For ancient agrarian cultures, the growing darkness signaled infertility, the sun standing still, the encroachment of uncertainty in the world around: the fallow fields beneath indigo skies, sleeping bulbs beneath frozen ground—no way of knowing what would come to pass.
Tuesday’s solstice comes with a full moon and a lunar eclipse. Wholeness and obscurity. A reminder that we, like the moon, are always full. We may feel empty or partial, a sliver of our total selves as we wax and wane. But at any given moment like the moon our fullness is there even when not apparent.
The poet Denise Levertov describes it this way:
Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
but sky-moon
complete, transcending
all violation
Here she seems to be talking to herself about
the shape of a life… (The Great Unknowing)
Winter solstice with its womb of solar darkness birthing lunar light invites us re-imagine ourselves—to glimpse the forgotten truth of our wholeness as we daily unfold into our own re-making. The childhood that shapes us, accords us the tenderness and bruises we spend our adulthoods learning to recognize, and if we are lucky, heal, contains the seeds of fullness whether they fall on fertile soil or settle on arid land.
The novelist Darin Strauss, writes in his new memoir, Half A Life: “Things don’t go away. They become you. …We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.”
We see ourselves reflected in a moon that in turn reflects light from a source both distant and present. Thus we are beings able to achieve incandescence by reflecting and synthesizing light, be it solar or divine.
Perhaps that is why I love the line: We walk in all the light we have. For like the moon, we have moments of brightness that set snowy fields awash like the dawn, and moments of eclipse when darkness penetrates our core.
Yet eclipse like shadow exists only in the presence of light.
In Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, she writes: “Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we are formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.”
Several years ago, when I volunteered as a chaplain in a county jail I encountered a man I’ll call Tom who felt victimized by a system that was out to get him. I listened sympathetically for many weeks. After Tom got sentenced to the state prison, I went up to visit him, along with another fellow I’ll call Bob I also met in the county jail. Unlike Tom, Bob took responsibility for his actions and blamed no one else. I visited with Bob first, mentioning my intention to see Tom. That’s when Bob told me that Tom had worked for him in a community-based treatment program for sex offenders. According to Bob, Tom had shown no remorse then for the poor choices that had led to his dismissal, just as he showed no remorse for the sex offense he had been convicted of.
Bob’s information took me by surprise. I let my visit with him run so long so there was no time left to see Tom. I reconsidered whether to answer Tom’s letters. Apparently, he had misrepresented himself and the truth.
But in that way that grace appears, I remembered the other line that instructs me: it is only in an uncondemned state that any of us can change.
This is, of course, a story of my stumbling in the darkness, not Tom.
It was not my role to judge him, but only to detect his light and reflect it back.
I decided to answer his letters and over the years I saw the shift from blaming others to expressions of remorse. Tom had enough light to take responsibility. He owned his offense. He recounted his therapy, named his addictions. Recognized his shadow and more remarkably, his light.
The darkness of eclipse is but a testimony to the hidden moon.
The former poet laureate Billy Collins writes:
The moon is full tonight…
It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.
And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.
And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.
And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.
The long night with its full moon bright and then eclipsed, then re-emergent gives us a way to visualize the interior process of spiritual journey. The way we each travel a path or blaze a trail in order to return to our essence.
It’s easy to lose sight of the moon in the ambient sulfur glow of human-made light. So much of it we create to find our way out of the darkness when instead we are called to go in, to inhabit the darkness in all its fecundity. Yet how do we enter into the darkness if we walk in all the light we have and don’t wish to stumble or worse, crash headlong into something or someone?
If we take darkness as metaphor for the moments in our lives we lack awareness or necessary insight, if darkness represents the blind spots, the defenses that obscure our ability to see the needs or wants of others, or to recognize the deepest longing within ourselves, why seek to spend a minute longer in it?
