Poetry Friday: Next Year

Next year, she says, I think I will be four,
And will I still live here,
she asks, in this house, and with you?
A funny kid thing to say except
she's from the orphanage so it's not funny
entirely, not entire comedy I'd say.
Of course I tell her
you'll live here
with me forever, until you kick me out,
until you pry me from your side
with your stubborn teenage body,
with your young adult scorn,
with your middle aged disgust,
with whatever weapon you try against me.
And even then we will not be parted.
It took a miracle to part the waves.
It would take a greater miracle to drive me from you.

-- Liz Rosenberg, from The Lily Poems, ©Bright Hill Press, 2008

More Poetry Friday at Carol's Corner.

 

Great Things Have Happened

This is without a doubt one of the best poems I've ever read, by the late Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, who suffered a great deal of hardship in his life. The poem is about an experience he shared with his wife and her son, whom he adopted.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Great Things Have Happened

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

(From What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread. © Nineties Press, 1993.)

Henry is Home

During Jude's adoption process, I had the pleasure of getting to know Carla, the giving and generous mother of a large family. Carla fought long and hard to adopt little Henry, a baby in a Ukrainian orphanage with a rare and serious health condition, and then longer and harder to provide him not only with a loving home, but also with the extensive medical care he needed to grow and thrive. Carla was Henry's fierce and untiring advocate from the moment she found out about him.

Last night, following complications from a recent surgery (the last of many), Henry went to his real home. He was two years old.

The writer Andrew Solomon has gotten a lot of adulation from the press lately for his just-released book, Far From the Tree, which explores the confounding -- to him -- ability of parents to love their children who, among other things, were born with severe disabilities. He would have done well to learn from people like Carla, who actively seek out and choose such children to love.

Leila writes movingly:

Carla had big dreams for her Henry -- that he would be free of pain, and that he would walk and dance and run! That he would be a faithful disciple of Christ Jesus, becoming a pure reflection of our Lord to all who encountered him, and that he would become a great saint, enter into Heaven, and dwell in the House of the Lord forever!

All these dreams of his loving mother have been realized tonight.

Henry is with God, in a place where there is no more pain and no more weeping. But his family is devastated. Please pray for them.

Tragedy

I've just learned that Kimberlie of Welcome to the Dumpling House has lost her husband. The two of them adopted four children from China, including an older boy with medical needs who has been home for less than two years. My heart breaks for her and for their four children, who knew the love of their father for such a short time. Please pray for them.

Something Beautiful

This summer, against the background noise of complaints that "my friends don't have to do this," I've embarked on a learning-at-home program with my son who's going into first grade (I won't call it homeschooling, because we are not what you would call a homeschooling family). We are doing various unit studies of my own design, starting with a central text on a particular topic and then branching out to ancillary texts. My son then has to write a sentence and draw an illustration in his journal every day based on our reading.

We started out with the topic of making the world more beautiful, a subject dear to my heart. We read the wonderfully straightforward Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, with its evocative folk-art-like illustrations, as our main text, and then went on to others that supported the same notion: Mole Music by David McPhail, about a mole who takes up the violin with consequences further-reaching than he can imagine; the classic Frederick by Leo Lionni, about the worth of the work of the artist; and, finally, a book that was new to me, which I found by happy chance, Something Beautiful by Sharon Dennis Wyeth.

This book has become one of my favorites in any genre, and my son wants to hear it again and again. It is about a little girl, in a neighborhood that looks very much like my old Bronx, who is saddened by the dearth of beauty in the hardscrabble world around her. She goes on a quest to discover what is beautiful, what has value, and what gives happiness to the hearts of her friends and family, and in the end resolves to take concrete steps to bring beauty to a place that knows little of it. The book itself is a beautiful thing, with an admirably simple and restrained narrative and wonderfully realistic pictures by Chris Soentpiet, a veteran illustrator who was, incidentally, adopted from Korea and has also illustrated a sensitive book by Eve Bunting, Jin Woo, about an older sibling coming to terms with his family's adoption of Korean baby.

