Author: simchajfisher

Raise your hand if you expected the Supreme Court’s response to the Little Sisters of the Poor case yesterday. No one, right? I know! I had very little hope that they would rule in favor of the sisters, and I didn’t expect any response at all until summer at the earliest.  There hasn’t been a decision yet, but they did basically ask the sisters, “Okay, fine, we’re out of ideas. What do you think would work?”

That’s no victory, of course, but it’s no defeat, either. A couple of things made me laugh as I was thinking over the situation. First, it looks like the GOP has accidentally blundered into a good deed for once. I had been so mad at them for refusing to even consider Merrick Garland. I get that they are super mad at Obama for being Obama, and I get that it’s super unfair that an outgoing president should get to exert such influence over the makeup of the court. But Garland was really the best that anyone could hope for, unless we think that Hillary or Trump were planning to use their necromancy skills to nominate zombie Scalia. Which they were not. The stonewalling was yet another example of the dysfunctional and spiteful short-sightedness of the party. It feels so good to lash out now, and who cares about next week? Bah. It’s like they’re all five years old.

But look what happened. The court was split 4-4 when the Little Sisters’ case came up, and if they couldn’t come to an agreement, then the decision would automatically bounce back down to the lower courts’ previous decisions, which is an inconsistent mess that was guaranteed to bubble back up to the supreme court again eventually. Nobody wants that. So the court was very motivated to search around for some kind of workable solution.

This brings me to the second thing that made me laugh yesterday. I realized that this is, in fact, the way the constitution was designed: to be so cumbersome and complicated that, out of sheer frustration, we sometimes get backed into doing the right thing. What a marvelous machine! It’s like a circuit breaker. We have this moment of panic when the lights go out, but then we realize that it’s better than the entire system getting fried. Turns out we can’t run the air conditioner and the space heater at the same time — and when you think about it, why would you want to? Pick one. What kind of house are we going to live in, hot or cold? Just stop and think, why don’t you?

This country isn’t over yet, and it’s our dysfunction that might actually save us. What do you know about that?

***

image of “Contemplation of Justice” photo By Daderot

Reminder! Friday is still within the Octave of Easter, and so it’s not a day of penance. There is no requirement to abstain from meat or make some other sacrifice. (Even the more stringent Catholics say so.) On the contrary, all the days within the Octave of Easter are solemnities, which means it’s time to feast.

So, meat it up! And thank God that we belong to a Church which teaches that the Beatific Vision is the most sublime experience of perfect happiness, and simultaneously thinks that we can rejoice in our Savior by having a big ol’ juicy steak. What a deal.

 

When I was pregnant with my Corrie, the doctors told us that she might have Down Syndrome or Trisomy 13. It wasn’t that she showed any clear symptoms, but more that she had certain traits which sometimes go along with these conditions. Modern technology and good insurance means you have to decide how much you want to know.

Spoiler for new readers: Corrie just turned 13 months old, and she has neither Down Syndrome nor Trisomy 13, nor any other abnormal condition besides an overwhelming enthusiasm for life that wears us out all day, every day. She was 10 lbs., 1 oz. at birth, and is now . . . glorious. She wears size 3T, she started walking at 7 months, she says at least a dozen words, she has a giant, heavy-headed mastiff wrapped around her finger. She tells baby jokes, manhandles us, and behaves like the healthy, beloved, cheerful little anarchist that she is. All is well.

But at the time, when the doctor took us aside for a special talk, we had no idea what we were facing. Naturally, we prayed that she would not have a condition that caused severe deformities and a likely early death. But a diagnosis of Down Syndrome was a slightly different question.

My husband and I had different responses. He is a crime reporter, and sees people mainly when their lives have gone horribly wrong.  His days were filled with families who routinely neglect and abuse even healthy, typical children, so you can imagine the dark life of a kid with special needs. He’s also more practical than I am, and was already thinking about how we could pay for special care, how we would fit yet another school system into our bonkers schedule, and how she would live after we died. For my husband, the possibility of a disability was an unmitigated disaster, a guarantee of suffering, and the only reasonable prayer was, “Please don’t let this happen.”

