My Little Banshee...

"I know my own mind."

So, I have in my possession a fourteen pound little bundle of joy, whose laughter will make your heart sing and your eyes sparkle, and whose cry will send chills down your spine and rivals the cacophony of Dante's Hell. I wish there was a more tactful way of saying it, but there isn't. My child, my little four-month-old, from the moment she sprang from the womb, has the heart-stopping ability to shriek as if five thousand Chinese torturers were upon her at once. Aside from the trauma it causes her big sister and, at times, her father, it has been the subject of some concern on the part of our neighbors, with whom we share a wall. There are even some neighbors (with whom we don't share any wall) who have stopped to comment on Perola's super-power. We go through the mortifying conversation, reiterating the fact that "No, she doesn't have colic"..."she's a bit stubborn at times"...and "Actually, she was just really ticked off". We try to laugh it off, walk away and shake the dubious stares behind us off our feet.
Our little Nazgul is also well-known at the library, where Bella and I have had to rush to the bathroom to keep the patrons from bursting into tears at the sound of her deafening screams. In the haze of the last few weeks, I seem to recall fleeing the library altogether, Baby Bjorn half-on, half-off, sweater all askew, Bella in one hand and a really angry baby in the other, Hah! hoping no one would notice. All my life, I liked to remain nondescript, quiet... a peacemaker even. Dan and I can't think where this little one got the propensity to be a volcano with little or no warning of impending eruption. God knows what we need however, and He must have decided that my pride needed to be knocked down another peg or two - or to put it more succinctly, I've got to get over myself. This false inner sense that I am ultimately in control has been obliterated by the presence of this child, and my reaction towards her spontaneous combustions has undergone a real and moral change. The deep humiliation, fear and anger that panged me, especially in public situations, has graduated to deep humiliation, love and submission. I wouldn't say the humiliation is welcome, but at least now it's received and offered back to the One who is ultimately the Author of it. With Bella I can truly say, "I'm sorry Baby cry sometimes", and mean it the way Bella means it - with Mary's "Fiat" behind the words.
I have wondered sometimes how Our Lady could possibly be a model for me in this situation. I mean, I'm pretty sure Our Lord was not subject to these fits of horrific proportions when He was a baby. How could she know how mortifying it is to be thought an unfit, unprepared, incapable mother? Then I remembered, Christ is not her only Child, in the sense that the whole WORLD consists of her children through her relationship to Him. She has literally billions of angry, impatient, tantrum-throwing banshees hanging on the hems of her skirts and deafening her ears with indignant cries. And I realized, how many times have I been one of them? Yet she has remained patient with me, and her mercy has no limit. In light of this sweet compassion I can say, with all fervor, next time Perola attempts to rend my soul..."Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy. Our Light, Our Sweetness and Our Hope....."

The Beauty of Picking Up the Mess...Again

This excerpt was taken from Mother Mary Francis, the Poor Clare Abbess who wrote The Art of Waiting, a series of meditations for Advent.A special thanks to my Mom for passing this along.
Enjoy, while I go wash Bella's hands.... :)

“A Cleaned Heart”

Is not a cleaned heart what Holy Church would have to mean for us poor little ones by a clean heart?  We look into this, as I have been looking into it in my own prayer these last days, asking, what do we mean by a a clean house?  What do we mean by a clean kitchen?  There can be something that looks like cleanness just because nothing is going on.  Let us linger for a couple of minutes on those material aspects.  There are two ways, for instance, you could have a clean kitchen.

One, is that the cook never does anything there, that no service goes on there. Everything is in its proper place and is never taken out; there is no work, there is no love, there is no energy, there is no spending.  Nothing is ever spilled because nothing is ever done.  Nothing ever burns because nothing is ever cooked.  And it’s a clean kitchen.

Then, there is the clean kitchen that is the result of loving labor after there have perhaps been some spills, some scorching, some pans boiling over-and then there is always cleaning up.  Lots of work has gone on, and wherever human work goes on, there are always going to be some spills, there are always going to be some pans boiling over and there are always going to be some things that don’t turn out as we had hoped.  But then it is all cleaned up afterward.  That is a very different kind of a clean kitchen from the first kind.

Then too, there a clean house, the kind of thing we have heard about, read about, shivered about:  women who are so tyrannical that they have a spotless house because nobody is ever really allowed to live there.  Nothing really happens, in a deeply human sense.  It’s clean, all right, but for lack of life.  And then again, there is a clean house in which a mother of many children has spent herself, every day, cleaning up the mud, sweeping the rug, washing the dishes because people have been fed.  You could have very clean dishes if you never fed anyone.  You could have a shiny stove if nothing is ever cooked on it—going back to our first image. But there can be the house that is always so beautifully clean because the mother is always cleaning up the inevitable messes that human living entails; the happy little disorders that come of living, and the messes that perhaps should not have been made but then should not be pointed at –just cleaned up.  And that is a very different kind of clean house.

In our spiritual life, the parallel is very evident;  nothing else could be meant by a clean heart but a cleaned heart. Every time we confess our faults, every time that we face the truth without the depression born of pride, we are cleaned, and we can come with a clean heart to Him.  For us to come with a clean heart to God, as the Church asks us to pray, means that I come as one cleansed.  And if I have had to be cleansed several million times, that can be transliterated very accurately as saying I have been loved by God several million times, because He has never said, “I’ve had enough.  I cleaned you for the last time.”  but every time He wants to clean us so that we can come to Him with a clean heart.