"This life I lead, setting pictures straight, squaring rugs up with the room - it suggests an ultimate symmetry towards which I strive and strain. Yet I doubt that I am any nearer my goal...even granted that this untidy world is ready for any such orderliness."

E.B. White

The paintings on the walls of this café depress me; I’m not exactly sure why. They are ugly for sure – the figures are badly drawn and out of proportion; the colours are banal, like cheap hotels: washed out blues and greens, and that particular shade of mauve that is supposed to inspire a restful, open attitude, but in reality inspires only discontent. Apart from the paintings, the café is ideal: white painted brick, perfectly weathered, black trim, heating pipes exposed along the walls, wood floors, wood tables; it has atmosphere, if only the painting would disappear!
We leave this evening for New York City to visit our dear friend Bill, who is studying there, and who is happy to play tour-guide for the weekend. We’re leaving our apartment in a state of disorder, which weighs on my mind more than it really should. The kitchen is half painted, two walls completely done and two only just begun. The kitchen things are everywhere: in the pottery room, on the floor, on the washer. The dishes are washed and stacked to dry beside paint cans and old brushes, and the laundry is piled desperately high, as the washer is taken over by kitchen things. When it is done, the kitchen will be beautiful. We are painting over the blah, barely blue walls with two different greens – both so refreshingly earthy I want to eat them, and running horizontal between the two a clean white stripe. I was unconvinced by the white stripe when my husband first proposed it, but yesterday, when we peeled off the tape on the first wall and saw the first finished wall, I fell in love. The stripe is perfect: so white, so clean, and so joyful! The whole kitchen, when it is done, will be refreshing as a spring rain.

I have been thinking recently about how difficult it would be to live a fully Catholic life without a good community. We are particularly blessed here to be surrounded by young families, people we love for themselves, who are passionately Catholic. It would be so difficult if our friends did not share our faith, or if they shared only our faith and none of our other passions. Cafés often make me thank God for the blessing of our community. In the cafés of Portland, there is such a mix of people: business men in suits and ties, sipping coffee and talking salaries; the young Urban Liberal in his cords and careless, windblown hair; the vocal woman behind the counter, lecturing her customer on the absurdity of having six children, rights of homosexuals, and the plight of American Indians. I sometimes feel as though I’m traveling incognito – they assume I agree and I am silent; I long for the company of my potter-friend, my old roommate, or my husband, all of whom have the sort of aesthetic that belongs in little cafes and the passionate Catholicism that completes that aesthetic and takes it from empty and haunted to whole.

“ We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.” E.B. White

My life is not hectic. It flows. Friday afternoon I prayed a rosary while walking the warm wood floor in my bare-feet. I love the feel of my skirt swishing and the smooth feel of the beads in my hands; I love the light on the floor and the smell of incense in the walls now; I love the Icons that watch and pray with me as I walk, the Virgin who follows me with her dark eyes, stern St. Nicholas, and the laughing little Christ in the cup. I felt as I prayed that I must be in a novel, everything is so beautiful: the bright walls, the long windows, the sunlight that moves as I walk and the sound of the wind in the trees. Friday evening I walked through downtown Brunswick in the dark autumn-evening air with my husband, smelling the nearby ocean air and peaking into warm, well-lighted little shops.

I am so blessed in my life! I can look into the dining-room and see my own mugs, full of good black tea, and a fresh-baked apple pie. I can spend my days creating beautiful pots and writing poems in my own well-loved little home.

"Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further. " -Soren Kierkegaard

I am spending this morning in a small cafe on commercial street. It's grey and rainy outside with that damp, leafy smell that belongs only to rainy autumn days. A man with two lovely labs is lecturing a small collection of like-minded people on the virtues of Barak Obama. They are not passionate, but they are very certain. I can hear them repeating the party line with a sort of half-hearted enthusiam but with the conviction born of many hours spent listening to NPR news reports and CNN "in depth" reports.

The man with the labradors has announced that we the layman cannot possibly understand the differences between the policies of the two, it is too far above us and his friends agree - they are not Harvard-educated after all, how could they understand; but Obama is so engaging.

There is a definate loss in man when he fails even to attempt faith, and this crisis: economical, political, and social is the result of man's pursuit of some other, lesser passion that has been raised in his mind above faith. But how do we take a mind so tightly wrapped around the little things of this world and remind it that there are made for greater things? What works on a mind to work faith out of it?

Even we who believe, our faith is not the passionate Faith that it ought to be: the faith that shone through the saints, that poured from the words of Augustine, the poverty of Francis, and the blood of countless martyrs throughout history. We do not want is as we should, so many times we forget to love God for Himself alone; because He gives us so much we begin to think of Him more as a giver and less as a lover, who Loves whether He gives or takes away.

"I conclude it from your Word,
from your gestures of the past,
when you, hands cupped, limits set, gave rise
to all that is and was, so warm and wise.
You said "living" loud and "dying" low
and ever repeated: "Be." "
- Rilke

There is something about the autumn that feels so alive - the crisp air and teh smell of dried, dead leaves falling brightly all around. It is a season for walking briskly in textured jackets and clicking boots; a season for soup-making and hot tea; a season for letter writing and for love.