Again a poet, this time Wendell Berry, provides an answer:
“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
When I was a child after I had cut my eye and been told it was a miracle I had not lost my sight, I used to practice walking with my eyes closed, feeling for walls and doorways, my fingers splayed across emptiness. I spent decades trying to find my way back to that original wholeness we come from, that oneness with creation, or as I like to imagine it, the great tree of life. And in that search for connection, that yearning for spiritual intimacy I stumbled a lot. Not unlike Tom when I first met him, I too blamed the furniture someone had carelessly left in my way. I cursed the darkness instead of getting to know it.
The dark wings and feet scared me.
But that is the beauty and gift of solstice, the long night, the bridge of darkness that delivers us, if we are willing to inhabit it long enough to know the moon is there when we do not see it, to feel the light of our fullness in that dark.
When we can view ourselves with compassion, when we can reach out to the parts of ourselves that feel horribly broken, whether shattered by dysfunction, ambition or grief, and run our fingers ever so gently around the sharp edges, when we can embrace the wisdom of an ancient poet’s line—“My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. I would not lose one”—we enter into union with the darkness and whatever we conceive of as the divine. When we can hold ourselves in gentleness not judgment, even the sharp parts, we glimpse the entire moon in a silver crescent.
I realize now, when Bob first told me what he knew of Tom, it’s as if he cracked open a vial of darkness and spilled it over Tom’s light. For a few minutes in a prison visiting room, I let Bob’s experience of Tom eclipse mine. The light I thought I’d seen in Tom became a mirage. But the grace that blooms in darkness, as Wendell Berry writes, sang to me again the truth that we walk in all the light we have. Just as Tom could not yet see his fullness, or understand how life bends us into shapes not entirely of our own making, neither could I. What I could detect however, was that in reaching out into the dark uncertainty that was Tom, I splayed my hand once again to comb my own darkness. To brush against my own edges and unfamiliar forms. To recognize compassion leads us back to our essential selves.
I imagine us coming into existence as an orb of glowing light, and then dispersing as experiences split us open and apart.
It’s so easy then to deny our missteps thinking they lead us away from God or whatever we name the sanctity of deep connection with all that is. It’s easy in these days of self-help and pop psychology to pathologize or rationalize, to slip into the chasm of sinner or saint, lout or victim. But that is not what allows us to come into our fullness. Compassion does because it lights the darkness, because it hold us in the same precious love Julian of Norwich promised six centuries ago.
Compassion for our true whole selves, scattered or reconstituted, and compassion for the thousand pieces of everyone else is what makes it possible to “gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself and carry him outdoors… steady[ing] his lolling head with the palm of your hand.”
As we enter the darkness solstice brings, and let it inhabit us for a while, we too will see in
“scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
… sky-moon complete, transcending
all violation
… talking to herself about
the shape of a life”
born into wholeness, rising full.
Amen.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Roses of Guadalupe
Last Sunday before the service, Mark Peterson told me he didn’t have my sermon titles to post on the board outside, so for December twelfth he put up “Guadalupe” because he saw it on a calendar. I had been thinking of sermon topics, something related to the season, so when Mark mentioned Guadalupe, what came to mind was the week I spent in January 2001 in Cuernavava, Mexico with a side trip to Mexico City to see the BasÃlica of Guadalupe. Continuing in a theme of important dates in the Mexican calendar, today I bring you The Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe, December twelfth, a day when thousands of Mexican pilgrims make their way to the Basilica, many traveling by bicycle and some arriving on their knees to pay homage to the Virgin.
The day I visited the basilica fell about a month after the feast day, but still hundreds of pilgrims filed by me on their knees. Thousands gathered to view the displayed piece of fabric bearing the image of Mary found by a peasant named Juan Diego this day in 1531.
The Benedictine nuns who took me and six other North American visitors to the shrine told us the miraculous origin of the cloth.
