Love in Action

I learned a new word today: “haecceity,” which means “The quality that makes something or someone what they are.” We all know people who are compassionate; the haecceity, or quality, that makes them compassionate is kindness. Unfortunately, today are seeing more and more examples of people who are violent; the quality that makes them violent is anger. This makes me wonder: What is the quality that makes someone a Christian? I believe it is trust in a God who loves all people and calls us to do the same.

According to Fr. John Kavanaugh, Mother Teresa believed that the greatest need in life is greater trust. Her belief is being affirmed today as many people are exhibiting high levels of mistrust in government, science, and our religious, educational, and judicial institutions. The peace educator Paul Chappell believes that this mistrust in coming from “tangles of trauma” that many people have experienced at the hands of family members, employers, religious figures, teachers, politicians, and judges.

Mother Teresa also believed that the absence of love is the greatest poverty. Therefore, it is critical that we who are grounded in the love that comes from knowing God extend that love to others. It is not enough to say “God loves you”; we need to demonstrate the effects of that love in our own lives by being generous, peaceful, caring, prayerful, and patient and by serving others. As another saint — Teresa of Avila — said, “Christ has no body on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion for the world is to look out; yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.”

It may seem impossible to untangle all the traumas afflicting our world today. However, that’s not our job. Our job is to be open to the ways God seeks to work through us to heal others. As Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:35).

Celebrating Our Dwelling Places

After my parents were married, their first home was in Ottawa, Kansas, where my father worked for a jewelry store in his first job as a watch repairman. Four years later they moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, my mom’s hometown. When my folks returned to Ottawa to visit friends, they would always drive by their former house to see if the fence dad built was still standing (it was) and to check on the trees they had planted.

We invest a lot of ourselves in the buildings we inhabit; the memories we create there become part of who we are and are markers of our lifelong journey of becoming. It’s no wonder we find it difficult to let go of buildings that have been important parts of our lives.

Today Mount St. Scholastica said a final farewell to St. Ann’s, a 9-bedroom building originally built to house workmen with no other home. Over 90+ years, St. Ann’s provided lodging for generations of laborers, college students, volunteers, and sisters. However, as Judith Sutera, OSB, reminded us, “their spirit is not in that one house but in all the grounds and buildings and works that they have created to sustain us.” Sr. Judith also offered this perspective:

“We are in our buildings for as long as they serve us well. We are of our buildings because architecture shapes our interactions and sensory perceptions. But we never are our buildings. Wherever we are is to be a place of spirit and truth.”

Because Benedictines recognize that God is constantly making things new, we attempt to practice conversatio morum — not clinging to what is at the moment but being open to the new ways God is working in our lives. That spirit of letting go sometimes means letting go of former dwelling places that no longer serve us. Gratitude for the blessings those places provided helps us to remember, to celebrate, and to move forward with confidence in God’s continued providence.

The Saints as Wounded Healers

Illustration by John August Swanson

For the past several years I have read about the lives of many saints in Give Us This Day and have come to realize that most of them are “wounded healers,” to use Henri Nouwen’s phrase. Many of the saints faced discrimination because of their social class or their race; often their spiritual gifts were doubted or discounted; some died early of physical ailments or martyrdom. How is it that the physical and emotional suffering they experienced aided them in their often heroic service of others? Consider this perspective offered by Rachel Naomi Remen:

“Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people....  I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.”

Being wounded in one way or another is an inescapable part of being human. In reading about the lives of the saints, we see that they had to deal with illness, grief, unfulfilled dreams, and family and workplace demands just as we do. What is distinctive about the saints is that they learned to refrain from making their wounds a source of bitterness or self-preoccupation and instead used them to foster healing through compassion and humility. They were able to do this by drawing upon Christ’s strength and sustenance. They give us hope that we can do the same, and so we honor the saints — those throughout history and in our own lives —and attempt to imitate them.

Expanding Our Vision of Heaven

As Halloween approaches, horror movies abound featuring zombies, evil witches, werewolves, vampires, and psychologically damaged murderers. The novelist Evelyn Waugh made an intriguing observation about this phenomenon: “The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a heaven that it shows itself cloddish.”

When asked what heaven will be like, most people speak in vague terms of seeing Jesus, being reunited with deceased loved ones and pets, having no pain, and being granted their every wish. We tend to focus on what our mind and body would want (A never-ending banquet! No more arthritis! Hugs and kisses from our parents, spouse, and friends! The chance to ask God any questions we want!).

Perhaps we should spend more time contemplating what our soul hopes to find in heaven. Here we can get more specific, because it is the same thing our soul longs for here on earth: Lush forests brimming with marvelous birds and animals, oceans and lakes of sparkling water, and rolling fields of fertile soil. People of different cultures celebrating each other’s food, customs, and art. Universities and industry buzzing with medical discoveries and engineering feats. The absence of weapons, poverty, and discrimination. Endless inspiration provided by musicians, storytellers, poets, and artists. A worldwide ethos that values and nurtures every unique being.

