Catholic Herald

Are you tweeting from Palestine?”

It was a harmless question popping up in my inbox, and I had already begun typing my Twitter handle, eager to pick up a few more followers, when I paused to consider the offer I was about to make. Did I really want to chronicle my Holy Land trip via Twitter? Did the fact that I could access an iPhone mean I should? Did I actually see myself tweeting “at Church of the Holy Sepulchre, reflecting on Jesus’ crucifixion”?

I stopped mid-sentence.

Something about tweeting on a pilgrimage feels wrong, contrary to the purpose. To tune in I must log off. To open my eyes I must still my fingers.

I’ll have ample opportunity to relay the experience when I return. I might as well give myself the 15-hour flight home as a buffer between seeing and sharing.

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are challenging our notion of public and private. Their default setting is public; you have to take action to make it private. The assumption is yes, green light, go.

Saying no requires a deliberate stance. But it’s a healthy one. You must say no to some things in order to say yes to others.

A tweet may be just 140 characters, but it’s long enough to interrupt a thought or a prayer. And those are the little moments that allow for the big ones that bring us to our knees.

I’m saying yes to silence, to emptiness, to the absence of it all – a mode that doesn’t come naturally to wired young adults. I’m going to the Holy Land to see the bigger picture and the higher ground. I’m hoping to capture sights and smells that linger, lending new meaning throughout the year to old readings.

I’m planning to turn off my phone so I can experience the spiritual joy St. Therese of Lisieux once described. “For me prayer is a surge of the heart,” she said. “It is a simple look towards heaven. It is a cry of recognition and of love.”

I’m proud to take a break from a habit that shortens, if not eliminates, the line between perceiving and publishing. I’m pleased to give a little less to a force that keeps demanding more. This spring Twitter unveiled a tracking tool that pins an exact location to each tweet. When I was invited to activate it, I didn’t have to think twice. Thanks but no thanks.

Many others, evidently, feel differently. Location-based applications like Foursquare are growing in popularity.

Personally, I’d rather go off the grid, as they say. I’m not keen on that kind of accessibility. There’s value in traveling lightly – no footsteps or footnotes.

I’m seeking the kind of discovery that comes with disappearing. After all, Jesus needed 40 days (in a desert I’ll soon see!). So I’m packing my suitcase and preparing an out-of-office message. Do you know how good that feels? Do you know how rarely I use that feature?

I’m inspired by my uncle Mike, who went off the grid for two weeks last fall to serve as the keeper of a historic lighthouse. He watched birds soar across sunsets, playing his flugelhorn into the glassy water. Sans electricity and Internet, he attuned his body to nature’s rhythms.

Uncle Mike is going back again this fall, and he’s planning to pack even lighter. He knows how to keep the light burning.

Whether spring cleaners decide to toss it or save it may be determined by whether they tune into American Pickers or Hoarders, two reality TV shows that issue opposite edicts on excess accumulation.

I started with the History Channel’s American Pickers, a likable Iowan duo who cruise backroads in search of antiques buried in barns and basements. “What most people see as junk,” the host explains, “we see as dollar signs.”

When he scored a dusty old bike for $1,000, he squealed, “My pickin’ prayers have been answered.”

I got sucked right in. When the pickers discovered a Remington typewriter, I blurted out, “I’d like one of those!” It’s not as if I’m nostalgic; I’ve never used one. And what would I do with it? Set it beside my laptop? Display it in a turn-back-the-clock, just-for-show office?

Soon after I flipped to A&E’s Hoarders, which films packrats whose lives and piles of stuff are on the brink of collapse. There’s Shirley the cat collector who protests to the police, and Patty and Bill, who lost their kids to their unmanageable mess.

That sent me straight to my closet, armed with a 39-gallon garbage bag.

I knew it was time.

I removed my jewelry, pulled up my hair, and turned to the What Women Want soundtrack. It began with a trumpet blast and Sammy Davis Jr.’s warning, “When an irresistible force such as you meets an old immovable object like me you can bet just as sure as you live somethin’s gotta give.”

In my case many things gave: pleather belts, corduroy blazers, tweed skirts. Horizontal stripes, diagonal stripes, and vertical stripes. Tops that were juvenile and tops that were matronly. Pants that were too small and pants that were too big.

I was tickled by the empty hangers and sense of order that emerged.

That’s not to say I didn’t save a few sentimental items. The letter jacket I’ll never again wear in public. The black shirt I wore the day I got engaged. And the sparkly silver sweater I planned to wear the day I got engaged.

