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.

Morning at the brown brink eastward springs . . .

I took the picture above while walking one morning this past week from Norman Towers where I am staying to the Motherhouse. Seeing the sun just peeking up from the horizon through those trees brought the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to mind. And it matched my mood.

I am feeling like I am living in the dawn of something wonderful.

Every day brings new understanding, new insights, new possibilities. Now, what to do with them.

Love IS stronger than death . . .

Today would have been our 56th Wedding Anniversary. We made it to 53. But today again fills me with joy to realize how little we knew of life, how little we really knew of each other or ourselves. And yet we made a life - a wonderful life - with our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, wonderful friends, shared faith. And because we were married to each other, we both became more than we could have become on our own - so I rejoice today that matrimony did what it is supposed to do: it opened us both to graces we never imagined in 1956.

The almond blossoms were blooming that late winter - and that's what we used for decorations - almond boughs, heavy with blossoms and fragrant, picked that very morning. For us, each spring, the almond blossoms brought us back to our beginnings. 

And now I am living other new beginnings . . . in an unseasonably warm Michigan late winter. No blossoms here . . . but a spring of new hope, perhaps.

Day 12 - Ash Wednesday - Books without dust jackets

If you were to go into a library where none of the books were wearing book jackets, and you were to peruse the shelves, you wouldn't have much information to go on - title, author - but the old adage, "You can't tell a book by its cover," would be very true.

So it is for me at the IHM Motherhouse. I go into the dining commons and sit down at a table with other women - pleasant, friendly, welcoming. They are books without dust jackets. They seem not very exceptional, not very distinct, even, from one another. Then conversation starts, and I begin to hear their stories. Then it's a whole other thing. These women of the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary have had amazing careers. They have had extraordinary experiences.

The other day I got to know Sister Therese (Marie Therese LaBlanc, IHM). I listened to this lovely woman telling of such adventures as I had never heard! I googled her name and came up with this little YouTube in which she is making a political appeal for clean air. Take a look at her face. Would you guess this woman had been a key figure in airlifting hundreds of orphans and adults out of Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. She tells stories of making her way across the city with another IHM sister, avoiding groups of young cadets who were shooting everyone who had broken the curfew. She tells of the pilot who took off with a cargo full of babies even though ordered not to -- lifting off just in time, in the darkness . . . and making it safely to the U.S. with their cargo. Gracious!

Or another who told me of doing pastoral ministry in the remote jungles of Honduras.

A library of stories - hiding behind the facade of gentle faces, white hair, some walkers and canes - the "retired" sisters of IHM, who, as far as I can see, are ALL still working!! And a couple of years ago, we see Sr. Theresa still active, asking for legislation on environmental issues.

Sunday morning - Day 9

This is an old picture - taken in 2008 on my way to California from Forks - someplace just out of Port Angeles on the puddle-jumper on the way to Sea-Tac. But when I saw it on my iPhoto today, it spoke to me about where I am now, in Michigan . . . far from home, but not out of touch with my own place on Washington's Olympic Peninsula.  I am thinking of a song from the '70's which was meaningful to me when I first moved to Forks:

Follow me, where I go, what I do, and who I know

Make it part of you to be a part of me.

Follow me, up and down, all the way and all around.

Take my hand and say you'll follow me."

Click above to hear it.

('m tryin'. 

            I'm tryin'.)     

And beneath that . . . still I hear. . .  I cannot rest from travel. I will drink Life to the lees . . . some work of noble note may yet be done . . . 'tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . 

But that boat already sailed. Didn't it?
                                  It is too late, isn't it? Get real.