Month: August 2018

I was recently travelling on 80 through Indiana and I stopped at a rest stop for obvious reasons. I am a patron of Starbucks and I needed to refresh my caffeine supply. So I got in line and checked my phone and after a few minutes realized I hadn’t moved, and that the person in front of me was highly agitated.

The staff there was clearly inexperienced (I am being nice). They were trying, all 3 of them, to negotiate an unusual method of payment on their register, and as they explained in a way that made no sense what was happening, the person in front of me was turning shades of red. Finally the crisis passed and more orders were taken.

But by then the line was long, they didn’t know how to work the microwave, not sure about how to make some of the drinks. Painfully slowly the very long line moved along. There was a young woman, obviously a college student travelling with her family, who was waiting the longest. Her father kept encouraging her to complain, and her response was “I trust the system.”

All of the older adults knowingly rolled their eyes. Trusting the system. Nope. Never a good idea. In the end it turned out there were three of us waiting for a chai we had each ordered in a particular way. The barrista managed to make a chai that none of us had ordered. I took it, told the barrista about the patient and trusting young woman, and made a run for it.

And as my passengers snoozed I thought about trust, and trusting systems, and how much I admired the faith and hope of that young woman. I do not trust the system, but I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I also think we have to be savvy evaluators, and use our Christian values as a litmus test to every situation.

So when I am determining, discerning, the good of a situation, I am holding up Gospel values—is this situation life-giving, compassionate, respectful of all people? How would I behave if Jesus were there? Is there a victim, and if so, how do we advocate for those who are being hurt? I wanted to say to that young woman, have your wonderful attitude, and be open to intervening for justice. Or in this case, her overdue chai.

Recently I was at a training on Nonviolent Communication. When we think of violence we usually think of physical violence, but emotional violence has an even more insidious impact, and many times that is spoken. We call names a lot in our culture, and that is getting more and more brutal. We have to be careful about the spiritual damage we do to ourselves when we are violent to others.

However I have been thinking about the violence we do to ourselves. We do not take very good care of ourselves most of the time. We overwork. We don’t sleep enough. We worry. We eat too many carbs and drink too much of things that are not good for us. We are constantly evaluating ourselves against others—do I look better, am I smarter, am I nicer, do I have more overachieving children????  You can tell me you don’t do this, but on some level I would bet you do.

What I would like us to pay attention to is how we talk to ourselves. Not do you mumble about where you left the remote or yell at the radio news when there is no one else in the car. I am referring to how you refer to yourself. Example-when I was mad at myself I used to call myself cat-tastrophe.  Get it?  Last name Catinella? Clever right?  Sometimes I was even more blunt, idiot being my preferred slight to myself.

At some point I realized that calling myself names wasn’t helpful. In fact, it didn’t motivate me, it just made me feel worse. I know when I have screwed up. What I need, from myself, is the belief that I can do better. And with God’s help all things are possible.

Now I don’t really call myself anything, but I do try to give myself positive messages and self talk. “You can do it. It will go better next time. You can feel appropriately proud of what you have just accomplished.” I try to acknowledge, usually pray for, other people who have helped me, inspired me, motivated me. In general I try to encourage my best self.

And it really does make a difference. I encourage you to pay attention to how you talk to yourself, how you refer to yourself, and make sure you are being as healthy and positive as possible. God resides within us, and we can engage God in helping us be a sign of love in the world. We have to love ourselves first though.

Lauren’s Song

the light has passed

but green is evident

and gold

and the stop sign

at the end of the road

the neighbor girl is singing

barefoot on the grass

“alleluia

alleluia”

karen

The room was empty, except for this prayer card taped to the wall. Somehow in the emptiness she beckoned me from the dark hallway. Come pray with me for a second. Come reflect on the gravity of finding me in this lonely space.

I walked across the now empty patient room, broken glass crunched under my feet, smashed light fixtures hung from the walls, paint peeled in long strips from the ceiling, an empty broken place and yet there she was, waiting.

Without thinking, I crossed myself and recited her prayer. A prayer I learned so long ago in grade school was instantly escaping from my lips.

Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.
Holy Mary Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Amen.

