Catholic Herald

Implementing a Twitter firewall at home is a bit like asking a roommate to hide your Halloween candy.

It is an act of surrender and of conquest. What you lack in self control you make up for in self knowledge.

My self-imposed Twitter sabbatical has been a good move, setting my summer on a sunnier course. More than 200 million people use the website, firing off tweets of 140 characters or fewer.

But me?

I’m ready for a break. I’d like to think longer thoughts.

I decided to seize the summer, vowing to replace my aimless web surfing with creative endeavors. Less technology, more art.

On Memorial Day I bought a $16.95 sketchpad, cringing at the price – no sale, no coupon – while relishing the splurge. The hard, black cover and thick pages dignified my work. Soon I was drawing teacups and peacock feathers, tilting my head and smiling inside.

Later that week I memorized some poetry, which I hadn’t done since high school Shakespeare. I’ve been reciting the verses all summer, and each time it’s like unwrapping a Hershey’s Kiss.

I assembled my clarinet, read in the porch and journaled my heart out – 103 pages since Memorial Day. It’s much more honest when no one else is reading and you’re not secretly vying to pick up followers. How often life morphs into a popularity contest – and how often we play along.

But the most formal artistic undertaking of my summer was also the most foreign: taking a stained-glass window class through St. Paul, Minn., community education.

Oh, to be a student again, experiencing that same old arc of emotions that makes you feel so young: thrilled to get an email from the instructor, anxious to depart for the first class, empowered to master a new skill.

I’m one of five students gathering on Monday nights to cut glass and solder lead. One student looks to be 20. Two appear close to 60. And we all look happy to be there. We want to make art.

Before the class began, I’d put a lot of thought into my design, dreaming up intricate patterns and imagining them as birthday gifts. But stained glass is more about skill than artistry.

I like the physicality of it – standing there for three hours, leaning into an oak work bench and hearing the sizzle of severing glass. It is a welcome antidote to a day at the computer, a pleasant switch from head to hands.

I panicked when I cut my longest section of glass and veered off the line. “Life Goes On” was playing in the studio, and Peggy, the student across from me, helped me through it.

When I cut the wrong side of the glass, I beckoned our instructor, Bob. “I think I made a mistake,” I told him.

“We don’t say that in art,” he said.

Later we slid our glass into lead, which made our imperfect pieces fit together perfectly. “It hides a lot of sinning,” Bob said.

I thought of 1 Peter 4:8: “Above all let your love for one another be intense, because love covers a multitude of sins.”

God is the One who takes all our broken pieces and turns them into art. He is the sunlight that makes our stained glass radiate.

I’m seeing the world in sharper lines and richer hues this summer – and it is one unspoken, unceasing thank you to the Creator, who looks at everything he has made and finds it very good.

Leave it to Grandpa to put things in perspective.

It was half way through our second annual Christmas party, and I was flitting around, refilling glasses and collecting empty plates.

Preparing for the party had kept me moving – wrapping presents, baking shortbread cookies, stringing 3,200 white lights on our Blue Spruce. Not exactly meditating to Silent Night.

I brought some water to Grandpa, sitting in the corner facing everyone, and sat down beside him.

“Look,” he instructed me, his blue eyes misty. “What do you see?”

I scanned the kitchen: nodding and laughing. Then I looked at Grandpa. Somehow he had stepped outside the scene and was observing it from a distance.

“No ill will,” he said, answering his own question. “Everyone’s happy. You see love.”

In that moment, I glimpsed it too, rising above the particulars and seeing the picture in broader strokes. Here we all were, shoveled out from the snow, marking another Christmas together, bound by blood and by love, standing in the sacred space where duty meets desire.

It was the perfect Christmas gift, to step outside the party like the Ghost of Christmas Present and then re-enter, relishing all the little things that had seemed ordinary a moment before.

