Maryology 101

When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. - The Beatles

As some of you may know, it is a big week for Our Blessed Mother Mary. On Monday was the Feast of The Immaculate Conception and on Friday is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Especially pertaining to Monday's feast, the Immaculate Conception is a Holy Day of obligation, the feast day for our nation's consecration to Her Immaculate Conception, and my parish's feast day as well.

The liturgical band that my roommates and friends are part of had extra practices for the beautiful Marian songs and I was all excited to celebrate such an important feast day with my new parish named after Her. Unfortunately I do not know if it is because it was on a Monday and people had to work or because people didn't know about it, but only about 25-30 people showed up for the noon and evening Masses combined. To bring about a deeper devotion and awareness of Our Lady, I'm doing a Youth Group night on Sunday on Mary, discussing dogmas, feast days, apparitions, and prayers to Her.

It made me meditate on my own devotion to Her and to God. Though I work at the church all day and do other ministries at night, my spiritual practices have changed. I've been overwhelmed in so many ways being here and I can't seem to find a way out of that state. Where is the quietness of my soul that used to find itself able to hear Them? I've gotten myself to be so busy and my time occupied with so many things and so many new ideas about life that I have been unable to digest them, and at times unable to make clear and rational decisions.

And then something miraculous in its simplicity happened as I was writing this blog entry. I'm not sure where I was going with this post, but it has defiantly taken a turn...

There is an elderly man who comes into the church when he is in town named Peter. He only knows a few sentences worth of English and I only know a few words of Yup'ik, so our conversations are between our eyes, smiles, and warmth towards one another. He is such a gentle soul and so tender with Our Lord. When he prays, he either sings or plays his harmonica. Witnessing him makes me feel gentler.

Then today he sat on the bench that is in our small narthex outside of my office. He started singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" in Yup'ik. For whatever reason I left my office, grabbed a hymnal, and started singing the same song in Latin. Then he started singing "Silent Night" and I sang it with him in Spanish. We didn't know what the other person was saying or singing, but we understood what each other meant through the song and how we sung it. He looked at me with his good eye, for the other is permanently closed, and as we both started to slightly tear up, we started to laugh. I said, "Quyana", which means "thank you". Then he got up, smiled, and left.

There was so much about that moment: the universality of the Church, the real language of God which is Love, etc. which were all present. But what struck me the most while we were singing was, when I looked up at the icon of Our Lady across from where we were sitting, I felt Her there. Not just like an unseen person standing in the room, but Her essence immersing itself in every space. Sitting next to Peter I thought, "brother". I felt brotherhood. For we were singing in front of Our Mother. She is always there, in front of us and in front of the cross. And now I think then, where am I?

The Pieta

Blessed was the night that Purity cried,
For it was the day that my Savior died.

Clouds rolling over, covering up the sun,
Blood weeping down His face,
With sorrow nowhere to run.

Counting down the minutes when Trust is here to stay,
She fell to her knees,
And watched Life fade away.

Her tears line His footsteps, shadowing over the past.
The immaculate grief of a mother,
Pierced through Her at last.

Taking Him in Her arms, She felt the breaking in Her chest,
Knowing it had only just begun,
The never-ending test.

Wrapping Him up with memories, She placed Him in the tomb,
As She does with all Her children,
To save them from their doom.

So always I call out to Her, begging for graces upon the morrow,
Because She is more than the Mother,

She is the Night of Sorrow.

(I wrote this poem for Her June 2007)

Driver's Ed 102

Greetings my avid and dedicated readers! My sincerest apologies for the long hiatus. An extremely busy schedule, waves of an unpleasant disposition, many failed attempts at uploading my Moose Movie (which did upload on facebook), and being overwhelmed by the many things I've been wanting to write has caused this awful pause. Hopefully that won't happen again. So I figured today I'd get back into the swing of things with a little jingle for you.

As many of you may know, the Jesuit Volunteers do not own a vehicle. However, because I work at the Church I drive Fr. Chuck's Church truck to do the ministerial errands and so forth. I'd like to make something clear. I hate this automobile. I hate it with a fiery un-comical passion. The souls of heaven are needed to watch over me every time I set foot in it because I could very well leave this world in that red beat-up Ford with no working 4 wheel drive.

