Really Listening to Children

~ Elizabeth ~ 6 Comments

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Lately everywhere I go I see adults dragging children around while talking on their cellphones. Sometimes the child is in a stroller, sometimes in a shopping cart, sometimes across the table in a fast food restaurant. The child is there, often talking, and the adult is either talking on the phone, texting on the phone, or looking at the phone.

In this photo,  I am four years old and I have the undivided attention of two family friends. They are taking me seriously. They are each focusing their gaze on me as I talk and they listen. I understood, without being explicitly told, that I mattered. I grew up assuming that what I had to say was important. It might not be well received later in my life–and often it wasn’t–but I held and still hold the conviction that my voice matters.

Children are little for a very short time, no matter how endless it seems when we are mothers to small children. They chatter nonstop, and we often wish for a little silence from them. Ironically enough, when they are older, we long to hear them say anything to us besides the monosyllabic responses of “fine,” “no,” and the extended sentence of “you wouldn’t understand.”

Listen whenever you have a chance. It can be life changing for a child. It was for me.

Learning New Words

~ Elizabeth ~ 7 Comments

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I have always been fascinated with learning new words. After many years in academe, following many years in university, I don’t run into many new words. So when I taught, I treasured hearing new contemporary words. Sometimes, the words weren’t new to me, just to my students. I remember years ago telling my community college students  to “holler” if they needed help. One student said, “Did you just say “holler?” He thought I was very up to date, while I had been using that word since at least 1955!

I use words which are strange to my grandchildren, but they think they are very old-fashioned, not excitingly new. I say things like “neato,” “kiddo,” “cool beans,” and “way to go,” placing my vocabulary back in the “olden days.”

So imagine my delight when reading another blog I enjoy I encountered the word “woke.” Now I have seen it a couple of times in the past week. What a great addition to the lexicon. It says so much in four letters. It sums up what I often want to say to people and seems to be the timely equivalent to the archaic,”what hay truck did you just roll off of?”

Thanks to my international diverse younger blog friends who are enriching my vocabulary. “Thanks a heap.”

Predictable is Underrated!

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

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Today three generations in our family went to see the movie “Sing.” The plot was absolutely predictable, so I don’t have to worry about a spoiler alert. (Unless you have never seen a happy kids movie before. In which case, this is a spoiler alert.) The basic plot involves a singing contest staged by a koala bear to save his theater from foreclosure.(If you don’t like anthropomorphized cartoon animals, avoid this film.) There is a motley crew of underappreciated singing animals who come together to save the theater. Of course there is a disaster when it looks like all is lost. IT ISN’T.

American culture is fixated on the new, the unpredictable, the cutting edge, the never-before-seen. Sometimes what we all need is a totally predictable, happy ending movie to restore our hope in things. All five of us, aged 7 to 69, left smiling, laughing and repeating, “That was a great movie.”

Hooray for predictability!

Peace and Grace to All

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

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Our tree is a kind of record of the years, filled with my daughter’s dough ornaments, ones I sewed for her when she was little, and a few from my husband’s childhood. I especially treasure the angel tree topper, bought long ago at a bazaar.

Whatever tradition you follow or invent as you go along, I wish you peace. We certainly all need it. Keeping our eyes focused on what lies ahead, may we keep our lives upright, not swayed by endless contradictory, dis-regulating tweets. Amen.

 

“Walk In The Light”

~ Elizabeth ~ 2 Comments

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This year Hanukkah and Christmas land on the same weekend. We are getting a double dose of light. We certainly need it. Sometimes when we are driving, the road is so dark we have to put our headlights on high beam to see our way forward. This seems like a “high beam” time in the United States, and I am grateful that two religious observances stressing light are being celebrated together.

It is easy to get discouraged by bad news or chaotic pronouncements. It is tempting to look into the darkness and begin to despair. But both of these faith traditions ask us to stay light focused. In this photo I seem to be struck dumb by the lights shining in the room and off the tinsel. Awe seems an appropriate response to overwhelming light.

May you find peace tonight whatever tradition you follow. Remember to walk in the light.

My First Christmas 1947

~ Elizabeth ~ 1 Comment

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Unlike so many pictures of babies, the one featured on this Christmas card shows me in a particularly thoughtful mood. I love the way the light is shining on the bassinet and my hand is resting on the paw of my stuffed kitten. I have that wonderful slouched position of someone who has just mastered sitting up but has to balance her head’s weight against that of her body.

Lost in thought in 1947, lost in thought tonight as I look back over many, many Christmases. Our country is going through some tough times. Inflammatory rhetoric fills the news. In 1947 the country was taking a deep breath after a long siege of war in the Pacific and in Europe. But we had unleashed the bomb, and our lives had become more perilous than most of us knew.

I have spent my whole life with the specter of nuclear war as a back drop. I mourn the reality that my grandchildren are now hearing talk of intensifying that threat. Tonight I pray for peace. I pray that cooler heads will prevail. I pray that we can lay down our weapons and spend our money studying peace.

