Friends of Different Faiths

Growing up, my best friend Jenny and I shared many things.  We both had a passion for reading, a fascination with ballet, and the ability to belt out the entire score of “Annie” by heart.

One thing we did not share was religion.

On Sundays, I went to Mass at St. Simon’s Catholic Church, where I knelt before an altar featuring a crucifix and life-sized statues of Mary and Joseph.  Jenny attended a non-denominational Bible church, where she and the other kids read Scripture stories in a Sunday school classroom.  Before dinner, my family recited the traditional grace, “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts…”  At Jenny’s house, her dad led their family in a spontaneous prayer, all holding hands around the table:  “Loving God, thank you for this food, and for having our good friend Ginny here with us tonight…”  Over the years, Jenny and I had many opportunities to experience each other’s faith.  She and I went together to a Protestant summer camp, where we sang about God under the redwoods and the counselor talked about accepting Jesus into your heart.  Jenny was present at my First Communion ceremony, where I, in a white eyelet dress and short veil, tasted the body of Christ for the first time.

We never really talked about religion; there were far more exciting things to do. But there must have been things she liked about my faith life, just as there were things I instinctively enjoyed about hers.  I liked the picture framed on her bedroom wall, an image of a smiling Jesus sitting in a sunny meadow, surrounded by kids in modern clothes. I found it far more inviting than the picture in the hall of my parochial school, showing Jesus looking solemn, his red heart glowing in his chest.  When I attended Jenny’s church with her family, the people there sang their praise with loud voices; it was a huge change from the music-less 7:30 A.M. Mass my family usually attended.

I don’t mean to imply that Jenny’s faith was warm and lively while mine was serious and boring.  To say that is to ignore the humor of the nuns at my school, the beauty of events like May Crownings, the fun of parish activities.  But her religious background added a welcome something to my own: a complementary perspective, a slightly different way of seeing the same things.  And it gave me a conviction that has only strengthened now that I’m a mom: a belief in the value of making friends outside of one’s own religion.

These days, as an adult who has been on her own journey out of and then back into Catholicism, I’ve been greatly enriched by interactions with people of other faiths.  My friends these days come from many different belief systems: Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, agnosticism.  I don’t choose friends on the basis of their faith, one way or another, but I have found that being around people with different beliefs makes me feel a certain kind of alive. When faith comes up in conversation, there is something to learn from each other.  It’s an opportunity to articulate what we believe and why we believe it – a process that can be just as illuminating for the person explaining her beliefs as for the person listening.   “Only connect,” wrote E. M. Forster in the book Howard’s End, and it’s a mantra that I’ve always instinctively liked.  These conversations are not about trying to convince each other of the truth of what we believe.  They are about creating a bridge of understanding where there was formerly open space, building a thoroughfare along which grace can be given and received. And there is a certain headiness to realizing that our shared humanity transcends what, in other times or places, might have been an insurmountable barrier to friendship.

As the parent of two young boys, I think of this often.   I harbor a little hope that my own children will grow up with a good friend of a different faith.  My parents and Jenny’s parents set a great example for us, whether they were conscious of it or not.  I thank them for letting us experience each other’s services and rituals and prayers without feeling that they had to defend one way over the other.  There was a subtle message there: Our similarities are stronger than our differences.   That message was never preached, only lived.

Jenny and her family live in a different state now, and I haven’t seen her in years, though we still exchange Christmas cards and Facebook messages.  And I thought of her when my son turned three, and I wanted to buy him a picture of Jesus for his birthday.  I remembered Jenny’s picture of the sunny meadow and the happy kids, the image that had always appealed to me.  And though I didn’t find exactly that picture, I did find something similar.  It’s a sketch of Jesus holding a smiling little boy in his arms, planting a kiss on the side of his head.  It shows warmth and happiness and love, three things that I want Matthew to grow up associating with his faith.

And it shows something else, too, something that I believe lies at the heart of all peace and good in the world: a moment of earnest, joyful connection.

Only connect.

Copyright 2013 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

Pickle-Chiffon Pie

If you’re looking for an engaging picture book with serious spiritual depth, look no further than Pickle-Chiffon Pie by Jolly Roger Bradfield.  As kids’ books go, it’s one of the best books that I (and my son Matthew) have  ever read:  a delightful marriage of lively illustrations, clever plot, and important life lessons.

Pickle-Chiffon Pie was first published in 1967, and it has recently been reissued by Purple House Press, which reprints great kids’ classics.   The illustrations in this book are absolutely fabulous. They have that happy, charming late-sixties-look that you just don’t find in kids’ illustrations anymore.  They are intricate and colorful and whimsical.  Just looking at them gives your spirits a lift.

And the story?  It’s utterly delightful.  There is a king who has a beautiful daughter, and many men want to marry her.  So the king takes the three nicest  suitors — the buff Prince Musselbaum, the bookish Prince Wellred (don’t you love those names?), and the plain but sincere Prince Bernard  – and gives each of them a task: Go into the forest for three days and find the most unusual and wonderful and marvelous thing you can, and bring it back.  Whoever brings back the most wonderful thing will win the hand of the Princess.

So they do, and in the forest, there are many strange and wonderful things  (including a lion in a velvet vest juggling cans of root beer soup and  an ogre so ugly that he scares leaves off of the trees).  Each prince makes his selection and heads home, sure that he will win the contest.  But Prince Bernard’s selection — a Three-nosed Snozzle who can bake the king’s favorite Pickle-Chiffon Pie — is simply not happy to go.  He’s very sad about leaving the forest and his children, who have no one else to look after them.  Bernard drags him along for a while, but then has to stop and reflect on his own actions.  Is it right for him, Bernard, to take this Snozzle away if he desperately wants to stay at home?

I won’t give away the ending, though it does conclude happily for all parties.   And it has a pretty deep message, too, one that applies to everyone everywhere.  Bernard has to wrestle with his conscience and with some thorny questions – is it okay to prioritize your own happiness above someone else’s?   Is it okay to pursue your own heart’s desire if it means hurting someone else in the process?  And what’s so  great is that these questions fit naturally into the narrative; there’s nothing pedantic about the story at all.

