O Sapienta

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,

attingens a fine usque ad finem,

fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:

veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

Wisdom, O holy Word of God,

you govern all creation with your strong yet tender care.

Come and show your people the way to salvation.
— from Evening Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours, December 17

In my mind, these last days of Advent, when the office moves from the usual daily round, where the propers are defined by where the days falls, and not by our proximity to the great feast, are inextricably wound up with final exams and endings.  The last classes, last papers, final exams, final good-byes to students with whom I have spent long hours.   And grades.  Final grades.

My job is wisdom.  Not just delivering content, but helping students develop in their ability to wield what they know well and wisely.  In the end, though, I must somehow decide, using a single axis, how wise in the ways of chemistry I think each of my students is.  So like many of my students, who are undoubtedly praying for wisdom as they approach finals, I, too, seek wisdom at this time of year.  Wisdom that is both tender and strong, that can with justice and fairness tell my young chemists how wise they have become.

Giving voice to an anguish not our own

Four years ago, after my friend Robin lost her son, I wrote this piece about praying the psalms for the Catholic Standard & Times.  We say we can't imagine what it might be like to...lose a child, lose a spouse, lose a home.  I wonder if it is less we can't imagine, but that we won't.  Or perhaps we don't know how, how to prayerfully imagine such grief, how to give voice to anguishes we would rather not know about.

I cannot mourn the children who died today as their parents are and will, but I can chose to be present to their pain in my prayer.  To take up the dark psalms of lament, the brutally honest canticles of the prophets, to let them stretch my heart.  To imagine, in the tradition of Ignatius, the conditions that would wring such words from soul and mind.  I cry out until the dawn. Like a lion he breaks all my bones. Day and night you give me over to torment.  

The night after Tom died, I woke up wailing in the night. My mother heard me, and came in to the room where I had finally collapsed into sleep, and held me, repeating over and over again that though there was nothing she could do to repair this grievous wound, she would be with me.

The psalms don't necessarily bring comfort or ease in grief, but like my mother, they are prayers that offer the chance to stand with those who mourn, whose one companion is darkness — as tonight's psalm for Compline will cry [Ps 88]. They let us do as Christ did, and weep.  Can we take up these psalms of lament, and widen our hearts to share in those in inconsolable agony of spirit?


This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times 25 September 2008.

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At the sight of her tears, and those of the Jews who followed her, Jesus said in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart, “Where have you put him?” They said, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. — Jn. 11:33-35


A friend lost her son last week, dragged from a long awaited retreat in silence into a maelstrom of pain. Over and over people told her that they could not imagine her grief. Perhaps what we really meant was that we did not want to experience her grief ourselves.

Returning to Bethany to find his friends Martha and Mary mourning their brother Lazarus, Jesus did not fail to imagine their grief, to experience this pain, though He could, and would, wipe it away in an instant. Jesus wept.

My friend sought the psalms in her grief. Not the green pastures and clear streams of Psalm 23, but the penetrating, inescapable love of Psalm 139. “If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there,” she prays.

Joseph Gelineau, S.J., whose now familiar psalm tones regrounded us in our own ancient chant traditions, said in his introduction to the Grail Psalter, “[the psalms] force us to widen our hearts to the full dimensions of redemption."

The psalms give us a way to voice the anguishes we have not experienced, the joys that might have never been ours, the fears that besiege and beset those around us. They force us to widen our hearts, and like Christ with Martha and Mary, be willing to go beyond acknowledging another’s pain, and imagine it. The psalms let us weep with each other.

In this way the psalms become for us more than the sacred songs of a generation long past, they are our own voices ringing in the wilderness of everyday life. As Andre Chouraqi, a distinguished Jewish theologian and linguist, noted, “We were born with this book in our very bones … 150 poems … 150 mirrors of our agonies and our resurrections.”