That is Grandpa’s magic. He has a painter’s grateful eye, sharpened 10 years ago by a heart attack.  Surgeons patched the hole in his heart, and he steadily recovered, embracing each day as a gift from above.

Three years later, at 73, Grandpa taught himself to play clarinet, putting numbered tape on keys to correspond with his fingering chart. Within months he was playing the second movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.

He is a dark-skinned, blue-eyed artist, the fifth child of a Florentine immigrant raised in the shadow of the Duomo.

Grandpa spent his career painting Catholic churches, refinishing statues of saints and applying gold leaf. Now he is enjoying retirement, playing in the St. Paul Police Band, fishing at his cabin and watching “Jeopardy” with Grandma. (She would be a brilliant contestant, he insists.)

He’s on his second pacemaker and awaiting the birth of his third great grandchild. He began writing a book called “Life Begins At 70.”

He’s come to love reading, and in March he wrote to World War II P.O.W. Louie Zamperini, the subject of Lauren Hillenbrand’s bestseller “Unbroken.”

“God sure must have had a mission for you in life to put you through so much,” he wrote. “We will probably never meet in this life but look forward to meeting you in God’s heaven.”

In May Grandpa gave a toast at my cousin’s wedding. “May earth and heaven mingle,” he told the newlyweds. I’ve seen him cry at every grandchild’s wedding, and that evening, he found the words for his tears.

In June Grandpa turned 80. We celebrated on the second Saturday of the month, which happened to be the day the cottonwood trees had been buffeted by just enough heat and just enough wind to unleash their flossy seeds. Wrapped in cotton clusters, they are designed to travel long distances.

So is Grandpa.

To experience 80 years and rejoice in each new day is his singular joy. He has taught me that heaven brushes earth – in paint strokes and clarinet notes, in written words and spoken prayers, in first Communions, in every Communion. And when those moments happen, we hold them to our hearts, never quite the same.

Being Miss America is a lot of pressure for 18-year-old Teresa Scanlan.

But then, when her mom was 18, she faced a lot of pressure too: She was pregnant and unwed.

Teresa learned this last September, when the Nebraska native was preparing for the 2011 Miss America pageant. Her half-brother, Jerod, had called unexpectedly. It was his 31st birthday, his wife was expecting their firstborn, and it seemed like a good time to reach out.

Teresa was working in her basement office when her mom, Janie, came down to tell her the news. Janie had gone on to get married and have six children, whom she had never told about Jerod, assuming she would never hear from him and that it would be easier on them that way.

Teresa was stunned.

“It was strange for me to even imagine that,” she told me. “I thought, ‘There’s no way. This has to be some kind of joke, some kind of misunderstanding. All you know of your family for 17 years has suddenly changed.”

The news offered Teresa insight on her mother. It hadn’t been easy for Janie being Catholic, pregnant and 18 in Wichita, Kan., and the pregnancy was kept a secret, even to relatives. With her parents’ blessing, Janie decided to give the baby to the Catholic Adoption Agency. She wanted him to have a stable, loving family and every opportunity for success.

When Jerod was born, Janie held his tiny hand, wrote him a letter and said goodbye. “It was so, so hard for her,” Teresa said. “I have all the more respect and love for her understanding that now.”

Shortly after Jerod’s phone call, he and Janie decided to meet at an Olive Garden in Lincoln, Neb. (“When you’re here,” says the chain’s slogan, “you’re family.”)  Janie brought three of her daughters, and they spotted Jerod, they engulfed him in hugs.

Over breadsticks and pasta, they talked for hours, landing on tidbits from three decades, studying each other’s faces and lives. “When he smiles, there are my mom’s dimples,” Teresa said.

Soon the big-hearted teen was viewing the situation for what it was: evidence of God’s providence, that Jerod would be raised by such devoted Catholic parents and that he would be reunited with his birth mom and her vibrant, faith-filled family.

“I’m just excited to be a part of his family and for him to be a part of ours,” Teresa said. “I always wanted a bigger family. I didn’t think six was enough.”

