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.

You Are Mine: A Christmas Reflection

Song of Songs, Marc Chagall

Arise, my beloved, my dove,

my beautiful one, and come!

For see, the winter is past,

the rains are over and gone. . . 

Let me see you, 

let me hear your voice,

for your voice is sweet,

and you are lovely! 

—Song of Songs

For a fleeting moment this morning, I felt you, vast 
and penetrating in your love, smiling broadly 
as if all my sorrows were naught. It was not a mocking 
disregard but a humorous dissolution of all the surfacing 
irritations and disappointments, as if to say:

In my Love, all is well, all is joy, all is peace.

Had you come back to me then?

Had you returned?

Had you stormed my dusty manger so unfit

for one as magnificent as You? 
And yet—you loathe artifice. 
Rather you would lie here with me in the dirt, eking a smile 
out of one so determined to be sad.

(Written at New Camaldoli Hermitage,
Big Sur, 2011)

The Well Runs Dry

 An angels's face is tricky to wear constantly.

—Tori Amos, lyrics from "Purple People"

I don't usually quote popular music when reflecting on ministry, but Ms. Amos' words have come to mind quite a bit these days: too many tragic calls to the ER; too many young people diagnosed with advanced cancer; too many sudden and stunning reversals of fortune; too many worst-days-ever for the people I've been called to care for.

Friends, family, and acquaintances often marvel at my capacity to last even one hour of one day working in a hospital. How do you not get depressed, they ask. I don't know. Call it grace, call it self-defense, call it desensitization. Most times I can manage to hold another's suffering and then let it go as I move on to another situation. Somehow I'm able to accept that (according to the Buddha, at least) life is suffering. I am of the nature to grow old. I am of the nature to have ill health. I am of the nature to die. Still. There are times when this surprising inner reserve and strength fail, and wearing the angel's face (an unspoken expectation of anyone in ministry, I think) becomes tricky indeed. The inner well is dry and I become painfully aware of my own human poverty. To smile takes effort.

At such times, I call to mind certain stories. I think of Elijah and the poor widow (1 Kings 17:8-16) or the feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:13-21). In both cases, someone is asked to provide nourishment, and in both cases, the resources on hand are woefully scarce. How can the widow manage to feed Elijah with barely enough food for herself and her son? How can the disciples feed a growing crowd when they have "nothing here but five loaves and two fish"?

From the human perspective, such requests are impossible to fill. You must be kidding me would be (and often is) my response. But as usual God is at work in his mysterious, inscrutable ways, taking the little we have and multiplying it to an abundance beyond our knowing or imagining. I try to remember this when I feel I have nothing left to give. I try to remember to invite God into my poverty, to allow him to increase in my decreased state. Sometimes I just have to accept what I feel and stop rejecting my inner poverty as a problem. Without it, there is no place for God; there is only the paltry finitude of the self.

Of Gods and Men and "the Lord's Strategy of Liberation"

 We have only to allow ourselves to be awakened by [God's] words, 
chosen by the divine prudence like so many hands extended to caress our sadness; 
and then we shall be caught in the trap set by the Lord's strategy of liberation.

--Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word

Recently (and finally!), I watched the film Of Gods and Men, a true story about a community of Trappist monks who have lived with, loved, and served their impoverished Muslim neighbors in Algeria for many years. As the country erupts in sectarian violence, the men must decide whether to stay or return to the safety of their native France.

Instinctively, many of them wish to flee: What is the point of committing collective suicide, one monk asks? Over time, however, the monks realize, through a lengthy process of individual and collective discernment, that they have no choice but to remain where they are.  As French citizens, they have the privilege and opportunity to escape the growing danger whenever they choose. But if they wish to be faithful to their calling, to the gospel, and to the Christian path of love, they cannot run away without suffering a fate worse than death: a conscience forever disturbed by a failure to live in solidarity with their Muslim brothers and sisters, who have no such privilege or freedom to escape the instability and violence.

