Column: Inconvenient Truths

Refugee tents at Budapest Station

Victor was in Hungary a couple of weeks ago, while the refugee crisis at the train station in Budapest was at its peak.  He felt he needed to respond in some way to those bereft of home.  I'm proud of how he stretched to do so.

In writing this, I read many of the recent Catholic Church documents on migrants and refugees. They speak powerfully of how we ought to respond.  The line that I'm still thinking about comes from Pope John Paul II at 3rd World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees:   "It will be necessary to abandon a mentality in which the poor – as individuals and as peoples – are considered a burden, as irksome intruders..."

Given the news from our own country and from abroad, this is a line worth contemplating.

A version of this column appeared at CatholicPhilly on 18 September 2015.

When they were few in number, a handful, and strangers there,
Wandering from nation to nation, from one kingdom to another people,
He let no one oppress them; for their sake he rebuked kings:
“Do not touch my anointed ones, to my prophets do no harm.” — Psalm 105:12-15

“Be prepared to walk three to four miles to your event,” advises one brochure on the papal visit. There are lists of things not to bring: no coolers, no shelters, no large signs. “Grounds open at 6 am.” For an event that will not begin until after noon.

Refugee children at coloring station in
Budapest station

I am immeasurably grateful; I have a ticket to hear Pope Francis talk about immigration on Saturday, and one that lets me stand on the parkway for Mass on Sunday. Yet the more I read about the events, the more challenging the weekend sounds. How long can I stand? How far can I walk? Will I be able to bring an umbrella in case of rain?

While I began to make plans for the World Meeting of Families and the Pope’s visit last week, my husband, Victor, was in Budapest to give a series of talks on mathematics. His pictures of the small dome tents housing Syrian refugees in the train station square made me pause. So, too, did Facebook posts from friends in California, watching worriedly as fires envelope nearby communities. I’m planning for a weekend of wandering about Philadelphia with my oldest son, I’m not fleeing a war or wildfires, young children, pets and my elderly father in tow.

In 2013, under Pope Benedict XVI, the Church offered a reflection on our pastoral and spiritual response to refugees, those driven from their homes by forces beyond their control.

We are reminded that migrants and refugees are first and foremost not inconvenient company, but are a way God points to both our own status as pilgrims in this world and to Christ: “The ‘foreigner’ is God’s messenger who surprises us and interrupts the regularity and logic of daily life, bringing near those who are far away. In ‘foreigners’ the Church sees Christ who ‘pitches His tent among us’.”

The document goes on to remind us that everyone is called to respond personally to the needs of those who have been displaced by disasters. Victor visited with the refugees at the station, joining a group of students helping parents entertain their children, sitting on the ground as they colored, blowing huge bubbles for them to chase. He bought small toys for these children — carefully chosen to be easy to carry and not noisy so as not to add to their parents’ burdens!

It’s harder to see what I am called to do from this side of the ocean, but I can pray. I can allow my own wanderings to sharpen my eyes for the displaced. I can offer up long lines and long walks for those who stand at the borders, hoping for a place of safety.

The pope’s visit will interrupt the regularity of our daily lives in so many ways, even if we are not able to go to any of the events. For a brief moment our lives will manifest aspects of the uncertainty and anxiety of those fleeing catastrophes.Can this temporary disruption remind us of the Gospel’s demand to be ever attentive to the needs of those driven from their homes? Welcome, the Church tells us, is not just a task, but a way of living.

It wasn't an accident

A devastated Hiroshima in the aftermath of the nuclear bombing.

The photo to the left isn't quite as recognizable as the one below, but the mushroom cloud in all its immensity does not capture for me the incredible devastation wrought by something small enough to fit in my kitchen.

The last topic I covered in intro chemistry this semester was nuclear chemistry, which I think is a critical topic (pun intended!) for many reasons.  I hope to give the students a more nuanced sense of risk around nuclear materials. So we talk about where exposure comes from (living in a brick or stone house exposes you to more radiation than living near a nuclear plant), how background radiation varies with location and altitude (the background radiation in the evacuated areas around Fukushima is lower than the normal background in Philadelphia).  We talk about risks and accidents.  How many people have died in coal mining accidents versus in accidents at nuclear plants - making power costs people's lives.  I tell them one of the most serious accidents happened in Brazil — four people died of radiation poisoning, including a 6 year old girl, hundreds were contaminated — and had nothing to do with nuclear power.

The mushroom cloud, 11 miles high, 

over Nagasaki

Suddenly a hand went up in the back.  "What about Japan," my student asked, "that wasn't an accident, was it?"  The class stirred restlessly as I searched for an answer.  "No," I said slowly, "no, that wasn't an accident.  It was a terrible, unspeakably horrific thing."  Now they are silent, still looking at me.  I confess I am a pacifist.  I tell them they should read John Hershey's Hiroshima.  I tell them that this, too, is a risk of having power, nuclear and otherwise.

