Mary DeTurris Poust's Blog, page 24

Miscarriage: Love and loss 18 years later

Usually I run the same annual post in this space on August 6, the day I lost my second child to miscarriage. But this year feels a little bit different. As always, I became aware in the back of my mind that the anniversary was approaching a few days out, and last night I intentionally remembered by baby as I went to bed. Then this morning, when I opened my eyes, the baby I call Grace was incredibly present in my heart and mind, and so we had a little silent mother-child talk. And I told her that even though I call her Grace despite the fact that I have no way of knowing whether she was a boy or a girl, the name fits, because she was all grace and for the brief time I was allowed to carry her in my belly, I was filled with a little extra grace because of her.

It’s amazing to me how this baby I never met, whose little heart was there but had stopped beating before I had the chance to hear it, still has such a powerful presence on my psyche and on my heart. Grief starts with such sorrow and pain, but, in this case, over time, it has blossomed into a blessing and the connection to a completely untarnished little soul who prays for me and her father and siblings from the other side. Grace was definitely the right name.

And now, here is the annual post I run in remembrance of baby Grace:

For the past few days I’ve been looking at the numbers on the calendar, growing more and more introspective as we inched closer to August 6. It was 18 years ago today that I learned the baby I was carrying, my second baby, had died 11 weeks into my pregnancy.

With a mother’s intuition, I had known something was wrong during that pregnancy from a couple of weeks before. The day Dennis and I — with Noah in tow — went to the midwife for my regular check up, I didn’t even take the little tape recorder with me to capture the sound of baby’s heartbeat, so convinced was I that I would hear only silence. I went back for the recorder only after Dennis insisted. But somehow I knew. Because when you are a mother sometimes you just know things about your children, even when there is no logical reason you should, even when they are still growing inside you.

When we went for the ultrasound to confirm the miscarriage, we saw the perfect form of our baby up on the screen. I remember Dennis looking so happy, thinking everything was okay after all, and me pointing out that the heart was still. No blinking blip. No more life.

With that same mother’s intuition, no matter how busy or stressed I am, no matter how many other things I seem to forget as I drive my other three children to and fro, I never forget this anniversary. It is imprinted on my heart. As the date nears, I feel a stillness settling in, a quiet place amid the chaos, a space reserved just for this baby, the one I never to got hold, the one I call Grace.

In the past, I have talked about the ways Grace shaped our family by her absence rather than her presence, and that truth remains with me. I am very much aware of the fact that life would be very different had she lived. She managed to leave her mark on us, even without taking a breath. She lingers here, not only in my heart but around the edges of our lives — especially the lives of our two girls who followed her. I know them because I did not know Grace. What a sorrowful and yet beautiful impact she had on us.

So thank you, baby, for all that you were and all that you have given us without ever setting foot on this earth. The power of one small life.

The post Miscarriage: Love and loss 18 years later appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Humility, humiliation, and quiet surrender

Humility has never been my strong suit, which seems somewhat odd to me because I’m not a bragger or a diva. In fact, I trend toward the low end of the self-esteem spectrum. But humility is a tricky thing because it seems ever so close to humiliation, which never feels good. Before you know it, pride rears its ugly head and ego is right behind it. Once ego is involved, all bets are off.

The truth is that humility is something we’re all meant to work toward, the virtue above all virtues, a characteristic you can sense when you meet someone who embodies it. The Spirit is obviously swirling around a person like that, giving off the clear vibe that he or she has thrown off the shackles of typical human existence and put on something better, transcendent. And usually when you catch a whiff of someone like that, you think: “I want that kind of peace.”

So how do the rest of us get there? For me, it’s a daily battle. I wake up every morning and think: “Today will be different. Today I will get it right.” But usually before lunch I’ve gotten it wrong, and I’m left shaking my head and wondering what I could have done differently.

“Humility can only get into the heart via humiliation,” Pope Francis says. “There is no humility without humiliation, and if you are not able to put up with some humiliations in your life, you are not humble.”

Why does God’s way always have to be so difficult?

So often I say I want real transformation. I map out elaborate plans to bring it about. Prayer schedules and exercise routines, eating habits and writing goals. Unfortunately, when I think about transformation, I do so on my own terms, which are not necessarily God’s terms. God’s version of transformation is usually a lot more complicated and difficult, sometimes even downright painful. Yet most of us can see with 20/20 hindsight that the best and strongest parts of us have not been forged by lukewarm shifts, but by the burning fire of challenge.