The monks accept this truth with simultaneous peace and dread. Like Jesus in Gethsemane, they know and accept what awaits them as a consequence of their obedience to what Love demands. They do not seek martyrdom but suffer it. Such is the cost of discipleship, the inescapable share in the cup of Jesus's own suffering and death (Matthew 20:22).

The monks' story reminds me of Etty Hillesum's, a young Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz and whose diary I recently read. As scores of friends, neighbors, and colleagues were rounded up and sent to "transport" camps, Etty was given several opportunities to escape. But she refuses. "I don't think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer," she writes. "It is sheer arrogance to think oneself too great to share in the fate of the masses." As frightened and horrified as Etty was by what she witnessed, she was clear in her will to never to escape the fate of her own people.

I see my own dilemmas in these stories, though far less is at stake in my case (at least on the surface).  As a relatively privileged person accustomed to having education, resources, a million options, and a great deal of freedom to exercise them, it's easy for me to become dissatisfied with my lot in life and to assume I can (and should) just change my circumstances at will. I habitually follow the glib conventional wisdom that says, "Just look for another job" or "do something else" or "do what makes you happy."

Such advice may have sufficed ten years ago in the grim aftermath of my dot-com days, but it doesn't hold up too well now. I'm no longer a wanderer but a follower (I hope) of Christ on the narrow road that leads to life (Matthew 7:14). That means I have far fewer options if I want to squeeze through the narrow gate or pass through the eye of a needle. I can't just skip away from life's challenges whenever I choose. I can't just be a seeker of self-fulfillment. If I desire eternal life, I must, like the rich man (Mark 10:17-22), sell all I have, which in my case means sacrificing the privilege of restlessly searching for "something better" and instead coping with life as it is. I'm not always happy to realize this and, like the rich man, I have often walked away shocked, sad, and even angry because I don't want to accept the cost of discipleship.

I often wonder what happened to the rich man after he walked away. Did he grieve for awhile then come back to Jesus? Was he overcome by Jesus's compelling love, so much so that, in the end, he was able to drop everything he knew to follow it?

Perhaps shock, grief, and dread are normal "features" of the spiritual journey. The Trappist monks felt it. Etty felt it. For they, too, were rich. But Love overcame their natural, human fear, and they gave their lives for it. Can I give mine?

An Homage to Oncology Nurses, et. al.

I cannot wipe away your tears, my dear.

I can only teach you how to make them holy.

--Anthony De Mello

Recently I led a memorial service at the hospital where I work to honor the many cancer patients who died this year, as well as the Oncology nurses, physicians, physical therapists, dietitians, case managers, and just about everyone who has a role in caring for them. Several people have since asked for the remarks I made at the beginning of the service. Fortunately I wrote them down the night before in a bit of a frenzied rush. That means I didn't have time to get in my own way, thus allowing the Spirit to flow. Here is what came:

We come together today to remember those cancer patients who died: To remember how we loved them and how they loved us. 

We also come together to honor the work that we do--our labor of love--because at the end of the day that is really what our work is about: whether or not we realize it, whether or not we feel it, whether or not we live up to Love's demands. 

We do our jobs and we do them well:
We order diagnostic tests and interpret results.
We administer medications.
We draw blood for labs.
We bathe our patients.
We make sure they have adequate nutrition.
We help them get out of bed to regain physical strength.
We arrange for them to go home with everything they need.
We keep their environment tidy, clean, and safe. 

Everyday we do so much yet in the midst of it all we are doing something even greater: I'm talking about the human connection we make--some might call it the sacred connection we make--when we care for our patients. 

We come to love them. We see them when they first come to us, perhaps with a new diagnosis of cancer. We see them frightened but also full of hope--hope for healing, hope for recovery. We come to know them as they struggle through treatment: We learn about their lives, their families, where they grew up, what they did for work, how they met their spouse, what they believe in. On this leg of the journey we find our patients still hopeful, but wavering at times, wondering will they get better, is the fight worth all the pain and suffering, why is God allowing this to happen. 

