Life as a Disciple

PRAY AS YOU GO: LINK https://prayasyougo.org/prayer/life-as-a-disciple-2732

With all the mothering I’ve done, and no it wasn’t mothering my own kids, it WAS mothering, yes, my six boys, my two girls, the team of programmers I hired to build a catalog with 20,000 parts, the kids at the bookstore including at risk kids that I hired, who I trained disciplined and sometimes paid late. My future son in law who now mothers me, and at my age, it is anyone who will listen and look interested. 

I came from a family of 11 – that’s nine kids. I was the runaway kid, and yes something was very wrong with me, I am still figuring out what it was. Sometimes looking back, it was 1968 when I received my first communion, surrounded by nuns in long black habits who taught me.

I don’t know why but i seemed to be the only kid interested in learning “O Salutaris”, when “Sons Of God” was number one on the V2 Top Ten List for Catholics who were sick of Palestrina.

I loved Palestrina, and I also wanted to be one of the nuns in the long black habits without hair or makeup, and once they went to short blue dresses after I'd memorialized them in my paper and drawing of “What I want to be when I grew up”- which included the long black veil and flowing habit, I lost interest in that idea all together and became a runaway at ages 15 –21. And to top it off, I found boys. Not nice ones. 

My husband made me marry him after finding me in my favorite fun Mexican Restaurant in the beach town where I lived where I was dancing on the tables and drinking Margaritas.

He said to me, “Get in the car we are going to San Francisco and getting married.”

I don't know why but I hopped in the car, and we were married that day, it lasted 32 years and we had a bunch of kids. 

I was unable to Mother my husband. He had Congestive Heart Failure and it was hereditary. I tried to properly feed him after a long day of work, but he always said to me, “I have the palette of a “six-year-old”- meaning skittles, taquitos, and Big Red Gum. He was the only man in three generations to live past age 60. When he passed away surrounded by his children and myself, the only thing mature that i did as the priest read the words, “May the Angels Greet him” was stomp my right heel and yell, “DANG”.  

I did it again at his funeral where the budget funeral home sent twenty card table chairs that were covered in furry green slip covers to sit on during his internment. To be honest, no one wanted to sit there so we all stood and cried while my brother-in-law sang a perfect rendition of “O Danny Boy” which I can still hear and still want to cry when I think about it. 

I am actually writing the above as an introduction to the “new life”  I was recently thrust into after meeting a “very nice” man on a Catholic Dating SIte. He was everything i had dreamed of, we had both been in Real Estate, both builders, both funny and full of laughs, but shortly after we started to talk he gained a contract in the Ukraine and left before the funding was cut from the US Budget and “Rebuild Ukraine” campaign. 

He sent me a contract to edit for him, which I dutifully did, and delivered it to “James” who would soon deliver the documents to China, Japan and Ukraine. I became an investor in the project, we had Facetimed and I agreed having been promised that “I would be paid back double”.  

He was super clever and also included a surprise line of code in the contract which allowed himself and whoever else to take full control of my computer and bank accounts and siphoned every dime I'd made for the year while I naively waited for his return, that never happened. 

When my kids and grandkids had the opportunity to move out of California to a new more prosperous life in the Lone Star State still not knowing what was happening to my fleeting bank account, I imagined that by then my business partner would certainly pay me in short order, and that didn’t and never will happen. When the lease to our home was up, I became a homeless mother with 2 locked bank accounts. This is where my story begins today. 

Since my husband passed away, I’d kept busy. The writing on the wall was that one of my eight would have to take me in. That was the impetus for me to imagine I would meet a nice Catholic man and live out the next twenty years with him in perfect love.  
All of the sudden, I am homeless, and yes, one of my boys has taken me in. I've always exercised and either run or body pumped or Pietraed to stay healthy and in good shape. In the old house that I had moved from, I had a perfectly safe 2.2 miles I ran every single day. It removed all of my stress.  

This last month or so was big though and I've found myself to be weak and shaky and subject to crying when I run, so I have adopted “Pray as You Go” as my inspiration and meditation each day, and then the “Divine Office of Readings” as insurance that I will not sink into a permanent depressive state.

In my move, I had to throw and donate everything I had ever collected to charity. My entire 10 year volumes of Culture Wars Magazine, my Patio Furniture, my couches and chairs, my children's artwork and I have lost my husband's Rosary and that in itself brings me to tears...  

So today my second day of my new life at my sons house and my second day of running in a new place, I remembered how many times I have argued with people trying to explain that the Catholic Lectionary is actually “Prophetic” and I know it wasn’t written just for me- but it was. 

Take Up Your Cross 
Jon Guerra 

Today is Monday the 30th of June, in the 13th week of Ordinary Time. 
Jon Guerra sings, ‘Take Up Your Cross’. 
If anyone would come after me 
Let him deny himself 
Take up his cross 
 
Follow me 
If anyone would come after me 
Let him deny himself 
Take up his cross 
Follow me 
Whoever would save his life 
Will lose it 
Whoever loses his life for me 
Will find it 
If anyone claims to worship God 
Let him give all away 
Take up his cross 
Follow me 
Whoever would save his life 
Will lose it 
Whoever loses his life for me  
Will find it 
What would it profit a man 
If he gains the whole world 
And forfeits his soul 
What would it profit a man at all 
What would it profit a man 
If he dies with a barn full of silver and gold 
What would it profit a man at all 
If anyone would come after me 
Let him deny himself 
Take up his cross 
Follow me 
 
Today’s reading is from the Gospel of Matthew. 
Matthew 8:18-22 
Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him,

he gave orders to go over to the other side.

A scribe then approached and said, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’

Another of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him,

‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’ 

https://prayasyougo.org/prayer/life-as-a-disciple-2732