Monumental

Saving history from destruction, one piece of work at a time.

I decided to continue building on yesterday's themes about service and stewardship by writing to you today about a real-life situation from the past, and it is this: saving our greatest artworks from oppression and evil. Hitler and his regime didn't have one sole purpose in war, that of killing an entire religious ethnicity to create some wacky "master race". No, they wanted to wipe out any traces of our cultural past by stealing and secretly destroying the best of art, design, and statuary. 

It's a powerful story that's been largely untold until now. A handful of priests, nuns, clergy, and other lay people united with a small group of self-appointed warriors (who were also artists, writers, scholars, professors, and curators), and the few military men they could requisition, to rescue some of the greatest works of art that we have as a species; works that were to be burned forever (as so many were, or gifted to the German elite who stole them), so as to wipe out our past as a people, on NO BUDGET, with almost no support, and no additional resources granted to them of any kind from any ruling government, relying instead on their own ingenuity, bravery, and heroics, on the worst killing fields of Europe during the close of WWII.

Chew on that the next time you feel like you can't do something in life. I often live with less to get through tough economic times, so I know firsthand that you can do it, too. What are you waiting for? Permission? OK. Permission granted! Do it now!  I think she was worth it. What do you think?

http://www.monumentsmen.com/

Little Red Birdhouse

The Little Red Birdhouse that could.

Now that the leaves have dropped, I can see the bone structure of certain things better: trees, houses, and little red birdhouses. I love that my neighbors share my penchant for Our Mother Mary, fun dog statues, and as many charming birdhouses as they can sometimes cram onto branches, or perch helpfully atop other structures.  
We so love animals here!

http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/birdhouses-and-treehouses/ 

 

Faith: All Saints Day

The New Rules. Familiarize yourself!

The other day I went for a follow up at a hospital here in the Hudson Valley called Good Samaritan, across the street from The Tagaste Monastery (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2013/10/sacred-spaces-tagaste-monastery.html). The link between my vocation and my health care was not lost on me as I stood by the chapel, waiting for the breast care center to open. They held a free event to heighten awareness about breast cancer that I attended, with free mammos, breast exams, and sonograms for women who are under insured or uninsured, as well as applications for free health insurance under Obamacare. 

Faithfully Healing the Earth.

As I stood there waiting, I saw a brochure next to the chapel. It was about the new mission focus for Franciscans. Of course it is. I don't have happy coincidences or lucky accidents like most folks you know. For me, every fortune cookie and seemingly trivial event has import and meaning, and that's just the way it is for me. This little two-sided  pamphlet demarcated the new codifications for Catholics, which is a green mission that includes taking care of our environment and the planet, as part of God's inheritance for us. Like so much of my life, everything just kinda falls into place. That's the power of faith, and that's my message for you today on this All Saints Day. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints%27_Day)

Have a closer look for yourself:

http://www.chausa.org/environment/climate-change.

http://catholicclimatecovenant.org/.

Celebrating our good green earth. They have the right idea!

Want to get started on the right path? Here's some inspiration:

http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/recycle-and-repurpose/

 

Faith: The Madonna

Our Mother Mary.

Another nice aspect about homecomings are the natural similarities 
we feel in the surroundings we grew up with. There are a dearth of Catholics in my hometown, and I didn't really feel the impact of 
that until I moved to the Mid West, where there's a religion called "Christianity" that's about as wacky and dissimilar to Roman Catholicism as a glass of tap water with ice cubes from your freezer 
is to an iceberg: both elemental, but as different as forms of water 
that one can get.

Here, I see signs of my faith everywhere, in the form of something we call "Madonna in a bathtub", because years ago, people submerged a bathtub into the ground and put a statue of Mary in the center of the arch the tub created, to symbolize visions of her in a grotto (ex:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Lourdes). Nowadays, they handily sell statues with a pretty eggshell blue background background (Mary's color), which saves Catholics quite a bit of work.

As I walk around, it's nice to know that I can save myself a bit of work too, on lengthy explanations. I'm not naturally loquacious. It was something I worked hard to learn in school and then develop on the job over the years because I had to, in order to explain the sometimes extraordinarily difficult concepts I deal with daily. I'm naturally shy, so whenever I can say something with an image over hours of sometimes wasted talk, I'm happy to go with that instead.  

Silence is a great blessing.

Got faith? Me, too: http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/faith/.

Faith: The Assumption of Mary

Birds in flight, on Assumption Thursday 2013.

Mary is THE Mother figure in our Catholic faith, because she represents all women, the one woman who, above all others, understands the most a woman's particular pains: they begin at labor and continue as she suffers and cares for her family until the end of her life. Women don't get a lot of help in the Old Testament (the book that is the Torah in Judaism), but the New Testament casts us in a slightly better light. We still have to be sacrificial virgins, but the good news is it's an angel who gives the news to Mary that the Almighty Force of the Universe is the baby daddy, and that instead of a bloody sacrifice, Mary is risen body and soul into His Arms in Heaven. Oh. 

Plane in flight, on Assumption Thursday.

It kinda makes our every day pains seems trivial, right? But that's what the really big myths do. They cast our woes into perspective by showing us that throughout human time, women have always had big burdens to bear, because we bear the entire human race. That's a big deal, and we have the holidays to honor this essential truth: the most important thing we have in this world (and the next) is love, because love is the answer, and the power of a mother's love is the love that drives this whole ship called Earth. Honor her well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assumption_of_Mary