I was walking through the parking lot at work this week, getting to campus early to catch up on a few things.  I zipped in and parked at the far end of the lot to get a little exercise  on my way into the office.  While I made mental lists of things to do for the day, I strode purposefully across the lot for several minutes.  Then I passed a young woman, a student, who was stopping to take a picture.  I glanced up at what she was seeing.

Only then did I notice the spectacular sky, the colorful sunrise and the horizon we could see across into Iowa.  It was a wonderful sunrise, with a balmy winter’s day to enjoy it.

When will I learn to watch the gifts God is offering me every day? Why do I get so caught up in things that I don’t notice what is going on around me?

What return can I make for all the Lord has given me?

Image by Vertigogen under Creative Commons license

This week we are republishing some of the most popular posts from dotMagis.

It was a momentof grace on a Sunday afternoon. My husband, Jim, and I were walking through the crowd into a Creighton U basketball game. In the middle of the throng on the sidewalk ahead of us, we spotted a little girl, about 5 years old, wearing a spectacular fluffy ballet tutu in game day colors, blue and white. Her special skirt bounced with her as she walked proudly along next to her father. I smiled at the difference in their sizes, her father a huge man, tall and beefy, carefully holding her miniature hand in his.

I saw that in his other hand he carefully held a tiny canvas bag—and out of the top of it peeked a Barbie doll. I loved the image of this large man carrying his daughter’s doll, unselfconscious in his desire to keep her happy.

As we passed them I complimented her on her skirt. They both smiled and she thanked me. “My mom made it for me to wear to the games,” she said proudly twirling in it. Her father looked down at her with such love then reached his hand down to reconnect with her and I saw it. The fingernails on his massive hand were painted a bright pink.

This was truly a father, a dad in all respects, whose love of his daughter gave him the freedom to not only allow his daughter to paint his nails, but to wear them publicly with pride and happiness or to forget he even had them done. Father and daughter joined hands again, their nails matching in color and their joy in each other, clear.

When we hear the story of Martha and Mary, the sisters who were such close friends of Jesus’, we most likely know which one we are.

I have always been a Martha, and like most Marthas, perhaps a little smug about it.  We Marthas might roll our eyes when this gospel comes up, picturing Mary sitting on the floor listening to Jesus and feeling Martha’s slow burn at her unhelpful sister.  Martha was the one who got things done.  Those of us who are Marthas suspect deep down that they somehow translated the ancient words incorrectly and that instead of stopping Martha from her frantic pace in the kitchen, Jesus was really saying to her, “Way to go, Martha.  If you weren’t running around getting things done, we wouldn’t have dinner tonight or a place to gather.”

Martha was the one who would argue with her dear friend, Jesus, and complain to him about things that seemed unfair.  She had a spark to her that I admire.

My Martha life has always been guided by To-Do lists and priorities.  I am all about productivity, tidying things up and closing the cupboard doors that stand open.  I am efficient and self-reliant.

And then I got sick.

This summer, after a small but nagging headache that lasted a few weeks, I found myself in the emergency room of the hospital.  I had a bleeding on my brain.  I was in intensive care for six days.  My head was shaved and I had surgery and was sent home … to do nothing.

I have spent the last four months at home, recovering, waiting for my energy to return.  For the first time in 36 years, I don’t go into an office every day. I don’t “do” much of anything.

Day by day, week by week, I can feel my energy slowly returning, but in the meantime I have been cared for tirelessly by my dear husband.  I had meals delivered by a dozen people in our parish – some I hardly knew.  People sent flowers and cards, letters and plants.  For the first time, I wasn’t the Do-er but the Receiver.

And for these past months, I have been Mary.  Sitting quietly.  Reading.  Watching my husband put together every meal. Seeing my colleague at the office carry on with our work.  Receiving.

