God Talk and Tea

Children need the faith stories of elders

As I sat down to order breakfast in our local diner, I remembered a time years ago having dinner here with friends we hadn't seen in a long time. They ordered
their perfect meal from the senior menu, but when I attempted to do the same, I was looked at with furrowed brow by the server. “M’am, you have to be a
senior to order from this menu.”

I proudly pulled my license from my pocket and said, “Here’s my proof.”

The young man tried to hide a snicker, “Fifty-five is not a senior in this restaurant,” and proceeded to turn the menu over so I could order something else, something more costly.

“Well, it is by AARP standards,” I muttered under my breath.

Who would have thought I’d be at a place where I was proud to be 55 years old?

It’s not the case for many my age or older who often feel a terrible competition from the younger generation.

I think many of us seniors would benefit from having a fairy godmother of our own, perhaps an older version of Cinderella’s, a little bent here and there, with a few brown spots and definitely a knee problem. She would, unashamedly, wear purple dresses and red hats and eat ice cream sundaes when everyone else is eating sherbet. Children, especially, would love to be around her because she would be REAL, authentically herself, and fully aware of the hard earned wisdom she had to share with others.

And rather than appear when we need help finding our Prince or Princess Charming, she would appear to us senior folks when we focus too much on how good we used to look or feel, or how we never accomplished our dreams or maybe even, now, feeling that we have no purpose in life.

It’s then that our fairy godmother would do one of those, Cher “snap out of it!” routines, and remind us in no uncertain terms that we are “all that” and more, especially when it comes to having a purpose in the lives of our families, and especially, in the life of our Church.

My 25 years of work in religious education has shown me that, in many ways, our children are hurting and our families are hurting, and in that hurt they need their faith. But, for many families, faith and religion receives just a tiny portion of their attention, if any at all.

So what happens to our children? What legacy is being left to them and their relationship with God and the Catholic family to which they belong? There is a real disconnect for them, a loss of their sense of roots and an emptiness that comes from a lack of tradition and ritual.

How are they to come to know God, to learn to love God and to learn to love an imperfect Church without someone to guide them?

I believe that seniors are integral part of the solution. Seniors are the elders of the Church, the wise ones, the people who must share their story with the younger generation so they may share the story with their children, keeping the cycle of faith and love alive and well in the American Church and in their homes, as well.

Mary was such an elder, one who guided, sustained and comforted the faithful of her time by her presence and holy examples. She must be our example, too.

Children may be the future of the church but without elders guiding them through the present with our witness and our wisdom, the future will continue to look bleak, especially the future of the Church as we know it.

As ancient cultures knew well, the special gift of elders is not is knowing everything but in being able to tell the stories – whether it is the story of your family or the story of the parish, the stories that have happened over the many years of our lives, leaving us with gray hairs and wrinkles and bad knees and worse eyesight, or most importantly, the story of our faith. There is wisdom in these stories and that places seniors among the greatest treasure our parish families have.

Tell the story of your Catholic faith to a child today. You can give them no greater gift.

We all have a need to 'perch for awhile'

Inevitably, while sitting at my computer trying to write, e-mail notifications distract me. 

“Let me just respond to these few,” I think, because, of course, they’re important. Behind me, the phone rings every few minutes, some calls I take, some I let go to voice mail, certain to store them in my mental “things to be concerned about” file.

Today, a new bounty of mail sits on my desk, added to the pile from the past week or so that is screaming to be opened.  As I answer the phone, a letter from the tax attorney catches my eye and I decide it’s best to take a peak.  After a minute of reading and sighs, I realize there is no longer any sound on the other end of the line.  My caller has been waiting for more than a few seconds for me to respond to her question, which I never heard because I was distracted; a case of being so busy nothing gets done.

And my writing? Now I need to reboot the entire process because in multitasking I lost valuable time and energy on my most important project. Besides, it will have to wait until I return from the supermarket and finish cleaning the house because my grandchildren will be here bright and early tomorrow morning.  And then there’s that on-line class I’m facilitating tonight.

Suddenly I am thinking of Dr. Seuss and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

Bartholomew is young boy who wears a plain red hat and lives in a hut on the edge of a cranberry bog. His family lives in the Kingdom of Didd. When mighty King Derwin comes to town and expects all the townspeople to take off their hats as a sign of respect, Bartholomew runs into a problem. Every time he removes his hat a new one appears on his head. Will he ever be hatless?

It’s a question to which many of us can relate, including the 16^th century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila who I am happy to have as my patron saint. Now here was a multitasker and wearer of many hats.

Teresa’s childhood desire was to follow in the footsteps of the martyrs, but fortunately her life unfolded according to God’s plan. She became a mystic, a writer, a poet, a bold religious reformer and businesswomen, and the foundress of the Discalced Carmelite order. She continually had to dodge the inquisition as she strove to do God’s work, frequently wore the hat of a politician to get what was needed for her order, her nuns and priests, and eventually became the first woman to be declared a doctor of the Church.

Though she originally desired only to establish a monastery for contemplative prayer, this passionate saint with a keen sense of humor eventually traveled thousands of miles of poor roads across Spain and Portugal by curtained carriage or mule carts, to found 17 monasteries for nuns, and with St. John of the Cross, two for friars. She also composed a body of mystical literature that continues to inspire and strengthen the faithful worldwide.

As a tireless fighter for her faith and her God, her life was a whirlwind of responsibilities, and while the rule in her Carmelite monasteries was one of discipline, intense prayer and work, in solitude and community, she wisely recognized that such effort needed to be balanced by recreation.

St. Teresa was so convinced of the value of rest and enjoyment she wrote it into her rule, requiring her nuns to take two recreation breaks a day. Joy was a hallmark for her, and she lived that joy, often singing and dancing for convent occasions and sharing her talents with the castanets, drums and tambourine,   In fact, the image of St. Teresa with a tambourine was written into a beautiful icon by Franciscan Brother Robert Lentz, and is a wonderful tool for meditation.

In her spiritual memoirs, St. Teresa offers some invaluable advice to those of us who sometimes struggle with many hats and many tasks, while our spiritual lives, and our joy, flounder in our busyness: “I am amazed by how much can be accomplished on this path by being bold and striving for great things. Even if a soul is not quite strong enough yet, she can still lift off and take flight. She can soar to great heights. But like a fledgling bird, she may tire herself out and need to perch for a while."