The Top of the Hill

I recently watched a video by Father Robert Barron, of Word on Fire Ministries, where he used a powerful analogy to describe the difference between faith and wisdom. He said faith is crawling on the flat land, where our perspective is limited—we see what is in front of us and next to us and sometimes above us, but our vision is often blocked by structures and people and noise. God feels like a nice idea that we hope is real, but we can’t devote much time to Him because of the buildings and the noise and the people.

Wisdom is like finding the high ground, the top of the hill, where our perspective is wide and encompassing. We can breathe. It allows us to see the connections and the reasons and the sense. It helps us understand how small and many are the pieces of the puzzle, but how important.

As I watched, my mom brain kicked in: Man we have to teach this to the kids.

I don’t know about you, but having a 9 year old and a 7 year old under the same roof is not exactly a recipe for calm.

I know I kind of do it already, when I step in between and talk them out of the fierce protection of what is theirs to slooooooooooowly seeing the other person’s perspective.

Too much lately, it doesn’t work and I banish them to the basement and pour myself a vodka.

The old words are falling on deaf ears. They take too long to get out of my mouth. And require me to be too close to a child who is begging for a whoopin’ for anyone to be safe.

So yeah, new words.

Then I realized, Here comes Lent.

The ultimate reset button.

It’s the perfect time to introduce a new way of talking about how we are in the world.

Are we crawling on the ground, surrounded by tall buildings, in the shadows where it feels scary and we think everyone wants our toys?

Or are we walking to the top of the hill where we can see the whole picture? Where the air is fresher and we remember we are not the only people who want or need something?

Down below, we’re angry and defensive and selfish.

Up above, we find wisdom and grace and compassion.

It’s a lot better than giving up chocolate, if we can make it work.

Mother of mothers

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with Mary.

It gets less complicated as I get older. Motherhood has made her more real to me. After Dana’s post about the spoons, I wondered if Mary ever ran out of spoons.

A two year old is a two year old is a two year old, right? Plus there’s the business of the missing teenage years.

Part of what I struggled with for so long was my church’s characterization of her as small, meek and sugar coated.

Because I’m not.

I resented the Renaissance depictions of her that hang in churches and museums all over the world, beautiful in form and face even as she grieves at the foot of the Cross.

I wondered, if she is the ultimate example of womanhood and obedience, in all her delicate beauty and grace, then what are the rest of us?

Then I became a mom and I knew the truth.

She was a lot like the rest of us.

She labored and gave birth.

She felt mama fear, as we all do. Probably more, after meeting Simeon in the temple and then being forced to flee in front of the slaughter of the innocents.

She felt mama anger, too. The bible tells us that she searched wildly for her son for three days when he was lost. And when she found him in the temple, she spoke up to him, in front of the men surrounding him.

The strongest word I could find to describe her tone is “questioning”.

Yeah, I bet. She probably wanted to question him all the way home and into his room until he was 30.

Which would explain the missing years. Huh.

She was Immaculately Conceived, gave birth to the Son of God and lived a sinless life (hey, I said she was a lot like us, not just like us), which makes her the Mother of mothers. She walked our path and then some. She gets it.

That’s what matters—not how she is depicted in a painting from 700 years ago.

When I descended into the darkness after Annie was born, and my counselor told me that meditation would quiet the loud and ugly voices in my head, I turned to the rosary.

For Catholics, the rosary is meditation. It’s also closely connected to Mary, and I needed the Mother of mothers badly at that time in my life. On the nights when the fears were chasing me, I let the beads slip through my fingers, begging Mary to pray with me for peace in my heart and thoughts, to add her voice to mine and ask God for healing.

I never made it all the way through before falling asleep. But when I awoke in the morning, my rosary curled up in bed with me, I felt peace and knew that Mary was with me in my struggle.

My friend Steffani is the one who brought me closer to this understanding of Mary. She’s a homeschooling mom with eight kids, and her family is a great big joyful bundle of noise and love. In the midst of this, she is a very calm and wise woman. I used to think this was because she’d seen it all. But then I realized it’s because she gives it all to God. And she asks the Mother of mothers on a daily basis to pray for her and her family.

So I started praying the rosary beyond bedtime, looking for support and wisdom. I do feel that those moments of quiet reflection bring me closer to God, help me clear out the distractions and listen for the answers to questions and prayers.

A few weeks ago, my 36 year old rosary broke. I knew right away what I wanted to do. I had a rosary handmade for my godson Owen, out of his birthstone, for his First Communion last year. I got it from ClaresGift (Agnus Dei Creations) on Etsy.

I went back to the same shop and asked Ellyn if she could make me a mother’s rosary out of my birthstone and the birthstones of my kids. But of course. It arrived on Saturday:

I love it.

I love what it represents, a powerful way to pray for my babies.

I love that it connects me to the Mother of mothers, who is ever ready to pray for me and with me in support and love.

I love that it brings me closer to God, and creates a quiet space where I can ask, honor and listen.

It’s another way to remember I am never alone.

I’ll bet Ellyn can make any kind of custom rosary—mother’s, grandmother’s, dad’s, godmother’s, First Communion, Confirmation, Wedding, Quincineara, etc. Or she has a standard collection of Catholic and Anglican rosaries at https://www.etsy.com/shop/claresgift.

Why I Won’t Coach My Own Kids

My brothers and I grew up playing soccer, and my dad coached us all at one point or another.

It did not go well the season he coached me. The team did well, he would want me to point out. But our relationship was no bueno. We are very much alike in terms of intensity and I was at an age where I needed to push back—from safely across the room or huddle; my mama didn’t raise a fool. Things were tense between us the entire season.

Directly afterwards I switched to volleyball.

I felt then what I can verbalize now: for me to be good at something, I needed the full love and support of my family, in the stands and on the sidelines, cheering me on.

