About Life Lines

Celebrating Life, Even in Death

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:52:16 -0400

When I went to my local YMCA this week, I ran into a man from my parish, a deacon who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. His wife recently insisted on a Y membership for him in hopes that the physical exercise would help his mental state, but he is quick to admit that his memory is fading fast.

A deacon for 30 years, he can no longer assist at Mass without a cheat sheet. At home, if his wife asks him to get something from upstairs, he has to write it down. Although he keeps his mind active by reading and doing crossword puzzles, he knows that this is just the beginning of what is likely to be a long decline into a place none of us wants to imagine we might go, a place where we can’t find our way home, don’t know our own child’s name.

And yet, as we stood talking, this man was smiling and complimenting the trainers at the gym for being willing to re-train him every time he comes in since he can’t remember their instructions from one day to the next. He talked about the seniors he visits at a local nursing home, and praised his wife for being his “angel.” Not one negative word came out of his mouth; no fear or self-pity flickered in his eyes.

As our conversation wrapped up, he smiled at me and said, “God is good.” I walked away amazed at the way some people are able to meet life’s greatest challenges with grace and trust. Instead of asking, “Why me?” people like this understand at their core that the real question is “Why not me?”

To be able to approach the worst moments of life with such clarity, such faith, is truly a gift. It doesn’t mean that we don’t get angry at God or wish we’d been spared. It means, rather, that we understand that life is uncertain, that every day we can choose to embrace what is good in our life in spite of what is bad.

A day before I bumped into my deacon friend, I’d been to the funeral of another friend who died at age 46 after a long battle with colon cancer. His two young sons sat in the front row of our church, facing an uncertain future on top of a devastating loss. And yet, Dave, in an obituary he wrote himself, asked his family members and friends to celebrate his very full life, not mourn his early death.

“Dave reflected that if he had died suddenly, he would never have learned the capacity and generosity of how blessed he was by the network of support around him,” he wrote. “…Dave wishes friends, family and loved ones to celebrate their lives and if they choose to attend the memorial service(s), to celebrate memories and a life and move on, not mournfully, but joyfully recognizing that every person is truly a blessing and every day is a wonderful gift.”

Every day is a wonderful gift. That thought wasn’t penned by someone who just won the lottery or landed his dream job. It was written by a middle-aged father who knew he would not live to see his children grow up or even finish the school year. That takes a certain kind of faith, a deep and abiding trust in a God who does not cause our sorrows but loves us through them.

God is good. We say we believe it, but is it the case only when life is humming along according to our own plans. Do we believe it when every hope, every dream is dashed to the ground? Can we look out from a place of sadness or fear and trust in the Divine goodness that permeates our days, our very being? God is good. Can we live like we mean it?

2011 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.

Finding a New Model of Success

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:45:43 -0500

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Just when I was sitting at my kitchen table with my head in my hands, wondering how I could possibly accomplish everything on my list of deadline assignments with everyone at home for a snow day, I came across an article about Dutch women and their complete lack of interest in so-called success. I have to admit that I read it with more than a hint of curiosity and quite a bit of jealousy.

Given the opportunity to work longer hours and earn more money and higher professional accolades, these women opted out. They choose part-time work over full-time. They aspire to have free time and to pursue hobbies and volunteer interests rather than claw their way up the corporate ladder.

Here’s the money quote from the Slate.com article by American journalist Jessica Olien: "We look at the world of management—and it is a man's world—and we think, oh I could do that if I wanted," says Maaike van Lunberg, an editor at De Stentor newspaper. "But I'd rather enjoy my life." In the article, Olien chronicles her own “masochistic drive for success” that is so common among her colleagues back home.

Now, given the fact that I work for myself, and there is no ladder to climb, corporate or otherwise, you would think I’d be immune to the success-driven mentality. To be honest, my career is in the basement. Literally. Right behind the treadmill and opposite the video game console. And yet, despite what appears on the surface to be a carefree freelance life, I, too, have become caught up in the notion that if I’m not taking on more than I can handle, I’m just not doing enough.

I say, “yes,” to every writing assignment, Girl Scout troop request, faith formation program, and classroom art projects, all while trying to imitate my own full-time stay-at-home mother who cooked elaborate homemade dinners every night, kept an impeccably clean house, and never raised her voice. So far, I’m failing miserably at my model of success, and it seems I’m not alone.

