You want to be a downer at any party?  Bring up the issue of suffering and ask what it’s purpose is in the world.  This, I can guarantee, will make your party circle dissipate.  That, or a LOT of people will suddenly excuse themselves, muttering their need to use the rest room or half empty drink classes that need refilling.

Not only is suffering a dismal, darkening corner of any person’s life, it is also such that because it’s so widely mysterious.  There are as many theories about the function and role of suffering as there are theories about God.  The age old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people,” is a question that can quiet any soul.  Why?  Because no one knows.  The unanswerable question, the spiritual vacancy that begs to be filled remains vacant.  Is it God testing us?  Is it punishment for something we’ve done?  Is it an evil in the world that strikes as randomly as a roulette wheel?

Or is it that it can be as simple as trying to find goodness and life-giving moments in times of distress and despair?

I recently heard an explanation that one of the seven Catholic sacraments, Anointing of the Sick, was not so much about that a person’s physical health rebounds, but more of a prayer for someone’s spiritual health; that the person does not slip into despair and emotional destitution.

Yesterday morning, I had packed Isaiah up and was ready to run errands with him and decided to clear out the trunk so I could fill it with groceries.  Awkwardly positioned, one handed lifting with my right, I blew something in my lower back that felt like a pull in my lumbar region which quickly radiated into my sides.  I fell to the garage floor in pain while Isaiah, stuffed in his bear snow suit gazed wide eyed at his fallen Mama Bear.  With teeth grinding and groans of pain, I picked him up out of the cold and nearly fell onto the living room carpet with him as he cried in surprise.  I called anyone close by for help.  I couldn’t move and I was terrified that my lower back was numb to feeling.  After a few hours, after a coworker came by to help with Isaiah and Nick left his classes early to come home and tend to his downcast wife, I began wondering.  The cliche set in.  WHY ME?  I had just deeply sliced my left thumb open last week and it was still healing and periodically bleeding from overuse.  My body was just clearing itself from a nasty and debilitating cold that racked my body since Sunday.  Despite all of this, I had been on the healthiest run of my life since I was pregnant: regularly working out, lifting weights, and running.  I felt terrific.

Immobile and feeling sorry for myself, I turn to pillows and tears as I could barely pick up Isaiah and had to ask Nick for every little thing: picking up something on the ground, helping me up from the couch and even slicing a fruit.  Asking for help was never so humiliating, even if the person being asked was my spouse.   Needless to say, staying in bed or on a couch made things even worse.  I was in a foul, foul mood.

This morning my back was stiff and uncooperative.  As Nick emailed his professors explaining his absence and Isaiah looked at my with his puppy eyes wondering why I wouldn’t pick him up, I decided to feel sorry for myself and hang my head.  That is until Nick decided to show me a video of Cher’s, “If I Could Turn Back Time” on YouTube and implemented his own song lyrics to fit my back dilemma:

If you could turn back time

If you could find a way

you’d never pick up that stroller

and you wouldn’t sway

You shouldn’t reach for the stars

Cuz your back still hurts

And you’d love me, love me

Like you used to do

Whoever would have thought that the topic to get me out of my funk would be Cher.  Not the most poetic lyrical adaptation, but performed in our living room with Nick screeching high notes and Isaiah clapping like an enthused fan, a gigantic laugh erupted from Couch Misery.  The rest of the day unfolded similarly.  We made each other laugh and exchanged loving and comical glances during the day.  I remarked that it reminded me of our college days; the days we used to spend together with nothing but hours between us.  Lately, between job, classes, Isaiah-care, programs, meetings, family, holidays, and general life, neither Nick or I could remember the last time we were forced to stay home, just the three of us, and not go anywhere or do anything except spend time together.  I couldn’t do anything except lie down, sit up, and channel surf.  And Nick couldn’t do much except watch Isaiah tackle every wire and pillow in the house.