I was less fearful, but even at the time I was aware that my perspective was skewed, too. I spend so much time around pro-lifers, who in turn spend so much time pushing back against a monstrous eugenic tide. You hear so often about the delights and affections of children with Down Syndrome, you can almost get the idea that life with them is a walking dream, that their parents have won a golden opportunity to enjoy sunny childhood forever and ever with a sort of blessed, human Winnie-the-Pooh — a fantasy which is depersonalizing in its own way. People with Down Syndrome are not pro-life mascots or bunny rabbits or huggy-wuggy puppets; they’re people, with immortal souls and distinct personalities. And they often have myriad health problems which are anything but cute.

But I did know that, as we waited for the next doctor’s appointment, we weren’t waiting for something to happen to our child; we were waiting for a description of the way she already was. Above all, she was our child, our beloved. Months ago, as I set the timer for the pregnancy test, waiting for that second shadowy line to appear, I prepared my heart to embrace whatever was already true, and to focus all my emotional energy on being open, rather than wishing for one thing or the other. I wanted to be welcoming from the first moment. I did the same as we waited for our level two ultrasound appointment.

When the day came, we got a sitter, my husband took the day off work, and we drove up north to the hospital with the specialist who could peer into our baby’s shadowy insides and tell us what it all meant. First we met with a geneticist, who questioned us minutely about every inheritable abnormality both our families carried. I made sure she knew that there was no condition on earth that would make us even consider aborting our baby.

Then, I lay for a long time in the twilight of the ultrasound room as the technician probed and scanned and shoved my organs around, with none of the normal “Sorry about my cold hands!” or “I bet you have plenty of pink clothes already, huh?” She had to fight with the baby, who wanted to roll away and not reveal the secrets of her anatomy. Finally, the tech flicked on the light and told us, “You have a beautiful baby girl.” And smiled at us.

Yes? We already knew she was beautiful. All of our babies are beautiful. All of everyone’s babies are beautiful. I had seen her heart beating, beautifully. And then what?

Then we realized that she thought she had already given us a diagnosis. When she said, “You have a beautiful baby girl,” she was telling us, “Your child isn’t defective; instead, she is beautiful.” But seeing our still-expectant faces, she hastily elaborated that the baby showed no signs of any kind of abnormal condition. As far as she could tell, this baby was entirely physically healthy in every measurable way.

And that was that. I wanted to tell the technician, “We were ready, though! We already loved her.” I thought of how many times she must open the door of that dim room and let out parents who are crushed, grieving, already making plans to undo what was already true. Already making plans to stop a beautiful heart from beating.

It felt strange to be so relieved. How we burden ourselves, trying to show grace in carrying loads that haven’t been given to us.

There’s no tidy bow for this story. If our child had been born with and died from a severe birth defect, we’d still be mourning. If she had been born with a genetic abnormality, I suppose we’d still be in the early stages of learning how to care for her. As it is, she’s who she is, just like she would have been if she had been born with some grave defect. We did love her from the start, and we still do. Like all of our kids, she’s changed us. She’s brought joys and trials. We still have no idea what the future will hold, or how much heartache and pride she will bring us, or how she will live when we die. She is the light of our life, a life that is already full of light.

I’m writing this down not because I’ve learned anything, or really been through anything. I am grateful that I was given the grace to hold open the door of my heart from the beginning, loving her already in the twilight of uncertainty. No one can probe all the shadows and tell us what they mean, what they will mean. A heart that is open is a heart that can beat, and that is beautiful, beautiful enough.

 

from “East Coker,” from The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Holy Thursday is many things: the day of the Last Supper, the day when Christ was betrayed, the day when Christ washed the feet of His apostles. It was the day that Jesus instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. And it was the day that He instituted the sacrament of Holy Orders, giving the first priests the power to turn bread and wine into God, body, blood, soul and divinity.

A great day for humanity! So much help was poured out for us on that first Holy Thursday. In particular on this year, I’m grateful for our priests. I’m thinking of all the men who’ve poured out their lives for their flocks . . .

The priest who let me in in the middle of the night when I went for a hysterical walk across town and decided I needed to go to confession for the first time in years now now now. The priest who took us seriously as a dating couple and encouraged us to stay on track. The priest who thought some of my spiritual struggles might be physical, and told me which tests to ask for.  The priest who took over our parish when the pastor retired. The pastor who came back out of retirement to help the new pastor, because there weren’t enough priests to go around.