A peasant named Juan Diego was traveling from his home village to Mexico City when he came upon a young woman surrounded in light who instructed him in the local language of Nahuatl to build a church in her honor. Juan Diego recognized the woman as the Virgin Mother. He hurried to tell the Bishop who instructed him to return to site and ask the woman for a sign proving her identity. So off Juan went and when he found her, he asked for a sign and she told him to go up the rocky hill and gather flowers. And though it was winter he found roses everywhere. Guadalupe herself arranged the flowers in his cloak and bade him not to move them until he reached the Bishop. Juan Diego returned to the Bishop and when he opened his cloak, the flowers fell to the floor and in their place a glowing figure of her appeared on the cloth where the petals had been.
It is that image on Juan Diego’s cloak that hangs in the basilica.
The nuns explain Guadalupe’s name really means “the one who protects us from the ones who eat us,” undoubtedly a reference to the Spanish conquistadors Indians like Juan Diego faced. “She is mestizo,” says Sister Fatima. “She welcomes the children of Spanish fathers and indigenous mothers,” inviting the blended into her maternal embrace.
On my winter visit, roses bloomed in the gardens of the nuns just as they bloomed before Juan Diego.
In the Christian liturgical calendar, this is the third Sunday of Advent, Any of you who grew up in or near the tradition may remember the colors that correspond with each of the four Sundays. Because Advent begins like Lent as a time of penitence and fasting, altars first feature purple, a color associated with both penitence and royalty, but by the third week they shift to bright blue to signify the night sky that will herald the rising star or the waters of life associated with creation, or they feature rose to reflect the joy inherent in the coming birth.
This year the third Sunday of Advent falls on December twelfth, the day Mexicans honor Guadalupe who chose as a sign of her authenticity roses abloom out of season on a rocky hillside.
There is a way the Spirit alights today no less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared before Juan Diego. No less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared to Mary herself when the angel Gabriel announced to her she would carry a son.
It is easy for folks like us who prefer a more rational approach to life than religious miracles portend, to dismiss the relevance of such stories, but the nine days I spent in Mexico a decade ago with the nuns taught me otherwise and summon me to heed the message of this time of year. So on this Mexican high holy day, it feels fitting to recount my experience, not with an apparition of Guadalupe, but an incarnation of her that appeared in the form of Benedictine sisters in their modest blue skirts and white blouses, cinnamon skin and dark eyes closer to the color of a Middle Eastern Mary than the paler versions we know.
Benedictines, whether monks or nuns, follow the Rule of Benedict, a set of directions for monastic life written in the 6th century by Benedict of Nursia whose wisdom shaped Western monasticism. Ten months a year, the good sisters at Las Misioneras Guadalupanas de Cristo Rey welcome visitors from the United States for a program called "Faith/Hospitality Experience in Latin America." For nine days, people like me are given the chance to experience Benedictine hospitality. For Benedictines, each guest is a representative of Christ.
Upon our arrival at the retreat center, several nuns rush out to greet us. Each one offers a big hug and says in English, "Welcome Home." In our rooms, much more spacious than the ones the nuns live in, we each find a vase of flowers next to a hand-lettered card with our name and another "welcome." In each bathroom is a bottle of purified water. In our three daily chapel services, the nuns provide readings in English and play tapes of U.S. monks singing. In the dining room there are Oreos, and mashed potatoes. Hot dogs and grilled cheese. Evidence abounds of their effort to make us feel at home.
Year-round the nuns work with the poor of Cuernavaca. Part of their mission is to educate us about that reality. Eighty percent of Mexico’s people live in poverty. Illiteracy and malnutrition contribute to vast underemployment. We listen to guest speakers and watch a twenty-year-old video about the hidden Holocaust of Guatemala—a civil war where 135,000 people died. We meet survivors of that war who have settled in Mexico. Every day, we visit children and adults who labor to subsist. On a dirt walkway just over the hill from the retreat center, we chat with four women, shovels in hand, creating a road from a heap of gravel. Another day, we visit four families in The Station, a cramped, non-arable swath of government land where 30,000 squatters live in dwellings constructed from scraps. In the homes we enter, little light shines in. There are no windows amidst the corrugated metal and stone. Dust. Rats. Bare light bulbs. Outhouses. Strips of cloth functioning as doors. Conditions that mirror the encampments of poor blacks who lived a mile from my childhood home in Tennessee, reminiscent of lives lived in cardboard box villages and in subway tunnels. Each foray led by the nuns a billboard for the prophet Jeremiah who wrote: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; that makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages.