In January Teresa became Nebraska’s first Miss America, the youngest in decades to claim the title. “I finally realized that it is those times when we’re least prepared, when we’re least ready, when we have those doubts and fears – that’s when God uses us,” she said. “He takes our feeble little attempts and turns them into amazing things.”

One week after being crowned Miss America, Teresa became an aunt. Jerod’s wife delivered a healthy baby girl named Marilyn, who has an incredible tiara-toting role model. Teresa hopes to one day become a Supreme Court justice.

Meeting Jerod changed her. She is a young woman raised in a pro-life family who has now lived it.

Being pro-life is an intimate experience, one that rewires families, homes and hearts – a shuffling of bedrooms and priorities, a clutching of faith. And it’s founded on a beautiful thing: hope for the future.

When you think of Teresa and her delicate niece, how can you feel anything but?

Another batch of graduates is nearing the finish line, and preparations are humming along — party planning and robe ordering, i dotting and t crossing.

And speech writing, of course.

That’s my favorite part of the pomp and circumstance: the prospect of a send-off speech that summarizes the past four years and prepares for all the remaining ones. An address that wipes away distractions — sweltering heat, silly stilettos, stiff chairs — and makes us all feel promising and powerful. A boldface life manual.

My hope is to be surprised, to be challenged and delighted by something original, free of cliché and the standard quote recipe (JFK + MLK + Helen Keller).

I’ve collected my favorite commencement addresses, stored as hardback books and YouTube clips, and I turn to them on foggy days.
Last night I revisited what may be the best one, Dr. Seuss’s rollicking speech turned book, “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” It was published in 1990, the year before he died, and has enjoyed one of the longest stays on The New York Times bestseller list, landing there 178 weeks — nearly three and a half years.

It was nothing like I had remembered.

I remembered the rhyming fanfare, the mountain moving and “banner flip-flapping.” The part about my success being 98 percent guaranteed. I suppose that’s what I wanted to hear.

But reading it again, I saw it more clearly, not as a celebratory book but a cautionary one.

Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don’t. Because sometimes you won’t. I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.”

The books is a tour through pitfalls and potholes, which makes it a valuable read for the post-graduate, those of us who have traveled far enough to have hit some.

Dr. Seuss doesn’t sugar coat, noting that life’s detours are lengthy, that you’ll “grind on for miles” and “hike far” and you’ll row “up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak.”

The two-page spread that struck me most illustrates “The Waiting Place,” which looks like one big, drawn-out staring contest: long lines, long faces, blank expressions. There, people wait for “the mail to come, or the rain to go, or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow.”

It’s a wake-up call for 20-somethings like me, caught in the drift between graduation and The Rest Of My Life, floating between the milestones of 21 and 30, settling for The Good Enough For Now.

Somewhere along the line, the important and the urgent are divorced. A bad job market takes the blame. Grad school slows our pace. And busyness masquerades as meaning and purpose.

Suddenly, we’re in The Waiting Place, sitting on stories and leads and invitations, holding the keys but afraid to unlock the door.
NO!” Dr. Seuss screams out. “That’s not you! Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying.”
So join me today: stop waiting, start doing.
We walk the path of the saints, who turned dreams into deeds — whether there was rain or snow, whether they heard yes or no. We heed God’s call to action, his summons to use our talents and not bury them. And we hold the banner high, with a Seuss-like bravado, so the new graduates can see where to go.

The youth choir Christina Green belonged to performs just once a month, on the second Sunday at the 9 o’clock Mass. And sure enough, the day after the 9-year-old was killed in Tucson, Ariz., the youngest victim of the shooting targeting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, St. Odilia’s youth choir sang.

It was Jan. 9, the feast of the baptism of the Lord, and there was just one baptism at that Mass, a 9-year-old girl.

That wasn’t lost on Fr. Richard Troutman, pastor of St. Odilia.