I like to make a distinction that I hope is a fair one: I’m not a hoarder, but I am a documenter. So I do save the kind of stuff that tends to collect dust beneath staircases. Movie ticket stubs. Birthday cards. Name badges from conferences and conventions. The kind of stuff that could go in a scrapbook – if I decided to take up scrapbooking one day.

I figure the Holy Father would understand. When he moved into the papal apartment, his collection of 20,000 books followed him. “For me it’s like being surrounded by friends, now that there are books on the shelf,” he said.

Toss or save?

It’s a crossroads many of us stand at this spring, as we prepare the house and soul for warmer weather and lighter accouterments.

To toss, in many ways, is to be relieved, to feel light and unfettered. But to save can mean being grounded, glued to tokens of a rich, well-lived life.

The Easter miracle illustrates both.

We are freed from the earthly shackles of sin, just as Jesus was unbound by the tomb. Yet we are fastened to that moment, so deeply rooted that we pick and press all the flowers that have blossomed from those seeds.

In Easter we celebrate history and novelty, responsibility and possibility.

Our closets may be full, but so are our hearts.

Heidi Montag has given new meaning to the concept of one-stop shopping. The 23-year-old reality TV star – one of those who is famous for being famous – underwent 10 plastic-surgery procedures in one day, as pin pointed in People magazine and now scrutinized online.

Among the 10 procedures, a few are predictable, while others involve regions you’d never imagine a young adult would need refined: neck liposuction, chin reduction and pinning her ears back. (“For the first time,” Montag gushes to People, “I can wear updos, instead of hiding [my ears] behind my hair.”)

The twisted psychology of her extreme makeover is as easy to trace as the black marks drawn on her pre-op body. “I’m competing against the Britney Spearses of the world,” she explains, lauding “the Heidi 2010 reinvention” and promising new versions in coming years.

She’s found inspiration on the pages of Us Weekly and In Touch, stashing away her favorite images, including shots of Angelina Jolie. (“She has those really high eyebrows, and I love them.”) She’ll find new ammunition in her quest “to feel perfect” this month, when Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit edition hits newsstands.
Their sandy sirens taunt average women, whose swimsuits and sundresses are tucked in top shelves, whose love handles are safely distanced from New Year’s resolutions and warm weather.

I’m told Sports Illustrated’s spreads are considered the classier end of swimsuit modeling, if such a thing as class is possible when you’re in a string bikini. Especially troublesome is the magazine’s use of body paint in lieu of swimsuits, the paint being code for nudity.

Indeed, a heap of distractions arrive in this short month, wedged between Miss America and the Academy Awards and complicated by Valentine’s Day. At every turn we measure ourselves – on scales, in mirrors, across cubicles, between Facebook profiles. We swing from famine to feast, from relief to remorse. We balance tangled expectations with reality checks, roses with thorns.

It is the perfect time to enter into Lent, to look inward and upward. This month’s readings guide our journey, reminding us that others “are occupied with earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven.”

St. Paul writes that Jesus “will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body.” That union is how we embody true beauty – not in the removal of pimples or the loss of weight. The pursuit of perfection is not only an impossible mission, it’s an undesirable one because our humanity is our lifeline to the savior.

“Therefore,” St. Paul concludes, “stand firm in the Lord.”

His charge is not easy when so many cultural forces attempt to sway and bend us. But to continually bend is to become weaker and weaker, which appears to be the true impact of Heidi Montag’s surgeries. Although she praised the results in her People interview, she repeatedly described herself as “fragile” – a telling statement of her physical and emotional well-being.

“I see an upgraded version of me,” she says. “It’s a new person, and I feel like almost all of the things I didn’t want to be and who I turned into kind of got chiseled away.”

The problem is Heidi is working in the wrong direction. She’s seeking inner peace from outer transformation. That canvas, of course, makes for quicker change. But the heavy lifting of Christianity, of Lent, and of life, begins inside. That’s where we do the real work and where we find the real joy.

It is nearly impossible to recognize Danny Cahill, the Oklahoma land surveyor, in NBC’s Biggest Loser. But if you look closely, you can see him in the corners of his smile and the familiar glimmer in his blue eyes – hints of the former man, eight months and 239 pounds ago.

Today the 40-year-old dad is a reality TV star, peddling an eponymous website and a hit single. “This is your second chance at life. Don’t you wait there for it,” he sings. “Don’t let this chance pass you by ’cause you are ready for it.”