The good sisters aim to churn our consciousness by exposing us to harsh realities. They want us to consider the ways we spend our disposable income and think twice before supporting NAFTA; but it is the nuns themselves, voices soft and laughter keen, who stir my soul beyond measure. It is their oft-repeated melodies sung on or off key, in praise of a god that restores their hope daily and calls them to serve by accompanying them as they do.
In Cuernavaca as I read aloud the poetry of Mary Oliver each day as part of my morning meditation, sitting outside among lavish winter roses, apricot and ivory, I realize why the people I meet there need the Lady of Guadalupe, a mestizo incarnation of Mary who fuses indigenous religion with Christianity in a way that makes sense to conquered people. As I walk to 7a.m. chapel, marveling at the roses and hibiscus, the palette of sky as the sun transforms it, I experience the divine in Mary Oliver’s images and the scent of flora, in the colors and texture and infinite wisdom of the universe. And as soon as I sit down in the chapel, careful to select a seat that permits me to gaze out the picture window at the rising sun and the reflection of the candle in the foliage on the hill so that I peer into a burning bush, the nuns sing praises to El Senor, to a human incarnation of God who suffers with the poor. As the sound of the nuns singing psalms in Spanish fills my ear, I feel the presence of the God they invoke.
Up until that moment, I have experienced a sense of the divine through poetry. My realm of the sacred: magnificent trees, Not surprising for a person who lives in a wooded landscape where the trees have room to grow like spires. But there in the small room filled with the good sisters of Guadalupe, my horizon of the sacred expands.
The sisters faithfully bow to the consecrated host in a glass box that hangs from the chapel ceiling, wafers made holy they tell me by blessings of the priest. And at that moment, I see as clearly as Juan Diego did, the presence of holiness. Not in the host consecrated by the priest, but in the welcome consecrated by nuns who embody the risen spirit in their radical hospitality, their tireless pursuit of justice, their unsung labor—they emanate a god that before, I would have only seen present in the petals of rose light that bloom on the chapel wall at evening prayer.
It is the nuns who instruct me why it is that as lovely as their flowers are, what ultimately stirs Juan Diego, and centuries of his descendents is the image of a mestizo Mary welcoming them as graciously as the Virgin accepts the fullness of her womb, a pregnancy she does not choose. The message Mary imparts is that within each of us the divine gestates and comes to light when we, as courageously as she does, welcome the unbidden. When we heed the great Sufi poet Rumi, who writes: “Be grateful for whoever comes/ because each has been sent /as a guide from beyond.”
The morning of our departure, I am the only guest who shows up for 7 a.m. prayer. I peer in the doorway of the chapel where five nuns pray. No guitars or singing, just the quiet murmurs of Spanish. An amber hand beckons me in. The mother superior offers me an English Bible and indicates a passage to read. After I finish, she reads the same passage in Spanish. A moment later, the nuns rise and move toward center. We all join hands. They begin the Lord’s Prayer in English. I wave my hand to indicate no, no, please say it in Spanish. But daily they embroider the Rule of Benedict on their hearts. Of course they will pray in English for the sake of their lone North American guest.
The words catch in my throat, blocked by welling tears. I struggle to make them audible, to give voice to my gratitude for their kindness, for the gift of their prayer.
I keep replaying the words of sister Ramona telling me that after we depart, they will clean our rooms, launder the linens, re-make the beds. "This is our work," she says.