And suddenly, through the throbbing of my back, I felt grateful.  Grateful for a life that allowed to have my husband stay home with me and make me watch Cher on YouTube.  Grateful for a son that crawled into his toybox and waved from the other room.  Grateful for a warm home, deli meat in the fridge, and caring family members sending emails asking if I was better.  I was grateful, mostly, for Nick, and the time to just sit on the couch side by side for hours and talk while we watched Isaiah try to balance a block on his head (so adorable but unsuccessful).

And the reason why my pulled muscle happened to me suddenly didn’t matter as much as the good things that came out of it.  Yes it means I’m backed up in work, and will spend several more days recuperating and not doing what I want.  Yes it means that Nick will be behind in his school work and can’t miss any more classes the rest of the semester, but our house is a little more full of light-heartedness, a little more radiant with laughter at Isaiah pushing his toys all around the house and yelling DAH DAH DAH DEE!

And that kind of uplifting, in the midst of physical suffering, feels quite miraculous.

(Thanks, Cher.)

Dear Isaiah,

I know I missed your 13th month birthday and I sit here not really sure which is more unthinkable: that I missed it or that you’re 13 months old.

You are growing by leaps and bounds.  Last week, you climbed up the stairs by yourself, looking for me.  I was in the bathroom, your Dad in the kitchen when we both heard very loud handslapping on the hardwood flooring.  Sure enough, there you were, crawling up and never looking back.

And your appetite is reflecting your constant movement.  You demolish bread like it’s nothing and stuff pasta in your mouth like fuel for a hungry machine.  Last week you started sipping out of my cup and drinking powdered G2 Gatorade.  Your eyes remain open as you drink, the opening of the glass cup nearly putting a soft indent in your skin as you stuff your face into the cup to drink.  Your father and I just laughed.

You’re almost walking!  You cruise pretty quickly along the couches, and anything sturdy and walk with toddler toys with wheels.  It’s so strange, still, to see you standing on your own, legs a little less wobbly, a little less cautious everyday.  The house is wrecked every 3 hours by your travels and need to pull everything out of their place.

Your Da Da Da DA! is hilarious to me and emotional for your Pops to hear.  We know you are just weeks away from walking and your talking to yourself proves that words will soon be on the heel of your independent mobility.  But we’re in no rush.  This weekend, your grandparents came in while your Dad and I went out for the first time in many months.  We feasted at the Saffron Patch, an Indian cuisine restaurant, and then front row of the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, my favorite place in Cleveland.  We enjoyed ourselves and relaxed, breathing you in from afar for a change.

Today is the first day you are not with your father and I during the day and I have already cried and it’s not even 10am yet.  Watching your Dad pack you up had me more nervous than I anticipated.  Flat on the bed, I listened to the car back itself out of the drive, the snow crunching beneath the tires and then the buzz of the accelerator as the car hit the dry road.  My eyeballs never moved from the ceiling.  A quiet house.  It both thrilled me and devastated me all at once.

I showered and took my time, realizing that I could.  I ate breakfast without side glances at the high chair and piecing off bread for your tray.  My neck bears a necklace this morning and I stared at it a long time, realizing it had been so long that I wore jewelry without chubby little hands clamoring for it.  There were no stains on my sleeves or pants from your messy hand prints or applesauce dots on my face when you purse your lips together and blow during breakfast.  I missed you.

My office hadn’t seen me this early in a long time and my coworkers were sympathetic to my transition, asking how I was dealing.  Of course I cried.  And my small cold didn’t make it any better.  I thought of all the little things you’ll be doing and accomplishing without me and think, “This is good for Isaiah.  This is good for all of us.”  And while I know it’s true in my heart, it doesn’t really wipe the sadness from the windows of my heart, wishing I could be there just to watch you interact with the world in the trusting and innocent way that you do.

You are always with me.

Love,

Mom

One of the things that I’ve been trying to do more is write about my spirituality.  Since writing, for me, is an intensely spiritual and often cathartic experience, writing about my spiritual journey should be a seamless task.  *Should* is a funny word. Because it’s not easy.  What *should* be easy is not.