Amen.

 

 

 

“Little Things Mean a Lot”

~ Elizabeth ~ 4 Comments

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I treasure my collection of miniature Nativity sets. Because they are small and relatively inexpensive, friends buy them for me when they travel. I have sets from Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, Ecuador and Peru. I enjoy the many different cultures’ visions of the Christ child’s birth. Here the birth is attended by llamas! I also love the hands that enclose the scene, reminding me of a song I sang once “he’s got the whole world in His hands.”

The fireplace mantel has room for the assortment. It’s a gentle reminder that in my tradition Jesus came for all people, not just the privileged.

 

“Such was his intention”

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

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In the reading for today, the fourth Sunday in Advent, I heard a wonderful phrase in the Gospel from Matthew. The account tells of Joseph learning that Mary is pregnant. He intends to separate from her, since the baby isn’t his. “Such was his intention,” the text states. Unfortunately for his plans, he is given a different message. While I think that angels look nothing like this image, I do think the depiction of Joseph represents his situation pretty realistically. He really had other plans!

Whatever your faith, and whatever texts you read in your tradition, I think we can all recognize those times when we had “an intention” and life sent us in a different direction. I intended to have several children: I had one. I intended to always be in a two parent household: I spent 11 years as a single parent. I intended to remain close friends with someone: she raged at me and stopped speaking.

Now I hold my intentions a little more lightly. We really don’t have complete control over our lives. We need flexibility to deal with the reality that we meet. We don’t have to spend time in the “if only” unless we decide to spend all our time looking back. And sometimes reality is much better than our “best intentions.” After all, when I finished the Gregg summer school course, I intended to never type again. And then they invented computer keyboards!

 

Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

~ Elizabeth ~ 3 Comments

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Here in New England we have just had our first bout of snow. It was only a few inches, just enough to give us time to find our mittens, hats, scarves and boots from the dark recesses of the closet where they had taken refuge earlier in the year. The little playhouse in the background is snowed in. The fence mid-yard forms a barrier between the dog’s yard and the play area. With the next snow, she will be able to walk over it. A bit of our red canoe still peeks out behind the garage, reminding us that the lake once thawed. And poor St. Francis, surrounded by zinnias in the summer, now sports snow for a hairpiece.

Seasons help me recognize parallel shifts in my own life. I need dormant times too, times to regroup, slow down and become more contemplative. Winter, with its short days, encourages me in these pursuits. And Advent is a time for reflection and stillness.

The roads are a mess as they always are after the first snow. Even the plow drivers have to get back in the groove. And people need to remember how to drive on ice and snow. By the next onslaught we will be back in the pattern of winter. Going out early to clear off the car(the garage on the left of the picture houses tools and the snowblower, leaving no room for the car!), salting the steps, clearing the sidewalk. We will once again yell:”Take off your boots before you come in here!”

Then spring will come along and startle us with buds and breezes. We will have forgotten all about it, so convinced that winter would never end.

 

The Rosary and Me

~ Elizabeth ~ 6 Comments

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When I was a teenager and my parents were loudly arguing in the room below me, I used to tune my bedside radio to a station in San Francisco, 600 miles away. Late at night, I would hear a very repetitive prayer go–it seemed–on and on. It was very soothing, though I really had no idea of what it was. I would fall asleep to its calming words.  I was unchurched and really didn’t even think to ask anyone about what I was hearing.

Fast forward 30 years and I was praying in a place in Portland, Oregon called The Grotto. It is a lovely sanctuary open to all. I found the quiet very grounding. One day I heard a group of mainly Philippine women saying that same repetitive prayer while holding strings of beads. Then the woman in front of me turned around, handed me one, a lovely amber string of these beads and said, “I am supposed to give this to you.” She handed it back to me and went back to prayer.

By then I was Christian, but I had heard horror stories about Catholic prayer practices which supposedly prayed TO Mary, as if she were God. But it didn’t seem to me to be the case. The sequence of prayers included a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed and five repetitions of the Lord’s Prayer. It was, as far as I could tell, theologically sound.

Fast forward another 20 years and my next door neighbor, newly widowed, asked if I would join her once a week to pray the Rosary with her. So I printed out the prayers, picked up my amber beads and went to her house that Tuesday. We meet each Tuesday morning and pray the prayers. I still get flummoxed occasionally, worrying that I am counting wrong, which definitely interrupts the contemplative nature of the prayer! But when I can drop down into the repetition, it has the same calming effect on me that it had 55 years ago.

Now when I get to Mass early (God’s sense of humor leading me to Catholicism over my Protestant friends’ dismay) I see others quietly holding the beads and moving their lips silently. I feel grateful remembering how important those beads were so many years ago.

If you want to learn more go to http://www.rosary-center.org. (As always, I respect many traditions, and I have no interest in proselytizing; I’m just sharing my perspective.)