A Beautiful Feast, a Brand New Month…

…and one or two leftover spooky thoughts.

I am inordinately fond of our kitchen calendar. I love turning the page on the first day of the month and seeing the new month’s illustration, which is always bright, happy and fills me with hope.

Hope is good. I’ll take a plateful, please.

A new month brings with it new goals, like the one that came to me during this morning’s holy hour. I decided that #comewhatmay, I’m going to write a blog post a day every day, and…

30 days hath November.

Certainly this will require a shifting of habits. I need to not be so uptight about writing the perfect post, and I need to fret less (Goal Number 823: Fret less!) about whether or not the world needs my words. The world can be the judge of that. You can decide if and when you will read.

In the end, that’s not the point. Getting comments is not the point, although sometimes I try to provide the incentive to lure you, as it were, out of the world of lurkdom.

My last post included an incentive at the end, and Kate (Commenter Number 1) was chosen by the Random Generator.  (Five people commented. Her odds were very good.)

Kate, a treat is on its way! Or will be, once I make it.

Meanwhile…and I’m typing stream of consciousness right now because it’s 5:30 p.m. and I need to make supper…because I napped all afternoon…which means I did not write this post after Mass as I planned…

I want to talk about what it means to be a saint.

(It’s not like I have all the answers, certainly, but I am starting to recognize what brings me peace.)

Being a saint means coming to terms with one’s weakness and accepting that you can’t control other people. This is a spooky thought for me! Ultimately, I have to let my children go, and while I have all kinds of hopes and a dozen different dreams for their future, in the end it’s up to them.

Their relationship with Christ is up to them.

I’m typing fast to just put this out there: often your kids will take “the path to the left” (insert obscure reference to Frog & Toad) and will, for example, stop going to Mass once they leave the house. This is (and was) one of my greatest fears, but I know–I KNOW–that the communion of saints is there for me.

Life is too short to screw this up and if we gain the world but lose out on heaven…

We lose it all. We are losers.

It’s not worth it.

Here’s another Spooky Thought: these little saints in my midst are my sanctity. They are my call to patience, especially when they fight, and ESPECIALLY when they dribble juice on the carpet,  and they are my call to trust in God unceasingly.

Even when they strew their candy wrappers all over the room?

Even then.

This morning, fresh from my holy hour and with a heart newly strengthened, I was getting breakfast while my six-year-old watched a show.  Somewhere in between frying the sausage and setting the table, I overheard Phineas tell his sister,  “Candace, you can’t live your life in fear.”

“Of course I can!” she said. “That’s my thing!”

And I thought, it doesn’t have to be.