Author Archives: Laura LaSpalluto

Who Do Atheists Thank on Thanksgiving?

Posted on by

 

... Or a lesson in semantics in time for Turkey Day

Being a writer, I naturally wonder about the semantics of Thanksgiving. Thankfulness or gratitude requires an object. When someone holds the door for me, I thank them. I don’t do this if I open the door and walk through it myself. When someone gives me a present, I thank them; I didn’t thank myself this morning when I bought myself a new watch.

So, to my word-obsessed mind, the question naturally arises, “Just who are we giving all those thanks to?”

Or, to put another way, who do atheists thank on Thanksgiving?

The first Thanksgiving was a harvest festival, and as such, was a way to give thanks to God for His provision. For people who believe, as Scripture says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above,” tomorrow will be a day of real Thanksgiving to the God who cares for them.

But I have noticed that often when people (those of faith and otherwise) say they’re thankful, what they really mean is they’re happy or pleased. As in “I’m so thankful that I bought my turkey last week when it wasn’t crowded.” Or, “I’m sure grateful Aunt Sally didn’t bring that jello mold this year.”

IMG_0974

Thankfulness is focused on the source of the blessing; happiness on the receiver.

Tomorrow, at our Thanksgiving feast, we will go around the table and one by one, say what we are thankful for. When it is my turn, will I remember the giver of the gift, or settle for the pleasure it gave? Will I be thankful, or merely happy. Will you?

Do You Believe in Magic?

Posted on by

“There’s not much traffic today.” My husband — my dear, sweet, non-neurotic, Midwestern husband — makes this benign observation, and I’m quick to shush him. “Don’t say that! The Evil Eye will hear you!” This is my Italian upbringing talking. Sicilians are mighty superstitious people, and they believe that the Evil Eye is just waiting for you to express some happiness or pleasure. Then, it will swoop in to gleefully relieve you of it. As soon as you say, “There’s not much traffic” you’ll find yourself able to count the blades of grass in the parkway median. The moment you observe, “What a lovely day,” it will pour. Exclaim, “I feel great!” you’ll be visited by ailments that would make Job’s suffering look like a day at the spa. If my family had a crest, it would say, “Whatever you do, never, never, tempt the Evil Eye.”

Now, I don’t really believe in the Evil Eye any more, but old habits die hard. The fact is, believing in magic (evil or otherwise) appeals to something primal in all of us. When confronted with things beyond our understanding or control, we instinctively seek to understand and control them. Sometimes this means seeking out a supernatural solution: astrology, Tarot cards, crystals, shamans, and psychics are just some of the kinds of “magic” people turn to when their own efforts fall short. Magic says: Make the right sacrifices, chant the right words, bring the right offering and whatever supernatural forces there are can be persuaded to grant your request.

Ultimately, magic is a transaction.

We present our desires, offer the prescribed words or actions, and voila! Easier than ordering a latte. This is why I think these forms of “magic” are so attractive to so many people. We think it is an impersonal, low-risk, “What have I got to lose?” proposition. And the best part is, if your wish is granted, the rest of your life remains unchanged and unchallenged. We think of magic as an encounter with the supernatural on our terms, and those are the terms we like best. (Of course, if you believe there is a malign force of evil in the world — and I do — than any encounter with it through magic is not spiritually neutral. We may think we are in control of this transaction, but we couldn’t be more wrong.)

Now, miracles are a different story. And by miracles I mean God’s intervention in our world in ways that defy our understanding of time, space and matter or are beyond any human ability.

If magic is a transaction, then God’s miracles are about revelation.

Scripture is full of God’s miracles: Creation. The parting of the Red Sea. Jesus healing the sick and feeding the multitudes. The resurrection. It is easy to think of most of these as God seeing a problem and fixing it. Need to get across a body of water? No problem. Not enough food to feed the multitudes? I’ve got this. Blind? lame? Possessed by demons? Bring it on.

While God’s miracles did accomplish those things, their purpose is much grander, much more cosmic than fixing problems. Every time God breaks into our world to act, it is an act of self-revelation. In creation, He is saying, “I am a creative God, a God of order and of beauty.” When He parted the Red Sea He was saying, “I am a God of rescue and restoration.” When Jesus feeds the five thousand, He is saying, “I am the God of provision.” When He heals, He is saying, “I am the God of Shalom — of wholeness and peace.” When He raises Jesus from the dead, He is saying, “With me, death never has the final word.”