Matka visited this past week and we watched the rain together, pinched pierogis next to the warm stove, and planned much more than we accomplished. It was a good visit. When she left on Friday I set my sights on the Feast of St. Francis and cleaned house. Now the feast is over, I am cleaning again, remembering the joy and and goodness of the day.

St. Francis amazes me. His simple, crazy zeal, his intensity; how could he sustain it? I love him because he loves and because he wanted God with such a desperation that his longing can still be felt accutely, even now when he has become the secular saint of hippies and vegetarians who ignore his orthodoxy as determindly as they ignore Christ's divinity; and Francis shakes his head, loves them and prays that they may be made whole.

The clouds are gathering, I wonder if an autumn storm is coming.

“I recollect that wondrous meeting,
that instant I encountered you,
when like an apparition fleeting,
like beauty’s spirit, past you flew.”
Pushkin

I met my dearest friend when we were both in love with the same man. She was overwhelmingly beautiful and I felt instantly that all was lost. He must love her, and I must love her – the whole world must love her, how could they not? It was a devastating realization and a thrilling one – I had never met anyone like her. I didn’t realize until later that she had felt the same on meeting me.

She is out west now and I am here, on the grey eastern ocean, married and trying to remember that I am a writer. I wish I could write her a life full of answered prayers and living dreams; I wish I could write lovely lives for all those I love: My dear brothers – one running recklessly from God and his whispering call to holiness; the other putting every gift of God away to molder while he waits for God to give him joy; my sister whom I love, and who I wish would listen just once to her heart. My lonely, lovelorn friends in the Midwest and the far West; my lost, soul-starved friends in the East and South – I long to write joy into the lives of everyone I know. How is it that I can be so joyful, despite my as yet unreceived blessings? I wish I could give them that joy.

In adoration today I thought about them and I realized that God, too, longs to write lives replete with blessings. He is held back only because He chose first of all to give them free will and in that freedom lies the opportunity to reject Him, His love, His gifts, the goodness of living for Him. Not all gifts are given when we want them, as I am learning – as we all learn at some time in life. Sometimes the gift given is the gift of learning to love God for Himself alone, not for His gifts and blessings; it is the gift of learning to wait, to hope, and to believe.

“Where the mind is perhaps rather unwilling to be convinced, it will always find something to support its doubts.”
Jane Austen

The other day I read about the group “Call to Action,” which exists to bemoan the lack of priestesses in the Catholic Church. They have gone so far as to perform their own “ordinations.” I read their literature and even watched some priestess-performed “masses” online. They are so old, and so sad! They have the pinched, haunted look of those who are always searching for something to support their mistakes, to make them true. They are a dying breed and they must see it, when they look around and see only old faces, the same faces they’ve been looking at for years, while the old, sunken-eyed academic who is Pope has the love and joyful obedience of millions.

The churches too, that continue to abuse the liturgy with liturgical dance, costumes, skits, and other tackiness are dying. Their congregations are old, the children leave as soon as they’re grown; there is nothing to hold them to the Church, having never really experienced Catholicism they don’t know what they’re leaving behind. It is sad, but its hopeful as well, because the people coming into the Church are coming for Catholicism.

There was a wave of extreme liturgical abuses after Vatican II that - despite all the issues still worrying our Church – seems at last to be on its death-bed. I am not saying that the Church is free of liturgical abuses, we need only assist at mass to hear the inappropriate add-ons: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord and each other;” to see the lack of reverence when priests forget to bow during the creed when we proclaim our belief in the Incarnation. But these are remnants the overall trend is towards the holy, the good, and the reverently celebrated mass.

This optimistic view is somewhat new to me. I look at the attendees at parish, which generally keeps within the churches norms; we are a parish of young families - families that chose the parish for its beauty, its reverence, its orthodox-leanings. They are also families who would welcome a more traditional mass and who are working slowing and respectfully to bring this about. I look at the young priests I know, intelligent, artistic, passionately faithful young men devoted to Christ, to the Blessed Virgin, and the Pope. They are men who were born and raised under John Paul II, the poet-pope who reminded them simply by existing that the priesthood is a passionate pursuit of beauty, a love-affair of eternal proportions.

“..to be an artist meant: not to reckon and count, to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storm of spring without fear lest no summer might come after.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

It is a beautiful, stormy, dreary morning and I for one hope that it will continue throughout the day. Rainy days are so deliciously indulgent! I may spend the afternoon with Tolstoy and a bowl of popcorn or Dostoyevsky and a pot of tea. I have just the teapot for the occasion too, a small Polish, painted teapot, just large enough to refill my cup and not so large that I will feel the need to keep drinking and drinking.

Autumn has finally come! The air is full of the cold, leafy smell of fall; the rain is cold and when I go out in it I feel the need to hang my head over a mug of hot chai to drive away the chills. But it is only early September, I doubt the weather will last. I fully expect to experience a burst of Indian Summer before the end of the season.

There is Adoration today at St. Joseph’s; I love peaking in for a brief visit. He sits in gold and shines out at me while I can only be silently overwhelmed by His magnificence. I always leave Him wondering why is it I do so little for Him, why does life have me so distracted?