“You realize how small they are,” he told me, “how much potential they have, how you really want to protect a 9-year-old.”

Fr. Troutman has been a priest since 1968, yet he approached that Mass as if it were his first, putting in extra prayer and still feeling a bit unprepared, like “a work in progress” pastor. He had heard the gun shots the day before and he was just as shocked as everyone else.

The first reading was done by a child, and the words from Isaiah seemed fitting. “Thus says the Lord: Here is my servant, whom I uphold … He shall bring forth justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street.”

In his homily Fr. Troutman spoke longer than usual, preaching about mystical union with God, a state that is preceded by unnecessary death. Baptism propels us toward community engagement and service, he said, which leads to events like “Congress on your Corner,” the public gathering where Christina was killed.

Then came the prayer of the faithful, with one petition for all of Saturday’s victims and one for Christina.
Communion was the high point, when Christina’s friends in the youth choir performed “We Are One Body,” an apt anthem for a devastated community being fed by the Eucharist. “We do not stand alone,” the grade schoolers sang. “He who believes in me will have eternal life.”

There it all was inside that sloping church on the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains, where the desert heat meets the snow-capped peaks: darkness and light; silence and song; grief and hope; one more baptized member, one less.

“Faith and doubt go really close together,” Fr. Troutman said on the eve of Christina’s wake. “God is the God of death and resurrection.”

Christina’s very arrival, born on 9/11, demonstrated that strange juxtaposition. Her mom says she took pride in being a grace note to a dark day. And surely Christina feels the same way about the loving acts performed after the Tucson shooting: parents who extended their kids’ bedtimes, giving an extra kiss or cookie; neighbors who offered heaping helpings of pasta and prayer.

The older I get the more I accept the contradictions in life, understanding how tears and laughter can mingle, springing from what feels like the same origin. Life’s contrasts bring meaning, just as a symphony has crescendos and decrescendos, rests and triplets.

I’m also coming to appreciate the richness and rhythm of the liturgical calendar. Sometimes we fall into stride with it, naturally matching its tenor. Sometimes its melody feels miles away, but we hear the invitation and jump in at a key change, singing out or humming along.

This short month is hinged on Valentine’s Day, and in Christina’s honor we should interpret it broadly, to gather all the love we can, to nurture it, celebrate it and act on it.

Nothing feels like a better bargain than a one-cent book, so I always click on Amazon’s used category.

Not only does it save me money, it comes with the added benefit of footprints from a previous reader – marks flagging the sentences that struck someone somewhere, a person who can unknowingly offer me a flashlight for the story ahead.

I also look for clues to identity – a library stamp, a cursive inscription – and marvel at the book’s journey.

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s end-of-life reflection “The Gift Of Peace” was passed from a daughter to a mother, then back to a daughter from a mother – with Goodwill in between. When I read the note inside, dated April 1998, “To Mom – All my love, Mary,” I knew a similar love brought it to me.

Then there’s the “Chicken Soup For the Soul: Living Your Dreams” edition, copyright 2003. Amazon offers 121 used copies – 18 for a penny – but mine came through Sam’s Club, where it sold for $7.47, down from its cover price of $12.95, and was later consigned for a dollar.

The first chapter includes a goal sheet for the reader to fill out. A previous owner played by the rules, leaving secrets in black ink.

He vowed to triple his income of $30,000 and lose half of his 240 pounds. “My ideal soul mate is: someone I can talk with, share things we like to do together,” he wrote in the book. “My right livelihood is: be my own boss. Other dreams I have are: a home on a lake.”

It’s not just hand-me-down books that become hand-me-down wisdom. As I orient to 2011, I’m thinking of all the things we share: recipes and knock-knock jokes, bobby pins and bug spray. Parking spaces and prayer cards, passwords and priests. How impossible a year would be if I were left to my own bag of tricks.

