A Little Way

 

   Today is the memorial of my favorite saint, Therese of Lisieux.  I am drawn to her story, "Story of a Soul", for her determination and spirit to make meaning out of a life of seeming invisibility in her church communion (Roman Catholic tradition) and her world at the time.  

    She was a woman of extraordinary faith, hope and most of all love, whose ordinary daily works attending to her sisters at the Carmelite monastery in the small town of Lisieux, held within them a vast attendance to the church and the world at work around her.  She saw her vocation as one of "love", where all her words in the quotidian, no matter how seemingly small, invisible and 'boring' to the observer, done with love, had the power to reverberate and extend out to the world with love, and transform in secret.  It also offered her assurance of profound belonging to her beloved church.  She says it this way,

"Since my longing for martyrdom was powerful and unsettling, I turned to the epistles of Saint Paul in the hope of finally finding an answer.  By chance the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the first epistle to the Corinthians caught my attention, and in the first section I read that not everyone can be an apostle, prophet, or teacher, that the Church is composed of a variety of members, and that the eye cannot be the hand.  Even with such an answer revealed before me, I was not satisfied and did not find peace.

   I persevered in the reading and did let not my mind wander until I found this encouraging theme:   Set your desires on the greater gifts.  And I will now show you the way which surpasses all others.  For the Apostle insists that the greater gifts are nothing at all without love and that this same love is surely the best path leading directly to God.  At length I had found peace of mind.  

    When I had looked upon the mystical body of the Church, I recognized myself in none of the members which St. Paul described, and what is more, I desired to distinguish myself more favorably within the whole body.  Love appeared to me to be the hinge for my vocation.  Indeed I knew that the Church had a body composed of various members, but in this body the necessary and more noble member was not lacking; I knew that the church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love.  I knew that one love drove the members of the church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their blood no more.  I saw and realized that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything, that this same love embraces every time and every place.  In one word, that love is everlasting.  

    Then, nearly ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed:  O Jesus, my love, at last I have found my calling; my call is love.  Certainly I have found my proper place in the church, and you gave me that very place, my God.  In the heart of the church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things, as my desire finds its direction." (Therese of Lisieux:  Story of a Soul)

    It strikes me now, more than when I first read Therese 40 years ago, how grand a soul she has and how it speaks into the desire of women today in their invisibility and their works of motherly love.  Whether we want to find a place of belonging and meaning in our Church or not, Therese witnesses to women of faith that the core of all belonging and acceptance is a love willing to die for others and only then will we be seen and heard inside of the Christ and the Triune God's self-giving love. Like for her, it will take our own martyrdom of the soul, loving this Church and the world it serves, to make a difference and to bring transformation to our own times.   

    I see Therese now, smiling down on women everywhere, on her beloved, broken church and world, letting us know, it's time for women to shine, invisibly. 

I cry out to be seen, to be known,

to fit in, to belong, not as I might have it.

I wrestle with the Word, to discover myself as I am in the truth of the One in Three,

the dance of life poured out creatively 

in every moment martyred on a cross,

like Mary.  A long, lonely, joyful, martyrdom.

Like a woman's gift of long labor

over a lifetime of loving

with or without reward

holding her peace within, whatever the outcome of birth;

stillbirth, different birth, beautiful birth, Messiah's birth,

carrying on with loving still

creating

blessing, forgiving, healing, welcoming while

washing clothes and making meals and growing gardens and picking fruit,

donning the clothes of the Kurdish fighter, or the scarf of Ukrainian resistance, or 

feeding the poor, defending the helpless, protecting and guarding the hearth,

Women at the tomb,

and the first to tell the Good News.  

    

Easter Season Devotions

Growing up I was surrounded by images, medallions, and elements for devotional prayer.  As a family of six siblings, my parents led us each evening in recitation of the rosary on our knees in the living room.  On the wall we all shared in seeing an image of the sacred heart of Jesus, a crucifix and a large beautiful landscape painting of the forested mountains in some part or other of British Columbia, painted by our sister-in-law.  All of these were sacred, beloved symbols of intimacy with God - for myself, none less than others.  I still hold my sister-in-law as a saint in our family, though she'd likely cringe at the thought, and with my father's farming and my mother writing songs about the sacred and wondrous beauty of the mountains, daily life lent nature a place in my devotions, though I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at the time.  

