Many are familiar with the movie, Philomena and its heart wrenching expose of deception, tragedy and a mother’s persistent love. It recounts the story of Philomena Lee and the adoption of her son to an American couple through the despicable actions of Irish nuns. Though I doubt it is worthy of its Best Picture Oscar nomination, much is praiseworthy about the movie. The film certainly exposes deep emotional wounds with which too many can identify, disgusting behavior by those charged with the care of others, the devastating consequences of lies and half-truths as well as the destruction caused in its wake.

Now 80, Lee attended mass on Wednesday morning with her daughter, Jane Libbteron, before their brief meeting with Pope Francis. Also with them was Steve Coogan who co-wrote, produced and co-starred in the film. “I felt such a sense of relief yesterday for the guilt I carried and that I still carry a little bit today,” said the real Philomena Lee after meeting the pope. “He really made me feel so good inside because I carried the guilt inside me for 50 years, without telling anybody.” For Lee, said Coogan, the encounter was “part of a perfect catharsis”, which few of her contemporaries at Ireland’s mother and baby homes have been able to enjoy.

For decades my own grandmother’s life was locked in similar sadness and secrecy. All we knew was that she and our Aunt Lizzie were two Irish orphans sent to Nebraska from Boston on an orphan train in the 1880s. Grandma, Annie Elizabeth Casey, was seven and Aunt Lizzie was four.  It would take more than 100 years before our family learned the truth of her origins and the tragedy that is part of our family story. This was possible because my four years of graduate school in Boston provided opportunities to cull state and church archives.  My quest encountered a response quite different from the suffering imposed on Philomena Lee.

We came to know that Grandma was the eldest of three daughters born to William & Ellen Hannon Casey. Tragedy struck when Katie, the youngest daughter died of bronchitis at the age of seven weeks. Then, Annie and Lizzie’s mother died of tuberculosis the following year. Grandma’s Dad would finally succumb to that ravaging plague thirteen months later in a hospital run by the largely Irish Sisters of Charity.

Records made easily accessible to me at the Catholic archives in Boston indicate that William, with the assistance of the priest who had witnessed their marriage thirteen years earlier, turned over care of his two young daughters on December 4, 1883 to the “Home for Destitute Catholic Children” also staffed by the same Sisters of Charity. William died of tuberculosis less than three weeks later. Of special consolation were fourteen yearly notations in the Home’s original ledger which I held in my own hands (my grandmother’s record in #5416) regarding her care and well being in far off Cedar County, Nebraska. These annual reports conclude simply in 1895 noting Annie’s marriage at age 21 to my grandfather, Joseph C. Wieseler.

We also learned that Annie and Lizzie were two of 96 children “placed-out” from Boston to an Irish Catholic community near Yankton, SD in four groups between 1883 and 1884. There they were broadly placed with families in what was then Dakota Territory and northeast Nebraska which had become a state hardly fifteen years earlier. Grandma lived her childhood in foster care – and as an extra set of working hands – in a series of German immigrant homes. How far this all must have seemed from her Irish roots on Boston harbor holding traumatic loss for one so young!

It was an especially celebratory Easter weekend in 1986 — 103 years after Annie and Lizzie Casey were sent West — as my mother, Grandma’s sole surviving child, and my father returned to Grandma’s birthplace, the church where she was baptized, and placed flowers on the shared grave of William, Ellen and Katie in the pauper section of Old Calvary Cemetery. Our pilgrimage was consciously made on behalf of Grandma, Lizzie and so many other relatives who would never know the full, true stories of their ancestory. We prayed at the graveside with profound thanks — a circle had been closed.  A persistent wound healed in ways that the movie Philomena leaves open and festering.

Today I pray that Philomena Lee’s recent pilgrimage and the full exposure of her tragic story bring to her the healing, reconciliation and joy our family has come to know.

Sometimes we just have to smile, if only to ourselves, when “the universe” – which I call Providence – conspires to give us exactly what we need.  Yesterday that happened at Peace House.  You may remember Peace House from my post on January 30. It continues to send those “zingers” and cut through the crap of life in ways that keep me coming back.  One thing I love about the people there is their transparency, directness and honesty.  They don’t have the money, means or “sophistication” to disguise or hide the truth of their lives.