Quite the opposite, writing about my spirituality is difficult.  I’m often hesitant and intimidated at the thought.  Spirituality now is such a hard topic to address.  It’s as if you have to write generally to make an agreeable point sometimes and since my spirituality shares significant space with my Catholic beliefs – and since Catholicism is so controversial in the faith and feminist debates – I take pause when the urge to write about God comes.  After all, deep conversations about the intangible, unseeable world is hard to discuss in person, let alone express to a screen of faceless readers.

Which is why I started reading “Things Seen and Unseen: A Catholic Theologian’s Notebook.”  It was floating around the office, a Christmas gift that took a hot potato turn from one set of hands to the next. No one seems interested in reading it.  Then it landed in my hands.  It’s essentially the quick and private thoughts of a Notre Dame professor who puts down on page the things that capture his attention: memories, ideas, epiphanies, quick thoughts.  All theologically framed, some hard to understand, but strangely interesting.

I often read books that will serve as a psychological trampoline; something for me to bounce from.  Ideas from a gifted and articulate spiritual educator seems like a good place to start.  I can’t promise revelations.  I can’t guarantee provocative questions.  What I can promise is a genuine and honest response to questions I have struggled with for what seems like eternity:

Who am I and who is God?  How are we connected?  What reveals God to me and what is God communicating to me and me alone?  Where am I and where is God?

These seem to be the rotary of questions begoggling my soul.  The pieces of social injustices, suffering, death and dying, miracles, prophesy, church as institution, sin, redemption…all these other issues which fascinate me are veiled by the curtains of much larger questions or origin and identity. These are questions that I know, deep down, somewhere in a quiet space where verbal language is not my primary means of communication, that these questions shall remain with me until the day I die.  But I think there’s more purpose and meaning to life when we approach our questions as if they were meant to be answered by the life and earth surrounding us now.  Today.  And like a voracious and relentless investigator – I must know the truth.  Or, at the very least, know that I am trying to live in a way that reveals its depth to me.

So, here we go…

of Jersey Shore.  It is, by far, the most ridiculous waste of television space that has ever burned on the screen…which is why I can’t take my eyes away.  I watched 2.5 episodes and the only reason I didn’t watch more because Nick was throwing me out the door so we could run family errands together.  There are scratch marks on the door frame, I believe, from where I was grasping to watch the last minutes of Jersey Trash before Nick threw me in the car.

And then I talked with a Jersey accent for an hour.

*pff* I’m so sure.

The conversations of my life…like snowflakes breezing over my face are hard to catch all at once and are equally unique and memorable…Here are a few gems.  Gems for different reasons…

Nick: I don’t think every conversation has to have the answer. I think sometimes even just talking about the uncertainty for the sake of talking about the uncertainty helps you along the way.

Speaker at a presentation I attended: I wouldn’t worry so much about censorship in this country.  I’d worry more about where people are getting their information.

My Sister, Carmen: I want personalized wedding stuff.  It probably is rooted from somewhere in my childhood because all those personalized keychains, all those personalized bracelets in those jewelry stores – they never had my name on them.

Acquaintance:  I was in conversation with someone who thought that disease was evil.  Like, from the devil.  It was a long discussion.

It’s hard to write everything down sometimes.  The small promises you make.  The hopes you list through your head on December 31.  All of the habits you swear have seen their last days.  It’s hard to write it all.  So I did a photo collage for the new year.

I’ll write more about this and the new year later, but this piece, entitled simply 2011 is themed after the things I am committing to this year. The relationships I will strive to continue, build, and improve.  You can see pictures of various friends, family, words, make/shift magazine, even a picture of myself with my camera.

This collage may look like a dreamy memory to you, but I made it for myself and it’s loaded with meaning.  So come mid-Februrary when New Year’s Eve is the last thing on my mind, I can remember all the things and people I saw YES to and what I will throw myself into.

Cheers, 2010.  I’ll never forget you.