I think of Glenda telling me our job is to stay in our joy. And I think of Guadalupe telling a peasant to gather flowers where you least expect them. I recall gazing up at that cloth, centuries old, beholding the image of a woman radiating light, arms extended in welcome. I recall the sight of men and women walking on their knees across an acre of concrete in humility and praise, traveling like the legendary wise men to pay homage to “the one who protects them from the ones who will eat [them].”
We rarely believe it is the unknown that will protect us. We don’t associate the unbidden or unexpected with what saves us. Usually, we meet the unknown with apprehension or run the other way. But on the feast day of Guadalupe, the third Sunday of Advent, may the color of roses, the color of joy, remind us of flowers that bloom when and where we least expect. May we, like Juan Diego, see holiness on the hillside, and like Mary, feel it stirring within.
Amen.
Closing words: Helen Keller wrote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Adventure begins with Advent. Pregnant with risk and possibility, it invites us to participate in birth of what we cannot imagine but nevertheless can come to know.
The day I visited the basilica fell about a month after the feast day, but still hundreds of pilgrims filed by me on their knees. Thousands gathered to view the displayed piece of fabric bearing the image of Mary found by a peasant named Juan Diego this day in 1531.
The Benedictine nuns who took me and six other North American visitors to the shrine told us the miraculous origin of the cloth.
A peasant named Juan Diego was traveling from his home village to Mexico City when he came upon a young woman surrounded in light who instructed him in the local language of Nahuatl to build a church in her honor. Juan Diego recognized the woman as the Virgin Mother. He hurried to tell the Bishop who instructed him to return to site and ask the woman for a sign proving her identity. So off Juan went and when he found her, he asked for a sign and she told him to go up the rocky hill and gather flowers. And though it was winter he found roses everywhere. Guadalupe herself arranged the flowers in his cloak and bade him not to move them until he reached the Bishop. Juan Diego returned to the Bishop and when he opened his cloak, the flowers fell to the floor and in their place a glowing figure of her appeared on the cloth where the petals had been.
It is that image on Juan Diego’s cloak that hangs in the basilica.
The nuns explain Guadalupe’s name really means “the one who protects us from the ones who eat us,” undoubtedly a reference to the Spanish conquistadors Indians like Juan Diego faced. “She is mestizo,” says Sister Fatima. “She welcomes the children of Spanish fathers and indigenous mothers,” inviting the blended into her maternal embrace.
On my winter visit, roses bloomed in the gardens of the nuns just as they bloomed before Juan Diego.
In the Christian liturgical calendar, this is the third Sunday of Advent, Any of you who grew up in or near the tradition may remember the colors that correspond with each of the four Sundays. Because Advent begins like Lent as a time of penitence and fasting, altars first feature purple, a color associated with both penitence and royalty, but by the third week they shift to bright blue to signify the night sky that will herald the rising star or the waters of life associated with creation, or they feature rose to reflect the joy inherent in the coming birth.
This year the third Sunday of Advent falls on December twelfth, the day Mexicans honor Guadalupe who chose as a sign of her authenticity roses abloom out of season on a rocky hillside.
There is a way the Spirit alights today no less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared before Juan Diego. No less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared to Mary herself when the angel Gabriel announced to her she would carry a son.
It is easy for folks like us who prefer a more rational approach to life than religious miracles portend, to dismiss the relevance of such stories, but the nine days I spent in Mexico a decade ago with the nuns taught me otherwise and summon me to heed the message of this time of year. So on this Mexican high holy day, it feels fitting to recount my experience, not with an apparition of Guadalupe, but an incarnation of her that appeared in the form of Benedictine sisters in their modest blue skirts and white blouses, cinnamon skin and dark eyes closer to the color of a Middle Eastern Mary than the paler versions we know.
Benedictines, whether monks or nuns, follow the Rule of Benedict, a set of directions for monastic life written in the 6th century by Benedict of Nursia whose wisdom shaped Western monasticism. Ten months a year, the good sisters at Las Misioneras Guadalupanas de Cristo Rey welcome visitors from the United States for a program called "Faith/Hospitality Experience in Latin America." For nine days, people like me are given the chance to experience Benedictine hospitality. For Benedictines, each guest is a representative of Christ.
