Oreo, Owl Bites and Unconditional Love

Our grandson, now two and a half, is a joyful presence in our lives. He wakes up early every morning, stretches, looks around to make sure that nothing in his environment has changed over-night, and then comes to our door. Squatting down, he speaks through the space between the bottom of the door and the floor, saying loudly, “I’m here Nana, I’m here!” And of course as he knows I will, I open the door and welcome him in with a big hug.

His world is very small and very secure and he  never doubts that he is loved. “I love you Nana,” he says, and I say “ I love you more.”  “No, I love you more.” And when he falls down and scrapes his knee, or drops an iron poker on his toe he runs for Nana, unless of course his Mama is around.

Today he was bitten on the back of his neck by something that must have stung because he screamed and ran to me. “What happened?” I asked, and when he didn’t answer I looked around his face and neck and saw the welt. 

“Oh, something must have bitten you.”

  “It was an owl” he sobbed. And I hugged him more tightly and took him inside for juice and a cookie. 

Owls must loom large in his imagination. I don’t think he has ever seen a real owl. 

 We do have a large, life-sized owl puppet I use for choir rehearsals. I encourage small children to hoot like an owl using their high voices, and it helps them discover  that they have an extended vocal range to explore. 

I keep the owl at home. One previous generation of singers named him Oreo, due to his white and black coloring. Oreo lives in a tote bag next to a binder filled with choral exercises, new music to learn and Mexican maracas. And also Mr Pooch, the tennis ball who teaches vowel formation. 

My grandson inspected the music bag one day and finding Oreo, took him out to play. He swooped around the room and hooted with enthusiasm. It never dawned on me that Oreo might be even a little bit intimidating. 

In A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Owl is a wise creature who can spell. He may be a bit pretentious, but he is never alarming.  In the Little Bear series by Elsa Minarik, Owl is one of the charming gang of forest friends who play with Little Bear in the woods. My grandson is fond of Owl and Little Bear. 

But when he experienced a sharp bite, it was, oddly, an owl who caused the welt to appear. I may never know why, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. As his world expands he will discover that danger and menace or just annoyance come in many forms, and owls won’t worry him. 

What matters now is that he can put a name to a kind of enemy, and he can seek consolation when he is distressed. And I hope he never loses that ability. 

“You need not fear the terrors of the night or the arrows that fly by day…..I will raise  you up on eagles wings, guide you in the breath of dawn, make you lie down with the sun and hold you in the palm of my hand.” 

The Old Testament Psalms replace the immediate comfort of family, as we outgrow the innocence of childhood, and they point to the loving parent we all need , our Father who art in heaven. To our Lord we run when we are distressed and in need comfort. This is a great blessing.  And would that on the most ordinary of days, when we are not distressed, we all would run as my grandson does, kneeling down and saying “Lord God, Jesus, I’m here.”

Who can suppose that we would ever not be received with tenderness, with mercy, with love that is never ending.

 “I love you more” the Lord says to us, and he does. 

The Word is No

We have a toddler in the house, soon to be two years old. He can be very endearing, especially when he rushes over to give a hug for no apparent reason, other than to show his general affection for Nana. He greets everyone he sees on the street with a lilting "Hi!", even the football players playing on the field at the high school. And he says "bye" very sweetly when he leaves the room. I  respond "write when you get work." 

He is also a recent specialist in the use of the word "no." He says it with a definitive shake of his head, even when he really means yes. Cookies, hugs, towels, toys, have all been rejected and there is no use in pursuing further inquiry. The word is no. 

I find this quite hilarious, and at times frustrating. I would like him to know that if he says yes to a hug, he can still say no later to a toy. But we haven't gotten there yet. "No" is for right now almost a state of being. He has discovered the word and he means to use it, against all adult attempts at persuasion otherwise. 

When my daughter was in elementary school, she would say with a sigh, "I can't wait until I get free will." (Religion classes were required in her school.) She was to learn that Free Will, whether personal autonomy or the religious kind comes with boundaries, and I don't know a single adult who doesn't chafe at some point about a boundary or two, sprinkled here and there throughout the day. Long red lights. The Ten Commandments. Cars that lose a head gasket on the freeway.

Toddlers don't take to boundaries even when accompanied by a snack. They are met with "no" from adults, and they respond in kind. No. Not on your life. Over my dead body. 

Some toddlers grow up to be adults who don't take to boundaries. especially religious ones. 

The blessed among us, in imitation of Mary, say yes fully, unreservedly, to cookies, and to the call of holiness. 

May the toddler inside us all learn the beauty and freedom of yes, fiat, according to your will.

Choir Choir, The Pressing Need for Zip Ties

  Our children’s choir squeezed in a Holy Saturday rehearsal this morning, so they would be ready to sing tomorrow at the 11:00am Mass. We are all excited because this is one of the best groups I’ve ever worked with. They sing beautifully. They are mostly bilingual, speaking Spanish and English, and most of them regularly attend a Spanish mass. To have, finally, a group willing to sing in either Spanish or English is very dear to my heart. 

