Introducing "Junior", Stillsong's Resident Gargoyle

 [[Hi Sister, I was looking at the pictures of your hermitage and I wondered about the grey thing in the foreground of one of the pictures. What is it? I hope you had a good Christmas and a Happy New Year!!]]

I think you mean "Junior" a small gargoyle I have had now for more than 25 years. He was part of a duo of gargoyles --- Mother and Son and he was made to sit on his Mom's knee.  During that period I was fascinated with gargoyles and loved both the size and the "age" of Junior.

I bought him singly and was glad that was possible because the pair was just too expensive for me; he has lived on my desk or bookshelves for all these years since. As gargoyles go I think he is pretty adorable. Occasionally I have looked for his "Mom" to see if I could afford her now, but have been unable to locate her. (To be honest, given her size and the size of the two of them together I doubt I would  have a place for her/them, but I have looked nonetheless.)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you too! I hope these holidays and all of the holidays within the octave of Christmas are fruitful for you. Junior sends you a friendly growl!

Christmas at Stillsong 2020 (Reprise with tweaks)

[[Hi Sister Laurel, I don't think I could ever be a hermit. I like people and I like to talk too much! Is the silence and being alone all the time hard for you? What about during holidays? I guess you don't visit with your family or spend the holidays like most of us do. Do you get Christmas presents? Do you have Christmas dinner? I am in fifth grade. Thank you for answering my questions.]]

Hi there yourself, and thanks for your questions. I don't get a lot of them from students your age so it is terrific you decided to write. You know I also like people and I like to talk but it is true that I am an introvert. By that I mean that I am a person whose energy comes from quiet activities done alone more than from being with other people. I enjoy being with other people but it also tires me out and I need time alone to kind of recharge my "inner batteries." (The other kind of person is someone we call an extrovert, and they get their energy from being with people and even from partying; spending too much time alone is what leaves them feeling kind of wiped out or "needing others".) 

I know it is commonly thought that hermits never see other people, but during ordinary times I see friends at Mass during the week and on Sundays, and I also get together with one friend (a Dominican Sister) for coffee many Sundays after Mass. Christmas is a little different too. Of course, now that we are in the midst of a pandemic all that has changed and I am unable to go out much at all --- as is true of a lot of people! But I will catch up with people online (ZOOM), spend the day writing some emails to friends and family, and just generally celebrating my life in light of the Christmas feast. At the same time, even apart from the pandemic, I do spend most of my time during holidays in the silence and solitude of my hermitage.

Like many Catholics and other Christians I ordinarily spend some of the holiday time in Church --- more than usual anyway since the hermitage is like a "little church" or "ecclesiola". (I should point out that in the early Church all Christian homes were viewed this way and it is a critical perspective we need to recover and retain even after this pandemic.) I usually go to Mass late on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas morning. I watched a streamed Mass from my parish for Christmas Eve this year. Apart from this Christmas is like most other days though. I pray several times a day; I do some studying and reading as usual and usually I will do some writing. Today I may also watch a movie on Netflix or do something else I don't usually do. 

I am not lonely during Christmas as some people believe I must be. I think that is part of what you are asking when you wonder if the silence and solitude are hard during holidays. Remember that I am called  by God through his Church to live this vocation and that God does not call us to something which makes us unhappy. Not only is God here with me in everything, but I have the sense that I am meant to be living this. Also, folks send me cards and small presents so I have a strong sense of living the feast with these people. I sometimes think that one of the things which makes people lonely during the holidays is the thought that others are enjoying time with family and friends so somehow being alone --- even if one chooses it --- is not okay. They feel left out and even unloved; sometimes they may even think that having no place to go during Christmas is a sign there is no purpose to their lives or that they have failed as human beings.

But you see I know that I live alone (really, with God!) for an important reason. My life says to others (at least I really hope it does!) that even if we are alone God is there too and that Presence changes everything. It is one of the things we celebrate at Christmas -- that our God is Emmanuel or God-with-us in a very special sense. Our relationship with God is part of being truly human; in fact, it is the thing which makes us truly human. Because of that witnessing to this relationship is a very important mission for any human being. More, I know that God loves me without limit or condition and that when I answer love with the gift of my own self God is truly delighted --- just like your being present with your family delights them.  For these reasons the time I spend in solitude is not usually hard for me even during holidays like Christmas. If I were always thinking things like, "I should be with family" or "I should not be alone; it's not right," then I might make myself feel really empty and miserable. Instead I celebrate what Christmas is all about with the One who made it possible 2000 years ago and who makes it real now in my own life too --- just as I am called to do.