Then there were mom's vials of holy water, holy salt and holy oils used frequently and liberally when praying with others for their needs.  Many a stranger came to our doors for prayers with my mom.  The elements of the earth were vital sacred sources, or sacramentals as they're called in Roman Catholic parlance, for making Jesus present, for healing.

Later, pilgrimage to sacred places (my first being to the Holy land at fourteen), and sites that held sacred clothing, (the mantle of Guadalupe; the Holy Shroud) or healing waters (i.e. Lourdes, France; Lac St. Anne's, Alberta), incorrupt bodies, or monstrances with Eucharistic miracles (like the one in O'Cebreiro along the camino de Santiago in Spain) all allowed for the natural environment to be elevated as part of our journey of transformation into Christ.  

When hail storms were forecasted, my father would take holy water in small vials and bury them in the four corners of the fields to protect the fields.  Sounds like magical thinking to some, but is it?  Now, it seems to me to be a graceful ritual, a reverencing of nature and an understanding that the earth is the Lord's and we are earth as well...one body transformed together in hope and faith and most of all love.

How did we lose the connection with devotions, and pilgrimages as reverencing creation; as forming the larger part of the web of relationships we encounter daily? Devotions may tend the affective, emotional intelligence of our nature; but they are largely the language of nature itself, sacred and penetrated with the incarnation of Christ.  For me the holy sites are not separate from the rest of nature, but rather resurrected signs of the whole of nature redeemed in Christ.  

My Easter season devotion is a daily walk with rosary in hand praying for the needs of the world, an end to COVID 19,... and watching for pussy willows as they bud and open on branches, Canada geese as they return from their migration south and waters make their way and run into the river as the snow melts.  Thankful for resurrected life.

The Resurrection and the Life

Sunday Readings - Ezekiel 37: 12-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:8-11, Jn 11: 1-45

"I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me, even though he die, will live, and everyone lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?" Jn. 11,25

"True joy, genuine festival, means the casting out of wickedness.  To achieve this one must live a life of perfect goodness and, in the serenity of the fear of God, practice contemplation in one's heart."

St. Athanasius

Jesus asks Martha the question.  "Do you believe this?"  She responds faithfully, "Yes, I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."  Her words are profound.  However dimly, she is given to see with the eyes of faith, Christ, the anointed one, will die too, will rise, and will pour his Spirit into the world, and the whole of creation will be blessed in his resurrection; will be raised up with him.  Do you believe this?  Have you ever seen the dead raised?  Have you ever been the dead raised?

In my twenties, I spent much time with a friend dying of cancer.  Our faith was young.  We kept hoping for a cure, and praying for healing.  We prayed and waited, but the cure did not come. We were present to each other, in joy and in sadness.  We loved in our waiting.  We played games, we talked late into the night about what the next life might hold, what resurrection meant, and we prayed together with each other and often in a community of loving prayer.  

In August she lay dying in the hospital.  I see her at noon, and sit by the bed holding her hand.  Her arm is exposed and I can see the cancer spreading to the surface of her skin on her arm, neck and face, in large blisters of purple/black blood.  She is breathing heavily with eyes closed.  I know she wants so badly to stay alive to attend her sister's wedding...to be present for her children.  The last time I had visited she was smiling brightly through a clear physical, emotional and spiritual suffering, sewing her daughter's dress on the hospital bed.  She made it plain to me she planned on making it till the wedding was over.  

Now, days before the wedding, she is clearly not going to make it.  I say to her, "I love you. ...Don't be afraid.  It's o.k. to go home whenever you want to go.  God is here.  He will take you home. " I said the words and I believed them.  I lacked imagination to see what this might be like or look like.  But I know I believe.

After this brief time with her I go home and I am supposed to return to be with her in the evening.  A few of us friends rotated visits so that someone would be with her until she died.  It turns out that the person who says he will come after work to look after our two boys - their father - doesn't show up.  I try calling to get someone to look after them so that I could be with her.  There was no one to help.  I felt frustrated and bewildered.  I felt so let down by the boys' father who was supposed to show up and chose instead to stay out drinking half the night.  I prayed asking for a passage to help me.  When I opened the Bible I read, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.  Love those who persecute you."  I was angry with God.  I couldn't see how this was helping me or anyone under the circumstances. My reaction was confusion and bewilderment, not unlike the disciples when they heard Lazarus was dying and Jesus waited two days to go see him.  