But today, I've decided to take those proverbial lemons and make lemonade by making fun of the truck I disdain so much. For those of you not living in Bethel, the Birthday Line mentioned in the song is the most famous radio show on Bethel's single radio station and the PO is the abbreviation for Post Office, which I have to go to everyday...which also has a parking lot made of a sheet of ice. Please sing my little jingle along to the tune of "Jingle Bells" and enjoy reading my driving experience.

"Evil Truck"

Skidding on the ice

In a 1990's truck

O'er the tundra we go

Screaming all the way.

Fan belt breaks and snaps.

I feel I'm going to die.

What fun it is to laugh and sing

With the Birthday Line tonight!

Oh, Evil Truck, Evil Truck

You're evil everyday.

Oh what fun it'll be to drive

Without you in PA.

Driving to the PO

The anger brews inside.

I can't control the wheel.

St. Chris be by my side!

I get stuck in a ditch.

Broken key is just my luck.

It makes me want to yell a word

That rhymes with Father Chuck!

Oh! Evil Truck, Evil Truck
You're evil everyday.
Oh what fun it'll be to drive
Without you in PA.

Hey! Evil Truck, Evil Truck

You're evil everyday.

Oh what fun it'll be to drive

Without you in PA.

Peg Tooooomb!

Shout out!

Driver's Ed.

Let's waste time

Chasing cars

Around our heads.

- Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol

As some of you might know, Bethel is not accessible by road from the outside. It makes me think of Pleasantville sometimes when Reese Witherspoon's character asks, "Outside of Pleasantville? Like, what's at the end of Main Street?" and her teacher replies, "Mary Sue. You should know the answer to that! The end of Main Street is just the beginning again". Most of the roads within the town are winding bumpy silt roads that weave you around the residential areas. There are two "stoplights" (and by stoplight I mean yellow blinking lights) on the one "highway" (and by highway I mean a paved single lane road where going 40mph feels like you're Marty McFly driving the Delorean it's so fast). With this in mind, this is one of the reasons why people don't normally lock their cars. Because if someone stole it, seriously where are you going to go? Despite this, we had heard that recently there was a "high speed" car chase around town that only ended with one of the guys running out of gas or something. I would love to know what brought such an endeavor on and how they thought it was going to end.

When I have access to Fr. Chuck's church truck when he's gone I usually drive some of my roommates to work in the morning. Now many of you from home that have seen me drive can sympathize with Michael's comment to me this morning where he said as I was waiting to turn back onto the highway, "You know, this is the scariest part of my day". See the problem is, is that I can't always tell how far away a car is or judge how fast it's going. So I have this constant interior monologue of, "Oh here comes a car... should I go... now? No it's too close... crap no it wasn't I should have gone... Should I now? Uhhh no too close too close. Oh it's clear... crap, no it's not, but I'm in the middle of the road anyway... go go go!!!" After Michael had said this my response was, "well I've never actually killed anyone so that's good". Oh if the DMV only knew.

All of this discussion about driving got me thinking about that proverbial driver's wheel in my life. Then lyrics from a favorite Incubus song draw my mind's attention: Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear/And I can't help but ask myself how much I let the fear/Take the wheel and steer. Do I drive my life the way I drive a car, where I'm either too cautious or too head on? Do I like knowing the rules and guidelines while simultaneously not being able to see when to use them? Or am I like those men chasing each other around a town that has no exit? Why is there no road map in life or to God's Divine Will? Or is there and we are too distracted to notice?

I keep thinking about that car chase. Maybe they just felt stuck, confined by the bordering tundra. Perhaps it was representative of their caged emotion, unable to get away completely yet unable to control its movement within you. That stirring seething fiery emotion that chases reason around inside of you until it just can't anymore or it explodes. Though it probably sound idiotic to say, but I admire those car chasers. Sometimes I want to just be able to through reason out the window and let it disperse as it crashes on the hot pavement. Allow emotion, spontaneity, and lunacy to drive me, rather than me driving them away as I sometimes do. I'd also love to schedule an appointed "loose my mind" time, perhaps on a bi-weekly basis...just kidding.

Maybe what I'm really getting at in this reflection is to simply say, "wake up!". Do what you need to do to realize the potential of each day, to be able to quiet our souls enough to hear God say "this way" or "that way", to remember that we're alive (hopefully without doing harm to ourselves or to others that is). We get so caught up in everything. I've even got caught up writing this post because I've been trying to multitask. Carpe diem. Seize the day and make it live.

