"I See The Moon"

On particularly beautiful moonlit nights, when in good company and feeling exuberant, I often start singing a song called “I See The Moon.” Its childlike melody and sweet lyrics are irresistible, and  a surprising number of people have asked me to teach it to them after  embarrassing myself by belting it out in public.

                                                                                                                                                                                    

I see the moon

And the moon sees me

And the moon sees somebody I want to see

So God bless the moon

And God bless me

And God bless the somebody I want to see

As a little girl, watching the moon and watching the moon “follow” me shaped my understanding of the omniscient God. It was a visible example of how God could see everyone at once, yet focus on each individual. The moon “followed” me, but it also “followed” my mother. Knowing this did not diminish by one iota the amount of love I felt when the moon trailed my four year old head around the yard, somehow finding me everywhere…finding me again a few nights later, ready to resume our game of hide-and-seek.

This continuous pursuit was, and is, deeply comforting. Humans need continuity. In a transient and disorienting culture, points of contact stabilize us. That the moon will be visible to us, its cycle permitting, whether we move from Boston to Botswana is a wonderful gift. If we are far from all that is familiar, we can look at the moon, and receive a sense of place and proportion on this earth. It is a beacon that reminds us that we are always home.

It is difficult to imagine a world where anything else could be the case: an empty sky, night after night, lacking an object that every soul on the planet could point to in recognition. How isolated would we feel across countries and cultures if we did not have the moon in common,  uniting us with its light and beauty? How dark and hopeless would the world at night be, if all it ever contained was unchanging blackness? 

Of course, the moon is not ever-visible in the sky. Its phases change, sometimes we see only a part of it, and sometimes nothing at all.  However, the glorious truth of the moon, as my four year old self found with delight, is that it always returns. We know that we will see its visage again.  Moreover, its very changefulness manages to surprise us with new loveliness, and fill us with a wonder that would not be possible if it always came to us in exactly the same way.

Psalm 19 claims that the night sky reveals something of God: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” The heavens, and indeed all of creation, speak to us in a language more meaningful than words. The handywork of God communicates directly with His creatures here on earth. It tells us about the Love that made us, and the Love that pursues us to this day.  

What does the moon say of God? I don’t know definitively, but I think it has said to me:

We are always under the moon’s sight. We are always under God’s sight. Because of our own lack of perspective, we cannot always see the moon. Because of our own lack of perspective, we cannot always see God.

No matter where we go or what we do, the moon never abandons us. No matter where we go or what we do, our Father never leaves us. We are always pursued and loved. We are always home.

“Love and Some Verses”: On Catholicism and Vowed Love

To me, some of the most beautiful and reassuring Catholic teachings are those related to marital love. When a friend admitted that they found Catholic teaching on the expression of physical love between unmarried couples counterintuitive, I pondered why that this point of theology always felt “right” to me. Not that it was easy, especially in regards to navigating the dating world, but that it always seemed right.

Catholic teachings on sexuality are centered on the essential dignity of the human soul. As all human beings are children of God, they should be approached with reverence. This is the cornerstone of our human dignity, which no one has the right to take away.

With this in mind, why does it follow that it is a breach of human dignity to seek sexual gratification outside of marriage? Why should human beings confine their sexuality to one person, namely, their spouse?

In the words of Catholic theologian Alice von Hildebrand, sex is a “donation which by its very nature calls for total commitment to another person...one cannot give oneself to many persons simeoultaneously.”

In our era of casual hookups, threesomes, and polyamoury, many people might take umbrage with this idea. Why not give physical affection to whomever inspires it and consents to it? It makes people feel good. Who does it really hurt?

Even without looking at the potential consequences of this line of reasoning, like pregnancy, or sexually transmitted diseases, the problem with sex outside of marriage lies in its negligence of the act itself. Non-marital sexual gratification is a problem because it does not give us or our partners Enough.

Instead of wanting what is truly best for someone first, we want something else. We want to experience pleasure, and give the other person pleasure, but what is good and right for them eternally- for their soul as well as their body- is not uppermost in our mind.

It can’t be. We have denied them the vows of self-sacrifice, exclusivity, and permanency that we give in marriage. Instead, we are in a “deciding” place, a place of learning and exploring how we feel about someone,  not a place of vowed submission to the cause of the highest good of that individual.

This is not only less than what the other person deserves, it cheats us of the great joy we experience when the giving of our bodies is complete. Von Hildebrand calls this “the sweetness of a mutual self donation, accomplished in trembling reverence.”

And it is sweet. Deeply, powerfully, sacredly sweet.

Though not a theologian, or even a  Catholic, singer-songwriter Sam Beam of Iron and Wine encapsulates everything that is “right” about sacramental love in his song, “Love and Some Verses”. Bear with me, I was an English major, and poetry and lyricism sometimes actually help me to get a better handle on certain concepts. 

~

Love is a dress that you made long/To hide your knees 

This first line reflects the safety and protection we have within vowed love. We are completely exposed in physical love; Adam “knew” Eve. Yet, someone’s complete acceptance of us, as wholly manifested by the consecration “the two shall become one flesh”,  shelters us. Their consideration of our own happiness, as secured by their promise to love us as their own body,  protects us. We are the most vulnerable we will ever be, but knowing that someone will love us as they love themselves, even to the point of dying for us, makes us safe within our vulnerability.