I read an article recently about the ways that the wave of gentrification which has turned most of the five boroughs into a playground for the wealthy has averted the Bronx. I only lived in the borough as an adult, but all my life, when riding the subway in the outer boroughs where the lines go above-ground, I pondered the many sections in my vast city where neighborhoods seemed to consist of one auto-body shop after another (many of them surely chop shops), aluminum-shuttered bodegas where the only fresh foods were onions and plantains, and twenty-four-hour laundromats. These were places where not a single green thing seemed to grow, and yet children ran through the streets and played in the spray from illegally-opened fire hydrants. What was it like for children, I used to wonder, to live in a place where they never saw anything beautiful?

Sharon Dennis Wyeth's book gives one answer. She does not condemn the inequality that compels some children to live amid poverty and ugliness. Rather, she suggests that the beautiful may be something that cannot be comprehended by the senses, something hidden, secret, and essential, and that it is something to whose revelation we all can -- and should -- contribute.

The Business

I don't usually write here about how fantastic my children are, because, while it's a topic of endless fascination to me, I'm sure it interests no one else. Nonetheless, I'm going to put in a quick Jude update here to mention that the way he is being woven into the fabric of our family can only be described as amazing. He is a great little kid, and it seems as if he's always been here. He's also adjusting really well. I took him for an evaluation to see if he'd qualify for speech therapy under Early Intervention, and he didn't; in spite of the fact that the supervising speech-language pathologist has other adopted Chinese children his age in her practice, it turned out that Jude's acquired language, despite the fact that he was nonverbal in Mandarin and English three months ago, was too good. It is pretty adorable to see him point to various things and, when I hand them to him, to hear him cheerily reply "Ta-tee [thank you], Mama!" before toddling off, or when he puts on his little backpack which he's crammed full of doo-dads, calling "'Mon, Ree-ree," to his brother (whose name sounds nothing like Ree-ree) and beckoning with extravagant arm gestures before setting off on some adventure. As a friend of mine put it, "Jude is the business."

Infertitily as a School of Prayer

I've read a couple of very thoughtful blog posts lately that have exposed the tendency of Catholic believers, including those who deeply and sincerely love the Lord, to adhere to the fallacy of magical thinking, which supposes that if I live a good life and do good things, good things will happen to me. Here is another, by a theologian who, with his wife, has struggled with unexplained infertility:


In contemplating the silence of the cross, the image of Christ stretched out in love, I could feel my own will stretched out gradually to exist in harmony with the Father’s. . . . And as my will was stretched out, I found . . .  that the “calling” of infertility has made me aware of the lonely, the vulnerable, the needy, and allowed me to perceive the true gift of a human life.  My meditation upon the image of the cross gave me the strength to go forward with the process of adoption; it sustains me as we continue to wait for a child; a child, who may need more love than we can ever give, more care than we can imagine; to enter into the suffering of the widow, the immigrant, the lonely, who also comes to Mass with a heart deeply wounded. . . . And the more I enter into prayer, the more I see that in these grace-filled moments, [the message of the angel] Gabriel has already come.

This deep wounding of humanity is something that's always been close to my own thoughts, and it's even closer now, as my family grows in love for the little person who, were it not for the strange miracle that is adoption, would have been cast out from all the circles of love and friendship offered by his own culture because he was born with a visible sign of our universal woundedness.

Ye Kindly Gods, Do Not Deceive Me!

 O ihr guten Götter, täuscht mich nicht.

Prince Tamino utters these words in Act I of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), after the Queen of the Night has asked him to rescue her daughter, Pamina, who has been kidnapped by the evil Sarastro. Tamino, who has not yet proven his manhood (he faints while being menaced by a dragon in the first scene, and the Queen of the Night's Three Ladies kill the beast while he lays unconscious), sets off to fulfill this charge. In a shocking twist of events, however, he learns in Act II that Sarastro, the high priest of Isis and Osiris, is a good man who has taken Pamina away from the evil Queen for her own good. Because they love wisdom, Tamino and Pamina seek to be initiated into the sacred mysteries of the Egyptian gods.

