Mary DeTurris Poust's Blog, page 45

A little liturgical dance on the Feast of Christ the King

This has always been one of my all-time favorite Stephen Colbert clips. So here it is again in honor of the Feast of Christ the King. “The King of Glory,” performed Colbert-style.

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Giving away Thanksgiving: How much cheap stuff do we really need?

The thought of people shopping on Thanksgiving, working on Thanksgiving, fighting each other over cheap cell phones and cheaper TVs on Thanksgiving makes me so sad. Every time I sat down to write about it, no words came out because, really, what can I say to a world that values products over people, bargains over blessings, retail over relationships? One day. That’s all. Can we have just one day where we don’t have to be on the quest for more junk to fill our closets and drawers and basements to overflowing? I guess not. 

I have never been a fan of Black Friday. Simply won’t do it. I don’t care how cheap you’re gonna make it, it’s not enough to get me to get in my car, fight someone for a parking spot, and then fight even harder not to get trampled in the crush. First of all, there is nothing at that mall I want even on a slow day. Throw in throngs of angry shoppers and, well, you couldn’t pay me to go there. Now, we’ve upped the ante, backing Black Friday into Thanksgiving and sapping all the joy from this beautiful holiday, one of my favorites, a holiday where we just give thanks and hang out together with people we may or may not get to see all that often. Pile some stuffing on top of that and it doesn’t get much better.

I came across this article on HuffPo today and decided that this guy hit the nail on the head when it comes to Black Thanksgiving. He says it better than I ever could:

For a while, Black Friday and Thanksgiving coexisted. We thanked God for His blessings on Thursday, and then jumped into the consumer mosh pit at Best Buy on Friday. But this Black Friday-Thanksgiving marriage was tenuous and rocky from the start. It was doomed to fail. Thanksgiving offers tradition, family and contentment; Black Friday offers smart phones at drastically reduced prices. In America, we all know who wins that battle. So Black Friday, like a black hole, violently expanded; it absorbed the light that surrounded it and sucked everything into its terrifying abyss, where all substance is torn to shreds and obliterated. Black Friday could not be contained to a mere 24 hours. It is Consumerism. It wants more. It always wants more. Nothing is sacred to it; nothing is valuable. So, now, Black Friday has eaten Thanksgiving alive. Thanksgiving let out a desperate cry as Black Friday devoured its soul, but we barely noticed. It’s hard to hear anything when you’re wrestling 4,000 other people for buy one get one free cargo shorts at Old Navy.

Many of the big chain retailers will be opening during, or before, dinner time on Thanksgiving. Walmart, Kmart, Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s — all among the many electing to cannibalize Thanksgiving. Kmart will be open starting at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning, offering great Black Friday deals for 41 straight hours. This is fortunate because I often walk into Kmart and think, “you know, the stuff in here just isn’t cheap enough.”

Yeah, what he said. Stay home, eat stuffing, watch football, fight with your long lost uncle, but, please, don’t shop.

 

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Proving that age really is a state of mind

“It’s all about having a purpose, and that’s why I think to retire is dangerous,” says one woman featured in the Fabulous Fashionistas documentary about older women who still have a sense of style and a sense of purpose. “…The minute you give an inch, life or illness or something else will take a mile.”

And this from the narrator:

“For all six women, their style and attitude was not just about the clothes they wore. They all have the same steely determination. They all share a quality, a spirit that keeps them going regardless.”

Can I get an Amen?

Watching this video made me smile and laugh and shake my head in the very best way. I love these women. I love their confidence, and I love the way they defy every preconception about older women.

As I watched, it made me even happier with my decision to get braces at 51 because, guess what? Only a crazy woman who has no intention of getting old any time soon or following stereotypical social conventions, would get braces at 51. Only a crazy 51-year-old woman would go to the store for walking shoes and come home with three-inch-heeled suede ankle boots and then wear them with a skirt to speak at a church. Only a crazy woman of a certain age would buy a Batik handkerchief skirt and wear it with a Guess jean jacket from the juniors department with a big gray silk rose purchased on the street in Greenwich Village along with a dark green scarf with little Indian bells on it.

I am that crazy woman, and this documentary only makes me want to kick it up a notch. While watching this I thought of so many fabulous friends and Facebook acquaintances who fit this same profile. You know who you are, and I love you all. You inspire me, the same way these women do and remind me that age really is a state of mind.

Here’s to growing old together with style! Watch the documentary. It’s 45 minutes, but worth every second.

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Moving Meditation: the sacred rhythm of raking

I love to rake. I love everything about it — the sound of the rake scratching against the earth, the smell of the autumn air, the pre-winter peacefulness that seems to be settling into all of nature at this time of year, the crispy brown oak leaves swirling against a steely gray November sky and filling my path as fast as I try to clear it.