I went to bed and I lay facing a crucifix on my wall.  I continued to pray, asking God to help me to forgive, asking God to show me I was loved because I was feeling so rejected and unloved at that moment.  At about 3 or 4am I was filled and overwhelmed with Christ's Spirit of love so completely, I saw only love within me and all around me.  I knew clearly that my dear friend had passed, and I felt her spirit flow through me and through my bedroom, as though telling me she was released and raised high with a joyful heart.  When the father of my children came in and crawled into bed after what had clearly been a night of drinking, I wept with forgiveness and love in my heart.  I knew pure joy inside of me for the first time in my life....though not for the last time.  

I woke at 8am to the phone ringing.  I knew it was going to be the news of her having died in the night, and so it was.  Our mutual friend, a nurse working at the hospital, told me she died around 1pm.  I rose up to a bright sun shining in a clear blue August sky, and went to be with her children and her husband at their home not far from mine. 

I woke understanding for the first time, clearly and without doubt, the meaning and the truth of resurrection life.  Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life and of this there will be no doubt ever again.  The story of Lazarus is a window into the truth of resurrection in Christ.  Wrestle with it and we discover the jewel of life waiting for us there.

Cautionary Tales and the Good News of Easter

A few years back, I watched two Netflix series that showed the lives of good men gone wrong....leading double lives mostly and caught in the darker and darker shadows of vices and choices leading to greater evils than good for the world.  The premise is as old as the biblical Exodus tale, or of Noah and the flood, but in these cases not nearly so hopeful for their lack of any reference to God or the spiritual life.

"Ozark" and "Rake" are what I will call ‘cautionary tales’ about men caught in vices that prove difficult to escape, drawing them into wider and wider circles of evil in their own self-made hell, and drawing the world in with them.  Both deliver drama and satire at their best - Rake more satire than drama and Ozark more drama than satire - making them addictive for their quality performances, complex characterization and dark and disturbing humor.

In Ozark, it begins, with a basically good family man.  The series opens, however, with his double life and vice exposed, as besotted with porn he watches the computer monitor in front of him while simultaneously and matter of fact like assisting a couple sitting across his desk with their financial matters.

He’s an accountant in business with a partner and friend.  His partner is caught up in laundering money for mafia related business people, and he doesn’t know anything about this.  He finds out when the mafia come to do business, and unhappy with the results of his buddy accountant’s skimming off the top, they murder his partner in front of him.

Caught now as the mafia's target for being a witness to this murder he is forced into a choice of either taking on his partner's former role of helping the mafia or handing his life over to them for slaughter.  He chooses the former and tailspins out of control drawing his whole family (wife, daughter and son) with him into deeper and deeper evils... until they are so familiar with evil they are blind to other possible choices to get themselves out.   They choose evil in other words...at first slowly and tentatively and then with greater confidence and familiarity. Woefully mired in a blend of atheistic and agnostic views of life, they are left with no foreseeable alternatives of choice.  There is no God to turn to, and no imagination or glimmer of faith to make room for a Higher Power to deliver.  

Rake is a similar cautionary tale of an effective and charming lawyer taking on cases for the sickest and most depraved of clients and going to bat for them in court.  Sadly, being unable to convince himself of his own goodness and lovableness, he numbs himself with drugs and sex while simultaneously trying to extricate himself from the hell he builds for himself and those around him. Like Sisyphus, he is forever looped in a sad comedy of rolling the boulder up the hill only to see it come rolling back down. 

It's not surprising that in the case of both characters, neither is delivered from their miserable existences.  The writers of these satires clearly know what makes for addictive viewing!  We watch waiting in hope for some miracle to extricate them, perhaps partly in a guilt-like, Pharisaical gratitude that we aren't like them at all, and perhaps partly in fascination that "there but for the grace of God go I"!  Yes, we are as human as they are, and as capable of falling into the mixed trajectory of evil and good as anyone.  And while it may be dark humor to watch as fiction, it is hugely sobering to see it happening in real life, whether in small ways in ourselves or in similar exaggerated ways in public life as these characters reveal.  To simply be amused, entertained or to give in to the agnosticism and atheism found there and fail to reflect on these as contemporary cautionary tales is to risk falling deeper into the mire ourselves.  