One of the most remarkable things about Mozart's last opera is its ethos of complete and stunning reversal. What was one way in the first act turns out, in the second, to be its exact opposite; what appeared good proves evil, and vice versa. A close study of the score provides early clues that all may not be as it seems; for instance, the Queen's entrance aria, rather than musically portraying her as a grieving mother, instead clearly reveals her to be steely and domineering, and, when sung and directed well, is actually a little scary (indeed, the voice type that sings it -- dramatic coloratura soprano -- has often been used in opera to represent characters who are not quite, or are somehow beyond, human):  


In a classic moment of overcommitment, I agreed, before Jude arrived, to cover (i.e. understudy) the roles of Second and Third Lady in a production of Zauberflöte being staged by a regional opera company in my area, in spite of the fact that it's been more than ten years since I last appeared in an opera. The conductor had heard me, and was very supportive, even telling me that I could bring my kids to rehearsals (a rare accommodation in opera, where few performers -- at least few women -- have children, and one that in the long run did not go over well with the stage director and his staff). The chances of me having to go onstage are slim, thank God, because I'm not ready; in addition to the usual parenting, homemaking, and post-adoption stuff, I'm also doing some editing and translating work for pay in the few moments I can spare for it, as well as working on my own (academic-musicological) book.

It's hard to describe how strange it is to be sitting on the sidelines during rehearsals, either with or without my children. To be benched, as it were, has forced me into a position of unwonted humility, since singing was always my ticket up and out, the simple tool I used to make a better life for myself. I watch the mostly excellent young singers and learn the staging, and I wonder what their lives and careers will be like. Two of the singers in the cast recently married each other: what will happen to them? Will one be successful, the other not? Will they have children? Will they stay together? In the world of opera, all of these matters are open to question.

And to be here, doing this, in Applachia is doubly strange. I think about my old life in New York, and I wonder if it was really real at all. After moving here, I longed greatly for that life, which I regarded as my true life, and my life here as some sort of shoddy bargain-basement substitute for what I might be doing. But now I'm not so sure of that hierarchy of lives. As I sit and watch rehearsals, I wonder if this was the life I was always meant to have, and if everything leading up to it -- everything which is now falling away as if it were a dream -- was in fact like Tamino's understanding of the world and the cosmos in the first act of Die Zauberflöte: shiny, deceiving, baffling, and completely opposite to the way things really are.

(Above: The Queen of the Night's entrance, from a stage set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for an 1815 production of the opera.)

Sehnsucht for Tots

I know something about longing, especially about longing for a past that may have never been what I now imagine it to be; I know reasonably well the dull ache for people and places gone forever, even when that longing is ontologically misplaced. I know all this not only from my own long and neurotic experience, but also from my schooling in the soundtrack of German romanticism, in which the keenest longing -- Sehnsucht -- is a guiding ethos.

My new son wakes up in the middle of the night and cries for hours and will not be consoled. My husband suggested that he, too, knows Sehnsucht. The present is better than the often-idealized past, but it's hard to explain that to a post-institutionalized, pre-verbal toddler in culture shock.

So this goes out to Jude; music by Schubert, text by Goethe:

Over all the hilltops

is calm.

In all the treetops

you feel

hardly a breath of air.

The little birds fall silent in the woods.

Just wait: soon

you too will rest.

The Years of the Locust

Betty Duffy writes in a recent post about noticing how

the lepers, the possessed, the ones whom Jesus heals always want to follow him, but he always sends them home to tell their families what the Lord has done for them. Or, in some cases, to tell no one who healed them.

I think I've missed this point in the past, as I've always thought the highest form of praise is to "leave all things you have, and come and follow me."

To those he has healed, Christ says, go home to your family. Go be in relationship with your people. Make reparation, which in many ways, is a more difficult vocation than leaving a tragic past behind and starting fresh among new people.