I honestly can’t think of a better book to teach children the value of empathy, or of putting themselves into someone else’s shoes for a while.   I don’t think these qualities come instinctively to young kids, who are known to grab the best toy in the bunch and try to keep everyone else from playing with it.   But kids need to become aware that our actions have a ripple effect, and that it’s important to consider how our  choices will impact others.  (Honestly, this is a lesson that many of us adults could stand to learn.)   And I can’t think of a  better vehicle for conveying it than this book — this engaging, delightful book, whose profound message is packaged in charming pictures and playful prose.   It’s a gem in every way.

Order Pickle-Chiffon Pie and support CatholicMom.com with your purchase

Copyright 2013 Ginny Moyer

A Spiritual Classic: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

When it comes to writing about why I love The Secret Garden, it’s hard to know where to start.  I could talk about how the book is largely responsible for turning me into a hard-core, lifelong Anglophile.   I could explain how it’s the story that first introduced me to  Gothic literature, to the eerie deliciousness of a huge English manor house with winding passageways and cries in the night.  I could go on and on about the edition I had as a child, with beautiful illustrations by Tasha Tudor: the picture showing Mary Lennox breathlessly turning the key in the ivy-framed door; the image of the country boy Dickon sitting on the grass, surrounded by woodland creatures;  the scene where Mary discovers the invalid Colin, his head lit up in an eerie candlelit glow.

Or I could talk about the story of this book, one that held me spellbound the Christmas that I was ten.  An orphan girl is sent to a cold forbidding Yorkshire manor house, where she discovers the walled garden that has been shut up for a decade.  She finds the key, goes inside, and discovers that although the garden may look brown and abandoned,  it’s not dead; there are green shoots coming up through the carpet of dead leaves, and the roses are “wick,” or alive.  With the help of one and then two and then three friends, she secretly tends the garden and brings it to joyous, colorful, vibrant lushness.  And in the process, her own cramped soul expands and grows into happiness.  A sickly boy learns to walk again, and a remote, depressed father learns to embrace life, not run from it.   It all happens because of a garden that once seemed dead but which holds in its soil a potential for healing that no one in the book could have foreseen.

And really, it’s this spiritual message that makes this book so moving to me now, almost thirty years after I first lost myself in its pages.   Isn’t that the Christian story right there? — out of death, there is life; out of despair, hope.  Nothing — and no one — is too far gone to be reclaimed and brought to his or her fullest, most beautiful potential.  It’s a message that  I see every spring in the garden, as I watch the roses that were once barren and stubby explode into color and fragrance.  I could live to be five hundred, and I’d never get bored by that.  Every single spring, it thrills me to watch the slow return of those shiny reddish-green leaves, then the buds, then the petals, all pushed into being by some force that I can’t see but which feels, every time, like a miracle happening just outside my windows.

This book celebrates that force, that miracle, in all of its manifestations.  And the characters all hunger for that miracle, whether they are conscious of it or not.   They all long for Life, and by the close of the book, they’ve found it.

And there is no happier ending than that.

Copyright 2012 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

Stone Soup by Marcia Brown

Boy, I loved Stone Soup when I was a kid. I checked it out of the library more times than I can count. And when I saw it in the children’s room last week, I grabbed it, for nostalgia’s sake. Those illustrations in orange and muted shades of brown … gosh, it was like winging back in time to my childhood.

And yet it has a pretty good message for the grown-up me, too.

If you haven’t read Stone Soup, it’s the story of three French soldiers traveling back home from the war. They’re tired and hungry, but when they stop in a small village to ask for food and shelter, they are turned away by sad-faced peasants who say that they have nothing to give. (In truth, these peasants have hidden all of their food so as to keep it for themselves.) Nothing daunted, the clever soldiers come up with an idea: they’ll make stone soup. So they get a big pot and fill it with water and put in three smooth rocks. Before you know it, the village folk are voluntarily contributing their hidden carrots, cabbages, beef, and potatoes, because while stone soup is good, it’s even better with all those other things in it. And before you know it, the whole village has made a satisfying soup, with enough for everyone to share.

So how is this story spiritual? Well, for one thing, it’s about the rewards of sharing freely with others. I have to say, the peasants really tick me off at the beginning of the story, pulling those long faces and saying that they have nothing to give when there are all those cabbages hidden under the bed. But — let’s be honest — I often do the same thing myself. I don’t hoard fresh produce, but I can be stingy with my free time, my undivided attention, or at times my material resources. There is a fine line between giving to others and conserving what you need for yourself, and I think I tend to err too much on the conservation side. This story challenges me to look a bit more closely at what I share and what I don’t, and to decide what else I can — and should — give.

It’s also about community, and that’s another place where the story touches a nerve. I’m hardly a rugged individualist, but I am an introvert, and sometimes it takes a certain amount of energy for me to engage with others, just because that’s not my default setting. And yet I value the groups, formal and informal, to which I belong — my network of friends, my church community, the folks in my neighborhood, my extended family. Those people been there for me in many situations when I needed help, and I’ve done the same for many of them. Plus they are a heckuva lot of fun to be with, and we all need fun, far more than we need to stay home and watch Seinfeld reruns.

The benefits of sharing and of community: that’s what kids and adults can take from this book. And, like the peasants, sometimes I need to be reminded of the value of both. I need reminding that a soup made and shared by all is a lot tastier than cabbage eaten alone.

Stone Soup, written and illustrated by Marcia Brown.

Copyright 2012 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

1. Pick someone else’s nose.

2.  Carry Matchbox cars in my purse.

3.  Take a rectal temperature.

4.  Buy chicken shaped like dinosaurs.

5.  Pretend to be a car.

6.  Say things like “There are starving children in the world who would love that piece of bread.”

7.  Leave the house with formula/milk splatters on my shoes

8.  Notice the formula/milk splatters and leave them there, because it’s just too darn much effort to  wipe them off.

9.  Say “Lord, have mercy” outside of the context of the Mass (prompted by a violent stomach flu wreaking havoc on the Moyer family).