A life without access or openness to the Creator, to the Divine Source, Redeemer and Sanctifier of life; a life without wisdom knowing through prayer and study and a relationship with Jesus Christ in the Gospels, will inevitably straddle, mix and become mired in the two worlds of evil and good.  To ad-mire is to easily become more 'mired'.  There is only one way through, a 'third way' we might say, and we find it surprisingly as close to us as our own breath.  It is to find our own profoundly human depths as we fix ourselves onto and plunge ourselves into the person of Jesus Christ.

Hardly a popular way today; largely a hidden one.  Watch a third movie, "The Hidden Life" by director Terrence Mallick on the life of Franz and Franzisca Jaggerstatter , and see this way precisely chosen and exquisitely formed on the person of Christ. See what unfolds!  A life of dazzling simplicity and freedom; of treasured grace and goodness.  It ends with a quote by T. S. Elliot about how many hidden lives are making our lives better for their selfless commitment to and faith in the person of Christ.  When faced with the ultimate choice for truth and justice like the character in Ozark (whose name I can't remember) or Franz and Franzisca (whose names I won't forget)...which way will we choose?

In the office of readings this morning, psalm 78  reminds us of how when we cry out to God, God delivers us from our "foes" - the vices, addictions, ingrained disordered habits we find ourselves imprisoned by.   If we don't know where to turn to get ourselves out of our addictions, vices, idols and evil, we will spiral on and draw others with us.  If we think we know how to do it ourselves, we are grossly misled and mistaken.  Only Christ can deliver us, free us and lead us to life-giving, deeply human ways of living.  

How often they defied him in the wilderness and caused him pain in the desert! 

Yet again they put God to the test and grieved the Holy One of Israel.  They did not remember his deeds nor the day he saved them from the foe...

The Office goes on with a reading "From the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world of the Second Vatican Council" saying:

Holy Scripture, with which the experience of the ages is in agreement, teaches the human family that human progress, though it is a great blessing for humanity, brings with it a great temptation.  When the scale of values is disturbed and evil becomes mixed with good, individuals and groups consider only their own interests, not those of others.  

The result is that the world is not yet a home of true brotherhood, while the increased power of humanity already threatens to destroy the human race itself.  If it is asked how this unhappy state of affairs can be set right, Christians state their belief that all human activity, in daily jeopardy through pride and inordinate self-love, is to find its purification and its perfection in the cross and resurrection of Christ.  

Humanity, redeemed by Christ and made a new creation in the Holy Spirit, can and must love the very things created by God.  For he receives them from God, and sees and reveres them as coming from the hand of God.  

As we give thanks for them to our Benefactor, and use and enjoy them in a spirit of poverty and freedom, we enter into true possession of the world, as one having nothing and possessing all things.  For all things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.  
The Word of God, (i.e. Jesus Christ) through whom all things were made, himself became man and lived in the world of men(humanity).  As a perfect man he has entered into the history of the world, taking it into himself and bringing it into unity as its head.  He reveals to us that God is love, and at the same time teaches us that the fundamental law of human perfection, and therefore of the transformation of the world, is the new commandment of love.  

Christ Jesus assures those who have faith in God's love that the way of love is open to all humanity, and that the effort to restore universal brotherhood is not in vain.  At the same time he warns us that this love is not to be sought after only in great things but also, and above all, in the ordinary circumstances of life.  

We can be oblivious and blunted to the Source of our deliverance from vices and human weakness, as the main characters in Ozark or Rake demonstrate, or we can turn our human weakness towards God for deliverance with cries from the heart and our whole being.  Our weakness truly is as St. Paul says our strength, for it leads us to cry out to be saved from our selves and paradoxically we are healed and made whole.

