Be Not Idle

I’m spreading the word about a national call to pray for the United States of America.  I know that some of you aren’t Americans, but I’m asking you to pray for my nation and its new leaders.

For my Catholic friends and family, there’s a Novena starting Monday, October 27, and continuing through Election Day, November 4. The CatholicVote.com Team suggests Catholics “stop everything we are doing at 9 pm (your local time) and pray for our Nation.”  

Fr. John Corapi is urging Catholics to pray the Rosary to Our Lady of Victory for the Novena. He writes, “Pray that God’s will be done and the most innocent and utterly vulnerable of our brothers and sisters will be protected from this barbaric and grossly sinful blight on society that is abortion. No woman, and no man, has the right to choose to murder an innocent human being.” The Novena prayers can be found at his website.

FastforHope.com has information about the National Days of Prayer and Fasting, November 3 & 4. They ask, “At this crucial time of transition, please join your fellow Americans in lifting our eyes, our hearts and our prayers to our Heavenly Father, pleading for His mercy.”

My guardian angel is Phred, a name I came up with in the fourth grade or so. It was shortly after a babysitter asked me for help with her homework, coming up with words that had a “ph” in them, like “dolphin” and  ”Delphine” (my aunt) and “phunky chicken” (there was a dance, you know…)

I used to pray the old Guardian Angel prayer every day when I was a kid. In the first grade classroom, Sister Agnesita had a print of an angel watching over two children crossing over a rickety bridge.  The angel was female and dressed very prettily. However, I thought of my Phred as male - a nice young fellow who wasn’t ready to clobber me like my brothers.  I also figured Phred was kind of plainly dressed and silent, ready to jump into action. Except when I was taking a bath. Then I thought he waited outside the bathroom door (with the dog) and I’d have to holler for Mom if I got my big toe stuck in the faucet or something.

But for many years (decades) I completely neglected to talk to or even think about Phred.  There was also a New Agey “angel movement”  which seemed to infiltrate even retreats. It marketed guardian angels as subservient beings, at worst a tool for getting one’s desire and at best a Jeeves-like personal assistant, constantly pulling his master out of a scrapes. I felt sort of embarrassed to be talking to him, as if I’d catch some  sort of cosmic cooties.

But I began to rediscover what angels are and how blessed I am to have Phred. And I’ve been thinking a lot about angels, especially since I started making clay sculptures that incorporate Christian symbols. (More on that later.)

And so, for old time’s sake, Phred…

Angel of God,
my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this day,
be at my side
to light and guard,
to rule and guide.

Where I live now - in base of the thumb of Michigan’s mitten - we almost never get snow days. The lay of the land and water is such that the climate is milder than the surrounding areas. (In the gardening, it’s a zone warmer here than in the rest of the state.)

This is probably the last snow day until next year, so I used it to its full.

I slept.

I haven’t been feeling well since Friday. Because my eyes are bleary and my thinking is slightly off, it takes me longer to get through normal chores like grading essays. Since it takes longer, I get up earlier in order to do lesson plans, etc. Then I feel tired and react so much slower to everything. It’s a vicious cycle.

I didn’t want to blog today, but it’s part of my Lenten discipline. In some ways, it’s not a lot different than praying! Sometimes the last thing I want to do is pray.  Until I actually do, and then I realize how necessary it is.

So I blogged, just like I did all the other necessary tasks between bouts of napping: doing laundry, correcting quizzes,  shoveling, catching up on reading, shoveling, filling the birdfeeder, washing dishes - and did I mention shoveling?

 Now I’m going to go off and pray, then get some more sleep.

…I sometimes forget to pray. It makes more sense to pray when the going gets tough, but that’s when I get to the end of the day and say, “Wait a minute, I could have asked Him for help. Why didn’t I?”

 Sometimes, however, I feel like a small child about prayer. And not in a good way. It’s more like being the kid who says, “I wanna do it myself!” And just like a kid, it’s usually right before everything comes crashing down around my ears.

I have had a request from a friend to explain what I mean by “squalor”.  I could just invite her over and have her look into my office and living/diningrom on a typical day, but it’s slightly less embarrassing to explain here. 

Squalor is a high level of clutter. It can be hoarding, like the people you see on various organization shows who collect broken computers because they’re useful for “parts”. It can be chronic clutter that explodes into a huge mess because a person is too ill or stressed to prioritize it. It can be everyday items that gradually take over every horizontal surface (including the floor). 

In other words, squalor has a lot of levels.

What causes it? A number of factors play into it. Obsessive-compulsive disorder leads a lot of people into squalor. Perfectionism is a surprisingly common trait among squalorees, as we call ourselves (when we’re not calling ourselves worse names). We get paralyzed by thoughts like, “This has just one broken part, so I should fix it. I can’t clean part of this room unless I clean the whole room. I know the recycling center won’t take this, but I’d feel guilty if I don’t find a use for it.” 

The National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization developed a Clutter Hoarding Scale which the Squalor Survivors Community uses:

 http://www.squalorsurvivors.com/squalor/measuring.shtml

When I lived in my first apartment by myself, I was at Level One: chronic clutter. As friends and relatives moved in with me, I went to Level Two and stayed there for years.  But I didn’t know I was at Level Two. I thought I was a dirty slob. I knew I wasn’t lazy. I had a full-time job, a part-time job, and took evening classes.  Was it avarice? But I didn’t LIKE having so much stuff. Was it an organizational problem? A professional organizer told me that all I needed to do was switch from being a “piler” of papers to a “filer”.  (Instead, I did both.)

