This doesn’t condemn “human traditions” or the Jewish rituals, but rather brings the focus back to the root, the place where we honor God not just with our lips, but with our hearts. The actions, then, spring forth from an overflowing of love, love of God and love of neighbor.

This makes me think, too, of the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. He had done everything “right” and still was far from the Father, because he was focused on his actions instead of relationship. And Martha, busy busy Martha, who wasn’t committing some horrible sin by doing the dishes! Her heart was not with HIM. It was focused on Mary, who “wasn’t helping.” Had she been focused on Jesus while she happened to be doing the dishes, all would be well.

What is it that takes your heart away from God? This God who is always there…waiting to love us, waiting to comfort us, waiting to direct our path. This is my question today, to me, to you. And the title above is my prayer. If we are present to Him, then His Presence will be our strength and our joy.

On that note, I’d like to invite you to go check out this beautiful column – just written by Michael Dubruiel – on bad things happening despite our efforts, on sudden and unexpected death…and on trust. It was his last.

I’d often heard my father speak of him warmly, as he communicated with him over the years about various publishing ventures. All I really know, is that Mike was a talented guy who used his gifts to serve the Lord. His heart was focused on God. This last column is a powerful testimony to leave behind…I’ve no doubt it’s just a glimmer of what those who knew and loved him, felt in his presence. My thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Amy, and their children. ~Erin

Song on my heart today: Be Still My Soul (Which, yes, I just now discovered is wrongly labeled on the player as Be Still and Know!)

This is a new Catholic search engine that allows you to type in search words and, within seconds, it comes up with a list of where that word or phrase is found in the Bible, Catechism, Popes and Councils. This is a dream come true for many people! You can limit your search to one or two of these or search within all of them. It’s amazing.

Check it out and refer your friends and family. It’s still in the developmental stages and will be tweaked and added to when he has time and when he gets funding. The developer is a convert out of England. It’s an incredible tool for those wanting to learn more, reference something, answer a question for someone, write a term paper, you name it! How I wish it had been available back when I was writing my papers at Steubenville!! Happy Searching:) ~ Erin

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you a desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
-Pope John Paul II at the vigil of World Youth Day Rome

The passage (Mt. 11:2-5 or Lk. 7:18-22) was the one where John the Baptist is sitting in prison, and he sends his disciples to Jesus to ask Him if He is the Messiah, the one they’ve been waiting for, or if they should look for another. Jesus basically says to them, “Go and tell John” and then He proceeds to list the things that are happening. “The blind see, the lame walk…” and so on. I remember being astounded when I first started studying Scripture in college and realized that this comes directly from passages in Isaiah where it says that all these things would come to pass when the Messiah came. (esp. Is.61:1)What Jesus is saying to John (who of course knew his Old Testament) is, “Remember this prophecy? It’s being fulfilled through me now. Yes, I am He.”

What the priest focused on, however, was John in the dark, having to ask through his disciples. Here he is apart from everyone, not seeing Jesus anymore who is now out preaching and performing miracles, and John wants to know if Jesus is THE ONE. “Do I have it right? Have I prepared the way for He who is to come?”

Maybe he was really doubting. I mean, he hears of what’s happening outside and maybe, as some say, it doesn’t exactly fit his expectation of what the Messiah would be like. Maybe more than anything he wanted his disciples to hear the answer…who knows. But what is important here is that this does happen in our life. We don’t see Jesus before us the way He was then…laying His hands on the sick, giving words of comfort to the downtrodden. And we don’t always understand why God acts the way He does, why He allows certain things in our life and in the world.

When we suffer, when we feel alone, when we don’t feel God’s presence the way we’d like or don’t understand something, we can start to wonder, is there meaning to all of this? Is my faith in God well placed? Do I have it right? What if I am truly alone? And Jesus says through this passage to John and to us, “I am He. My presence is real and my love is active in the world, though you do not see me right now, though you do not understand it all.”

One of the main points of the homily became the fact that often it is through others good works and “fair faces” that we recognize and experience God. I thought his expression was cute because…well, who says fair faces? But as I looked around I thought it was an apt description. All around me, in the very people I had felt alienated from a bit earlier, were fair faces. All of a sudden my heart was opened and my expectations of what things should be were left behind. I saw the sweet old women who smile with their eyes of wisdom, teens trying to find their way in a society that doesn’t support their morals…all around me children of God who are in their imperfect, wounded way, bearing Christ to me, if I but have the eyes to see Him.

When Mary (speaking of fair faces) said her “Fiat” (her “yes”) to the angel Gabriel, she became the first to have God “take flesh” in her. She then went immediately to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who at the sound of Mary’s voice felt the babe in her womb (John the Baptist!) “leap for joy.” (Lk.1:44) In the Eucharist, Jesus has given us the great gift of remaining with us here on earth, fully present to us under the veil of bread and wine. When we receive Him in Holy Communion and say our “Amen,” we are saying, “Fiat, let it be done. Jesus, take flesh in me that I might become like You, that I might carry You out from here and bear You to a world in need.” This is how we conquer our doubts, this is how we become Christ for others. Hopefully, if we allow ourselves to be transformed by Him, even our voice will witness to His presence.

Be encouraged, look for God in the unexpected, draw near to Him in the Eucharist.

~ Erin Flynn

Check out this link:

http://www.catholicity.com/cds/healing.html

What happened, however, was that the Blessed Mother had other plans and made them extremely clear…which doesn’t happen to me that often, trust me! Through a very quick series of events, I found myself booked for a mission trip to Bosnia and on yet another international plane ride 6 weeks after I flew home from Russia. I wouldn’t recommend this course of action to anyone unless it’s a must. For me it was a must…can’t say no to Mary:)

We worked within the refugee camps there that still remain from the war, as well as distributing supplies to poor families in the area and to a hospital in Mostar. It was unreal to see bombed out buildings with vegetation growing out of what used to be windows and roofs. There was a church we visited though that, while still riddled with bullet holes, was a sign of hope because of the extensive restoration that had taken place over the years and is continuing now.

It was a hard trip for me on top of what I had experienced so recently in Russia, but I was also prepared in a way I would not have been otherwise. I found in Bosnia the same hard conditions of poverty, but nothing I saw even in the refugee camps was worse than the villages in eastern Russia. While it enabled me not to be overwhelmed by it all, there was something in me that realized that at some point, there is a part of you that feels emotionally a bit numb to what you see, that sort of goes on auto-pilot so that you can function. I still felt compassion, I still felt a deep horror at the conditions and circumstances of these people’s lives, but the emotional reaction, which at times can be debilitating, was not so strong.

I came home ready for that R&R I’d been dreaming of, but was enticed by a friend to join a very short mission trip to Guatemala. I don’t know how else to express it except to say that Guatemala was healing for me. I was with an incredible group of people and a dear priest friend and his mother. The emotional climate there is very warm, open, and laid-back, and is grounded in a profound sense of gratitude. The Mayan people are beautiful and even though I was at a refugee village (necessary b/c of a mudslide that demolished a community) and listening to tales of the farmers and the injustice that has been – and is still – imposed upon them, everyone is smiling. It was a perfect place for me to go to be renewed in the belief that, while suffering always exists, joy is possible, and a positive outlook is priceless.

I’ve come to the conclusion again that I cannot take on the suffering of the world, I cannot be everywhere at once, I cannot heal all the wounds and I cannot find food and homes for all the children. But God…God did take on all the suffering, He is everywhere at once, He will heal all wounds, He Himself has become our food, and He has prepared a place for us…an eternal home. I think the danger of empathy without keeping this perspective is that it can overwhelm, because it is promised only that heaven is the place where there will be no more tears, no more suffering, no more sickness, and no more pain.

As I continue to see material poverty, physical maladies, emotional woundedness, orphans, refugees, and hopelessness in the face of red tape and destroyed economies…I am convinced again that the only thing to do is to love – love God and then love whomever He places in my path – receiving His blessing so that I can become a blessing to others. And, in that, to instill in others the hope and peace that this world cannot give.

As I write, I am listening to a record (remember those?) of Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor (Opus posthumous), which perfectly expresses what I’ve written here about my experiences. There is an intro and then the first note of the body of the piece. It brings me to tears with its melancholy, as if it somehow encompasses all the sorrow in the world in that one note. Yet at the very end of the piece there is a shift to unmistakable hope and even joy. It is the cycle of death and resurrection – of our days, of the world, of the Christian life. Kick back and listen to it sometime. God bless you ~ Erin

Here’s the article….

I will be going on hermitage this coming week for some much-needed solitude- to center myself and pray about what’s next. I return the following weekend to speak and sing at Mercy Sunday at the National Shrine and then will record an updated version of the Chaplet for EWTN the following day.

Please keep all of that in your prayers as you’ll be in mine during such an amazing time of the year! A very blessed and joyous Easter to all of you….Erin

I walked the roads of Russia once
When my eyes were bright
And my hair blew shining
In the cold east wind.

I was weathered by the hard terrain
And the driving gusts from the bay of the sea.
But it did not break me, this land
It did not break me.

I imagined a dawn
When rays of a gentle sun would break
upon the icy soil
And the shells of men, frozen from the bitter years…
Would crack and fall and be trampled
By the joyful steps
of children’s running feet.

And on to the program. When I returned from Japan I met the new kids who had arrived and I had a warm reunion with the ones I had left. They are used to not depending on anyone and to having people come in and out of their lives, but they have not lost their excitement or affection when someone actually does return once they’ve left. Unfortunately our other American volunteer has gone home because of a lack of the funding that was promised from the mission. We came here to eventually establish a center where the kids could sleep and, unfortunately, at this point that looks impossible.

I am trying with my time left to make sure that what we’ve begun will continue, and hopefully grow, with Russians taking the lead. What we have kept reminding ourselves these past few weeks is that these kids were cold and hungry when we came here and now they are warm and eat nutritious meals every day. We have shown them what it is like to have someone be involved in your daily life, caring about what happens to you, how you feel, if you are sick, what you think about and what you dream about. That’s what always gets me the most, is that they come to me with their stories of what has happened to them that day. Many times it is horrifying like an axe fight out of town with some other kids, the police who burned their “shelter”, or which kids got caught and beat up by the police this time.

Oftentimes though it’s sweet, like Slava showing me his new student ID that he’s so proud of, or asking, like he did today, if I want to see his marks and then going through each of his notebooks page by page with a big grin to show me the high numbers he’s getting in his subjects. Little Dima came to me b/c he cut his finger helping me chop onions. When I put a bandaid on I almost cried because he was so receptive and I realized, they know. They know that this is how it should be. Sometimes it’s intuitive and sometimes it’s because when their mothers are not drunk they are good mothers, and they do these little things. Katya showered and then curled up and slept at the apartment today because she felt sick. I took her temperature and gave her some medicine and juice and checked on her now and then. Andre meanwhile hung out with me and the interpreter in the kitchen, just sitting there talking away because there was someone to listen. Slava had missed the cafeteria lunch because he was at school so I cooked him up some sausage and pasta and of course Andre then had a second lunch (no Mari, not second breakfast) because, well, he’s a teenage boy! These are our days here, and they are bittersweet.

The question that has been working on me since I came to Russia is, “How do you help people who feel that change is impossible and who have no drive to help themselves?” Some of these kids really have tried to get their passports and get jobs, but have been burned by the system (red tape anyone?) and are now discouraged and hopeless. Some, however, just don’t see that anything more is possible. It is at times very difficult to find Russians with initiative or vision and, after the repressive climate of the Stalin years, one can understand why. For many, initiative meant death, and for others, their spirit was defeated or scared into hiding and this attitude in certain places seems to have been passed on to the next generation. So, I’m not sure how many kids we can really help in a concrete way. You cannot force someone to dream, or to try over and over again until they succeed. There is also the problem of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and FA Effects (FAE) and I am now convinced that many of our kids suffer from this which has many ramifications on what kind of goals will be realistic for us to expect from them.

Despite all of this, we are optimistic, and are grateful that we have a chance to positively affect even a few. And I have found great meaning in binding wounds (there are a lot of those!) and giving hugs and cooking meals with love and a small budget. For those who know of my great culinary experience ha ha, just imagine me cooking for 10 – 20 people on Saturday and Sunday! I’ve come to adore buckwheat. Healthy,quick and filling! The boys found my album the other day in the apt. and discovered I am a singer, albeit a religious one! They think I should sing with their pop idols here to which I said nyet spaceeba. (no thanks) It was cute but toooorturous to have them play my CD while I was cooking, but two good things came of it: they said they couldn’t believe I was here with them so I think it made them feel important, and they found out that most of the music I do is solely for God, which I hope planted a seed.

They have lately begun to ask me if I am leaving too, which breaks my heart. The thought of never seeing them again is something I can’t even think about, and I just pray that their lives will only get better from here. Maxim is one of the boys who is constantly giving me hope for the others. He has had a job since I met him, even if it meant standing in the bitter cold for 12 hours a day as a guard outside a local store. He hardly gets paid anything for these jobs, but he is now able to pay rent to live in a friend’s apt. and he comes to eat with us. He has a ready smile.just a super cheerful guy who is grateful for each meal, each tablet of cold medicine, and each word of encouragement.

Some of the other boys have now gotten their passports to try to get jobs like his. I just found out yesterday that he wants to be a chef (yikes and he’s been eating my cooking?!) and is trying to earn enough money to go to a school here where in a matter of months he can get a certificate. We are going to help him pay the tuition. He has a connection on a navy boat and has been promised a job once he graduates. We have also just helped Vova sign up for a school which will, in 6 weeks, give him a certificate for operating a forklift, and he also has a job lined up. It’s been a very full and important 3 months since I returned so thank you again to all those who helped me get to Japan for my new entry visa.

On that happy note I will sign off. Sigh. We went and walked on the sea (actually the bay) the other day, which was frozen. For all you worriers, no we didn’t go out that far:) It was very cool, however, to see snow as far as the eye could see, and the only way you could tell it was water was because of the boats harbored! One of the few times I felt like I was really in Russia. So, happy spring!

Love, Erin

p.s. my roommate and I are still trying to get that women’s support center up and running before we leave so for those who are helping raise funds, please give us an update on how it’s going so we can let our dream director know we want her!