The Carmelite Charism

My name saint St. Therese of Lisieux died young, but her passion for Jesus was mighty and her humility awesome. She is often drawn and described as sweet, but studying her closely you find she's salty, too.

Carmelite charism catches up and offers a childlike surrender and trust to God's Mercy and Love. It's very attractive, but obviously hard and serious work. So I enjoyed finding this article on St. Therese's humor:

She joked with the sisters about being the one to try out the new cemetery plot. And when they were talking about how they would arrange her in the coffin, she said "Well, put the candle in my hand but not those candlesticks--they're too ugly!"

She was dying a slow, suffocating, painful death from TB at the time.

Does our Holy Father come to your mind, too?

1200 girls in one building!

In the post below, "Ten Things I Did You Probably Didn't," #10 is nuttiness I engaged in my senior year of high school. I did get three detentions, by the way: one for cutting religion class, and the other two for facetious reasons, singing badly and smoking, I think. I served them all in one hour and the jug teacher congratulated me. Boy, I got lucky.

What strikes me in review is that, if I had gone to a co-ed high school, I wouldn't have dreamed of pulling off that stunt because the boys might have seen me. In the bosom of the all-girl "family," even though life wasn't perfect (girls at Catholic schools can be total b****es, too) I had my own identity and felt reasonably safe to be me, within the limits of teenage angst, and me found in me that day an insane impulse to entertain.

More Catholic high schools are co-ed now, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. Am I being a grumpy-old, or are teens among their own sex freer to try new things, to take a chance, or is that merely the line they fed us when I was in high school in the '70's? Are there other outlets to try out and express your personality, equal to or superior to school life?

I flourished academically and personally in that atmosphere. But I had to adjust in college, and was quite maidenly in my reaction to men; I wasn't sure they thought like I did. I related best to them if I thought of them as brothers OR boyfriends, one extreme or the other; it took a long time before I could study with them or talk to them as friends.

I do not regret my all-girl high school experience, the benefits were measurable and lasting. But do you? Do your children?

Ten Things I Did That You Probably Didn't

First, pray for Terri. Fast for Terri. Give money to her defense fund. Contact your US representative to push through the Federal "Terri's Law." Believe that God is very close to the Schindlers and very much in your efforts.

My blogsister Roz posted her unusualnesses at her other blog Indwelling. So, here are mine:

1. Played piano for Andy Kaufman while he was on his college "Elvis and Wrestling Women" tour.
2. Played piano at age 15 as a pit musician in the world premiere of the opera "The Prodigal Son."
3. Played cocktail party piano to pay for part of my college tuition.
4. Completely forgot I had an English final in college. I don't remember feeling like such an airhead.
5. Had a comedy show on my college radio station.
6. Wrote my uncle's obituary, and phoned it in to the Chicago papers, as an eighth-grader. The rest of the family was in shock at his sudden death at 45.
7. Learned to read and write Egyptian hieroglyphics.
8. Turned down an autograph from Mario Andretti to his face at the Indy 500 time trials because I wasn't sure who he was.
9. Talked (giggled, mostly) to Davey Jones, the Monkee, on the telephone, while he was appearing at a Chicago radio station.
10. Cut religion class, put on a Dominican sister's habit and roller skates, lit up a cigar, and skated through my high school lunchroom at noon singing the Marx Brothers' "Hurray for Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer" so I could finally get a "jug" (detention) before I graduated.

Post yours! Here or on your own blog.

Terri Schiavo: A law professor weighs in

From Blogs for Terri, an incisive discussion by Elizabeth Price Foley of the weakness of the legal judgment to remove food and water.

On Feb. 11, 2000, Pinellas Circuit Court Judge George Greer determined that there was ''clear and convincing evidence'' that Terri Schiavo would want to disconnect her feeding tube. Once this decision was made, the judicial balance became tilted in favor of withdrawing care to an extent nearly impossible to overcome.

That initial erroneous decision by Greer five years ago has had a snowball effect that has tainted all subsequent judicial proceedings. The Second District Court of Appeal affirmed Greer's decision, concluding, in a disturbingly cursory fashion, that Schiavo's ``statements to her friends and family about the dying process were few, and they were oral. Nevertheless, those statements, along with other evidence about Theresa, gave the trial court a sufficient basis to make this decision for her.''

However, Greer's conclusion that the evidence was ''clear and convincing'' is shocking . . .

The danger of letting this become judicial precedent is huge.

Truth and grace

Steven at Flos Carmeli has posted a poem called My God, My God, Why Have I Abandoned You? Here's the first verse:

Silence is shattering.
It says nothing more than what you hear in it and what you see in it.
Sometimes it shows you the numbness of the heart.
Other times it shows you the hardness of the heart.
But silence cannot be silence without grace, and grace prevails.

To me, this is beautiful. The very silence in which we perceive the raw truth about ourselves is the same in which grace comes, "and grace prevails."

I'm counting on it.