It’s an apt soundtrack to the footage he has given us: sweating on the treadmill, crying to the camera, stepping onto the scale, pumping his fists in the air and hugging his family as confetti cascades.

I feel like a million bucks,” Danny told Meredith Vieira the morning after his victory. By losing 55 percent of his body weight, he has gained so much: cash, celebrity, confidence and, best of all, longevity.

Danny’s extreme weight loss makes him the Biggest Loser ever, a triumph we all can get behind right now.  As the century’s first decade gives way to the second, we’re feeling a heightened desire for turnaround, an itching to up the ante on our typical New Year’s resolve.

Time magazine has added to our urgency, bidding farewell, on a recent cover, to “The Decade From Hell.”

“Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post-World War II era,” Andy Serwer writes. “Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over.”

The magazine’s dramatic claim is laced with the promise, a subtitle, that the next decade will be better.

As Catholics we have cause for great hope – and a myriad of turnaround tales. The lives of the saints are full of second acts and second chances: heretics and hedonists, embezzlers and extortionists, gossips and gamblers and gang leaders who turn around and do great things for the glory of God. St. Augustine stopped denouncing the church. St. Olga stopped killing. And Mary Magdalene was freed of seven demons, becoming the first witness of Jesus’ resurrection.

Our merciful God has given us the grace of the sacraments and the power of reconciliation. “As far as the East is from the West,” David the Psalmist reassures us, “so far have our sins been removed from us.”

Just as 430-pound Danny Cahill has vanished, absolution leaves no trace of our former selves.

My favorite expression of that hope for transformation comes from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.”
What a sweet and simple phrase: things that have never been. Mountains that have never been climbed. Prayers that have never been uttered. Cures that have never been found. Babies that have never been born. Books that have never been written. Dreams that have never been imagined.

For as long as our history here, there is so much yet undone, waiting to be breathed and willed into life. This new decade. This new year. This new day.

Maybe it’s your turn for a turnaround.

The moment I uttered the words I knew they sounded silly: “What do you get the girl who has everything?”
Nothing, of course, suggests common sense. But the Pier 1 employee fielding my question saw I wasn’t letting that pesky force stand in my way, as I milled through paper lanterns, artificial apples and $3 bags of “mini river stones.”
She suggested the very thing I had sworn off, a bottle of wine, then pointed out a $22 walnut photo tray. This intrigued me: For someone with more pictures than walls, here was a new place to stuff snapshots.
I knew I was in a predicament, shopping for a friend who filled an entire bookshelf with Williams-Sonoma cookbooks. Years later not a dab of vegetable oil has stained their pages.
I probably should’ve flipped through Sky Mall, the airplane magazine that showcases the weirdest stuff you never knew you needed (and can’t afford): an Electronic Feng Shui Compass ($159.99), a 3-Day Talking Forecaster ($41.99), a Telekinetic Obstacle Course ($99.95). Online you can choose from 44 alarm clocks – ones with MLB and NFL scores, ones built into robots and drum sets and, for the impossible to rouse, a runaway clock that rolls around your bedroom and forces a blanket severance.
It got me thinking about the gifts we give – the things we can wrap, tape and tie, and the intangibles that mean the most. It seems we’re beginning to make that distinction, a hard-won lesson of the recession’s tail-end.  A new Consumer Reports holiday shopping poll finds that Americans are planning to cut back on spending but expect no subsequent drop in yuletide cheer. Sixty five percent of us plan to curb holiday expenses, while 87 percent await a Christmas that is “as happy or happier than last year.”
Perhaps we’re returning to the origin of the word “gift,” which is Middle English for “talent.” It pertains to a person’s capacities, not her funds. This Advent I challenge you to determine what you are uniquely suited to give – thanks to your job, your neighborhood, your family or your skill set – and offer it to someone who could use a lift.
Looking back on 2009, I remember the gifts that took time, not twenties. The neighbor who mowed my lawn. The Saturday morning Mom cleaned my house, readying it for company. Hugs from grandparents, voicemails I saved, emails I printed. And tucked in my journal, a stack of four thank-you notes from my soon-to-be sister-in-law, Jodie. “Thank you for the cutting board,” one reads. “But thank you especially for just being the wonderful person that you are.”
When Jodie’s dad, Denis, died last month, we were devastated. The morning of his funeral, between Ave Maria and Taps, our grief was heavy. Then we embarked on a tour of Busch Stadium, home of Denis’ beloved St. Louis Cardinals. As a teen Denis had worked as a Cardinals change boy and he later got his cousin Mickey a job there. Fifty four years later, Mickey is now the manager of stadium operations, and he led our tour.
We stepped out of the dugout and onto the field, a Technicolor scene: green grass, red cardinals, silver Arch and blue sky. It was one of those moments when heaven hugs earth. We all could feel Denis beaming down on us.
Mickey gave us an incredible gift that day: a deeper connection to Denis. We will cherish it with each passing year. That is the ultimate Christmas gift, begun by Mary’s brave yes: to accept life, nurture it and honor it.