Yesterday the ridiculously popular Serenity Prayer came up in group meditation.  A woman shared a version that was new to me:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the people I cannot change,
Courage to change
The one I can,
And the wisdom
To know that’s me!

Another woman said, “Hell, I don’t have a problem with sobriety.  The hard part is living with serenity!”  Isn’t that the truth for many of us?  Perhaps it gets back to the glass half full or half empty idea.  How do we see the world?  …ourselves?  Is our focus on faults and failures or on blessing and virtue?  I left wondering what it would really look like in my life if I conscientiously focused on actively living/applying serenity, courage and wisdom for just one 24 hour period.  Imagine the effect!

A man also spoke about the second half of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer which had its debut in a sermon Niebuhr preached in 1943. I often find it needlessly prescriptive and theoretical but you really should take a look if you are not familiar with it (cf., http://www.lords-prayer-words.com/famous_prayers/god_grant_me_the_serenity.html)

What really hit home was how I saw my brother live the second half of this prayer in his thirty-plus years of working a 12 Step Program.  There were three special lessons, or gems of wisdom, that I take from his living with Alzheimer’s for ten years before his death last June at age 78.  Jerry had three mantras – so much so that at times he could drive you crazy with them!  ”Thank you, thank you, thank you!”  “Life on life’s terms!”  And, “Let God!”  Yesterday, I was reminded of his source.  More significantly, I have seen their truth actually lived.

The simple, ordinary, honest people at Peace House brought me back to these foundational truths… a very good place to start!

I’m in the middle of repairing a 90 year old clock! Who doesn’t like the comforting pulse of the gentle tick or the consoling chimes marking each hour from a distant mantel top? Well, so it seemed when I bought a handsome though broken Seth Thomas at a favorite antique store a few years back. Thankfully, we have a friend who just happens to be a member of the extremely dedicated and increasingly small Twin Cities Clock Makers Guild. Ivy generously offered her wisdom, guidance and well equipped “shop” for the task.

Last week we tore apart the innards and cleaned a gazillion little pieces in a bath of ammonia and then alcohol. We had to gently, ever so carefully, release the tension on the over-wound spring that keeps time. The spring that powers those comforting chimes had proverbially sprung, bending sprockets and brackets in its wake! Today we begin putting the pieces back together. Easier said than done! But this is an absolutely fascinating process and I am guided by a patient, forgiving master teacher. Whoever came up with this technology back in the 15th century, each piece hand-crafted and painstakingly calibrated, were geniuses of the first rate.

Today is also the seventh anniversary of my sister, Della’s death. It seems appropriate to spend time this afternoon tinkering with an old clock and carefully reconstructing its inner workings. Do we pay enough attention to the time we have? Can we gently release parts in our day that are wound too tight? How do we repair that which has sprung and damaged the way we operate? Do we sufficiently treasure each methodical tick in our day? Are we consoled by the marking of time and gladdened even more by chimes ringing forth the later hours?

Today I miss my sister with her quirky humor and sometimes maddening idiosyncrasies. I loved her. Della loved me even when I acted unlovable. Yes, it is a gift to disassemble the inner workings of our lives and restore the reassuring sounds of time. She is a master teacher and – when attentive – we recognize the wisdom of the ages, discovering both memory and promise.

Maybe I care about this topic more than most because my cousin’s son was sentenced to death for the contract murder of a real estate agent.  No, he is not a person of color who dropped out of school or an inner-city drug dealer.  Peter was raised on a farm in northeast Nebraska by good Catholic parents and graduated from local schools.  Between the time of the murder and his arrest, we were pall bearers together at his grandfather’s funeral at the Catholic Church in our hometown of 1600 residents.  I was baptized in this church and we have buried my parents from there as well.  His grandpa’s funeral was the last time I have seen Peter in person.