And all the hundreds and hundreds of priests who forgive our sins, baptize our children, bury our dead, officiate at our marriages, and bring us the Eucharist. All the priests who proclaim the gospel, who bless and encourage us, who counsel and comfort us. All the priests who sing, whether they can sing or not. The priests who fight a thousand spiritual and physical battles on our behalf. The priests who endure suspicion and ridicule from a jeering world, and criticism and grousing from their own people. The priests who are expected to know everything, fix everything, pay for everything, and please everyone. And yes, all the priests who are tired and grumpy sometimes, and who say the wrong thing, or miss opportunities, or make things worse because they are just men. Every single priest wakes up in the morning and see an impossible job in front of him, and he gets up and goes to work anyway.

We love you, our priests, and we are praying for you, especially during the glorious marathon of the Triduum.

A prayer for a priest from Catholic.org:

O Jesus, our great High Priest, Hear my humble prayers on behalf of your priest, Father [N]. Give him a deep faith, a bright and firm hope and a burning love which will ever increase in the course of his priestly life.
In his loneliness, comfort him In his sorrows, strengthen him In his frustrations, point out to him that it is through suffering that the soul is purified, and show him that he is needed by the Church, he is needed by souls, he is needed for the work of redemption.
O loving Mother Mary, Mother of Priests, take to your heart your son who is close to you because of his priestly ordination, and because of the power which he has received to carry on the work of Christ in a world which needs him so much.
Be his comfort, be his joy, be his strength, and especially help him to live and to defend the ideals of consecrated celibacy.
Amen.

***

Photo: By Matthias Ulrich. The original uploader was Matteo3000 at German Wikipedia – selber fotografiert, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19508162

“I’m waiting for marriage” for sex, say three young women interviewed in . . . Cosmopolitan? Yes, that Cosmopolitan, the pink trash women’s magazine that’s been screaming sad and ridiculous sex advice at supermarket shoppers for as long as we can remember.

Curiouser and curiouser, the abstinent women in the article aren’t presented as zealots, oddities, or hopeless naifs, and the premise isn’t “vigins are inherently laughable and undesirable.” They’re allowed to explain in their own words why they’re abstinent and how it plays out.  Here’s how the interviews are introduced:

Although Millennials are often criticized for just wanting to hook up, never falling in love, and never going on any actual dates, there are twentysomethings out there for whom dating is about everything but sex. Cosmopolitan.com spoke with three women in their early 20s who are waiting until marriage to have sex, and yes, they’re still going on dates, and yes, they’ve used Tinder.

But wait, it gets stranger! The first woman, “Sara,” 22, says,

“I decided I wanted to wait when I read St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. In it, he discusses how Christ loves us totally, definitely, and sacrificially through his body, and that is what sex was created for us to do as well — to love others totally, definitely, and sacrificially through out bodies.

 

I don’t care how many monkeys had how many typewriters: No one expects a Theology of the Body name drop in Cosmo, not without the influence of an Infinite Improbability Drive.

The third surprise? I’m not even actually that surprised. We’ve been slogging around in the sexual wilderness for long enough. The original generations who were so in love with Egypt’s fleshpots are starting to die out (or at least their relevance is), and the younger generations aren’t blind. At least some of them are looking around at the dust and the squalor, the disorder and the pain, and they’re thinking, “This is no way to live. Let’s see, what else is there?”

And they are discovering abstinence before marriage. They are discovering Natural Family Planning. They are discovering the sanctity of life.

I’m no pollyanna. The world is in bad shape, and I know it. But there is hope, too. Sanity still has a foothold, and the sane are gaining ground and telling their friends.

Lots of secular people really do want something more. This would be a great time to make sure your friends know they can come to you, as that one Catholic friend who’s happy to answer questions without being pushy or rude. This would be a great time to signal to a lost world that there really is something better than the sexual, ethical wilderness that tried so hard to brand itself as the promised land.

***

Image: Bart Everson / Flickr (Creative Commons)

The wise and lovely Daria Sockey said on Facebook this morning: “I will not read or share a single post about Donald Trump this week or next week. This week is too solemn, next will be too glorious for such activity.”

A wonderful idea, worth expanding. I resolve not to read or share anything, Trump-related or otherwise, that’s likely to encourage myself or anyone else to be nasty. What do you think? Want to join me?