And if my dad was my coach, I wasn’t getting that from him. I was sharing it with ten other girls.

I didn’t want to share it. And for the rest of my career, I didn’t have to.

This is the first reason I will never coach my own children.

I did spend seven years coaching other people’s children. Honestly, I struggled to have the patience to coach high school students. Some of my players were using volleyball to fill time until their favorite season started. This was hard for me. I wanted everyone to give the same dedication to volleyball that I had given. And I had a hard time dialing it down. My teams were fun and successful, but I was a hard coach to play for, and I know it. There are a whole pack of young women on Facebook who consider themselves “survivors”.

They are all still in touch with me, and lead amazing lives as grown ups so it must not have been that bad. Even so, this is the second reason I will never coach my own children. It’s all well and good to have survived a coach.

But I never want my kids to feel like they survived their mom.

The third reason has to do with the sport parenting culture these days. It scares me.

We saw it in football this season, parents who already feel like so much is at stake, that their 8 year old’s NFL dreams live or die in Mitey Mites football.

There was maneuvering for starting positions. There were dads looking ahead to high school, talking about moving into school districts where the rosters were not so deep. And there was tension and hostility towards the coaches’ kids, and accusations of favoring.

I don’t want us to lose sight of our basic family values. I want to insulate my children as much as I can from the greedy and self-serving culture of youth sports today. It wasn’t like that when my brothers and I were playing. I want my kids to love it for the same reasons we did, because we were strong and fierce and challenged. But I also want them to keep their values and their souls about them.

I can’t do that from the bench. I have to do it from the stands.

Somebody has to coach the kids. I get it. I know parents who do it well, including my younger brother, who coaches with old school values and a lot more patience than I ever had.

But I will never do it.

We should all know our limitations as parents, and this is one of mine.

Surrender to the Hope

A few weeks ago, a friend told me that the death of her child happened for a reason.

When I asked her what she meant, she told me that she believed God was teaching her a lesson by taking her child. That she had done something in the past that had “earned” this pain.

Like what, I wanted to know.

I don’t know she told me. That’s what I have to figure out.

I let those words sit there at the moment because I was trying to be a witness to the larger story of her grief.

But you better believe I went back to them later.

Yes, Christians say it all the time: These things happen for a reason. Too often, in our hurt and grief, in our effort to understand, we think this means that our suffering is a result of something we have already done.

We can hurt ourselves and others trying to find the reason, trying to place the blame.

We can damage our relationship with God if we see Him as a petty and cruel Father who punishes us, withholding love and forgiveness.

I do believe that things happen for a reason, but the reason is not behind us. It’s in front of us, and it’s a gift from God to help us heal. When people say that good came from some horrible suffering, this is what they mean. If we stay open and trusting through the hardest times, we will see God’s plan.

Even if we’re angry and questioning and closed down for a while, it doesn’t matter. There will always be a lifeline. That’s who God is, the Greatest Lifeline in the History of Ever. He doesn’t make bad things happen, but he does help us turn bad things to good.

It’s a mistake to look back and surrender to the suffering. As hard as it is, we have to look forward and surrender to the hope.

For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity,

to give you a future and a hope.

Jeremiah 29:11

The Gifts of the Magi

Tuesday is January 6, the Twelfth Day of Christmas. Christians celebrate this day as the Epiphany, when the Magi arrived from the East seeking the new king. They brought with them three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

These were gifts of great luxury and honor. Frankincense and myrrh are both made from the resin of trees found on the Arabian Peninsula, and areas of North Africa. They were valued for their scent and used in religious rituals and as perfume and incense, something only the temples and the very rich could afford.

But frankincense and myrrh show up in ancient medical texts as well, some dating from 1500 B.C. They were suggested for treating battlefield wounds and used as anti-inflammatory, analgesic and antiseptic. In fact, there’s a long list of ancient suggested uses: digestion, asthma, congestion, cough, hemorrhoids, arthritis, dry and cracked skin and gum disease.

The resins were so valued that the Incense Route was born: the trade path for frankincense, myrrh and other spices. It flourished in the Arabian Peninsula for 800 years, meeting up with other major trade roads heading to and from the Far East. The route was incredibly profitable, and cities grew up along the way to accommodate the traffic. Then diminished trade in the 3^rd century caused the trade routes to alter, and just like that, the towns and the trade disappeared into the desert landscape.

With them went a general understanding of the medicinal uses of frankincense and myrrh, at least in the Western world. They are still used in Eastern forms of healing and medicine. But if I can be completely cynical for a moment, we are trained in the US to believe we can have “better living through chemistry” and that Eastern medicine is New Age-y or un-Christian or under-educated.

Which is not true. It’s an ancient and biblical wisdom developed and shared through-out the Far and Middle East for thousands of years before Jesus was born. It’s part of what made the gifts of the Magi so valuable.

For the first time this morning, I had this thought: From Mary’s perspective, perhaps the frankincense and myrrh were not gifts of wealth, but gifts of health for her baby.

And so for us.

Maybe someday, Western and Eastern medicine will be complementary, used to treat the whole patient. In the meantime, I have frankincense and myrrh essential oils in my medicine cabinet to use—after consultation with our doctors—for things that do not require more serious medicine, like wound healing and scar reduction. My friend is having her teenage son use it for his acne. In the next few months, I will be working with a local goat milk vendor to see what happens when her amazing face butter meets the anti-aging trio of frankincense, myrrh and helichrysum.

All of these are uses suggested in my copy of the Modern Essentials Usage Guide (6^th edition, 2014). Always use in consultation with a doctor in case of interaction with certain drugs.

For more information and to purchase frankincense and myrrh essential oils, visit www.mydoterra.com/danaalvarez/

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