live. I believe our fear of death is God-given, instilled in us to keep us here and keep us striving despite all the sacks of crap that are thrown our way.

Life is a gift, but it’s hard. IT’S HARD. I say this as a person of faith and one who has lost too many loved ones to suicide, my husband and sister included. I know they wanted to live — or, again, wanted to want to live. They fought to remain here with every ounce of their beings, and they did so with the faith that God was present in their pain. But the pain became too much. Fear of death became secondary. And I lost them.

SO DON’T TELL ME I SHOULDN’T FEAR DEATH, MR. FATHEAD. Don’t tell me this fear springs from a lack of faith — whether in God, or in life. That fear is a gift. That fear pushes me to treasure this time I have on earth, these hugs I share with my dear ones, these moments of light and beauty and laughter that dapple the craziness. That fear lends urgency to this life, defines its boundaries, inspires all of us to live and give and love and heal in spite of it — knowing we’re not here for long, groping for answers we know we might not find.

And since we’re on the subject of Our Lord and Savior, I just gotta add one point: EVEN JESUS WANTED TO LIVE. (Shakes fist, thumps bible, adjusts dollar-store reading glasses.) In the Garden of Gethsemane he grappled alone, in agony, in the dark, with his own fear of death. I am baffled why any professed follower of Christ would gloss over this little moment, because that’s why his sacrifice meant something. Meant everything. Meant the literal and figurative world. He gave himself to God, and to us, despite his own urge to let the cup pass him by. It’s kinda, you know, the point.

Does that sacrifice mean the rest of us shouldn’t fear death? Nope. It means WE SHOULDN’T TAKE ANY OF THIS FOR GRANTED. It means we should live and give and love and heal the way Jesus told us to live and give and love and heal: With absolute awareness that we aren’t here for long. With the sense and conviction that death is around the bend, and every sacrifice matters, every gesture of love and generous impulse. With the stubbornness within that says life is worth living even when it hurts like hell.

We’re here now. Let’s cherish what we have, do what we can, and take care of each other.

(Straps on mask.)

 

 

 

 

the circle

amybiancolli love, random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized 13 Comments

I think I have discovered the highest good. It is love. This principle stands at the center of the cosmos. 

-Martin Luther King

Not long ago, an image flashed into my brain that I just couldn’t shake. I kept coming back to it, wrestling with its implications, wondering if I’d finally found a way to illustrate — to myself, at least — my understanding of love and God, my confusion and dismay at the hateful partitions that divide us, my own imperfect faith and my stumbling movement forward in my efforts to do right. Then today at Mass, the King quote popped up in a visiting pastor’s homily on love, and the image flashed in my mind again, almost cinematic in its scope and detail.

This is it:

We are all in a circle as wide as humanity itself. Imagine a field with tall grass and a shadow of mountains ringing the horizon. Imagine a light breeze with a scent of earth. And imagine, at the center, the wellspring of all love in the universe. Some of us call this center God; some of us call it goodness, or kindness, or the guiding principles of life. The name we give it doesn’t matter. But it’s the same beaming nucleus for us all, the same source and impulse to love that warms us and draws us forward.

We spend our lives walking toward the middle, or we should. To our right and to our left are our loved ones, holding hands as we take each hesitant step. Beyond them are those we know not quite as well, maybe love a little less. Beyond them are those we don’t know but see as equals. Farthest away, on the other side of this colossal circle, are those we might not even recognize as human: We can’t see their faces, after all. We can’t see the light reflected in their features — the warmth in their eyes, the gentleness in their bodies as they lean to help their neighbors. So we judge them. Fear them. Demonize them as the Other.

Only when we walk toward the center of the circle, pulled by love, does the distance between us shrink and we see their faces in the light. The closer we get, the clearer they become, and those faraway masses cease to be strangers. We see the fullness of their humanity and wonder why we failed to see it before, why we thought they were different, why we judged and feared and demonized.