On my way out the door for rehearsal, my husband quietly asked if I wanted him to back the car out , as he had pulled in fairly close to the wall. I nodded, so he backed out and I was on my way. 

Normally he wouldn’t think of helping me back the car out of the garage. But , as the saying goes, circumstances alter cases. The circumstance in question being my recent encounter with the edge of the garage door opener, a metal piece that in my opinion is way too exposed….. However, here is what happened. I backed the car out, scraping the front fender against the above noted GDO which caused the , VERY FLIMSY fender  to separate from the car. Yes it was entirely my fault, and all joking aside, I have no idea how I could have been so careless. 

My daughter, who is good at arranging things like insurance reports, called our agent who, she reported, tut tutted and said self inflicted damage to a car is a lose lose situation. 

Meaning it’s going to cost the earth to get the fender securely reattached. 

A, our daughter, then said she knew what to do and it involved the purchase of zip ties from Kroger’s. So we packed the baby in her car and drove to Kroger’s, where in addition to zip ties, we found iced Easter cookies. 

To my husband’s great astonishment, our daughter zip tied the fender back on the car, and it looks almost as good as new. Lose lose doesn’t weigh on me as much now because it seems we can post-pone the repair  almost indefinitely. The zip ties are black, by the way, matching the color of the car. Had they been white, I might be in more of a hurry to get Harry from Harry’s Body Shop on the case. 

We went from lose lose to win, (and later,) lose. Seeing how effectively our daughter jumped in and saved the situation is a huge win. I don’t think zip ties would have occurred to me. Maybe they are standard among her friends. If so, more power to them. Both her initiative and her solution are a win win for me. 

And who knows, the zip ties might out last the car.

Deo Dicamus Gratias.

Choir, Choir,  Putin's War

We in the Sanctuary Choir are always on the move. That is, we are always jiggling or tapping, or swinging our legs in time to the internal melodies we each hear. Yesterday , during mass I watched a jiggling foot in the front row, while behind him sat two foot- tappers, and then there were my fingers playing on the keyboard etched on my arm. There was also an occasional foot stretcher, in time to what must have been a stirring Largo, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance perhaps. 

The movements of music, the rhythmic patterns which carry listeners through time , the push and pull of harmonic dissonance and consonance,  are encapsulations  of life itself. They communicate struggle and pain, or tranquility, love  and at times peace. Battles are fought and conflicts are resolved on the pages of a music score. Sometimes life is portrayed in periods of intense musical dissonance accompanied by jarring rhythms, with only occasional moments of serenity.  I imagine  the first hearers of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring were caught off guard by the portrayal of clashing forces they heard.  And then there is Elgar, who creates such tender and sweeping beauty that clashes and wars can be moved to a more distant place, and what is wonderful  in life is recalled.

Both Elgar and Stravinsky linger in memory, though I never catch myself humming The Rite of Spring. These days though, I’m not humming at all.

Putin’s war has overtaken my own senses, like a wave that threatens to engulf a fishing vessel in the North Atlantic during a storm. The sheer evil of what we are seeing has placed me in a kind of ferocious symphonic movement that threatens never to resolve and come to rest. I tried to pray a rosary tonight and I couldn’t  get images of fighting and frightened children and merciless bombing out of the way.

That of course is my own human limitation. In God's Providence there is always a cadence promised, even if it doesn’t occur during our lifetime. And then there is the resurrection, the ultimate cadence to a long and tortured symphony.

I try to pray for the people of Ukraine, that God will hold them close during this time of terrible tragedy. And for the people of  Russia, that truth will dawn in their hearts and will move them to rebel against an evil regime.

Do I pray for Putin as well? Yes, though probably not as often as I should. 

And for myself, I pray that my own courage and faith during difficult times will not waver. 

To return to the foot tappers, the foot stretchers, though the individual music we hear varies constantly, the deeper harmony of truth remains. Sometimes, only occasionally, that inner  music pauses. Then I  can only breathe an Ave, or lift up my heart in love and gratitude. And  I can say the words God has given me to say, the Lord’s Prayer, and this act  is carried to heaven without music or emotion, but only grace. 

Scenes From Literature

 “All little girls like pincushions,” pursued Miss Cuff. “When I was little, I had quite a collection of them.” She paused; she was getting very slight encouragement. Greta, who had just discarded a collection of bomb fragments (some with dates on them), was perhaps to be pardoned for a lack of ebullience.”

The Foolish Gentlewoman, Margery Sharp

The Other Side of Death

 Mr. Putin's war continues to shock and disgust most of the world. I try, from time to time to consider things from his point of view. He seems to believe that the land and its resources which currently comprise Russia are not enough for his people, or his ego, or both. That Ukraine should exist in its own right as an independent country with its own history, cultural, and westward tending ways, is a reality he cannot seemingly comprehend. He is blinded by evil disguised as nationalism, anti Nazism, pride for Russia.