We all deserve to be loved this sacrificially.

Love to say this to your face/I'll love you only

When someone “loves us only”, it imitates the ecstatic completeness Adam and Eve had with one another in the Garden of Eden.  Exclusivity says: “You are enough for me. You are all I need.” Isn’t this exactly what our partners deserve? Isn’t this exactly what we deserve? When we hand our bodies over to someone, when we physically give ourselves to another human being, don’t we want to believe that our offering will satisfy them? Yet, by sharing this experience without first committing to our partner exclusively, we are essentially saying: “You might not be enough for me.” This attitude does not do justice to someone’s surrender of himself or herself. What does justice to surrender is giving your partner the grace of knowing that their complete giving is completely enough for you. That they themselves are enough.

We all deserve to be loved exclusively.

From your changing contentments/What will you choose for to share?

Someday drawing you different/May I be weaved in your hair?

The nature of humanity is to grow and to change. Women’s very bodies are cyclical, and this aids in the propagation of life, and the continual re-creation of our ever changing world. We are not always the same people we were on our wedding day. Our bodies change, our minds adapt and grow to accept different ideas, and our wants and desires change, as formed by our life experience. In the rite of marriage, we vow to love and honor our spouse through these changes for the rest of our lives.

The question, “someday drawing you different/may I be weaved in your hair?” is a beautiful illustration of the trust and unconditional acceptance that is worthy of the sexual gift. Though our partner may change from the person we married, we are still woven into them. We are a part of them. We cannot be extracted by time or other external or internal forces.

The symbol of physical oneness is only fully realized in this truth of being one for life. What makes the death of physical oneness bearable at its completion is the reality of a deathless love.

So, throughout our partner’s “changing contentments”, as well as our own, we choose to share our love. Our giving of ourselves will not stop once it suits us. Nor is our love dependent on our partner staying the same. We give them the freedom to become whom they are meant to be, and we come along to share their journey. And how much better is the journey with love on our side?

We all deserve to be loved for life.

~

Ultimately, as von Hildebrand states, sex is “meant to be at the service of the deepest human aspiration: love.” Our giving of our bodies both reflects and is informed by the giving of our whole selves. Let us not do injustice to the most sacred of acts by giving it less than it deserves. Let us "taste the true beauty of a sexual union based on mutual love, and lived in reverence."

In Country Sleep by Dylan Thomas

I

Never and never, my girl riding far and near

In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,

Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood

Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,

                                         My dear, my dear,

Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year

To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise,

My girl ranging the night in the rose and shire

Of the hobnail tales: no gooseherd or swine will turn

Into a homestall king or hamlet of fire

                                         And prince of ice

To court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise

In a spinney of ringed boys and ganders, spike and burn,

Nor the innocent lie in the rooting dingle wooed

And staved, and riven among plumes my rider weep.

From the broomed witch's spume you are shielded by fern

And flower of country sleep and the greenwood keep.

                                         Lie fast and soothed,

Safe be and smooth from the bellows of the rushy brood.

Never, my girl, until tolled to sleep by the stern

Bell believe or fear that the rustic shade or spell

Shall harrow and snow the blood while you ride wide and near,

For who unmanningly haunts the mountain ravened eaves

Or skulks in the dell moon but moonshine echoing clear

                                         From the starred well?

A hill touches an angel. Out of a saint's cell

The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves

Her robin breasted tree, three Marys in the rays.

Sanctum sanctorum the animal eye of the wood

In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost

The owl at its knelling. Fox and holt kneel before blood.

                                         Now the tales praise

The star rise at pasture and nightlong the fables graze

On the lord's-table of the bowing grass. Fear most

For ever of all not the wolf in his baaing hood

Nor the tusked prince, in the ruttish farm, at the rind

And mire of love, but the Thief as meek as the dew.

The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,

                                         Know the green good,

Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood

Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace. Sleep spelled at rest in the lowly house

In the squirrel nimble grove, under linen and thatch

And star: held and blessed, though you scour the high four

Winds, from the dousing shade and the roarer at the latch,

                                         Cool in your vows.

Yet out of the beaked, web dark and the pouncing boughs

Be you sure the Thief will seek a way sly and sure

And sly as snow and meek as dew blown to the thorn,

This night and each vast night until the stern bell talks

In the tower and tolls to sleep over the stalls

Of the hearthstone tales my own, lost love; and the soul walks

                                         The waters shorn.

This night and each night since the falling star you were born,

Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls,

As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides

Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the wind-

Milled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands

Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged

                                         Apple seed glides,

And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides,

As the world falls, silent as the cyclone of silence.

II

Night and the reindeer on the clouds above the haycocks

And the wings of the great roc ribboned for the fair!

The leaping saga of prayer! And high, there, on the hare-

                                         Heeled winds the rooks

Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books

Of birds! Among the cocks like fire the red fox

Burning! Night and the vein of birds in the winged, sloe wrist

Of the wood! Pastoral beat of blood through the laced leaves!

