Category: Inspiration


Wrap Your Mercy

Filed Under: Epiphanies, Inspiration, prayer, Spirituality by Julianne McCullagh — 1 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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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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Baptism

Filed Under: Epiphanies, General, Inspiration, prayer by Julianne McCullagh — Comments Off
September 28, 2012

When I taught Baptism prep classes to parents and godparents way back when, part of my job was to relate the physical elements of the sacraments to the spiritual gifts. God works through the physical as a means of bestowing grace.  I find this a comfort, a reassurance, a reminder of God in the everyday objects such as water, wine, oil and touch as transmitters of a grace beyond our comprehension.

Here’s a little excerpt from my forthcoming novel:

“How we doin?

“Behind by four. But there’s time. Ohh!! Make that six.”

Jimmy’s face is pointed toward the television. No reaction to the shot. He holds the coke can in his hand. He’s not watching the game. He can’t. They’re way beyond basketball games in search of common ground. His right hand is getting jittery; the left is tucked under his thigh.

“Need a smoke.”

Jimmy goes through the kitchen to smoke on the back porch. First stop is the refrigerator to grab a beer. The long cold drink rushes down his throat, wave after wonderful wave. It hits his belly in a splash, immediately releasing its magic. There’s his old friend. Now he can relax, get his hands steady. He tosses the bottle cap toward the metal can. It pings and misses. He leaves it in the mud.

It’s dark. He turns right, to the aurora of street lamps along Forest Park Drive, to the diluted light pushing its way through the trees that have arbored this area for generations. Wind whips up under his shirt and slaps his back. Jimmy steps out from the awning. A smoldering cigarette in one hand, an empty beer bottle in the other, he raises his arms over his head breathing in the cold, clear, wet dirt smell. His upturned face receives the sharp needles of rain. A baptism.

The wind and rain pick up. A crackle of light breaks blue deep into Forest Park. Thunder reverberates his thin frame, tolling out the bell of him. Somewhere in there, somewhere in here, I still am. I still am.   

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Better Angels of Our Nature

Filed Under: Inspiration, Spirituality by Julianne McCullagh — Leave a comment
September 3, 2012

The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus… when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.  From Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address

Good ole Abe Lincoln with his quotable words. One set of words that often runs through my mind is from the last paragraph of his first inaugural address: “the better angels of our nature”.

The progression went something like this–I was praying for people, and naturally, on my list were folks who have died, such as ancestors, friends, family, others I have never met in this life. And that led to thinking about who we are once we have passed from this world to the next (‘cause, well, I don’t know about you, but my life experiences and energy attest to the conclusion that life goes on in some form after we have left this flesh behind).

Do we lose all the nonsense when we die and become our better selves? Do these ‘lesser angels’, our baser inclinations to sin versus our better invitations to holiness, joy and love, get sloughed off in the transition between this world and the next?

Then I wondered, hoped, that once we pass on to the next life, in some process I can barely grasp at, like vapors of a dream, I think we will become our better selves. Ourselves, yes, but better. Shinier, more true, unencumbered by faults and sin. Unencumbered by jealousy and resentment and anger, lust and greed. All the big and little faults that separate us from a more perfect life.

And, “mystic chords of memory” in that same speech. Ah, what a beautiful confluence of words. How brilliant was this American saint, this secular holy man of history? Isn’t it memory and imagination that builds us, feeds us, gives us strength to draw on and reminders of what to avoid? Memory girds us when we feel bereft of comfort; it brings to the foreground those moments when we once felt, whether fleetingly touched by the divine or filled with light in every cell of our being. Thus armed, we can endure, we can hope, we can pray.

And, become, the better angels of our selves.

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To Bear Witness

Filed Under: Epiphanies, General, Inspiration by Julianne McCullagh — 1 Comment
August 8, 2012

This post first appeared on Melissa Embry’s blog: nojobforsissies.blogspot.com on July 30

 

If you are at a writer’s conference and the first speaker of the weekend shares with you his ‘moment of grace’ where he received his commission in life, you should sit a little straighter, lean forward and tune up your hearing.

Luis Alberto Urrea went on a mission trip as a young man; he came back a writer.

What was this ‘moment of grace’, as he called it? He and his pastor were working among the most forgotten, the world’s cast-offs who lived and died in an actual garbage dump. Young Luis, notebook in hand, was writing his observations, thoughts, scenes, scribbling words on paper that he would turn into story. A resident of the dump asked what he was doing. Writing. About this place? This dump. About me? Yes, about this place and about you. “Tell someone I was here.”

Now, Mr. Urrea did not say that the sky opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him. But novice writer Luis knew that this moment, standing in a cathedral of trash, was his commission, his anointing, his sending forth. He was tuned in to the energy of the moment; he was paying attention. That is what we, as writers, are asked to do. Pay attention, and as my friend, the writer Bill Marvel, likes to say, bear witness.

We are to bear witness to history in its small moments and its large moments. Bear witness to people, to changes in the atmosphere, to changes in attitude. Pay attention to the new and to the ancient that threads through the now. Be an instrument of history, a commentator, a sense maker, a question raiser.

Writers sift through the materials of life and choose a bit of this to expand on, a bit of that to explore. We churn and tumble and wrestle with the stuff of life long after they have moved into silent history and then we snatch them back and give them a place on the page.

“Tell them I was here”’ is our common plea.

It is also our job.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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