It’s February 10, and Jamaica Plain
is now easing its way back into regular life. The cars along my street once
again look like cars; the 39 bus made its first trip from Forest Hills to Back
Bay Station; and my roommate bought a full gallon of milk and bag of apples from
the now-open grocery store. The snow is melting into thick, gray slush and
forming ankle-deep puddles on the crosswalks.
Earlier, I walked around the
neighborhood and snapped pictures with my phone. I am not a photographer, but
it was afternoon too beautiful not to capture. Throughout the short journey I
found a six-foot pile of snow surrounding a traffic light, Jamaica Pond half
frozen over and a couple carrying cross-country skies in route to the Arboretum.
The sun was bright and for the first time in a while, I enjoyed simple the act
of breathing. I had a sense that everyone walking around me was doing the same.
There we were: seeing our neighborhood in whole new way.
The night before the blizzard
commenced I went to see Catherine Brunell, a “pastoral minister of the everyday”
read from her new book Becoming Catholic. Again. Brunell is living a life that her radical, social justice-loving,
Jesuit University-attending self never imagined living: motherhood in the
suburbs with youth-soccer centric schedules and SUV-dominated rush hour traffic.
Her book is about her faith and the ways in which the Catholic Church continues
to strengthen and erode it. At the end of each chapter she invites readers to
apply the questions she’s held very close to her heart to their own lives and
spiritual journeys.
During her reading, Cathy recounted
her experience traveling to a friend’s wedding in New York City, which included
a late departure, a tearful goodbye to her three year old, and the moment when
she realized, two hours away from home, that she’d left her dress behind. It
was a perfect dress—one she’d dug out of her closet from high school and paired
with borrowed gloves and jewelry. She takes the reader through the explosion of
inner-voices that followed, pin-pointing all of her personal shortfalls that
contributed to this new reality. But no matter how hard she thought about the
reasons why she left the dress behind—there was no changing anything. As time passed
the noises in her head went with it. She phoned a friend who came to the
rescue, armed with a stunning black cocktail dress from the Bloomingdale’s
sales rack. In the end, the wedding was beautiful, because she allowed herself,
even in her incompleteness, experience it. She writes: “We miss huge moments in our lives
and in the lives of others because we are so busy trying to reassure ourselves
that we are OK.” Her oversight became a cause for celebration and an invitation
to let go.
The book, which I’m halfway through
and enjoying, fits well with the mindset that emerged in Boston this weekend, amidst
the closed storefronts and derailed public transit system. Brunell reminds us
that we do not become our best selves in the checked-off items on our to-do
list and we are not defined by our unmet goals.
But instead by embracing, however fully or reluctantly, each day—complete
with its slept-through alarms, forgotten outfits and never-ending mounds of
snow.
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