God’s self-revelation is an invitation to relationship.

God is not making these proclamations just to hear Himself talk. He longs to be in relationship with his people, and as with any relationship, self-revelation is the first step. “This is who I am. This is how much I love you.”

I think this is exactly why some people have a hard time accepting God’s miracles. I have known people who were perfectly willing to believe that the scent of apple blossoms would help them find their lost keys, but flatly reject God’s miracles. I have known people who believe that shaman incantations can cure disease, but consider Jesus’ healing miracles laughable.

I think that we know instinctively that God’s miracles are inviting us into something deeper, something beautiful and just a little frightening. On the most basic level, it means acknowledging there is a Creator God who is powerful beyond our understanding and operates in ways we can’t predict, often don’t understand and can’t control. In short, there is a God, and it’s not me. For independent, self-actualizing, self-sufficient, self-made people, this can be a tough pill to swallow.

Unlike magic, which leaves us unchanged and unchallenged, meeting the God Who Reveals Himself leaves open the possibility of new life. And while new life with God can mean liberation from things we long to shed, it can also mean that God will ask us to let go of things we want to hold onto. This, too, can be a stumbling block.

In His miracles, God declares, “This is who I am. This is how much I love you.” No forces of magic offer this. No Evil Eye is interested in our flourishing, our peace, our joy. No amorphous auras care about our pain, much less want to enter into it. The Universe doesn’t wait with outstretched arms for us to come “home”. It is only the God who creates, parts the sea, heals, feeds and defeats death who does that.

The Day After

Posted on by

On this Day After, I feel I should be adding my voice to the chorus of lamentation over the death and suffering in Paris. I believe that somehow I should have something to say, some insight to offer, some outrage to give voice to, some balm for our aching souls. I have none.

I feel I should be posting encouraging Scripture verses that reassure us that God is still on his throne, despite the evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps I should be offering prayers of comfort. Maybe my contribution is a clenched fist of solidarity and a vow of “No retreat, no surrender!”

I can’t seem to muster any of these things. I am just sad. And mad. And afraid. The words of the Isis statement claiming responsibility are meant to strike fear in my heart, and although I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of frightening me, they do. They are words of darkness and chaos; people who say yes to this kind of mass murder are not likely to say no to much else. And while I feel safe here, now, I know I have no more reason to than those who innocently went out to dinner, or to a concert, or to a soccer game yesterday in Paris.

I ache for the lives lost, for the suffering ahead for the wounded, for the people afraid to leave their homes for fear of what a trip to the bakery might hold. And I know that God wants me to feel compassion, to mourn with those who mourn. I know that when I do this, I am most like Jesus. And yet, I somehow have to do this without being overcome by the horror of what has happened, I have to hang onto some hope. Hope that God will comfort. Hope that God’s justice will prevail. Hope that this will not be the final word.

But maybe The Day After it is too soon for me to hope. This morning, I opened my Bible app and this is what I saw:

I lift up my eyes to the hills — from where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

                                                             (Psalm 121:1-2)

On The Day After, as I resist being pulled into the vortex of death, darkness and despair, all I can manage is to lift up my eyes to the hills and wait for the Lord to send his help.

Seeing Red

Posted on by

Social media has been abuzz the last two days over coffee cups.

That’s right, coffee cups. Specifically, Starbucks’ “holiday” coffee cups, which this year are plain red. No Merry Christmas. No Happy Holidays. No reindeer, snowflakes or jingle bells. Someone posted a video online railing against them for removing all references to Christmas and accused them of “hating Jesus.” The mainstream media are reporting that Christian groups are calling for a boycott, when in fact, no “group” has done so. I think this whole kerfuffle tells us more about the disproportionate power of one cranky guy with a cellphone video than it does about some grass roots, widespread outrage that a coffee cup doesn’t say Merry Christmas on it. I also think it speaks volumes about media and our culture’s image of who Christians are, but that’s a story for another day.

Still, it got me thinking. It doesn’t bother me at all that a commercial establishment isn’t wishing me Merry Christmas or Happy Hannukah or Joyous Kwanzaa. In fact, I kind of like it. The “holiday season” as we are now to call it, has become an unrecognizable mash up of traditions, beliefs and customs of these three holidays.

