A Christmas Twist!

This Christmas Eve was truly a night of unexpected surprises! Texas has had, for the first time in about 80 years, from what I have been told: A White Christmas! The snow actually stuck on the ground, and it got very windy. There was enough for small snowdrifts! Unbelievable in Texas. It was truly a wonderful blessing for Christmas, since I have from Vermont and at LEAST like to have a white Christmas. Well, even in Texas, I was granted that beautiful sight! Just so you all can see it and believe it:

However, with this wonderful blessing of a white Christmas came some unexpected change of plans musically and liturgically. Alas, I could not make it to Dallas for midnight mass with the latin mass community. I was supposed to sing a Victoria's "O Magnum Mysterium" mass and everything, but with the way the highways are constructed here and the fact that they have NOTHING to put on the roads, I didn't make it far. It would have been EXTREMELY treacherous. I never would have thought that a couple inches of snow would be so treacherous, but it was also the ice underneath. You see, in Texas, I think the road engineers pride themselves in seeing how many overpasses they can stack on top of one another and loop through one another. So their highways are way up in the air and so they froze over VERY BADLY with ice. There were sooo many cars spinning off the road, even when going 30 mph! I would have been afraid not so much that I would spin off the road myself, but that someone else would lose control and hit my car! It would have taken forever to get to Dallas going that speed anyway.

However, God works in interesting ways, because instead of singing a polyphonic mass for the Dallas latin mass, I got to stay at the College of St Thomas More's chapel and help with singing there! I even got to walk to and from my apartment to the chapel (about a 20 min walk) with my good friend Andrew on the eve of Christmas in the snow. As he put it, that was a very nice and RARE blessing in Texas! And my friend Richard who is the director at the chapel, had planned very nice music, including a simpler polyphonic mass. I had happened to even be at one of their rehearsals for this music earlier in the week, since my roommate was the one who was supposed to sing and was late, so i filled in for her. But since her family lives a half hour away and she went home in the afternoon, she couldn't even make it back for mass! So instead, I sang, which made the polyphonic mass still possible, and with a devout priest who celebrates the novus ordo mass ad orientem.

It is still not as beautiful and captivating as the latin mass, but it was the best 2nd choice around here! And I still got to sing beautiful and worthy music. Truly, God works in strange ways :)

Well, a Merry Christmas to all who will read this. I have a flight home to Vermont tomorrow, which, I pray will not be delayed, since it is already supposed to get there late, at 11pm. So far, travel is looking okay. I might beat the storm before it reaches the far east coast. At least that is what it is showing on the weather channel. However, they could be wrong... since there was NOTHING in the forecast only TWO days ago about the Texas blizzard we just got today!

Gaudete, gaudete! Christus est natus ex Maria Virgine, gaudete!

On the Eve of the New Year...

My life has seen many changes. I have had a roller coaster of a ride when it comes to romantic relationships, and I will now end the year single. I feel lost in terms of, well, everything. I wonder if I have even followed God's will in the past two years. I have no way of knowing if I have done "the right thing". It is hard to believe at times, like today, that I have purpose. Why am I in Texas? What was the purpose in that? I thought God had brought me together with a certain person and had firmly believed it was the person I was to marry, only to see that dashed to pieces before me. I made a wonderful new friend in the process, and was unsure if it was to be more, causing more confusion, and have finally decided I must not proceed further than friendship with him at present because I still need to heal and draw closer to Christ. To use a visual, it is as if I sit admist the scattered pieces of what WAS my life in the past year, and have no idea how to put them back together again into a whole. There is uncertainty with my employment for the coming year, but that is not what concerns me so much.

One thing that has always bothered me deeply from time to time is an overwhelming sense of not "fitting" anywhere. I can hang out with friends but then after feel like I was on the "outside" somehow, not really belonging. It leaves me feeling so sad and lonely. It was like that all through college as well. It is has also saddened me and left me feeling without purpose that I went to school for music and graduated, and since then, I have had decreasing opportunities to use the gift of my voice for the Church. I hardly sing anymore, and so it is also painful to listen to my senior recital CD from college and feel like I cannot sing as well as that anymore. That I am losing that gift little by little because I have no solid place to use it, and I do not have money for continual voice lessons. Even if I did, I would wonder what the purpose in taking them would be, if I have no place to really use my voice.

So this advent, I have turned more to Jesus, and do the thing that is hardest for me: I wait on him. I don't know what he wants from me. I don't know if there is something more I am supposed to be doing for him. I end up wishing things had turned out differently this year than they are right now. The way things have gone has left me feeling like I am floundering and just plain tired of not knowing what direction I am going in. I have forsaken my own desires to find the man I am supposed to spend my life with to hopefully witness the rebirth of a friendship between the two who mean alot to me and used to be good friends.

It creates a burden on my heart that is hard to explain, but seeing their friendship will mean more than any relationship. I think what makes the burden hard... is because I spent 3-4 years learning how to be content by myself, and with Christ. And then I understand my vocation to marriage through someone brought into my life, only to have it taken away, and yet still have to live in the place where I reminded of it every day. And yet I have to return to how it was before, to my time with just Christ and myself.

As I grow older, I do find myself understanding this world more and more as a vale of tears, and desire the coming of Christ, to wipe away all sadness, and live with him forever in joy and peace, for he is the only one who can fill my heart, comfort it, and wipe away my tears. It is a sadness, and yet also a joy, to envision resting in his arms and with our mother Mary, knowing that they understand the aches of my heart and the troubles of my soul.