In all of my years in New York City -- years of bad mistakes, of humiliation, of foolhardiness -- I harbored the secret fantasy of moving somewhere far away where nobody knew me, a place where my life would be a blank slate and I could start over. I had all kinds of career plans in this fantasy, most of which involved buying a dilapidated old warehouse in a decrepit town like the one where I now live and turning it into a thriving arts center. To actually move away from the city, though -- and probably to actually move anywhere -- you need a good reason, and to turn old warehouses into arts centers you need a lot of cash, so my fantasy stayed a fantasy.

And then it happened -- part of it, at least. We moved far away to a place where I knew no one and no one knew me. And so here we are.

Every day my life here becomes different in ways both big and small. The big ways include things like adding another child to my family through adoption. The small things include learning to accept that "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil," that, in other words, all is not as I longed for it to be since before I can remember -- that is, a life lived through, by, and for aesthetic values, dominated by beauty, and redolent with the variegated shades of meaning not stated outright, but only hinted at in the music that, over long years of study, became part of me. The fact is that I spend a lot of time cleaning up messes, trying to neutralize extreme behavior (my children's as well as my own), and going to Walmart, all things entirely antithetical to my youthful aesthetic ideal.

Otepoti just did the incredibly generous and heroic thing of traveling from New Zealand to China to help my husband bring home our little Jude. She slept on my sofa for two weeks, and helped out with the kids, cooking, and cleaning.  She dealt fairly and compassionately with my autism-spectrum son's sometimes-maddening behavior, and she changed plenty of nappies. She also went to a big Rwandan-refugee house party with me, hosted in honor of my friends' daughter's baptism, attended rehearsals of an opera production at the regional opera company located here in which I am a cover (i.e. understudy) for one of the roles, and watched episodes of Portlandia and the marvelous Danish film Babette's Feast with me. 

At the end of the latter, there is a wonderful monologue spoken by General Löwenhielm, who, as a young man, had rejected the love of one of the two devout daughters of an austere Protestant minister. In old age he is invited to a banquet given in their home, and he gives the following speech at table:

Mercy and truth have met together. Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another. Man, in his weakness and shortsightedness, believes he must make choices in this life. He trembles at the risks he takes. We do know fear. But no. Our choice is of no importance. There comes a time when your eyes are opened. And we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence, and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And, lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us, and everything have rejected has also been granted. Yes, we even get back what we rejected. For mercy and truth are met together; and righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.

As he leaves the party, he continues:

. . . I have been with you every day of my life.... You must also know that I shall be with you every day that is granted to me from now on. Every evening I shall sit down to dine with you: not with my body, which is of no importance, but with my soul. Because this evening I have learned, my dear, that in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible.

The first comment Otepoti ever made on this blog was from Joel 2:25: "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten." Not only did this comment mark the start of a great friendship; it also gave me hope. And I have come to believe, like General Löwenhielm, that God even restores to us what we rejected in this life, though restoration of this kind may not look the way it did in our fantasies. Indeed, Otepoti helped with that restoration herself, when she helped to bring our Jude home. Now may God help me to make the reparations I need to make in order to be in relationship with people, to live in a family, and to demonstrate to others the ways He's healed me.

Before, During, and After the Airport

I just want to note briefly that Jude is a very, very cool little kid.

And I want to thank some people who helped us in getting him here, especially the wonderful and brilliant Otepoti, who, with my husband, brought him home.

But there are also some local friends (a term that until recently I thought was an oxymoron) who helped in all kinds of ways, including

- Laura, who drove eight hours round-trip to pick them up at Newark Airport.
- Sara, who with her construction-worker husband brought over and assembled a crib for him.
- Father W., who assured me that God privileges adoption in a special way.
- Maria, who gave me a box of lemon pastilles from Sicily on a bad day.

