The Blue Chapel Blues- Union City

When I was a kid attending St. Francis Academy in Union City, I walked home some days past the cloistered home of some Dominicans nuns  who lived in the mysterious Blue Chapel.  That was back in the old days, when St. Michael's Monastery was the centerpiece of Union City architecture; when Veronica's Veil played every Easter season; when the Passion Play at the park Theatre was a Lenten obligation never to be missed.  Union City was a monument to the European Catholic diaspora - Irish priests, Italian customs, French nuns, and the German Fritz Rueter Altenheim on Union Hill.
The Blue Chapel was a place we went to buy religious articles -rosaries, cards - or to see the vestments that would sometimes be purchased and displayed along with the flowers at a funeral.  I never got the past the gift shop.  My mother did all of the talking.  I just remember that it was very quiet, and that I had to stand very straight and still.  To this day, it remains a curosity to me.
This article about the Blue Chapel appeared in this week's Star-Ledger.  The connected videos are great, too.  Give it a read, and remember when you were little and didn't know whether or not nuns had legs.  Better yet, place yourself in the time when there was a church dominated by some ethnic group in your neghborhood, a neighborhood candy store, and you walked to the neighborhood school -Catholic or public. The world was smaller and more familiar. What was your Blue Chapel? Like Blondie, what's the power and passion of your Union City Blue?

Keep reading and writing, especially during Lent when you are not eating potato chips or pretzels or olives,

Maureen*

*Thanks, Judy, for directing me to this article

Borrowing Lent

shore



By Rima Vesely-Flad



there were no roads in the Sahara


we rode out into the desert, into vast


space, searching. Tuareg nomads,


makeshift tents, camels in the distance.


a soft sun sank and the desert


rose into its own fire. wind licked


my skin, sand blew into the crevices


of my body. scalp, ears, toes.



that was the time in which i


hungered, when every movement in


my life was an act of leaving. i began


to want boundaries, a shore, an edge.


containment. a place to land.



beyond words, beyond a horizon, there


was a way of moving into the wind.


opening to the presence of Jesus on


water. rowing to shore. just


believing a shore existed.



This poem is a reflection on the 21st chapter of John's Gospel.


Is New Jersey the best state for Lent? There is certainly enough guilt to go around - and well-deserved guilt it is, too. We have madated that it is not okay to be a bully here, yet Jerseylicious and Jersey Shore, and the ghosts of The Sopranos still role model that for us at every click of the remote.


I feel a little Lenty in New Jersey and will spend some time over the next forty days walking down that ashy street to the intersection of Palm and Tenebrae.  God tries to enter our hearts in various circuitous ways throughout the year.  Sometimes he tries to sneak in a meaningful moment during a crackling hymn on Christmas morning, before the house is filled with crumple wrapping paper and purple plastic from Little Tykes.  Sometimes He's hiding in a pink candle on an Advent wreath, waiting to drip down on some fake ivy.  During Lent, I think He's waiting for us to come to Him, being present in the nothing special, the emptiness, the no decorations, the lights that are turned off.
I like Lent.  It makes me feel like starting something wonderful.  I have given up some unimportant things that have become too important, but I am mostly looking forward to moving toward the center.  I just started the Stephen R. Covey book The Speed of Trust.  I am going to begin there.  For Lent, I am giving up not trusting.  Let's see.

Keep reading and writing,

Maureen

Spellbound in New Jersey...

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me

And I cannot, cannot go.



The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow.

And the storm is fast descending,

And yet I cannot go.



Clouds beyond clouds above me,


Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing dear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

...Spellbound by Emily Bronte (not from New Jersey, but would have been great on the Palisades)
 
 

This is a short, creepy poem about things we can't escape from.  For me, I guess, it's writing.  I have missed this blog and the opportunity it provides to get some ideas out.  God gave us this gift of a snow day -  I have enjoyed snow days since 1961 when I was in Kindergarten at St. Francis Academy in Union City - and I have promised myself to post here today. 

Nemesis looking rather aggravated...

 
Lots of reading and writing since we last met, most notably Philip Roth's Nemesis.  This "alternate history" novel is centered on a deadly outbreak of polio in Newark during WWII.  (Newark was actually beset by polio in 1916.) The disease is surely a metaphor for the Holocaust and the impact of surviving a nightmare.  The protagonist is a good-natured soul who becomes beaten-down by the disease he tries to escape and who himself becomes the "method of transport" for the physically crippling polio.  Nemesis, in Greek mythology, is the agent of punishment and balance.  A "nemesis" cannot be defeated; it is one's undoing.  This novel is the story of a guy who has gotten just one too many breaks and whose good luck catches up with him.  He has missed the chance to be a hero.  He carries his nemesis on his back by being a survivor, living in a world of shame and darkness of his own making.
 
It  is reminiscent of Roth's earlier story Eli the Fanatic, which appears in Goodbye, Columbus.  ("What do we do with survivor European Jews who have landed here in suburban Long Island?")  It certainly is connected to Roth's The Plot Against America, the story of President Charles Lindbergh and his election's impact on the Jews of Newark and the nation generally.  Roth asks, "What if?" in these stories in which new historical heroes and villians emerge when opportunites are presented for both courage and disgrace.
 
Ever think about your own "what if"?  Consider the chess pieces on the board of your own life.  What would have happened if you made a few different moves?  More importantly, what would that difference mean?
 
Glad to be back.  Keep reading and writing,
 
Maureen