Kathy Coffey

We gather to honor small people wriggling on blankets in the grass.  Such tiny recipients hold such big dreams, their diversity astounding. Some are missing both front teeth; others “don’t even have a wiggle.” Beyond that easily observed difference stretches a multiplicity of first languages, cultures, socio-economic backgrounds. One dreams of being “a garbage man just like my dad!” then gives his teacher a huge, warm hug. Another wants to be a paleontologist. Some began the year barely knowing letters and now, miracle of miracles, all 25 can read.

That points to the achievement of heroes-never-acknowledged-enough: teachers. Daily, they contend with head lice, quirky language, sloppy kisses, runny noses, petty quarrels, helicopter parents, potty talk, hyperactivity, contagious rashes, endless rambly stories, serious learning challenges, super hero band-aids, vision problems, shifting friendships and discipline issues. For this and litanies more, they are paid relatively little. Nothing can compare to the irreplaceable gifts they give: abilities to read, calculate, and write. Valiantly, they return day after day to the rewards of watching a human being unfold. Our society shrugs off their achievements, then focuses on the really interesting, highly compensated jobs, like tossing a football. But to a small cluster of parents and grandparents, gathered with cameras, balloons and flowers, they walk on water.

It’s entertaining to speculate: will that small boy, punching his friend, research a cancer cure? Will the little girl in the flowered headband negotiate peace in the middle east? Will that one be a distinguished professor, or this one a compassionate nurse? Will one face addiction, another jail, a third a fulfilling marriage, another a spectacular career? Impossible to predict, and probably futile in the rush to home-made muffins and Krispy Kremes.

Thousands of graduations are happening now at schools around the world, and perhaps this one is a microcosm of all such milestones. Neither the certificate nor the applause can capture the wonder: that one who so recently learned to toddle, talk, separate from mom, and hoist a backpack stands firmly now on the path to life-long learning, continuing exploration, inexhaustible treasuries of heart and mind. The whole precarious, tumultuous, soaring, crushing, creative, greedy, generous, flowering, barren, tragi-comic human adventure contains such sweetly endearing moments. Gerard Manley Hopkins said it best:

Nature, bad, base, and blind,

Dearly thou canst be kind; …
I’ll cry thou canst be kind.

Look for the June 29 Soul Seeing column in National Catholic Reporter: “Jew, Christian, Muslim: See the Beloved Everywhere” by Kathy Coffey

Sometimes the confluence of experience and learning is splendid. Recently, I journeyed to Calaveras Big Tree state park in CA and admired 2000-year old giant sequoias. A tree that old may live through more than 100 fires, which benefit the trees by opening the cones to release their seeds and clearing the ground of litter so seedlings can reach mineral soil and receive sunshine. At their bases flowered mountain dogwood. The contrast between the solid, towering, rusty brown trunks and the floating, lacey white flowers spoke powerfully of male and female, yin and yang, the vast spectrum contained in and expressed by the Creator.

During a mindfulness class the next week, we were led in a meditation where we envisioned an image of spaciousness, like ocean, mountains, or God. Through this expansion, we delighted in an infinite vista, an everlasting care. Then we were asked to hold up against the first image another: of suffering. Placing the problem or sorrow in a larger context helps neutralize or defuse it. Buddhists use the comparison to a spoonful of salt placed in a water glass: the salty taste will be strong. But if that same spoonful were poured into an ocean or lake, the taste would be negligible. So, too, the suffering is real; we don’t deny it, but we don’t let it overwhelm us.

The meditation showed that we can stay present with difficult things, not immediately default. Most people are inclined to flee suffering, stuffing it or denying it. But consider how trees breathe in carbon monoxide, poisonous to humans, and transform it to life-giving oxygen. Humans breathe in cooler air, and without any effort, breathe out warmer air. So my image now for unlimited spaciousness will be the giant sequoias, some estimated at 2600 tons, the weight of 18 blue whales, and the delicate white dogwood blooms. Placed beside that spaciousness, any problem seems less formidable. We’re not only about the small self; we’re also part of a larger picture, a more radiant brightness.

Admittedly, my approach to this feast is colored by 23 years of education with the Religious of the Sacred Heart. I could belt out “Coeur de Jesus” with the best of them, but secretly admired my parents for refusing to drive across town for the celebration of the feast at school. School? In summer? When we’d so recently been freed?

That wasn’t the only ambivalence. Ever the sensitive-to-hypocrisy teen, I noticed that though the talk was about love, the practical reality was a fierce discipline, a pervasive obsession with rules, silence and order. Wiser people have counseled, “Let it go!” That was simply the era, a perhaps desperate attempt to corral hundreds of chattering girls. Other writers have explained that the feast itself represents progress from 17^th century piety, with its emphasis on the externals of religion.

But somehow the rigidity softened at the front gate. There stood a statue which remains an icon somewhere deep in the psyche. It was a large representation of Jesus as the Sacred Heart, with the odd heart-outside-the-body typical of that art. But more important: his arms were flung wide in welcome. His hands didn’t hurl thunderbolts or brandish law books.

The stance epitomized St. Margaret Mary Alacoque’s insight: “The divine heart…is an ocean full of joy to drown all our sadness…” When she tried to convince others of this broadly inclusive approach, authorities called her delusional. (If only the prune-faces could’ve been around when she was vindicated: for the feast proclaimed in 1856, her canonization in 1920.)

That set the stage. Then in adulthood, I could understand Richard Rohr’s superb book, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation, where he explains that we can do nothing to make God love us more. “All is given all the time!” because God can’t not love.

If I could really believe that, live out of it, I’d have it made. We all would. So, thanks to the Sacred Heart for that good grounding.

One of the most striking sentences in the first reading from Acts (2:4) describes people speaking different languages, yet still being understood. We all know that even those who speak the same language can have a hard time communicating. Pentecost reverses The Tower of Babel story, which tries to explain why people began speaking in different languages. The people that day achieved understanding, despite their linguistic differences.

Pentecost continues today, as African students in an ESL classroom learn English and across the hall, North Americans learn Spanish. A young California woman who had emergency gall bladder surgery in a Tokyo hospital felt alone and afraid, unable to communicate with or understand her nurses and doctors. She was placed in the oncology ward because a few nurses there knew some English. But another patient broke down the language barrier. She simply lifted her hospital gown and showed the American her scar, a silent signal that she could relate to the girl’s pain.

One way to celebrate Pentecost is to appreciate the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in our lives. The processes of ordinary living are so fragile, so immensely significant, so fraught with terror, that we desperately need someone beyond ourselves. We need the warmth and power of the Spirit to help us in whatever we have undertaken.

If you look back over the last 5, 10 or 20 years, where could you could say this? “Ah yes. So you, life-giving Spirit and Guide, were there all along, enlightening and accompanying through whatever came.”