The Return of the Alleluia

I love this song from the Shrek soundtrack.  It is the only soundtrack that I bought immediately after seeing the film for the first time--mostly because of this song.  While this song is very somber, there is nothing somber about the Easter season.  Somberness is reserved for lent.

In lent, the flowers on the altar become more understated or disappear altogether; We quit saying Alleluia before the Gospel reading; we omit the Gloria at the beginning of Mass as well.  Worship becomes stark, and it reinforces the idea that now is the time to fast, pray, and do penance.

And then, Easter comes.  Just as with many things in Catholicism, the order of worship reflects the feelings and tone of that part of the liturgical year.  This is why the Easter Vigil has to be my favorite service of the year.  It begins outside the sanctuary by a bonfire as the sun is setting.  Then, the Christ candle is lit from the bonfire while the Story of Christ's death and resurrection are briefly recounted through the Easter Proclamation.  Then, from the Christ candle, candles that each participant holds are lit.  Traditionally, the sanctuary remains dark for the first part of the Mass, except for the candles that the congregants hold.  Then, the Priest, as he is entering the sanctuary, says, loudly, "The light of Christ" and we respond, "Thanks be to God."  This part always brings to mind the verses from Isaiah 9:

The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light;

Upon those who lived in a land of gloom

a light has shone.

What I love most about the Easter Vigil, though, is the fact that the whole of the salvation story is recounted. There are 7 readings from the Old Testament that are traditionally read (although you usually only hear 4 for the sake of time), as well as a reading from the New Testament and the Gospel narrative of the resurrection.  Then, any adults that are entering the Church receive the sacraments of initiation (Baptism if needed, First Communion, and Confirmation).  I love this part, too, as it reminds me of when I entered the Church. 

On this night, we also sing/say the Gloria and the Alleluia for the first time in 7 weeks, and every time it makes my heart sing.  I find that, as we go from darkness to light, from fasting to feasting, from penance to praise, I am reminded of the verse in the Psalm 30:

For his anger lasts but a moment;

his favor a lifetime.

At dusk weeping comes for the night;

but at dawn there is rejoicing.

 And then, the Easter Season begins.  I love this, too.  For, Easter doesn't end with one day.  It lasts until Pentecost Sunday, and we officially celebrate Easter for 8 weeks.  What a blessing that is--to remember the joy of Christ's resurrection for longer than we were "rending [our] hearts and not [our] garments" (Joel 2:13). 

So, the liturgical year reminds me once again that weeping and rejoicing both have a place in my life.  Sometimes, like in the song above, I rejoice through my tears--and when I do, sometimes that rejoicing is "a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah".  For I often know that God has asked me to give up or has taken away from me those things which keep me from Him. In the process, I become better, more grounded, and ultimately, more like Him. May we grow closer to Jesus as we rejoice in this Easter season, just as we did in the fasting of Lent, and may we never lose sight of how much He did for us!

4:30 PM on Friday

Tick, tock, tick, tock
The time passes in
Grains of sand and
Emails: "you have won!"
"Can you help me?"
"20% off!"
All of them beckon
Me to read, to ponder
To attend.

My mind is elsewhere,
Dreaming of long walks
With my dog, a good book
And homemade popcorn.
No alarm clocks, No
Deadlines, No urgency
For two languorous days.

I love what I do,
But this day has reached
That pivot point:
Too much time to do nothing
Not enough time to begin
Something new.
I'll get to it
After the weekend.


(After giving up poetry for various reasons during my marriage, I am finally finding my voice again.  Expect to see poems here from time to time. If you like them, feel free to share, as long as you attribute them to me.)

Finding My Poetry

I found her in the back corner:
Hidden behind the leftover
Rolls of Christmas paper
The extra curtain rods
And my long quilting ruler

I'd begun packing--
Sorting through the detritus
That naturally grows
Pile after careless pile
With every orbit of the sun.

This is why I love Lent:
An excuse to sift and discard
To slough off the mountains
That creep into my heart and my home
From thoughtless placement through disuse.

So, each year, I give, I store,
And I find anew:
Gems hidden with casual malice
In the corners, under piles
And forgotten

What is that box?
The dust billows in
Silent testimony to her
Years of sentry duty
Never moving, never moved

Never relieved of the
Weighty duty
To which she
Joyously volunteered.
She measured time grain

By tortuous grain
Beside tomes of heartfelt musings
Old movie stubs and
Flowers pressed between
Webster's words.

I dust her off
In gentle reverence
And catch up on changes,
Events, and the unending
Rhythm of daily life.

She smiles in amusement:
The slow trickle of time
Has not escaped her.
Though rusticated, she remains
My muse.

