Man is a giddy thing

It's Latare Sunday. How is it time to break out the rose vestments already? Didn't Lent just start? Almost every year around this time I start to worry that I don't feel penitential enough, that my Lent needs to be harder, that I should have piled on more things to give up. If I'm not miserable I must be doing something wrong. Does this ever happen to anyone else? I guess it's a sign that I need to involve God more in my thesis drudgery.

A nineteenth-century rose cope at St. Ignatius of Antioch, NYC

Brother #3 is turning 17. How has it been that long since he was born? Wasn't I just 17? It can't have been that long since he was born on a Holy Saturday evening. I still remember the cooing compliments from the nurses when we all came to meet him the next day in our Easter clothes. My sister and I had matching dresses (my idea), but I also remember my 9 year old hair-styling skills being not that great. When Mom and the new baby arrived home the next day, our next-door neighbor kid climbed up on the garage roof to meet them. I'm so proud of the outgoing, ardently Catholic young man my little brother has become since that day.

Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's death. Has it really been that long since I watched all the news coverage of crowds gathering to mourn in St. Peter's Square? That weekend was a very emotional one for me. I've idolized JPII since childhood, and as his sickness and pain ended, my own journey into suffering was just beginning. The circulatory condition that would eventually make me drop out of college for a year was just starting to flare up. Grief over the Holy Father combined with frustration at my body slippping out of my control and I ended up crying in a heap on the laundry room floor. Normally I don't cry when people die, but that day I felt like I was finally getting it right. I'm grateful for what I learned that year about suffering and trusting God, and for how much stronger I've gotten in the past 6 years. I like to thing that JPII may have put in a good word for me up there.

I guess what ties all three of these things together is that since time keeps moving us forward, there will always be more opportunities to keep growing into the people God wants us to be. I love how this song explains that with a little help from Shakespeare.

Sigh no more, no more
One foot in sea, one on shore
My heart was never pure
And you know me
You know me

And man is a giddy thing
Oh man is a giddy thing...

Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
Of my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be