10. Hear a small boy say, “Mommy, I love you.”

11.  Melt inside at “Mommy, I love you.”

12.  Realize that parenting is totally, completely worth it.

Copyright 2012 Ginny Moyer

It’s no sacrifice for me to go to Mass when I’m traveling.  Though it requires a certain amount of legwork to hunt down a local parish and figure out the Mass times, I have an insatiable appetite for visiting new churches.  It’s the same impulse that makes me stop by open houses in my neighborhood: I love seeing what different people do with their living spaces, and I love seeing what different communities do with God’s house.

At its core, this is simple curiosity, but it’s the kind of curiosity that is rooted in an openness to transcendence.  It’s the same impulse that makes me want to travel in the first place  – I’m motivated not just by the desire to see a new place, but by the awareness that the place will change me, will enrich me in some subtle way that I can’t begin to imagine.

Like the stamps on a passport, each of these out-of-town Masses has left an imprint on my spiritual life.  Those Masses in France showed me the history and the universality of my childhood religion.  The church in Albuquerque showed me that architectural simplicity can be breathtaking.  The Mass in Irvine was proof that a community of believers, gathered in Christ’s name, can infuse even a portable building with the presence of God.   These spiritual discoveries are the souvenirs that I bring back home with me, tucked carefully into the luggage of my mind.

When I’m worshipping in a new setting, I also find that I engage with the Mass in a different way.  The unfamiliarity of the church can lend a certain exoticism to the words and prayers of the liturgy, the ones that I know by heart.  It’s as if I’m not just a physical traveler but a spiritual one as well, wandering into the ritual of the Mass for the first time, gazing open-mouthed at its beauty.  We all need to play the tourist in our own faith every now and then.

And yet for all of the charms of variety, my traveling Mass-going has taught me a very important lesson about what I value most in my faith.  Though the architecture and the stained glass and the congregation and even the language can vary from place to place, the ritual is always the same.  No matter how far away I go, when I’m at Mass, Christ always comes and finds me.  No matter where in the world my wanderlust takes me, when I walk into a Catholic Mass, I’m home.

Copyright 2012 Ginny Moyer

Believe me, this is not how I wanted things to turn out.  When I found out that the first boy had to delivered via scheduled surgery, for a medical reason that was beyond my control, I went through something that felt a lot like mourning.

Like many women, I had a very detailed vision of what it meant to give birth.  It involved the sudden drama of breaking water and the relentless rigors of labor, an experience that I’d fight through like a lioness, awing everyone in the room with my womanly fortitude.  And the idea of not knowing when exactly my child would be born was so appealing in its mystery.  I loved the idea of being part of a natural process that was larger than my own knowledge or control, something epic and primal.  “You know neither the day nor the hour,” says the Bible, a verse that related powerfully to my sense of what it meant to become a mother.

So when I stood awkwardly in front of the nurse’s desk, staring at the little squares that indicated the month of September, it felt all wrong.  This isn’t how it’s supposed to go, I thought to myself, as I processed the unwanted responsibility of choosing my baby’s birthday.  Two years later, when my second boy also had to be born via scheduled C-section, I went through the same process, and – yes – much of the same mourning.

People are usually surprised to learn that though I’m a mom twice over, I’ve never been in labor.  When they talk about their own birth stories, assuming that I can relate, I often have to tell stop and them that I have no idea what a contraction feels like.  (I can, however, tell you how it feels to have staples removed from my abdomen.)

What I’ve learned from all this is that the traditional image of labor and delivery is not the reality for lots of moms.  In fact, these scheduled C-sections have, in their own way, been a blessing, because they’ve taught me not to make assumptions about the ways in which other mothers have welcomed their children into their lives.

There are lots of moms who have never been in labor, and there are lots of moms who have never been pregnant.   In my own circle of friends, I know people who have adopted children locally, and those who have adopted from overseas.  I know couples who have become parents through the foster care system.    Their labors don’t involve contractions or scheduled surgeries, but they do involve the arduous process of preparing for home studies, of waiting to hear from foreign bureaucracies or to be picked by a birth mother.  Their deliveries don’t involve hospital stays and doulas, but they do involve an exciting flight to an orphanage in a distant country, or a thrilling call that the birth mother has just checked into the hospital.   It can be easy to forget this, to assume that every birth has unfolded just like our own child’s, but that’s not the case.  Every mom has her own unique story, with its own drama and challenges and pain and exhilaration.   And yet every narrative ends in the same way: with the beginning of a new life, for the parents as well as the child.

Even though my own birth stories didn’t follow the scenario I’d always envisioned, in the end, I’ve learned that it really doesn’t matter.  What really matters are the two little boys, purple and squalling and utterly beautiful, who were pulled out of that incision in my body.    And what matters is everything that’s happened since then, all the thousands of little memories that those boys and I have shared, the smiles and laughs and hugs and sweet words that I treasure in my heart.

Not every mom has been in labor, and not every mom has been pregnant.  But every mom has opened her heart to welcome a child, in a way that is uniquely her own.

And that’s what matters.

Copyright 2011 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

My little boy Matthew and I spent the morning doing some mother-son bonding.  We went to his favorite toystore, where he played with the train tables that are set up for the enjoyment of the under-six crew.  On our way out I told him he could choose an animal from the display near the front door.  Our family has now increased by one cow (named, according to Matthew, “Cow”).

We stopped at the supermarket, picked up a few items, then had a lunch at the park  under a big shade tree.   After some climbing and sliding on the huge play structure, I gave my little guy the five-minute warning.  I was almost out of time on my parking meter.  But we’d make it, right?  And if we were a minute or two late, what are the odds that the meter man would happen to find our car, out of all of the hundreds in the big old downtown?

Good thing I’m not a betting gal.