And the Chinese-born Princeton professor who sat next to my husband on the flight going over, and emailed him later to say:

I was delighted to hear from you and to receive pictures of your new son.
As I told you on the flight, I was deeply moved by your unselfish love! What a lucky boy with a wonderful family.
Jude looks very healthy, smart and handsome.
Thank you very much for what you did to Jude and to this world!

Thank you so much, friends -- and especially you who have been praying -- for what you, too, did to Jude and to this world.

Jude Update (For Those Who Were Wondering)

He and his dad are completely in love.

He kisses my picture, and kissed the phone when I called the other day.

He knows how to make the sign of the cross (taught by his father).

He is now comfortable enough with his dad to be naughty.

There was a brief scare when he was found to have been exposed to TB. A chest x-ray revealed no infection. Thank God, because, in that case, he would have been sent back to the orphanage for quarantine and treatment and adopted at some later date, who knows when.

He is coming home tomorrow night. I can't wait.

On Craggy Island

I'm sure, gentle reader, that -- if you're not already a fan -- you would be shocked and horrified by the extreme irreverent humor of the old RTÉ sitcom Father Ted. For the uninitiated, the show's premise is that three venal, callow, and feckless men (who happen to be priests) are exiled together on a benighted island off the west coast of Ireland, having been sent there as punishment for various egregious infractions committed on the job. For Father Dougal, it was the unmentionable "Blackrock incident," in which many lives were irreparably damaged; for drunken reprobate Father Jack, it was "that wedding at Athlone," his actions at which are never revealed, but the mere mention of which causes a leer to light up his ravaged face. The titular character, Father Ted himself, made off with a parish fund meant to send a sick child to Lourdes, and went to Vegas. Now, in their shared disgrace, the three fallen priests must learn to cope in a strange, backward place, far from the not-inconsiderable perks of their former lives and under the thumb of a corrupt bishop, while having cups of tea continually forced upon them by their overzealous housekeeper, Mrs. Doyle. (The photo above shows Fathers Dougal and Ted protesting the showing on Craggy Island of the controversial film "The Passion of St. Tibulus.")

When we first moved here, I admit to feeling a bit like Ted and his comrades, having been uprooted from a much more enjoyable place and a much more connected relationship to it, and placed in a semi-rural area ravaged by social problems similar to, but, it must be said, exponentially greater than those in the city. I was lonely; I was isolated; I couldn't drive; I couldn't find a teaching job to replace the dearly-loved one I had to leave in New York.  I couldn't figure out the suchness, the quiddity, of my new environs and its denizens. And, worst of all, I felt that I was in a dull, dreary place that was a poor match for my . . . specialness, the specialness I'd long believed to be my birthright.

All of which makes me realize, three years into this adventure, how good, how necessary it was for me to be uprooted from my formerly beautiful life as a teaching artist and intellectual mom in New York City, where everything was just the way I like it. It was necessary for me to leave aside -- not that I've completely succeeded -- my idea of myself as someone special, someone deserving of a certain amount of connection, attention, and enjoyment.  I used to walk the streets of my new town and admit to God that He'd really slammed me down but good this time -- all right, Uncle already -- and could He please shine a little light on my now drastically-narrowed path and, little by little, though not in any dramatic, epiphanic way, He did. Little by little, it began to dawn on me that a good life is not necessarily the life that we planned. I even began to consider that I might try sacrificing my own yearning for aesthetic fulfillment for the more pressing and immediate needs of those around me.

There are other good things about this place: the natural beauty, my son's wonderful school and his masterly violin teacher, the fact that the income-to-cost-of-living ratio made it possible to adopt our son Jude, who is coming home soon. And learning how to drive has made me feel like a normal person -- maybe not normal in the old way, the kind of normal conferred by walking for miles through neighborhood after city neighborhood, meeting friends and colleagues, performing, teaching at my inner-city urban college -- but normal in the sense of having a place somewhere, a locus from which I might possibly be able to make other, different contributions.

