BEING ALL WE CAN BE IN THE BUCKET

GOD PRIZES DIVERSITY--THAT IS WHY HE MADE EACH OF US UNIQUE

 God loves and creates each one of us as a unique being with different gifts and challenges.
One of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), put it this way:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand. [1]

I think this poem beautifully expresses God’s desire for us to live into the fullness of our humanity and our identity. 

If we stay small and “hide our light” under a bushel basket, there is almost no place for God to move in, through, and with us for the sake of the world!

Sometimes we have a false idea of modesty and humility--they do not mean that we should bury  ourselves. 
Instead we should take up the challenge of our gifts and  develop them to the fullest extent  that we can. Especially if we remind ourselves and others that the gifts are from God we will actually be glorifying Him--not ourselves.
He gave us  our gifts to see them shine and help improve the world.  
Our gifts are a continuation of the INCARNATION in daily life. 

They enable us to  be part of God's plan for the salvation of everyone.
  That is a huge order
--so drop the false  humility and put yourself and your talents out there. 

Risk laughter and ridicule  rather than hide what God has given to you.

MY EXPERIENCE OF DOWN SYNDROME

Today is my mother's birthday.

 She died in 1997. In fact her death and the desolation I felt afterwards teaching in Cincinnati spurred me to leave this country and accept a Fulbright appointment to Romania.
  I had created a highly demanding routine of teaching and publishing  and I wanted to be somewhere where I was unknown and where  much less would be expected of me.

 My mother's life had centered around her three daughters --me, the middle one, and my older sister Janie and my younger sister Sheila, both of whom  had Down Syndrome. 
 Our family life  was shaped and blessed  by their needs and special traits and difficulties. My mother came to understand the challenges they brought to our lives as  gifts from God, and she often quoted to me the idea from the Bible that we sometimes entertain angels unawares.  That is what she believed and she also warned me that we would be judged by the way we treated Janie and Sheila.

For me thinking that Janie was angelic was  easy.  I have written in other entries on this blog that she was an ideal older sister. She helped me in all my escapades. She stole pears with me and she never squealed.

 On the other hand Sheila had a more emotionally difficult  and volatile nature. Sheila died of leukemia when she was  sixteen and I was twenty. Janie outlived my mother by just one year and died  the summer after I returned from Romania. I was with her  and my Aunt Anna for her last moments. I  often think of Janie and miss her. 

Recently Richard Rohr  has  reminded  me of the experience of Tim Shriver with people with Down Syndrome. 

He  writes about Tim Shriver and his experience with people in the Special Olympics

Tim Shriver, a friend and Chair of Special Olympics, works with many people whom our culture excludes or disregards. Through their eyes he has come to see God’s presence in every human being. As you read Tim’s words, imagine how you might stand in solidarity with someone “on the edge,” someone who has been excluded, and see that individual through God’s eyes. 

You cannot believe in or practice unitive consciousness as long as you exclude and marginalize others—whether it is women or people of different sexual orientations or people of religious or ethnic minorities or, in my experience, people with intellectual disabilities. My work is largely with and in support of people who have significant vulnerabilities because of intellectual disability. In many cultures these people are excluded and oppressed, though often unconsciously, even more so than other marginalized groups. . . . They are thought to be hopeless. Mostly they are ignored and forgotten.

For twenty years I have been mentored by these same people. Some might not be the best-spoken, the most articulate writers, the most celebrated thinkers, the fastest runners. And yet, despite all of that, I have met person after person who emanates a kind of radiant light. After a while, even the densest of us may have our eyes opened to that something which transcends all superficial distractions of disability: the unimaginable beauty of every person. That beauty is ours for the seeing if only we have the eyes to see, if only we pay attention.

I try to maintain those eyes as I engage in this work. At times I will pull myself out of whatever I’m doing and try to remember that I’m united with all that is. I give myself license to step away and reconnect. I fail mostly, but once in a while I succeed, and when I do, I feel like I am touching a “sweet spot” of wonder and peace. It enables me to be present to people in a way that I can communicate to them that I love them unconditionally. There are no conditions to our unity, to our oneness.