Do I get Christmas presents? Yes, as I noted briefly above, I do. This year I am especially aware that my life is the greatest present I could be given; I celebrated that yesterday as I met with my Director and it is something I am journaling about as well. One of the things I love about Christmas is that God reveals himself in all of our stories as someone who brings life out of barrenness (like he did with Elizabeth) or where God makes people who have been frightened, grieving, or were mute into people whose lives are songs of great meaning and joy (like we hear about with Zechariah or Mary)! But I also get Christmas presents in the sense you mean. Those come from friends, family, and even from my parish or organizations in the parish. One gift this year was a small oil lamp with Christmas greenery inside it. It is really lovely and goes well with Christmas decorations. 

I hope I have answered your questions. Please feel free to write again if you have other questions or if I was not very clear about something. It is refreshing to hear from a fifth grader! Have a terrific Christmas season and a happy New Year too. All my best. 

Fourth Sunday of Advent: Vulnerability by David Whyte (Reprised)

Throughout the Gospel of Mark Jesus' invariable title for himself is Son of Man which can be translated as "Son of Humanity" or even "the Human One". One of the things Mark is concerned to show his readers is that Jesus reveals the nature of authentic humanity. Jesus is the One in whom humanity is exhaustively transparent to God. This is one way of seeing how it is he can reveal both the nature of humanity and divinity at the same time. At the heart of this double and paradoxical revelation  stands the critical and peculiar openness to God and to all God wills which we know as obedience and also, a radical vulnerability.  We see this in the creche and we see the same openness in the events of the cross. One of the most wonderful pieces I have read on the nature of vulnerability and its centrality to authentic humanity is the following piece by David Whyte:

[[Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. (from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of everyday Words)]]

In Christ authentic humanity becomes a reality in our world and in him it becomes a possibility for us as well. It is truly a humanity which does not "fall short" of the dignity to which we are called by God. (Remember hamartia which is translated "sin," literally means, "to miss the mark" and the mark we actually miss is, as noted in recent posts, that of realizing our call to be imago dei and becoming imago christi.) The birth of Jesus marks the coming of this new possibility into our world. As we approach the Feast of the Nativity may we each recommit ourselves to the vulnerability which allows us not only to say yes to God in the way Mary did, but also to grow in the grace and stature of an authentic and self-emptying humanity as did Jesus. 

Best wishes and prayers for a wonderful last week of Advent and a fruitful Christmas! Sister Laurel, Er Dio.

Laetare Sunday: Embracing Stricter Separation from the World as a Way of Rejoicing in our call to Authentic Humanity

This afternoon I attended a retreat (virtual) offered as a gift by the Mission San Jose Dominicans. The presenter was Father Jim Clark from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. It was a significant piece of an especially rich Advent season marked by the way my own inner work has come together along with resonances with Scripture from the Mark class and reflection on Canon 603 and the concept of stricter separation from the world --- something I mentioned in an earlier post because of the role it played in the renewal of my vows and in the notion of Sabbath as well. In today's retreat the presenter spoke of becoming our truest or authentic selves and of incarnating God in the process --- ideas which will certainly be familiar to readers of this blog. It reflects that process of kenosis (self emptying) I have sometimes described as "becoming wholly transparent to God."

In speaking of "guarding the heart" and "preparing the way of the Lord" Clarke referred to being careful of or avoiding anything causing us to lose sight of who we truly are. What struck me most about this was that it is a very good way to speak of what canon 603 calls, "stricter separation from the world". Ordinarily I define "the world" in the sense used by the canon in terms of anything "which resists or is antithetical to God in Christ (or to the love of God)" but this notion that "the world" could also be defined in terms of "anything causing us to lose sight of who we truly are" and are called to be was new to me. I have certainly approached this insight but never really saw or articulated it so directly before.  What I came to see  regarding what canon 603's stricter separation from the world requires of us is that it serves our focused journeying toward the realization of our truest selves and that it is primarily a positive element in the canon and in the spiritual life in so far as it helps prevent us from losing sight of who we really are. Also, of course, in and of itself stricter separation from the world can and inevitably will be misunderstood without this correlative and primary focus on the true or authentic self which God summons into being at each moment of our lives.

