The View Up Here

2020 was the year that stretched and formed me more than any other in recent memory, and I'm not talking about the Covid. Last August, I started teaching full time at a small Catholic, Classical school in Rochester. While I love my work and my students, the 50-55 hours a week are grinding me into a pulp. No brain matter for anything else, really. It has forced me, though, to be attentive to how I spend the time I have outside of work. Prayer is my priority - resting in His Love and praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I'm back to reading akshual books, which is a great gift of itself. Current read:  A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. But 2020 left me an orphan. After a year's struggle with gastric cancer, my brother Patrick passed into eternity on Nov. 27. Yes, the man who'd spent years in retail died on Black Friday. I can't help but think that was no coincidence.  Thankfully, we his family were with him during his last week. It was far more grueling than what I wen...

So many months have passed since I took to this blog. Here's a sweeping update: started new job at the new parish in a new town moved into a sweet studio with a giant back yard, functional if small kitchen, attached garage, lovely neighbors/landlords finished revised draft of Black Doves; it's with the publisher now. Hoping for publication this year. finished short story "Working Man"  started writing other short stories that will be collected together in a self-published work at some point in the future Sadly, I must also report that my brother Patrick was diagnosed with stage III stomach cancer just before Christmas. I am asking the Lord to open doors for me to move there -- yes even though I just moved here. It's time to go home. I need my family, and my family needs me. I've already blown through all my PTO and I don't have the money to keep schlepping back to the South Shore on long weekends. By the way, my new profile pic is of him and m...

I am waiting in the silence for Messiah, the One who saves, the One who is Love, to come into my heart. Ah! He is already here, yet He seeks even more of my heart.  This Advent I was wracked with mono (since October) as well as stomach flu (last weekend). At first I was angry: how unfair, why did this happen to me, why now? I was planning to go "home" to be with family on the South Shore of Boston for Christmas as usual, and as usual, the hype and stress of getting everything done before I hit the road for a 7 hour drive to stay at other people's houses (even people I love) was starting to ramp up. To give you an idea of how this feels: One night in the midst of stomach flu ickiness earlier this week, I was awake, sweating, feeling so horrible I almost felt out of my body. And that's where I met Jesus. "Accept everything." That's what my spiritual director had said in his voice mail message that morning. "Jesus I trust in You." It...

I just finished a marvelous week with my family in Massachusetts and would be feeling refreshed if I weren't so tired. Actually, I do feel refreshed. My mind is clear and my spirit is refreshed, even if I need to go to bed earlier than my grand nephews' and grand niece's bedtime. However, I feel the need to blog since a couple things hit me during the past week that deserve airing. A close family member of mine is asking the tough questions about God, including, "If he's all-loving, why does God allow suffering of innocents?" The question was asked not as a philosophical exercise, but with righteous anger. Appropriately so. We should be angry at injustice and suffering. If we're not, we need to take Human lessons. Tonight as I was washing dishes in a daze, the answer rose up in my mind in a phrase: God allows suffering so that we can love. Allow me to 'splain. God has given humanity free will to either love each other or hurt each other. Thro...

A couple weekends ago, I went on a vocation discernment retreat with the Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ. It was a beautiful weekend away, and I came home with a renewed intimacy with Jesus. I accept that as long as I am in the world serving in ministry, I need a monthly renewal retreat. That had been a long time coming after months of ministry with no time set aside for God alone outside the normal every day routines. I won't make that mistake again! I am still discerning my life path and listening. What is Jesus whispering to my heart? For now, I am in Elmira, praying and striving to be present as I help prepare young people for the Sacrament of Confirmation, hold a bi-weekly women's prayer group, and bring Holy Communion to the homebound. I am drawn to the woods, to quiet nature. I am drawn to water in any form - stream, brook, river, lake, ocean. I am drawn to silence and certainly to contemplative prayer. I am drawn to rhythms, seasons, pulses, not the unrelentin...

Normally around this time, I do a wrap up of the year in my own life and estimation. Although I don't remember if I did one last year. Anyway, I'm resuming the tradition.  After spending the Christmas holiday with my family, I arrived home last night to find a pile of Christmas cards awaiting me in the mail box. I had anticipated this and was delighted to open cards from friends and family in other states as well as right here in Elmira. What I wasn't prepared for was a letter tucked into a card from my friend Fr. David, a Trappist in Utah. His letter held some sad news, including the death of their Guestmaster, lay brother Michael. Michael was my first contact at Holy Trinity Abbey, where I spent many a retreat weekend during my year in Salt Lake City, and we had quickly become friends. I will always remember his New Jersey baritone, "We all love you, honey. We're praying for you."  So last night after doing laundry and watering my plants, I made my ...