If I lay here

If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old

Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars

Around our heads

Lunch Break

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me. - Voces by Antonio Porchia

Last week or so, a very special and personal event happened that I will remember and cherish for forever. It was my roommate Erin's turn to make dinner. And she made it very well. The dish she made was superb. It was something of a culinary fantasy that reminds you that you have a palette, and a fine one at that. This dish that I had never had before that gave me such joy was grilled cheese. Or as Lemony Snicket's Count Olaf might say, it's the Swedish term for cheese that is grilled. I'm not entirely certain as to why I had never given grilled cheese a try before, but I am not going back to such a life of deprivation. So to Erin, I am eternally grateful.

In any case, a discussion about the price of bread and cheese ensued because of how expensive it is up here, which then got us talking about how much we work for the amount of pay we receive and the perspective that we should keep that we are volunteering. But then an unsettling realization began to cloud over me as I pondered this word that I had written about in my first reflection: volunteer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a volunteer is defined as, "a person who freely offers to do something" and "a person who works for an organization without being paid". Especially in terms of the second definition, what am I doing here? Or even still to echo Hamlet's resounding question in its agelessness, "to be or not to be" a volunteer... to be or not to be who I thought I was going to be when I signed up for this program.

Why is my work at the Church considered my "position" rather than my job? I get paid to do it, though not much. Yet, what is much? According to Globalissues.org, half of the world accounting for three billion people lives on less than $2 a day; UNICEF reported that 26,500-30,000 children die each day due to poverty; less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen; 20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the world’s goods; and the list goes on and on.

We hear these facts and figures time and time again. We take mission trips, immersion trips, and study the problems and solutions behind modern Gothic architecture walls and 1 1/2 inched grass that you can't walk on. But where is this poverty? Where is this concept that we want to volunteer for, however you define volunteering? Yes it is in those empty bellies, in the facts, in those idealistic papers we write, on the news, out your front door, and maybe even in your home. But I ask you where should this poverty be? In your heart. A poverty so rich in humanness, in reality, that it holds and embraces in place our restless souls just looking for the answer to that question, "to be or not to be" or "why am I here". It calms us in the depths of our heart's floundering to breathe in that breath of clarity so we look at that answer of charity. It is the poverty that is and it is the charity that does.

It is true what they say that money cannot solve poverty, that would be missing the point. I want poverty to be in my heart, and not just around me or in my thoughts. How do I find that poverty that is always hungry to give, always thirsty for truth, and always yearning for the good? Poverty that is a vow to our interconnectedness, to dependency on charity that is to be given and charity that is to be received. Can I find it by working with my education from the top down through governmental organizations or from the bottom up? Can I still have it in my heart if I make a lot of money, but donate some of it and invest in my future children's education? Must I teach them this idea of poverty through monetary poverty additionally and always? It's one thing for me, but would it be another if I ever have a family? ... I digress.

How we are called to live this out I don't know. What I do know, is that Christ told us, "blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God" (Mt 5:3). And in that sense poverty is not just a way of living, but a way of being.

Is your heart complete? What do you lack?

Orientation Pics

Music Theory

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life - Berthold Auerbach.

After hearing that there are seven of us who had never met each other living in the same house in a city we had never been to, many of my friends said, "oh my gosh! You guys are like The Real World: Bethel, AK!". I must admit that there are seven strong and diverse (in a good way) personalities living in the house. And even though we've only been in Alaska for about a week and a half, we have already managed to cling to a "house song". If we did make Real World: Bethel, then our theme song would undoubtedly be "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show. Other than Michael who introduced us to the song, none of us had really heard this song before, and now we listen to it all the time, everyday, and sometimes at every meal. In that regard, it reminds me of saying grace, a unifying verse that we let run through us to arrive at out own understanding.

When I was thinking today about this first week of being here finally with our jobs, I couldn't help but to hear that folk melody ride me lazily along my memory. Specifically, I've been thinking about Tuesday the 19th which was Fran's 22nd birthday. She's adventurous, vivacious, and just so full of life. Thus keeping in character, she asked us if we would all jump in the cold Kuskokwim River with her to celebrate. I think that even if we weren't daring before, we all will be when we leave here because it's just the way life is. So of course, we all say yes and head out to the river.