And sometimes, after years or maybe even weeks or months, they return and we know-and they know--that something is different this time: They are not getting better. The healing we had all hoped and prayed for is not to be. Life in this world is coming to an end. 

In this moment all seems lost and we begin to feel anxious and sad with our patients, who are no longer patients to us anymore but friends or brothers or sisters. We've been on a journey together and we've arrived at a crossroads or a threshold. We've reached the limit of what medical treatments can do. We say there's no more hope but that's not really true. It all come down to how we understand hope. 

If our hope is based solely on the happily-ever-after outcomes of our own actions and interventions, then all hope is truly lost. But if our hope is rooted in something deeper--something eternal--then nothing, not even death, can take it from us. 

I want each of us to remember that, when we come to this threshold between life and death, whether with our patients, our loved ones, or even ourselves, we are standing on holy ground. We may not be able to treat the disease any longer. We may not be able to cure. But we can still heal. 

How? Because of the love that we have cultivated and shared all these weeks and months and years. We heal because our presence assures our patients that we will continue to care for them until the end, that we will not abandon them when they become helpless or when they suffer.

We heal because we can do less and be more. We can wipe a tear, hold a hand, embrace; we can pray, we can sing. We heal because even as physical life fades, we continue to celebrate all of who this person is and what she has meant--and will continue to mean--to us.

Custody of the Eyes

A journal entry written while on retreat at New Camaldoli Hermitage, Big Sur

In loving memory of Kathleen Flowers (1964 - 2009), 

whose presence still remains in our circle of writers

I came to the hermitage with the intention, the hope, the need to shed every garment and sit in naked awareness of my heart, and to notice the countless ways I permit my spirit to be tugged away from the place I love most--the place where You and I live and move and have our being.

"Contemplation," Ivan Mestrovic

      This need, this hope, to bring myself back again and again to the heart is the reason I have cast my eyes down to the ground, choosing not to look up to see who is walking toward me or standing next to me in the kitchen. At such times, I notice a need--a compulsion even--to engage the other's eyes and give a smile of acknowledgment. But even this seemingly benign, polite, courteous gesture feels burdensome to my spirit.
      I have come to see that I have spent most of my life trying to take care of others' feelings--to make sure they do not feel hurt, spurned, ignored by anything I say or do or feel. In the name of goodness and "Christian" love, I have torn my spirit away from its source and handed it over to those to whom it does not belong. When this happens--this unwitting handing over--I feel my life draining out from the center and dissipating in a thousand directions. I experience it as a rending of the most deadly kind. I lose ground. I become terrified. I topple over. I struggle to gather myself up into one still point: my heart, where my own truth dwells.
      And so I have chosen, like Kathleen, to keep custody of the eyes, and to experience the habitual, conditioned urge to look up, be nice, to take care, to control, in some measure, how the other fashions her story about me, as if that story were the truth and only she and a thousand others could tell me who I really am.
      No. This time God demands that I gather up my faculties and turn them wholly inward, so that I might know who I am in God and experience the peace and stability that come from living in that center.

How Buddhism Made Me a Better Catholic, Part I: A Nativity

I always tell my Western friends that it is best to keep your own tradition. Changing religion is not easy and sometimes causes confusion. You must value your tradition and honor your own religion.

-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

About ten or so years after my dad died, I attended a poetry reading/event sponsored by the Zen Hospice Project (ZHP) in San Francisco. The featured readers were Frank Ostaseski, ZHP founder, and Norman Fisher, poet and Zen priest. I came to know about Norman through a graduate program in creative writing I was attending, and I'm pretty sure that's how I ended up at Fort Mason that night with a couple of my classmates.

Nativity Scene: A Thangka--sacred Buddhist wall hanging--
given by H.H. the Dalai Lama to Fr. Laurence Freeman 
and the World Community for Christian Meditation in 
December, 1998. Image by Robert Jonas.

