Category Archives: Family Spirituality

Doing this week‘s newspaper word search with my grandson, all the hidden words contained the root “joy.” That word could name the theme for the life of St. Clare, St. Francis’ lesser known female counterpart (though standing alone as well) and dear friend.

Clare enjoyed the “guarantee of living without guarantees.” That might make us feel insecure and wobbly. We rely heavily on insurance policies; she relied totally on God. Clare saw humans as mirrors reflecting the divine. In the beauty of the Beloved, she found more than enough wealth to offset her life style of poverty.

As Richard Rohr points out in Eager to Love, Clare and her sisters had a topsy-turvy insistence on living without privilege. Totally dependent on God, spending 40 years in one small house and garden, she discovered abundant joy. It seems important to note that in dark times, we can still nurture joy—it’s not a dirty word showing we simply don’t understand our era.

One of the most famous, but misguided, images of Clare was her holding the monstrance high, so that Saracens invading Assisi shrank back in fear and left her monastery alone. It’s true that soldiers did enter her home, San Damiano, but they were European mercenaries hired by Frederick II. The monstrance didn’t exist then—in 1240.

What Clare actually DID, confronting the genuine threat of invasion far outside the city walls where she and her sisters lived unprotected, was take “her usual posture for prayer,” lying prostrate.  It seems the exact opposite to a macho demonstration of power or strength, and yet it was effective. The invaders retreated, causing no harm.

Clare’s process of letting go ego and learning to mirror God led her to write: “Place your heart in the figure of the divine… and allow your entire being to be transformed into the image of the Godhead itself, so that you may feel what friends feel…” Given that intimacy, it’s unsurprising that Clare not only lived but even died joyfully, encouraging her soul to go forth with “good escort.”

Kathy’s newest book, A Generous Lap: A Spirituality of Grandparenting has just been published by Orbis books, 800-258-5838, OrbisBooks.com

The story of Australian Mary MacKillop (1842–1909) begins with an insecure childhood; no one would’ve been surprised if she wound up in an orphanage. Her father’s financial failures meant the loss of many childhood homes, and constant moving with her seven siblings. But at least he educated the children. At fourteen, Mary went to work to help support the family. With two of her sisters, she eventually started a school in a Penole stable. (Cue “Away in a Manger”?)

When in 1867, Mary founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, their school was revolutionary for admitting both paying and non-paying students. She was the first religious sister outside the cities, and first to educate children in the far-flung regions of the Outback. With characteristic humor, the Australians called the nuns the “Brown Joeys,” the color of their habits like the local kangaroos.

Then the story gets really interesting. The audacity of the congregation being directed by an elected mother general, rather than the local bishop, caused predictable grumbling among Australian hierarchs. Worsening the situation, the sisters lived in the community, not in convents—Mary even consulted a neighbor about the fish she was trying to cook, which had crumbled. Not the way nuns did things then! They were supposed to be above the mundane concerns of ordinary folks.

When Mary and her sisters reported a priest who’d sexually abused children, the tension with Australian bishops hit a peak: for a time they excommunicated her. It’s interesting to speculate how patterns of clerical pedophilia in other countries might have changed if more women—sisters, mothers, teachers, grandmothers–had known, then spoken up.

A diorama in Sydney shows the bishop railing at Mary and kicking her dramatically out on the streets. The country people saved the sisters from starvation, and Mary named those who caused this suffering her “most powerful benefactors.” From a remote corner of the Australian Outback, she tapped an insight known to the world’s wisdom traditions: we sometimes learn more from our “enemies” than our friends.

While the bishops’ names are mercifully forgotten, Mary became Australia’s first canonized saint in 2010. The Harbor Bridge in Sydney bore her name in lights, and Australians belted out in the Vatican their raucous Olympic cheer: “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!”

Excerpt from More Hidden Women of the Gospels, (Orbis, 2020) https://orbisbooks.com/800-258-5838

Feast of St. Ignatius, July 31

Today’s gospel about the “smallest of all seeds,” the mustard, seems appropriate today. In the castle of Loyola, Spain a simple plaque says, “Aqui nacio.” On a literal level, it means St. Ignatius was born there in 1491. Symbolically, it reaches more broadly: the tiny start of a creative, alternate narrative no one dreamt would spread so far, or endure so long.

At a time when clergy were the only intermediaries between ordinary people and God, Ignatius differed. Gloriously, he told ordinary shmucks: “God has a dream for you.” Ignatius’ alternative didn’t emphasize external rules. Instead, the interior process of the Spiritual Exercises asked not what? but who? Called into “conscious living relationship with the person of Christ,” Ignatius exchanged his sword for a walking stick. He traded the macho drama of a knight’s life for a mysteriously unfolding process. He had no idea where it would end, but limped into it trustingly.

