#also in regards to these two you have seen me drawing deacon a lot recently and i only drew armya once so far

[moeblob]

Windy at my house + power flickering = no comm work = quick laptop doodle

[stevedonnellyfaith-blog]

What Remains Hidden

                        I spent the least enjoyable portion of my week in a termination interview for an employee, with whom I had worked for a number of years.  The man had run afoul of our 10-point no fault attendance policy.  The employee, who is a friend, had scored an impressive array of points in all sorts of amazing circumstances within a relatively short period of time.  He was like the Michael Jordan of attendance infractions – raining in the points in one and two point weekly episodes.  His stories ranged from the incredible to the improbable, but as usual he and his union representative focused in on the couple of points that might be in doubt so that the man could remain an employee of our company.

I encouraged both of them to pursue their grievance, because I respected the excellent work that the employee had done for us previous to his most recent run of total unreliability, poor workmanship and serial distraction.  My friend, an ex-con and recovering addict, had been a great talisman for human potential and second chances until his struggles in the last eight months.  

But really, I explained to them both, gaining my friend an extra couple of weeks of employment really seemed like a lot of bother and paperwork prior to his inevitable final flameout with the next one or two point incident.  I posited that the employee needed to fix whatever the root cause was that was making him the second most prolific scorer of attendance points in the history of our facility.  My friend’s visage flickered brighter momentarily and he blurted out, “You mean I should do something to resolve all this car trouble I’ve been having.”  

“No,” I replied, “that is probably not what you need to take care of.”  What was hidden remained concealed; my intervention failed.  We finished up the required paperwork and the transacted our final goodbyes.  After he left, I prayed to Pam to intercede for my friend at whatever level she has access. In the short term, his future looks pretty bleak.

My bereavement meeting with widows and widowers in the Hall at 6PM of Thursday was a much brighter chapter of my week.  The meeting doesn’t take long, but it is a good chance to review the ups and downs of my life with some other people who are walking similar paths.  This week we discussed how to get through the holidays, a uniquely challenging season for people in our circumstance.

In our discussion of family vendettas that sometimes occur at Thanksgiving, it struck me that hidden things can contribute to family friction as well.  Like rocks submerged in navigable waters, underlying and unspoken issues can ruin family harmony and destroy relationships.  One person described a death of a father that occurred two days before a family gathering several years ago.  A couple of siblings immediately engaged in an argument that has separated them for the several years since.  Was the father previously acting in a way that prevented the full exercise of an otherwise underlying bitterness in the family?  Were the siblings, like my daughter Abby and I did after Pam’s death, choosing to argue over some unimportant minutia as a distraction from their overwhelming grief.  The road to reconciliation is different depending on the underlying true cause of the disagreement, a cause that must be brought to light for resolution.

Unspoken issues and unconscious motivations are ubiquitous to the human condition.  I met two friends for lunch the other day, and in our discussion it became clear that both men were being shaped by the Holy Spirit in particular ways without an apparent root cause.  Through our conversation over several hours, more and more puzzle pieces were added to their stories so that a vague idea of what God was trying to accomplish became more discernable.  

The first man works for law enforcement in one of the most violent neighborhoods of our local area, yet he is walking ever closer to the Lord in his daily life.  While waiting for our other friend to arrive, he and I discussed a recent shooting that he had witnessed and how our reaction to the tragedy differed so greatly from the laughing perspective of a person who had uploaded video of the same incident onto YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvEKq5CeGJo&sns=em). (Violent content)  

My friend had been driven to pray the Hail Mary aloud during the ordeal.  By contrast, for the person filming the car-jacker dying in a hail of bullets, the incident was pure entertainment.  I have struggled with the purpose of why the Holy Spirit moved my friend to his quiet act of piety for several weeks, but in the course of our conversation it became apparent to me that my friend’s outlook on his whole career had been altered by being inspired to make a few simple prayers.  He has spent the ensuing time considering the plethora of poor corpses that he seen over the years and has begun to pray for their many souls.  Before the incident my friend had protected his sanity at work with a Kevlar vest of emotional detachment.  Now the policeman was allowing the plight of perpetrators and victims alike to touch him in a very human way. I expect that the Holy Spirit is preparing him for additional service to the community in a new role.  Instead of merely maintaining the simple peace of the community; his future will involve leading others to the profound peace of Christ.

My other friend arrived later and described the gravity like pull he feels in his life towards devotion to the Virgin Mary.  Although, he was Catholic as a young child, his family made a few years long foray into the Protestant faith.  He returned only in recent years carrying much of the same anti-Marian baggage that I also lugged around for thirty or so years.  Lately, my friend has been feeling irresistible urges to pray to Mary for a very specific thing that have been subsequently granted in dramatic fashion. He has also received a free copy of Tim Staples’ new book, Behold Your Mother, under unusual circumstances. Through seeming coincidence, he was likewise put into a situation regarding the visit of the Fatima statue to IHM that removed his visceral dread of praying to Mary and Jesus through painted or sculpted representations of them.  

None of these dominos that appeared to be buffeting my friend towards a vocation in the Blue Army made sense to me. Why was my friend such a high value target for conversion to devotion to Our Lady?  Finally, he confided in us that as a young child he had been awed by a beautiful Christmas card of Mary holding Jesus.  He subsequently, cut Mary out, pasted her up above his bed and prayed to Her nightly. By appearances Mary is not making a new claim to a convert; she is exercising a latent consecration that has lain dormant for decades.  My friend has always had an underlying Marian devotion and he is going through a process of rediscovering the childlike faith that he had once possessed - a faith of simplicity that is the sweetest oblation to Our Lord.

In my case, forever the observer, my subterranean tensions remained hidden at our lunch.  I spent the weekend pondering the lingering questions about my own vocation.  In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis draws a simile between being a widower and having a leg amputated.  I guess I have reached the emotional state he described as functional hobbling.  I now know that I can effectively hop through my work day – no matter how full of dysfunction.  What remains uncertain is whether I can stumble along effectively as I resume my duties as a parent of a nine-year old girl or whether I can go a step further and emotionally juggle answering God’s call to seek ordination as a deacon.  To be effective in either role, there seems to be a necessity for a prerequisite joyfulness and hope that I seem to be lacking.  Still my current inclination is to step over the gunwales and into the waves and try to walk towards Jesus in hopes that I find something in His eyes to replace my inner storm with serenity.

Finally, I had another experience with hidden issues over the weekend.  Scrolling through people’s personal errata on Facebook, I happened across a video link that promised hope for divorced people.  Because I am so emotion starved, the video, called Rejoice,  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxLwqGsRkQ) seemed to exercise a gravitational pull at my heartstrings.  The attraction disconcerted me as the scourge of divorce is as irrelevant to my current personal situation as is a couples nights out.  I felt compelled to watch the film even to the point of ignoring the timewasting Facebook game that has obsessed me for a week.  I even rebooted when it froze and accessed it through several different links until I was able to watch the whole thing.  In the end, I was reduced to strange tears as the video left me with an impression of hopefulness for the hero and heroine.  This romantic rock submerged in my sub-conscious surprises me whenever I run afoul of it, but it used to make Pam smile whenever she could conn me into watching the Notebook or something similar.  I will have to be more careful in my social media scrolling in the future.