Home for Holy Week

Today is Palm Sunday -
and Holy Week, the most important week of the year for me, is just ahead.

 I am glad to be at home for this week - I've always tried to arrange my schedule to be in my home parish for the Triduum - the "three days" that, together, are the movement toward Easter: Holy Thursday when we celebrate the institution of the Lord's Supper or Eucharist, Good Friday when we mark the crucifixion of our Lord, and the Mass of the New Fire at the Easter Vigil on Saturday night.

Holy Week has been a time of special events in my life. I came into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil of 1974.  The deaths of several dear friends - Carol, Dirk, and Liz -occurred during Holy Weeks. I buried my husband Don on Tuesday of Holy Week in 2009. So I always walk from Palm Sunday to Easter with a lot of significant memories in my heart.

I've always thought we did the Triduum very well at St. Anne's in Forks. We have a great fondness for our particular rituals. I don't know where I will be in subsequent Holy Weeks, but I'm glad to be home this year.

I am particularly looking forward to the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday when the great cross Dirk built will be uncovered as the choir sings: Behold the Wood of the Cross;  two of his daughters will come up through the darkened church to hammer in the great spikes while Sally sings Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?  Every time we do this, I'm again caught up in the mystery.

I'm glad to be a Catholic. I need these signs and symbols and profound re-enactments to help me be present to the most important realities.

Life at Visitation Monastery

No one ever really knows what lies ahead - but, at this point, I have been accepted to Visitation Monastery's Monastic Immersion Experience, for a six month stay with them. I don't know exactly when I will begin or end my stay there. I do know that it will not be a permanent stay. After that - another adventure - but one that still remains a little cloudy and uncertain for me.

I asked them once: what do I not know about you that makes you what you are?

I have asked myself why I am so desiring to make this stay with the Visitation sisters. There is something in their life that draws me powerfully: the way they live that "peaceful presence," in the neighborhood; their gentle Salesian spirituality; the quiet and peace of their house; the rhythm of monastic prayer that undergirds each day. There is something for me there that I have long desired without even knowing it.

Two young women stopped by one
afternoon. They grew up in the
neighborhood - and they wanted to
show off their babies to the sisters.

They used to come play at the monastery
when they were children - whenever
the windsock was flying from the front porch.

  If I were younger, I'd apply for admission there and commit the rest of my life to carrying on what they have begun there - but it's younger women that are needed for that. It's a wonderful way to live the gospel. It makes me feel young just to be there and to be part of each day's activities. The pulse of life there is so strong, so vital, so full of the presence of God in the lives of ordinary people in the neighborhood. And there are so many wonderful people who share in their work. 

An Evening at Jane House - Leadership Training

I spent a wonderful evening at a training session at Jane House where folks from the neighborhood are learning ways to combine leadership skills with that beautiful Salesian spirituality. People are being empowered to bring gospel values and behavior to the streets and homes of N. Minneapolis

The evening begins with a shared meal prepared by some of the participants.

And then there is prayer and sharing from life experiences - and application of the teaching of St. Frances de Sales to the practical realities of life in N. Minneapolis.

I want to learn from them - the sisters and their neighbors - how to live that way - wherever I am.

Come back soon - and I'll tell you all about the next stage of the story. For now, just know that God has done great things for me . . . and I am feeling very blessed.

I love this life, too . . . Visitation Sisters live as a peaceful, prayerful presence in the neighborhood.

Wednesday morning neighbors gathered at Visitation Monastery to share the Eucharist. Afterward all joined together for brunch. Kelly brought a quiche. Someone else a Pistachio cake, traditional gift near St. Patrick's Day. Afterward all shared in clean-up.

Peace and gentleness permeate the atmosphere. Here is a world I have just become aware of -- where prayerfulness is cultivated not only by the sisters, but by the friends who have gathered around them in the past 24 years. It is a beautiful and wonderful way to live - and a means to counteract the violence of the world around us. 

I hope to come and stay here for a long retreat soon - probably for six months. I want to learn how they are so peaceful, so gentle, so resilient, so effective in small, but wonderful ways. I told them that they have learned a dance - a way of being with each other and with others that provides a container for this peace. I want to learn the dance. I want to try it out. There is still time for me to learn a new dance, I think. And maybe share it with others.

Impossible dreams . . .

Dreaming Impossible Dreams - Tilting at Windmills

In the Jerusalem Bible, which is my favorite translation of the Bible, we are told in Acts 2: 17, 

• In the last days -- the Lord declares -- I shall pour out my Spirit on all humanity. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young people shall see visions, your old people dream dreams.

Yes, old people can dream dreams - not just young people - and women, as well as men. (That's one reason I like this translation of this passage.)


Not all dreams can be realized, of course. We all know that - but on my present personal quest, I am trying to find out just where the limits are as to what might still lie ahead for me. Tennyson's Ulysses has caught my imagination, and I stand with the aged Ulysses looking ahead, and not behind, knowing that I don't want "to rust unburnished." I want to "shine in use." I want to explore that "untraveled world" seen through the arch of my own experience, that world whose "margins fade" as I move through life.