I made a fumbling stab at expressing all of this after church, when I spoke to the visitor who’d delivered the remarks quoting King: the Rev. Daniel Carson of the First Reformed Church in Schenectady. I found him, thanked him, told him my story, told him about my image of the circle, told him I’d grown up in an atheistic/agnostic family and converted to Catholicism 30 years ago this spring. Told him, too, that I’d never understood the urge to erect so many walls. We’re all in this together. We’re all following the same light.

Believing in God means believing in love —  but saying we love is one thing. Moving toward it is critical, and not only because we long to be closer to the source; because it brings us closer to each other. Sometimes we lose sight of the love that binds and beckons, and we fail, we fall, we turn away. But as Martin Luther King reminded us — reminds us, still, from his place at the center of the cosmos — we can always turn back.

Because the love is there. It’s real. No matter what we call it, it calls to us at our places in the circle. And we walk.

(Stock image from dreamstime.com)

 

listen, papa: let priests marry

amybiancolli spirituality 16 Comments

So Pope Francis has called for an “all-out battle” against clerical sex abuse — no specifics on what the battle would entail, but it’s a start. As a lowly Catholic laywoman who’s all but voiceless in the church, I urge Il Papa and everyone with a say in the hierarchy to consider the following:

Let priests marry.

Maybe not all of them will want to; maybe some will choose to take a vow of celibacy. If they’re called to it, they should. When news of the scourge first broke in the early 2000s, a lot of people questioned whether the vow itself was the problem — whether a life of sexual abstinence inevitably led its practitioners toward a twisted and criminal dark side. I didn’t believe that then. I don’t now.

But I do believe we would all be better off in a church with married priests. To me, the problem with the church then, the problem with the church now, and the problem with the church’s history of covering up abuse and shuffling around the molesting clerics all boils down to this: No one in the hierarchy is a parent.

If parents had been in charge? No way in hell all of those monstrous priests would have been reassigned. The bulk would have been fired, defrocked, excommunicated, busted, brought up on charges and kicked on their asses into prison. There would have been some small sense of moral reckoning, not this lingering, decades-long suspicion that too many higher-ups in the Catholic Church just didn’t get it and never would.

Part of the problem has always been the boys-club element, the No Girls Allowed, and I’m with everyone who calls for women in the priesthood. The novelist Alice McDermott has a brilliant piece in The New York Times  advocating for same. “For the male leaders of the Catholic Church, the lives of women and children become secondary to the concerns of the more worthy, the more powerful, the more essential person — the male person, themselves,” she writes. “The Catholic Church needs to correct this moral error.”

And I agree. Wholeheartedly. Had women occupied the Vatican, the bishoprics and the rectories around the world, there’s a chance that at least some of those outrages might not have occurred. There’s also a chance that abusive priests might have been reported to the police.

But I also feel that this isn’t a man/woman issue. This is a life/love issue. It’s a matter of engagement in one of life’s most mundane and sacred mysteries — raising children — and the ferocious love engendered by it. How can an institution comprehend the divine if it isn’t fully human? Wouldn’t the church be wiser and more loving if a few of the folks in charge truly understood what it means to be a father or a mother?

Parents know that nothing matters more than a child’s well being. Parents know their mission on earth is to protect them. Parents know the madness of loving a child, the joy of loving a child, the fierceness of loving a child, the single-mindedness of loving child, the frustration of loving a child, the incomprehensible, inexplicable, sublime and mind-altering hugeness of loving a child.

I’ve been Catholic for almost 29 years now. Despite the church’s problems and my various disagreements with it, I still attend weekly Mass. I still receive the Eucharist, which inspired me to convert in the first place. But I never felt closer to God than I did when giving birth. I never felt more at one with the body of Christ or the sisterhood of humanity, and I never felt more humbled and awed. My kids are now 25, 23 and 18. I’m still awed. My love for them still brings me closer to God.

When they were little, I always told them this: There’ll be married priests in my lifetime, women priests in yours. I still sticking with my prediction, but I’m 55 now, and I’d rather not push it.