Literally, of course, the psalms are the skeleton upon which the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church’s daily work of prayer, hangs. On a deeper level, I find this image of the psalms as bones reminds me that these “150 mirrors” are not a superstructure shielding us from the difficulties of each other’s lives, nor are they an exoskeleton that bounds our growth.

Instead, they hold up for us what we need to see in our own lives, in the lives of those around us. They support us while we grow, through these shared experiences of joys and sorrows, virtues and transgressions.

As I prayed Psalm 139 this week, for my friend and for her son, it brought me back to the dark hours of a Holy Thursday more than 20 years ago. I sat in a hospital waiting room, facing the news that my husband would not live to see the morning. My breviary had disappeared in the chaos of the night before, but the psalms turned out to be in my bones and therefore my memory. When I could not hope, Psalm 30 could hope for me: “At night there are tears, but joy comes with dawn.”

The psalms still give voice to my griefs, my joys, my angers, my failings, my triumphs — they hold me up. They are my very bones. Through them we hold each other up. They are our very bones.

My palate turned dry as a shard

Like water I spilled out,
   all my limbs fell apart.
My heart was like wax,
   melting within my chest.
My palate turned dry as a shard
   and my tongue was annealed to my jaw,
        and to death's dust did You thrust me.

Psalm 22:14-15
Robert Alter's translation

Made Radiant by the Light of the World: For the feast of St. Lucy

Last night I gave a reflection for an Advent prayer service at a local retreat house...here is the start

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Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. — Isaiah 8:23a, 9:2 

I saw a great light tonight.  As I drove down College Avenue, I looked up to find the sky aflame.  It literally took my breath away.  On this last day of classes, the fiery rose and gold sunset seemed to say, here, here is Advent.  A season of lights set out in a world yet dimmed with tragedy, grief and sin. Stop.  Look. Listen.

Four years ago, in the depths of winter, I spent thirty days in silence in a retreat house on the edge of the Atlantic ocean making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.  It was an extraordinary experience of prayer, awash in fire and water, tinged with the light of dawn and sharpened on the edge of frigid winter nights.  These exercises are made in silence, save for Mass and a daily conversation with the Jesuit directing my retreat, but once a day I would take my iPod and sit in the sun in the small alcove under the stairs, and set one of my assigned periods of meditations adrift in a sea of music. 

The second week of St. Ignatius’ Exercises begins with meditating on the Incarnation and so it will perhaps come as no surprise that my playlist included an exquisite Ave Maria, but the piece that can still pull me back into those depths of prayer is Stella Maris….

Solve vincla reis, profer lumen caecis…the clear soprano voices called.  

Loosen the chains of the guilty, send forth light to the blind.

These threads of the prophet Isaiah, warp to the Gospel’s weft, holding it within its place in salvation history, bind me to the whole company of Israel as I pray.

Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. 

The word caecis in Latin means more than physically sightless, it can mean aimless or confused. Isaiah promises not just that our blindness (metaphorical or otherwise) will be healed but that the anguish of our confusions will be eased, our wanderings given direction.....

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There is much tangled in my life these days, and I long for some easing of the confusion, for some clear direction in these muddled times.  Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.

As one of my Jesuit friends reminds me:  first, we preach to ourselves.

O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Dawn, splendor of eternal light, and sun of justice, come, and shine on those seated in darkness, and in the shadow of death. 

Sharp Melting Points

The Boy learned to make caramel at Thanksgiving (which seems so long ago).  Last night he asked me why the sugar melts so suddenly, not gradually, but collapsing into a puddle all at once. "Because it is a pure solid.  One test of the purity of a material is how sharp the melting point is."  I have a vivid recollection of a sample of something I synthesized tamped into a narrow glass straw, its crystals suddenly losing their structure and collapsing into a liquid.

I'm not pure by any means, but I think I may have reached the melting point tonight, and it was quite sharp.  I've been plugging away all week at a list of "things that must be accomplished" before weeks' end. Minutes ago I put the last touches on the exam that has to be ready tomorrow morning and just about collapsed into a professorial puddle.

One more task for the night and I really can collapse into bed.