Upon our arrival at the retreat center, several nuns rush out to greet us. Each one offers a big hug and says in English, "Welcome Home." In our rooms, much more spacious than the ones the nuns live in, we each find a vase of flowers next to a hand-lettered card with our name and another "welcome." In each bathroom is a bottle of purified water. In our three daily chapel services, the nuns provide readings in English and play tapes of U.S. monks singing. In the dining room there are Oreos, and mashed potatoes. Hot dogs and grilled cheese. Evidence abounds of their effort to make us feel at home.
Year-round the nuns work with the poor of Cuernavaca. Part of their mission is to educate us about that reality. Eighty percent of Mexico’s people live in poverty. Illiteracy and malnutrition contribute to vast underemployment. We listen to guest speakers and watch a twenty-year-old video about the hidden Holocaust of Guatemala—a civil war where 135,000 people died. We meet survivors of that war who have settled in Mexico. Every day, we visit children and adults who labor to subsist. On a dirt walkway just over the hill from the retreat center, we chat with four women, shovels in hand, creating a road from a heap of gravel. Another day, we visit four families in The Station, a cramped, non-arable swath of government land where 30,000 squatters live in dwellings constructed from scraps. In the homes we enter, little light shines in. There are no windows amidst the corrugated metal and stone. Dust. Rats. Bare light bulbs. Outhouses. Strips of cloth functioning as doors. Conditions that mirror the encampments of poor blacks who lived a mile from my childhood home in Tennessee, reminiscent of lives lived in cardboard box villages and in subway tunnels. Each foray led by the nuns a billboard for the prophet Jeremiah who wrote: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; that makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages.
The good sisters aim to churn our consciousness by exposing us to harsh realities. They want us to consider the ways we spend our disposable income and think twice before supporting NAFTA; but it is the nuns themselves, voices soft and laughter keen, who stir my soul beyond measure. It is their oft-repeated melodies sung on or off key, in praise of a god that restores their hope daily and calls them to serve by accompanying them as they do.
In Cuernavaca as I read aloud the poetry of Mary Oliver each day as part of my morning meditation, sitting outside among lavish winter roses, apricot and ivory, I realize why the people I meet there need the Lady of Guadalupe, a mestizo incarnation of Mary who fuses indigenous religion with Christianity in a way that makes sense to conquered people. As I walk to 7a.m. chapel, marveling at the roses and hibiscus, the palette of sky as the sun transforms it, I experience the divine in Mary Oliver’s images and the scent of flora, in the colors and texture and infinite wisdom of the universe. And as soon as I sit down in the chapel, careful to select a seat that permits me to gaze out the picture window at the rising sun and the reflection of the candle in the foliage on the hill so that I peer into a burning bush, the nuns sing praises to El Senor, to a human incarnation of God who suffers with the poor. As the sound of the nuns singing psalms in Spanish fills my ear, I feel the presence of the God they invoke.
Up until that moment, I have experienced a sense of the divine through poetry. My realm of the sacred: magnificent trees, Not surprising for a person who lives in a wooded landscape where the trees have room to grow like spires. But there in the small room filled with the good sisters of Guadalupe, my horizon of the sacred expands.
The sisters faithfully bow to the consecrated host in a glass box that hangs from the chapel ceiling, wafers made holy they tell me by blessings of the priest. And at that moment, I see as clearly as Juan Diego did, the presence of holiness. Not in the host consecrated by the priest, but in the welcome consecrated by nuns who embody the risen spirit in their radical hospitality, their tireless pursuit of justice, their unsung labor—they emanate a god that before, I would have only seen present in the petals of rose light that bloom on the chapel wall at evening prayer.