Many times I’ve watched, for instance, as a person with Down syndrome stands with a gold medal around her neck, arms raised high to a cheering crowd. I can’t look at that child, at that human being, without slipping out of dualistic thinking. Those moments are a kind of sacrament of unitive consciousness. They are “both-and” moments where shadow and light coexist in the same experience. . . . Divine energy shoots vertically through me like a force, and says, “See! Look! Pay attention to what is right in front of you! That is all you need to know!”

My two sisters were right in front of me and I felt  their closeness and dearness to God whenever I was with them.

THIN TIMES ARE HERE AGAIN IN THE BUCKET

THIN TIMES and THIN PLACES

 Lately I have been reading about Celtic Spirituality and the concept of "thin places" and "thin times" in that tradition.

 Are there thin times and thin places in the Bucket?
With the days shortening and the onset of Halloween we are coming to one of the "thin times" of the Celtic Year. Thin times are those times in the year when the connection between human activity and divine activity becomes less opaque to us.
 When we feel some possibility of communication between souls still caught in time (us) and souls that have re-entered eternity. 

The idea of human life as the time we spend between two eternities is a widely held one on Celtic thinking and writing. 
Here is how the venerable Bede describes the experience of life and our ignorance of what was before life and what may be after life on earth:

 “The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. 

So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to be followed in our kingdom.” 


The season of Samhain as it was called by the Celts was the end of the harvesting season and the marking of the onset of winter.
WE CALL IT HALLOWEEN.

It was a time when those of us alive could communicate with the dead. The residue of this idea comes through in our celebration of Halloween and in the Christian accommodation of ALL Saints Day November 1 and All Souls Day November 2. It also erupts in the well known Mexican celebration of November 2 as The Day of the Dead. 

Since my mother's birthday was 28 October, I especially feel close to her at this time of year and sense her presence in her Pawtucket house amid belongings that she treasured and the poems that she left behind.

A POET'S ADVICE ON WRITING

THIS TIME OF YEAR IN THE BUCKET

One of  our favorite sonnets by Shakespeare  seems perfect for this time of the year and this season of our lives.

Sonnet 73: That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold
by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’ d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

That was the first read through. Let us look at this sonnet more closely.
  Shakespeare makes perfect use of the  sonnet form of three  quatrains ( 4 line stanzas)  and an ending couplet (2 lines that rhyme}

 Sonnet 73: That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold

by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

This first quatrain  explains what time of year we are  talking about. Autumn and in fact late autumn. Not the time of brilliant color as we have now in October, but more like November when most of the trees are bare of leaves  and  the song birds have retreated to warmer climes. In fact  for him the bare  revealed  tree branches become  choirs that once  were filled with song. IT  is a cold and emptied out scene.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

This second quatrain now describes what time of day the speaker is  seeing in himself and we are seeing. It is twilight--not sunset but after the sun has set and has faded.  Black night is almost here. So again it is the lateness of the day--just before the dark-- and the word Death is invoked for the first time- and night is seen as a harbinger of Death that will end every  life as Night ends every day "in rest."

Sonnets besides having a structure of three quatrains and a couplet also have an 8-6 split in their  14 lines.  The first eight lines should lay out and exemplify  a problem, and the last six lines should  attempt to suggest a solution or a counter argument or attitude. SO  this next section must somehow  turn  the argument around.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire

Consumed with that which it was nourish’ d by.

And the third quatrain is equal to that task. Abruptly the poem sees a glow like a fire in his own  self even if he is in the late Autumn and the last daylight of his life. And what kind of a glow is it?  It is the glow of red hot coals as they turn toward ash and are at their hottest.
He insists that his present day aging self still has  burning inside even if hidden by ravages of age and time the heat of his younger passions. They have not died with time they will only expire with death.  The death bed of passion is like a hearth filled with glowing ashes. The  emotions that fired him as a youth still consume him and warm him.

And the final couplet  literally puts the cap on this argument with love and time.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Here he turns to the imagined listener and /or reader  who has been in every part of the poem--his beloved --and you and me.

He  insists that his lover has  shared these perceptions and that this sense of something about to leave has the effect of making these last moments together even more precious and has given their love a new intensity.  Did you notice that two segments of the sonnet begins with the same three words?  --"In me thou"

This sonnet  is fiercely honest about the leaving but refuses the loss--it refuses to be diminished and in fact insists on an increase of devotion when we understand the shortness of the time we have left together.  It also  creates an astonishing transformation and unification of the lover and the beloved with those three words--IN ME THOU.  They have an unbreakable unity. Those two have become one forever.