But unlike Ulysses, I am not bored with what I have. I love what I have! 

There is not a day of my life I have not stood in wonder at what I have been given. I treasure every scrap of my life - which is why I keep it all, my graduation dress from high school, my wedding dress, my grandfather's vest, my children's baby shoes, my mothers' crocheted dress - all lying neatly folded and labeled my cedar chest. Family portraits are scattered here and there on table-tops and dressers in every room;  my files are still packed with treasured letters and cards from family members and students. The trees in my yard are carefully pruned and trimmed by dear Tom Larkin to keep me safe in my corner of the forest. The Pacific coast is only a short drive away and I go there often.


But now I am faced with choices - to go on as I am, live out what I have always assumed was the life I have been given, or to allow myself to be drawn to a very different life, full of many challenges, and one for which I am clearly too old! 


No matter where we live, or in what state of life, we are all called to detachment in one sense or another. We may not cling too closely to anything, no matter how dear, no matter how valued. I have tried to approach life's inevitable losses with a willingness to give back what I have been given. Every change in my life - whether of place to live or position held or beloved person whom I must leave behind or who will leave me - has been a new challenge: to let go, to grieve, and to go on. Because ultimately we must let go of everything and know that only one thing matters: union with God, the destiny for which we were created, for which the universe itself was created.


So one more time in my life I am experiencing a call to let go of the familiar, the known, the beloved - and trust that I will be once again be blessed in whatever lies ahead. Now I don't know if this letting go requires only the willingness to let go or the need to actually make practical and factual changes in my location and life style. It will take time to know that. But I have heard an inner call to give back what I have been given - and I am trying to be faithful to that call. 


The sisters here at the IHM Motherhouse are also hearing a call - to explore a new vision about the future of religious life, new emerging forms of religious life. The life of today's apostolic sisters - those who go into the world to serve its needs (as opposed to the older, more traditional contemplative, cloistered life of sisters in the past, who lived in enclosure) is only a couple hundred years old! It was once a "new form" They don't know what new emerging forms of religious life look like, they tell me, until people like myself bring the call they are hearing to them so that these calls can be mutually discerned.


The sisters mounted an art show recently: all pastels. Hearing that my favorite of these was the one of Don Quixote, the artist, Sr. Joan Lowell,  whose ministry was that of an art therapist, made a gift of it to me. 


The other sisters tell me it's fitting - that I have spent the month with them tilting at windmills. So I will be carrying with me on the plane an image of Don Quixote and I will be hearing the strains of a song about an impossible dream.

Day 24 - The heart of the IHM Community

The picture above was taken after Sunday mass at the Motherhouse. The Chapel is the centerpiece of the Motherhouse - it's WITHIN the Motherhouse itself. You come in through the front doors, cross the great tiled lobby, then through the first set of chapel doors, to the foyer, and then into the chapel itself.

The Motherhouse was designed by the father of Sister Margaret Brennan. He was architect of many important buildings in Michigan. It was built in the 1930's, following a fire that destroyed the earlier Motherhouse - incredible to think that such a building could have gone up in those days of the Great Depression. The windows are beautiful. They were brought over from Germany just before the beginning of WWII.

Mass is said here on Sundays and weekdays; occasionally, if a priest is not available, a service of word and communion is held instead. In the late afternoon, I go here for Evening Prayer (Divine Office) just before dinner.

All the sisters speak of the Motherhouse as "home,"  - as in, "when I first came home from Peru (or Nigeria or Kentucky or Albequerque) . . .  In spite of its size it has the feeling of a home. The sisters who are retired live here. There is a Health Care Center (a licensed skilled nursing facility) within the Motherhouse where not only sisters, but sometimes people from the surrounding town of Monroe, come after surgeries, etc. And its where those sisters live who require skilled nursing care. There is also a Memory Care unit where alzheimers patients live - elderly sisters, sometimes relatives of the sisters, sometimes lay persons. There's a store downstairs where one can buy the most important necessities; there's also a thrift store, a beauty salon, an ice-cream parlor, a physical therapy center, and a post office. Upstairs are administrative offices for the leadership team. Downstairs there are administrative offices for the congregation itself. It's very nearly a self-sustaining entitity.

Ooops! I hear a bell ringing!  Time for me to go to prayer - and then dinner - where there will be more good conversation! Almost every IHM sister was a school teacher in the beginning - other ministries branched out later. So lots of sharing of school stories . . .

Day 20 - The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;


Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,


And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


I am spending a lot of time trying to find the paths, distinguish between them, and anticipate outcomes. I have told my children that I know God will bless me whatever I decide - they are choices between two good outcomes: the familiar which I love so much; the unknown which invites me to take a risk. Each day brings new insights. Fortunately I am placed where there is untold wisdom and charity all around me.