Real transformation requires real faith. Do I have it? For most of my life, the answer would have been a resounding yes. Now I’m not so sure. If I had the kind of faith that would mark me as a true follower of Jesus and the Gospel beyond a shadow of a doubt, humility would be my calling card and humiliation would have no sting. I am far from that place. Humiliation leaves me breathless, crying, angry, resentful. Just today, in fact, humiliation left me pulling a crucifix down off my wall because I wanted to be done with God. Then I apologized to Jesus, put him back over my desk, and considered why other people’s opinions (and opinions of me) have so much sway over my view of myself, my life and my trust in God.

“He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” (2Cor 12:9) Do I believe those words, or do I hear them and nod my head, all the while setting out to stake my claim, get what’s coming to me, avoid humiliation at all costs.

I think we reach points in our life when we are given a clear choice: humility or pride, quiet surrender or panicked grasping. I’m at one of those moments. This column almost wasn’t written because what could I give you from a place of panicked grasping? I can give you a reminder to begin again every day even when you think you can’t, to trust that God is there even when all you feel is absence, to sit in silence and ponder whether humility might not be the more peaceful path even if it is not the easiest path.

This Life Lines column originally appeared in Catholic New York.

The post Humility, humiliation, and quiet surrender appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Clearing out clutter: sometimes a sock is just a sock

Back when Olivia was in preschool, she went through a brief period of hoarding. I’m not talking about holding on to too many favorite toys; I’m talking about hiding deflated balloons and broken plastic spoons in her nightstand, of “rescuing” used Dixie cups and even old tissues from the bathroom trash can because she couldn’t bear the thought of anything being thrown away. “Hon, I think she’s going to be writer,” her Montessori teacher said. And while I tried not to be offended by that evaluation, I have to admit there was probably some truth to it. Whether a writer or musician, artist or actor, creative types tend to see beauty where no one else does.

Almost one year into my job as director of communications for the Diocese of Albany, I continue to add odd trinkets and new decorations to my office to bring a sense of peace and joy to the place where I spend the bulk of my time. It’s gotten to the point where other people stop by to soak up some serenity because the twinkling lights, bamboo plant and various photos and icons signal to them that there’s something different going on there. Just walking into my office and seeing my treasures can make me smile.

And yet, I desperately want to declutter my life—physically, spiritually and mentally. I long for both literal and figurative clean lines and open spaces. Enter “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” a bestselling book I thought would provide the solution to my object overload. It sat in a pile of clutter on my nightstand for about nine months before I decided to crack the cover. When I did, I began to see things more clearly, but not in the way I had expected.

Author Maria Konda recalls her horror upon opening a client’s sock drawer and seeing all the “potato-like lumps” of rolled socks. She writes: “I pointed to the balled-up socks. ‘Look at them carefully. This should be a time for them to rest. Do you really think they can get any rest like that?’” She goes on to talk about how socks in your sock drawer are “essentially on holiday.”

Um, I get tremendous joy from many inanimate objects in my life, but sometimes a sock is just a sock. I think when we start to blur the lines between things we love and things that serve a practical purpose and are required whether or not we love them—tax returns and toilet paper come to mind—we move into territory that can get in the way of our connection to the many things all around us every day that truly do contain a seed of the divine. Sorry socks, but you don’t rate that ranking. Unless I’m buying the wrong kind of socks.

In the book, the author tells readers to appreciate their belongings, not a bad idea, until you realize she means to have an actual conversation with your clothes. “Thank you for making me beautiful,” we are told to tell our accessories as we remove them. Objects are worth keeping in her worldview only if they give us joy, a me-focused perspective that gets everything backward.

Why not thank God for making us beautiful? We are all “wonderfully made,” as Psalm 139 reminds us, not because our accessories are working so hard but because our God is loving us so much, every minute, every day since before time began. Why do we tend to forget that and go searching for “magic” in books and classes and movements?

There is no magic, and that’s the good news, because magic isn’t real; magic is a slight of hand. God’s love for us is anything but. God holds each one of us in His hand and finds us good, lovable, worth saving, even when we are fickle and fraught with flaws. When we look at life through the lens of God’s unconditional love, we can find joy everywhere, maybe even in a cluttered draw full of balled-up socks.

The post Clearing out clutter: sometimes a sock is just a sock appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Entertaining angels unaware

My latest Life Lines column, running in the current issue of Catholic New York:

I’m not a big believer in coincidence. Rather, I see those unlikely moments and “chance” encounters that cross our paths—and sometimes change our lives—as something much more significant, as the movement of the Spirit. And although the Spirit is always swirling around us, even when we are unaware, when we actively open ourselves up to this grace and holy energy, we can expect the unexpected.

