There is a moment during the liturgy that can help children literally to "see" the mystery of communion. The preparation of the chalice, a gesture that is often completed in a matter of seconds, is a profound prayer of unity that children find particularly solemn and meaningful.
Open door(s)
Lena, Suzanne, Judy, and Sweetpea
In Bulpitt, all the important rules of etiquette were bewilderingly reversed: my cousins laughed when I ate French fries with a fork, and they expressed great suspicion when, after drinking, I failed to leave a Kool-Aid mustache encircling my lips. Despite the fact that my Grandma shared daily life with my other cousins, she evidenced no distance or awkwardness with me or with my sisters when she’d see us again after years apart. She looked at me with exactly the same frank gaze of affectionate familiarity that she used with all my other cousins. She clung to memories of our times together and brought out these stories, to chuckle endlessly over them when we would return to her kitchen table; for example: “Remember that time you were frying eggs, Suzy, and one slipped over the lip of the pan below the burner of my stove?!” Then she mimicked the sound that an escaping egg might make: “Fwwiipppp! How I laughed when I pulled out the drawer to clean and discovered that one perfect egg, all shiny – and – UNBROKEN!” And she’d dissolve into more gales of laughter. Though I had failed to report the egg’s fall to her, she did not view this as a mark against me, or worthy of any reproach.
Parable of the door(s)
“Golden Door,” by Sharon Mollerus
Without hearing a “yes” from someone who is not me, I am unable to give myself permission, even to live. The word “yes” represents an invitation. When we hear the word, “yes,” we also experience radical hospitality. To be met with “yes” means to receive acknowledgment, to be ratified as one who exists. “Yes” tells us that we belong, that we matter, and even that the other perceives us as something good.
Which hill will you die on?
Albert Joseph Moore, “Elijah’s Sacrifice”
…Calvary, then, is also a place of joy, a joy far greater than that of Mount Tabor, where Peter had wanted to build tents for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus so that they could all remain together, basking in the glow of beatitude. I’m certain that Mary never had the impulse to set up camp beside the cross so as to prolong the experience of watching her son die. Yet, she must have experienced a kind of fullness when the finality of death laid bare the certain fact that love will always have the last word…. Read more
wormholes
A wormhole is a shortcut through two distant parts of spacetime: it’s like a tesseract, or a wrinkle in time.
The latest New Yorker features a reprint of a piece by James Baldwin, whose relentlessly limpid truth-telling grabs readers by the bones. If a sorcerer were to offer to slice away everything about my writing that stutters and then stitch part of Baldwin’s voice to my own, I would not hesitate to open my mouth wide to the scalpel and needle…
…My tongue now has two different regions, each a different color, separated by an elegant curving scar where my surgeon stitched that flap from my wrist to the native tongue. My eloquence hasn’t improved as a result of the surgery; but reading Baldwin’s Letter From a Region in My Mind, written in 1962, transports me to [when I was working on my unpublished novel]. Baldwin’s prose opens, in me, the desire to make my words scorch the page, this time.