I will lead the blind on their journey;
by paths unknown I will guide them.
I will turn darkness into light before them,
and make crooked ways straight.
These things I do for them,
and I will not forsake them.

-- Isaiah 42:16     

Malcolm Monday

Thanks to the powerful advocacy of Carla and others, there is now over $7,000 $13,600 available towards Malcolm's adoption, and there are one or two families who are discerning whether they are called to be his family.

Please give, and if you can't, please pray. Please pray anyway.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans . . . in their distress.

UPDATE: Twelve hours after I wrote this post, after a day in which at least half a dozen bloggers that I know of wrote posts about Malcolm, there is $9,600 in his fund! God is good! Let us pray that he will soon be home with his family.

A Righteous Man

My husband was given our Jude today. He is over the moon, and so am I.

I was thinking about Saint Joseph on this great feast day, and it struck me that we can only accurately call Christ by the title Son of David in light of His own mystical adoption, so to speak, by Saint Joseph, for it was Joseph, not Mary, who was of the royal lineage of the house of David. In a certain sense, then, as Mary is the mother of the One Who created her, Joseph adopted the One through Whom we are all adopted.

Thanks to all who have been praying for us, and happy feast day.

China-Bound

My husband leaves for China tomorrow. Prayers would be appreciated.

Thanks!

One of Us

This was one of the  morning intercessions listed in Magnificat today:

For those who are rich in the gifts of the heart,

- that they may find blessing by loving those who are unlovable and unloved.

I was struck by the notion of being "rich in the gifts of the heart." What does that mean, exactly? When I was younger, I imagined that I was rich in this way, but I was mistaken about what the gifts of the heart really are. I fancied myself someone who had a limitless capacity to love, especially when it came to the men who interested me, men who tended to be sad, troubled, angry, addicted, oddballs or misfits, or some combination thereof.  Like many other women, I convinced myself that these particular men needed me in particular --  needed my own peculiar "gifts of the heart." I believed I had some sort of solace to offer in my love, something remedial, therapeutic, even redemptive; I even went so far as to believe that my ability to love gave me some sort of power.  I pictured myself wading out into deep waters, saving troubled men with the power of my love, men who would, in gratitude, love me forever in return. Strangely, that never happened.

Nonetheless these men were by no means entirely unlovable, just lonely (though a friend of mine used to caution that lonely guys were lonely for a reason). Still, they were intelligent, and relatively clean. When I ask myself now who is truly unlovable, a parade of images comes rushing into my mind: mentally-ill homeless men and women whom I saw on the subway or the street over many years; barefoot men and women whose feet were toughened and blackened with dirt, or who had improvised plastic grocery bags for shoes; men and women with wild hair and bulging eyes; men and women who stank so badly that they could clear a subway car; men and women I would shrink from. It would take someone rich in the gifts of the heart indeed to love these men and women, these brothers and sisters, these children of the Father. I was not that rich.

Our son Jude, who is coming soon, is a "waiting child." That is, he is in danger of being forgotten and unloved, and he might even be considered unlovable by some, because he has a birth defect.  But there are parents far richer in the gifts of the heart than I could ever be -- parents like self-professed Jesus-lovin' Air Force wife Sonia.

When I read the petitions in Magnificat today, what came to my mind, in addition to homeless men and women, was the cult-classic horror film Freaks. Freaks was made in 1932, before the Hays code began to be strictly enforced in Hollywood, and I'm quite sure it could never get made even today -- perhaps especially not today. It's the story of a circus troupe -- compellingly acted by a cast of actual sideshow performers with a variety of disabilities and deformities -- and its moral is that these "freaks" are more loving, more human, than the attractive, able-bodied strong-man and trapeze artist who are having an affair, and who plot to destroy their disabled colleagues. "One of us" is the motto of the freaks, who accept the trapeze artist as one of their own, in spite of the fact that she is an outsider who knows nothing of their own culture of mutual aid and kindness and who seeks to exploit it (this motto comes again at the end of the film with a chilling twist -- if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it).

