To live in death and life, light and darkness

“(Be)comings all involve goings. I keep musing about how Christ holds all these things in tension: birth/death; emptiness/fullness; light and darkness; dance and stillness….and perhaps that’s what it means to be fully human, to live in death and life, light and darkness?"

Easter week funerals were the topic of post-morning prayer chatter yesterday. A parishioner died this weekend, his funeral will hold until Easter Monday; and an Augustinian friar that I know died on Friday, to be buried Wednesday of Easter week. Someone wondered how it was to be on hold through these days. So I said, difficult and not....it's to live in the doorway between light and darkness, between life and death - we are always stretched out between heaven and earth, we just don't always notice how it feels.

Tom died 27 years ago today, on what was Holy Thursday that year. We held his wake on Easter afternoon, the funeral was on Easter Monday morning...

Mercy-ing

At times when I write, I'm acutely conscious that it is a way of holding open a door for God to enter the world, a way in which the Word takes flesh and walks among us, pitches His tent within us.  I think of Annie Dillard, wondering how we dare to come to prayer at all, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?”  I have perhaps a faint idea of what we are invoking.  Such awareness generally does nothing for my writer's block.

Today I'm writing at DotMagis about the Word made flesh, word,s and Pope Francis' notion of misericordiando — mercy-ing.

"I’m both consoled and challenged by the pope’s notion that mercy is not just an object, but an action. Mercy-ing is a way of proceeding, a way of being in the world. Like Hopkins’s “just man who justices,” who, “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—Christ,” mercy-ing calls us not just to be merciful, but to be mercy..." 

Read the rest at DotMagis.

Column: Looking for Calvary

The police shot the robber (inside the bank), but he survived.  When Crash saw the man the guards had shot being carried from the bank and put into the ambulance, he turned to me and said, "Did he not go like a bunny?"  Every time we crossed a Roman street I would entreat him to "go like a bunny" so we didn't get flattened by a Roman driver. I suspect I made a noncommittal noise, not wanting to go into detail at that moment about what had happened.

The crowd dispersed and we were on our way, though for the life of me I don't recall where we went from there.  The Vatican museum?

What do we see?

This column appeared at Catholic Philly on 10 April 2014.

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You see many things but do not observe; ears open, but do not hear. Isaiah 42:20

Many years ago, when Crash was four and The Boy only two, we traveled to Rome for a couple of weeks, so that my husband could present a paper at a conference there. While Victor worked, the two boys and I enjoyed the sights of Rome.

The shortest route to the subway stop ran through the local indoor market, a cool and colorful oasis in the soggy heat of a Roman summer. One afternoon we wove our way through the crowded Friday market and popped out onto the street to find ourselves at the edge of a crowd, all pushing and craning for a look at the street. We couldn’t turn back and couldn’t move forward. Sirens were sounding, and men were barking orders. In the confusion I turned to the man next to me and asked in halting Italian what was happening. “There’s been a bank robbery,” he said, “with guns.” I clung tightly to the boys’ hands and prayed.

I am cantoring Palm Sunday and in preparation to sing the Psalm, I spent some time earlier in the week meditating on the readings, lingering with Matthew’s version of the Passion. I began to wonder what it might have been like, had I been in Jerusalem the morning that Jesus was crucified?

Would it have been like that Friday in Rome? All noise and confusion, with very little information to be had, and no time to think before you are confronted by a difficult and frightening reality. Would I have grasped what was happening at all, understood that in the dust of Jerusalem street, lay Jesus, the Son of God, dying for my sins?

I wonder, too, how often I miss seeing Christ walking that road to the crucifixion here and now, seeing Christ, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ put it, playing in ten thousand places. Have I learned from listening to the Passion narrative how to spot those bearing crosses, those caught up in living out the Paschal mystery through their own suffering, or do I stand there in the crowd, confused and a bit too complacent?

I watch an elderly man come into the dim church, himself a bit unsteady on his feet, holding tight to his frail wife, bearing as much of her weight as he can. I see Simon of Cyrene steadying Jesus, pulling the weight of the cross onto his own shoulders.

I see a photo of a priest standing alone before a crowd, a cross in his hands, a soldier pointing a gun behind him. I hear Jesus in St. John’s Passion, “I came to testify to the truth.”

I read of parents in the Sudan, boiling poisonous roots for their children to eat. I see the soldiers offering gall to Jesus to drink.

I will hear the Passion read twice this week, but had I eyes, I could read the Passion daily. For Christ plays in a thousand places, looking up at me from the dust where he has fallen, asking, “Do you see me? Can you hear me? Will you pick up my cross and walk with me?”