I didn’t know that other people were like me. Granted, I knew people who had trails of dirty dishes from the sink, across the countertops, over various tables, and into their home offices. But mostly those were young men, and everyone knows about ”bachelor housekeeping”. If a man’s bathroom smells like urine and has topless toothpaste tubes oozing over the sink, it’s not pleasant but it’s a manly foible. Similar conditions in a bachelorette’s home are unacceptable (unless she has a closet overflowing with shoes and clothes - that’s just the life of a fashionable single girl!) 

I knew a couple women who were sloppy housekeepers, but one suffered from depression and, conversely, the other was a highly successful businesswoman.  I also knew hoarders, but they tended to store everything so NEATLY that it wasn’t until later that I questioned why anyone would WANT an entire shelf of stacked empty cottage cheese containers.

I remember when I prayed for help. I had been a “secret slob” as Holden Caulfield put it in The Catcher in the Rye - looking neat on the outside but shoving boxes of stuff into the storage closet so company wouldn’t see it. Or getting the urge to clean and throwing out good stuff (like the year I threw out my tax return… eek!)  But I couldn’t hide it anymore. My younger brother moved in. He’d take his friends into my bedroom to use my computer and there was my squalor: boxes stacked next to the bed, dresser piled with stuff, overflowing file cabinet. I couldn’t hide it.

I prayed and even talked to someone at my church to ask for prayers. As usual, Our Father answered not with an instant ”cure”, but by steering me towards other people.

I had been reading business books about time management and organizing work-related items. I checked motivational tapes (Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, etc.) out of the library and listened to them on my commute. One day I came across a misfiled book, a funny book about ”Sidetracked Home Executives”. The “Slob Sisters”, Pam Young and Peggy Jones wrote about their own squalorous lives and how they invented a card system to keep them on track. 

The cards never worked well for me, but on their website did. There I ”met” other people who had similar challenges in staying organized. One of them was Marla Cilley, “The FlyLady” as she prepared to launch her daily FLY List. From there I made my way to OrganizedHome.com  and the Squalor Survivors Community (see my blogroll for links).

 So that’s my story. (And I’m sticking to it… but in a PostIt Note way, not like old bubblegum…)

One of my favourite people is Pat who runs Celebration of Faith, a Catholic bookstore in St. Clair.  About a month ago, I stopped in and she gave me a statuette of St. Anthony. She wouldn’t allow me to pay for it. She said that’s the deal she has with St. Anthony. She’s asked him so many times to pray for her and her family, and she’s seen that he’s tireless in his intercession. So she gives away his paraphenalia.

I thought it was very cool that St. Anthony is one of her “prayer friends”. I used to have a few in college, mostly other young people in the Navigators’ Bible study group. They were the people I could ask to pray with me or for me.

I was never great at asking saints to pray for me. I’d call on St. Andrew from time to time when I was kid. (Usually when in a boat.) I had a feeling that they were very busy with God. Seemed a shame to interrupt them. I prayed the Rosary, of course, but that was more a meditation on Christ than asking for anything.

So the angels took the brunt of interceding when I had no one else to pray with me. St. Michael got a lot of desperate calls late at night when spooky sounds or general oddness abounded.  And my poor guardian angel! My mother’s grandmother had told her, and she passed it onto me, that if you began the Rosary at bedtime and fell asleep, your angel would finish it for you. Poor Phred must have covered 9/10 of every Rosary I prayed before I hit puberty. (Phred is my guardian angel. When I was a kid, someone got it into my head that guardian angels have names. I hope mine has a sense of humour. :) 

 But it’s a relatively new thing for me to ask the saints to pray for me. It’s really only been since I moved to this area. There are more Catholics around here, but I haven’t really become a part of my parish. Ironically, I know more people at the daily Masses in a neighbouring community, since so many older volunteers are Catholic.

Anyway, I’ve had St. Anthony’s statuette in a box since then, languishing on a coffeetable. I was looking for a good place to put it. I have the Holy Family on a bookshelf in the livingroom, surrounded by family photographs - which makes perfect sense the more I think about it.

Pope John Paul II said it often that young people need Jesus. I have a student who is a senior. I’ve had him in class less than 15 days, but it’s clear that he’s troubled in his heart.  Other students have plans for the future - sometimes totally unrealistic or intentionally hyperbolic plans - but he doesn’t want to think about it.

Sometimes my students will express the wish that school would be over and they could do something more interesting. More often than not, “interesting” means hanging out with friends and/or doing nothing in particular. But many of the  seniors  become anxious when they realize that school doesn’t last forever. They have to make plans and do something because they want to, not because they’re being forced by laws or their parents.

One of my collegues commented, “There’s something wrong when students have no goals; they imagine no future.”  In other words, they have no hope.

It’s not just the “at-risk” kids who feel hopeless. Sometimes they are students who have a lot going for them, but seem depressed or lacking in self-confidence. I often wonder if they are longing for something less material than what usually ends up in the “futureography” essays: “good-paying job”, “lots of friends and parties”, etc.  Someone who gives them hope.

 So this young man is going to become my special prayer intention during Lent. I scarcely know him, but I know he’s hurting.