Studies show that more professional success doesn’t necessarily equal more personal happiness. Bigger isn’t better. More is often less. And the grass is almost never greener. So why do we continue to spin our wheels, aiming for things that promise to make our lives more complicated and less content? Because we have bought into the notion that we are the bottom line in our bankbooks, the title after our name, the bio on the back of the book. But we are so much more.

In a sidebar on my website, I have the following quote from Thomas Merton: “Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”

So often we ask our children what they want to be when they grow up, but do we ever stop to ask ourselves – now that we’ve reached that grown-up phase – what we want to be, how we want to live? It’s not a question reserved for childhood, but one we can and should ask ourselves again and again.

What were we made for? The answer is not likely to be found in the ink-covered pages of our datebooks but rather in the empty spaces in between, the places where we’ve given ourselves time to breath, room to stretch.

Moving at warp speed through life can make us feel productive, successful. I view my deadline-covered dry erase board like a shield of honor. Look how much work I have. I must be worth something. But it’s only when we can find our worth outside our work, outside the world, that we will finally reach true happiness. No ladders necessary.

2011 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.

Skip the Resolutions. Go for Goals.

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 12:43:15 -0500

What new routines have you vowed to start and keep this year? A healthy eating plan? Exercise regimen? House re-organization effort? The new year offers the promise of a clean slate, a chance to begin again or try for the first time something that will improve our health, our home, our world.

I tend not to make typical resolutions, but I know plenty of people do. I remember when I was still a member of our local YMCA. When that first week of January hit, you couldn’t find a free treadmill or weight machine no matter what odd hour of the day you showed up. I asked a trainer, “How long will this go on?” He said, “Hang in there until the end of February and they’ll all be gone.”

We spend a lifetime – or at least a lot of years – acquiring the bad habits or out-of-shape bodies or lukewarm prayer lives that compel us to make resolutions, and yet we expect dramatic results in two months or less. We forget that undoing our habits is a one-day-at-time effort. One day at a time, one year at a time, one decade at a time.

Unfortunately, our society has brainwashed us into thinking we can find a quick-fix for everything. Pop a pill, drink a potion, buy a gadget, and you, too, will look like the plastic perfection staring out from a magazine cover. Of course, body and beauty resolutions are an easy target. They bear the brunt of the new year promises (both fulfilled and broken) because physical appearance is so important in our culture, but I know from experience that spiritual exercise routines and daily doses of prayer are no easier to stick to than that weekly abs class or low-fat diet. Spiritual renewal requires hard work.

At the start of each year, I tend to make a mental list of things I’d like to accomplish by the next year. Not anything like “lose ten pounds” because that seems to be a perpetual resolution in my middle-aged life. No, my list is more like this: go on a silent retreat, learn to do Centering Prayer (properly instead of the half-baked way I usually do it), clear out the unnecessary physical junk in my office that clutters my prayer life with mental junk.

I like the annual goals approach because it removes the one thing that tends to derail typical resolutions: the notion that if we screw up within a day or a week or a month we might as well give up completely. When we have an annual goal, we can continue to get back up every time we slip and know that there’s still time to make things right. And, if we don’t get to everything on our list by the end of the year, well, there’s always next year. But, it’s not likely that even our annual goals prove successful if we approach them at breakneck speed, spinning in a hundred directions at once.

In one of my favorite books, “A Gift from the Sea,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote: “With our pitchers, we attempt sometimes to water a field, not a garden. We throw ourselves indiscriminately into committees and causes. Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions. Instead of stilling the center, the axis of the wheel…”

Can we still our center in order to achieve our resolutions and goals, whatever they may be? Even just five minutes of silent stillness can begin to reshape our thinking and our lives, and give us strength to follow through on our plans. Five minutes. Can we do that? No formal resolutions, just an unspoken agreement that we will give ourselves five minutes of every day to sit and wait for God. Just watch and see what happens.

2011 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:38:24 -0500

About three years ago, I made a list of spiritually centered goals I wanted to accomplish before the next year rolled around: Go on a retreat. Check. Sell my idea for a book on spiritual friendship and write it. Check. Visit my friend Dorothy, who has been a model of faith and a source of inspiration since I met her at my first job almost 30 years ago.

The year came and went, and the one goal that remained unfulfilled was the one that should have been the easiest to cross off my list. I never got around to visiting Dorothy. So I put it at the top of the list the next year and once again failed to make the trip to her home less than three hours from mine. I couldn’t find the time, or, more accurately, didn’t make the time.