Never did this prayer have more weight than in those few moments, standing alone in an abandon Veterans Hospital. I prayed for whomever had taped her to the wall. I prayed that they were healed, recovered, or at peace. I prayed for our broken world and the things we leave undone or abandon.

I reached out and touched Mary’s face. I thought about liberating her from this space. Yet, I resisted the urge to peel her from the wall and take her home. It didn’t feel right to leave her to be destroyed when this building is demolished in a few short months. Yet it didn’t feel right to remove her. This was her home, her sacred space, where she provided comfort to a veteran.

I walked out of that room feeling the power that our faith tradition bring us through prayer. I felt the comfort that only God can bring to us when we are truly lost in an empty, lonely place. I felt a connection to the veteran that stayed in that room. All from a prayer card taped to the wall. A solid reminder that we, as Christians, are all one.

That day I drove for ten hours. I zig-zagged across the northern edge of Ohio four times. I spent 35 dollars on tolls, sat in traffic behind an accident, and drove through flooding-condition rain. Oh, and I dropped off my first-born son at college that day. It was a day among days.

We began with a packed car and high hopes, my son and I. A three-hour drive ahead, he took the wheel, and I set about the task of putting the screen protector and case onto the 2-day-old laptop. Hopes were crushed early; the computer would not boot. A windows icon, then a black screen. I quickly googled the fixes, tried the five surefire ways to reboot or restart your system, pressing start buttons and volume buttons together and in fancy sequences. None worked.

As we arrived at the dorm for move-in, the unresponsive computer loomed in my mind. We unpacked, chatted with staff, but finished early and went to the college store that shipped the laptop. Same results–buttons and sequences and a looming black screen. We arrived late to the luncheon where my son ate while I phoned Microsoft Tech support and pushed the same series of buttons to the same unsuccessful end.

Frustration mounting, the choice emerged:  I could wait a week for the local store to diagnose, ship, repair and return, or travel two hours away to the retail store for a possible exchange. I hastily hugged my kid (hardly the emotional parting that I had envisioned that morning) and told him I would see him in five hours.

The rain started one hour in–buckets of water on my windshield in single-lane construction with hydroplaning. I called the Microsoft hotline twice to push back my appointment, and finally arrived, dripping, to the mall lobby. The saleswoman met me at the entrance, and I don’t even remember what I said: probably rambling chatter about how I was not going to leave the building without a working computer, and that I had dropped off my kid at college that day. While I imagine myself to be a composed, in-charge, confident customer, I am sure that I was a frazzled mess. She led me to the service area, and asked a simple question that I am sure she was trained to ask: “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Had I not held onto the last of my composure, I am sure I would have burst into tears.. Instead I said, “My God, yes.” She asked me about how I took it, led me to a chair, and brought me coffee and creamer and a container of sugar, laid the array before me and smiled. In that moment, that cup of coffee, that kindness, that caretaking was world-changing. In a day where I was the mom, I was the computer tech, I was the organizer of college stuff, I was able to take a breath and switch roles. I was no longer responsible for it all, and for an hour, this stranger shouldered my stress in that cup.

And she will probably never know what she did. While it is easy to get cynical about corporate sales pitches and forced hospitality, none of that mattered. Instead, her smile, her kindness mattered. They mattered deeply. And I wonder how often this moment happens. Times where a kind word, a kind gesture, an often-practiced polite gesture can drastically change the trajectory of a person’s day. And how often, in the giving, we don’t even know that it happened.

I’ve come to understand that God calls us to be deliberate, to be intentional about our kindnesses. To practice kindness in our daily life and work–that this is part of the “the work that [God] has given us to do.” Those small gifts that we give one another are truly part of our call to be “faithful witnesses,” even when we may never know that others have seen the face of God in our actions, especially when we don’t know where this intentional kindness may lead another person.

I received another gift that day. Joseph, the Microsoft tech, swapped out the computer without the infuriating series of tests. He simply said, “Give me that glitchy computer. It is Microsoft’s problem now.” He proceeded to spend the extra time setting up my son’s laptop, and I drove back to the university refreshed. Mind you, the drive was grueling, and I was worthless the entire next day, but amid one of my worst days, that coffee was indeed spiritual food.