I found that out in grand fashion earlier last month, when I was managing media coverage of one upstate New York priest’s 24-hour confession marathon. I sat down next to a woman quietly crocheting in a back pew to ask if she was on line. What unfolded over the next hour or so was one of those Spirit-infused moments that you just know was meant to be.

Joan wasn’t from the parish and wasn’t on line for confession. She was there to pray for 24 hours straight in support of the pastor, priests worldwide and all those seeking forgiveness through the sacrament of reconciliation. Beneath her chair was a box of supplies: wool for a prayer shawl she was making, a Bible, prayer books, a bottle of water. As confessions got under way, her powerful prayer presence was making itself felt. As I sat there chatting with her, another woman came in with a therapy dog. The two women began talking, and before I knew it, I could feel a healing moment forming around me as they shared stories of loved ones battling Alzheimer’s, of horses and dogs that help people face their demons, as they offered to pray for one another in the days ahead.

The Spirit was making itself known in obvious ways that day, and again a few weeks later, when I met up with Joan a second time at another confession marathon in a completely different part of our diocese. We smiled and hugged when we saw each other, making me realize that Joan, for reasons I’m not completely sure of just yet, is meant to be part of my journey. A gift from the Spirit.

A few days later, bound for Canada via Detroit, I was feeling stressed. As I drove myself to the airport, I tried to shake it off and put it all in God’s hands, even going so far as giving thanks for what was yet to come, not knowing what that might be. Trust me when I tell you that this is not standard operating prayer procedure for me. I took my window seat in row three of the very small jet, hoping for two hours of quiet to review the talk I was about to give. I had just settled in when the gentleman next to me asked about my final destination that day. After only a few words and within a matter of seconds, we realized a spiritual energy moving around us. He had just come from leading a retreat at a center I love; I was headed to a university to give a Lenten talk on the connection between food and faith and the habits that often keep us from moving forward, topics he addresses in both books and workshops. We did not stop talking until we landed in Detroit, at which point I felt as though I had just been on a retreat myself. I was in a better spiritual place as I approached my own speaking engagement because of that encounter. More grace.

Sometimes it’s in the simplest—or even most frustrating or stressful—moments of our lives that we recognize in hindsight a great Force at work. We don’t have to lock ourselves away in spiritual solitude for days on end to encourage the Spirit to enter our hearts and minds. All we have to do is be willing to let the Spirit take us where we are meant to go. We’re guaranteed a spiritual journey like no other, no suitcase or passports required.

The post Entertaining angels unaware appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

He is risen. Alleluia. Alleluia

Life begins again today. Even without dying, we feel reborn because we have been given the ultimate second chance. Without earning it, without understanding it, resurrection is now our destiny. Never has emptiness felt so full. Alleluia, Alleluia. He is risen. And we are saved.

— From my final reflection of Not By Bread Alone 2016 (Liturgical Press). Thank you to all of you who journeyed with me through my book during this Lenten season.

The post He is risen. Alleluia. Alleluia appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Spreading Good News with a small and capital “g”

I was featured as a Faces of Faith interview by Rob Brill in today’s Albany Times Union. I’m honored. Here’s the story:

MARY DeTURRIS POUST

Background: Born and raised in Pearl River in Rockland County. She graduated from Pace University. Her husband, Dennis, and their children, Noah, 19, a freshman at Le Moyne College, and daughters Olivia, 15, and Chiara, 10, who attend Bethlehem public schools, live in Delmar where they are parishioners at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church. She’s director of communications for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany.

Your resume includes reporter, editor, columnist, author and blogger. You’ve switched hats in your new job.

It’s the culmination of everything I’ve done professionally over the past 32 years, not only as a writer but as a public speaker, retreat leader and commentator of Catholic issues. Dealing with the media is my favorite part of my job, because I’ll always be a journalist at heart. I love to find an interesting story in the diocese and get it out there in the secular press: Good news with a capital g and a lower case g. I do sometimes miss being a full-time writer.

Continue reading HERE.

The post Spreading Good News with a small and capital “g” appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Defying definitions and trusting your own story

Everyone has his or her own story. Our history, family, faith, environment – all of it combines to create a background story that runs through our entire life, for better or worse. Through the ups and downs, the surprise plot twists, the losses and accomplishments, we write a new chapter day by day.

The problems arise when we forget our story or get stuck in a bad chapter or let someone else write the story for us. Have you ever walked into a family gathering happy, confident, carefree, only to find yourself crashing downward when a loved one says something (perhaps unconsciously) meant to fit you into someone else’s characterization of you? Suddenly you are 12 years old again and powerless.