From another point of view, for any who've cried out and been delivered from troubling dis-orders and vices, we can easily forget God’s goodness while wandering in the wilderness; how he’s delivered us from the foe with grace, mercy and miracles as wondrous as those of the people of Israel in the desert! We are free in the wilderness (like the vast kind of wilderness we find ourselves in now) only when we stay focused on the God of love who leads us.  Everything else is distraction at best, complaining misery and free-falling into temptation at worst.

Cautionary tales aside, the good news is the Easter story we are slowly and surely living inside of.  Oh to make this a deliberate choice every day and act our part!...to know and be known inside of the love of God!  On this fourth Saturday of Lent, the opening part of a reflection from Daybreaks Daily Reflections for Lent and Easter by Ron Rolheiser says,

The stone that rolled away from the tomb of Jesus continues to roll away from every sort of grave.  Goodness cannot be held, captured or put to death.  It evades its pursuers, escapes capture, slips away, but forever rises all over the world.  Such is the meaning of the resurrection.

Take the dive into the hidden life with Christ and you will see resurrection life everywhere.  Especially in dark and mired times, as you are forced to choose, you too will rise out of the mud, whole and free, drawing your loved ones forth with you. 

"Do you want to be made well?" Jn 5: 1-16

"On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food.  Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month...Their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing."  Ezekiel 47: 12

"Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea."  Ps. 46

"Do you want to be made well?"  Jn 5: 6

The flow of Spirit in our lives is a subtle and hidden work of healing and happiness.  From Ezekiel's vision we hear her described as a river that flows beneath the threshold of the temple eastward and southward, feeding and healing all of life.  We have a sense that this threshold of the temple is at the heart of each and every one of us, of every human being, as a potential for joining Christ in this self-giving, life-giving flow for the good of the world.  The river, he goes on to describe, feeds the trees on either side of its banks, and leads to the sea where it freshens what would otherwise be dead waters.  We flow with the whole of creation, of the earth, and are made of her elements: water and earth, to freshen, heal and feed the people, places, and world we find ourselves in right at this moment.

Fear holds us back from going with the flow.  We can get stuck, trapped, or frozen along the way.  God gently calls us back in the flow, like Jesus coming upon the man by the pool of water "Beth-zatha", who's been ill thirty-eight years.  Jesus asks him as he asks us "Do you want to be made well?"  For how long have I been trapped or stuck in fear?  For how long have I blamed others or made excuses for my paralysis holding me back from plunging into the pool of life? 

Jesus doesn't wait for the man to say 'yes'.  He listens to him compassionately.  How do I listen to my friends or strangers in need? Do I listen with judgment or with love? Jesus doesn't help the man into the pool of Bethzatha. Jesus is the river of life.  He says, "Pick up your mat and walk.", and the man does just that, on the holy day of rest for the Jews.

Drinking in his new life of wholeness and self-gift, this man walks towards the temple, towards God, not knowing who it was who 'cured' him!  He is free, whole and walking in the flow of life for the first time in thirty eight years!  The legalists see him, and trapped in their lives of trying to please and to secure themselves a place in God's house, they try to confine the man in their own traps once again with their empty words.  "You can't do this on the Sabbath." they insist, and they want to bring down whoever is telling him to walk and carry his mat (the symbol and reminder of his years of groundless fear and waiting). 

Jesus finds him in the temple and declares himself as the One, the Living Water, who's made him well.  Jesus tells him, "Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you." 

The cured man, not knowing this Jesus as a friend - not knowing him well enough to see through the strained and myopic hearts of those who want to harm Jesus - goes and tells them Jesus made him well.  And they, in their ignorance persecute Jesus for giving life and for being rest on the Sabbath.   

Ezekiel's vision of the river has us walking in first ankle-deep, then knee-deep and ever deeper into the River of Life - into Christ's heart.  The deeper we go, the more we can be sure we will be persecuted.  The deeper we go, the more our fruit becomes food and our leaves healing for a world of blind, lame and paralyzed others.  A thousand more steps and we will be in the flow of the Eternal.