The only thing they have in common is gift giving, which is I suppose why retail is so invested in celebrating and promoting them. These December holidays celebrate different things and mean different things, and yet by accident of timing, find themselves squeezed into seats in the middle row of an airplane, sharing armrests uneasily, on a very long flight.

They do have one other thing in common. They all have an element of joy and love, and so I guess it’s natural to want to acknowledge this to people you encounter during this time. But what do you say?

Giving holiday greetings can require a kind of “spiritual profiling” that is risky business.

How do you know who will welcome a “Merry Christmas” and who will not? I guess this is the dilemma that the bland “Happy Holidays!” is meant to solve. (I don’t really mind it, except once, in church, someone wished me a Happy Holiday and my head almost exploded. I mean, come on, if we can’t say Merry Christmas in church then all is lost.)

I do understand the need to find some generic way of acknowledging the disparate celebrations that share a month. I can live with Happy Holidays because it’s a fact of life: there are several celebrations going on at the same time and the speaker often doesn’t know which one (if any) you celebrate. Not an elegant solution, but it’ll do.

What does bugs me is when we try to redefine things within any of those traditions. Case in point: Holiday Tree. It’s not a holiday tree. It is a Christmas tree because it is part of the tradition of celebrating that particular holiday. Now, you don’t have to be a Christian to have or appreciate a Christmas tree, but the fact is, it is inextricably bound with that Christian tradition. You don’t see anybody trying to call a dreidel a holiday spinning toy, do you? Well, maybe that’s next.

Finally, two scenes came to mind when I starting seeing that Starbucks red cup all over Twitter: The first was in a parking garage where the cashier was Muslim (it seemed so by her dress and headscarf. Spiritual profiling is tricky). As she handed me my change, she said, “Merry Christmas!” Next, I’m walking in the Old City of Jerusalem on a Friday morning. I asked someone for directions, which she gladly gave and as she left she said, “Shabbat Shalom!” Both of these women made assumptions about who I was, what I believed, what I celebrated. Neither offended me. Quite the opposite. Each of them offered me warm human connection. Each offered me a blessing. They made me smile.

So, I welcome all expressions of good wishes and blessing, regardless of whether you “guess right” about what holiday I will be celebrating next month.

Or, if you’re like Starbucks, and you have no celebratory words for me, that’s fine, too. I prefer to get my blessings from people, not coffee cups.

Faith and Fear

Posted on by

walking-on-water-christ-saves-peter-began-to-sink.jpg!Blog

When I was 30, I thought that my life had become too safe. I decided that every time I went on vacation, I would do something that terrified me. So I parasailed over the Atlantic Ocean. One time, despite my fear of heights, I climbed a series of rickety ladders leaning unsteadily up against the side of a mesa in Arizona. I keep pictures of these accomplishments on my bulletin board to remind me that it is possible to not let fear rule my life.

Fear is just part of being human, which is why the Bible talks about it a lot. (The word itself appears 399 times!) Scripture assumes that we will feel fear. The question it asks is, “What are you going to do about it?”

One of my favorite stories is from the book of Daniel. Here we find Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, condemned to die because they would not worship the golden idol of the king of Babylon. They expected God would be faithful to His faithful promise to be with them, even if he didn’t save them from the fire.  Now it’s easy to think that their great faith in God meant they weren’t afraid. I think they were plenty afraid.

But faith is about what we do with our fear.

Do we allow our fears to set the boundaries of our lives, then resign ourselves to living within them? Or do we acknowledge our fear, even respect it, but make it subject to boundaries set by God – what God expects of us and what we can expect of God.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego did that. Afraid or not, they knew what God expected of them: You shall have no other gods before me. Afraid or not, they knew what they could expect of God: God would be faithful to them, too.