We were standing across the street from the car, waiting for the light to change, when I saw it: the insidious little meter vehicle hanging out just alongside my car, with a man sitting in it, bent over his little touchpad thingy.  You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought to myself.  I’m like five minutes late; seven at most. I hoped that if I got over there before he’d tucked the ticket under my windshield, I might be able to tug at his sympathy.  I’m not the type to bat my eyelashes to get out of a ticket — never have been, really — but I figured that maybe if he saw me walking along with an adorable little boy wearing playground dirt on his face, that maybe, just maybe, some generous instincts would prevail.

As I opened the door and got Matthew into the carseat, the meter man came over towards me.  “I’m here now,” I said, somewhat hopefully. “Is it okay?”

“No,” he said, tucking the envelope firmly under the windshield. “You’re too late.”

Aargh.

I thought of saying something in response.   Oh, but I was only five minutes late — seven at the most. Perhaps I could go with We would have been on time, but my son does not walk very fast with these short tired legs of his. Or perhaps, Come on, you heartless automaton.  I’m just a mom giving my son a fun day out and you are going to totally ruin it with your stupid, ridiculous ticket.

But some part of me decided that arguing back just wasn’t the thing to do.  Because, after all, I was late.  The meter was red.  When you park at a meter, you know the rules.  And some little part of me realized that maybe, even though my son is only in preschool, this was a chance to show him what it means to accept that you have made a mistake and to take responsibility for it.

I think my experiences as a high school teacher come into the picture here.  So often, I’m in the place of that meter guy, with students (yes, or parents) who accept the rules and policies in advance and then later try to argue their way around them.  Frankly, it happens all the time.  And it drives me nuts.  And I guess I don’t want my son to see his mom trying to manipulate or guilt-trip some city worker who is, after all, just doing his job.  Sure, there is a place for clemency in life;  if there are big extenuating circumstances, I have been known to cut  my students a break.  I won’t deny that some mercy from the ticket guy would have been nice.  But still, I can accept the fact that I was at fault.  I can take responsibility.  I can even be graceful about it, more or less.

So in addition to a cow and some nice playground memories, I came home with a $35 dollar fine.  That, frankly, is painful.  But I also came home with a little bit more clarity about what kind of mom I want to be, and what kind of men I want my boys to be, and how the one influences the other.  I learned that sometimes you just need to grit your teeth, hold your tongue, and woman up.

And next time, I will leave the park with a lot more time to spare.

Copyright 2011 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

“Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.”

Erma Bombeck is very much a name from my childhood. My mom used to read her books (I can still picture the cover of If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?). Her humorous newspaper columns about family life were loved by most of the women in my family. She even wrote the foreword to the Family Circus Treasury , a book that my sister and I pored over until the spine fell out.

Last summer, I dove into her work (compiled in the book Forever, Erma), and all I can say is that there is a reason she was so wildly popular. Her newspaper columns — about taking kids to the hospital in the middle of the night, about husbands who don’t ask for directions, about never being able to find a pencil when you need one, about the charm of hanging clothes out on a clothesline — are hysterically funny, and often deliciously sarcastic, but they are never mean. Back in the sixties (through to the nineties), she wrote about the drudgery of being a housewife and a mother in a way that was hilarious and real. But she wrote about the joy, too. Reading her work, you can tell that she loves her kids and her husband and her life; the complaining, such as it is, never overpowers the warmth.

When it comes to “domestic humor,” she really is the pioneer. I think every mommy-blogger today owes her a certain debt. She showed that there is a huge audience for stories about motherhood, especially if those stories are told with pithy humor and with real heart. What I’ve learned from her columns is that there is true power when a writer’s voice has both, in equal amounts.

I can probably illustrate this best using Erma’s own words. I love her for writing this:

“One thing they never tell you about child-raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is. “

But I also love her for writing this:

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’”

Copyright 2011 Ginny Moyer

On a personal level, it’s funny to think that I’ve been teaching high school as long as some of my students have been alive.  That’s pretty eye-opening.  And here’s an interesting fact about teaching: I am a much better teacher now than I was when I started.  No, I’m not in any way perfect. Yes,  I have much less youthful energy than when I began teaching, along with many  more demands on my evenings and weekends (becoming a mom will do that, oddly enough).   But all the same, I have a much bigger toolbox than I did way back when.  If a difficult situation comes up in the classroom, odds are good that I’ve encountered it before.  I’ve also learned what all teachers eventually discover, which is that you need to alter your persona subtly depending on which class of kids you are teaching: one period may require you to be ever-so-slightly authoritarian, another period may be able to handle the driest of your dry humor, another period may require you to bring out your “mom-voice,” another period might make you feel more like a wise older sister than anything else.   It’s tricky to find the right persona, but it’s what teachers do.  And in a wacky paradox,  those personas only work if you are still truly yourself underneath it all.

So I guess what I really want to say is that we teachers do an exhausting, highly complex task day after day.  We don’t get big financial rewards.  (We do get a nice summer vacation but, as a former colleague once said, that’s not vacation — it’s comp time.)  And sometimes we get to witness the extent of our students’ progress, and sometimes we don’t.  When you teach English as I do, you don’t get to see the student who, at the age of twenty-five, re-reads The Grapes of Wrath and suddenly remembers a discussion from your English class,  only to find that discussion resonating with him in a way he could never have anticipated when he was seventeen.  As Jacques Barzun wrote, “In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.” That’s often frustrating, but it’s the nature of the beast.

So if you have read this far, and if you know a teacher, hug him or her.  (If she’s your son’s severely-dressed biology teacher and you don’t feel comfortable with a bearhug, a little card at the end of the year is always nice.)  Believe me: we appreciate knowing that people value us.

And the truest thing I can say about teaching is this: like parenting, it’s not always easy, and it’s not always fun.  But just like parenting, it is something that you always know, deep in your gut, is worth doing.

Copyright 2011 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

When I started my career as a high school teacher, way back in 1997, I was that not much older than the students I was teaching.  For a while, in my secret soul, I struggled to accept the image of myself as a teacher.  When I’d tell the students to open their books and start reading, a little part of me was shocked that they did so.  Wow! I’d think to myself.  They’re actually listening to me!