This past Saturday, I spent most of the day raking the front and side lawns and painstakingly pulling all the leaves out of the holly shrubs and hydrangeas and boxwoods. And I knew, even as I was doing it, that it wouldn’t last more than a few hours. One look skyward was all the proof I needed: oak trees still laden with too many leaves to ignore. At this time of year, raking feels like a large-scale, leafy version of those intricate sand mandalas Buddhist monks painstakingly create and then blow away. I create crisp leaf-free lines and corners and edges and by the time I turn around all those edges are softened and corners filled in and I have to begin again. But there’s something freeing in that. As I drag leaves across the lawn, I know in the back of my mind that what I’m doing is only for that moment.

All of those things combined — the rhythm, the movement, the fleetingness of the results — make raking a perfect way to pray in the everyday. When I wrote Everyday Divine: A Catholic Guide to Active Spirituality, raking was at the top of my list of ways to pray without ceasing, to turn mundane moments into moving meditations.

And what I find especially interesting is that I can be so at peace with the impermanence of my raking efforts when the same does not apply to other chores I do around my house. Sweeping the floor only to find little pieces of dirt from the tread of someone’s shoe all over the previously clean white tile makes me sort of crazy, as does a freshly cleaned bathroom sink that is covered in blue toothpaste within minutes. But for some reason raking doesn’t come with that baggage, at least not in my world, but maybe my attitude toward raking can begin to inform my attitude to all the other chores in my life. Clean doesn’t last forever or for ten minutes. Can I be okay with that and can I find joy and beauty and peace there anyway?

Give it a try the next time you find yourself with a rake in hand. Tune out everything else and just be in that moment, in the beauty of God’s creation. Pray in whatever way most suits you: the Rosary or intercessory prayer or silent contemplation or song. Let go of the somewhat irksome fact that what you’re doing will have to be done again the next day or the next weekend. And there, amid the swirling leaves, you just may find the Spirit whispering to you.

 

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Foodie Friday: Sweet potato black bean chili

I actually Googled “sweet potato black bean chili, Not Strictly Spiritual” this morning to find this recipe I had posted here months ago. It was easier than searching for it in the piles of cookbooks in my kitchen. This is what’s on the menu tonight at the Poust House. It’s de-lish! Give it a try, if you didn’t do it the first time around.

Ingredients

1 Tbs plus 2 tsp EVOO

1 medium-large sweet potato, peeled and diced

1 large onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 Tbs chili powder

4 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp ground chipotle chili

1/4 tsp salt

2 1/2 cups water

2 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed

1 14-ounce can diced tomatoes

4 tsp fresh lime juice

1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Directions

Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add sweet potato and onion; cook, stirring often, until the onion begins to soften (about four minutes). Add garlic, chili powder, cumin, chipotle and salt; stir constantly for 30 seconds. Add water and bring to a simmer. Cover, reduce heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until the sweet potato is tender, about 10 to 12 minutes. Add beans, tomatoes, and lime juice; increase heat to high and return to simmer until slightly reduced, about five minutes. (I lowered the heat at this point and left it on  a low simmer for a little bit longer so the flavors could marry.) Remove from heat and stir in cilantro. Serves four.

Cook’s note: I didn’t have chipotle powder the day I made this. I just threw in a few dashes of hot sauce and it was fine. Also, I like to top this with a dollop of sour cream or plain Greek yogurt and a little diced avocado. Another option is to serve it over yellow rice, which is a favorite at our house. Click HERE for a yellow rice recipe by Mark Bittman. His calls for saffron threads. I didn’t have any, so I substituted turmeric (and made a few other personalizations) and it came out great.

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The hope that’s found in the promise of purgatory

Some people have a problem with the idea of purgatory, which is something I honestly just don’t get. Of all our teachings, this is one that is not only incredibly beautiful but also especially logical (as logical as things of the spirit can ever be) and especially compassionate, at least in my book. When I look at my life here on earth so far, I can’t imagine — despite all my good intentions — that I’ll be ready to meet God face to face when I die. And so I’m banking on purgatory and the possibility that I might be able to do in the next life what I haven’t been able to achieve on this side of heaven, namely, get right with God.

When I was at All Souls’ Day Mass today, the priest described purgatory as “a process, not a place,” and I loved that image, this image of ever-forward movement in the afterlife bringing us closer and closer to union with the Divine. What a merciful and beautiful belief, so full of hope and understanding of our human frailty and our trust that God can and will continue to perfect us even after we’ve taken our last breath. I think that’s why I love All Souls’ Day even more than All Saints’ Day. Sure, I like to celebrate the saints, but, even more than that, I like to pray for those who may still be in process, those who could us a little spiritual assistance on the path toward God for all eternity. I sure hope others will do the same for me some day, although based on today’s showing, I’m starting to have my doubts.