Dorothy, who is 27 years older than me but in many ways seems younger because of her incredible attitude, is the epitome of Christian faith lived out in the world. She has total trust in God, lives simply, shares her faith, practices what she preaches – and she really does preach. She has given missions all over the country since leaving her cloister years ago and becoming a lay woman with a singular purpose.

So last weekend I finally decided to make good on my vow. On the way home from a workshop I was giving on spiritual friendship – one where I read an excerpt about Dorothy from my new book -- I drove to Dorothy’s cozy little house. We went to Mass together, shared a meal, and talked for hours. No one would have guessed that I hadn’t seen Dorothy, save for a quick visit nine years ago, in more than two decades. We just picked up where we left off.

As we sat down to the dinner Dorothy so lovingly prepared, she asked me to say the blessing, and I immediately switched into my I’m-not-good-at-spontaneous-prayer mode. In true Dorothy fashion, however, she challenged me to stretch. So I bowed my head, took a deep breath, and let the Spirit lead the way. As I did, I smiled, because this was exactly why I wanted to visit Dorothy, to experience for a few hours the kind of spiritual prodding I sometimes need. It’s about trust.

The next day, we took our warm mugs of pumpkin spice coffee out onto the patio and into the cool morning air. A couple of deer ambled by and Dorothy happily called to them, asking where the rest of their clan was and if they couldn’t bring “Mr. Bear” with them next time. I stood there next to the St. Francis of rural New Jersey, remembering why I loved my visits all those years ago. It’s about joy.

Later, as we sat in a local restaurant, Dorothy prayed over our breakfast, calling down blessings not only on us and our families but on farmers and truck drivers, stock boys and cooks, waitresses and fellow diners, anyone who could possibly be connected to our omelets and toast. I felt a rush of warmth run through me that had nothing to do with the piping hot coffee. It’s about gratitude.

We all have special people in our lives, those family members or friends who have left a lasting imprint on our hearts, the loved ones who quietly but powerfully shape us as people, as believers.

This Advent my challenge to you is to reach out to one special person who hasn’t heard from you in a while. Make a call, write a letter, get in the car and drive. Find the time, make the time before one of you runs out of time. It’s about love.

2010 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.

Soul friends for the spiritual journey

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:34:19 -0500

We live in age when we can strike up a new friendship with the click of a mouse, where our “friends,” many of whom we’ve never even met, can number into the hundreds, or even thousands, thanks to social networking. Yet, despite all the connections and links and “likes” about everything from what we cooked for dinner last night to our latest work project, most people are hungry for something more.

We can have 395 Facebook friends and still feel lonely. We can “talk” to people all day in an almost constant stream of email, telephone and online chats and never have a conversation that dips below the surface to touch the soul. We can surround ourselves around the clock with coworkers and neighbors, parishioners and family members and still wonder at times if we’re flying solo.

In a world where so much is mobile or disposable, we crave something deeper, something eternal. Sure, it’s important to have friends who’ll share a night out for cocktails, a ball game, or a monthly book club, but it’s more important to develop at least one friendship that goes beyond the boundaries society sets for us to a place where God enters the picture. We all need someone – or several someones – who will walk with us down our spiritual path, push us, pray with us. We need someone who’s as comfortable sitting in silence with us before God as sitting across from us in a diner sipping coffee.

When I tell people about my new book, “Walking Together: Discovering the Catholic Tradition of Spiritual Friendship,” they sense that this seemingly new classification of friends could be the answer to their prayers. But there’s nothing new about spiritual friendship. We can go back to the Old Testament Book of Sirach 6:14 and read: “A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter; he who finds one finds a treasure.” We can go back to ancient civilizations, to different faiths throughout the ages, to Jesus himself, and find a deep need for and reliance upon friends who meet us on a soul level, people whose connection to us goes beyond “normal” friendship because we are bound together by our love of God.

Jesus sent his disciples out two by two, knowing they would need companionship for the sometimes-difficult journey. He had his own close friends – Martha, Mary and Lazarus; Mary Magdalene; Peter – all of whom held a special place in his circle of followers. We can look to some of our greatest saints and holy men and women to see how spiritual friendships can influence not only individual journeys but entire missions: Francis and Clare of Assisi; Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal; Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin; even Pope Benedict XVI and his brother, Georg Ratzinger. Through them we can see how spiritual friendship has the power to lead us closer to each other, closer to our true selves, and closer to God.