Giving something small can have a big effect, cracking open the heart and sharpening a sense of purpose. I know for sure that generosity invites grace, and I’m determined to welcome the new year with upturned palms, as the cheerful giver God loves. When we share we are drawn into community, practical support underlined by neighborly affection.

Our year begins with Epiphany, when the Magi from the East follow the star. Along the way they share bread and blankets. Their fellowship guides and sustains them, carrying them to Bethlehem where they drop to the ground in worship of the Christ Child. “Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.”

We are prepared for this well-known Gospel by a short second reading, when St. Paul tells the Ephesians about “the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for your benefit.” And therein is the key to it all, that we are merely stewards of the blessings and crock pots and laptops in our homes. We do not own them; we are temporary keepers. In that spirit we do not count or collect but give freely.

When we embrace the call to community and stewardship, it becomes easier to journey toward the star. As you do, look out for the pilgrims who fall into stride with you, if even for an hour. And together, leave bread crumbs for the ones who will follow.

In the tiny town of Bovey, Minn., four years into World War I, an old man peddling foot scrapers knocked on Eric Enstrom’s door.

Eric was 43, a Swedish immigrant who had bought land, opened a photography studio and raised his kids to speak perfect English. He fed the peddler and studied him. There was something striking about the man, a gentle strength in his deep wrinkles and straggly beard.

Sitting before a loaf of bread and a bowl of porridge, the peddler closed his eyes and dropped his head into his folded hands. Eric flashed his bulb and pressed his accordion-like Bellows camera.

Poof!

“Grace” was born, the picture that has been hung in kitchens and living rooms across the world, a call to gratitude, a symbol of faith that is both sturdy and hushed.

Eric had long embraced its meaning, leading his family in grace before every meal. His third born, Warren, tagged along on fishing trips and photo shoots of Minnesota’s Scenic State Park. Warren watched his dad shoot panoramas, turning a slow circle that seemed to sweep in every detail.

When Warren departed for England to serve in World War II, he packed a 116 camera. “I took quite a few,” he said, “but not as many as I should have.”

The photographer’s son can still see the bus he rode when the Nazis captured him and the machine gun fire that granted him an exit three days later.

His favorite war-time snapshot – a black and white that is missing from his album but vivid in his mind – shows a uniformed Warren sitting by the entry of a small Austrian church right after the war ended. “I look pretty happy,” he said. “Oh, God, the war was over.”

Warren went on to work as a construction superintendent, and throughout his life, “Grace” was never far from him. He was once given more than 200 pictures and he framed every one before sharing them with friends. His wife embroidered the image. “She won first prize in that category at the Texas State Fair,” he boasted.

Decades later, when she passed away and Warren began receiving food from Meals On Wheels, a volunteer noticed the picture in his room and was inspired to feature it in a promotional postcard.

Today Warren is 95, one of five or six residents at Juliette Fowler Homes in Dallas who hung a “Grace” portrait in his apartment to make it feel like home. He’s given talks about the photograph and hands out a “Grace” brochure to everyone who will accept it.

Promoting the picture gives him purpose. “I think that’s the most pleasant thing I’ve done,” he said, “except my wife and I went to Hawaii once.”
Isn’t that how grace works? It comes as a flicker, a sprinkle of the sacred. But at any moment, any one of us can capture a shot of it, creating a permanent record, a legacy that inspires generations.

Last weekend brought our first snow of the season. I woke and grabbed my camera, shooting the old oak that had been made new. Friends exercised the same impulse, blogging in their pajamas. Deep down we understood what Pope John Paul II wrote to artists, that beauty is “an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future.”

The holidays can be dizzying, but we have the ability to press pause, to wade through scattered wrapping paper, grab a camera and process the world through its grateful lens.

The question on the cover of the November issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, caught my eye: “What’s your true calling?”

It appears beside a pared-down Oprah Winfrey – which is to say her fake eyelashes are less dramatic. The cosmetics are softer: brown eye shadow, peach lipstick. Wrapped in an ivory sweater, Oprah’s hands are drawn to her heart. She’s practically down-to-earth – except for the walnut-sized emerald on her right hand.