Now, they weren’t sure how God would do that. They just knew he would. And when they are thrown into the furnace, we see how God fulfills his promise. A fourth man, “who had the appearance of a god” enters into the fire with them, and all four emerge, unharmed. Instead of removing these three faithful believers from the danger and pain, God was with them – in the most literal sense.
And for a completely different picture of faith and fear, I think of Peter. Peter and the disciples find themselves in a storm — the wind is howling, the boat is pitching back and forth and when he sees Jesus walking on water towards him, he thinks it’s some ghost come to finish them off. But even though it looks like Jesus, and sounds like Jesus, Peter needs more proof. He says, “If it is you, tell me come to you on the water.” Peter gets his proof – he is able to walk on the water towards Jesus. Then Peter looks at the storm and sinks because in that moment, he doubts that God is with him.
In the middle of the fire, you can almost hear Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego look at the fourth man and say, “God is with us!” as if they expected him all along. Of course God is with them! That is what God does.
In the middle of the storm, Peter seems to say, “God is with us?” as if he can’t quite believe it.  Peter not only didn’t expect God to be with him in the storm, he didn’t believe it when he was.

Faith is about what we do with our fear.  It is not about some unshakable certainty. It is not some superhuman bravado. It is expecting God to show up when what we fear has come true.
When you are in the middle of the storm, or the fire, or the health crisis, or the family problem, what are you expecting?  Do you expect God to show up?  More importantly, do you recognize it when he does?

 

Rescue Me

Posted on by

In honor of National Cat Day I want to tell you about Bert.DSC_0314

Bert is a 10-year-old cat who has come to live with us after his human died this summer. I recently wrote about my sorrow and frustration at not being able to save her from the many challenges she faced. http://bit.ly/1GiK18I

I couldn’t save my friend, but I wound up rescuing her cat.

With his human companion suddenly gone and his already chaotic home upended by family members clearing it out, Bert seems to have decided that I was his. I was the only one he would let near him; he’d greet me with a purr and an invitation to rub his belly.

Cats are funny that way — they take your measure, make a decision, and don’t look back.

I agreed to take him in temporarily in spite of some very real concerns. Would he get along with Roxy, our cat-in-residence? Would he use a litter box after years of using his whole apartment as one giant one?  Plus, my husband needed convincing. 

But Bert needed somewhere to go and we decided to give it a try and hope for the best. After one day hiding in the bookcase, he attached himself to me, and hasn’t let go since. He happily uses his litter box and plays with his scratching toys. He and Roxy tolerate each other most of the time. He nuzzles and cuddles and has one paw on me at all times. He is in my lap right now.

The funny thing is, for months before he came to live with us, I had been talking about getting another cat. Not that I don’t love Roxy — but she’s not a lap cat, and I needed a lap cat. But I was afraid Roxy wouldn’t be too keen on the idea, so it remained an itch that wouldn’t be scratched.

But Bert needed rescuing and somehow that trumped all my previous hesitations. What I couldn’t do for myself — get another cat just because I wanted one — I could do for someone else.

Now maybe you don’t think that with everything going on in the world, God concerns himself with cats and the people who love them. But I do. I can imagine God saying, “Listen, you two need each other.” Maybe in His infinite mercy, God saw my sorrow over not being able to save my friend and gave me the pleasure of seeing Bert thriving under my care.

Maybe God is that loving and that kind.

The Flip Side

Posted on by
Photo credit: Jennifer Foster/AP

Photo credit: Jennifer Foster/AP

For a few weeks in 2012, this picture was everywhere:  A New York City police officer offering a pair of boots to homeless man.  When I saw this photo, I was moved to tears by this officer’s love and humility.

“What Would Jesus Do?”  This.

When I looked closely at the picture I was shocked.  I knew that homeless, shoeless man.  I had seen him six years earlier, walking up Fifth Avenue in the freezing cold, without shoes or socks.  Unlike that cop, I didn’t go and buy him shoes.  I didn’t kneel to help him put them on.  In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “Just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”  And on a bitter cold day, right in front of beautiful Christmas decorations celebrating the birth of the Savior, I saw Christ suffering and kept on walking.

I wasn’t indifferent.  I was just paralyzed.

The sight of him began a frantic dialogue in my head: “I have to do something. Is it safe to approach him?  Should I buy him shoes?   How would I know what size? Maybe I could bring him into Lord and Taylor.  Would they even let me in with him?  Would he just turn around and sell the shoes and use the money for God knows what?”  As the questions swirled in my head, I kept walking in the opposite direction.