You can decide how far you want to go. Maybe you will skip complaining, or skip criticizing . . . including criticizing yourself. Maybe you will only share positive news, thoughts, and images; or maybe you will still talk about sad or ugly things, but will strive to respond to them in the most productive way you can. Productive = likely to make the world better instead of worse. Kind of a basic Christian goal, but not an easy one.

Oh man, this means I’m going to have to swallow some very witty zingers, and I’ll miss out on some fascinating, invigorating debates.  I won’t get my share when the latest juicy outrage bobs to the surface. But it’s just a week. If not this week, then which week? I think we can do this.

Feel free to use my chimpy image to post on your social media page, or just make a private resolve without announcing anything. No nastiness for Holy Week. Ready . . . go!

[img attachment=”95836″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”alley 2″ /]

That “here’s what a week’s worth of food looks like around the world” article is going around again. If you want to feel streamlined and virtuous, despite being a fat cat westerner who feeds off the misery of Africans, just take a look at our Aldi haul from last week:

[img attachment=”95451″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”shopping carts” /]

Then I go to Hannaford and pick up whatever I couldn’t find — usually bananas, Coke, seltzer, tonic water and wine, some meat, herbs, and half a dozen other miscellaneous items. Maybe I should ask for carbon credits for Christmas this year.

SATURDAY
Hamburgers, chips, salad

That’s what it says on my magic blackboard, so it must be true. I have no memory of this.

SUNDAY
Zuppa Toscana, pumpkin bread

Pretty good recipes I’ve made many times before.  While I was shopping for the cream, I saw something called “fat free half-and-half.”

[img attachment=”95453″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”portrait of a woman encaustic” /]

I thought the kids would like pumpkin bread muffins in their lunches, so I tripled the recipe. The whole time I was adding ingredients, this little alarm bell was going off in my head: “Ding ding ding . . . something about this feels familiar . . . ding ding ding . . . nine cups of sugar . . . ding ding . . . kind of a lot of batter . . .ding . . . ” By the time I started really listening, it was too late, and I had about six gallons of pumpkin bread batter. Not a problem, exactly, but definitely a lot of pumpkin bread. This is part of it:

[img attachment=”95449″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”pumpkin bread” /]

There would have been more, but I ate a ton of raw batter because I am disgusting.

MONDAY
Chicken burgers, cheezy weezies, salad

Boy, Monday feels like a long time ago.

TUESDAY
Oven roasted pork ribs, mashed potatoes, steamed asparagus

This may be the first time we’ve ever had leftover mashed potatoes. I think I made eight pounds. I woke up at 5 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I seized the moment and became a potato martyr. Just kept peeling and peeling. The day went downhill from there, but at least we had a lot of potatoes.

[img attachment=”95440″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”potato difference” /]

WEDNESDAY
Omelettes, hash browns, grits

Usually, I made omelettes to order, but I felt very deeply on Wednesday that I did not feel like doing this. So I figured I’d made giant omelettes and cut them up into servings. I started with just plain egg, assuming that that was what most people would want. Seven eggs went into the pan and started to fry up nicely. Then I asked the kids what kind of omelette everyone else wanted.

Guess how many people wanted just plain egg?

One.

Luckily, that one was my 13-year-old son.

[img attachment=”95448″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”emperor-snake-582202_640″ /]

Oh yes, he ate the whole thing, plus hash browns and grits. Then he just sat there, digesting, and the villagers crowded around and weren’t sure what to do, besides keep their distance.

THURSDAY
Boiled Dinner

Although my husband’s family is Irish through and through, we go with the apparently inauthentic traditional American St. Patrick’s day meal: corned beef, potatoes, cabbage, and carrots, boiled with peppercorns and bay leaves, and served with mucho mustard. I also made a couple of loaves of soda bread from a mix, because nobody likes soda bread, so why should I bother to make it good? I should get an honorary Irish birth certificate just for that.

I think I have a picture somewhere, but it looks exactly like everyone else’s boiled dinner.

FRIDAY
Pizza with homemade dough

We have the day off, not even sure why, so I’m making a stab at homemade dough. I quit doing this when we graduated to three pizzas, because my recipe only made enough dough for two. We now need four extra large pizzas, so we shall see. I’m going to use this Martha Stewart recipe.

***

So, how are you doing your part to deflower the natural world with your unnecessary packaging and your unhinged jaw?