To read:
Read slowly and meditatively Mark’s account of the Passion (we will hear Matthew’s on Sunday and John’s on Friday): Mark 15:1-41

To pray:

Anima Christi
Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O Good Jesus, hear me.
Within your wounds hide me.
Permit me not to be separated from you.
From the wicked foe, defend me.
At the hour of my death, call me and bid me come to you
That with your saints I may praise you
For ever and ever.
Amen.

To listen:
The text sung here, which comes from the book of Lamentations (1:12 ), is from a response traditionally used during Holy Week:

O vos ómnes qui transítis per víam, atténdite et vidéte: Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus. Atténdite, univérsi pópuli, et vidéte dolórem méum. Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus.

O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention and see: if there be any sorrow like my sorrow. Pay attention, all people, and look at my sorrow: if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.

Give Me a Word: Radical Hospitality

As we move toward Holy Week and Easter, I find myself listening harder for the voices that call from unexpected places, wondering how I can be Christ in these situations, so far away from me, not only in physical distance, but in experience.  I'm struck with remorse that mothers must scavenge food for their children in bombed out streets in Syria, that parents in the Sudan are boiling inedible roots for their children to eat.  Would I wash their feet?  Greet them with joy?  Bring them a meal?

We argue about the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday - does the mandatum stretch to more than twelve?  to the non-ordained? to women?  Then I look at these photographs and know whose feet Jesus would be washing, whose feet he command us to wash...

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 3April 2014.

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Amma Sarah said, “It is good to give alms. If a person does it to please people at first, he will come from pleasing people to living in awe of God.” — from the Apothegmata Patrum, the sayings of the desert fathers and mothers

A flustered-looking student I did not know knocked on my doorframe last week. I looked up from my desk and asked if I could help her, thinking she was lost in the maze-like science building. “Do you have a charger for a phone?” Amazingly I had the charger she needed, and perhaps equally amazingly, I handed it over to her, without thinking to ask her name or when she might be back.

When she returned the cables an hour later, overflowing with thanks, it struck me that my loan was the modern day equivalent of providing a bucket for travelers to pull up water from a cistern in the desert; we depend on being able to fill our phones up with electrons, we feel so lost without them. (Modern oases do offer both water and electrons to desert travelers!) I handed over my bucket without a thought to whether I might later need it to power up my own phone — it was a most immoderate act of hospitality.

The stories of the immoderate hospitality of the men and women who fled to the desert echo the Gospel call to see the stranger as Christ. Lord, when did we give You to drink? Whenever you do this for the least ones, you do it for me. Visitors to these desert solitaries were met with warmth and care for their physical as well as spiritual needs. As a 4th century visitor to a desert father writes, “when he saw us, he was filled with joy, and embraced us and offered a prayer for us. Then, after washing our feet with his own hands…he invited us to a meal.”

The hospitality practiced by the desert fathers and mothers went further than meeting the needs of their visitors as if they were Christ in a different guise, but were obedient to them as if they were Christ himself. The fathers and mothers of the desert tell the story of a monk who was fasting, but when visitors invited him to eat, he did so without comment or complaint. Later, his fellow monks wondered whether he was upset at his failure to keep his fast. “I’m only distressed when I do my own will,” he responded.

The mothers and fathers of the desert practiced a radical generosity, one that depended not on material wealth, but on their poverty of spirit. They were able to set aside not only their physical needs, but their spiritual needs. Priest and theologian Johannes Metz reminds us this self-abandonment is not to be practiced in isolation, fasting for the sake of fasting, but must respond to our encounters with our brothers and sisters.

Is it harder to fast than it is to let others — to let God — offer themselves to us? Can we not only see, but hear and answer, God in our brothers and sisters? As Lent moves toward Holy Week, I am listening for God’s voice in my classroom and on the streets. Speak, Lord, I am listening.

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To read from Scripture: Lord, when did we feed you? Christ reminds us that He can be found in the people around us. Matthew 25:42-45

To pray:

In the silence of the stars,
In the quiet of the hills,
In the heaving of the sea,
Speak, Lord.

In the stillness of this room,
In the calming of my mind,
In the longing of my heart,
Speak, Lord.

In the voice of a friend,
In the chatter of a child,
In the words of a stranger,
Speak, Lord.

In the opening of a book,
In the looking of a film,
In the listening to music,
Speak, Lord.

For your servant listens.


Speak, Lord by David Adam

To listen: Where do we hear God speaking to us? Margaret Rizza’s beautifully still setting of David Adam’s poem reminds me that listening to God is not done in isolation, even by those who live in the wilderness of the desert, but within the relationships we have with our sisters and brothers.

What does grace sound like?

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.


A few weeks ago a friend posted this video on his Facebook feed. Where I see birds on a wire, someone else sees music.  What do I miss when I'm not expecting grace to intrude, but merely looking for the ordinary?  What would the world sound like if we could hear grace?