"One of Us" is also the name of a song by the little-known American composer Theodore Chanler, the last number in a song cycle called The Children, in which Chanler set poems by, of all people, Leonard Feeney, S.J.  I could not find any Youtube videos of this song, but here is the text:

 

Husbands and wives!

Are we not your little lives?

Fathers and mothers!

Who but we will be your others?

Why do you fear us, freeze us out of your heart?

One of us was Jesus;

He played our part,

In His little manger,

Smiling in His smallness,

To protect us from the danger

Of nothing-at-all-ness.

One of us was God.

Has this not been told abroad,

To some by song,

To some by star?

Then when will we be known

For what we are? 

I have heard this song performed several times by my friend and colleague Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, a gorgeous soprano and a scholar of music and disability studies. Fr. Feeney, who must have written the poem in the 1940s, was most likely referring to contraception, but Stephanie has noted that it also speaks eloquently to the question of who has the right to live. 

Since we can all accept that everyone has the right to live -- even the most disabled, the most deformed, the most likely to suffer, the most likely to cause suffering, the most likely to invoke horror, the most likely to die -- may we all become rich in the gifts of the heart. These gifts, like all of what Amy Welborn calls "gifts 'n talents," must be disciplined, and this is the hard thing. Love should be prodigious rather than prodigal. We must not be reckless in love; we must learn to love in the right way, that is, to love steadily rather than wildly, and with quiet force rather than frenzied ebb-and-flow. If everyone has the right to live, then we must not just accept that right in theory; we must somehow find a way to love everyone, even the unloved and the unlovable. I'm pretty sure that to do so is what differentiates Christians from pagans. 

As Father Zossima says in The Brothers Karamazov:

Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. 

More on Malcolm

 Leila of Little Catholic Bubble is making it her Lenten mission to see that little Malcolm is adopted.

Remember, Malcolm is a developmentally-normal little boy who has cerebral palsy. According to the laws of his country, if he is not adopted before he is five, he will be committed to a mental institution. For life.

From Leila:

There are families who are considering adopting Malcolm and bringing him home to the US. But raising the huge sum needed to get him from Russia to his new home is an unfortunate obstacle, as we can all imagine.

Lent is a time of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. It's the almsgiving part that can really trip us up. I know it does me. But today, I donated to Malcolm's fund, sacrificially. Nothing is truly ours; it all comes from God -- including our money. I'm telling you that I donated (and yes, I'll tell my husband the amount later, gulp) in order to challenge you to do the same. Any amount really, even five dollars, would be so important to this one precious child. Please Bubble readers, let's do this for one lonely little boy and for the love of God. We are Christ's hands and feet. . . 

Please consider little Malcolm's desperate plight as you consider your almsgiving on this first Friday of Lent.

Thank you, thank you, and blessings!

Amen.

AN UPDATE: Thanks to Leila's fundraising efforts, there is now over $4,700 $5,000 $6,300 available towards Malcolm's adoption! Please give and please pray.

Quick Takes: It's Lent!

1. I felt like titling this post: "Wake Up, Mother------, It's Lent!" but thought the better of it. Nonetheless, that's what I tell myself in the morning when my feet hit the floor.

2. I've used this picture before, but feel compelled to use it again. I am trying to consciously set Lent apart in my mind from ordinary time, but I have historically been bad at making any kind of distinction between Lent and the rest of the year. It all feels like Lent to me -- the daily sense of a kind of messy, uphill slog in semi-darkness in a barren landscape to a destination that's unknown and not expected to be much fun when I get there. I often feel, in my quotidian life and work, as if I'm hauling heavy stones up a steep hill, only to get them there and watch them tumble over the cliff into a bottomless void. Lent feels no different. I suppose it's up to me to make it different by punctuating my days with regular periods of prayer and by giving up small pleasures, something I usually resent doing. I hope and pray for a better disposition this year.