Married priests now, Papa. Please.

fear, love and the jesus i follow

amybiancolli random philosophizing, spirituality 7 Comments

I can’t stop thinking about Jesus. No, this isn’t normal. Yes, I’m a churchgoing Catholic, but I am not that holy. Lately, however, I’ve been envisioning my Lord and savior slumped in the kitchen over his iPhone as he scrolls through the news: xenophobia, Islamophobia, fear of the immigrant, fear of the Other, loathing of all, so much of it fomented by those who call themselves Christian. And as he reads, he’s yanking at his hair and yelling, DIDN’T THEY LISTEN TO ANYTHING I SAID?!?!

Backtrack a week or so to my participation in the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., where I met this guy holding a sign intended to bring people to Christ. We didn’t exchange names, so I’ll just call him The Evangelist. He was hefting a sign emblazoned with scripture: “Jesus Said ‘Unless A Man is Born Again He Can Not See the Kingdom of God.’ John 3:3.”

jesus-signHmmm, I thought. That won’t do. That won’t persuade anyone to leave their nets and follow Him. Not in this crowd.

So I went up to the guy.

ME: Hey, there.

THE EVANGELIST: Hello.

ME: I’m a Christian. A Catholic. And it’s good you’re here. But I gotta tell you, you won’t be making a lot of converts with that sign today.

THE EVANGELIST: ??

ME: The translation. You should have used a different translation. One that doesn’t use the word “man.” Especially today. (Gesturing at the crowd.) Here. Now. At the Women’s March.

THE EVANGELIST: ??

ME: I’m just saying you might want to find a Sharpie and scratch out the word “man.” Replace it with “person.” Or add “woman.” Or something. Because you’re at the WOMEN’S MARCH, right? Which is about including people, not leaving anyone out. And the translation you’re using leaves people out.

THE EVANGELIST: I’m sorry you were offended.

ME: No no no! I’m not offended! I’m trying to do you a favor. I told you, I’m a Christian. But the thing about Christ: He didn’t leave anyone out. His message was meant for everyone, right? Isn’t that the point? Everyone? So, look, if you can just find a Sharpie, and. . .

THE EVANGELIST: I’m sorry you were offended.

And that was that. I gave up.

Afterward, I wondered about these habits of exclusion, small and large — not just the one guy, with his one sign, but all the myriad ways that people of faith can wall off entire populations. When my fellow Christians do it,  it drives me bonkers. Jesus was really, really, REALLY clear about this: He came as a messenger, as a reconciler, as a literal, physical embodiment of God’s love — and he came for every last one of us broken people. We’re all broken. We’re all loved. We’re called to love each other in our brokenness. It’s that simple.

And yet this simple truth gets twisted in service to — what? Self-righteousness? Tribalism? Nationalism? Fear? Consider Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Neither Jew nor Gentile. Nor Muslim. Nor refugee. Nor Mexican.  Nor anyone or anything else.

Or consider the parable of the good Samaritan, the stranger who came to the aid of a beaten traveler. Imagine how unlikely — outrageous — that story must have seemed when Jesus first told it. Samaritans and Jews did not get along. They did not chit-chat about football and kids over the backyard fence. In fact, they loathed one another. But that was exactly the point: human boundaries and prejudices don’t matter, in the end. Anyone who helps and carries another is a good neighbor. Jesus razed barriers. He didn’t build them.

I’m no theologian, and I’m certainly no saint. But the Jesus I follow calls me to love, not hate. To include, not exclude. To see the light in others, not deny it or ignore it or disparage it as darkness.

Jesus didn’t wall people off. Christians shouldn’t, either.

the view from here

amybiancolli beauty, random philosophizing, spirituality 5 Comments

view from hadley

Today, for Mother’s Day, my two youngest and I hiked up Hadley in the lower Adirondacks. It’s not a big mountain, not a long hike, not at all difficult or dangerous. But it was enough of an expedition to make us feel as though we’d gotten out into fresh air and sunshine, and it was enough of an exertion to work up a decent sweat. It was also plenty windy. At the summit, buffeted by wild, chilly gusts, we stayed just long enough to snap a few photos and peer up the fire tower (nope, no climbing that, not today, not without flying away like gum wrappers in the wind) before skedaddling back down the trail.