If we can choose to introduce horror and death into our world through monsters both real and imagined, we also can choose to introduce delight and life through the better angels of our being. We can do a better job of inventing an astonishing heaven that has its origin right here on earth. Imagine that!

Deep Listening and Gentle Speech

We humans are wired to try to make sense of things. We are also wired to tell stories. Thus, when we don’t understand the actions of another person, we try to figure it out by telling ourselves a story that will explain the person’s behavior. That’s when we run into problems, because the stories we tell ourselves are often inaccurate or incomplete. The remedy, as St. Benedict knew, is to ask the person for his or her perspective (that is, offer a place of hospitality) and be willing to listen.

Here’s an example: “Johnny” is a poor student and acts out in school. His parents are frustrated because they believe his behavior reflects poorly on them, and they create a story about why he acts this way. “He doesn’t care if he gets poor grades,” they say. “All he cares about is playing video games.”

Here is where another tenet of St. Benedict comes into play: humility. We often think that the actions of another are somehow related to us, because we have a tendency to make everything about us. However, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” If Johnny’s parents asked him why he doesn’t like school, they might discover that his acting out has nothing to do with them, and indeed he cares very much about his poor performance in school. However, unbeknownst to his parents and teachers, his brain scrambles letters, making it impossible for him to keep up with the other kids in his class. He thinks his parents don’t love him because he’s “stupid” and finds comfort in video games that use images instead of words and allow him to be a hero instead of a failure.

In His book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh notes, “Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions.” When we listen to each other and use gentle speech (another recommendation of St. Benedict), we often discover that we each have been victims of our wrong perceptions. “The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication,” Thich Nhat Hanh says, “because once communication is restored, everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation.”

Our society is greatly in need of peace and reconciliation within families and in our workplaces, schools, and churches. We can help by modeling deep listening and gentle speech, because our current situation will only improve one conversation at a time. 

Knocking at the Doorway of Death

In the past two weeks, four sisters of Mount St. Scholastica have died: Sr. Berlinda Gallegos on October 9, Sisters Celinda Medina and Paula Howard on October 24, and Sr. Sheila Carroll on October 25. When I was a staff member at Shantivanam House of Prayer, we used to pray for those who had “walked through the doorway of death,” so it was fitting that today in our communion hymn, we sang “Knock and the door shall be opened.”

These sisters had unique journeys through life — among them, they taught every grade level from preschool through college, provided elder care, wrote icons and books, provided spiritual direction, led retreats, and lived with various debilitating illnesses. Likewise, just as every woman’s labor to give birth is different, their labors to gain release from their bodies in order to be born into new life were different.

These labors are sometimes difficult to watch. When I was sitting with Sr. Celinda a few hours before she died, an aide came in and said, “I know you all try to make this happy, but I have a hard time with death.” The work of dying often is a struggle, but we are able to view this transition with joy because we know that when one of our sisters who is at the doorway of death knocks, the door will be opened by the One who says, “Come to me, all you who thirst; come, and life shall be yours” (Rev. 21:6).

Because Jesus walked the passageways of death before us, we can trust that he is the way for us in death as in life. There is nowhere Christ is not with us, even in death. And so, whether our labors are brief or prolonged, new life awaits and we can say with Dag Hammarskjold, “For all that has been, thanks! For all that will be, yes!”

 

Watering Our Life of Prayer

St. Benedict provides many instructions about prayer in his Rule, including detailed directions about prayer times in the different seasons of the year. In Chapter 16, St. Benedict quoted Psalm 118, which said, “Seven time a day have I praised you,” and he noted “We will fulfill this sacred number of seven if we satisfy our obligations of service at Lauds [dawn], Prime [sunrise], Terce [9 am], Sext [12 pm], None [3 pm], Vespers [ending between 5:30 and 7 pm], and Compline [before retiring].” Because Psalm 118 also said “Let us arise at night to give him praise,” Benedict’s monks also prayed Vigils (Matins) during the night, sometime between 2 and 4 am.

What is the purpose of praying so often? Desert Father Abba Poemen provides one perspective:

“The nature of water is yielding, and that of a stone is hard. Yet if you hang a bottle filled with water above the stone so that the water drips drop by drop, it will wear a hole in the stone. In the same way, the word of God is tender, and our heart is hard. So when people hear the word of God frequently, their hearts are opened to God.”

Another water-based image of prayer I heard mentioned at the 2021 Oblate Renewal Day at Mount St. Scholastica is that prayer is like an ice cube that melts into us throughout the day. In other words, we are always to carry an awareness of the divine presence within us.

Few of us are able to take time to pray eight times a day, but it is likely we drink water or other liquids that often — perhaps even during the night when we wake up thirsty. One way for us to stay centered in God, then, is to recall whenever we take a drink that God is our water of life and the source of all the blessings that flow into our lives.

Thomas Merton, when asked how to improve prayer, replied, “take the time.” Taking time to drink fluids is essential for a healthy body; taking time to pray is essential for a well-developed soul.