It proved to be an auspicious evening. By the end of the night, I had picked up an application to become a volunteer caregiver at ZHP, and within a few months, I was immersed in its intensive (and intense!) 40-hour training, then assigned to care for terminally ill residents at a nearby inpatient hospice unit. Thus began my journey back to the Church through the rich practices of the Zen Buddhist tradition and its approach to caring for the dying.

The story of my return is, as you might imagine, quite involved and lengthy, so I won't unravel it all here. But for now, I can tell you that . . .

. . .at the time I began my hospice volunteering, I was not exactly a fallen away Catholic. I was more of a disaffected one. I had been living in San Francisco for several years after graduating from college (where the Newman Center had provided a great community) and I hadn't yet found a parish in which I felt connected. Most of the churches I hopped in and out of seemed, well, dead: sparsely attended, especially by those my age. (And, to be honest, I wasn't really trying that hard.)

I was also still wrestling with the spiritual crisis sparked by my father's death and by all the life and lifestyles I had encountered in my college and young adult years. I became, perhaps, a bit like Pilate, not in his nasty, brutish aspect, but in his question: "What is truth?" I no longer believed many things, and yet my spirit was still searching and yearning for this seemingly elusive "truth."

And so I attended mass every so often and checked out the many "alternative spiritualities" that the Bay Area has to offer. (Nothing too weird, mind you; I've got a healthy dose of the traditionalist in me…) Mostly, I explored yoga and Zen Buddhism and had begun practicing meditation as it was taught at the San Francisco Zen Center. Both the yoga studio and the zendo were always packed to capacity, especially with my peers, and I began to wonder what was happening there that wasn't happening at mass.

I began to wonder what was happening in me.

To be continued.

The Chaplain's Dress: Good Reasons for Old Habits

A couple years ago, a friend and I lamented the seeming problem of a woman's appearance. We both enjoy dressing nicely--professionally, prettily, stylishly but not overly so and certainly not revealingly. We are, as they say, "appropriate," and yet we can never really escape objectification. Often, it is subtle and insidious, such as when people (often other women) comment incessantly on how we look. Other times, it's classically salacious and overt: "How's my favorite chaplain today?," ogled the young doctor. "You look like a lilac!!"

For a woman in ministry (or for me, anyway), this matter of dress and appearance is especially thorny. On the one hand, as a woman, I am expected to be attractive--to meet the societal standard of beauty; on the other hand, as a chaplain, I am expected to be a bit dowdy and plain--or a man or a nun. It's hard for people to place me: "Women can be chaplains?!" "But you're so young!" "You're so pretty!"Are you a nun?" "Are you married?" "Are you allowed to marry?" "Have kids?" "Have sex?" "I love your shawl! Did you knit it yourself?"

After a while, this line of perplexed questioning becomes intrusive--and I wish I had a blanket or a burka to throw over myself. Which is what my friend and I ended up talking about and how we ended up thinking in a rather odd and unexpected away about burkas and other "coverings" such as hijabs and nun's habits.

As modern, "liberated" women, it's easy to view these "veiling" practices as signs of women's oppression and a denigration of our sexuality. And there may be a lot of truth to that. (Let's just say this issue is far more complex than I wish to plunge into here, and I can hear my beloved feminist friends screeching! For a more in-depth account and analysis of this issue of the woman minister and her clothing, read chapter 7 of Sarah Sentiles's book A Church of Her Own: What Happens When A Woman Takes the Pulpit.) But I think there may be another side to it as well--a liberating quality.

Now, I know less than nothing about how Muslim women experience or give meaning to wearing a burka or hijab. But I wonder if some of them who choose to wear it feel a kind of freedom from ogling and harassment, enslavement to fashion and consumerism, and a sense of personal autonomy and privacy: The woman reveals herself only to those closest to and most trusted and loved by her--i.e., her family, her husband.

