A while back I wrote about how Love > Fear. This equation was in my heart and mind during some of my prayer time this week on retreat. It was more of a movement within than something I can capture with words. Hence, this video prayer reflection set to “No Fear in Love” by Steffany Gretzinger. This video prayer is inspired by Ezekiel 36:26, and starring some objects I found on the beach.
I am back from retreat, slowly re-entering my day to day life, such as it is, where really every day is full of its own adventures, flavors and textures.
Speaking of textures, one invitation I experienced this week was to pay attention to the textures. Textures in the pictures I was taking of the beautiful landscape around the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Oregon.
Textures in my life, relationships, community. Textures in my deepening experiences of God’s love. Textures in my response to my ongoing call.
Some hard. Some soft.
Prickly or smooth.
Moisture on rock–sitting patiently
impervious, or maybe
not.
Some will sink into the deep.
It is in the textures of life
where we touch, feel, and know
We are together,
incarnating in our world
the love that has been given
Gift for all.
I went on my first silent retreat 11 years ago when I was in the initial stages of formation with my religious community. To be honest, on that first week of silence I did not quite know what to do with myself, which of course is why it was good that it was a silent directed retreat, meaning I met each day with a spiritual director. It ended up being an amazing time of quiet reflection, long walks, and prayer with our loving Creator God.
Now of course when the time for my annual retreat rolls around, I know what to expect. Except that I really don’t, because each retreat has held its own challenges and wonderful surprises.
In our CSJP Constitutions we say:
We nurture our life of prayer
by reflective reading, particularly Scripture,
by periods of solitude and silence,
and by an annual retreat. (Constitution 30).
Retreat is a special time to reconnect with my loving God. No email or Facebook. No meetings or to-do lists. It is simply a time to pray and reflect on God’s daily invitation to seek justice, love tenderly, and walk in the way of peace.
This morning I make my way to Oregon where I will spend the next week on retreat at the Trappist Abbey. The last time I was there was just before I professed my first vows as a Sister of St. Joseph of Peace. So much has happened since then!
I’ll be holding my bloggy connections and friends and their special intentions in my prayer this week.
Blessings of Peace
I have just returned to the States after a visit to our CSJP community in the UK. One of the sisters I was pleased to have the opportunity to spend time with during my visit with was Sister Joan Ward. This morning, I heard that Sister Joan passed away in the early hours today.
I first met Joan when I was a novice spending four months with our community in England. Sister Alexine, who I lived with in London, arranged for the two of us to spend several weekends travelling about with Joan who was an expert in our Congregation’s founding story. In fact, here is a picture that Alexine took of Joan and myself at the grave side of our founder Margaret Anna Cusack (Mother Francis Clare) in Leamington Spa on one of those weekend pilgrimages. (I wrote about this particular 2007 pilgrimage trip on my old blog –you can still read that post.)
Joan was a dedicated researcher who cherished the story of our founders and early community. I myself will always cherish those special weekends. Joan, Alexine and I went to Grimsby on the east cost of England where our first sisters ministered with the poor. I will never forget going to the Grimsby library with Joan and looking at original census records that listed our early sisters. (In fact, thanks to the way back machine which is my old blog, I have also recorded that experience for posterity!)
In addition to being a community historian, Joan was a dedicated community member. In her younger days she was novice mistress. She was dearly loved across the congregation and so committed to our mission. We had our community assembly in the UK this past Saturday, and Joan was there, attentive and present to our conversations about the vitality of religious life.
I had dinner with Joan this past Sunday. We talked about religious life and our congregation and vocations. “I don’t worry about vocations,” Joan said. “I never really have. It is all in God’s hands.” Given that one of my roles these days is as congregation vocation director, and given that my thoughts are often preoccupied with vocations, I took Joan’s hand and said to her: “Joan, I need you to do something for me. Please pray for me, in my role as vocation director, that I don’t worry about vocations.” She promised me that she would indeed pray for me, and I have absolutely no doubt that she will.
Rest in peace Joan. I am so grateful that I had the chance to get to know you. You have been such a tremendous gift to our congregation! Please pray for us and for those who God will send our way as future Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace.
This weekend is Mother’s Day in the US. My latest Global Sisters Report column is a reflection on racism, white privilege, and lessons I learned from my mother about confronting systemic injustice.
My mother had a particularly informed conscience and made choices that confronted systems of oppression. While I grew up in a mostly-white suburb, my mother would take me shopping at the mall located in a neighboring suburb where most residents were people of color. This was not only to expose her children to diverse groupings of people, but also because she knew that the major department stores intentionally sent lower quality goods and a lesser product selection to stores in communities of color. She was sending a message by choosing to spend her money in those stores, hoping to contribute the strength of her purchasing power to changing what she understood to be an unjust and racist system. …
This Mother’s Day weekend, I choose to remember and honor my mother by lamenting the ways I am connected to and benefit from systems of oppression and exclusion. As my mother’s daughter, I commit myself, once again, to work for justice and the common good.
