Growing up, I drew all the time. Art allowed me to figure out what I felt, what I thought. For a time, it seemed I would never run out of pictures. One day, shortly after I got married, in the midst of drawing, I knew the well was dry. I couldn’t finish the piece.
There were moments of inspiration. I still drew from time to time, but the art wasn’t constant. I didn’t need to draw.
In 2004, I started writing. Like art before it, it filled a need, it became a necessity. Every day for years, I wrote stories, lists, jokes, poems, and op-eds. I studied how to write, why to write, what to write. It became part of how I identified myself: Catholic, mother of ten, writer, then, Catholic, mother of ten, published author, teacher.
This past year, it felt like the same thing that happened to my art, happened to words. I play the piano. I memorized ten pieces for the guild audition. Six of them still reside in my fingers. Writing likewise is still very easy for me, but the contant need isn’t there. I stopped calling myself a writer because quite simply, I wasn’t writing.
So I am left with the question. Why does the need disappear?
Also, what do I do with the writing skill and the art skill when it is not pushing me? When I am pushing it? Was I only writing for the acknowlegement, the thrill of being published? If so, then I wasn’t a writer but a glory hound. So did I want to be a writer? Yes. It felt like a wound, not being one, not identifying as one.
The answer depends upon what I want to be–do I want to be an artist? A writer? A pianist? If the answer is yes, the rest is an act of the will.
Which brings me to reflecting on the bigger reality of all of us –our calling to be saints.
If God is not pushing us –or pulling us, but merely courting, then the movement is all because we will it. So when we cease to will, God can continue to shower us with graces and opportunities, encouraging us to begin again, but when we cease moving, we drift with the styles and tides of the time.
So at fifty-eight, all activity is an act of the will, coupled with habbit and expectations. So what do I want my will to do –create better habbits?
How?
Yes, I’m back to writing it down and recognizing, all the words won’t be beautiful, but all of them are necessary.
On Thursday, I didn’t make it to the Feast of the Assumption. I knew it was a feast day of obligation. I’d looked at the times and opted to go for the five rather than the nine or the twelve. At four, I received an invitation to go see a musical with friends that evening, but it meant forfeiting mass. So it was an intentional but not planned miss –which later upon reflection, I understood how it has longer consequences.
When we choose our own desires over the goods –like not going to mass or confession, we tell ourselves it does not do any harm. However, that is the great lie of every sin –they all have ripple effects, bruises beyond what we anticipate or recognize. Am I sorry I went with my friends? No. Am I sorry I missed mass? Yes. Do I know what I should have done?
Yes.
Gone to the earlier mass stupid.
Always go to the earlier mass.
This should be the rule in my brain because I know, something will come up.
The trick of life is to recognize when you mess up, admit it, and start again. “Begin again.” as Saint Teresa of Avila would say.
So I started really reflecting on the reality of newness, of beginning again.
Next week, we launch one child to college, another to graduate school, a third to a new college. Begin again.
Next week, I start prepping and planning to teach tenth grade. I’ve never done this. Begin again.
Today, I am doing an inventory of myself, my goals and my hopes. Begin again.
At mass I knew it, God was welcoming me back, as if it didn’t happen. Not because it didn’t happen, but because God was interested in my heart today.
It’s why we must forgive those who hurt us, because hurt always traps us in the past. Forgiveness does not mean it didn’t happen or it didn’t hurt or doesn’t have consequences. It merely means releasing the hold the existence of the hurt has on our present, and on our ability to relate to others. We still have to do the work, but it is a begin again moment.
Each time we feel anger at the hurt, is an opportunity to forgive again. To recognize Christ forgave us from the cross and all sin is a grave injustice against God, and so we must forgive again –and let Christ’s love shine through us like the sun, on the just and the unjust. We also must recognize, and we don’t like this –I don’t like this, we are the unjust far more than we recognize. And still God loves us and invites us to begin again.
So, consider this blog a reminder. If you have goals you’ve let atrophy, dreams you’ve set aside, books you want to read, concerts you want to see, friends you need to connect with, begin again. We do not need to seize the day, we need to live in the present with the people, and love them well. If we’re not able to love them, we need to pray for them, to be surrounded by people who do love them. Praying for those we find difficult to love is an act of love itself. It is also a form of “beginning again,” because we come closer to loving them as God does, each time we do.
So I’m writing again. Almost one thousand words because I just sat down and let myself “begin again,” and found myself surprised by the joy of it for its own sake. The muscles I worried were atrophied, showed they remembered. So now, it’s time to just make it part of my day. Beginning again.
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