“True calling,” of course, is a safe, secular way of saying vocation, and the words have the same origin. Vocation comes from Latin – the noun “summons,” based on the verb “to call.” It is, by definition, a call or summons, something with an irresistible pull – not a could-do or a should-do but a must-do.

The life you were born to lead was designed by a detail-oriented Creator who counted the hairs on your head and stamped you with unmatchable fingerprints.

As Catholics we identify the big-picture vocations to marriage or religious life. When it comes to the smaller-scale vocations, a person’s work, the options are multiplied exponentially and things get fuzzy. Suddenly it’s time to declare a major, submit a resume and navigate a labyrinth of salaries, superiors and suits.

Few jobs provide a perfect fit, satisfying that quiet hunger to use all your gifts and talents at once, heart and head in concert. Whether it is designing a house, building it, decorating it, selling it or raising a family in it, a vocation feels both important and fun, exhausting and life giving.

We can delay or deny, but the summons of a vocation cannot be escaped. I was reminded of this last week when I indulged in an hour-long massage. The lights were dimmed and ocean waves sounded, and I closed my eyes, preparing to shut up and shut down – until a nagging curiosity bobbed in my brain.

Where was my masseuse from? Where does she live? What’s her family like? I lobbed a few questions her way, and as she massaged my neck, I made eye contact several times, which required a lot of my eyeballs.

I silently scolded myself then decided to accept the Chatty Kathy attack. I am an eternal reporter. So be it.

My masseuse proved just as committed to her vocation. Sitting beneath a framed diploma, Paula told me she’d been called to her industry as a teen. She rattled off the health benefits of massage and dismissed her lengthy commute.

The next day I watched Chilean miners emerge from their deep desert tomb. The second rescue, 39-year-old Mario Sepulveda, gave an early interview to CNN, professing a renewed commitment to his vocations of marriage and mining.

He resisted the celebrity awaiting him. “I want to be treated as Mario Sepulveda, as a worker, as a miner,” he said. “I want to continue to work because I think I was born to die tied to the anvil.”

Then came the marriage bit, Mario’s counsel against divorce. “You’ve got to talk. Don’t put an end to things just like that. Love is the most beautiful thing in the world. …I’m going to live a long, long time, to have a new beginning with my son, my dear wife…and my daughter…”

So go, pull yourself out of your own rocky entrapments. Follow your love and embrace your loved ones. It’s your true calling.

I had relegated shepherds to the unicorn file, somewhere near the hunch-backed blacksmith and the whistling milk man. They were the stuff of Mother Goose lore. So it was surprising to discover actual shepherds when I visited the Holy Land.

I was riveted by the sloping landscape of Jesus’ ministry. Two tones checkered our vistas: crusty white limestone and fluttering blue-green olive trees. And there, among the jagged hills, was a man tending sheep. He was dressed in brown and his head was covered. He appeared hot and lonely.

I asked our guide Wisam, a Catholic Palestinian, about that line of work. It looked undesirable. But Wisam said shepherds cherish their lifestyle and their work, which is often passed on for generations. The meager wages don’t deter them.

Wisam then shared a fascinating element of shepherding. If a sheep persistently wanders, he said, “a good shepherd” will break its leg and carry it until it heals. That physical closeness creates a strong, lasting bond, and the sheep may go on to be a leader among the flock.

What a powerful insight for us wandering humans, whose self sufficiency so easily leads us astray. We bemoan the times we are broken, but if they send us onto our knees and into the shepherd’s arms, we can consider them an abiding blessing.

We live in a culture that produces lost sheep – Heidi Montags, Levi Johnstons, Lindsay Lohans. It confuses attention with respect, wealth with success, and pleasure with contentment. The ravenous reality-TV circuit spotlights the weird and the weepy, the loony and the loopy, seeking characters, not character, making “good TV” out of bad people.

