Wrap Your Mercy

Filed Under: Epiphanies, Inspiration, prayer, Spirituality by Julianne McCullagh — Leave a comment
May 24, 2013

I have a favorite song. The title is Last Six Hours of Summer, but I always refer to it as the mercy song. You might get a better feel for why it is my favorite if you heard the music, but that I don’t know how to do in this space.

   Wrap your mercy around me.  Bury me in light.

   All the days get older and older then die every night.

   Last six hours of summer,  driving ’round the lake,

   Silver lights dance over the water ’til day starts to break

                Follow me back home, let the daylight into our bones

                Starts and it stops, breaks all the locks, there’ll be peace

                when the morning comes

   Take these chains from my body, hang them over your door

   I don’t want to carry the weight  of my sins anymore

   Give me back to the water, lay me down across stone,

   Let the moon call all her waves back to shore,  take my bones

            Follow me back home, let the daylight into our bones

           starts and it stops, breaks all the lock there’ll be peace

           when the morning comes.  Repeat

(© Mike McCullagh)

I’ve been part of a Tuesday Morning Prayer Group since we moved to Texas more than twenty years ago. We were, at the time, a gathering of mothers with young children. Now, twenty years on, our kids are grown and some of us are grandmothers. For all these years, we have been with each other through good times and tough times, through births and deaths and struggles with faith, with life.

Just this week we had an emergency meeting to pray for one of our mothers and her family because they are going through a terribly difficult time. Seven mothers were able to attend, seven mothers praying the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary with the hope and faith of sending hope and faith and relief to this family, who are dear to us.

These small communities of faith are perhaps the best kept secret of the Church. Many times they are the only face of the church that its members can belong to, for a very, very long list of reasons. Dark nights of the soul, family troubles, illness, depression, confusion, spiritual warfare, just to name a few. The struggles of life that many of us might succumb to if we didn’t have a manageable faith group to catch us. There’s the Church and there’s the church, the small gathering of saints and sinners meeting in each others homes, holding each other together in prayer and fellowship.

Wherever two or more are gathered, you know.

 

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Girl, Ferocious

Filed Under: Human Rights, Life, Women by Julianne McCullagh — 1 Comment
April 5, 2013

We have two refrigerator pictures of the grandkid’s visit to Santa. One is the before shot which Katie took while they were waiting in  line, a very long line. Both Jude and Sophia look happy in their Christmas finery, though Sophia is scratching at the stiff fabric of her fancy dress. Fast forward an hour, and three and  a half year old Jude is smiling like the proud and happy little man that he is and his just about to turn two year old sister is squealing and squirming while the man with the big white beard has his broad arm around her belly.

Typical, huh? Yes, it is. (Now we have no pictures of our youngest child with Santa because the few years we attempted it, he screamed from his stroller. He was not going to sit on a giant red-clad bearded man’s lap.)

I had both pictures on the refrigerator until one of my son’s bandmates– thank you, Rob– commented that this was one unhappy little girl who didn’t want to sit on the creepy man’s lap. (I make no judgment on that man in the beard who puts up with all variety of children, some damp and smelly, some thrilled to be in the presence of the king of fairy tales.)

Rob’s comment brought into sharper focus my initial reaction to the picture, that is, we need to respect when little girls and big girls do not want to sit on someone’s lap, or however you would like to extend the metaphor. (Really, I am not leaving out little boys, but this piece is about girls. I have much to say about little boys and the broad ‘taming’ of them so they sit still in school, but that’s a different piece.)

A few weeks ago I attended a GirlsRising/Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org) presentation of the conditions of half the world’s population and their systematic abuse decreed by state, family, tribe and ‘tradition’.  Tradition.  A term used to evoke a nostalgic feeling of the good old days where families were always warm and loving and, within the protective arms of ‘the way we do things’ peoples lives are safe and ordered. Ordered, perhaps, but safe has nothing to do with it.

Girls around the world are discarded, sold to pay family debts, married off as nine year old children to grown men who can use them any way they desire and are bearing children their tiny bodies are not designed to accommodate. Then, when they are broken in childbirth, they are exiled to live out their short lives where their problems present no offense to their families.

Many girls are taught to be docile, pretty, compliant, uncmplianing and illiterate. Then they are blamed if a man cannot control his sexual desires toward her for having these very qualities they are told will provide them with security.

Our little Sophia likes pink ribbons, pink shoes and pink polish on her tiny toenails. She is also fierce, fearless and ferocious. May those traits never be educated out of her.