The priest today mentioned how when he was newly ordained years ago, parishes needed to celebrate three Masses on All Souls’ Day to accommodate the crowds in much the same way that they celebrated three Masses on Christmas. In other words, back in the old days people understood the importance of praying for those who have gone before us. Today the church was mostly an empty, and it made me sad, not only because it was a reminder of the sad state of religion in modern America but because it seemed to me to be a denial of some sort — of our mortality, of our human weakness, of our dependence on one another, of our humility before God.

For my part, I’m putting my money on that middle ground, the space between, where I just might finally get it right.

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THIS is what a vibrant parish looks like

I knew from the get-go that St. John the Baptist Church in Madison, Alabama, was an active and vibrant parish. After all, the people there scooped up 550 copies of my Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Catholic Catechism in order to use it as a text during the Year of Faith. That’s some serious Catholic mojo happening there. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, I received an email a while back asking if I’d be willing to come down and do a series of talks for the parish. That’s typically something that would happen on a diocesan level, at least where I come from, so the fact that a single parish would have the resources and motivation to do this intrigued me. Clearly they get it: If you don’t feed people, they just might walk away. And at St. John the Baptist Church, the people are being fed, and not just tiny scraps but endless buffets of spiritual goodness from what I saw on my recent visit.

The bulletin alone is enough to make that clear. Page after page of activities and devotions and opportunities for people of every age and background. But if you want the real proof of this parish’s vibrancy, sit through all five Masses on a weekend — I did just that last weekend — and watch in amazement as 3,500+ people come pouring through those doors, most of them with little children. I don’t think I’ve seen that many newborns in one place outside a hospital nursery. And at every Mass, when the children brought up donations for the food pantry as part of the offertory, I kept waiting and waiting for the lines of kids to end, but it seemed to go on forever. As far as I’m concerned, you can measure the health of a parish by the presence of so many young families with children.

As I listened to the announcements at Mass, as I looked around at the physical structure of the church, as I listened to the pastor and the associate pastor at Mass and watched them laugh and visit with their parishioners in the vestibule after Mass, I have to admit that I felt some pangs of jealousy. THIS Is the parish I’ve been looking for all my life. Can I commute from New York to Alabama every week?

Do you know what I think makes this parish work so well? It’s a beautiful blend of the best of our Catholic traditions. You cannot look at this parish and try to pin it down or label it, which is probably why I felt so at home there. From the obvious focus on Eucharist — the tabernacle at the center of the altar, the post-Communion prayer that weaves together Thomas Aquinas and the Baltimore Catechism in order to focus parishioners on the reality of what they have just experienced, the Adoration that occurs every single day in the little chapel after daily Mass — to the welcoming and easy-to-sing contemporary music and the inclusion of children and the casual rapport between the priests and the people. It all worked like a well-oiled machine, and as I watched happy faces streaming in and out of Mass after Mass, I thought: This is a parish that gets it. This is a parish that understands its people.

Confession is available three times a week. THREE times — on Saturday afternoon and two weekday evenings before the weekday evening Masses. Weekday EVENING Masses. A clear recognition that not everyone can go to Mass at 9 a.m. or noon. And those confessionals are active. Father Phil, the pastor, told me he was in the confessional on Saturday from 2:50 until just before 5 p.m., so two solid hours, and people just kept coming. And Father Joy, associate pastor, was hearing confessions at the same time.

It’s not hard to see why this parish is successful. There is a basic understanding that people need to be fed or they will go elsewhere, and so they are given sustenance through the sacraments and through ongoing adult faith formation, through babysitting for parents with young children who want to attend presentations and through conveniently timed faith formation programs for families, through its variety of musical styles at Mass — from choir to contemporary group with electric bass to single cantor and piano, depending on the Mass — and through its active Life Teen program and moms’ group. And on and on. If any pastor wants to see a successful parish in operation, stop by St. John the Baptist one Sunday and be amazed. I was. I’m just sorry I can’t go back next weekend.

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The taste of a memory

When I went to visit my grandmother at the nursing home yesterday, I packed a little cooler bag with my lunch, thinking it might be nice to eat with her. I just threw some random stuff in the bag as I ran out the door — yogurt and water, an apple and a cheese stick. Much healthier than my normal lunch, truth be told.

I got to her room, parked myself on the edge of her bed and took out my blueberry yogurt, and as I sat there, stirring up the blue-purple concoction, a memory came flooding back like a tidal wave.

When I was young, maybe 4 years old, my grandmother would watch me while my mother worked part-time. I would go with her to her job as a cashier at the Food Fair in Pearl River, over in the same parking lot where the old L.H. Martin used to be, in what would eventually become Pearl River Lanes. And I would sit on the ledge at the front of the store, against the plate glass window, swinging my legs and watching as my grandmother rang up customers and bagged their groceries. (Maybe that’s why I’ve always said I could be a champion bagger.)