A few years later, I had another, more thrilling new beginning.  Scott and I stood in front of a flower-flanked tabernacle and promised that we’d journey through life together.  And as much as I loved being married, I will admit that it was a dramatic adjustment.  For several months, my hand stumbled over my new signature.  I’d mention “my husband” in the course of conversation, and the words sounded strange to my ear, as if I’d temporarily stolen someone else’s identity. 

Fast forward a few years, and I’m holding my first son, Matthew.  I’m looking at his sleek dark head and realizing that all other changes pale in comparison to this one, this blessed event, the arrival of a little person who would depend on me in a way that no one ever had before.  Like many new moms, I was daunted by the magnitude of the task.  I felt like a fraud taking home this child when I was so full of questions about how to comfort him when he cried, how to nurse him, how to swaddle him.  It was joy and terror combined.

Then, two years later, I was in the hospital again for the arrival of Luke.   I was an experienced mom who could navigate her way around a diaper bag and knew how to handle tantrums, yet I was entering a new identity as the mother of two children.  Luke was his own person,  that was clear from the start; certain things that worked with the infant Matthew were not successful with him.  And I learned to start over, letting go of preconceived notions and responding to the wonderful uniqueness of my Lukey, who always keeps me guessing.

This is how life is, right?  The new starts just keep coming; they never stop.  And each brings its own period of adjustment.  Even the positive changes can feel stiff and uncomfortable at first, like a pair of shoes right out of the box.  Luckily, with time and use, we break them in.  Eventually, there comes a day when we can’t imagine how it felt to wear anything else.

And as we celebrate New Year’s, the day of new beginnings, I love that we celebrate Mary, too.  Her own life is a catalogue of new starts and corresponding adjustments.   There’s the Annunciation, and her unexpected new identity as the Mother of God.  There’s her marriage, and the birth of her son.  Shortly thereafter, she has to make a new start as a refugee in Egypt.  Scroll forward a few decades, and she is now the mother of a famous man, who stirs up controversy everywhere he goes.  There’s her piercing pain at the execution of her son, and then her joy at seeing him alive again – which, to me and surely to her, is the most beautiful new start in the history of humankind.  And, of course, there is her presence at Pentecost, the birth of the Church in which so many of us make our home.

Mary navigated her way through a sea of new beginnings,  beginnings that were joyful and daunting and confusing and terrifying.  While it’s tempting to look at images of her and see only serenity, there was actually fierce courage and tremendous tenacity in this young girl from Galilee.  Mary is the poster child for resilience, and that is always worth remembering.

Like all of us, I don’t know exactly what 2011 will hold for me.  I can’t say which aspects of Mary’s story will resonate most strongly with me.  But I love knowing that through every new start, through every fresh beginning, I’ve got a pretty amazing woman in my corner.  If I let her teach me strength and faith, she will.  That is always worth remembering, today and every day.

Copyright 2010 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

So what did I do?  Rather than eating my way through an entire box of Godiva chocolates, I got smart.   After I put the boys down to bed, I lit two candles in front of the icon of Theotokos and sat on the couch and prayed the rosary.  It was this scene, but in the dark, with flickering candles:

I may lose my Mary credentials for saying this, but I don’t pray the rosary regularly.  It’s more my “go-to prayer” in stressful times.  And it was perfect last night.  As always, while I prayed, certain thoughts and worries swirled to the surface of my consciousness.  I skimmed them off and set them aside — for future reflection in some cases, or rejection in others.  It felt like a spiritual cleansing.  And as I kept working my way around that lifeline of beads, my breathing slowed, and my heart slowed, and my words slowed.  In the flickering candlelight, Jesus and Mary looked almost alive.

And I had a sudden realization: the short bookcase on which the icon stands is a bookcase that belonged to my grandparents.  It was always in their living room when I was growing up.  I thought about how I once saw a black-and-white photo of them as young newlyweds, circa 1940, and I recognized that very bookcase in the background.  And as I said my Hail Marys, I thought of my grandparents, and how  amazing it is that my boys stack trains on this very bookshelf, and how much my grandparents would have adored Matthew and Lukey, and how much my grandma — a big Mary fan — would have been delighted beyond measure to see me inviting Mary into my stress and icks.  And that made me happy, there in the candlelit darkness.

I haven’t figured it all out, this crazed circus act of working motherhood.   I’m probably going to be a stress-mess until June.  But last night was a pretty beautiful thing, that little period of calm, that reminder that I’ve got Mary and Jesus — and Grandma and Grandpa — squarely in my corner.


Copyright 2010 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

Enjoy!

[Mary] shows forth the victory of hope over anguish,

Of fellowship over solitude,

of peace over anxiety,

of joy and beauty over boredom and disgust,

of eternal visions over earthly ones,

of life over death.

Credit Where It’s Due:

Quotation by Pope Paul VI from Marialis Cultus (1974)

Images, in order:
1) Holy card, from my own personal collection (I love you, eBay!)
2) The Visitation, Carl Bloch
3) Madonna in Prayer, Sassoferrato
4) Madonna and Child with St. Catherine and a Rabbit, Titian
5) Madonna and Child with St. Martina and St. Agnes, El Greco
6) Madonna and Child, Giulio Romano

Copyright 2010 Ginny Moyer

And when Scott came home, he got to hear every detail.  I unloaded over the dinner table as the boys watched Veggie Tales (a singing cucumber is preferable to hearing mom skate on the edge of profanity).   ” I NEED to go running tonight,” I said.  “I’ve got to get this out of my system.”  Then I thought of the long, exhausting evening routine that would have to come first: the cleanup, the baths, the bedtime stories.

“Why don’t you go do your jog now, instead of waiting until the boys are in bed?” asked Scott.

Oh, dear God: How I love that man.

So I headed back to our room to change into my running gear.  From behind the closed door I could hear the boys’ feet thundering down the hall, and the bumps and wails and clatter of toy trains that is the typical soundtrack to our evenings.  I could hear Scott supervising and breaking up squabbles and I just lay on the bed for a moment, in the room drenched with the evening sun, trying to get my breath to slow.  I felt caged in by frustration.