But friendship like that doesn’t just happen on the sidelines as we watch our kids play soccer on a Saturday morning. It happens when we find someone who clearly shares our sense of spiritual awe, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable before that person, when honesty, prayer, and mutual love become the foundation of friendship.

“Friendship demands very close correspondence between those who love one another, otherwise it can never take root or continue,” says Francis de Sales, the 17th century bishop who wrote extensively about spiritual friendship.

So the key to spiritual friendship is communication – not just those status updates or tweets you put out there for the whole world to see, but real heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul conversations that allow us to glimpse God in one another. And there’s no app for that.

2010 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.

Chance Encounters Turn Rome into Home

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:01:47 -0400

When I set out on a recent pilgrimage to Rome, I expected to be awed by the sheer spectacle of the scenery. How can you stand in the Colosseum or pray in St. Peter’s Basilica and not be bowled over by the magnitude of where you are? But what I quickly learned was that this pilgrimage would have more to do with people than with places.

The morning of my flight, I was near panic because Hurricane Earl was due to arrive on Long Island exactly when I was scheduled to take off. I did something I almost never do – took Lourdes water from a top shelf in the kitchen and sprinkled some on my forehead, and on my kids and husband for good measure.

I headed to Albany airport to catch a shuttle bus to JFK and struck up a conversation with others waiting at the bus stop. Two women joined by Father Paul Tartaglia of Albany were headed to Lourdes, of all places. As they shared prayer books and asked me to write down my intentions so they could bring them to Lourdes, I could feel my fears begin to evaporate. My pilgrimage was already under way and we hadn’t even hit the Thruway.

My 10-day visit to Rome as part of a program for foreign journalists who cover the Catholic Church will be seared into my memory not because of the big events but because of the smaller moments of grace. God really is in the details, especially when those details take the form of human encounters that make a place or a meal or a church come alive.

One evening, two colleagues and I had to “settle” on a little restaurant near the Vatican when we couldn’t find the one we were looking for. There, at a long table in the center, was a group of men talking and laughing and eating. As we ate pasta cooked to perfection, the men began to sing at the top of their lungs, first in Italian and then in Polish. They were seminarians from Belarus, and they sang extra loud once they heard our applause.

The next morning, as I sat in the front row at the papal audience, the camera panned to a group of young men. When the pope said their name, they stood up and started singing. I looked at the video screen and saw the seminarians from the night before, our seminarians. Alone in a throng of thousands, I suddenly felt at home, and I realized that what often seemed like aimless wandering around the Eternal City was clearly full of spiritual purpose.

Even the long wait for the papal audience turned into a moment of unexpected grace, when the Jesuit priest sitting next to me spotted my Magnificat and asked if I wanted to join him in Morning Prayer. Amid the noise and chaos of the auditorium, we created a silent sacred space.

Then there was my Friday night trip to Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of the oldest churches in Christendom, where I was moved to tears as I sang Vespers in halting Italian along with the vibrant local community of Sant’Egidio, lay movement that focuses on issues of peace and justice. And my meal at the French restaurant run by African nuns where, midway through the meal, all of the diners turned to face a statue of Mary and sang the Ave Maria together.

Sacred places certainly make the physical aspect of pilgrimage meaningful, but it is often the purely human moments that propel us further down our interior path, proving that we don’t have to leave home to travel far.

2010 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.

Letting go and loving God first

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 11:25:20 -0400

A couple of recent events have forced me to focus on the idea of “detachment,” letting go of those things that threaten to control us, consume us, or, at the very least, use up a lot of our energy and time unnecessarily. In our world today, detachment is most often talked about in reference to material things. In fact, it’s almost a bit of a fad. People want to live more simply, downsize their houses, buy local, go green.

For me, the material stuff isn’t so much the issue. I don’t need the big TV or expensive shoes. It’s the less tangible things that I seem to have to disentangle myself from. It makes me think of the passage from Luke 14:26, when Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

For a long time that reading just didn’t resonate with me. How could we “hate” our mother and father, our brothers and sisters? But, as usual, Jesus wasn’t talking literally but in story form, trying to teach us a bigger concept. Putting messianic prophecies aside (because so much of what Jesus said meant more to the Jews of his time than any of us can understand without a Bible scholar on hand), this passage is a reminder to us of where God needs to be in our lives.