Heart of Mercy

"O give thanks to the Lord for God is good; for God's love endures forever."  Psalm 107

Come let us return to the Lord, it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us but he will bind our wounds.  He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence.  Let us know, let us strive to know the Lord.  Hosea 6:1

God be merciful to me a sinner. Lk. 18

Day One of Self-Isolation

Two weeks have passed and I have seen more change in and around me than I have in a lifetime.  Still, there is a quiet, peaceful center in my soul where God's unchanging love endures forever, just as the Psalm says.  This is not because I have been faithful my whole life or because I've been good (though I hope that mostly I have been).  Like the Publican in today's Gospel reading, I've had more than my share of occasions to beat my breast and cry out to God, "Be merciful to me a sinner.", and what has grown inside of me is seeing myself so greatly, surely loved I have grown free of the sin that has bound me and so freer to respond to strangers, enemies and friends with the same love, forgiveness and mercy I have experienced. There is no end of mercy, only a turning towards her with our broken hearts and miserly fears; and our Merciful God first empties us out, drives out our weakness and sinfulness, then fills us with none other than God's Divine Heart of mercy; with God's self.

This lent is uniquely aligned with the circumstances we now find ourselves in with the virus.  God has drawn us into the wilderness, is calling us to follow in Christ's way.  We strive and seek to know God through scripture, through the metaphor's and images of our day to day encounters, through nature in all her wild and wonderful glory.  God is the heart of mercy, with us in all things.

This morning as I rose to make my first cup of coffee, I greeted the crucifix hanging on my wall.  My hand touched the cross in a conscious desire to draw near to him whose love cries and pours out from the cross of his sufferings around the world, and before even having prayed morning prayer, I was overcome with grief and sorrow for my sins.  I weep every time I do this.  When I turned the corner into the kitchen and made my coffee, looking out at the early dawn, and seeing my home, with the precious gifts hanging on the walls, the furniture and photos of loved ones, Rublev's icon of the Trinity hanging on the wall, I was overcome with gratitude, peace and joy.  A simple gesture; a simple turn.  I made my coffee and went to my room to pray.

God's whole heart is given in mercy.  There is nothing more to do than open our hearts, minds, wills, bodies, souls to receive.  He will revive us after two days.  On the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence.

New Eyes, Ears and Heart for Christian Unity

We are in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  A gentle thought occurred to me today that the Protestant Reformation reminds me of when my teenagers left home to make their own way, or of growing up with five siblings who eventually all made their way from the family nest to make their own way, myself being the last to go.  Granted, none of my four brothers or my sister left our religious tradition of origin, but we all found unique variations on living the tradition in our daily life.  Some of us had to leave it for awhile and there's a tentativeness to return, others of us have chosen to stay.  Either way, there is no illusion that any one of us has chosen a better path.  It is simply our path for now.  When we gather together we most often put aside our differences and celebrate our lives for the greater good of remaining united in compassion, mercy and "unusual kindness".  We trust that Someone greater is doing a saving, healing, transforming work in us. 

We do the same with our children and grandchildren.  We gather them to our hearts and listen attentively - now that we're older - to the grievances, the hurts, the joys they've experienced through their day to day.  We find ways to tell that 'good news' stories that bind us all together, and we forgive the hurts and make straight a path to our truest selves together.  We let the Divine life flow in, through, around and out of us and we respect the different paths our children have taken, learning to listen to their flow inside of the Divine - whether they are aware of it or not. We are learning to trust their mistakes as a way to their inner wisdom, and we are willing to suffer them gently.

This is how I understand staying with and praying for unity with my Christian brothers and sisters. There is no upper handedness or self-righteousness or superiority to wield on this journey.  There is only deep listening, growing respect for the gifts each Christian family brings to the table, and a deep knowing that Divine Trinity is gathering us together in ways unknown to us; a Mystery so deeply, silently at work, we are being woven back together to the life of Christ in our world without our hardly being aware.

Years ago, when I was MUCH younger, it used to be easy to focus on the negatives of how distant, different and strange other Christian traditions seemed to me.  Or how much better my own tradition and hence I was in relation to everyone.  (seriously so laughable)  How humorous to me now.  Now, they appear like the eccentric aunts or uncles in the family, or the wild teenager, or the amusing niece or nephew in an unbroken story of family - all as natural and fondly loved as the air I breathe.  And because I love them more and more, the Voice in me opens and the stories are shares from the heart to the heart, on the altar of our souls.  That's where unity is found and trust and hope in Someone greater than ourselves is born.