Monday, July 20, 2015

For the Beauty of the Earth

For the beauty of the earth,
   For the beauty of the skies,
For the Love which from our birth
   Over and around us lies:
Christ, our God, to Thee we raise
This our Sacrifice of Praise.

For the beauty of each hour
   Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flower,
   Sun and moon and stars of light:
Christ, our God, to Thee we raise
This our Sacrifice of Praise.

For the joy of human love,
   Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth, and friends above;
   For all gentle thoughts and mild:
Christ, our God, to Thee we raise
This our Sacrifice of Praise.

Oh, there is great beauty all around us. And I'm going to harness it and wrap it around me!

Here's the start. 

BEFORE

Not bad, but not yet mine.

AFTER

And that's what I'm talkin' 'bout!!

Peace, 
Kari
  • Tuesday, July 7, 2015

    What Compels Me

    What is this mad compulsion to write? And to publish?

    Every time I click "publish" I feel a piece of the past falling away. It is a beautiful and celebratory thing EVERY TIME.

    This blog is my story.  It is absolutely and beautifully skewed based on what I experienced with my five senses, in the deepest corners of my mind, and spiritually.

    For the last year, most of my thought and action and writing have been tempered by the overwhelming confusion and dismay I felt because of my husband's actions, cruel words, and gossip mongering. My story is also defined and shaped by the choices and actions of my former friend, someone I trusted with way more than I ought have. My story is shaped best, though, by the beauty of what has transpired in the last few months.

    So why tell this story? The one of my worst behavior, weakest moments, and greatest betrayal?

    Because I am compelled to live in truth.  I've always, always said that sin hides in secret, dark, and shame.  And I will not reside in any of those.

    I do feel the truth in what many faithful people have told me: Satan attacks what most threatens him. 

    My marriage threatened him, because of what outsiders observed.

    My work threatened him, because of my compulsion for goodness.

    I threatened him, because of my compelling need to be the hands and feet of Christ - and I continue to threaten him for the same reason. 

    I've always, always told people that our senses deceive us.  I don't have to say more about that than the following statement:  when we look at the horizon while standing on an ocean beach, it looks like the water falls off the edge of the world; it doesn't.

    Know what doesn't deceive us?  Truth.

    I am a writer.  I write because I love words.  I love truth.  I love beauty.  How can a heartfelt missive not satisfy all three?

    There are other reasons to write too. Expression. Articulation.  Passion.

    Though I've lost the link for the following comments, this is what other writers had to say about their own passion for it. The italics and bold font are mine!

    Passion is what makes a writer. If you do not have passion for what you are doing, well, you won't be able to write. I write because I want someone to feel something. I write from my experiences, hoping that someone will learn, or feel sad, or happy. -- Dina

    Why do I write? That is both an easy and a difficult question, especially if I were to try to explain it to a non writing person. There are several different reason, none of them really connected. My main reason would have to be because I have to....Writing is something that gets into your blood, like a terminal disease you can never entirely get rid of....  I write because I love it. The feeling I get when I finish a book is indescribable, like receiving a much wished for Christmas present. Like I have just climbed Mount Everest. -- Katherine

    Why do I write? Because I was born to be a writer. As a child, I spent all my free time reading; escaping into far away places, meeting new people and being the person I wanted to be. That ''escape route" became my lifeline out of a torment of 'real life' and I've always felt I owed it to others and myself, to pay that back. I now try to create places and people and events that can fill that gap for others out there who want to be more than they are or can be. -- Sherry

    I write because I like it. I write to relieve stress. I can be someone else when I write. I can solve anything when I write. It makes me think when I write. -- Kay

    Because not writing would be like death to me. At seven I already had a clear vision of what my path in life would be: I would be a writer. While my friends played four square (anyone know what that is?) and talked about the next birthday party, I sat in a corner with pen to paper living the life, creating the life that could only be mine in dreams. I was quite a lonely child with severe self-esteem problems and I clung to writing like a life-line - I believed it was the only thing I could do well....Writing is not a hobby for me, not a career. It is a compulsion. the truth is I can't not write. I now have a clearer vision of my future and I know what type of writer I want to be (a journalist), but that seven year old's ambition and enthusiasm is still here, inside me. -- Bianca

    I've always been able to write.  I've always been good at it.  I am so thankful it's become a part of my life again.