The stream from the priest black wristed spinney and sleeves

                                         Of thistling frost

Of the nightingale's din and tale! The upgiven ghost

Of the dingle torn to singing and the surpliced

Hill of cypresses! The din and tale in the skimmed

Yard of the buttermilk rain on the pail! The sermon

Of blood! The bird loud vein! The saga from mermen

                                         To seraphim

Leaping! The gospel rooks! All tell, this night, of him

Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

Illumination of music! the lulled black-backed

Gull, on the wave with sand in its eyes! And the foal moves

Through the shaken greensward lake, silent, on moonshod hooves,

                                         In the winds' wakes.

Music of elements, that a miracle makes!

Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act,

The haygold haired, my love asleep, and the rift blue

Eyed, in the haloed house, in her rareness and hilly

High riding, held and blessed and true, and so stilly

                                         Lying the sky

Might cross its planets, the bell weep, night gather her eyes,

The Thief fall on the dead like the willy nilly dew,

Only for the turning of the earth in her holy

Heart! Slyly, slowly, hearing the wound in her side go

Round the sun, he comes to my love like the designed snow,

                                         And truly he

Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew's ruly sea,

And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds. Oh he

Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking

Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair,

But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer

                                         He comes to take

Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake

He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking

Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come.

Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear

My dear this night he comes and night without end my dear

                                         Since you were born:

And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,

Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.

Dylan Thomas takes my breath away. 

The Scent of the South

I've been missing Virginia lately, but what I seem to remember most (besides, of course, the wonderful people) is the scent of my old home.

Scent is so different in the two states where I’ve lived.

Here, I am blessed to smell sea air as soon as I walk outdoors. I was brought up in its rhythms. I know the scent of a cold sea breeze versus a warmer one, and how it changes on the boardwalk and on the wide streets. I’ve felt the spaces in my mind expand upon inhaling. I recognize the peppery, sun-drenched scent of the sand and its creatures. I breathe in the gentle wind off the lake after it has wafted through trees. I anticipate the scents of cake baking downstairs, of onions frying, of garlic and cooked chicken, of tea with honey. I delight in the pleasure of well aired rooms, fresh bed linens, candles burning. I welcome the scent of incense at Mass and the perfumes of church ladies. All of these scents sum up home in my mind.

If my hometown’s scents are bright and invigorating, Virginia’s scents were heady and languid. Sure, there was the crisp fragrance of fresh-mowed lawns, coffee brewing in the shops, or spring breezes on the river. But overall the fragrance of Virginia seemed somehow older, permanent, full of wisdom. There was sunshine on brick paths as old as the Colonies, mossy trees, and dew-soaked grass. Indoor scents like waxed furniture, lemon polish, sachets, even gunpowder. The sweat of swing and contra dancers, and the hand lotion of good friends. Above all, the flowers- the fragile, yet timeless scent of magnolia. The sweet allure of wisteria. The pervasive benediction of Carolina jasmine.

Even the way scent travels is different in my two home states.

Here, fog always smells like the ocean. You can be miles past it, but if you close your eyes it seems like low tide is right next to you. The world is alive, beckoning, and full of possibility as you imagine places an ocean away.

In Virginia, mist smells lush and humid, as if it has carried every leaf, every bush, every ancient building and garden it has touched. Yet, for all its fullness it is not heavy, and the sweetness in the air is inescapable. The world seems older and settled in its ways, and there is comfort in the fact that all is both pleasant and unchanging.

I miss my Southern smells, especially the flowers- magnolia, wisteria, Carolina jasmine. I miss the presence of enormous trees and all of the secrets that they hold. I am grateful for scent memory, because even eight months later I can remember the joys of a world I’ve (for now) left behind.

A Gratitude List for Thanksgiving

In no particular order...

1. The health of all of my family members- what a blessing!
2. New friends
3. Old friends
4. A roof over my head with people who love me
5. Living by the ocean
6. Simon, the sweetest beagle in the world
7. My health
8. My five senses
9. Living in a free country where I can walk outside without fear of war and violence
10. Forgiveness, in all its forms

Perhaps unconventional, but these are the top 10 for now!

We all have so much to be grateful for.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I thought I would be blogging this month

But this seemed too good to resist: http://www.nanowrimo.org/whatisnano.

October was really magical- hanging out with my friends and extended family,

seeing one of my favorite bands in concert and hanging out with them after the show,

performing in a Haunted House and another murder mystery which will continue into the fall, and trick or treating with my castmates dressed as the Serenity crew from Firefly.

So much fun, and a complete change of pace from my school days.

Now, however, I'm ready to let my writerly impulses loose and CREATE! Wish me luck :)

Reasons (cough, excuses) for my neglect...

I realize I've neglected my new blog terribly :/ As usual, I've been too busy living life to write about it; acting in plays and interning for a local attorney (and, lets face it, just lazing around) have absorbed me of late. It's been fun, but I'll probably feel the need to write something substantial soon.

In the meantime, a picture from the haunted house I'm in. All of those in the Howell, NJ area should definitely come out to see us and get scared at Ocean Grave!