And at some level, I want to briskly brush this question away, and go back to talking about why Brazil nuts are so radioactive and how much uranium is in a granite kitchen counter top -- things that by comparison seem brightly ordinary and safe.

Instead, I listen to their silence, realize I will not recapture the ordinary in the 4 remaining minutes, and I send them away...

They shall beat their swords into plowshares 
and their spears into pruning hooks; 
One nation shall not raise the sword against another, 
nor shall they train for war again.  Isaiah 2:4b

Prophetic music: Guide our feet into the way of peace

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest:
for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;
to give knowledge of salvation unto his people for the remission of their sins,

through the tender mercy of our God;
whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. Lk 1:76-79 (King James translation)

For almost thirty years I have prayed the Benedictus each morning, "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel.." Yesterday morning, I sat outside on a glorious fall day to pray. On such a still and perfect morning, war seems unimaginable. Yet I knew the paper that still lay on the driveway would make it all to easy to imagine the tempest that is gathering on distant shores.

I love the antiphonal nature of Vaughn Williams' setting.  It brings me to face  the prophetic call of this text, not just for the baby whose name was to be John, but our own baptismal call. A single voice of remarkable clarity calls forth a response from the many, with grace, the melody blossoms into four-part harmony.  Despite the traditional liturgical setting of this text  within morning prayer, Vaughn William's music evokes for me a sense of vigil, and a gathering darkness outse.

May our prayers so gather, layer upon layer, until we can be heard to the farthest ends of the earth.  We pray that we might be prophets, that we might prepare the way. We pray for light in the darkness. We pray for mercy. We stand in world torn by violence and we cry: Lord, guide our feet into the way of peace.

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A version of this post appeared at  RevGalBlogPals.

Anxieties

"This is why most people don't stick with a contemplative discipline for very long; we have all heard all sorts of talk about contemplation bringing inner peace but when we turn within to seek this peace, we meet inner chaos instead of peace. But at this point it is precisely the meeting of chaos that is salutary, not snorting of lines of euphoric peace." Martin Laird OSA in Into the Silent Land

I'm on holiday at my dad's. Family time. Some lovely silent time, in my hermitage and standing out under the stars at night to pray. Floating in the pool. It sounds relaxing, and for the most part it is. But anxiety is pulling at the threads, puckering up my mind. The Boy ended up with an infected cyst (we've named it Bob). I spent time worrying about whether I should worry. At home, I would have called the pediatrician. Here, do I need to take him into town and find a clinic, or will hot compresses do the trick? (No...it needed antibiotics.)

Now our cat care person has phoned to say she is worried about the cat, who has apparently vanished in the house. There isn't anything I can do from this distance (other than ask a neighbor who knows the Fluff to check in later today...which I've done). I'm trying to be present to what is here, anxieties and all.

Column: Stretched between heaven and earth

I did go up to my study last week intending to write an entirely different reflection -- on God's delight in playing games with us, and our delight, and sometimes frustration in trying to figure out just how the game is played. Events intervened - and I was interrupted even more times than I listed here!

I'd been reading the Ancrene Wisse for entirely different reasons (thinking about spaces for a series of essays I'm writing on teaching), but the line about "a sensible woman" floated through my brain as the two sides of my life pulled at me like a rubber band. Other tidbits from the Wisse that resonated with me -- if you must have an animal, you are advised to have a cat (check!), and bloodletting is encouraged four times a year (I give mine away about that often). Still, I don't think I'm searching for an anchorhold anytime soon.

This column appeared on 4 June 2009 in the Catholic Standard and Times.

Let your thoughts be on things above, not on the things are on the earth, because you have died and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God. — Col. 3:2-3


“If a mad lion was running through the streets, would not a sensible woman shut herself in?” So asks the author of the Ancrene Wisse, a 13^th century guide to life for anchoresses — women who elected to spend their lives in prayer, sealed into anchorholds within the walls of churches and monasteries.

There were waiting lists for some anchorholds. Frankly, at the moment, I’m not surprised. At quarter past eight, dinner cleared up, I went up to my study, leaving teens busy with homework and husband off to his night class. I imagined I might write this column. But…by 8:27, “Mom, can you help me?” At 8:49 settle squabble over computer; 9:19 locate clean socks; 9:31 bedtime; 9:42 phone rings.

Never mind the mad lion, this is enough to drive me to barricade myself in my room, if not seek an anchorhold within the walls of my parish church.

Anchoress derives not from anchor but from the Greek “anachorein,” to withdraw. Yet in some ways, the lives of these medieval women were no more or less withdrawn from the world than mine. Their cells had two windows, one looked into the church, the other out into the world — so passersby might seek their counsel, ask their prayers and be inspired by their lives.