But it is evil. And in the name of this evil his soldiers, who have been fed a diet of dehumanizing words against the people of Ukraine... they are pigs, let's wipe them from the face of the earth... have responded with the worst of human behavior. They have senselessly brutalized a people they could barely acknowledge were people at all. They have even gone after the dogs.

It is often said that in order to fight in a war, you have to be hardened to your targets in order to take aim at them and try to shoot them before they shoot you. We all understand this as a deplorable, but sometimes necessary part of fighting in a just war, though what constitutes a just war in today's world remains to be seen.  Certainly, for Ukrainians, defending themselves against Russian aggressors is a just activity. And if they must focus on the worst behavior of Russian soldiers in order to convince themselves that they must kill, then the world understands.

Mr. Putin doesn't have a point of view, if by that you mean a set of ideas which can be freely debated and countered in more or less rational terms. What he has is a lust for power that is uncontrolled, the reasons for which will be debated by historians in years to come after this mess is a distant memory.

I pray for Mr. Putin, because I know that no power on earth can change his mind. Only God can, and so I turn him over to the Lord of all creation who is perfect love, and whose love embraces every evil to the point of death, death on a cross. Putin and his crazed soldiers will always have the freedom to ignore the offer of love, but that offer will never be withdrawn. And that gives me comfort. When there is a great evil in the world, Saint John Paul II once said, it can only be met by an abyss of love.

I thought of this recently in quite another context. I was talking with a friend about the Catholic view of contraception, and whether it makes sense, especially if the goal for society is to reduce abortion. It would seem that providing contraception to couples could easily prevent the need for an unwanted pregnancy, and then an abortion, an outcome that is another form of disregard for human life.

But what if there is another way to counter abortion? What if the impulse to cherish every human life were to begin with the act of sexual congress itself, so that the very possibility of a human life resulting from that congress is thought to be a gift to be preserved. 

As I watch the terrible pictures emerging today from Ukraine, pictures of the torture, rape and murder of innocent Ukrainians, I think about the beauty of a witness which is the polar opposite. It is the witness of a love for human life which begins even before conception, which welcomes human life and seeks to cherish and preserve it until its natural death. This love is stronger than all the Putins of the world and all his lost soldiers. It points to the abyss of love, which is divine, but which can be hinted at in the actions of each of us, if we dare to try. It is not pragmatic love. It is the wide open all- embracing love that each one of us hopes to receive from our creator, and so it is the love that we pass on to others as best we can. Contraception has been reduced to a medical act that might have a positive effect on society, but looked at another way, it is measure that narrows and limits the outer boundaries of love, the abyss of love that the world so terribly needs. 

It is hard to speak of these things, and to speak clearly. But I am trying because against all reason I know that there is a love that is greater than death and destruction, a love that I want to witness to because the alternative is to drop bombs on Putin and his minions and wipe them off the face of the earth. Love can creep into every human activity if we allow it to. And that includes our sexual activity. In fact, a witness against the use of contraception speaks to me of a powerful love, unwavering in its trust that every single human life, even those that exist in the form of possibility as sexual expression occurs, is unique and beautiful. It is, if you will, the other side of death.

 Deo, dicamus gratias. 

Scenes From Literature

 “Mr Annett’s patience snapped suddenly. He rattled his baton on the reading desk and flashed his eyes. ‘Please, please! I’m afraid we must begin without Mrs Pickett. Ready, Miss Read? One, two!’ We were off. Behind me the voices rose and fell, Mrs Pringle’s concentrated lowing vying with Mrs Willet’s nasal soprano. Mrs Willet clings to her notes so cloyingly that she is usually half a bar behind the rest. Her voice has that penetrating and lugubrious quality found in female singers’ renderings of ‘Abide With Me’ outside public houses on Saturday nights. She has a tendency to over-emphasize the final consonants and draw out the vowels to such excruciating lengths, and all this executed with such devilish shrillness, that every nerve is set jangling. This evening Mrs Willet’s time-lag was even worse than usual. Mr Annett called a halt.”

“‘This,’ he pleaded, ‘is a cheerful lively piece of music. The valleys, we’re told, laugh and sing. Lightly, please, let it trip, let it be merry! Miss Read, could you play it again?’ As trippingly and as nimbly as I could I obliged, watching Mr Annett’s black, nodding head in the mirror above the organ. The tuft of his double crown flicked half a beat behind the rest of his head. ‘Once more!’ he commanded, and obediently the heavy, measured tones dragged forth, Mr Annett’s baton beating a brisk but independent rhythm. Suddenly he flung his hands up and gave a slight scream. The choir slowed to a ragged halt and pained glances were exchanged. Mrs Pringle’s mouth was buttoned into its most disapproving lines, and even Mr Willet’s stolid countenance was faintly perturbed. ‘The time! The time!’ shouted Mr Annett, baton pounding on the desk. ‘Listen again!’ He gesticulated menacingly at my mirror and I played it again. ‘You hear it? It goes: ‘They dance, bong-bong, They sing, bong-bong, They dance, BONG and BONG, sing BONG-BONG! It’s just as simple as that! Now, with me!’”

— Village School (Fairacre Book 1) by Miss Read