Two Takes on the Same Readings

My family usually attends our parish's biggest Sunday morning mass, which among other things includes Litergy of Word for Children, and offers babysitting (yup, I'm one of the lazy bad moms who dumps her kid on others rather than taking her to mass). My older daughter's social life has meant that she missed that mass today, so I took her to the Lifeteen mass tonite (which she, being a sophisticated pre-teen, loves). In short, I attended two massed today and while the readings were the same (of course) the homilies were quite different. This morning our PV had mass. He seems like a nice enough guy but he speaks slowly with long pauses between words, and some of the lessons he draws from the readings have me scratching my head--not necessarily with disagreement but more with "how did he get THAT from those readings". In today's gospel Jesus healed the leper and told him to show himself to the priests, offer the customary sacrifice, but not tell anyone. Fr. C mentioned the guy's faith--that he didn't say "if you can heal me, please do so" but rather said "if you want to, you can heal me". Then he went off about not judging by appearances, and about how the leperosy kept the guy from practing his religion and now he had religious freedom, and how we are so lucky to have religious freedom today. The priest who said mass tonite was the former pastor of a parish that is being closed due to Katrina. He spoke about healing and how all of us have something in our lives that needs to be healed and we need to name it and ask Jesus to heal it.

WHO'D A THUNK IT?

http://www.financialexpress.com/latest_full_story.php?content_id=116523 is an article about a study that will be published in Science which shows that HIV/AIDS rates are declining in Zimbabwe. Why? People are delaying sexual activity and having fewer casual sexual partners. Condoms may also play a role (and if you go to Google News and search on Zimbabwe AIDS you'll find a lot of reporting on this study that tries hard to credit the condoms and downplay the changed sexual behavior) but in the end, it seems that it is better not to have sex with someone infected with AIDS than it is to wear a condom when you have sex with someone infected with AIDS. Maybe the Catholic church wasn't so dumb when they said that years ago.

Weaning

My baby is almost two and we are in the weaning process. Until shortly before Christmas she was waking up to nurse at 2 and 5 am, which kept my milk flowing well, even though I did not resume pumping when I went back to work after Katrina. With my older two children I quit pumping at a year and they both weaned completely by 15 months, basically figuring  the little milk they were getting wasn't worth the trouble. Since unlike the others, the baby wasn't sleeping through the night, I knew the milk would last longer, but once she started sleeping through the night, I knew the beginning of the end was here. It is almost funny to watch her. She crawls in my lap holding my nursing pajamas (her security blanket) and says "nurse". She then sucks for a while, tries changing positions and then switching sides, sure that things will work the way they once did. It's like she hates to quit--but doesn't get the satisfaction from it she once did. She was always my best nurser, a working mom's daughter who hated bottles and only took what she had to during the day. While there is a part of me that is getting tired of having her hanging on me, she is, in all likelihood, my last baby and I feel a sense of loss knowing that I'm not going to be doing this again.

Tonight the thought entered my mind that there is another weaning going on in my life right now. My mom is dying. She was supposed to come home from the hospital today with hospice care. She has been sick for about three years now and is getting down about it.  She is starting to be in pain at times, while the only "problem" her disease has given her up until this time has been extreme fatigue. We've all known for a long time that she was going to die sooner rather than later, but hearing the word "hospice" was like a punch in the gut--even though at Thanksgiving I was wondering if she'd make it to Christmas. Just as weaning the baby is a natural process of separation with steps that are pretty identifiable if you know what to look for, so too is the death of the aged from chronic illness. There is the "I'm ready for this to be over with" contrasted with "Once its gone, it's gone for good" and the knowledge that as I must wean the baby, so must I say goodbye to my mom.

More about Katrina

I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, though I have spent my adult life in suburban New Orleans. I have been to Long Beach several times since the storm (see pictures from Christmas) but due to time constraints and roadblocks, have never really gone sightseeing--before today that is. I went to visit my parents but took a route that put me down on the beach several miles west of their house, and what I saw just made me sick, even though I had been told that's what I'd see. For 98% of the coast that I saw, you could see two blocks back--there was nothing there but oak trees. There was one small stretch, for anyone familiar with the area, of Scenic Drive in Pass Christian, which while it overlooks the beach, is up noticeably higher than the beach and the houses on which are often set back quite a way from the road, where the houses survived, with some even looking repairable.

One other thing that survived was the SS Hurricane Camille. Hurricane Camille hit the coast in August, 1969 and was "the worst hurricane ever" (at least until Katrina). One thing it did was wash a tugboat across the highway onto dry land. Some entrepreneur named it the SS Hurricane Camille and built a gift shop next to it. While the gift shop did not survive Katrina, the tugboat did--and it is where Camille left it. like this