With genius and craziness, Ignatius directed his followers, a group who eventually became the Jesuits, into the swirl of cities, where lively plazas offered places to preach and exchange stimulating new ideas. His directions for Jesuit life are remarkably flexible: no office in common, no excessive penances; regarding dress, “the manner is ordinary.” He often inserts a realistic qualifier to fit circumstances: “or whatever’s best.”

Just as prophets usually meet with disdain, so the Jesuits have had perpetual differences with the powers-that-be. Or as George Anderson puts it, “A life of active fidelity to the Gospel could place them in conflict with the generally received notion of what it means to be a law-abiding citizen.” “Jesuits in Jail, Ignatius to the Present” in Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 9/95.

It’s not hard to name current laws that conflict with human values, just as slavery or denying women the vote once did. So to their credit, no other religious order has spent as many man-years in jail as the Jesuits. (http://faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/briefsjhistory.htm) Congratulations on that badge of honor, and happy feast to them!

A version of this essay first appeared in Give Us This Day, 7/31/20.

Let’s hope that on the Feast of Mary Magdalene, we all do our part to correct the misperception of her as prostitute. That error, a conflation of three Biblical texts, was given authority by Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century, and not corrected for 1400 years, until revisions to the Roman calendar of 1969.

Luke’s gospel names her as one of several financially independent women who supported Jesus’ ministry. But her role is more important than financier. Dan Brown’s best-selling Da Vinci Code gave her a romantic role, but again, her centrality in the early Christian community was more than simply a private relationship.

All four Gospels agree she was one of the first witnesses to the resurrection. When Jesus calls her name in the garden, it is a pivotal point of human history. Her name is the hinge to a new order. She was the first to realize that God could vanquish even death, and to tell the other disciples. She convinced them and skeptics throughout history that “love is stronger than death.” To silence her voice and discount her primary role does her a great disservice. She calls us instead to the vision of a world free of sexism, suffering, exploitation and death. Arguments over authority simply distract from that larger hope.

Biographical details are sparse for this Patron Saint of the Environment: daughter of a Mohawk chief and a Christian, Algonquin mother, Kateri was orphaned when her family was wiped out by the smallpox epidemic of 1660, which left her pock-marked and half blind. Adopted by her uncle, she asked for baptism at age 20, and celebrated it in a chapel festively decorated with feathers, ribbons, flowers, and beads. The beauty of nature, which she had always loved, took on new intensity because she knew the creator.

The Mohawks, however, could not accept her conversion and ridiculed her. Eventually she made a long journey on foot to the Sault mission south of Montreal in Canada, where she could live among other Native American Christians. Early French biographers describe her as solid and joyful. She nursed the sick and dying with remarkable cheer, considering that her own health was precarious. Her joy was so contagious that children were drawn to her for storytelling. She showed a key hallmark of holiness: people wanted to be around her. At her burial there was no mourning, only public rejoicing.

At a time when clean air, water and wilderness is dangerously threatened, we can appreciate how the restrained native American approach might’ve saved the planet. (For more on that topic, see Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.) In desperate, last-ditch circumstances now, we need Kateri’s wisdom, reverence, and sense of the earth’s sacredness.

Biographical details are sparse for this Patron Saint of the Environment: daughter of a Mohawk chief and a Christian, Algonquin mother, Kateri was orphaned when her family was wiped out by the smallpox epidemic of 1660, which left her pock-marked and half blind. Adopted by her uncle, she asked for baptism at age 20, and celebrated it in a chapel festively decorated with feathers, ribbons, flowers, and beads. The beauty of nature, which she had always loved, took on new intensity because she knew the creator.

The Mohawks, however, could not accept her conversion and ridiculed her. Eventually she made a long journey on foot to the Sault mission south of Montreal in Canada, where she could live among other Native American Christians. Early French biographers describe her as solid and joyful. She nursed the sick and dying with remarkable cheer, considering that her own health was precarious. Her joy was so contagious that children were drawn to her for storytelling. She showed a key hallmark of holiness: people wanted to be around her. At her burial there was no mourning, only public rejoicing.

At a time when clean air, water and wilderness is dangerously threatened, we can appreciate how the restrained native American approach might’ve saved the planet. (For more on that topic, see Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.) In desperate, last-ditch circumstances now, we need Kateri’s wisdom, reverence, and sense of the earth’s sacredness.

When we dip into the “imaginarium,” we find a rich treasure trove that holds images, memories and symbols of God more basic than any doctrine we’ve learned or lesson we’ve memorized. Einstein said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Richard Rohr adds that “God can only come to any of us in images that we already trust and believe, and that open our hearts.” (A Spring Within Us, p. 220) One of these fruitful places for me is the garden.

It all began and ended there: the first scene of Genesis set in the garden where Adam and Eve walk with God through the cool of the evening, the resurrection where Jesus meets Mary in a garden and she mistakes him for the gardener.