Father Clarke's presentation began with Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey", which set the tone and key of the entire presentation:

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.

Learning to leave all of those distracting, distorting, and falsely defining voices behind to attend to that one new voice which is truly our very own, the voice of God which dwells within us as our deepest truth, our truest identity, and which calls us by name to truly be, requires we embrace a process of kenosis. It is a process in which slowly the stars begin to burn through the clouds that have surrounded us and prevented clarity; in fact, it is a process in which life begins to burn within us ever more abundantly if our journey is on track. But to stride deeper and deeper into the world of that authentic voice or call, will mean embracing a stricter separation from anything that obstructs our view of and commitment to becoming our truest selves. This really is the process of Advent. It is the process of the inner (growth) work I have referred to occasionally here; and it is the process and meaning of stricter separation from the world called for by canon 603 and echoed in our similar Sabbath practice. 

There is pain, struggle, and darkness in this kenotic process, but ultimately, it is marked by a profound freedom and joy as we embrace God and the deepest selves God creates within us. During this third week of Advent rejoice in the Advent journey. Rejoice as Isaiah call us to do in today's first reading and let us never lose sight of the God-given splendor of the one God calls us to be.

Rejoice heartily in the LORD,

in God is the joy of (our) soul;

for he has clothed (us) with a robe of salvation

and wrapped (us) in a mantle of justice,

like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem,

like a bride bedecked with her jewels.

Our Lady of Guadalupe: Believing in a God Who Lifts Up the Lowly (Reprise)

 Fifty years ago at Vatican II the messiest, most passionate, and often "dirtiest" fighting to occur during the council took place during discussions of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. Out of nearly 2400 bishops the fight was divided almost exactly evenly between two factions, those nicknamed the maximalists and those nicknamed the minimalists. Both factions were concerned with honoring the greatness of Mary in our faith but their strategies in this were very different from one another. The maximalists wanted the council to declare Mary Mediatrix of all Graces and to proclaim this as a new dogma in the Church --- never mind that the thrust of the Council was not toward the definition of new dogmas. They wanted the council to write a separate document on Mary, one which effectively made her superior to the Church.

The minimalists also wanted to honor Mary, but they wanted to do so by speaking of her within the document on the Church. They desired a more Scriptural approach to the person and place of Mary which honored the dogmatic truth that Christ is the One unique Mediator between God and mankind. The Church would be spoken of as Mother and Virgin, for instance, and Mary would be seen as a type of the Church.

The minimalist position won the day (had only 20 Bishops voted differently it would have been another matter) and so, in Lumen Gentium after the Church Fathers wrote about the Mystery of the Church, Church as People of God, the hierarchical nature of the Church, the Laity, the universal call to holiness, Religious, and the Church as a Pilgrim people, they wrote eloquently about Our Lady in chapter VIII. Mary is highly honored in this Constitution --- as it says in today's responsorial psalm, she is, after all, "the highest honor of our race", but for this very reason the Church Fathers spoke of her clearly as  within the Church, within the Communion of Saints, within the Pilgrim People of God, not as a rival to Christ or part of the Godhead, but as one who serves God in Christ as a model of faithfulness.

It is always difficult, I think, to believe and honor the Christmas truth we are preparing during Advent to celebrate, namely, that our God is most fully revealed to us in the ordinary things of life. We are a Sacramental faith rooted in the God who, for instance, comes to us himself in bread and wine, cleanses and recreates us entirely with water,  and strengthens and heals us with oil. Especially at this time of the liturgical year we are challenged to remember and celebrate the God who turns a human face to us, who comes to us in weakness, lowliness and even a kind of dependence on the "yes" we are invited to say, the One who is made most fully real and exhaustively known in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place. Advent is a time when we prepare ourselves to see the very face of God in the poor, the broken, the helpless, and those without status of any kind. After all, that is what the Christmas Feast of the Nativity is all about.