It has been a wonderful experience not to be rushing all the time; to take naps a few times a day and to be what I might have called “unproductive.” Now I have a new respect for the art of “restoring” the depleted resource of my energy.  I pay more attention now. I watched my summer garden in fascination and have really noticed the spectacular fall leaves.

Mary listened to Jesus as she sat on the floor, while Martha just picked up the general ideas — she was so very busy with her preparations.  Now, after all of these months at home and contemplating that story, I understand that I didn’t get it right.

I don’t think Jesus was telling Martha to stop everything she did.  I think he just missed her.  He loved her fiery intelligence but wanted her not to be so distracted.  He invited her to sit next to him and simply be with him.  He wasn’t looking for her productivity or her finished To-Do list.

And he isn’t checking my list either.  I won’t find a higher place in heaven because I have finished more or been more productive.  Jesus is simply calling me to sit next to him and listen and not be distracted by Doing.  He wants me to notice how much he loves me and to relax deeply into that love.

I know that as my energy returns, so will my To-Do lists.  But I want to keep my life a little slower.  I want to pay more attention to the world around me.  And I want to sit on the floor next to Jesus and to lean back comfortably on his shoulder, basking in his love, his stories and his laugh, and remember what a graced life this is.

A while ago I sent this as my first blog posting for dotMagis.  Today there is an update.

In December of 2009, I wrote:

I went to a funeral Monday morning; the mother of a friend.  She was about 95 and left behind a grieving husband who will turn 99 next month.  They had been married for 73 years.  I sat in church and pondered that kind of love and commitment.  Seventy-three years?  For those of us who have been married a long time, there are days you wonder if you will make it seven years, then you wonder if you can make it to 12, then 25.  Marriage is so hard on some days and so glorious on most of the other ones.  By far the joyful days outnumber the bad days, but you have to marry your spouse every single morning when you get out of bed.  You have to make that promise to love and cherish all over again for the next 24 hours.

I think we are attracted to people we marry because they are different than we are – they fill in things we don’t have in ourselves.  Those who are hard-driving might find themselves married to a soft-spoken, gentle sort.  The extroverts to the introverts.  The joyfully fun-loving to the serious and determined.  Later, on the hard days, it’s probably the very things that attracted us to each other that are the things that drive us crazy.  It’s not always easy to see the sacred in each other on the bad days.

You marry for your entire life, but each day is a new commitment.  Day by day, week by week, decade by decade, until the young woman you met in your village in Italy, the “prettiest girl in town,” has been your companion in life for 73 years.  The loss of that person leads to the kind of sorrow and grief and emptiness that only our faith can fill and the hope of salvation we have been promised for so long.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from the daughter who said that her father had died.  She wrote, “My dad died this morning at 11:05 at Hospice House. Peaceful. I think if he was sending this message he would wave goodbye and say:

God has been good.  I have had a good life.  I wish you a good life; God’s blessing.  And now I am on my way to be with the “prettiest girl in town.”

My husband, Jim, and I had traveled to another town and called an old friend – Fr. Dennis, a priest we had known for a long time.  He had been forced into retirement by a debilitating disease. He invited us to his home for Mass.

He had a brand new altar in his living room, a beloved gift that is at the center of his home, and his heart.  It’s too late. He used to say Mass at the dining room table and now stands in front of this altar that he loves, but he can’t stand well.

He sat in his push-up chair and did the Liturgy of the Word from there. When he needed the readings, he opened his iPad and had an audio version of the readings read from there. He said his voice didn’t hold well and this was a long gospel.

Then took his walker to the altar and did the Eucharistic Prayer. His voice quavered a lot. We are not in the same town often, but I wondered that his voice was not as strong as it is over the phone. Then I realized he was crying. He sobbed through the Eucharistic Prayer and at one point just stood, crying. I found myself saying under my breath the next words, “Do this in memory of me,” as if to prompt him.

I thought of this very good man, this wonderful minister and the burden he has to bear with a disease that has already taken the ministry he has dedicated his life to and in the years to come, will take everything.