    Peace,
    Kari

    Wednesday, July 1, 2015

    The Skin of Our Teeth

    This is one of my favorite, all-time quotes.  It's from Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, a 1942 Pulitzer-prize winning
    I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them - it was that promise.
    When I started writing The Feast at Cana (a contemporary Christian celebration of marriage and family that my music group, SALT, performed several times), I recalled and used this quotation.  Originally, I had seen the quote on the front cover of a church bulletin when Fr Harry was at St Henry.  He was doing a marriage series.  I remembered it, I think, because of the truth it houses.  My friend voiced the nearly lyrical passage. In retrospect, that's a great irony.  By contrast, I do not think it's ironic that I penned something about marriage. I consider myself something of an expert by way of study, observation, and experience.

    At the time we started discussing marrying each other, I was fairly certain it was a good idea.  I remember weighing the options.

    I was very pragmatic about marrying my husband. I did not marry him because I loved him; for reasons better explicated elsewhere, I am somewhat emotionally withdrawn.  I decided to marry him because he loved me and because his family offered something I'd never experienced. I married him because I thought he would be honorable and honest, steadfast and strong, dependable and detached.

    See, my parents were very passionate about everything.  The passion that flew from person to person in my childhood home was intense and overwhelming for someone extremely sensitive to energy exchange.  In my home, one never knew when the extreme would be a happy one or a bad one.

    My husband's family was very different.  Things were always quiet and people talked to one another with what looked much like respect. They did gently silly things - like making me think they'd let the family dog lick a plate clean and then put it back in the cupboard (I didn't eat there for a very long time!).  They included people and seemed interested in the zany topics I had to discuss. I was too naive and trusting to realize then - or for a long time after we married and had a family - that the silence hid secrets, grudges, and hostility.

    I wanted the peace I thought I found in my husband's family for my own, so I made my promises.  The first time I made them was January 5, 1991. Fr Harry officiated.

    We had already indicated our willingness to marry one another with these words:
    Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?
    Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?
    Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his church?
    "(Name) and (name), have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?"
    "Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?"
    "Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"
    - See more at: http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/catholic-wedding-vows.htm#sthash.PsOWYBvb.dpuf
    "(Name) and (name), have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?"
    "Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?"
    "Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"
    - See more at: http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/catholic-wedding-vows.htm#sthash.PsOWYBvb.dpuf
    "(Name) and (name), have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?"
    "Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?"
    "Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"
    - See more at: http://catholicweddinghelp.com/topics/catholic-wedding-vows.htm#sthash.PsOWYBvb.dpuf
    After agreeing to each of these questions designed to ascertain intent, my husband and I conveyed the sacrament of marriage on one another with these words:
    I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad.  In sickness and in health.  I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.
    Tough promises.

    Can anyone keep them?

    And if they do, are they ever happy?

    Over the years I made those same promises to him three more times: once when my wedding ring was replaced and Fr Tim blessed it in the beautiful St Henry chapel.  Two other times I made those promises to him during Feast performances.  In each case, we were collectively at a different place in our lives and in our marriage, and I meant what I said, and I believed he meant what he said each time.  Every time.

    Remaking those promises and restating those words was a replay of our wedding day, and it was a renewal and blessing of the sacrament we entered that day.

    Those promises should have kept us both safe.

    As the events of the dissolution of our marriage unfolded, I spoke to my husband on rare occasions.  Once, last January, I told my husband that I would have stayed married.  His response?

    Actual conversation:

    Me: I'm glad you did what you did; I would have stayed married.
    My husband: I would have stayed married too, if you had followed the rules.
    Me: And what about my friend? What would you have done with her?
    My husband: Yeah, well. I'd have her too.

    The skin of my teeth.

    Escaping by the skin of your teeth means a narrow escape, or barely escaping.  It is usually used in regard to a narrow escape from a disaster. The phrase first appears in a translation of Job 19:20, which provides a very literal, word-for-word translation:  "I haue escaped with the skinne of my tethe."  The full passage reads, in modern English:  "I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth."
    I like this website's additional insight:  "Teeth don't have skin, of course, so the writer may have been alluding to the teeth's [sic] surface or simply to a notional minute measure - something that might now be referred to, with less poetic imagery than the biblical version, as 'as small as the hairs on a gnat's bollock'.  (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/83000.html)

    Staying in a marriage based on my husband's arbitrary rule structure or staying in it with a third party involved would, for certain, have been living my own life and calling by the skin of my teeth.

    Instead, I escaped.  And I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

    I'm glad I escaped by the skin of my teeth.  And I'm glad that real peace, the peace the love of Christ brings, is within reach.

    Peace,
    Kari