I think this is one of the lessons today's Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe teaches most vividly. We all know the more superficial story. Briefly, in 1531 Juan Diego, an Indian Christian encountered a beautiful Lady on the hill of Tepeyac; she told him to ask the Bishop to build a church there. The Bishop refused and required a sign of the authenticity of Juan Diego's vision. Diego returned home to find his uncle dying. He set out again to fetch a doctor and avoided the hill where he had first met the woman and went around it instead --- he did not want to be distracted from his mission! But the Lady came down to him, heard his story about his uncle, reassured him his uncle would be well, and told him then to go to the top of the hill and pick the flowers he found there. Diego did so, gathered them in his tilma or mantle, and went again to the Bishop. Juan poured out his story to him and he also poured the flowers out onto the floor. Only then did he and the Bishop see a miraculous image of the Lady of Tepeyac hill there on the tilma itself.

But there was a deeper story. Remember that Juan Diego's people were an essen-tially subjugated people. The faith they were forced to adopt by missionaries was geared toward the salvation of souls but not to what we would recognize as the redemption of persons or the conversion and transformation of oppressive structures and institutions. It was more a faith enforced by fear than love, one whose whose central figure was a man crucified because an infinitely offended God purportedly willed it in payment for our sins. Meanwhile the symbols of that faith, its central figures, leaders and saints, were visibly European; they spoke and were worshipped in European languages, were dressed in European clothes, were portrayed with European features, etc. At best it was hard to relate to; it's loving God was apparently contradictory and remote. At worst it was incomprehensible and dehumanizing. Moreover, with the "evangelizers" who had forcibly deprived the Indians of their own gods and religion came diseases the Indians had never experienced. They were dying of plagues formerly unknown to them, working as slaves for the institutional and patriarchal  Church, and had been deprived of the human dignity they had formerly known.

It was into this situation that Mary directly entered when she appeared on Tepeyak hill, the center of the indigenous peoples' worship of the goddess Tonantzin, the "goddess of sustenance". The image of the Lady was remarkable in so many ways. The fact of it, of course, was a marvel (as were the healing of Diego's uncle, the December roses Diego picked and poured out onto the Bishop's floor or the creation and persistence of her image on Diego's tilma), but even more so was the fact that she had the face of a mixed race (Indian or Mestiza) woman, spoke in Diego's own language, was pregnant, and was dressed in native dress. And here was the greatest miracle associated with OL of Guadalupe: in every way through this appearance the grace of God gave dignity to the Indian people. They were no longer third or fourth class people but persons who could truly believe they genuinely imaged the Christian God. The appearance was the beginning of a new Church in the Americas, no longer a merely European Church, but one where Mary's Magnificat was re-enacted so that ALL were called to truly image God and proclaim the Gospel. One commentator wrote that, [[Juan Diego and millions after him are transformed from crushed, self-defacing and silenced persons into confident, self-assured and joyful messengers and artisans of God's plan for America.]] (Virgilio Elizondo, Guadalupe and the New Evangelization)

Here too then, in the truly unexpected and even unacceptable place, our God turns a human face to those seeking him. He comes to us in weakness and lowliness as one of the truly marginalized. In the process we see clearly once again the God of Jesus Christ who scatters the proud in their conceit, unseats the mighty from their positions of power, and lifts up the lowly. During this season of Advent Our Lady of Guadalupe calls us especially to be watchful. God is working to do this new and powerful thing among us --- just as he did in the 1st Century, just as he did in the 16th, just as he always does when we give him our own fiat.

Second Sunday of Advent: Embracing Sabbath and the "Way" of Jesus

Over the last three or four weeks I have been working on or giving presentations for a Women In Faith group in my parish. It dealt with our foundational vocation to become authentically human and the ability to be free and rest that our embrace of such a vocation results in.  I have the concluding half of all of this to do on Tuesday and so, it has been on my mind. Specifically, I will do a presentation on Sabbath as the "great equalizer", the day (period) when, in  God, we embrace the identity God gives and calls us to and allow ourselves to truly rest from all those "'essential' roles and burdens" the world defines us in terms of. On Sabbath we let go of competitiveness, workaholism, consumerism, and so many other ways in which we are set against our true selves and one another and we simply rest in who we are in God. The title for the second part of the presentations will be "Be still and know that I am God" from psalm 46:10. The title for the first half of the presentations reverses this to, "Know that I am God and be still". The two are inextricable from one another and together they present a symbol of the freedom of authentic humanity.