Their 15 minutes come at a great personal cost: severed engagements and marriages, ruptured friendships and families. They clamor for the camera and play the game, and, in doing so, lose faith – in self, in neighbor and in God.

This month St. Luke reminds us that our good shepherd would leave 99 sheep to seek out one missing and rejoice when it is found.

The same Gospel reading chronicles the prodigal son’s return. For years when I heard this passage from the pulpit I identified with the faithful older son. I was the girl showing up every day, sitting in the front row, raising my hand. What a raw deal the older son got!

Then one day in my late teens or early 20s, a light bulb flashed: What if I was the younger prodigal daughter? Suddenly I was recalling the times I’d received undue credit. It was a jarring paradigm shift, a revelation that redrew all the lines of my comfortable theology.

Of course each of us needs the unfailing devotion of a good shepherd – to be singled out, chased after and cared for.

When I look back on the year, I think of the people who have been broken and carried. The widow who has continued her husband’s nightly prayer ritual with their three young children. The dad trying to hold on to his house, who is still quick to tickle and tease his kids. The mom who lost her job the same month she rushed her asthmatic toddler to the ER. The latest post on her blog is a request for others’ prayer petitions, an offer to return the good graces that had been shown her.

Their pain produced a stronger bond with the good shepherd, and now the rest of us are drawing closer too.

It was 4 p.m., and hesitance was creeping in.

“Ten-year high-school reunion,” she tweeted. “To go or not to go?”

A single mom who had just been let go was facing a chance to prove she had not let herself go – and seeking a little courage online.

She played punk rock, applied extra blush and pinned on a homemade bridal hairpiece. Three hours later she was primped and pumped up. “I’m gonna rock it,” she typed.

There is nothing like a high-school reunion to force a long look in the mirror and the hard math of a decade, the difference between expectation and reality.

My Evite sent me flipping through the closet and shopping on the web. I’ve been watching RSVPs trickle in, tallying maiden names versus married names.

I got a little preparation last month at a wedding that doubled as a college reunion. I was taken aback by the range of social circles in attendance. Someone had lost 70 pounds. Someone had lost two front teeth. Someone had hired a life coach.

At one point, a cluster of women compared wedding rings. “I don’t have a ring,” the lone single among them said, “but I just ran a marathon!”

Isn’t that the impulse, to wave away perceived shortcomings and loudly broadcast achievement?

In the movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” impact trumps accuracy. Asked what she’s been up to, Michele stammers: “Oh, OK. Um, I invented Post-Its.”

The gap between what was once imagined and what was actually accomplished can overwhelm. Undone items pop in the brain first – and stick. A neighbor lady raising two boys and forging a rewarding career refused to attend a reunion because she hadn’t become a lawyer, as she had vowed to do.

Status makes for easy answers, but they miss the heart of the matter. The real feats are subtler, defying measurement. Good relationships with your parents. A strong prayer life. An eagerness to rise from bed no matter what work awaits.

What a decade promises is vastly different from what it delivers. At 18 I couldn’t envision what it would look like to flesh out those generic resume subheads, education and experience, how they would add color and interest to every day. I couldn’t grasp the way stamps on a passport would lift flat countries into relief and rewire my thinking. I didn’t believe the tall, dark and handsome groom I dreamed of would indeed arrive, bringing intelligence and affection and teaching me what true partnership entails.

In the decade after high school, I thought I would have traveled faster and farther. But I got depth and quality instead of speed and range. God is good.

This month’s readings put things in perspective, illustrating the chasm between status and success. St. Paul urges the Colossians to “think of what is above, not of what is on earth,” and St. Luke tells the parable of the rich farmer who builds bigger barns to store all his grain.

“But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for all who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.

Those insights don’t fit on a name tag or in a five-minute what-have-you-been-up-to talk. But if you have stored up divine treasures, then you can consider the past decade a resounding success and walk into that reunion with your head held high.