The View Up Here

Thanksgiving is next week! What the... how did that happen? It seems like I was just in Giselle's garden in Salt Lake City, picking cosmos for the living room table, and cherry tomatoes and basil to make a batch of The Sauce. This year has been big for me - paying off credit card debt, getting new (bifocal) glasses and two root canals, moving from Utah to New York, and of course being granted a way to handle the student loan debt when I find the right community to enter. I also had my heart broken over two Carmels that didn't end up working out (it's okay! better things were on the way), only to be introduced to St. Clare and a deepening awareness of my own Franciscan/Clarian charism, leading up to my live-in with a Poor Clare monastic community in Massachusetts in January, 2016. I am humbled by all of this incredible grace. Can I just empty this thing and crawl inside until Jan. 2? And now we're all looking at the calendar, realizing that Thanksgiving is ...

The world reels from the violence that we are committing and enduring on a daily basis. Paris, Beirut, Syria, Israel... the list goes on and on. But also our own streets here in the U.S., where people are dying of hunger and homelessness - that is also violence. Spousal and child abuse. Animal abuse. School shootings. Human-caused or influenced environmental disaster. I'll stop there; you get the idea. This is what humanity is doing to ourselves, to each other. Every day. On Facebook, a rush of support for Paris flooded status updates and profile pics after the terrorist attacks were made known across the globe - much as the world offered support for the U.S. after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But then came a backlash of posts and memes, including one that starts out "It is not Paris we should pray for."  Okay, on one hand, I get it. We need to pray and act on behalf of the entire world, not just one city, because...see Para 1. But at the same time, I found the me...