Mary and Elizabeth: Women in Transition

Mary and Elizabeth

Today I attended a short but powerful retreat called Women in Transition in which we applied the practice of lectio divina to the transitions we are experiencing in our lives now. The facilitator invited us to read our lives as we would a passage of scripture, listening with the ear of our heart to notice what is there, what is drawing our attention, and what God might be communicating to us. As part of this process and over the course of the day, we constructed a poem in the form of a pontoum, which uses repeating lines in a series of quatrains.

At the beginning of the retreat, the facilitator asked each woman (about 50 of us) to describe in a word or two the transition she was going through. The whole gamut was there: the illness or death of a loved one, marriage, divorce, children leaving home for college, losing a job or starting a new one, aging, moving, falling in love, losing faith, pregnancy, birth.

My particular transition has been around moving. After being mugged outside my home last year, I felt I had to relocate to a safer community that was also closer to my work. I now live in a beautiful place in a beautiful neighborhood, but I don't feel much at home in it. In fact, I feel like I'm living in exile.

A big part of this feeling is that, for mostly practical reasons, I decided to no longer attend mass at my old parish, which I loved. Instead, I wanted to find one in my new location to avoid a lengthy commute and to try to connect with people here. It has been a challenge. The nearby parishes are a bit lackluster for me, unlike the vibrant, diverse community I had come from. I now attend mass at a convent with which I've had a spiritually enriching relationship for many years.

There is an inner dimension to this moving as well: the movements of my own spirit in response to these and other circumstances in my life. I want to believe that, in both my personal and ministerial life, I have fallen deeper into the love and light of Christ—a love that is gentle, receptive, delighted in my being, and not terribly prescriptive. I sense God's deep desire that I come to know and trust myself as I am in Him—a knowing that far surpasses anything my mind could possibly attempt to comprehend. The only problem is that this inner sense, this intuitive (yet always speculative) knowledge, is increasingly at odds with certain "orthodox" trends in the Catholic Church these days. At times, I feel genuine agony and fear: that what I have come to know in my own life is not true and cannot be trusted and that I would be viewed as a pariah by those who might claim that my experience of God is invalid, "secular," heretical, or "just my personal opinion."

I am no renegade. I love the Church. I have loved her from a very young age. I have been a social misfit for my love. But the closer I live to my experience, the more clearly I hear a still small voice that tells me not to trust the fear but to move through it and beyond it into a place of unimaginable hope. Abraham did it. Moses did it. Elijah did it. So did Mary and the disciples and, of course, Jesus himself.

"Peace be with you." "Do not be afraid." You have found favor with God." Such are the kinds of messages spoken to those trembling at the threshold of a divine encounter. Consider Mary's experience of the Annunciation and her subsequent visit to her cousin Elizabeth, which the Church celebrated last week. What appeared scandalous to human eyes (for in her unwed pregnancy, Mary was in a shameful, scandalous state), was in fact the hidden miracle of our salvation, a miracle conceived in what must have been an overwhelming, if not frightening, encounter with the living God. Mary could not understand with her mind, but her inner knowing must have given her the courage to trust and say yes.

I wonder if her inner knowing also prompted her to hasten to her cousin Elizabeth. In Elizabeth, Mary found a safe place and a safe person, someone who could see her as she really was—full of grace, full of God, not as a disgrace and a cause of shame to her community. I imagine the great comfort, strength, and joy the two women must have felt in each other's presence.

Mary and Elizabeth were, like so many of us, women in transition: pregnant, about to give birth, about to usher in a completely new reality. If only we could view and inhabit our own transitions and uncertainties in light of their story. How much more hope and joy would we feel amid the struggle, pain, and uncertainty in our own lives and faith journey.

As I reflect on the story of Mary and Elizabeth, I pray that all of us can be for each other as Mary and Elizabeth were: a safe, loving place to express our experience of God and, above all, to see and acknowledge God's life and grace in the other.

The following poem is the pontoum I constructed during the retreat.

I have moved far from where I have lived before. Am I in exile? Or am I home?
In all these crises of change, who, God, am I? Who are You?
At times, the intensity of Your love is so extreme: Can I trust it?
Thank you, Beloved, for receiving me.

In all these crises of change, who, God, am I? Who are You?
I am in suspense. My knowing is incomplete.* 
Only you, Beloved, could say who I am and who I will be.
Thank you, Beloved, for receiving me.
It is a gift to be heard.

I am in suspense. My knowing is incomplete. 
Only you, Beloved, could say who I am and who I will be.
At times, the intensity of Your love is so extreme: Can I trust it?
It is a gift to be heard.
I have moved far from where I have lived before. Am I in exile? Or am I home?

* This line is taken from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's poem Patient Trust

Notes from the Bedside: Tales of a Chaplain

"Morning Prayer": My typical '"setup" on any morning
(sans the iPod), experienced in a special way
at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur.

Back from another retreat at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur: a home away from home for about twelve years now. I do most of my writing here, often with a coffee cup at hand and a few books. There isn't much else to do. So aside from writing, I spend some of my time rummaging through the "old stuff" just to see what's there. In my latest rummaging I came across something I wrote last year, which I thought might be worth sharing.


Monday turned out to be a day of surprise hugs and unexpected connections. 

I went to visit Bella in the morning. I had seen her a few times before and she never showed much response. She was elderly, nonverbal, contracted; sometimes she responded to my voice by looking at me, sometimes not. On Monday, when I walked into her room, I expected much of the same. I stood by her right side and took her hand, which she began to squeeze quite hard. I wasn't sure if this was a meaningful response or just contractions. But after a few minutes she let go of my hand and reached her arm out to me as if to embrace me. So I leaned down to let her embrace me—and, oh, how she held me tight and patted my back. I just stayed there, laying my head against her shoulder with my other arm draped across her chest. I felt like a small child in its mother's arms. 

It seemed important to let her hold me like that—to allow her to offer and express something deep within her, something that still lived beneath what had become her "incapacities": dementia, stroke, perhaps Parkinson's . . . For me it was an authentic moment of ministry because it was an authentic moment of human connection—without words but with the most articulate language we have: the language of our bodies.

I left Bella feeling joy and amazement. I thought of how deprived she and so many sick people must be of touch, contact. I thought of how few people would let themselves be held by a sick woman unable to speak, unable to get out of bed. Not that I credit myself. It was a moment of pure grace.

Later that day I walked by David's room. He was a fifty-year-old man with metastatic pancreatic cancer who would soon go to a nursing home to spend his final days. His brother and uncle were with him and were signing paperwork for the transfer. David was pacing around the room, wanting desperately to be taken outside for a cigarette: his "last one before he dies." The doctor finally wrote the order for him to go outside, and I volunteered to accompany him (no one else wanted to) along with his brother and uncle down to the miserable, enclosed "smoking shack" around the corner from the ER. When David heard I would take him (a staff person had to accompany him), he threw his arms around me and hugged me for a long time saying thank you, thank you, thank you, as if I had granted him his greatest wish (which perhaps I had). So down we went in the wind and the cold and the rain, and I stood by him in that wretched shack, inhaling smoke, while he began to cry about all he would miss in this world and about how he had "ruined [his] life."

I suppose I had once again surrendered to what the moment called for—to what God might have been calling for (perhaps not the second-hand smoke part): to be with these two people in a way that others may have found impossible: unsanitary, disgusting, uncomfortable. That I could even do so was a sure sign of God's grace breaking into the most unexpected places.