We last hiked Hadley as a family of five several years ago, back when my youngest was wee, my oldest was home and my husband was still among the living. To say I recalled him — and the family we once were — as I hoofed up and down today is to state the obvious. Of course I remembered him. I see him everywhere we ever went together. And of course I remembered our children in their younger days. How could I not? Being a parent means seeing children with eyes that view the past as well as the present, flashing back through earlier incarnations (baby, toddler, kindergartner, middle schooler) while regarding the fully formed creatures before us with love, admiration, worry, gratitude and something close to shock. How the heck did that happen?

My oldest daughter couldn’t hike with us today, because she’s about to graduate from college. That statement is so outrageous, I have to re-type it in all caps. SHE’S ABOUT TO GRADUATE FROM COLLEGE. How the heck did that happen? My younger daughter just came back from volunteering in Australia. How the heck did that happen? How the heck is my son about to finish his second year of high school? How the heck did I give birth to three such colossally spirited, resilient, interesting, good, compassionate, loving, intrepid souls?

It’s a mystery, just as every gift is a mystery. So is every loss. God only knows why anything happens to anybody, and I mean that literally.  All I know is this: I loved their father. Because I loved their father, these three people sprang into being. Because they sprang into being, the mother I am sprang into being. Every fumbling step I’ve made through parenthood sprang into being, too. Every decision I’ve made. Every mistake. Every moment of pain, frustration, insight, joy. Every piece of who I am now, who they are now, who they might be next week or next month or next year. All of that transcends time, transcends space, transcends any comprehension of the cosmos as finite or linear or in any way confined by my puny capacity to understand it.

My kids embody all of that. They give shape and sense to things too misty to grasp: the love of God, the looping movement of days, the sense of blindly hiking through a thickening fog to an unknown summit. I can’t and don’t know squat, really. Who does? What can we know in this life beyond the value of the people walking beside us?

Looking out from the top of Hadley, I saw the rolling peaks, the bundling clouds, the elbowing curves of the Great Sacandaga Lake.

Looking over at my children, I saw love.

 

 

not alone at being alone

amybiancolli beauty, random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized, writing 8 Comments

prairie pano
I often feel alone. And not just when I’m writing, which is usually, and which must rank as one of the most isolating occupations devised by humankind, right up there with oil-rig roustabout and Byzantine hermit. I can feel alone even when surrounded by people I love, and I’m blessed to have a lot of those. I can be having the bestest time with the wonderfulest friends and family — I can be gabbing, and laughing, and thanking the Lord for all the gifts in my life, fully in the moment and profoundly joyful — and all the while, deep down, a little hidden piece of me feels an awkward disconnect. Feels adrift, insecure, unsure, invalid. Alone.

As a former introvert turned “ambivert,” whatever the heck that means, maybe this is my natural state. Maybe I’m always beating back a sense of isolation. But who isn’t? Who doesn’t feel alone? And wouldn’t it be weird if we didn’t?  Look at us, steering through life in bodies as self-contained and alienating as cars with tinted windows, unable to see behind the windshield and fretting that no one can see us, either. How easy it is to grumble with resentment — nobody understands me! nobody knows me! nobody cares! — and fire off middle fingers into the darkness.

As a person of faith, I believe I came from a Somewhere without boundaries and misunderstandings, where I’m known and know and loved and love with clarity, transparency and ecstatic peace. I believe that I’ll return to that Somewhere someday, and I believe that when I do, I’ll reunite with a fine horde of loved ones who unfortunately arrived well in advance. I also believe I’ll shed any nagging pang of solitude or separation — from them, from God, from creation at large.