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Tucked

Filed Under: Epiphanies, gratitude, Reminiscing by Julianne McCullagh — Leave a comment
February 25, 2013

It’s been ten years since my mother died. But no, that’s not right. When I snuggle into the cool sheets on a February night I am again seven years old and the heat rises through the grates under the window in the pink bedroom I share with my sisters. Just a few hours before we billowed the just-out-of-the-dryer sheets, the best part of making the bed, and then tucked blankets and stuffed pillows with pink flowered cases. Everything is new again with this simple bit of housework, or is it homemaking?

The next morning I will try to repeat the techniques of bed making that my mother performed so deftly last night. The day after I will return to my hasty pull up the covers move that is a poor relation to her expertise. Something I still do, I admit.

There are moments that can get lost if they don’t tap you on the shoulder when you’re not looking and return you, giggles and all, to the most innocent of times. If we are not careful, or if those whispers abandon us, we can color the past in the wrong shades of blue and neglect the light that was there, tucked away maybe, but there just at the end of your fingertips.

 

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O, fie upon thee, strumpet!

Filed Under: General by Julianne McCullagh — Leave a comment
January 28, 2013

Charlotte Rains Dixon is a  writer, a writing coach,  and a dispenser of good advice.  She also has a great web site filled with all kinds of goodies for writers, like retreats and seminars and discussions. Today I am a guest blogger on her site Wordstrumpet (www.wordstrumpet.com), so please, pop on over.

Funny thing about that name, wordstrumpet.  I was on the phone with my son, telling him the name of the site and he said, oh, words trumpet, like a trumpet for words. I replied, Ha! I always thought of it as word strumpet,  a strumpet, of some sort, for words.  So, naturally, I had to look it up.  It’s a 14th Century Middle English term for harlot or prostitute.  Shakespeare used it in Othello  against  Desdemona,  victim of cruel deception by that villain Iago.

So, whether it is Trumpet or Strumpet, check out Charlotte Rains Dixon page.

Maybe she will let us in on the secret or maybe she will keep us guessing.

I am no strumpet, but of life as honest as you that thus abuse me.  Othello

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Light that Darkness Cannot Overcome

Filed Under: Epiphanies, Inspiration, Spirituality by Julianne McCullagh — 3 Comments
December 31, 2012

It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness

At Christmas, New Years, winters solstice there is much talk of darkness and light

The days are short and the nights are long and in this time between Christmas and the new year the trees are still lit and the houses and lawns with their angels and reindeer and wreaths of light still shine in the darkness.

We begin again tomorrow. A fresh start. Take it from the top.

And we carry this past year, and all our past years, forward, with memories, with smiles, with tears, with love and forgiveness and the million moments of grace that once in a while we sit still long enough to feel, and be grateful: graceful.

I have written before of the prayers of monks and nuns whose job it is to keep the lights on. They are professional pray-ers. I am grateful for them and their quiet unseen work, raising incense and chanting prayer with their whole being to God, arguing our case to keep the lights on a little longer. And so far God has agreed.  Despite. In Mercy. In love. In the light that darkness cannot overcome.

In my fivety-five years of living, through all the trials and heartache and joys and uncountable blessings, through loved ones deaths and the miracles of birth, I believe.  I believe in the power of prayer, in the graces waiting to be poured out to us for the asking, and yes, of course, even if we don’t have enough faith to ask, the blessings still flow.

How can I say these things in light of war and starvation and fiscal cliffs and the gunning down of kindergartners and their teachers, and all the misery that only scrapes by the daily news programs?

Because there is love. Love in the little acts of kindness, in the big acts of generosity and heroism. In the blankets wrapped around shivering shoulders. In the gentle touch of my mother’s hand on my cheek, so long ago.  In conversations with my father, who now cannot speak, tethered to a respirator and feeding tube. In the squeals of delight when my grandchildren call out “Mamaw!” when they see me. In the cup of coffee my husband sets up for me each morning.

It is these small acts; all the small acts of love and tenderness, of generosity and forbearance, in kind words and hands held. The list is endless, the love is boundless.  In the face of darkness, we light a candle. And then another and another until we are bathed in the light of love, in the midst of pain, in the midst of tragedy.  It is these small acts of love, of prayer, of faith, of struggle that rise like incense to our God who came to live among us and open our hearts to love beyond understanding.

Keep the lights on. 

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