I look at my own childhood and my own children, and it’s easy to see how we can sometimes foist our own definitions upon others – the brain, the social butterfly, the daredevil. But when we take a closer look, we see things that go much deeper than the labels. We are all complex beings. We hear everything, see everything from our own unique perspective. Meanwhile, the people we love, the people who drive us crazy, the people we encounter in even the most fleeting moments of our days respond to us from their own perspectives and stories. It’s fascinating and at times frustrating no matter which side of the equation we are on.

How do we defy the definitions that threaten to contain us to the small world other people want us to live in? How do we throw off the labels and embrace the path God has laid before us? By embracing our true selves, the people we were created to be, not the people we think we should be or the people the world – and sometimes the people we love – tell us to be.

In No Man Is an Island, Thomas Merton wrote: “Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”

Deep inside I think most of us have a sense of what we were made for, and yet we don’t trust ourselves, don’t trust God. We believe what the world tells us – it’s too difficult, you’re not smart enough, it’s crazy, you don’t have the temperament – and we throw obstacles in our own way.

Recently I arrived early for pick-up at Chiara’s gymnastic class and watched as the girls stepped up to the uneven parallel bars to attempt the aptly named “fly-away,” which requires the gymnast to let go of the bar and sail through the air for a few terrifying seconds.

One after another the girls pulled themselves up to the high bar and kicked into a rhythmic movement, but one by one the girls would reach the moment of truth and stop. Their feet would cling to the bar and they’d hang there like a little cocoon, as the coach tried to convince them to let go.

When Chiara, 10, stepped up, I expected the same. I watched as her muscular arms and legs pulled and pumped until she was moving fast and then, without even a nanosecond of hesitation, she flipped her legs up, released her hands and flew into the air as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was a moment of pure trust.

We start out trusting, all of us, but somewhere along the way the stories people tell us about ourselves become more real than our own truth. Someone makes fun of us or scolds us, highlights a flaw or plants seeds of doubt, and little by little we begin to hold tighter to the bar, afraid if we let go we’ll hit the ground with a splat.

Own your story. Trust your heart. Let God reveal your true self and then let go and soar.

http://www.notstrictlyspiritual.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0173.m4v

 

The post Defying definitions and trusting your own story appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Why I Stay

My Life Lines column running in the current issue of Catholic New York:

Why do you remain a Catholic?” That was the challenge issued to me on Facebook a while back. Never one to refuse a good challenge, I pondered that question anew even though I had wrestled with it before in relation to various crises in the Church, particularly the sex abuse scandal. Why do I stay? I had originally thought the new answer to that old question would be easy. But, as I reflected on it more deeply, I realized that my truth is not that simple, because it would imply that the sex abuse scandal is the only thing that makes me wonder sometimes why I stay. And, quite frankly, abuse is just one thing among many that can make this faith a challenging matter.

Don’t get me wrong. My Catholic blood runs true blue and has for all of my 53 years. I love the Church deeply, but sometimes the Church makes me crazy. You know how your family can make you crazy? Yeah, like that. There are days when I want to run away, change my address and take up a new identity. Family can do that to you, and the Church is my family, the Church is my home, and since I’ve worked for the Church for 30-plus years in one form or another, the Church is also my business. When you spend that amount of time with anything or anyone, it can sometimes make you want to run screaming from the room. And yet I haven’t run. I haven’t changed my identity. I am here, not without some fairly regular whining, but here. Firmly planted, whether I am giddy with the joy of faith or grumbling in the pain of darkness. But why? Why not walk away and be done with even the most minor frustrations? Why not find an easier path or maybe even “create my own religion,” as some tell me they have done, where I crop out the hard stuff and fill the frame with only flowers and light?

Because life is never just flowers and light, because there will always be frustrations, there will always be something to whine about, something that doesn’t go according to my plan, and I cannot imagine getting through my daily dose of drama without God ever present in my corner, without Jesus always in front of me, without the Eucharist providing food for the often difficult journey.

When the crowds around Jesus start to have trouble with some of his difficult teachings and begin walking away, he asks his closest followers if they, too, will leave.

“Lord, to whom shall we go?” Peter answers. “You have the words of everlasting life.” That remains at the heart of my answer today. Always I identify with Peter, who never fails to screw up but somehow gets it on a deeper level. He doubts, he denies, he runs away, but Jesus sees through it to the faith that lives inside him. I pray Jesus can do the same with me, see through my mistakes and missteps and failures to the faith that is sometimes shaky, often lukewarm, but always present. For my entire life my faith has been the air I breathe. Like the beating heart we don’t question until it starts to fail, my faith has been beating inside me for 53 years, often without my taking the time to stop and admire its steadfast rhythm and life-giving power. Until someone asks me, “Why stay?”