And then I noticed the Madonna and child figurine on my dresser.  It was sitting smack in a ray of sun, which lit it up like a spotlight.  It was breathtaking, actually, that sunlight hitting the side of Mary’s face and the top of Jesus’ head.  Even the fact that I could see a thick layer of dust on the mirror behind them didn’t matter to me.  It was a perfect moment, a little epiphany when I desperately needed it.  It felt like a miracle.

When I say that, I don’t mean that Mary deliberately made the statue blaze in the evening sun, just to cheer me up.   I don’t think it works that way.  But there was a miracle there all the same.  The miracle was that I  — in my pissy, nasty mood –  noticed the beauty at all.

There’s hope.


Copyright 2010 Ginny Moyer

Those thoughts always turn to the immensity of the ocean. It’s impossible to look at that horizon and NOT feel humbled. It’s a good kind of humbled, though. It makes me realize that there is so much out there in the world, beyond my own perspective. Looking at the huge sweep of ocean, I can’t help but think of the courage of people who brave those waters and literally sail into the unknown.

Maybe this is why I love the title Stella Maris — Star of the Sea. It’s an old name for Mary, one that emphasizes her role as guide. For centuries, the stars have helped sailors find their way through the treacherous ocean waters. Mary plays a similar role for us landlubbers. When you’re lost in the choppy churning waters of any kind of problem, try firing off a few prayers to her. She can help you get back on the right course. She can keep you from drowning.

And I truly believe that Mary, like all moms, wants us to grow beyond ourselves. She wants us to explore the world and especially our own potential — but she wants us to do it safely. And as we sail beyond our comfort zones she’s always there, watching us, cheering us on, and hoping we’ll look up whenever we feel lost at sea.

Copyright 2010 Ginny Moyer

As the saying goes, one of these things is not like the other. But if you love Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy Books as much as I do, you know that Mankato, the town that inspired the books’ setting, is a powerfully attractive destination. Truth is, I’ve yet to meet a Betsy-Tacy fan who does not long, on an almost primal level, to spend some serious time in Deep Valley.

So what exactly are the Betsy-Tacy stories? On their most basic level, they are a series about a girl and her best friends, living in a small town in Minnesota at the turn of the last century. (The books, though fiction, are largely autobiographical; Lovelace based nearly all of the characters on people she knew.) Betsy and Tacy (and, later, their new friend Tib) get into all of the gentle scrapes that you’d expect of three imaginative but good kids growing up under the gentle eyes of their families and neighbors.  What’s really great about the series, though, is that the girls grow up.  Along with the four books about the girls as children, there are six more: four of them cover Betsy’s high school years, in which she navigates the waters of dating and discerns her writing career; one book focuses on the tour of Europe that she makes, alone, in her early twenties; and the final book, Betsy’s Wedding, tells how she marries her intellectual and creative equal, the brilliant Joe Willard.

My own acquaintance with Betsy and Tacy came through my mother, who had read the books herself as a child in the 1950s.  It took one volume of their girls’ experiences, complete with Lois Lenski’s charming line drawings, for me to become Betsy and Tacy’s staunchest seven-year-old fan.  When I was a freshman in high school, I re-discovered Betsy through the high school novels, and it was like revisiting an old friend who had grown up as surely as I had.  At fourteen, Betsy did the same things I did: she wrote in a journal, developed a massive crush on a seriously cute guy, went to dances and football games.   Though the high school books were out of print, I cobbled together a complete set thanks to library book sales. The copies were ragged on the edges, with library stamps and suspicious-looking stains on the pages, but that didn’t matter. What mattered – then as now — were the stories themselves, and the characters who quickly became some of my dearest friends.  Now, at the age of thirty-six, I have realized that there are no other books I’ve re-read as often as I’ve re-read these.

Why?

For one thing, this series is a tribute to the power of community.  Deep Valley is a town where everyone knows your name, but in the nicest way.  Though Betsy and her friends dream of seeing the Great World, as they call it, there is nothing about Deep Valley that is hostile to their imaginations.  There is none of the provincial narrow-mindedness that is often found in stories of small towns, no gossiping neighbors who defeat Betsy and her dreams of becoming a writer.  It’s also a community where local history is known and respected, where kids can play alone on the Big Hill without fear.  Growing up in Silicon Valley, in 1960s suburban tract home, a little bit of me ached for the bucolic paradise of a small rural town, where Betsy and her friends could pick wildflowers and go sledding.  Even now, I rather envy it.

Betsy is also, in the stories, surrounded by a smaller community of family and friends.  Her family is cozily close-knit; her parents take their three daughters on a yearly pilgrimage to the place where they married, and they let each girl grow up at her own pace, following her individual dreams.  Betsy is also a part of The Crowd, a group of high school students of both genders who gather to sing around the piano and go on picnics.  There are no Mean Girls in the stories, no boys who pressure their girlfriends to cross boundaries they don’t want to cross.  And though Betsy does, her sophomore year, date the wrong boy for her — someone who makes her tamp down her natural ebullience and alter her personality — she learns her mistake before she is too far invested in him, and before she has irrevocably damaged her healthy sense of self-worth.  If only all teenage girls were so lucky.

On another, most primal level, I loved – and love — these books because they are so upbeat.  When I was a teen, I was distressed by most young adult fiction.  It was so dark, rife with family conflicts or physical abuse or characters who found themselves in sexual situations that were still years in the future for me.  Though there is certainly a virtue in fiction that holds up a mirror to the complexities of real life, and though I don’t as a rule believe that teens are not ready to be exposed to difficult subject matter, I also think that in the churny waters of adolescence, there’s a place for books that are, simply, happy – books where bad things happen but are resolved with no lasting harm, books where family and friends are a part of the circle that keeps us whole, not antagonists who undermine our emotional wellness.

And, as a writer myself, I admire Lovelace’s craft.  Her writing is dynamic and sprightly, and though she talks often of sentimental matters, she does so with a freshness that holds up beautifully, sixty years later.  And it’s impossible not to love the irrepressible protagonist.  Betsy is a deep thinker and a writer, but she’s an incurable optimist as well; she has, at many points in my life, lifted me out of the blues and into a sunnier frame of mind.