NOBODY'S PERFECT IN THE BUCKET

ONLY GOD IS PERFECT.  WOW That is a relief. 

The Islamic faith got this truth right.

They value the imperfect in their work--even their rugs are not perfect. Perfection is  God's reality and it is our aspiration.

"DELIBERATION BEFORE ACTION PROTECTS YOU FROM REGRET" Inscription on Islamic bowl.

That is the best we can hope for--be deliberate and  then act--even then we will not  make anything perfect.

Our mortality gets in the way. 
 And as we get older the fact of aging also complicates and makes  some of our  resolves seem impossible and delusional.

Sometimes when I lay awake at night I review the delusions that I have  entertained in the day.
I am saddened by the fact that I will most likely not travel to Ireland and see Lough Neagh and the OLD CROSS at ARDBOE again and all my cousins  who still live there.

 I fear that I will not recover  my health enough to make a move-- either across the state line to Massachusetts or across the country to California to be closer to my son and his family.

  Then I  stop my sad thoughts, say a decade of the rosary, and turn everything over to the Almighty. 
I remind myself that if it is impossible for me, then it is not God's Will for me.  So I ask  Him to  allow me to see the way forward that He wills me to follow.  Then I usually fall asleep.

Evidence of my own imperfection became even clearer when I  suffered from an infection that turned into Sepsis and then Septic Shock.

Here is an essay   that was the result of an interview with Ethan Shoney the editor of a local weekly--The Valley Breeze.  It will make my imperfections very clear--

http://www.valleybreeze.com/2019-09-24/pawtucket/jenckes-survives-septic-shock-spreads-awareness

I know that it says in the Gospel "Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect."
So again, God is  already perfect, and we should strive to be perfect.  But perfection is like the goal of Zeno's arrow--it is always at a distance.  We can halve that distance, but we cannot  get there while we are earthbound.

Not in this life--not until we are taken into heaven  and all the limitations are removed and we are one with the Perfection of the Almighty. 

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLOR IN THE BUCKET

I STILL FIND COMFORT IN THE LATIN WORDS

I woke up this morning with the word DOLOROSA in my head.
And I remembered that  when I was  12 years old and it was time for my Confirmation I wanted to add the name Dolorosa to my names.  I was baptized Norma Margaret but at Confirmation you get to add another name to yourself--the only one that  you get to choose for yourself.  It is your warrior name I guess--the one that you think is the real YOU.
I  felt that I was full of sorrows and that name  I chose was  bitterly denounced and argued against by my mother and my Aunt Anna.

Stabat Mater Dolorosa is considered one of the seven greatest  Latin hymns of all time. It is based  upon the prophecy of Simeon that a sword was to pierce the heart of His mother, Mary (Lk 2:35).  The hymn originated in the 13th century during the peak of Franciscan devotion to the crucified  Jesus and has been attributed to Pope Innocent III (d. 1216), St. Bonaventure, or more  commonly, Jacopone da Todi (1230-1306), who is considered by most to be the real author. The hymn is often associated with the Stations of the Cross. In 1727 it was prescribed as a  Sequence for the Mass of the Seven Sorrows of Mary (September 15) where it is still used today.  In addition to this Mass, the hymn is also used for the Office of the Readings, Lauds, and Vespers for this memorial.

