joy

Fly: An Easter People

lpatangan

Hi all~

As we go into the Easter Triduum I wanted to share this post with you. Holy Week reminds me so much of life. The coexistence of hardship, sacrifice, and sorrow with the joy of our faith, redemption, and forgiveness.

How can both things be true? How can life be so maddeningly hard, painful, and desolate and yet still be such a gift of grace with its merciful laughter, love, and promise? Jesus’ death is so sad and yet opens the door to a glory like no other. It’s really fantastic. 

So whatever season of life you find yourself in or however many seasons of life you are experiencing simultaneously, may you take this Easter Sunday to feel nothing but unparallel joy. Alleluia is your song, sweet friend. And, blessedly, it’s mine too. ~ love, Lara

P.S. — I just received an email from my publisher, Our Sunday Visitor,  that they are running a special on my book, Simple Mercies, until Friday. The book is $5 which is just about as cheap as dirt (unless you buy fancy potting soil kind of dirt. Then it’s even more of a bargain!)

Maybe pick some up for Divine Mercy Sunday gifts, book club, or heck, everyone you know!  Here’s their message and link: Get these books for only $5 each through Friday when you use promo code FIVE23 at checkout. Get free shipping (in the continental United States) when you spend $20 or more!

Fly: An Easter People

Sometimes I feel like a tiny bird with an injured leg from an encounter with the claws of a crazed cat.  I know how lucky I am to be here and how much worse things could be; yet, still, I carry a limp from my wounds that sometimes keep me tethered to the ground.  (I might start telling people that when they ask me how I am doing.)

Life is so messy and most of us try terribly hard to tidy what we can.  In its constancy, life can feel like a marathon, and like the tiny bird, we merely hop along.  One of my favorite quotes is from Saint John Paul II who said: “We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.”  It conveys such unparallel joy – a skyward ascent of heavenly praise.  It hardly makes me think of hopping.

Indeed, we are an Easter people and we are meant to rise.  Lent is a time to unload the burden of sin we carry.  It’s a time to shed the miscellaneous and the excess.  It is a time to reconnect to God by disconnecting from our distractions.  Sometimes the Lenten experience feels empowering like a strenuous workout or the purging of an overstuffed closet.  Other times, it just feels hard.  All the emptying, sacrificing, and sustaining from a 40-day reflection can feel too austere for a hallelujah song.  No sweet little bird chirps that indicate winter’s hibernation is over.  Just a half-hearted hop, hop.  Yet Easter is coming – not just at the end of this Lenten season.  Also, at the end of our lives.  In between, in the thicket of life’s doing and undoing, we rise.  Amidst the momentary affliction of life’s messiness, we remain upright.  “Arise, for it is your task, and we are with you; be strong and do it,” (Ezra 10:4).  Even when it’s hard or feels impossible — when there is not enough money, not enough time, not enough of your poor tired soul to go around — be strong and rise.

Jesus did the impossible.  He did the miraculous.  He transformed death.  The finality of it was made infinite.  Hallelujah is our song.  It may not always feel like it, but our time on earth is nothing but a rising.  We are enduring people.  Our suffering does not define us. Our injuries do not bind us.  Challenges, adversity, and wounds cannot stop our ascent.  “Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise,” (Micah 7:8).  We are the Easter people.  It’s not just Christ’s resurrection we have to celebrate, it is the possibility of our own.  Easter isn’t just a day culminating the end of Lent.  It’s an everyday.  The shedding of our burdens, the surrendering of suffering at the foot of his cross, and the unification of our souls to his, is what makes our rising possible.  It’s what helps us to remember that even in our brokenness, we are an Easter people and we still have wings to fly.

Hallelujah. 

Dance Like Everyone is Watching!

lpatangan

Hi all ~ We are a few weeks into a new year and maybe it’s not feeling as shiny as you hoped. So, I hope this post encourages you to find joy no matter how messy or imperfect your days may be. As Christians, we have so much to celebrate – so may you dance (and live) like everyone is watching. ~ Love, Lara

My dance resume is so scant it wouldn’t fill a Post-it note. I took a month of ballet when I was seven-years-old, and a few years later a private jazz class that culminated in a duet with my teacher to Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York. The best thing about it was of course the red sequins and fish-net stockings my nine-year-old self wore with scandalous pride. Other than that, my dance career consisted mostly of inebriated moments on the sticky dance floor of some bar where an intoxicating mix of youthful angst and heady independence collided in manic, exuberant moves that made me feel like a rock star but probably looked like I was having a grand mal seizure.

My only other notable dance moments usually occurred when Gloria Gaynor belted out “I Will Survive,” as part of the DJ’s dubious playlist at a wedding. Without thought, I would abruptly end my conversation and hustle out on the dance floor as if it was my sole mission to join in solidarity with the other women to celebrate the rising that comes from a bad breakup.  Again, why do they play this at weddings?