The Great Lenten Experiment

So, I've been thinking a lot about what to give up for Lent, and I haven't been able to figure any thing else out.  Most of my go-to stuff is either not an issue this year because I've already pretty much given them up (Starbucks for instance), or because I have to use it for work this time around (Social Media).  So, I've been racking my brain for what to give up for Lent.

Usually, I take something on and give something up--I read a book, add a prayer discipline, etc. in addition to giving something up. It is because of Lent several years ago that I still refrain from listening to music in my car on the way to work: I use that time for prayer instead.  I have also had some drastic failures...One year, I gave up all land animals for Lent.  I was able to make it through lent, but I hate fish.  I ended up eating a lot of tuna and meat-less meals.  I don't think I touched tuna again for close to a year!!!  Since then, I have set my sights on things that are less weighty: it has become a reset time for me.  I give up those things that I know are items that tend to eat up more and more of my time as time goes on--For many years, it was TV, and then it became Facebook/Social Media and Starbucks.  But, I have already cut Starbucks this year, and I am in charge of a contest at work that is using Social Media during the month of March.

Even though I'm feeling the creep of social media,  I can't cut it completely, so that isn't really a good Lenten discipline this year.  So, I think that I'm going to try something that I've always wanted to try...I'm going to make Lent a "Buy Nothing" Month.  Of course, I know that I will still need to buy food and gas, but basically, unless it is a necessity, I'm not going to buy it. My goal will be to stay under $200 for necessities each month for the (almost) two months of lent. Even then, I suspect that I'm not going to need much from the grocery store during Lent--My pantry is fully stocked, and I keep buying things that are already in the pantry because I don't know what is in the way back!

Really, the hardest part is going to be refraining from eating out, as I eat out more than I should--I often don't feel like cooking when I get home.  I think that I'm going to need to be better about cooking on the weekends so that I can eat the leftovers all week long.  I'm also going to need to be better about telling friends no when they mention going to eat after running.  At least I will have the excuse of, "Sorry. I gave it up for lent."

Ash Wednesday is March 5th this year

The real question is what to do with the money that I don't spend...One of the traditional disciplines of Lent is almsgiving, but it would also be nice to pay off more of my debt, so I can't really give it all away.  However, I will be upping my giving from the money that I'm saving.  This is going to be fun and very informative.

The three traditional disciplines of Lent in Preparation for Easter: Fast, give, and pray.

What are you giving up for Lent?  Are you taking anything on?  How do you prepare for Easter?

The benefits of having a treadmill, or why I have running on the brain.

Me at the finish line to the El Paso Half-Marathon this past Sunday. My official time was 3:12:07.99, which is 19 min and 17 seconds slower than last year.  My shirt says, "Forget the glass slipper. This princess wears running shoes."

Last night at about 11pm, I realized something rather disturbing, and it was that I have running on the brain.  I came to this conclusion when I had been laying in bed for close to 2 hours, and still wide awake.  At that moment, I started thinking, "hmm. I wonder if going for a quick run will help me to get to sleep.  Maybe pounding the pavement will help me to relax my brain enough to quiet my thoughts, and then I will finally be able to drop off."  I even got out of bed long enough to think about the logistics of running at that time of night:

1. Find sports bra
2. Put on running clothes
3. Tape feet
4. Put on shoes
5. Find some sort of light to run by
6. Think of route that would be safe at this time of night
7. Remember house key...

I even thought that Ginger might be egging me on, because she kept getting in my face like she was expecting me to play with her--I obviously wasn't asleep.  After standing in the middle of my room for about 5 minutes of indecision, I crawled back into bed, mainly because I don't have a light that I could run by.  At that moment, I realized that treadmills have a valid place in the grand scheme of things--had I had a treadmill, I seriously would have run for a few miles.

I have to admit, though, that I have a hate-hate relationship with treadmills.  I can run around a track with impunity, and run on a road/local running trail for hours.  And this is in spite of the fact that I often will go out and back several times to get the mileage that I need.  But, put me on a treadmill, and all of a sudden, I feel like this:

Treadmills seem to have copied the same concept for human consumption...

Or maybe like this:

Look at 1:37 of this clip to understand... (on a side note, I really like this movie, especially the Georgio Moroder version which was set to classic rock).

I can run 5-6 miles easy when I am running on the road, but when I step on a treadmill, I end up struggling to finish just one mile!  On top of that, treadmills act like clothes hangers for me--they accumulate clean clothing on their arms and other horizontal spaces, and eventually, they look something like this:

Yes, I owned a treadmill once.  I decided that more hangers used up less space.