It was a difficult decision for the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa to suspend its wild rice harvest last fall.

The Native American tribe in northern Minnesota shepherds Nett Lake, the world’s largest wild rice lake. Its harvest is a source of pride, identity, revenue and renown. To forgo an entire ricing season marked a major setback.

But the growing conditions had been poor – cold weather, little rain – and the tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, Conservation Committee and spiritual advisor agreed it would be best to close Nett Lake, allowing the unharvested rice to reseed the lake for the benefit of future crops.

“This is disappointing news,” the tribal chairman told a reporter, “but we have to remember that nature runs in cycles.”

He was right, and last year’s prudence allowed for this year’s prosperity: the best harvest in more than a decade. The lake yielded more than 1 million pounds of rich wild rice.

I got to see the large, colorful grain on a trip this week. I have been working mornings and nights, weekdays and weekends, and my getaway up north felt overdue. It wasn’t a long visit, but my packing revealed a desire for retreat: a journal, a prayer book, an Anna Quindlen novel, an Anne of Green Gables soundtrack, and a few blank greeting cards with Maya Angelou quotes and a dusting of gold.

I thought about the resistance Bois Forte must have faced in canceling a ricing season, the trumping of long-term benefits over short-term demands, the abiding respect for nature’s cycles. And I took a couple days off with no guilt. It may seem counterintuitive, but the tribe’s skipped season makes the case convincingly: rest ensures a more fruitful harvest.

So I enjoyed the scenery – the amber leaves, the leaping deer, the sense of autumn gracefully bending to winter. After a hot bath and a long sleep, I woke before the alarm sounded feeling refreshed.

I returned to an email from a colleague. “It feels like we’ve been going a million miles an hour lately,” she wrote.

As I scrolled through my favorite blogs, I paused at a fellow twenty-something’s post. “There hasn’t been much down time,” it began. “I kept thinking it was going to slow down eventually, but I think it’s not.”

The word “down” jumped out at me – slowing down, craving down time. So much of our daily grind is about being up: We wake up, stand up, show up, speak up, hurry up, follow up, buck up, clean up, check up, cheer up, change it up.

Maybe we all just need a little more down.

This month’s readings urge us to step back from “the anxieties of daily life” to “be vigilant at all times,” because workaholics will miss the Lord’s coming.

Our Holy Father echoes that message on his annual vacation, when he plays piano and strolls through the pines. Down time, Pope Benedict XVI has said, provides “an opportunity to draw closer to the Lord in prayer and thanksgiving.”

It is the perfect way to draw into the season and mindset of Thanksgiving. When I slow down, I can move beyond the year’s obvious blessings, the baby and bride who joined our family on the same September day, to relish the details: the way my grandma coos when she holds Abigail Grace, the way my dad smiles when Jodie walks into the room, the way our hearts keep expanding.

“Thank you” is the simplest, sweetest prayer. So slow down and sing it out.

Oprah imagined the comeback long before Whitney Houston stepped on her stage and delivered it.

She sang, “Oprah said, ‘Girl, do you know you’re loved?’ Now I know my own strength.” Oprah blinked away a tear and the audience screamed, and in that moment, Whitney’s triumph over addictive drugs became Oprah’s triumph over sagging ratings.

It was a classic Harpo exchange, one that managed to feel both commercial and spiritual. As the two women hugged, I thought about the transformations we cheer into being, clapping and whistling, waving brightly-colored poster boards that broadcast our confidence.

In my twenty-some years, I’ve been blessed with many cheerleaders, and lately, I’ve been more attuned to their impact, the way they spur along my pursuit of big dreams and small to-dos.

The other day, for instance, I told my dad that a National Public Radio editor is considering an essay of mine and has requested audio samples – something I’m a tad short on. Dad didn’t miss a beat, recalling a few 10-minute segments I did five years ago. “You’ve got radio experience! Did you tell him about those Relevant Radio interviews?”

His confidence gave me the strength to press send on the email I’d pieced together, to take the risk and make the leap.