Now I do have to record here that on the way to the river through the tundra, things got a little messy. I don't know how many of you have ever been on tundra before, but it's like this spongy, mossy, ground that reminds us of Mother Nature's moon bounce. Anyways, if it gets wet, it can be very deceiving as to how deep it actually is. Well we were walking on the boardwalk until we got to a part of it that was flooded. Why I thought it was a good idea to walk off the boardwalk so that my feet wouldn't get wet (on my way to jump in a river mind you), I'm not really sure. But when I stepped off of that written wet road, I plunged a good three feet deep in a mud hole that had looked like a shallow puddle. My foot got tangled in a root and bing, bam, boom I fell backwards into more sludge and mud. All onomatopoeia aside, it was pretty funny. Then poor Jon in his valiant attempt to help pull me out (because I kept sinking) lost, found, and broke his shoe... or should I say Maura's shoe... and had to walk to the river and back partially barefoot.

In any case, we make it to the infamous Kuskokwim River where we have all caught, beheaded, gutted, filleted, and eaten fish from. (I really need to put up pictures up of that, trust me.) Michael, who now has a fitting Native name that essentially means "big daddy", was the first to jump into water. As I saw how cold and out of breath he was when he swam up, I began to feel a little more hesitant. But the desire to change grabbed and yanked me off the ledge into that sustaining river. Submerged in the biting water of the far north, I pushed off the mired bottom to regain sight of the scenery of my new tundra life. Then as Maura swam with me to shore, I couldn't help but to think about how much farther away that shore really was first of all, and how different I felt. For fear of stating the obvious cliche of our first "event" all together and sounding too banal, I held this realization in my unrestrained beating heart, tired from the shock and swim.

Even now, I have that grace-filled hymn Wagon Wheel playing as I write about our Alaskan baptism. Within this recollection of the physical and spiritual cleansing, its harmony continues to wash away the remaining misconceptions and inhibitions that I came here with. I'm surprised at myself, though, that it will need to be a daily cleansing because it is more difficult (though necessary) to start fresh within my own self than I thought. People always say that it is a weakness to run away from something; yet when you're running toward something greater, it sheds a new light on that direction. I don't think it's possible to have nothing left behind, and we all are coming from parts or whole pieces of a past that we must run from. But as long as we stay focused on what or whom we're running to, I think we might just make it there. And as the song goes...

Oh, the North country winters keep a gettin' me now

Lost my money playin' poker so I had to up and leave

But I ain't a turnin' back

To livin' that old life no more

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel

Rock me mama anyway you feel

Hey mama rock me

Rock me mama like the wind and the rain

Rock me mama like a south-bound train

Hey mama rock me

Social Stratification 101

Sorry about the delay in posting anything or being in contact with you all. Now that I have started work, which is complete with my own office and computer, communication will be much easier.

Anyways, I wanted to reflect here firstly on my orientation, or rather how I got to orientation and then got to my placement here in Bethel. Unbeknownst to me, I was holding a first class ticket to my flight to Portland, OR. We had gone to AAA to buy it and since the agent never asked us what class ticket we wanted, I had assumed she would have given me an economy class (especially for the price that we got it for). Now, everyone has probably heard about how the airlines are charging for everything, particularly for extra baggage and extra weight for baggage. Knowing this my parents gave me money to accommodate. However when I was checking my bags and getting out this money, the woman politely said, "You don't have to pay for anything, miss, because you hold a first class ticket. We'll take care of everything, just go over to your gate when you're ready. Do you want to sign up for our frequent flyers program?" Relieved though confused, I was like, "Hey! Works for me!".

When it came time to board the plane I got to go on first, despite the fact that there was an extensive line already formed and that I was sitting comfortably in my seat far out of line. I walked down the long pathway, breathed in that recycled airplane air, and set my first foot into what I like to call the magical mystical world of first class. The seats were only two to a row, leather, padded, and oh so comfortable. I had all of the leg space in the world, not to mention the window seat and a very amiable gentleman to sit next to. Life was good, even at 6am with practically no sleep. Deep down I knew that this was all too ironic, but I spent most of the flight talking to the man next to me and didn't elaborate this thought at the time.

