Spirituality of events

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

In a talk I gave at WTH on Mary, the Witness to Hope, I shared about learning how to live our lives with an attentiveness to the “spirituality of events.”  This basically means asking the Holy Spirit to speak to us through the events that happen to us in our days, to help us to learn what God is trying to teach us through all that comes our way.  God wants to teach us how to look at the events in our lives with His eyes, with the eyes of faith. Yesterday’s meditation in Magnificat reminded me of that:

“The circumstances through which God has us pass are an essential and not a secondary factor of . . . the mission to which he calls us.  If Christianity is the announcement of the fact that that Mystery has become flesh in a man, the circumstance in which one takes a position about this in front of the whole world is important for the very definition of witness” (L. Giussani)

We all know well what these circumstances are that have challenged us throughout this year: the economic crisis, . . . the many forms of pain which have caused us to reflect . . . seeing a world collapse in front of our eyes, with laws that no longer know how to defend the good of life or of the family, finding ourselves more and more obliged to live our lives without a homeland, dramatic personal and social circumstances from illness to trouble to the loss of work, if not in fact the loss of everything . . . So these circumstances through which God has us pass, says Father Guissani, “are an essential and not a secondary factor of our vocation.”  For us, then, circumstances are not neutral.  They are not things that happen without any meaning; that is, they are not just things to put up with, to suffer stoically.  They are part of our vocation, of the way in which God, the good Mystery, calls us, challenges us, educates us.  For us, these circumstances have all the weight of a call, and thus are part of the dialogue of each one of us with the Mystery present.

Life is a dialogue.

“Life is not a tragedy.  Tragedy is what makes everything amount to nothing.  Yes, life is a drama.  It is dramatic because it is the relationship between our I and the You of God, our I that must follow the steps which God indicates” (L. Giussani).  It is this Presence, this You that makes circumstances change, because without this You everything would be nothing, everything would be a step toward an every darker tragedy. But precisely because this You exists, circumstances call us to him.  It is he who calls us through them.  It is he who calls us to destiny through everything that happens.

How to manage

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

Some more excerpts from Deb Herbeck’s book, Safely Through the Storm:

I will not mistrust [God], thought I feel myself weakening and on the verge of being overcome by fear . . . .I trust he shall place his holy hand on me and in the stormy seas hold me up from drowning.  (St. Thomas More)

Go and find him when your patience and strength give out and you feel alone and helpless.  Jesus is waiting for you in the chapel.  Say to him, “Jesus, you know exactly what is going on.  You are all that I have, and you know all.  Come to my help.”  And then go, and don’t worry about how you are going to manage.  That you have told God about it is enough.  He has a good memory.  (St. Jeanne Jugan)

All things fail, but You, O Lord of them all, never fail. . . . You seem, O Lord, to give extreme tests to those who love You, but only that, in the extremity of their trials, they may learn the greater extremity of Your love.  (St. Teresa of Avila)

Pneuma

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Pneuma

The wind breathes where it wishes
blows where it flows
The eye of your storm
sees from the wild height
Your air augments the world
tearing away dead wood
testing, toughening all trees
spreading all seeds
sifting the sand
carving the rock
the water
in the end
moving the mountain.

~Luci Shaw

“The Power of the Powerless”

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

My new favorite, must-read, book is The Power of the Powerless, by Christopher de Vinck.  Perhaps you’ve heard of this book already–published in 1988.  I just stumbled upon it recently.  In his book, Christopher recounts the powerful impact his blind, mute, brain-damaged older brother had on his life, his brother, Oliver, who could do absolutely nothing for himself except to teach Christopher how to love.  You can dip into the book yourself here.  It’s one of those books that permanently brands your life upon reading.  A very important book for our-lack-of-respect-for-life times.

Today I am an English teacher, and each time I introduce my class to the play about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker, I tell my students the story about Oliver.

One day, during my first year of teaching, I was trying to describe Oliver’s lack of response, how he had been spoon-fed every morsel he ever ate, how he never spoke.  A boy in the last row raised his hand and said, “Oh, Mr. de Vinck.  You mean he was a vegetable.”

I stammered for a few seconds.  My family and I fed Oliver.  We changed his diapers, hung his clothes and bed linens on the basement line in the winter, and spread them out white and clean to dry on the lawn in the summer.  I always liked to watch the grasshoppers jump on the pillowcases.

We bathed Oliver, tickled his chest to make him laugh.  Sometimes we left the radio on in his room.  We pulled the shade down on the window over his bed in the morning to keep the sun from burning his tender skin.  We listened to him laugh as we watched television downstairs.  We listened to him rock his arms up and down to make the bed squeak.  We listened to him cough in the middle of the night.

“Well, I guess you could call him a vegetable.  I called him Oliver, my brother.  You would have loved him.”

Not in control

Sr. Dorcee, beloved6 Comments

Years ago after I arrived home one day, I asked one of our sisters who was the cook for the day if she had everything under control.  She replied, “I hope not.”  I’ve never forgotten her response.  God was the One who needed to be in control, not her.  I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently because a lot has been going on that is beyond my control.  Because of stress in my life, I had to cancel some of my obligations over the past couple of weeks, including speaking engagements at our parish women’s retreat.  Not the kind of thing I like to do.  My comfort this morning has been reading the psalms, especially those which speak of God being in control.  (Hmmmmm. Aren’t they all about that?)  Or take Isaiah 54:10 “For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you.”

May you have a day not in your own control.  🙂

Sometimes

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This morning I was digging through one of my old journals of quotes and found this gem.  I hope it strikes a chord of hope in the heart that needs it . . . as it did in mine this morning when I re-read it.

God seems to confound our prayers, by putting off deliverance to such a point that it seems removed to a distance from which it cannot reach us.  He does not often deal with us thus, because He is merciful, but He does it sometimes, for the very same reasons.  (Adolphe Monod)

And That Will Be Heaven

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

A Sunday-poem for you:

And That Will Be Heaven

and that will be heaven

and that will be heaven
at last      the first unclouded
seeing

to stand like the sunflower
turned full face to the sun    drenched
in light    in the still centre
held    while the circling planets
hum with an utter joy
seeing and knowing
at last     in every particle
seen and known     and not turning
away
never turning away
again

~Evangeline Patterson

“God never wastes His children’s pain.”

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For those of you who seem to be suffering fruitless pain, a word from Amy Carmichael:

But to what end is pain?  I do not clearly know.  But I have noticed that when one who has not suffered draws near to one in pain there is rarely much power to help; there is not the understanding that leaves the suffering thing comforted, though perhaps not a word was spoken; and I have wondered if it can be the same in the sphere of prayer.  Does pain accepted and endured give some quality that would otherwise be lacking in prayer?  Does it create that sympathy which can lay itself alongside the need, feeling it as though it were personal, so that it is possible to do just what the writer of Hebrews meant when he said, “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body“?

. . . What if every stroke of pain, or hour of weariness, or ay other trial of flesh or spirit, could carry us a pulse-beat nearer some other life, some life for which the ministry of prayer is needed, would it not be worth while to suffer?  Ten thousand times yes.  And surely it must be so, for the further we are drawn into the fellowship of Calvary with our dear Lord, the tenderer are we toward others, the closer alongside do our spirits lie with them that are in bonds; as being ourselves also in the body.  God never wastes His children’s pain.  (Rose from Brier, p. 124)