Of course we’re not supposed to hate the people close to us. After all, Jesus told us we were to love everyone, even our enemies, so I think it’s fair to say we’re supposed to love our family. But those relationships cannot become so all-consuming that they get in the way of our relationship with God.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about these days. We go through life trying to fulfill certain roles in our immediate families, our extended families, our circle of friends, our community. Sometimes we don’t even stop to think whether that role is good for us or for anyone else; it’s just what we do because, well, aren’t we supposed to do it? No, as it turns out.

Our job is to love God first and let everything else fall into place. Detachment, I think, is a natural byproduct of the God-centered life. So, when we can’t make a family member love us, we find a way to love them anyway and let go. When our children start to spread their wings and we have the urge to mold them in our own image, we find a way to pull back and let them choose their own path. When we can’t be all things to all people, we find a way to step aside and quickly realize that things move forward without us.

Still, it’s not an easy thing to do, this detaching. Human nature makes us want to hold on for dear life, whether it’s to our possessions, our children, our larger family, or something even less tangible than that – our fears, our expectations, our self image.
I think I learned the greatest lesson in detachment when my mother died more than 22 years ago. Despite our physical separation, I realized – perhaps slowly as the initial grief began to fade – that the bond we shared transcended time and space. It remains for all time, and that’s a beautiful gift and a powerful lesson.

It’s only when we let go of our need to hold onto people and things that we finally experience the depth of love we were hungering for. It’s only when we remove the mask we put on for the world and face our true selves squarely in the mirror that we finally have the opportunity become the people we were created to be. It’s only when we love God first that we finally learn to love those around us more perfectly.

2010 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.

Preparing for a pilgrimage to Rome

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 11:28:19 -0400

For the past couple of years I’ve been obsessed with traveling to Italy. I made a promise to myself to get there, somehow, before I turn 50, which is in two years. I didn’t really see how it was going to happen, but the longing was so strong I kept holding out hope that a minor miracle would occur. I realize that international travel does not typically rise to the level of miraculous but that’s pretty much how I see it from where I stand, not having made it past Mexico or Canada since my college trip to China in 1984.

I’ve worked for the Catholic press for more than 25 years (starting as an intern at Catholic New York in 1984), so I felt a visit to the Church’s home office was a logical destination choice. Add to that the fact that my grandfather was born in Naples and my grandmother’s family hails from Avellino and, well, Italy just seemed like a place I had to visit at least once in my lifetime.

Then, a couple of months ago, I received an email from a Catholic writers’ group. It explained that a seminar for journalists who cover the Church had extended its deadline and there was still time to apply for the program, which would be held in…wait for it…Rome. At the time I didn’t even have a valid passport.

To make a long story short, I got the passport, was accepted into program, received a scholarship and booked a flight. In just a few short weeks I will be headed to Rome for ten days of what promises to be part professional opportunity, part spiritual pilgrimage and part personal adventure. The Church Up Close program, which will be held at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, is filled with in-person “encounters” and classes with high-ranking Vatican officials as well as visits to the usual tourist haunts – St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel – and some not-so-common sights as well. We will be among the small number of daily visitors allowed into the Scavi, the excavation site beneath St. Peter’s Basilica believed to contain the tomb of St. Peter and others.

But even more than those “official” events, I am looking forward to simply being in Italy, wandering the streets, stopping in churches, sipping cappuccino, and soaking up a culture that runs through my veins even if it has not been part of my life up until now. The idea of walking through the incredible history of the Eternal City is beyond what I can imagine, even as I devour travel guides and Vatican journals and novels set in Rome. I can’t wait to be a pilgrim -- to walk in the footsteps of saints, to stand in St. Peter’s Square, to attend a papal audience, to experience the land of my ancestors.

Pilgrimage has always been an important part of our faith. Since the earliest days of Christianity right up to the present, believers have traveled to the places critical to our faith story, places that allow us to enter into a long-ago moment in time so that our spiritual lives can receive an infusion of courage and strength and inspiration.

In their book “The Journey: A Guide for Modern Pilgrims,” writers Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda and Michael Scaperlanda remind us of the significance and power of the pilgrim journey: “Although pilgrimage is often lonely travel, it is never unaccompanied. Whether we see them or not, or know them or not, others journey with us.”

Although I will travel to Rome alone in September, I will not be “unaccompanied.” I will be surrounded by thousands of other pilgrims walking the same path, by the spirits of untold numbers of pilgrims who have made this journey for century upon century, and by those unseen pilgrims who have not yet set foot in Italy but have promised themselves that they will some day.

2010 Copyright Mary DeTurris Poust. All Rights Reserved.