Goodbye, 2011!

As I am writing this, I am sitting here, quarantined in my room. I caught something from one of my perpetually ill cousins this Christmas and, so, there you have it. No mind, I will just have to bombard you all with Twitter updates and blog posts! :)


What a crazy year it's been! So many ups and downs. In June I graduated, and have spent every day since then having everything I once thought about my future, my goals and dreams, my life, being turned upside down by God. Nothing in my life has been safe from His devastating love.


I'm writing now my goals for this year, but I want to do something a little different. I'm taking part in the "One Word 365" challenge, which is basically a commitment to find one word that speaks to your heart for 2012 and the hope you have for the New Year. It's an intentional sort of thing and I will write a mile-marker post every 3 months or so. Hopefully you will all consider participating! Or just doing it on your own!


So my word for 2012 is this: Χάρις - charis. 


Such a small word, yet so rich and pregnant and vibrating with meaning. 


Charis is grace; the grace that God gives, that I can live, inhabit, be. Grace that I could return, give to someone else. It is also joy, holy kindess, charity, Christ-love. 


It forms part of the word eucharisteo, eucharistia - eucharist. This sacrament I am called to live and live by. 


There is so much here! My prayer this year is to make it part of my every breath and heartbeat. 


Blessed John Paul II will also be my patron saint this year! Praying alongside me and guiding me closer and closer to Jesus. 


May all of you, too, be guided by the grace of God, and the peace that He gives! Happy New Year everyone and peace be with you and yours!

7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 1)

1. 

My first Quick Takes post ever! I thought it would be fun to do one right before Christmas because I probably won't be blogging again, or around the blogosphere, much until 2012. 

virgin is the new mermaid

At first I laughed. 

When I saw the promo for a new TLC "reality" show called "The Virgin Diaries" featuring that goofy altar kiss, I laughed like everybody else. When I saw it again on Ellen, I laughed a little less but, still, it was funny. Then I saw the actual show and I stopped laughing. I watched the morning news shows trot out "experts" to weigh in on how healthy this lifestyle is. How these smart, successful, modern women all laughed at that strange being: The Virgin.

when God uses glee and st. john of the cross in the same sentence

Bear with me, there is a method to the madness.

We must then dig deeply in Christ. He is like a rich mine with many pockets containing treasures: however deep we dig we will never find their end or their limit. In every pocket new seams of fresh riches are discovered on all sides...The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, to enter the thicket of the cross. (st john of the cross)

Ode to Autumn

Courtesy of La Tartine Gourmande

I love the changing of the seasons. There's a kind of sadness that you feel in your blood, the changing of your body rhythms, night, day. Watching the resplendence of spring lounge under the hot haze of summer. And then after such fullness, the earth cleanses itself again, shedding its leaves like an old skin. But all this happens in a big fire of color and symphony and wonder. I hate the years when fall lasts all of six minutes before that bear of a New England winter settles down until sometime in March. And I am trying not to that that so much.

So, in honor of the loveliness of fall, I'm posting this poem by the wonderful John Keats called "Autumn":

Let it be

Today has been a rough day. Every year on this day, we Americans, New Yorkers, remember where we were, what we were doing. Everyone marks this day in their own way. And now it's been ten long years, and we say goodbye to a decade lived under the shadow of the Twin Towers.

I can remember passing under them as a kid, bending my head as far back as it would go and still unable to see the top of the World Trade Center buildings. There was almost something sacred about them, that something in this world was bigger than me. It's like a punch to the gut to see the Manhattan skyline with those buildings missing like a giant gaping hole. And more, to think of all those trapped inside, how when the buildings fell, they took 3,000 innocent lives with them.

I visited Ground Zero for the first time in early October 2001, only a few weeks after the attacks. There was a makeshift chain-link fence set up around the site which, then was still a smoldering, dark, smoky pile of horrifically twisted steel.


I will never forget, as long as I live, what it felt like, smelled like, walking down that long block to Ground Zero, made eerily still by the death that, too, had passed by. Everything was still covered in a thick, powdery grey ash, like a blanket laid over a body at rest. The dust caked cars still left there, shoes, crushed phones, abandoned ambulances, blown out shop windows and apartments. I will never forget turning from busy, bustling downtown Manhattan into what could only be described as a graveyard.  I could never fully describe the feelings that day, looking over the site, my parents, my family, New Yorkers to the core, weeping.

Brief Merton post

We are words that are meant to respond to Him, to answer Him, to echo Him, and even in some way to contain and signify Him. Contemplation is this echo. It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit, in which our very life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and mercy of the Hidden One. ... The contemplative is at the same time the question and the answer.

A lot to take in, right? I've been chewing on this quote lately from Thomas Merton a la the New Seeds of Contemplation. What a treasure this man is/was to the Church. His writings are so challenging yet at the same time, they make sense. I would encourage anyone interested in the contemplatives, or this aspect of Christian spirituality to take a look at his stuff.