I was shaken for days afterward.  The sight of a homeless person wasn’t new to me — I’ve lived in the New York area most of my life, including the “bad-old days” of the 70s and 80s, when it seemed that every subway station and street corner was a great black hole of human need.  I was taught to look away, hold tight to my purse and keep moving. But this day was different.  I wanted to help, but didn’t know where to begin.  I wanted to do something, but felt utterly impotent.

This is the flip side of the Mighty Mouse delusion I wrote about in my last post.  Instead of feeling all-powerful to save, we can feel weak and small and useless. Just this morning, I looked at pictures of refugees emerging from the Aegean Sea with that haunted look in their eyes, and I thought —I am just one person, far away, with no useful expertise to offer.  Could I be more useless?

Instead of rushing in with fantasies of saving the day, we can let the enormity, the complexity or the intractability of the problem render us immobile.  The flip side of thinking ourselves more powerful than we are is believing we have no power at all.  Each is a serious misunderstanding of what God asks of us.

Sometimes we think that in asking us to feed the hungry, God expects us to eradicate hunger.  We think that in asking us to clothe the naked, God is expecting us to eliminate poverty.  Not so.  When Jesus says, “The poor you will have with you always,”  it is a sobering reminder that we live in a broken world that only the Second Coming will completely heal.  Still, this isn’t an excused absence from doing social justice.  We are still called to love, clothe, feed, visit and bear one another’s burdens.  But we do so knowing that the ultimate, complete restoration of God’s good creation is yet to come.

God is in charge of eternity.  We are responsible for today.  Regardless of the final outcome, every act of service and love is holy and sufficient in and of itself.   Ironically, several weeks after the policeman bought him new boots, that same homeless man was spotted, barefoot once again.  The cynics said, “See, he probably sold those boots and bought booze. That cop was a sucker.”  Maybe so.

Loving and caring for God’s people can be a messy business. It isn’t always clear what to do, when to do it, or how.  There’s no guarantee that you won’t be taken advantage of, or that what you do will really help.  But God only asks us to act, and to leave the outcome to Him.

We are not all-powerful.  We are not powerless.

The life of faith is lived in the tension between these two poles.  St. Ignatius put it this way:  “Act as if everything depends on you.  Trust as if everything depends on God.”

 

 

Mighty Mouse and Me

Posted on by

mighty_mouse_using_pop_art_style_by_duceduc-d561xzj

My friend died and I am sad. But I am more than sad about when and how she died. I am profoundly sad about how she lived.

For as long as I’d known her, she lived with a variety of serious medical problems. Some she survived much to her doctors’ surprise; some were chronic and intractable. In addition to her overwhelming health problems, she lived in utter chaos. In her apartment, there was barely a path to walk amid all the piles of paper, newspapers, magazines, and just plain STUFF. The only clear surface where anyone could sit was on her bed, and “clear” is a relative term.

I accompanied her to doctor’s appointments. When she was in rehab after her major surgeries, I did her laundry, helped her pay bills, took care of her cats. I attempted to tackle some the mess in her apartment, throwing away bag after bag of trash, and corralling what was left into boxes with labels like “Top of Desk,” “Sofa” and “Table Next to Kitchen.”

I say all this not to tell you what a wonderful friend I was. I say this as a confession, because while I did these things out of love, I realized after she died that I was also trying to save her. I wanted to be the one who rescued her from her loneliness, from the home that was not fit to live in. I was going to be Mighty Mouse, swooping in to right all wrongs to the strains of my triumphant theme song: “Here I Come to Save the Day!”

Then she died and now it would never change. When I went to her apartment after she died, the boxes I packed three years ago were still there, stacked against the wall, now surrounded by a fresh layer of detritus. Those words, in my own handwriting — “Top of Desk,” “Sofa,” “Table Next to Kitchen” — mocked me and my fantasies of rescue. As I grieve the loss of my friend, I am also mourning my failure to be her savior.

I know how those words sound: full of hubris and delusions of grandeur. Yet, I suspect I am not alone in this. Many of us want to feel wise enough to know what someone needs and powerful enough and capable enough to provide it. Many of us want to believe we are wise enough to understand our own needs and self-sufficient enough to see to them ourselves. We like knowing we have a Savior in Jesus; we just don’t always live like we need one. If I admit I can’t be someone else’s savior, I have to admit that I can’t be my own either.