It is the nuns who instruct me why it is that as lovely as their flowers are, what ultimately stirs Juan Diego, and centuries of his descendents is the image of a mestizo Mary welcoming them as graciously as the Virgin accepts the fullness of her womb, a pregnancy she does not choose. The message Mary imparts is that within each of us the divine gestates and comes to light when we, as courageously as she does, welcome the unbidden. When we heed the great Sufi poet Rumi, who writes: “Be grateful for whoever comes/ because each has been sent /as a guide from beyond.”
The morning of our departure, I am the only guest who shows up for 7 a.m. prayer. I peer in the doorway of the chapel where five nuns pray. No guitars or singing, just the quiet murmurs of Spanish. An amber hand beckons me in. The mother superior offers me an English Bible and indicates a passage to read. After I finish, she reads the same passage in Spanish. A moment later, the nuns rise and move toward center. We all join hands. They begin the Lord’s Prayer in English. I wave my hand to indicate no, no, please say it in Spanish. But daily they embroider the Rule of Benedict on their hearts. Of course they will pray in English for the sake of their lone North American guest.
The words catch in my throat, blocked by welling tears. I struggle to make them audible, to give voice to my gratitude for their kindness, for the gift of their prayer.
I keep replaying the words of sister Ramona telling me that after we depart, they will clean our rooms, launder the linens, re-make the beds. "This is our work," she says.
I think of Glenda telling me our job is to stay in our joy. And I think of Guadalupe telling a peasant to gather flowers where you least expect them. I recall gazing up at that cloth, centuries old, beholding the image of a woman radiating light, arms extended in welcome. I recall the sight of men and women walking on their knees across an acre of concrete in humility and praise, traveling like the legendary wise men to pay homage to “the one who protects them from the ones who will eat [them].”
We rarely believe it is the unknown that will protect us. We don’t associate the unbidden or unexpected with what saves us. Usually, we meet the unknown with apprehension or run the other way. But on the feast day of Guadalupe, the third Sunday of Advent, may the color of roses, the color of joy, remind us of flowers that bloom when and where we least expect. May we, like Juan Diego, see holiness on the hillside, and like Mary, feel it stirring within.
Amen.
Closing words: Helen Keller wrote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Adventure begins with Advent. Pregnant with risk and possibility, it invites us to participate in birth of what we cannot imagine but nevertheless can come to know.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Seligman Sermons in the Wider World
Recently, we received a response to Leaf's sermon, "The Cost of Indifference" from UUSC:
Dear Rev. Seligman,
I was moved by your recent blog on the cost of indifference – thank you. “What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?” you wrote. It really is so important to remember that the people we are helping have character, personality, history, relationships – full lives.
I noticed your blog because recently I met a woman in Washington DC who attended First Parish Fitchburg years ago and still received news from your congregation. Your news had prompted her to renew her support of UUSC!
UUSC recently ran a “JustJourney” to Uganda and one of the participants – Rev. Sally Beth Shore of the UU Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley – wrote a blog post about her experiences in meeting people over there, addressing one of your points in your blog.
Sincerely,
Charles
-----------------------------------------------------
We're so happy to hear that Leaf's words are making a difference out in the world! Thanks for writing us, Charles.
The Blog Team
Dear Rev. Seligman,
I was moved by your recent blog on the cost of indifference – thank you. “What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?” you wrote. It really is so important to remember that the people we are helping have character, personality, history, relationships – full lives.
I noticed your blog because recently I met a woman in Washington DC who attended First Parish Fitchburg years ago and still received news from your congregation. Your news had prompted her to renew her support of UUSC!
UUSC recently ran a “JustJourney” to Uganda and one of the participants – Rev. Sally Beth Shore of the UU Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley – wrote a blog post about her experiences in meeting people over there, addressing one of your points in your blog.
Sincerely,
Charles
-----------------------------------------------------
We're so happy to hear that Leaf's words are making a difference out in the world! Thanks for writing us, Charles.
The Blog Team
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