You know that pang, whether you believe in a creator or not: It’s that ache you feel when you encounter the sublime. It’s the rift that hurts — the impassable gap that we all yearn to cross and become one, at last, with beauty. We want to crawl inside it. We want to know it, merge with it, be with it, whether it’s a breathtaking vista, a swell of Beethoven or an immortal beloved.

This is the strange pull of our lives, longing for a union we can’t quite achieve. We brush tantalizingly close. We make love and babies, love our babies into adults, say goodbye and squat in our emptied nests. We bury spouses and sisters and parents and friends.

The truth of being human plays out like a lie. We’re called to push ourselves outward, to share ourselves wholly, to embrace without judgement, to know and be known, to love and be loved, to do all of that perfectly, fearlessly, generously, completely, divinely, repeatedly — all while knowing we’re bound to fail. Fail we do. What choice do we have? The game is rigged, right? But then we turn right around and do it again, beating back loneliness the only way possible: by tempting its onset. In an effort to assuage it, we risk more.

Fun paradox.

So here I am, squirreled away in my attic on the last day of 2015, busily isolating myself at my chosen profession, counting my multitudinous blessings and the bounty of love in my wee world. I have so many causes for gratitude, so many beautiful reasons not to feel alone. The fact that I do anyway doesn’t mean I’m wrong; it just means I’m human. Happy New Year from across the abyss.

things unseen

amybiancolli random philosophizing, spirituality 5 Comments

36th floor
Periodically, someone suggests that my faith is a comfort to me, and I find myself explaining that, no, it isn’t. And I wonder why. I wonder whether I would feel any differently about anything that’s happened to me so far in this rather eventful life of mine had I experienced it from an angle of atheism — an outlook I last took as a kid. By the time I’d reached my teenage years, I believed in Someone. By the time I graduated high school, I was generically Christian. In my 20s, I felt bound for Catholicism, finally converting in the spring of 1990.

I am not sure, at any point, whether my faith gave me comfort. It gave me a way of seeing the world, maybe, a practiced mode of regarding both the good and the ill. The world was of God, and so was I; that I saw. I also saw that it, and I, were flawed, that everyone is, that all are capable of wreaking horror and beauty both, that tragedy can strike any little life at any time, and that none of us, no matter how closely we look, can ever understand why. Understanding why means understanding the mind of God, and we can’t understand that. We can’t even understand each other. If that were possible, I could crawl inside your brain case and peer outside, blinking at the suddenly altered perspective and suddenly changed light, seeing and thinking and feeling all that you see and think and feel.

But I can’t do that. I can try to do that, and the trying amounts to empathy; and the empathy amounts to love. Maybe that’s all we can manage, the love. Maybe that’s all we can know of God, too. Maybe that’s all we need to.

When I look out from my shortish vantage of an aging mother with whitish hair, I see everything I don’t and can’t possibly know. That’s what my faith gives me: a grasp on the vastness of God’s creation, not just the cosmos, with its order and forces and distant, starry masses, but everything betwixt and beyond it — something darker and less-knowable than even the dark matter and energy that fill most of the universe. From this great Unknown and Unseen comes the joy of loving and the grief of losing, for neither has logic in the known and seen. What I know most of all, in loving God, is the realization that I don’t know anything at all, really. But God does. That’s the essence of my faith, and it doesn’t make burying a loved one any easier. It doesn’t give me comfort. It gives me a posture of alertness, a reason to pay attention, a way to face the agonies and the ecstasies of life so I can move on to the next one. I see so little when I open my eyes. All I can know is that I can’t.

tonight at the table

amybiancolli spirituality 8 Comments

On this blustery Holy Saturday, sun fighting with clouds, warmth fighting with wind, I’m thinking about what a holy human mess I am. How I always was and always will be. And why, 25 years ago, I became Catholic at the Easter Vigil service in a now-shuttered parish in Cambridge, Mass.