Hope is like breathing.
Hope in, hope out.
In between it mixes with
all my worries
and cares and doubts.
How will this all work out?
What about x, y, z?
Why me, why now?
Indeed were it all up to me
Hope would not be enough.
But God is in the mix.
Breath of the Spirit.
Breathe of God.
Breath of life.
Love.
“Cast the anchor of hope
into the Heart of love,
and all things shall work together…”
-Mother Clare
Breathing in
Breathing out
Hope.
My latest column on Global Sisters Report has been posted- Help Wanted: Easter People. It is a reflection on being Easter people in a mixed up world, in conversation with Pope Francis, Gustavo Gutierrez, and the founder of my religious community, Margaret Anna Cusack.
In the face of such suffering, against the backdrop of fear-mongering and terrorism, and with the soundtrack of an oftentimes toxic political debate, we celebrate Easter.
Christ is risen. Alleluia!
If Easter and the Resurrection are to mean anything, then we must be Easter people in such a world. …
As Easter people, we are called to find joy, to create hope, and to build peace.
Through us, the Easter story continues.
Click here to read the whole column.
Life is filled with many Holy Saturday moments. Time upon time we must let go of what was before we can even begin to be open to what will come. I think of the way the first Holy Week after my own mother’s death was different than any other before or since. I felt it in my bones. I think of friends who have lost their job and struggled to find their feet again, or friends who have lost a child far too soon, or seen the end of their marriage. There is always that messy middle space of witnessing the love lived and lost before something new emerges to call us forth to witness to love and life in new ways.
Theologian Shelly Rambo identifies Holy Saturday as the “middle day, as the site of witness to a more complex relationship between death and life” (Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, pg. 46.). And what is at the core of this complex relationship? Love of course. “Between death and life, there is a testimony to Spirit, to a love that survives not in victory but in weariness” (pgs. 79-80).
This weariness is real and of the Spirit. It attests to the depth of love that has been lived. But it also can keep us from seeing the new life that is before our eyes. Think of Mary Magdalene at the tomb, mistaking Jesus for the gardener!
I can’t help but ponder the shifting landscape and transformations taking place in religious life through the lens of Holy Saturday. As I wrote in a Global Sisters Report column last year, “Middle space represents this time as an almost Holy Saturday moment. Much is breaking down, we know something new is emerging, but this is a moment pregnant with not yet.”
On this Holy Saturday morning, I found myself reading an article featuring some younger Catholic sisters I know who are members the Sisters of the Holy Redeemer. It is a great article that focuses on the new life that is present and emerging, even as the sisters are letting go of the structures of the past. “Now they are crafting a brave future in which the sisterhood may be minuscule, but its work will go on.”
We are indeed living in a Holy Saturday moment. “We can say, ‘Oh, isn’t it sad, our sisters are aging, nobody is coming, we’re dying out’ – and that’s real,” said Sister Anne Marie Haas, provincial supervisor of the community’s Montgomery County headquarters. “But we have a choice.”
And that choice is love, even in its weariest and messiest forms. As we say in our CSJP Constitutions, “Confident of God’s faithful love, and collaborating with others who work for justice and peace, we face the future with gratitude and hope.”
Distractions and details
come and go.
Swirly,
they lead me down
meandering mental paths.
Still I sit.
God is patient with it all.
With me.
God is Present to me in it all,
waiting for me to be present to God,
in the stillness
in the quiet
in this morning moment.
Here I am.
This morning, after reading much disheartening news on the domestic and international front over breakfast, I spent some quiet time with today’s Scripture readings and my friend Julia Walsh, FSPA’s latest Global Sisters Report column.
In Hosea, I read: “What can I do with you, Ephraim? What can I do with you, Judah? Your piety is like a morning cloud, like the dew that early passes away … For it is love that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
In Julia’s column, I read: “In this fearful age, God can transform all of us and the ways we feel about each other. We can love in radical ways, guided by our faith that each of us — even the person who scares us the most — are truly children of God deserving to be loved and cherished. Then, freed from the fears that plague our conversations, news, and dynamics, we can powerfully love one another just as God has loved us, sharing transformative mercy and hope.”
Both can be summed up by this equation:
Worthy of meditation and practice, I think.
It is also important for me to stay abreast of current news and the currents of political discourse. But I can’t let that weigh me down. Fear is not stronger than love. Suffering is not insurmountable. Hatred is a symptom of broken relationships and isolation. We are called to something greater, to community and connection.
We must give voice to love in the face of fear, through our words, our actions, our hopes and desires. Not just in the quiet contemplative moments but in all of our interactions and in our ordinary lives. That is how change happens and how love spreads to dispel fear. Don’t you think?
At the Corner of Susan and St. Joseph 