Last year, I added another bullet point to my dance resume – a dance class at the YMCA. This is the kind of class where you have to channel your inner preschooler who has more energy than inhibition and more acceptance than austere ambition. At the start of class, the teacher says that the only rule is to have fun. I would add to try not to run into anyone and most importantly, don’t look at yourself in the mirror. (I’ve done both.) The woman I ran into was gracious; the mirror – not so much. When I saw my reflection, I went from feeling like one of the Fly Girls from that 90s show “In Living Color,” to freezing like I just saw the snake-haired Gorgon, Medusa, and turned to stone out of utter fear of my incongruous boogie moves. Trust me, it’s better to just embrace the delusion that you are a Fly Girl, or Rockette, or Beyonce. Read more →

How to Not Feel so Bad

lpatangan

I can’t sing any better than I can do math. Still, I love music. Recently I was thinking of the song, “My favorite things,” sung by Julie Andrews in the 1965 film adaptation of the musical, “The Sound of Music.” I was thinking about it because right now life is wrought with many of my unfavorite things: death, illness, doctors appointments, moody teenagers, indecision, dirty counters, and the swirl of controversy over everything from Covid to the environment.

Sometimes it all gets to be too much. Truly.

As this was the case recently, I found myself obsessing about hydrangeas. Every week this summer I cut two blooms to enjoy inside. It made me happy to see the plump pink flower amid the inevitable sprinkle of paper and crumbs on my counter. Last week, I cut the last two remaining good blooms. And, in the midst of planning funerals and rescheduling appointments and moving my son into his new apartment, and trying to keep up with the ordinary minutia of my day, I felt an urgency to buy more hydrangea plants.

I couldn’t stand the thought of not having any blooms to greet me the following week. More than ever, I needed this simple quiet joy.

Eight hydrangea bushes later (and an exhausted husband that doesn’t understand why I can’t just find joy in something that doesn’t involve him doing manual labor in the hottest month of the year) I’ve thought a lot about being joyful even in the midst of trials.

Part of me wondered if I was looking for joy in the wrong place since I know that lasting joy comes from God not the delicate blooms of flowers. Then I decided that was like ignoring the lifeboat in the middle of the storm. Right now, for me, hydrangeas are a lifeboat.

They are among a few of my favorite things.

I know they won’t solve a single problem or relieve a single ache of my heart. Yet, they remind me how important it is to find joy wherever I can and that no joy is too small or unimportant to make a difference. They remind me that life is precious and we are not promised tomorrow’s bloom. The hydrangeas remind me that even when they will go dormant in the next few months, that like happier days, they will return.

Even during troubled times, perhaps especially during troubled times, it’s important for us to remember the joy that is promised to us as children of God. “So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take that joy from you,” (John 16:22).

We have so many opportunities in daily life to experience genuine contentment. In nature and our neighbor, we are reminded that joy isn’t in the perfect; it’s in the perspective. Very often, it’s in the simplest things. Look for it. Hold on to it. Plant it if you must. It’s a great mercy. You are worth whatever effort it takes.

We don’t have to let our worry and hardship spread with the tenacity of strangling weeds. We just have to hold tight to the seeds of our faith that remind us of the promise of his everlasting joy. Until that day, try to remember a few of your favorite things.

And, then you won’t feel so bad.

Hi all~ I felt like a kid waiting to unwrap presents on Christmas day, waiting for my husband to plant my new hydrangeas. Of course, life being life-y, it started raining while we were planting. Determined, we soldiered on (me, in my hooded rain jacket, and him, in his wet muddy clothes — because he refused my merciful offers to get him proper rain attire). When I saw lightning strike a few houses away, I figured the Lord was teaching me patience– again. Like most things, no matter how messy, wet, or tiring the work was, it eventually got done. But now where there was once mud, joy blooms!

I would love to know what brings you joy right now? If perhaps, Simple Mercies is among a few of your favorite things, or even among your “good enough” list of things (I’m not proud), please consider leaving a review on Amazon!

 

 

Book Launch: Simple Mercies

lpatangan

There was an amazing article in The Florida Times-Union this past Sunday about the year I spent doing works of mercy. Please check it out: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/local/2021/05/21/turning-40-led-jacksonville-woman-year-service-writing-book/5091085001/t

The author did such an amazing job capturing the intention of the year and of the book, Simple Mercies. 

I spoke at my home parish this past Saturday and celebrated with a book launch reception afterward. It was one of those magic nights that made all of the hard days seem so far away. If a picture captures 1,000 words, then surely these capture the joy, gratitude, and love that made my heart simply happy!

 

 

Joy of Faith (and ice cream)

lpatangan

One of my doctors suggested I try a Mediterranean Diet after I had been diagnosed with a spontaneous carotid artery dissection. “Spontaneous” is the operative word here because it just happened and no one knows why.  It’s rare for people my age without some kind of underlying genetic disease or physical trauma like a car accident.  I had neither.

I have nothing against the Mediterranean Diet.  I like to eat fish and appreciate a plan that includes red wine.   For a few days, I considered it.  I wanted to be excited– to have some new regimen that would fix the broken parts of me.  I read a few articles that outlined the diet.  I even ate some walnuts. While I desperately want to heal, my diet is not the problem.  Whatever caused my artery to spontaneously dissect had nothing to do with what I ate.  I thought about the years I spent as a vegetarian, my almost-daily exercise routine, the half-marathons I had run, and the complete randomness of what happened — I realized I was basically that cliché of the uber-healthy person who drops dead.  Only I didn’t die.  By God’s grace, I am still here.

What I need most is not a new diet but to accept that we can’t control or fix everything (or sometimes much of anything). I’ve spent so much of my life not being spontaneous – thinking that if I followed the rules, the outline, the diet, and the plan, then I would be safe.  Of course, these things matter and it’s important to not be reckless with our lives or the lives of others. It’s just that we can easily get so focused on the regimen that we forget the reason for it.  I knew it wasn’t legumes and olives or even wine I needed.  It was ice cream. Read more →