As for the habited nun, I begin to see the practicality, if not the virtue, of it. In the context of ministry, perhaps the habit (or the collar or cassock for priests) can facilitate a more spiritually focused dialog. It is certainly a clear marker of identity and role. But it can also have the opposite effect: erecting a major barrier, especially if the patient whose room you're walking into has negative associations with Catholicism or religion in general. My priest colleagues encounter this sometimes: Patients who refuse to talk to them will talk to me, in part because I don't look like a nun (or a priest) or any kind of "religious person." More often than not, people think I'm the dietician or the social worker. (Ha! Gotcha!)

So, a good habit (if not a burka) would certainly solve some problems: It might fend off some cads and throw them onto the path of other hapless women; it might diminish the magpie effect of wearing a tasteful outfit; it might deter certain inappropriate questions (but undoubtedly tempt other ones); it would definitely save money and might even collapse certain class distinctions.

For all these reasons, I've come to see the habit as eminently practical rather than exalted or superior or supremely obedient. And yet, I doubt I will be donning one anytime soon. Forgive me, but I like clothes. Time to polish up the mary-jane pumps, wrap myself in a resplendent red scarf and go billowing down the hallway.

Discipleship: Falling/Faltering/Following

Beloved, I long to know the depth of your life in me--

At times I feel so hopelessly apart from you--

so profoundly lost and alone, without the security

and protection of your love--

I pray to trust that you live deep inside me--

and are guiding my every step with your love.

To follow you feels so precarious--

yet, to do otherwise feels like death--

An Atheist's Christmas Carol

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you now

--Lyrics from "The Atheist Christmas Carol"
By Vienna Teng

I think of a patient I met a several months ago. Byron (not his real name) was in his eighties and becoming sicker. He knew he was coming to the end of his life and seemed to accept it. He was an atheist but he welcomed my visits, and one morning, we had a lovely chat.
       Turns out Byron knew a lot about the bible and about Christian theology, especially some contemporary Catholic theologians such as Teilhard de Chardin. Byron had grown up in Texas--in the "bible belt"--and was turned off by the extreme fundamentalist beliefs of the people around him. Even now, he said, he had a niece back home who always prayed for him, that he might at last accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Byron loved his niece but didn't feel "seen" by her. He found it hard to reconcile so many (or any) of these beliefs with his own thinking, learning, and intelligence. None of it made sense to him, and I wondered if any of it would have made sense to me had I grown up in that kind of environment.
       I felt sad for Byron. He seemed so kind and open. I wondered if the God he was presented was too small for him, and if he thought his only choice was to reject a belief in God rather than reject such narrow beliefs about God.
     I don't know if this is what Byron thought. These are just my thoughts and perhaps they reflect my own experience: a sense of sometimes being too confined inside the doctrines and traditions of my chosen religion when what my heart and my imagination desire is to run free: to discover what lives inside me and to proclaim what I know about God without claiming to know God . . .

Re-acquainting: Note to G-d

And I feel such a desire
to be with You now, away
from all that religion and all that talk--
Away from all the fuss and striving--
We are friends now, old friends--
We can sit beside each other in silence
and not feel awkward or afraid--


(Journal note, 2003)

"Accept the Inevitable Tumult and Struggle"

This prayer is by Etty Hillesum from her diaries published posthumously in a book called An Interrupted Life. I have been reading it these last couple weeks and, as a wise friend told me, it is a trustworthy roadmap for the spiritual journey. And Etty is fast becoming one of the best companions I have found along this path.