After Mass, he apologized and said he had a few bad days. He said he could track the progression of the disease in the last two days and he knows now that he will have to move to assisted living. He cried as he talked. It was yet another loss in this process.

As we ate the breakfast we had brought with us, Jim reminded him of a powerful experience of Mass we had once with Dennis on the night of September 11.  I echoed that. I said in a packed church that night, Dennis had used the Mass in time of War and he had announced that it was the first time he had ever used it in all of his years in the priesthood. Dennis didn’t remember it.  I tried to prompt his memory with one of the songs a choir had sung that night.  I sang, “I will not be afraid at all, my stronghold, my savior, I will not be moved.” Dennis just crumpled into tears and I could see how afraid he was.

He talked about the anxiety and fear of what is ahead and all we could do was be with him, listening — our poor ministry to this man who had ministered to thousands over the decades.

We went into the living room and talked for a little bit and he cried more. When we went to the door, not wanting to overstay our welcome, he dissolved into tears again. I put my hand on his shoulder and Jim, with an unerring sense of what is right, began to pray for Fr. Dennis out loud, while he held Dennis’ other shoulder. We asked if he wanted us to stay but he said, no, he would be alright.

What a good man, who must be looking at the cup and asking that it pass him by.

Perhaps because I feel as if I have been brought back to life after a 12-day siege with the flu, I have been thinking a lot about Lazarus.  It’s such a deep and wonderful Gospel with Jesus standing at the end of the tomb, peering into the darkness and calling us back to life: “Lazarus, Come out!”

It’s that kind of summoning back to life, the invitation to unbind ourselves from the things that tie us up that gives such power to our relationship with God.  Lent is a time of becoming aware of how much God longs for a deeper relationship with us, one where we realize that God is not in our minds, but deeply settled in our hearts, just waiting for us to notice.  It’s a gift of faith that I deeply wish for those I love the most.

My dad, who died about 9 years ago, was always terrified of death.  He actually dwelled on it a lot, but it was often in kind of a maudlin way and it was clear he was afraid of it.

Now, when I think back on his life, I can also see that he was raised to be terrified of God.  He knew that at the end, he was going to be punished for his bad life.

My dad was a hard man in many ways but finally, toward end of his life, I had the grace to see him with new eyes, maybe looking at him as Jesus does. He had lived a good life, raised six children and did his best. In his faith life, he never missed Mass. He read a number of Catholic magazines and lots of books and in retirement often had long conversations with his pastor about church issues, church politics, and reform.

But perhaps he could never move his relationship with God from his head to his heart.  It was rare for him to talk about his relationship with God, but when he did, it was clearly one of fear with God as a judge.  It didn’t seem to be a warm relationship but more cautious and leery.

He never had the sense that at the end, he would be falling into the arms of a loving God.

He didn’t know he would hear Jesus saying, “Cletus, come out!”

Sometimes we are blind to what is right in front of us.  Recently at our parish, we watched two altar servers who had fun all through Mass.  It may have been the first time they had served Mass.  Or maybe they had just gotten really comfortable.

They talked.  They laughed.  They slapped their legs with the cords of their server garments.  They pointed to their friends.  At one remarkable moment, one of them half stood and shot a wave over his head to a pal he spotted in the back of the Church.

They thought that because they sat behind the priest, he couldn’t see them, which is true.  Our presider had no idea.  But they were blind to the fact that the entire congregation was facing them—including their parents.  That is a particular kind of blindness, but I suspect the kind you only have once.

All of us are blind to things from time to time, but I suspect the biggest thing we don’t see and can’t always feel is how God delights in us.  Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J., quotes Anthony de Mello, who wrote about how we might meditate on how much God loves us:  “Behold the one beholding you, and smiling.”  Fr. Greg adds, “It is precisely because we have such overactive disapproval glands ourselves, that we tend to create God in our own image.  It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be any part of God’s DNA.  God is just too busy loving us to have any time for disappointment.”