Like Peter, I can only say, “To whom shall I go?” If not here, where? If not this, what? This is where Truth lives. This is the Way. This is the Word to which I cling. Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega—with me, with all of us, until the end of time.

The post Why I Stay appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Confronted with Christ

My brief reflection from Give Us This Day earlier this week:

Whenever we take our children to Manhattan, we are confronted by the reality of “these least brothers” Jesus talks about in today’s Gospel. On subways and street corners they hold out battered cups in battered hands. Our kids look to us to gauge whether we should be doing something, and if not, why not? We tell them we can’t give to every street person. And even as we explain, we fight our own guilt over ignoring those with the least who live among those with the most.

On my last visit I kept running into one homeless person after another. Each time I’d look at my husband and say, “Is that one Jesus?”

Jesus seemed to be trailing me in what Blessed Mother Teresa called the “distressing disguise of the poor.” As I usually do, I eventually came face-to-face with someone who caused me to let down my New York City guard, in this case a woman in the doorway of a shop where I bought a red leather bag. I came out and offered her a few dollars. She smiled and said, “God bless you,” and the words of today’s Gospel hit me full force, and not in a good way.

What will be the standard by which I am judged? For the small kindness of throwing a few bills into a beggar’s paper cup? Or the incredible selfishness of buying myself one more unnecessary thing rather than buy that poor woman a sweater or a meal or even her own beautiful leather bag?

 

The post Confronted with Christ appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.

Sometimes happiness isn’t a choice.

My Life Lines column, running in the current issue of Catholic New York:

My hands look older than my mother’s hands ever did. That’s what I was thinking at Mass last Sunday when I should have been focused on more spiritual pursuits. But I couldn’t get past the sudden, albeit not surprising, realization that I am aging far beyond anything my mother experienced in her 47 years. Thanks to a couple of small-but-disturbing age spots and prominent veins, my hands remind me that life is moving at breakneck speed and I might want to take stock of things.

I don’t think the timing of my observation is coincidental. Although I’m not one to make annual resolutions, I do have a penchant for long, somewhat depressing strolls down memory lane at this time of year, meandering mentally through all the things I have not yet done, or didn’t do so well. For the people (like myself) who dwell in darkness, God’s great light only seems to penetrate so far.

We darkness-dwellers can be suffocating to those lucky enough to live in the light. We seem to drain the life out of everything, like the soul-sucking Dementors of “Harry Potter” fame, but the truth is that this is how God made us. “Happiness is a choice,” I read on Facebook and Pinterest with some regularity. Baloney. While some people are hardwired for joy, others are not. For us happiness is a constant longing, a place that is always 10 steps ahead of us. “Choosing” happiness doesn’t change who we are at our core any more than choosing warm sunshine will change a gray January day in upstate New York into the tropics.

This reality was driven home for me this past year when I watched from a distance as my dearest childhood friend battled breast cancer. Never during that year did she seem angry or hopeless, dark or desperate. Her game face was always one of optimism and opportunity, great expectations and living in the moment. I’m sure she had to work hard to stay in that place, but she began from a baseline of happiness; she is a remarkably upbeat person.

When she was declared cancer-free last month, I sent her a note telling her how glad I was and at the same time how sorry, because in the midst of her crisis I had been consumed with worries far less significant than cancer, so much so that although I prayed and prayed for her good health, I never did see my way clear to make the drive to see her, or do much of anything else in terms of support.

My aging hands brought all of this to the fore. As I looked at skin that is changing from vibrant and glowing to translucent and lined, I wondered if I would see similar interior changes if I were able to peer into my own soul. Had my ability to bounce back from a sad place lost some of its elasticity, just as skin does as it ages? Had my cynical-but-hopeful foundation begun to crack?

I’d like to think our soul doesn’t work that way. That maybe as our exterior self ages, our interior self soaks up all the vitality. I always assumed age would bring interior peace. Like happiness, that isn’t a matter of making a simple decision, like choosing a pair of shoes. Lasting peace and happiness require difficult interior work and critical exterior support for some of us. And sometimes despite our best—and prayerful—efforts, those much-desired things stay slightly out of reach.

Moving from darkness to light, sadness to joy is not a matter of choosing to be something other than who God created us to be but rather of refusing to buy into the “happiness-is-a-choice” myth and accepting our own truth, even if it comes only in a shade of blue.

The post Sometimes happiness isn’t a choice. appeared first on Not Strictly Spiritual.