Etty Hillesum, 1914 - 1943, died at Auschwitz

God, take me by Your hand, I shall follow You dutifully, and not resist too much. I shall evade none of the tempests life has in store for me, I shall try to face it all as best I can. But now and then grant me a short respite. I shall never again assume, in my innocence, that any peace that comes my way will be eternal. I shall accept all the inevitable tumult and struggle. I delight in warmth and security, but I shall not rebel if I have to suffer cold, should You so decree. I shall follow wherever Your hand leads me and shall try not to be afraid. I shall try to spread some of my warmth, of my genuine love for others, wherever I go. But we shouldn't boast of our love for others. We cannot be sure it really exists. I don't want to be anything special, I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise. I sometimes imagine that I long for the seclusion of a nunnery. But I know that I must seek You amongst people, out in the world.

Enduring Conversion

God, you know better what I've done here--

all the things I've laid at your altar:

the pleas and desperation--the hope

for relief--for healing--for love--

for a return to you--

May I be the seed deeply planted in your heart

May I take root there--and grow up into You--

May you protect the fragility of this seed--

fragile yet determined to live--to burst

forth from your heart--to become

self-gift--

God, may I die enough to be that gift--

May I give and receive love--

May I conceive (of) it in new ways--

May I seek not romance but 

true intimacy with You.

Mary Magdalen: Sculpture by Bruce Wolfe

An Annunciation: To Mary

It is hard to imagine you

as my guide in the ways of love--

and yet, you were the ultimate Lover

of God. The way you opened yourself fully--

even in the midst of your fear--your lack of understanding.

Something must have compelled you to open--

Something must have stirred your heart, your flesh--

Something must have roused you--

Something must have drawn that Yes from your lips--

Annunciation, by Ivan Mestrovic

Toward a Church That Stands Somewhere in the East

Untitled Poem

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

I heard this poem at a retreat I recently attended called Life as Pilgrimage: Walking with Intention and Grace. Fr. Michael Fish, one of the retreat leaders, was sharing his experience of walking El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain and reflecting on the spiritual journey as something we do "not just for ourselves but for the world." If we do not take this journey toward the "church somewhere in the East,"  the next generation suffers. Our children are left to wander in the emptiness and pain of their elders' unfulfilled yearnings. 

       I thought immediately of my father, who died at age 52 of lung cancer. He was a man of deep spiritual yearnings, but quashed them in pursuit of the American "Dream." One evening during the last year of his life, he told me that one of his deepest desires as a young man was to become a minister. (Dad had grown up Methodist and became a Catholic shortly before marrying my mother.) When I asked him why he never followed this call, he told me he couldn't imagine how to provide for a wife and family on what he assumed would be a pittance. He was, as many of us are, "seduced by safety," too afraid to risk "stepping beyond his field" onto the definite yet unfamiliar path God had laid down for him, a path he would only come to discern with each halting step. When he died, he was, for the most part, still inside the dishes and the glasses of his own house--though, unlike the man in the poem perhaps, I think he realized where he was and regretted never having stepped out. Perhaps his death was his first step toward that church that stands somewhere in the East: a place we know exists but have never seen and cannot describe . . .   

       After our father's death, my sister and I felt compelled to embark (without the other knowing) on urgent spiritual quests in search of the church our father forgot. My sister's pilgrimage led her to convert to Judaism and to obtain advanced degrees in Hebrew Studies and pastoral counseling. I went from pious Catholic teenager to confused college kid to increasingly confused young adult who returned to Catholicism by way of Buddhism. Now, many years later, I find myself working as a chaplain and ministering to cancer patients not unlike my father.

       I have often wondered if the path I am walking is really my father's and not my own. Am I fulfilling his dream of ministry? Am I completing his unfinished work? If he had found the church he had longed for (and forgot) in this life, would I still be walking toward this same church? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Life is as it is now. And I am walking this Life, less and less concerned with whose life it is. Perhaps it is God's Life walking in me.
       I sense that I am now in the vicinity of that church that stands somewhere in the East. When I began this journey, I had only myself and my own "salvation" in mind. But the further along I've come, the more I've discovered that I walk not just for myself but for my father and, as Fr. Michael said, the world. It is not a path of self-fulfillment, as I once thought, but a path of self-offering--self-gift. My life has become an oblation to God for others.