Additionally, last Sunday as part of the first Sunday of Advent I prayed with the ecclesial community of a couple of friends of mine who celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary during the week and who renewed their vows last Sunday. As part of the celebration they asked me if I wanted to renew my own vows and I did. As part of  doing that I had to compose a renewal formula which led me to thinking once again about  the term "stricter separation from the world" and how I would say that for a community who would be likely to misunderstand the canonical phrase in terms of a rejection of God's good creation. I borrowed the  overall structure of the formula from that of the Sisters of the Holy Family, and for the c 603 elements of my commitment, including "stricter separation from the world," I promised to: "devote myself to the service of God and all God holds precious in stricter separation from anything resistant or antithetical to God's love, in the silence of solitude, and in assiduous prayer and penance."

In both of these activities what canon 603 calls "stricter separation from the world" played an important role. Sabbath itself is a way of  standing aside from "the world" which often holds us bound by its values and perspectives, its way of viewing God, ourselves, and others, while making commodities of them (cf., Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance); it is a way of resting in God and both being and becoming the ones we are called to be in God. It is a symbol of freedom and is given to us as gift and responsibility in the Decalogue, the charter of freedom and covenant in the OT. but this freedom plays off against the bondage of something canon 603 calls "the world" --- again, that which is resistant or antithetical to God's love.

Pharaoh's Egypt was, for Israel, the very epitome of "the world" canon 603 calls me to separate myself from more strictly. The Jewish people were made to toil endlessly without even time to pray or worship. When they sought the time and space to worship their God, they were punished and the toil they were made subject to became even more demanding, even less fulfillable, and even more dehumanizing. Hours were long, food and time for rest short. Relationships deteriorated as did the Jews' own sense of their own dignity. Their behavior likewise deteriorated then and they fell into the kinds of things we expect among the dehumanized and starving: unhealthy competitiveness, theft, covetousness, dishonesty, murder, the failure to honor one's inheritance as one born with infinite dignity or to honor others in the same way, etc. In short, this bondage and dehumanization marked by endless toil and insufficiency was incapable of putting God first, resting in God's love, and loving oneself and others in God as a natural consequence. Israel became bond to an ethic of idolatry (for this was the Pharaoh's system and Pharaoh was a divine figure) and dehumanization --- an ethic resistant and even antithetical to God's love. (These two elements, idolatry and dehumanization, always go together.)

What I recognized is that quite often today we buy into the same bondage and the same forms of dehumanization. We buy into "the world" and in fact, we build that same "world"  and our own self-definition upon it. We do this in the form of a system that makes commodities of us all--- objects which can be bought and sold, used and disposed of as easily as one would do to a shirt or pair of pants. We become workaholics whose value is tied up with what we do rather than who we are, or shopaholics who fail to be in touch with the really new (kainetes) God is doing in our lives every day and substitute the merely new in time (neos) --- something which has to be replaced almost as soon as we have purchased it, or we become those who treat others in the same way through competitiveness, elitism, classism, an unhealthy capitalism, etc etc. What we are called to instead is the way of Jesus, the way of the Kingdom of God, the way which honors and delights in God's good creation but is also the world of Sabbath and the Ten Commandments, the world of the Great Commandment -- that is, the world of the love of God and all that God holds precious.

When I renewed my vows to live as a diocesan hermit under canon 603 last weekend, it was the all-too-common  but destructive meaning of "the world" I rejected and the "way of Jesus" I embraced again more intensely. As we enter more fully into Advent what I want to suggest is that this is the same commitment the Church and God are asking of each us --- not as hermits perhaps, but as those who recognize the Kingdom of God in our midst at the same time. I would encourage you to look carefully just as I am doing, at the way the canon 603 sense of "the world" plays a defining role in your own life, and that you build in real Sabbath rest where you allow yourself to rest in God and be just who he had made and calls you to be.  

Separate yourself more strictly from that false and idolatrous world. Let go of the consumerism, competition, division, striving to achieve (including religious striving(!),  and all of the other "-isms" that so represent the idols of our day, and try to do this in a focused or dedicated way for at least one entire day each week. After all, this is what the fourth commandment requires of us. Reject Pharaoh's ethic of ceaseless toil and embrace Jesus' ethic of God's gratuitous (and ultimately unearnable) love. Embrace "the great equalizer" of Sabbath which allows everyone and everything to rest and be the ones God calls them to be, the world of  genuine respect for all of creation, and of loving collaboration and unity in the Love of God.  I believe it will change the season for you and help it be what it is meant to be, but also, over time, it can change family life, life in our faith communities, and even the larger world in which we live.