***

Mashed potatoes photo credit

snake photo credit

woman who is having none of your fat free nonsense photo credit

As we all know, drinking yourself stupid is no way to honor St. Patrick. Also, it’s offensive to actual Irish people when Americans perpetuate the stereotype of heavy drinking as characteristic of this noble people who happen to be heavy drinkers.

And green beer is for losers. Do not drink green beer. Beer is not green, begorrah. Beer is not green.

Isn’t it time that we, as a sensitive and responsive people, find some way to recalibrate our alcohol consumption so that nobody’s widdle feelings get hurt? Begorrah?

Here’s what I propose: don’t drink because it’s St. Patrick’s Day. Drink despite St. Patrick’s day.  What, you don’t have any other reason to get a medium-sized load on, assuming you can find a glass that your lousy kids haven’t filled with sand and glue and left in the driveway?

1. Drink because it’s almost spring. Hooray, spring! Have a drink. What other reasons? Let’s see . . .

2. Your teeth are like that because of heredity, and you’re doomed to carry flossers around in your purse, to become intimately familiar with that faded oil painting of irises on the oral surgeon’s wall, and to occasionally experience the disquieting sensation of tiny shards of bone working their way through the wall of your gum. Yes, that would be pieces of your skull coming out of your mouth. That seems fine. Have a drink.  It’s a kind of oral care.

3. You keep finding what looks like a really perfect college for your kids, and then it keeps turning out they’re yet another one of those “please let us know if your roommate isn’t following the underwear folding guidelines. You know, for her soul” colleges. Bottoms up.

4. 41 years old; still don’t know how to use eyeliner. Glug glug.

5. They’re going to clone a T-rex, I guess. Honest to goodness, I feel like death by imprudently reconstituted savage dinosaur is the best kind of future we can hope for right now. Cheers!

6. I guess we’re still talking about thigh gap, still? (I unlinked the link because of bad effing language, but really, all you need to know is that they’re still talking about thigh gap, still.)

7. There’s this:

At first I was like, “Oh, they’re just not listening very carefully, and the sidewalk is pretty noisy.” But no. They heard. O dinosaurs, do not delay.

8. Begorrah, I got up at 4 a.m. because my head was killing me, and then right before it was time to bring the kids to school, I threw up for no reason. No, I’m not pregnant.  I just thought about what kind of day it was going to be, and throwing up felt right. And now I need to start boiling the traditional repulsive slab of red fat strings, in honor of St. Patrick. First person to play Clancy Brothers at me is going to get a wedge of hot cabbage served up in the worst way.

9. You know what, the Clancy Brothers deserve their own number. Those sweaters. Gevalt.

10. I don’t mean to be a hideous racist or whatever, but it occurs to me that doing something just to spite someone else, whether it’s drinking or not drinking or taking a breath, is probably the most Irish thing you can possibly do, unless maybe it’s doing something you do enjoy doing, but pretending you don’t enjoy it and that you’re doing it just to spite someone else, because that’s not crazy at all, you crazy Irish person. So I’ll leave you to sort that one out. I’ll be over by the bar, by which I mean the driveway, digging glue out of my glass. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Shantih, shantih, shantih and have I mentioned, begorrah.

 

Some time ago, a reader whose life sounds a lot like mine sent me a message:

Just came across your blog. Looks interesting.. I’m copying it to my “Look Into” heap of links– which, sadly, is a bit like the giant warehouse at the end of the Raiders Of The Lost Ark, but at least it’s there.

Oh, yes.  Saving for later.  I spend so much time making sure the right things get saved.  There was a pile of papers on the kitchen island, and I finally bit the bullet and sorted through them.  Along with paid bills, cancelled checks, and warranties for products long since broken and thrown out,  there were reams and reams (yes, I realize a ream is 500 pages.  That’s what I meant) of drawings of birds, ballerinas, flowers, and clouds stuck together with stubby little rainbows.  I smiled at each one, and then, feeling like Satan incarnate, threw them away.

Sometimes when I sort, I save a few representative samples; sometimes I am ruthless. But of course saving everything is not an option.  Even if I had the space to somehow neatly and un-hoardishly preserve all the hilarious and charming pictures my kids draw, when would I have the time to enjoy them?  I have some fantasies about old age, but even the most unrealistically golden ones don’t include spending years of my life looking at thousands of pictures of rainbows rendered in blue pen.