STABAT Mater dolorosa iuxta Crucem lacrimosa, dum pendebat Filius. My love of Latin started in the 8TH Grade.  My teacher was Sister Michaeleen -- at Saint Joseph's School in Pawtucket. She was the best teacher  I ever had and now I see that she  made me want to teach and showed me how to teach. She was  my home room teacher and she was going  to Boston College to complete an MA in Latin. Each day if we  finished our work, she would reward us by reading from  her translation assignment. She was translating Virgil's Aeneid.   I will never forget the day she read  the passage that describes Aeneas' desertion of the Queen who has been so kind to him and has fallen in love with him.  When she realizes that his ship has sailed,  Dido  asks the help of her sister Ana to  make a pyre to burn all that he left behind. Of course, she also means not just his material belongings but she intends to throw herself on the pyre of  his discards to burn her self. This is what Sister read this day of the love of the two sisters: [672] Swooning, her sister heard, and in dismay rushed through the throng, tearing her face with her nails, and beating her breast with her fists, as she called on the dying woman by name. “Was this your purpose, sister? Did you aim your fraud at me?  Was this for me the meaning of your pyre, this the meaning of your altar and fires? Forlorn, what shall  I first lament? Did you scorn in death your sister’s company? You should have summoned me to share  your fate; the same sword stroke, the same moment would have taken us both! Did these hands indeed  build the pyre, and did my voice call on our father’s gods, in order that, when you were lying thus, I,  cruel one, should be far away? You have destroyed yourself and me together, sister, the Sidonian  senate and people, and your city! Bring me water to bathe her wounds and catch with my lips whatever  last breath may linger!” Thus speaking, she had climbed the high steps, and, throwing her arms round  her dying sister, sobbed and clasped her to her bosom, stanching with her dress the dark streams  of blood. She, trying to lift her heavy eyes, swoons again, and the deep-set wound gurgles in her  breast. Thrice rising, she struggles to prop herself on her elbow, thrice the bed rolled back, with  wandering eyes sought high heaven’s light, and when she found it, moaned. [693] Then almighty Juno, pitying her long agony and painful dying, sent Iris down from heaven to release  her struggling soul from the prison of her flesh. For since she perished neither in the course of fate nor  by a death she had earned, but wretchedly before her day, in the heat of sudden frenzy, not yet had  Propserpine taken from head the golden lock and consigned her to the Stygian underworld. So Iris  on dewy saffron wings flits down through the sky, trailing athwart the sun a thousand shifting tints,  and halted above her head. “This offering, sacred to Dis, I take as bidden, and from your body set  you free”: so she speaks and with her hand severs the lock; and therewith all the warmth  passed away, and the life vanished into the winds.  As Sister Michaeleen read this passage to us   she began to weep. And I put my head down on the desk and I wept with her. In that moment, she showed the passion and  the vulnerability of a great teacher. THANK YOU, SISTER MICHAELEEN (RIP).  You set my life's course and gave it meaning.

God's Favorite in the Bucket

RICHARD ROHR REMINDS US  OF THE SACRED FRIENDSHIP OF FRANCIS AND CLARE.
THIS IS THE FEAST DAY OF SAINT FRANCIS.

"Like all saints, FRANCIS delighted in both his Absolute Littleness and his Absolute Connection in the very same moment. Of course, they totally depend on one another. Francis and Clare died into the life that they loved instead of living in fear of any death that could end their life. They were both so very eager to love, and they somehow knew that dying to the old and unneeded was an essential part of living this love at any depth. Most of us do not seem to know that—and resist all change.

Yet Francis’ holiness, like all holiness, was unique and never a copy or mere imitation. In his “Testament,” he said, “No one showed me what I ought to do,” [1] and then, at the very end of his life, he said, “I have done what is mine to do; may Christ teach you what is yours!” [2]

 What permission, freedom, and space he thus gave to his followers! Bonaventure (1217–1274) echoed that understanding of unique and intimate vocation when he taught, “We are each loved by God in a particular and incomparable way, as in the case of a bride and bridegroom.” [3]

 Francis and Clare knew that the love God has for each soul is unique and made to order, which is why any “saved” person always feels beloved, chosen, and even “God’s favorite” like so many in the Bible. Divine intimacy is precisely particular and made to order—and thus “intimate.”

SO-- whoever we are and wherever we are we can become God's favorites because our unique souls make us each special and unique in the eyes of God.  That is why Jesus compares the love of God to the love of a Good Shepherd who prizes each sheep and will search until He finds  each lost lamb. The search is propelled by His Love and also by the fact that he knows we are  Special.

I find this special part  sometimes very hard to see in myself and in others.  It is the special  aspect of our souls that causes God to seek us and watch for us to turn away from our PRODIGAL SON  IDENTITY  and to come  back to HIM-- to the source of our goodness.

I M NOT THERE YET. BUT I HOPE THAT I HAVE FOUND THE RIGHT PATH.

I try  not to despair because I  have faith that even if I am in a thicket He can find me and He will find me.