Dad is also there to classify failures as flukes. “You just had an off day,” he said last month, after a softball game filled with strike-outs.

He pulled me out of my rut with batting practice. “You were watching the ball,” he said between pitches, “but you weren’t focusing on it.” After a few more whiffs, I put bat on ball. Then I made smoother strokes. The next game, I was back.

My mom also has cheered me along. She was there to listen to every story I wrote as a girl. Where there were heavy adverbs and too many participial phrases, Mom heard a burgeoning vocabulary and a creative mind. She listened to my clarinet, sipping her tea and trusting that “Three Blind Mice” would one day turn into Mozart. She believed scales would be followed by symphonies and flat notes would slide into tune, that Dr. Seuss would lead to Shakespeare, Little League to varsity, and tantrums to temperance.

She knew what practice could do, what braces could do, what a good night’s sleep could do, what time could do, and ultimately, what God could do.

This month’s readings illustrate the transformative power of God’s love, a God who counted each hair on our heads, the God who restored vision to the blind man, the God for whom “all things are possible.”

We never really outgrow the desire for gold stars and blue ribbons. The rallying cries of our cheerleaders mean even more in young adulthood, when doubts can be darker and more persistent. It is a novel juncture: We are old enough to recognize and appreciate their support, and we’re old enough to become cheerleaders to others, including our parents, blossoming into vibrant grandparents and active retirees.

When we demonstrate our belief in friends and relatives, classmates and colleagues, we invite them into a clearer sense of self, a picture that is closer to the way God sees them: cherished, resilient, whole.

How blessed we are by the ones who love us as sinners and believe in us as saints.

Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Inver Grove Heights, Minn. Email her at Christina@readchristina.com.

This is it.

This is the month that set the orbit for our entire year. We are gearing up for two events, which will happen in the span of a week, the blink of an eye: My younger brother, Tony, is getting married and my older sister, Angie, is having a baby.
The countdown we launched last winter, the number that felt so big and distant, is rapidly dwindling. Now we are scurrying around, setting things in place, whitening our teeth and watching our waistlines – especially Angie’s.
There is a headcount to finalize and a nursery to complete, plus final check-ins with the deejay and the doctor. We will try to keep it all together, but it is all so tightly wound: steamed dresses and high hopes, shined shoes and tangled nerves.
My final wedding task – scanning old photographs and arranging them into a slideshow – has made me aware of the swift passage of time. There is Tony, with all those freckles and the dimples in his upper cheeks. He is a ring bearer, a prom date, now a groom. There is Jodie, with those round brown eyes and that button nose, riding in a Huggies box, visiting Santa, traveling to South Africa, walking down the aisle. The snapshots play out just as the years did, in fast forward.
But my nostalgia isn’t wistful; it is tinged with cheer, a sense that these two people belong together and that this growing baby belongs in our family. What looks like change, in many ways, is a continuation of what has been: the same traditions, the same sacraments, the same stories and songs.
I was reminded of that last weekend, when my dad took Angie’s firstborn, 2-year-old Isaac, to the zoo we visited every summer as kids. Dad is still a superb guide, whistling at the orangutans and pointing out the tigers. Sparky the Seal performed the same tricks, and Isaac clapped from Dad’s lap.
We revisited the carousel we used to adore. Isaac looked timid on the big painted horse, but after making several rounds and finding us waving from the same spot each time, he finally broke into a smile. The band organ hummed Cat Stevens’ “Another Saturday Night,” and Dad sang along.
The next day the aunties threw Jodie a bridal shower, where we supplied her with towels and blankets and Tony trivia. I watched everyone greet her with genuine affection, and I knew, as Teresa wrote in her card, that Jodie already has become a part of our family, just like that little baby, whose face and name we long to know.
Isn’t that how life goes, that God showers down double blessings, and our thirsty souls are not only quenched, they are doused. We blink and quiver, stunned by how much the human heart can hold.
Pope Benedict XVI says our families provide “living images of God’s love” – flesh-and-blood examples of divine mercy and undeserved kindness. When we learn to share bedrooms and bathrooms, attention and dreams, we serve as a “sign and instrument of unity for the entire human race.”
This month my family will be thrilled by new additions and comforted by their familiar forms. We are building on what has come before, blessed and ordained by the same everlasting God.
Soon we’ll enter into a flurry of camera flashes and Hallmark cards, hugs and toasts, and somewhere between the chicken dance and the contractions, there will be grace pouring down.

Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Inver Grove Heights, Minn. Email her at christina@readchristina.com.