During E-ma’s breaks, I’d go with her to the break room and eat a snack — often blueberry yogurt, sometimes cottage cheese with pineapple, both still favorites of mine. Now I realize it’s because of the taste of the memories more than the taste of the food.

As I sat on the bed, my legs hanging over the side in much the same way they did when I was a little girl sitting on that ledge, I looked over at my grandmother and thought about how strange and wonderful it is that something as basic and uninteresting as yogurt could give me that gift, that memory of being so little and being with her. And I thought about how much time I spent with her throughout my childhood, not just in that store, but at her house and our house, and not just as a little girl but right up through my teenage years and young adulthood. She was ever-present in my life growing up. In my adult life I haven’t been so lucky. I’ve lived too far away to have those kinds of moments. But today, for the briefest time, I was back there.

We have come full circle, my grandmother and I. I’m now close to the age she was when she babysat for me and she is closing in on 101, the two of us bound together forever by time and love and blueberry yogurt.

 

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On the road…Stop by if you’re in Alabama

Today I head to the Jersey Shore to give a two-day retreat — “Creating Calm Amid Life’s Chaos” — to the principals of the Diocese of Metuchen at the San Alfonso Retreat House in Long Branch. Work with an ocean view. Not a bad way to make a living. We’ll be talking about all sorts of fun stuff, from cravings and everyday prayer to community and friendship. Can’t wait to get started.

Then on Saturday I fly to Alabama — my first time in that southern state — to give a few talks to the folks at St. John the Baptist Church in Madison, not far from Huntsville. If you or anyone you know will be nearby, please tell them to join us. I’ll be speaking to the adult faith formation program on Sunday morning at 10 a.m. That talk is titled “Pilgrim’s Progress: Walking the Journey of Faith Together.”

On Sunday evening at 6:45 p.m., I’ll give my main talk: “Conversion of Heart: Discovering the Divine in the Everyday.” I’ll repeat that talk on Monday morning at 9:15 a.m. before I fly home.

Should be a whirlwind week for me. I’m looking forward to meeting lots of great people because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of a lifetime and in my travels to meet with different groups and parishes, it’s that Catholics love to have fun, even when they’re talking about God.

See y’all soon. (I’m practicing for Alabama.)

 

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Italy alert: We are now under the one-year countdown to the most amazing pilgrimage

One year from now we will be just back from the most amazing pilgrimage, a 13-day food and faith tour of Italy that will take us from Montecatini, Florence, Siena, and Assisi to Rome, Naples, Salerno, Sorrento, and the Isle of Capri. There’s still plenty of time to save up some money and vacation days and join us for a wonderful weaving of spirituality, sightseeing, and one fabulous meal and hotel after another. You can find the full itinerary HERE.

But let me first address something that has come up when I mention this tour to friends and family. Inevitably the first thing they ask is, “How much does it cost?” And when I say $4,999, their eyes glaze over and they say, “Never mind.” So I wanted to talk honestly about this because if you price this tour against other tours, what you find out very quickly is that there is simply no way you are going to get to Italy for 13 days, stay at spa level hotels, have almost all of your meals included, incur no hidden costs, AND take a cooking class, do an olive oil tasting at an agriturismo, a wine tasting at a vineyard, and cap it all off with a boat trip the Blue Grotto on the Isle of Capri for less than this. When Melani over at Travel Overtures says “inclusive,” she’s not kidding around!

Price out airfare and top-of-the-line hotels alone and you’re likely to find that you’re getting close to our cost before you even eat one bowl of pasta, sip one glass of wine, or enter one fabulous museum. And you won’t have an English-speaking tour guide guide taking you step by step through the whole glorious adventure. And if you see other Italy tours that seem to cost less, look at the details. How many nights are you staying? How many meals are included? Is all your in-country transportation and tax covered? What about entry fees to various sights and special events? Yeah, you just won’t find anything like this.

When this pilgrimage possibility came up, Melani told me to “dream big” and spell out what I would consider the perfect pilgrimage to Italy. I came up with the outline of this trip and then Melani took it over the top and made it more than I ever could have hoped for. So know that when you join me on this tour, it’s not simply a “job” for me or even a vacation; it is the culmination of a dream, and I want it to be as close to perfect as possible for all of us.

If you have any questions, email me directly. If you haven’t already liked our Facebook page, click HERE and then click “like” and you’ll receive regular updates, beautiful photos, and other goodies as the trip gets closer. If you want a hardcopy of the brochure, email me your regular mailing address and we’ll get a copy out to you right away.

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