So, I'm probably not going to run out and buy a treadmill any time soon.  However, I am planning on buying a head lamp with my next paycheck on the off chance that I get the notion to go running at 11 pm some other night.  Come to think of it, I may just create a bundle of running clothes in one of my drawers so that it is easy to find everything on another night of chronic insomnia.  I need to try it at least once, just to see if it will really help me sleep!

Listening to Silence

Before I went on my Camino, music was an integral part of my running routine.  I was always looking for that next song that would motivate me, help me keep my pace, and to be perfect for singing along to.  The idea of running without music sapped a lot of the joy from the idea of running.

My Compostela.  It is now in a frame, but I have yet to figure out where I'm going to hang it.  Part of me thinks it belongs in my bedroom, and part of me wants to bring it to work and hang it over my desk.

Then, I walked the Camino, and I spent 21 days in the quiet of my surroundings.  I learned to still my thoughts as I walked, and I found that having nothing on in the background was a blessing.  So often, we fill our surroundings with noise--sometimes so that we can drown out other sounds/noises, and sometimes so that we don't have to deal with the internal dialog.  When I am working, I actually prefer to work in silence, but because I work in a lab setting, I usually listen to music in order to block out the distractions of conversations, etc., going on around me.  It is why I like working in a corner where people don't always see me.  In doing so, I'm able to cut even more distractions around me.

My ear-buds--they are made to stay, even while running, and I love them! It doesn't hurt that they are purple, either!

When I first got back, I would turn on my music because I thought I had to in order to use my iPod Nano to record my run, then I would tuck my ear-buds into the strap of my bra.  It meant that I couldn't check my distance easily mid-run (my nano tells me through my ear-buds), but it allowed me to run with no music.  Instead, I could listen to the cadence of my feet, the crunch of the leaves, the flow of traffic, and the ebb and flow of my own thoughts.  Then I found a new setting--there is a "No Music" option!  So, now I run with at least one ear-bud in, but most of the time, there is no music playing.

This can be problematic when I am running with friends, as I tend to be more chatty without music playing, but the quiet is just another layer to the joy I find in running, especially when it is just me, Ginger, and the road.

As you can see, this is the standard response when we are about to go running, and it is heartbreaking when I have to go without her.  I'm convinced that she is mad at me for the rest of the day if I leave her behind.

When I am silent, I also find that I am attuned to things that I might otherwise miss.  Earlier this week, when I noticed that the plum trees outside my office were beginning to bloom, I also noticed that the local bee population had also found the blossoms.  Close to the tree, you could hear their buzzing, and I would have missed that if I hadn't been quiet both physically and internally. 

A bee visiting one of the plum trees near my office

Come Sunday, I will be running a repeat of the race that was my very first half marathon, and I'm of two minds about whether to listen to music or to run in the quiet.  I'm already looking forward to our footfalls on the pavement sounding like the sound of a hard rain hitting the roof, and the blessing of once again pitting myself against 13.1 miles.  I'm not expecting any major insights, but I also know that, when I listen to the silence, God will often whisper to me in that space.  It is when I let noise for the sake of noise creep in that I lose focus and balance.  I think that is also why many cloistered religious orders have some sort of rule about being silent for at least part of the day.  It carves out space where God can whisper to them.  May we all carve out spaces for silence in our lives, and may we listen to that silence.  Who knows?  Maybe the Lord is just waiting to speak!

This post is in response to the weekly writing challenge at http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/the-sound-of-silence/#more-69294 .  Go there to find out more, and/or add to the conversation!

The Economics of Toilet Paper

One of the staples of life...

There are some days when you think of the craziest things.  Remember those dispensers from High School?  You know, the ones with the single sheets that had the consistency of tissue paper and you needed a hundred sheets to keep your hands from getting wet? Weeeelll, one day as I was using the restroom here at work, and I started thinking about toilet paper, and how, when you buy the cheaper stuff, you end up using more of it.  There has to be some sort of balance between being frugal about toilet paper and getting a soft, cushy experience when doing your paperwork.  While I will grant you that the experience is of some importance--I don't want to be using crepe paper--it is also important not to be spending more for my toilet paper than I need to.

This is similar to the toilet paper that I used while I was in Mongolia, although that really DID look like mauve crepe paper!

So, I have seriously been thinking about doing the great toilet paper experiment...Buying one roll of all of the options of toilet paper from the store and seeing which lasts the longest for the lowest amount of money, and which makes doing my paperwork bearable, if not a joy.  I'm not sure I will actually do it, but it is interesting to contemplate in those moments when there is nothing else to occupy my mind.  ;-)

remember these?