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the hardest and holiest of weeks 

7 Comments

Thin places.

The ancient Celts gave us this phrase to capture the feeling of space and time when heaven and earth are scarcely separated. My life has held a handful of these sacred moments and holy grounds. I imagine yours has, too.

I always recognized these encounters in space and time by their sheerness – the sense that I could simply reach out and touch a Presence that I did not feel elsewhere.

Where walls once stood solid and strong between here and heaven, everything collapsed for a brief, beautiful instant.


Holy Week has often been a thin place for me.

One year I suffered a deep hurt during these days and had to start a long learning of what it means to forgive. Another year someone I love came to a point of crisis in this week, and I had to witness another kind of suffering unfold too close to home.

Over time I have journeyed through these days inside and out. Trying to make sense of the stories we tell of death and resurrection. Trying to make sense of my life as it intersects with the stories.

Some years – and this is clearly one – I have been tempted to protest that the trek through the Triduum is too much. That I cannot bear to enter in when life is already so weighty and waylaid.

How wrong I am.

This week is thick with God. It is the farthest thing from thin. It plunges us into the hardest parts of human nature – betrayal, hatred, violence, revenge, death – and it drenches us in divinity that changes everything.

We cannot escape God this week. Christ waits for us around every corner.

And I need this truth now more than ever. Or I will stay stuck in death’s tomb.

. . .

When Abby and Maggie died, I prepared myself for a thin place. Surely this would be what it feel like to hold two lives as their souls went beyond.

Instead I was shocked to find the exact opposite.

Everything was thick. The hospital room, the NICU, our arms themselves – all of it was thick with God. Thicker than anything I have ever felt. Thicker than everyday language can convey.

It felt as if my breath, my eyes, my heart, and my whole body were covered by a layer of love that I never knew existed. As if God were above, beneath, behind, before, beside, and within us. As if everything I had lived up until this point was a pale imitation of real.

Here and now was heavy, but thick with holy.

. . .

The night before I had left for the hospital, hoping that Saturday’s surgery would succeed in severing the connected blood vessels that were making the twins so sick, I had a last-minute thought before the boys went to bed.

I grabbed a small bottle of holy water from a windowsill in our bedroom, a gift from a friend’s pilgrimage to Lourdes. I asked our sons if they wanted to do a blessing, one of their favorite practices.

We sat on the messy floor of their bedroom. All three boys jumped around in pajamaed chaos post-bath, laughing and wrestling like lion cubs.

But as soon as I opened the bottle, they scampered into a circle around me.

Each one held out his hand to press a finger to the bottle’s rim for a drop of holy water. Solemn and smiling, they traced a cross on my forehead. They asked me to bless them in turn.

Then I asked them if they wanted to bless the babies. Without hesitation, they pressed wet warm hands against my giant belly, feeling their sisters kick and squirm inside.

That moment of blessing will be forever sealed in my memory as a thin place. A shimmering flash of hope, in the face of all we feared, that stretched open my heart to let God enter in.

And if it had not been for this thin place before Maggie and Abby’s birth, I might not have grasped the overwhelming thickness of love during their deaths.

. . .

Perhaps Lent does the same for Easter.

It pulls back the veil between us and God to sear into our memories how deeply we are loved and how desperately we need this love.

It prepares us to enter into the thickest of days: the intensity of Triduum that we cannot escape.

And it blesses us, pressing the cross deep into our heart and hands, as we begin this week.

The hardest and holiest of weeks.

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Comments

  1. Katie Glafcke says

    23 March 2016 at 2:25 pm

    THIS: It pulls back the veil between us and God to sear into our memories how deeply we are loved and how desperately we need this love.

    Thank you Laura. You have such a gift! Holy Week Blessings to you and your family.

    Reply
  2. Sarah Macon says

    23 March 2016 at 3:37 pm

    Wow. Thank you for sharing this. Peace be with you during this time and always.

    Reply
  3. Laurel says

    24 March 2016 at 4:11 pm

    You’re putting into words much better than I could something I experienced vividly with the death of my grandfather, too. It is an AWEsome experience.

    A blessed Triduum and Easter to you and yours, Laura! <3

    Reply
  4. Lisa Hincapie says

    27 March 2016 at 5:02 pm

    Laura, God has blessed you and your husband with such a grace of what His love is. Thank you for sharing this difficult journey with us. Your words have been so inspiring to me about what it is to live out our lives as Christians. It is hard. It is worth His love.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. the yes that breaks your heart - Mothering Spirit says:
    25 March 2016 at 10:30 am

    […] All week the hard and the holy have circled round my heart. I want sacred to mean soft, comforting, beautiful, and light. Yet suffering seems to be wrapped up and woven into sacred. I continue to find the holy concealed within the hard, despite my deepest desire to the contrary. […]

    Reply
  2. for all our souls - Mothering Spirit says:
    2 November 2016 at 2:15 pm

    […] Saints and All Souls are thin places on the calendar, arriving each year as light fades and days shorten, leaves fall and gardens […]

    Reply
  3. second year of mourning – In Earthen Vessels says:
    25 February 2017 at 12:28 pm

    […] Sunday in Lent falls on the one year anniversary of the death of my brother.  As Laura has written of before, I feel the thinness of this place. There is something about Lent that welcomes grief. I don’t […]

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
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