Much like mine, an anchoress’ life oscillated between “sitting … stone-still at God’s feet, listening to Him alone” and earth’s interruptions at the window. In her essay, Holy the Firm, written while she lived in what amounted to a modern-day anchorhold on the Puget Sound, Annie Dillard captured this tension: “You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.” There is prayer and work to be done on either side of the wall.

The unknown writer of the anchoress’ rule of life drew a parallel between the cross on which Christ hung and the cell in which she was held. An anchoress was dead in the eyes of the world — she would have been given Extreme Unction before she was enclosed — and now, as St. Paul would say, her life is “hidden with Christ in God.” As I read this section of the “Ancrene Wisse,” it stirred me to recall the words of one of the Eucharistic prayers: “he stretched out his arms between heaven and earth.”

If my life is now hidden in Christ, why am I surprised to find my arms stretched out between heaven and earth? To find that my times of stillness and silence succumb to the realities of life as the mother of teens when I least expect it?

My life is just an anchoress’ cell writ large. I look through one open window toward God in whom my life is rooted, through the other toward the responsibilities He has given me. My ability to weather mad lions (or teenagers’ tiffs) depends not on barricades, but on the balance between heaven and earth that the cross, like the anchoress’ cell, holds me to.

The anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse ends by asking that each reader of anything in the rule “greet the Lady with an Ave Maria for him who wrote it…[m]oderate enough I am, who ask so little.”

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

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Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Stalking the wild rubber band

It's midnight and Fluffy is crawling into my big bag. No tuna in there; what could she possibly want? The oversize rubber band she is now enthusiastically chasing around the 2nd floor. My gratitude knows no bounds. It's not a mouse!!

Crash-ing Temps

It's -13^oF here and it's not even the coldest part of the night yet. After a frigid afternoon of skiing (even Barnacle Boy was cold enough to put on long underwear), Crash thought a dip in the outdoor hot tub was in order. Since he couldn't go alone, I reluctantly volunteered to put on my jacket and oversee his soak. "You'd be warmer in the water," he offered. He was right, better in the water and warm than shivering in a jacket. But it was so cold that when I ran my wet hands through my hair, it froze in about a minute. Crash admired the clarity of the sky and the stars, I alas, had left glasses inside, so could see only a blur. When my eyelashes froze together I declared an end to the time in the tub.

But I'd do it again...

Pocket Guide to WMD

I spent the last week at my professional society's national meeting. There is always a huge exposition along with these meetings - hundreds of vendors peddling their wares, loads of tsotchkes to bring home to Crash and the Boy (lobster lollipops got best of show in my book). This year, the FBI had a booth - hoping to recruit chemists. A couple of my students have gone to work in forensics - real life CSI - so I thought I'd see if there was any good information I could bring back to put up on the career bulletin board. I picked up the basic info, then spotted the brochure: A Pocket Guide to WMD

A Pocket Guide to WMD? Does the generally public really need to have in their pockets a guide to identifying weapons of mass destruction? or listing the associated laws? (Yes, it is illegal to produce, obtain, possess, demonstrate, or teach others to make weapons of mass destruction.) My favorite part of the guide shows the standard warning symbols for biohazards, nuclear materials, and flammable or explosive chemicals, advising us to be able to recognize these symbols. In bold print, it goes on, however, to warn that we should "not expect to see them on a WMD device".

Interestingly, the brochure didn't provide any information about identifying actual devices, like the guides to identifying energy ship sillouettes from WW II, just broad definitions. ("Any weapon involving a disease organism.") The brochure itself seemed to me to be an incendiary device, the sole purpose to suggest we be ever vigilant for we know not what.

Five Minutes Peace

When my kids were small, they had a book called Five Minutes Peace by Jill Murphy. Poor Mrs. Large asks her kids for 5 minutes peace after breakfast. She heads for the bath, visions of bubbles dancing in her head. Any mother knows what comes next: the kids, of course. In the end, the kids end up in the tub and Mrs. Large gets her peace - all 3 minutes and 45 seconds of it back in the kitchen. "Five minutes peace" is now the code in our house for "Mom needs privacy, please don't...(fill in the blank: stand outside the bathroom door and converse, ask me to sign your math test while I'm up to my elbows in cat litter, you get the idea!)"

Don Riley, OSA, currently the provincial of the Augustinian province of St. Thomas of Villanova gave a wonderful homily for Mother's Day, which drew on the Gospel for the day (John 14:23-29) where Christ promises to leave peace as his gift to the world. He stopped preaching 5 minutes sooner than usual, then suggested we give the mothers in the assembly "Five Minutes Peace", a gift he thought they rarely enjoyed. He asked the lector to time it, and we sat down - in peace. My first thought was that kids would get restless, adults would whisper, little ones would cry - what is he thinking? But it worked. Not only did silence take hold, but peace did as well. It was a risk, but one worth taking. I wonder how often we fail to take a risk for peace, since it seems that whatever we might try would be so little in the face of so much conflict and could not possibly have an effect should it succeed?