Thankfully, if there is any reason for gratitude in all of this, Nebraska has a peculiar clause written into its state constitution that enables death-row inmates the grounds for seemingly endless appeals. I still remember anguished notes from my dear Aunt Rose asking for prayers as the date set for her grandson’s death in the electric chair approached.  These last minute appeals – a delay tactic based on this “generous” state constitution – remains the legal strategy of choice for Nebraska’s death-row inmates.  For my Aunt Rose and Peter’s mother, my cousin, such excruciating suspension of any resolution constituted its own “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Relief came with the US Supreme Court decision which put into question the way the death penalty was being applied in the various states – not its legality, to say nothing of its morality!  A review of all death row cases was mandated across the country. A three judge review panel voted 2 to 1 to uphold Peter’s sentence.  Only that one dissenting vote on a panel of three judges provided that tenuous “reasonable doubt” – in the application of the death sentence, not the conviction – to have Peter’s sentence commuted to life in prison.  Coincidentally, that dissenting judge grew up two blocks from me in Omaha.  We went to the same schools.  To this day, I don’t believe he knows anything of our family connection because of the differences in surnames. Yes, capital punishment is up-close and personal!

I am outraged at every murder and my heart grieves for victims’ families – at the time their father was murdered, the sons of the man Peter shot were students at the same Jesuit high school from which I graduated. With this family association, a brief op-ed in the current issue of America magazine grabbed my attention and approval.  “It is a cruel irony that people debate about the ‘most humane’ way to kill a person… Is lethal injection morally preferable to the electric chair? Does a firing squad provide a more efficient execution than a gas chamber?”

The family of the victim in a tragic case in Ohio currently receiving a great deal of attention is, understandably, less sympathetic. “He is being treated far more humanely than he treated her,” they said in a statement. America — the magazine, at least — frames the issue perfectly: “True. But is this the right standard for judging the means of execution?  Arguments about the relative humaneness of different methods of execution miss the essential point: When the state applies the death penalty, it deliberately ends the life of a human being. Whatever method it uses, the state perpetuates the cycle of violence.”

Where will it all end?  Where will it end?

“Faith expressed by many … is often dull, oppressive and insipid.” With this quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, David Brooks’ January 27 NYTimes op-ed really grabbed my attention. I reluctantly agree with Brooks’ further supposition: “There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the Scriptures oppose it.”

Yet, with tenacious optimism reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins’ poem God’s Grandeur, Brooks celebrates “a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.” Others have similarly identified the essential God-given capacity of humans to live within paradox. Parker Palmer’s incisive consideration, The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life was first issued in 1980 with an Introduction by Henri Nouwen. Attesting to the prominence and persistence of his topic, Palmer’s book was reissued in 2008.

Brooks makes a singular contribution by introducing us to Audrey Assad, “a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence.” Assad enjoyed “an idyllic childhood” in which developmentally appropriate black-or-white dichotomies provided the necessary foundation for her identity. Then, true to life, inevitable tragedies and complexities began to mount. True to form, Assad experienced the familiar erosion of certainty.  And, isn’t that as it should be? Isn’t our worst response in moments of challenge and uncertainty to batten down old belief structures and frantically defend frayed formulations? Those who work 12 Step programs know very well that “control” or “white-knuckling it” sets up the very conditions in which self-defeating, addictive behaviors are likely to explode.

Assad describes her evolution into a person of mature Christian faith as making her way “from darkness into paradox.” Her story makes me grieve any who refuse to grow up — any who “turn away” from the invitation to an unknown future as did the Rich Young Man in the Gospel. Worse, yet, are “parental” leaders of faith communities who place all sorts of obstacles in the way of people growing up, burdens Jesus suggests they themselves are often unwilling or unable to bear. If there is any certainty, I believe it is from such as these that God comes to save us! 

This makes me recall a favorite comment by Flannery O’Connor in a letter to a dear friend: “Many of us come to the church by means the church would not allow.” AMEN to that!

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Brooks’ column may be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/opinion/brooks-alone-yet-not-alone.html?emc=eta1&_r=0