I am reminded of the words of Henri Nouwen: “It is Jesus who heals, not I. Jesus who speaks words of truth, not I. It is Jesus who is Lord, not I.” I can — and should — be loving, merciful, and self-sacrificing to others. I can — and should — do what is within my power to care for myself.   But I must be careful. I cannot cross that line from “serving” to “saving.” I cannot be seduced into thinking I have the power to  bind up the brokenhearted or heal deep wounds. That is Jesus’ delight. That  is Jesus’ mission, which can be accomplished through me, not by me.

My faith tells me that whatever disappointments, suffering and frustration this life had for my friend, they are gone now. She is with the God she loved and who loved her. Whatever struggles she had with her own limitations are gone. She is in the care of someone — the only one — who could truly save her. The same could be said of me, this side of Paradise.

Welcome to Ordinary Time

Posted on by

I always feel a little sad on January 7. The 12 days of Christmas have come and gone, and the decorations are put away for another year. The house looks naked without the garland on the mantle and the staircase, the bowls of deep jewel-toned ornaments, the ever-growing collection of Santas on the bookcase. And the corner of the living room where the tree has been standing since the day after Thanksgiving — Just what usually goes there?

I feel as empty as that corner looks.  The next great milestones of the Christian calendar  — Lent and Easter — are months away.  It’s back to every day life, with no familiar rituals, no shared traditions, in a season without a name.

Well, that last part isn’t actually true.  The time before and after Christmas and Easter — the great lodestars of the Christian life —  does have a name.  It’s called Ordinary Time. We live two thirds of the calendar year — 33 weeks — in Ordinary Time.

It’s hard not to feel that somehow these are the humdrum times, so dull they don’t even have a cool name. Where’s the hoopla of Advent and Christmas?  Where’s the spiritual rigor of Lent and the joy of Easter?  It’s easy to feel like I’m just marking time until the next spiritual  high.

Somehow, this all makes me think about Peter and his experience on the mountaintop with Jesus.  He has an awesome (in the true meaning of that now-overused word) experience when he sees Jesus transfigured in the presence of Moses and Elijah.   His first reaction?  “Let’s stay here forever”. Would you ever want to leave?   But Jesus says, no, we must go back down, down to “real” life, back to the demanding  crowds, conflict with authorities, back to the messy world He came to save.  He says, in essence, “We have to take this magnificent encounter with God and live it out in Ordinary Time.”

And so it is with us. The Christian life isn’t lived on the mountain. It’s lived in the everyday. And every day isn’t Christmas or Easter, and really, that’s a good thing. As wonderful as it would seem, we would get bored, we would take it for granted. You can’t live forever on the mountaintop without diminishing its power. And you can’t live forever in the valley without the nourishment, encouragement and wonder of the mountaintop experience.  Both are essential to a life of discipleship.

I guess that’s why the church calendar is often depicted as a circle.  The Incarnation and the Resurrection are the touchstones, for sure. But it’s in the weeks of Ordinary Time we figure out what difference these touchstones make in our lives. What difference does it make to me, sitting here in my office in 2015 that the Word became flesh? How is my life any different knowing that? Yes, Jesus was resurrected. But what does my resurrection life look like? What just happened and what am I going to do about it?

And then, these weeks of Ordinary Time lead us, inexorably, back to the next celebration of the Incarnation, the next celebration of the Resurrection, and hopefully, we aren’t the same as we were the year before. We can hope that the Holy Spirit has had another year to soften our hearts, to reveal our sin, to give us courage and hope and joy. And the next time we enter Ordinary Time, we will not be the same as the year before. And so it goes.

Two-thirds of our lives are lived in Ordinary Time. Two-thirds of the New Testament is a collection of narratives and letters telling believers what the events of the Gospel look like when they are lived out in the valley of everyday life.  I don’t think this is a coincidence.

[tweetthis] The Gospel’s true power to change the world and to change us lies in Ordinary Time.[/tweetthis]As wonderful as the Gospel’s accounts of Jesus’ birth, ministry, death and resurrection are, its true power to change the world and to change us — then and now — is in the other two-thirds of the New Testament. The two-thirds that challenges us to think differently, live differently, love differently. The Gospel’s true power to change the world and to change us lies in Ordinary Time.

[wysija_form id=”2″]