3. Lent is also a yearly time of personal mourning for me. Two dear friends of mine died in the middle of Lent in 2006 and 2007. During Lent 2007, I also had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, landing me in the hospital and necessitating emergency surgery, during which one of my ovaries was removed (it took several days to be correctly diagnosed, so, in my usual state of oblivion, I went on about my life, walking all over town, teaching my classes at the large public university where I was completing my doctorate, and filing a claim against a former landlord in Bronx County Court, while ignoring the pain that dogged my every step). Sometimes I feel quite lost without one of these friends in particular. He died right before the ectopic rupture, which happened one night at home, and, as I was lying there on the floor sweating and vomiting, I prayed to him to ask God to save my baby, but evidently it was not to be.

4. We are supposed to wait in "joyful expectation" for the coming of our Savior, another thing I'm lousy at.  I wonder how to do it. Is my usual habit of grimly expecting something not-so-nice just a habit? Can it be changed? Can I change my temperament and demeanor without becoming a complete, phony sap?  This year, we are waiting for Jude, and I will be happy when he's finally here. Nevertheless, I don't know if it's because of my general demeanor, or if it's an opinion formed from my own observations and experiences, but I don't buy into that happy-ever-after scenario about this or about anything. The adoption magazines -- like all parenting magazines, actually -- are full of stories of the wait over, the family and the individual completed, the loneliness soothed, the joy of union. I'm not sure I ever believed that was the expected outcome of any relationship. I like to think of myself as a realist, as someone who sees through what is false in our culture, but perhaps I'm just a cynic who has more in common with my southern Italian forebears than I like to think. Nonetheless, I wonder what happens after the airport.

5. I've decided to give up drinking this Lent. I've never done this before. My drinking, such as it is, is restricted to a glass of wine every night with dinner, but I love that glass of wine, and have come not only to expect it but also to see it as a reward for getting through the day. It wasn't a hard choice, though. I was hit with a stomach virus last week and couldn't even drink water, so my nightly habit fell rather naturally by the wayside. Now that I can eat and drink again, I weighed wine and coffee in the balance, and decided that, much as I love that glass of wine, I need coffee more.

6. When I was little, I never thought I'd grow up to drive a car. Not only was it not really necessary where I lived, but also I really hated cars. I hated their smell, both inside and out. As a child, I used to fantasize about ploughing over all the roads in the world and planting grass and trees there, leaving a small path for people to walk, returning the ugliness of industrialism and urban life to the peacefulness of a sort of William Morris-esque pastoral utopia.  But then I grew up to feel as if I needed the city as much as I now feel like I need that glass of wine or cup of coffee every day. And now I am, reluctantly, driving. I still feel unmoored, too light, when I'm behind the wheel. I filled up my gas tank yesterday for the first time, and managed to get gas all over my shoes and inside my pocketbook (being a city girl, I never leave my purse in the car, even when I'm filling it up with gas). I am going to try to incorporate the fact that I drive a car now into some sort of intentional Lenten practice.

7. A good and fruitful Lent to all.

I Am the Abductor

"When my new daughter comes into my arms . . . it's ok if she cries," says an adoptive mother:

[If] I'm to be honest, not only do we hope she cries, but I hope she's scared.  And frightened.  And maybe even terrified.  Maybe so much so that she throws up, even on me.  Or can't look at me.  Or pees on me. Or kicks us and bites and tries to scratch our eyes out.  It's totally ok with us, if she tries to run away. Or if she bangs against the hotel door, for hours and calls out the only woman she's ever known as mama. It's ok if she does it for hours and even days, and I think it's good and true for her to be able to process the feelings and emotions.  I hope she has a reaction, any kind of reaction to what is happening to her.

It'll be heart breaking to see.

It'll be gut wrenching to watch this happen to our child.
 
But these things are reactions that we can hope for, if our daughter is having a healthy reaction to what is happening to her.  If she has had a healthy attachment to someone in her past, than these would all be normal reactions.  And I have prayed every single day since I saw her face that she has had an attachment to someone... anyone.