And, God may be still chuckling about the altar servers at Mass last week.

I have a friend whose family members hang onto grudges and slights. They are people who remember everything ever done to them, against them – and by whom. They just can’t let of the wrong that has been done to them and they carry it with them every day.

“Refusing to forgive someone who has wronged you,” he says, “is like taking rat poison and hoping the rat dies.”

Forgiveness is an incredibly difficult task, and for many whose lives have been so much more difficult then mine, perhaps a seemingly impossible job.

That’s why I was so struck by a brilliant passage in Loyola Press’ Thrift Store Saints by Jane Knuth. She writes about the customers she meets in her volunteer work in a St. Vincent de Paul store. One day a woman comes in for clothes, a woman whose life and body speak of manual labor, long hours on her feet and poverty. She chooses the clothes she needs and as she stands at the checkout counter, she begins to talk about her life.

“Some church people, they talk about forgiving all the time, but they don’t have any idea how hard it is to forgive because I don’t think they’ve ever had something really wicked done to them. I’ve had a hard time forgiving my dad. I left home when I was 15 because of him.”

She continues talking to Jane as the clothes are bagged. “Don’t get me wrong. Forgiving is the most important thing. If you can’t forgive, it eats you up inside.” She says she is now the only one in her family who speaks to their dad. Jane is stunned at this woman’s insights and asks how the woman how she forgave her dad.

“Well, you know how church people say you have to forgive because Jesus forgave the people who crucified him? They say he forgave them while he was hanging on the cross. I heard that over and over.”

She pauses and explains to Jane that what “they say” isn’t quite right. She looked it up in the Bible, she said. “What actually happened, what he really did say was: ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’ He was talking to God, not to them. He was praying for them.”

What a profound lesson from a streetwise theologian who apparently found the peace she was looking for. May we all find that peace and ability to forgive.

We made it.

We got through January 24^th, the worst day of the year.  A group in Great Britain came up with this date a few years ago and designated it as the worst of any of the 365 in a given year.

Why January 24^th?  For those of us in the northern hemisphere the weather is cold and dark, for all of us the holidays are really, really over, our new year’s resolutions may have faltered and for some the reality of Christmas spending is just arriving in the mail with credit card bills.  I know in my head we have more sunlight with each passing day, but I can’t see it yet.

Into the midst of this cold, bleak darkness, comes the good news of Isaiah, repeated in the Gospel, courtesy of the Sunday readings two days ago.

“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
You have brought them abundant joy
and great rejoicing….”

Into the worst day of the year, our faith invites us to rejoice and wallow in abundant joy.  Jesus came to be with us in the darkness, with us in our sorrows and struggles as well as in the light and dancing.

That’s good news on any day.

It was a moment of grace on a Sunday afternoon.  My husband, Jim, and I were walking through the crowd into a Creighton U basketball game.  In the middle of the throng on the sidewalk ahead of us, we spotted a little girl, about 5 years old, wearing a spectacular fluffy ballet tutu in game day colors, blue and white. Her special skirt bounced with her as she walked proudly along next to her father.  I smiled at the difference in their sizes, her father a huge man, tall and beefy, carefully holding her miniature hand in his.

I saw that in his other hand he carefully held a tiny canvas bag—and out of the top of it peeked a Barbie doll.  I loved the image of this large man carrying his daughter’s doll, unselfconscious in his desire to keep her happy.

As we passed them I complimented her on her skirt.  They both smiled and she thanked me.  “My mom made it for me to wear to the games,” she said proudly twirling in it.  Her father looked down at her with such love then reached his hand down to reconnect with her and I saw it. The fingernails on his massive hand were painted a bright pink.

This was truly a father, a dad in all respects, whose love of his daughter gave him the freedom to not only allow his daughter to paint his nails, but to wear them publicly with pride and happiness or to forget he even had them done.  Father and daughter joined hands again, their nails matching in color and their joy in each other, clear.