And yet it cuts so deep to throw them away.  Same for sorting through baby clothes.  It’s not that the little purple onesie is so precious and unique in itself; and it’s not as if I actually want my child never to grow out of size 3-6 months.  It’s just the act of leaving things behind that hurts.  I get better at making it happen, but I don’t get better at not letting it hurt.

People are always saying, “Store it in the cloud!” Give it to the cloud rather than cluttering up my poor overworked hard drive:  my pictures, my music, all the words words words that I churn out.  It’s only the price of ink and the shoddiness of my printer that keeps me from printing out everything — every cute kid story that goes on Facebook, every draft of every half-baked idea that never makes it all the way home, every well-turned phrase of love or encouragement I send to my husband at work.  I want to save it all, and never let it go.

It’s not that I hope for fame that outlives me:  “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” and so on.   It’s just that I want it all to last — somewhere, somewhere, all the things I love and have poured my life into.

It’s a terrible anxiety, the fear of losing things that are precious — terrible because it hurts so much, and terrible because of what it means about me and my disordered loves. When the fear of loss is bad, it drains the joy out of my treasures even as I’m holding them.  My little baby smiles at me with such a direct, melting simplicity:  two perfect teeth, tiny and fresh like little bits of shell, her mouth pops open, and she lunges like a jack-n-the-box, so unthinkingly in love with the world that she wants to eat it all.  On a bad day, her happiness gives me pain, because all I can think of is how it passes, how she passes, how I am passing away.

I feel better temporarily, less existentially bereft, if I take a video, to capture the tricks and charms which are uniquely, adorably hers, which will never be repeated by any other baby, which must be remembered, must be saved — mustn’t they?  But saved for how long?  Technology is outmoded.  Today’s cutting edge video capture will be tomorrow’s wax cylinders.  Today’s acid-free photo paper will last only in the same way as “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.”

So much has been lost, irretrievably. Does it matter? My kids want to know what their first words were. I remember a few. Some I wrote down, but lost the book. Moved away, left it behind to be discarded by some overworked landlord or U-Haul maintenance man. Does it matter? I still love them now; I listen to what they are saying now. Does that mean that what I’ve lost doesn’t matter?

Remember how poor Ivan Karamazov saw all the pain in the world — the brutality against children, most of all, was what he could not abide.  He did not want to be able to abide it.  He understood that, in the light of the Resurrection, all would be made new — that Christ would return and reconcile all things to Himself, and the pain of innocents would be subsumed into a peace and justice that passeth understanding.

Ivan did not want this to happen.  He could not bear for it to happen.  He did not want outrageous injustices to be all right:  He wanted them not to happen in the first place. This is how I feel.  I don’t want it to be okay that they are lost.

Still, I know that if I try to save, save, save, then in most cases, what I’m really doing is burying them.  I’m not doing anything useful, not respecting their value by agonizing over preservation, any more than the workers in that final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark were doing a good deed by packing away that precious crate among tens of thousands of nameless, dusty crates in a warehouse that stretches on for dreary, nameless acres.

So I try.  I do a little saving, just enough to make me feel human, and then I inwardly send the rest up “into the cloud,” hand it over to Jesus, who has infinite capacity to keep every drooly smile, every first word — if that’s what He wants to do.  I don’t really, in my heart, want Heaven to be a retirement village where all the saints have endless hours to pour over memories of the good old days back on earth!  Ugh.  So I uproot and uproot these things from my heart.  But this disease of affection, this pathology that makes me love the world, and ache as I love — what is it?  And am I sure I want to be healed of it?

That’s the problem, right there. Lose it all or save it all: either way, it’s wasted. Either way, it’s lost. That’s what we mean by the Fall: loss. Everywhere. Everything. Our very mode of being is defined by loss.

Well, it’s Lent. And I am not Ivan, because I have tasted God’s love. I am not a government flunky, senselessly sealing up treasures, because I’m the one giving orders here. I’m not a dragon sitting on my stinking hoard, flying out in a jealous frenzy when some trinket goes missing.

I am fallen, but I have been saved, am being saved, and I will be saved. Nothing is lost, not even me. I know it. I wish to God I could feel it.

***

photo By Axisadman (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons