Volume IX, Issue 15
April 8, 2020
Word of the Week: blessed
Dear ,
The holidays we celebrate in spring tell of darkness, then light, of hope, perseverance, strength, love. They are filled with ritual, steeped in tradition. And they urge us to remember what is holy—whom, and what, is deserving of our blessing.
Viewing Passover and Easter through the lens of a pandemic makes me appreciate even more deeply the value of sacrifice for a greater good. And while it's hard to think about an Easter dinner without family around the table, I'm grateful for the warm memories of holidays gone by, all the way back to my
childhood. Here I am (on left) with my sister Mary and brother Tim, back in 1961, coloring Easter eggs.
I feel so fortunate to have had a mother who loved to celebrate holidays. This week's writing tells about one of her faith traditions. It's
s one of the pieces for my cookbook memoir that I've been working on the past few weeks. I hope you enjoy it, and the bonus of extra writing prompts for you.
Now and always, may your life be filled with blessings. Thank you for blessing mine
through your presence in my writing community.
Love and light,
Online
WordPlay
\POETRY ROCKS!
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* a short reflection to solidify the concepts covered
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WHAT PARTICIPANTS SAY ABOUT POETRY ROCKS
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Featured Writing
from
How She Fed Us
Reflections on the Recipes
of a Perfectly Imperfect Mother
BLESSED ARE YOU
One thing I grew to appreciate about my mother the older I got was her respect for people of different races, different walks of life, different religions. Although almost everyone she knew was Catholic, she had a few friends of other faiths as well, including Jewish neighbors whose backyard adjoined ours; and she appreciated that the two religions had much in common.
At some point, Mother began a yearly tradition of celebrating Holy Thursday—the commemoration of Jesus’ Last Supper—with a Paschal meal, a recreation of the Passover meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples before his betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The ceremony—a communal retelling of the story of the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt accompanied with ritual cups of wine and symbolic foods—is a beautiful one, rich in tradition.
In addition to a full dinner featuring marinated roast lamb, there were ceremonial foods to prepare—bitter herbs to dip in salt water, homemade matzo (unleavened bread), and horoses (a salad made of apples and spices), along with Burgundy for the grownups and grape juice for us kids.
Given all this extra work, we ate later than usual. So in my memory, despite the longer spring days, it was dark outside by the time we began the blessing. The beauty of the ancient prayers, read by candlelight, stirred something in my soul:
“Blessed are You, God, Creator of the Universe,
who brings forth from the earth the fruit of the vine.”
As one after the other of us left home for college and then began lives of our own, Mother stopped making a Passover meal at home. But the tradition didn’t end. She began coordinating a Passover meal at her church with the help of my sister Mary’s good friend Jane, who still attended Saint Luke’s, our family’s parish since we’d first moved to Erie in 1963.
I learned about this meal from a letter I received from Mother dated “Monday,” which she probably wrote in 1987 or ’88:
“Pascal Meal went very well. Jane did a great job.
I did all the meal planning + shopping—plus
marinated + roast + cut lamb. Everyone liked the
dinner—lots of compliments + we came out with
very little leftover—except matzo + Horoses (both
of these were all gone last year).”
Mother wrote me many letters over the years about various aspects of her life. She filled those letters with clippings about child-rearing and housekeeping, coupons, Dear Abby columns, praise and encouragement. Out of all these letters, one that she sent shortly before Easter ten years or so later was by far the most impactful. By then, our relationship was a warm one. The love and
attention she’d lavished on my children had melted my heart. Raising a family of four had helped me understand many of the factors that caused her to sometimes lash out at me when I was a child. So, the contents came as a complete surprise.
Though I’ve searched for that letter in vain over the past two decades, I’ve never forgotten what it said. Twelve years after I lost Mother, as I, along with the students in one of my creative writing classes, responded to the prompt “Write about a letter,” this is what came out:
I have saved every letter
my mother ever
wrote me, I suppose, so
I don’t know how many
hours it would take
to find the one
that mattered, the one
that I left on top of the piano
for months
as my daughter banged out
the notes of Für Elise over and
over, kept going back to until
she knew them by heart, the way
I kept sliding her
pale blue stationary out
and in, out and in of
its pale blue envelope I kept
in my sight as I walked
to and from the kitchen,
back and forth with
the laundry, up and down
the stairs, out and
in the front door, the letter
with the scrawled script
so hard to decipher
it needed to be
puzzled out letter by
angular letter, word by
generous word, the letter in which
Mother said she was
sorry, she felt
so badly, she hadn’t meant
to hurt me.
Blessed are you, Mother, Bearer of me, and blessed are apologies that bring forth from the heart such healing.
~ Maureen Ryan Griffin
from the upcoming cookbook memoir How She Fed Us:
Reflections on the Recipes of a Perfectly Imperfect Mother
WordPlay Now! Writing Prompt
This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and potential of one good word after another? This week, it's “blessed."
PROMPT:
This week, I've pulled out four potential directions for you. Try one, try a few, try them all.
PROMPT 1: Write about a holiday tradition, either your own or one of your character’s.
PROMPT 2: Write a letter, from you or one of your characters. Or write about a letter.
PROMPT 3: Write about an apology, either given or received, that made a difference to you or one of your characters.
PROMPT 4: Begin with “Blessed are . . . and keep writing, about one person, or many, about anyone or anything that you would like to bless.
You can find out about WordPlay classes, workshops, and retreats here.
MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of
Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and three collections of poetry, Ten Thousand Cicadas Can't Be Wrong, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water.
She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, “We are meant to midwife dreams for one another.” Maureen also believes that serious “word
work” requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best
learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours!
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