This Christmas and New Year's Eve, I am spending time with family and old friends in Massachusetts. I'm always happy to return to the place where I grew up, enjoy the holidays with loved ones, and worship in the very church where I received my First Holy Communion.  Fr. Jim's homily at Christmas yesterday was short on time but long on meaning. The closing of his homily was an encouragement to hang on to Jesus as an anchor . I love this analogy, as so often it does feel like we are tossed around by big waves, storms, wind, and the uncertainties of where we are going.  From the Catholic News Agency , quoting Pope Francis in his Christmas homily: ...the Pope asked that we open our hearts to receive the grace offered on Christmas Day, “which is Christ himself.” Jesus, he said, “is the radiant day which has dawned on the horizon of humanity. A day of mercy , in which God our Father has revealed his great tenderness to the entire world. A day of light, which dispels...

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...

I have no good excuse for not writing here. Reasons, yes, but laziness combined with a certain obsession with re-watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot from the mid 2000s really took up a lot of time that could've been spent elsewhere. So why the BSG binging? I'd been hankering to see it again, and after listening to some of the soundtrack on YouTube, I decided to dive in. What did I glean the 2nd time around? I didn't dislike the ending as much as I did the first time. I still have some issues with plot holes you could fly a, well, a battlestar through, and it still made no sense why Cavill would off himself at the end. But seeing the mixed human-Cylon settlers on "new Earth" decide to start over made sense to me, and it resonated on a personal level. How many of us want a "do-over" in our lives, or at least in some situation in our lives? The good news is this: we DO get to start fresh. Because when you reconcile with God, the sins and mistakes o...

Tomorrow is Passion (Palm) Sunday, the start of Holy Week. I'm very pleased to be singing in choir at my parish, and I hope that the experience will remain an inspiring one through the coming months. I believe it was St. Augustine who first commented that "A person who sings prays twice."   I haven't written here much since I've been busy with work (a full time job and an on-going string of free lance editing for which I am very grateful). A quick update: I'm still on track for paying off my last piece of personal debt by the end of June. Yay! I will be returning to NYS mid-June for my cousin's ordination (he is becoming a Catholic priest). At that time I will visit friends and family, and nose around some of my old stomping grounds in Elmira.  I will also be visiting the Transfiguration Monastery in Windsor, NY when I'm back for my summer visit. I'm very excited about finding them; interestingly, they were founded around the same time...

As it so happens, gentle readers, I am home from work after having my first root canal surgery, and I am taking some pretty good pain killers, so forgive me if my thoughts stray here. OTC ibuprofen doesn't seem to be enough to do the job, so 800 mg combined with acetaminophen and hydrocodone are in effect. As you can see, there have been some changes here - most notably my old domain "fred in the can" is gone. Time to put that one to rest; I've been using it with my films and writing since the mid-90s. The View Up Here is appropriate in more ways than one. I am living my life in a different way, from a different place, the Heart of Christ, plus I'm now living in Utah, which as the license plate boasts, is where one can live "life elevated." But, as most of you know, I prefer life at sea level. My visit home to Massachusetts for Christmas and New Year's was glorious. I was able to spend time with my family, and I had some time for discer...

Life in a new city, a new job, a new home - all of this and more have kept me occupied and not blogging. The third week of Advent is well under way, and in a week's time, I'll be on a plane headed to the Land Where I Was Birthed for Christmas and New Year's Eve. Not only will I be visiting my dear family and friends, I will also be continuing my discernment by staying overnight at the Carmel in Concord, NH , and visiting with the Poor Clares of Boston , located in Jamaica Plain. (Incidentally, Jamaica Plain is where my parents first settled when they moved from Elmira, NY to Boston back in the early '50s.) A few words on the full-time job I've held since August - I'm the Office Manager for Mt. Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Salt Lake City, UT, working for the Catholic Diocese of SLC. Certainly not rocket science, but definitely a ministry - in more ways than I would've thought. I've come to see and know a deeper vein of human experience and suffering...

I realize, of course, that I am lamentably behind in blogging. However, it is a new year, and there are new situations and dispositions in my life that will hopefully help me to be more prolific here. I usually wrap up the old year before delving into my hopes for the new year, so here we go: 2013 Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Last year was very much about letting go of the illusion of control and surrendering completely to God.  It was also about recognizing that my charism is Carmelite , marked by simplicity. Sometimes God closes doors to open a new portal for us to walk through; other times, He asks us to close the door ourselves so that we are free to walk through the next door He has already opened for us. In April, I was not hired back for the permanent position at Ithaca College Los Angeles, but the very next month, I was offered a job as an administrative assistant for a Catholic high school. In July, my father-in-law passed away, and that very same week, my divorce was...