I became Catholic not because of the Church, a human structure built on faith but prone to error. I became Catholic because I’m prone to error, too, and because of that, I need the Eucharist. I became Catholic because I believed in God — something I started doing as a kid — and because I believed in Christ — something I started doing a teenager — and because I had come to believe that the Eucharist was the singular, unchanged, inclusive and binding force between Jesus and every messy child of God born before and since.

The Lord’s supper drew me. It’s not that I felt worthy of it; I felt as unworthy as anyone. But I was convinced that the gift of Jesus, by Jesus, at the table with Jesus, was meant to make things right for all of us, whether we choose to pull up a chair or not. “Christ died for the ungodly,” Paul wrote. Also: “In Christ there is no East or West.” Or gay or straight or poor or rich or imprisoned or free or black or brown or white.

How easy to forget this in our passion for pushing away anyone who doesn’t fit our notion of right, normal, acceptable, traditional, perfect. I’m baffled and angered by the behavior and beliefs of Christians who cast others as Other, as though Jesus ever left anyone out. As though any kind of Other wasn’t loved by him. As though any of us is anything but.

I don’t think much about sin, but I know we’re all full of oddities and imperfections, and I’m pretty sure that God made us that way. He’s the omniscient one, right? He knows this about us. He knows we’re odd. I’m also pretty sure we aren’t expected to be perfect, however one might define such a thing. We’re called to try our best, to aim a little higher and love a little better, to offer a hand when someone stumbles and hold on gratefully whenever that someone’s us. This is the body of Christ, the literal and metaphoric corpus at the the table, the grip of love and unity designed to heal us all.

Christ was perfect; that’s enough. We’re not, so he is on our behalf. He represents! God sent us Jesus to handle that end of things, to be faultless because we can’t be, to be the ideal love that shows the way. Jesus came because we’re broken, not because we’re whole. He’ll be there tonight at the table. Twenty-five years later, so will I.
tree sky

re-re-re-re-re-re-re-birth

amybiancolli spirituality 2 Comments

photo (45)
We dogged Judeo-Christians like to think of ourselves as linear. IN THE BEGINNING! AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT! AND ON THE THIRD DAY! Even if we don’t take all that calendar-progression stuff literally (seriously, how long IS one of God’s days, anyway?), the Bible still piles on the highlights from one sequential event to another. So when we read about alternate, cyclical conceptions of time in other cultures and religions, we tend to think: Oooh-ee, wooh-eee, now THAT’S exotic! Just imagine! Time looping around for a re-do!

And then, lo and behold, Christians celebrate Christmas same time each year. Over and over, an unmarried teenager gets pregnant in the Middle East. Over and over, her boyfriend marries her anyway (a true miracle), and over and over, the impoverished, homeless, faithful couple wind up giving birth in a barn. And that’s not all that happens. When I attend midnight Mass, I can bank not only on Jesus’ birth but his entire Passion, too: the prayers that lead to the Eucharist mark his suffering, death and resurrection. Every Eucharist is a little Easter unto itself. And so, in the course of a single Christmas Mass, Jesus is born, eats his last meal with his friends, dies on the cross and rises again. That’s quite the life cycle.

Sometimes, sitting in Mass, I fall into a moment that feels like a snatch of timelessness, not a turn of a wheel, not a ticking second, but something illumined and profound. Believing, as I do, that God joined us and healed us in our brokenness the only way God could — by walking among us, drinking wine at our weddings and scraping his sandals in the dirt next to us until he bled and died — then why wouldn’t I also believe that he’s still here? In this very moment, and the next one, and the next? We’re still broken, right? We’re still walking. It’s not like we’ve perfected this mortal-living shtick of ours. We plod ahead with our blinders on, trying to see too far ahead and not pausing to feel the present. Why wouldn’t the God who’s always back for more just plod away beside us?

So Mary’s about to give birth. Jesus is about to arrive, howling for milk and warmth and love, finding it in the arms of his parents. He lives. He dies. He lives again. Amen, and Merry Christmas.