As I write, Betsy-Tacy fans everywhere have a new reason to be happy: the complete series is now back in print.    Last fall, Harper Perennial reissued attractive double volumes of the six high-school-and-beyond stories, complete with the original drawings.  (I guess it’s time to replace my battered library copies.)   As I wandered around our local Borders store a few months back, I came upon the new edition of Heaven to Betsy/Betsy in Spite of Herself on the display shelf – a crisp new paperback, showing Betsy and her friend Tacy dancing hand-in-hand on their way to high school.  And as I looked at it, I actually felt envious of all of those who would get to pick up the book, open the cover, and enter, for that magical first time, the cozy, perennially youthful world of Deep Valley.  When it comes to fiction, there really is no happier place to be.

Check out the Betsy-Tacy Books and Support CatholicMom.com

Copyright 2010 Ginny Moyer

It has occurred to me that the timing of this celebration is absolutely brilliant.  Seriously, when it comes to honoring Mary as mother, there is no better time than the first day of the year. The real, historical background for the feast can be found here, for any interested parties.   But I personally think there are two major reasons why it makes sense to celebrate Mary on January 1^st. They are not the historical reasons, true, but they are ones that I suspect every mom will understand.

Reason One: January 1st is one week after the birth of Christ.  I don’t know about you other moms out there, but frankly, one week after giving birth, I was not at my best.  I was horrendously sleep-deprived, which led me to do bizarre things like take a shower with my wristwatch on (this was a novel experience for the watch, one that led to its tragically premature end.) My chest felt like it was on fire from the pain of constant nursing, the sort of pain that makes you curl your toes and grit your teeth in agony. Due to my throbbing C-section incisions, I could not even laugh without grimacing, and I had to execute a series of intricate gymnastic maneuvers to do something as simple as get out of bed.   Yes, I was basking in the glow of my sweet little babies, but my body felt like it had been taxed to the breaking point.  Throw in the inevitable post-birth hormonal fluctuations, and I was a royal mess. Let’s just say that it would have been the perfect time for the world to honor me with a big celebration.  That would have cheered me up considerably.

So I love that we remember Mary one week after the day that we celebrate the birth of her son. She didn’t have to deal with water-logged wristwatches or C-section staples, but she had her own period of adjustment to this new little person in her life. Every mom does, after all. And it’s nice to have this solemnity to honor her and her motherhood, to celebrate the vocation that she embraced, with all of its unexpected joys and unanticipated challenges.

Reason Two: January 1st is a new year, and a new start.  It’s a lovely clean slate: past mistakes are forgotten and the future awaits, pregnant with promise, full of second chances. I think that all moms — Mary included –  really get the importance of giving second chances.  Frankly, we moms are pros at this.

To cite an example: one Sunday morning, your toddler zealously sweeps the coffee table clean of Annoying Things That Are Not Thomas the Tank Engine Toys. Unfortunately, one of those things happens to be a water glass, which breaks all over the floor.  The toddler instantly knows that he’s made a big mistake.  You, in your infinite mercy, do not flip out at him, and instead turn it into a teachable moment (after you’ve sequestered him safely in his room and spent fifteen minutes obsessively vacuuming the crash site, that is).  The repentant toddler is then free to return to his Thomas toys.  See?  Second chances. (Oh, and if you DID flip out and utter harsh words, the good news is that you, Mom, get a second chance, too. Not that I’d know from personal experience, or anything.)

I’m betting that Mary had to give her own son a bunch of second chances. Yes, He was sinless, but even sinless kids have accidents that require mom to step back, breathe deeply, and learn to let it go. It’s just part of the experience of mothering. And thus far, I’ve only had to deal with minor mishaps, little toddler transgressions. As moms of older kids will tell me, the giving of second chances doesn’t slow down as the children grow up. It intensifies, in ways I can barely begin to comprehend.

But through this lifelong process of helping our kids learn from their mistakes – as through the sleepless nights and the aftermath of childbirth and everything else that makes up the experience of motherhood – we’ve got a rather amazing woman in our corner. If there’s one thing I keep learning about Mary, it’s that there is never any end to her relevance in my life. And I love being Catholic and celebrating her as much as we do. I love belonging to a Church that honors this mother on the very first day of the year, a day when we remember how profoundly she has shaped the past, and how beautifully she illuminates the future.

Link: http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/SOLMARY.HTM

Copyright 2010 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

Here I must pause and share one little detail that is crucial to this narrative: I do not know Spanish.

But I went anyhow. (See, God? See how much I love You?) And as it turns out, God must have been up there smiling and thinking, “Ginny has no idea how GREAT this is going to be.” For the day was December 12, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

If you want to celebrate Our Lady of G, as I quickly learned, go to a Spanish Mass. It was, in word, fabulous. There was a procession to honor her, winding around the Mary grotto and into the church. There was a mariachi band dressed in white on the altar. “Viva la Virgen!” shouted the priest and various lectors. And, at the end of the service, parishioners crowded the altar, bearing small statues or framed images of Our Lady. They waited patiently for the priest to bless them before taking the icons back home.

Our Lady of Guadalupe has a huge following. There’s something about her that just grabs people. Maybe it’s the way she represents the marginalized, appearing to the disenfranchised Juan Diego rather than to the mighty bishop. Perhaps it’s because she is seen as a powerful advocate for the unborn (the black sash she wears is a traditional symbol of pregnancy). Maybe it’s the way she has become an icon of those who sacrifice themselves for the dignity of others; I think of how her image accompanied Cesar Chavez as he marched for the rights of farmworkers. She’s a Mary who feels particularly close to the people, all people. No matter how gritty or demeaned our lives may be, she is our champion. Not a one of us is outside the mantle of her love.