Then when I was waiting to board my next flight from Atlanta to Portland, I got to talking to a very friendly and chatty woman also going to Portland who also came from Pittsburgh. After I had told her where I came from with her response being, "Oh I didn't see you on the plane", I didn't really know what to say. One of my initial thoughts while on the flight to Atlanta, half kidding and half serious, was why more people don't do this. And then as I was looking at this woman next to me I realized that not everyone can do this. And I do not just mean, not everyone can afford it. I mean that I also noticed how small the first class cabin was. There really are only so many seats, and somehow I had one of them. Me, a Jesuit Volunteer, a person signing up to live simply and in solidarity (on her way to orientation mind you), was flying with the elite.

Then somewhere in between this woman telling me about her grandchildren and birthday parties, I began to feel ashamed. It was a feeling that I have not had much time with in the past, and it is a feeling that I predict I will see more of in the near future. Making it all more intensified, the flight attendant called the first class passengers. The woman hearing the announcement, which interrupted her story, said with a comical sneer, "Oh don't worry about that. That's just the first class being called". Even though I've heard that we have over 50 muscles in the human face, I couldn't get any of them to move upwards into a smile because I knew that her sarcasm for the first class now included me. Inside of myself I was shouting, "I didn't know it was first class! I'm never in first class! I didn't even know where it was on the plane! Don't judge me!". But outwardly I simply thanked her for speaking with me, wished her luck, and got up to go back to that new world I was initially so fond of.

What ate me up inside was that though I wanted to allow her or anyone else board before me, I couldn't. I mean I could have waited in line with the rest of the passengers, but what would that do in the end? What about the family with three young kids and a stroller struggling to hold everything and everyone together in that frozen line? Anywhere else I could have held the door for them or let them go first, but here I felt powerless because of a ticket that was paid for with money that our society deems so powerful.

When I boarded the plane this time, it looked quite different. I remember just staring at the divider between the two classes and thinking, "How did I get here?" and further, "How did I feel when I flew on the other side?" Feeling ashamed of my privilege never occurred to me any time that I flew. There are some privileges that we have that we need to acknowledge and be truly grateful for and use them for the greater good to the best of our abilities. And I'm not saying that I'm not thankful for my parents buying this ticket for me, but I couldn't help but to think about how incentive of the poor I can be riding in any class.

For me, I guess it had been one thing to go volunteer at a soup kitchen or make blankets or fast and apparently an undiscovered mentality for buying material things (even sparingly) to be quite another. What is enough? Is it enough to feel good about choosing to go to or work with a lower class, to know that you're choosing less? What surreptitious arrogance can be found in such a thing if we're not careful, feeling proud of the act of humbling or even being ok with sacrificing when it was convenient for me. Before that flight to Portland I may have seen it as choosing less, but now I see it as choosing more. Choosing to get more out of life. And yet, there lies the other major issue I am having: choice. How should I view this choice that I have made to volunteer? I think all of this far to long reflection can be summed up in the Aborigine proverb that my roommate Erin reminded me of:

"If you've come to help me you're wasting your time. But if you've come because you believe your liberation is somehow bound up in mine, stay and let us walk together."

Prereq Summer Session

Hello to all! My name is Elyse and I am going to be spending this August 2008 to August 2009 in the wetland/tundra city of Bethel, Alaska doing the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I will be the youth minister, volunteer coordinator, parish assistant administrator, juvenile delinquent minister, and hopefully anything else that the Immaculate Conception parish needs that I can do. I cannot describe how excited I am to not only start my position there, but also to see what it is like living in this kind of environment and living this kind of lifestyle. One of the core principles of the JVC is to live simply, which will be a challenge for me I'm sure.

I did set up this blog so that I could stay in contact with people from the lower 48 and to talk about what the volunteers and I are doing up here, but I also created it so that YOU could let me know what you are doing. So please feel free to posts comments as often as you can. If they're in response to something that I've written then that's great, but please also post anything new going on with you too! :) Staying in contact with people is very important to me, so please hold me to that!

As of right now I have yet to arrive in Bethel or for my orientation with the JVC in Portland, Oregon which starts Monday the 4th of August. I'm busy packing, getting last minute gear and necessities, and most importantly I'm trying to fit in seeing as many friends and family that I can before I leave. And basically I wanted to get this blog up and running before I left, so here it is! Please keep my community and me in your prayers and rest assured that you'll be in mine. :)

Viva Alaska!



I consecrate this blog to Our Blessed Lady of the Immaculate Conception.