I think of a day I spent in San Francisco’s Mission District several years ago. It’s a neighborhood that is known for its Latino population and for its colorful, vivid murals. You can walk the streets and soak in these fabulous modern works of art, many of them dealing with themes of justice and peace and struggle. They are huge, these murals, stretching across entire buildings. There’s a place called Balmy Alley that is full of them, all painted helpfully at eye level.

And then, as you wander along the sidewalk, you happen to look up. Painted on the side of a building, way up high, is Our Lady of Guadalupe. And you realize that she has been there the whole time, and you didn’t even know it. She’s been there all along, watching over you, watching over everyone who walks the crowded streets and does their very best to make it, dignity intact, through another day.

Viva la Virgen!

Copyright 2009 Ginny Kubitz Moyer

This happened just the other day.  Both boys were napping, and I was savoring the peace and quiet, when I was hit with a sudden wave of rosary-longing.  There was, however, a logistical problem: my rosary, a lovely green one, was in my bedroom in the back of the house.  And our house has hardwood floors.

Hardwood floors sounded great when we bought the house, back in those well-rested days before having children.  But over the last three years, I’ve seen their downside.  When the boys are napping I move around the house like a ninja, holding my breath as I creep down the hall, and I still get CREAK!  and SQUEAK! and BUCKLE! with every step.  And, you know, I just wasn’t ready to see naptime come to an end.  It all seemed hopeless, until I remembered my son’s wooden rosary, up in the drawer in the front room.

Bingo!

IMG_4670

If you can imagine Little Tikes having a Marian Devotion division, that’s what this big chunky rosary is like.  It was a gift from a lovely lady at a parish where I did a book talk.   It’s been in that drawer for a while; when Matthew first got it, he was pretty young, and I was afraid to let him play with it without supervision.  So it has been rather forgotten there in the front room. I grabbed it, settled onto the couch, and began to pray.

About two Hail Marys into it, the baby began to cry.   I rolled my eyes. Down the hall I scurried on tippy-toes, trying to get to him before he woke up his older brother.

So much for the rosary, I thought as I brought Luke back to the living room.  I sat there on the couch, holding him.  He was happy being out of his crib, sitting on my lap, having things to look at and reach for with his pudgy hands.

I gave him the rosary to hold.  He was intrigued by it.  He held the beads, fingering them as if he were trying to memorize it by touch.  And I looked at those chubby hands with the huge colored beads, and my heart constricted with love, seeing my littlest boy taking a quiet moment to explore this strange and wonderful new thing.  I paused, as I often do these days, and fixed that sweet image in my mom-memory, tucking it away to keep forever.

I guess, in a way, I did pray that rosary after all.

Copyright 2009 Ginny Moyer

This spontaneous diagram was prompted not just by curiosity, but by Boy-Scout-style pragmatism.  Scott was about to attend our annual Family Get-Together, and, like any guy hoping to make a good impression, he wanted to be prepared.

These family gatherings are a fixture of the summertime.  They began in 1973, when I was a few months old.  My grandfather had passed away suddenly of a heart attack, and his four siblings and their spouses and children gathered at my grandmother’s house after the funeral.  Out of that sad occasion, an annual tradition was born.  Every year, the generations converge upon my grandmother’s house.  Every year there are kids running around underfoot and people signing the huge tablecloth and the pock of the ping-pong ball as it is batted across the net.   There is tri-tip grilled to perfection by my uncle; there is homemade salsa, and jokes that are even saucier.

It’s a pretty a mad whirl, actually.  With around seventy people there, I never get a chance to visit with everyone.  But thanks to these celebrations, I’ve been given a real gift: a knowledge of my extended family that not many people can boast.  There are so many shared family traits:   the wide, toothy smile, the ease with jokes, the tendency to break into song at random moments.  I see the spry grace of my ninety-year-old grandmother, who has spent a lifetime doing concrete actions – cooking, cleaning, hosting — to make other people’s lives happier.  And the more time I spend with my relatives, the more I see how her example has filtered down to her kids, her grandkids, and now her great-grandkids.

These reunions have taught me that there is a power in knowing your people.  Whether your family is biological or adoptive, the folks who raised you leave an influence on you.  Knowing the people who started the chain … or, to be more precise, who continued it … is pretty powerful stuff.  In getting to know them, you learn more about yourself as well.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this in relation to my Catholic faith.  Honestly, I feel like I’m doubly blessed.   In addition to my California relatives with their in-jokes and casual optimism, I have that vibrant thing called the communion of saints: that huge sprawling family up in heaven, a family that we all get to share.

Truthfully, I didn’t always see this as positive thing.  Years ago, when I was distant from the Church, I saw the saints in a particularly negative light. To me they were irritating goody-two-shoes meant to make the rest of us feel bad by comparison.  One of the greatest gifts of returning to Catholicism has been discovering the humanity of these fascinating people, and realizing the ways – the many, many way s—that they’ve influenced me.

It’s because of a saint, for example, that I have a certain understanding of the spiritual importance of ecology (thank you, St. Francis of Assisi).  St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who faced intense emotional struggles, has been a source of support when my own anxieties have seemed larger than my ability to contain them.  The story of St. Maximilian Kolbe – who, like me, was Polish – impressed me deeply as a kid.  Giving up his life to save another prisoner at Auschwitz showed me that people can and do follow Christ’s words:”No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

And watching over them all is Mary, the greatest of saints.  She’s shown me that radical faith in God may not guarantee an easy life, but it will transform the world. Like any good mother, her influence just keeps filtering down through the generations.  Looking closely at the lives of many of the saints, you can see her own example reflected in their actions and in their writings.

It’s a gift, really, to have this heavenly family.  As I read about the saints, as I pray with them in times of crisis or doubt, they just keep becoming more alive to me.  And as I learn about their own human frailties, the bond gets closer, the similarities between us more clear.  I see where things come from: my spiritual beliefs, my religious traditions.  Through their stories, I learn how to reconcile the questions I have about my faith.   Thanks to them, I start to understand my own little slot on this massive, vibrant, spiritual family tree.

In getting to know the saints, I get to know myself.

And that’s pretty powerful stuff.

Copyright 2009 Ginny Moyer