July seems a lovely month to reflect on gardens’ rich spiritual significance. At some level, we always walk with God in the garden, because we are never separated from God. Or as Julian of Norwich says, “between God and the soul, there is no between.” Surely the garden displays the profusion at God’s very heart. Entering, an overview: a wild riot of colors, textures, sculpted shapes, spikes and flowing vines. Moving closer in to bury one’s nose in myriad fragrances: Ivory petals deepen to creamy centers. The shades of multi-flavored nectars abound: apricot, peach, plum.

We who have a hard time cozying up to the many unknowns in our lives could well spend time watching the unfolding mysteries here. Unhurried and sure, each flower grows from tight green fist of bud to the mysterious swirl of petals around the core, finally dancing into outspread skirts of full bloom. Sometimes we too are closed tight as buds, and sometimes gradually relax into the opening, healing sun. “Trust the process,” gurus counsel, but that’s easier when the unfolding brings fragrance, delight and beauty. Does God deliberately send important “lessons” with joy, unburdened with classroom trappings and academic stresses?

Maybe Mary wasn’t so wrong about the mysterious gardener’s identity; the risen Christ still meets us there. And God walks always with us in the cool.  

Barbara Brown Taylor has long been such a favorite author that I often drool with envy, wishing I had written exactly what she just said. This Episcopal priest is in touch with scripture, liturgy and the hard work of a four-day power outage, when she breaks the water in the horses’ trough with a hammer twice a day. The focus here will be on one of her books, but all are a delight.

An Altar in the World begins in wonder “about what happens when we build a house for God…What happens to the rest of the world when we build four walls—even four gorgeous walls—cap them with a steepled roof, and designate that the House of God? What happens to the riverbanks, the mountaintops, the deserts, and the trees? What happens to the people who never show up in our houses of God?”

For an example of her broad vision, she cites St. Francis of Assisi who “read the world as reverently as he read the Bible.” (p. 9) She then piles on abundant evidence to help us pay attention to God in the world: through our own bodies, through saying no, through physical labor, and pain “which leads to the ground floor of all real things: real love, real sorrow, real thanks, real fear,” an altar to discover “life as full of meaning as it is of hurt.” (173)

Her description of discovering her vocation is delightful for its earthiness. She repeatedly climbs a fire escape wobbling from a Victorian mansion next door to the Divinity School. There in her prayer spot, she asks God what to do with her life, receiving the answer, “anything that pleases you.” Hence, she had a career that included cocktail waitressing, newspaper reporting, teaching horseback riding, preaching and pastoring—with one tantalizing possibility still hovering on the horizon: being a member of Cirque de Soleil.

Not the least bit churchy, irreverent, open-minded, quick to admit flaws, a superb writer who’s a stickler for the precise word, Taylor would make a marvelous companion for brunch. Or travel. Or anywhere else she might wander, with her conviction that “life is unmitigated gift.” She brings spirituality a much missing dimension: humor. Sometimes, she even prompts a delicious chuckle aloud. She questions the sacrosanct and tweaks the easy assumption, getting by with it in her creamy Georgia accent. (Podcasts also abound.) Her grounded priorities help us lose our appetite for social media gossip and shopping bargains. I will try to carry and continue her practice of “saying thank you now, while I still approve of most of what is happening to me, [so] then that practice will have become habit by the time I do not like much of anything that is happening to me.” Sound advice for aging!

Even after more than 50 years since my education by the Religious of the Sacred Heart, this feast still captures attention, still intrigues by its contradictions. On the negative side, the fierce discipline, the school’s obsession with rules, silence and order might have been simply the products of an era when few schools were enlightened or relaxed. Some friends have worse horror tales from crazier nuns and more uptight Catholic schools.

On the positive side, I still remember a statue of Jesus as the Sacred Heart which stood outside our school. It had the odd heart-outside-the-body typical of sentimental art. But more important: his arms were flung wide in welcome. His hands didn’t hurl thunderbolts, tick off lists of wrongdoing, or brandish law books.

The stance epitomized the insight of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, credited with popularizing devotion to the Sacred Heart. “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. Indeed, she had made a huge stride forward from 17^th century piety, with its emphasis on the externals of religion.

The inclusive tone of today’s feast is consistent with Julian of Norwich’s writing in The Showings about God as mother. “In the sight of God, we do not fall” (p. 222) because we are always graciously enfolded in love. Just as a mother brims with pride in her child, so we too are God’s joy, treasure and delight (p. 228). I’ve written about Julian in other places; thanks to a Sacred Heart education for the assurance that God can’t not love.

Intriguing how heroes in every era emerge to meet the particular needs of the time: Harriet Tubman and Wilbur Wilberforce to combat slavery, Susan B. Anthony to secure women’s vote or M.L. King to press for black civil rights, Rachel Carson to speak for the environment. The list could go on, but extraordinary people seem to arise in sync with the specific demands of the situation and a company of anonymous others: artists, scientists, political activists, theologians, writers, musicians and engineers.

For our times, when the destruction of the planet seems imminent, Kris and Doug Tompkins worked for 30 years to preserve wilderness and protect biodiversity. Their story is told in “Wild Life,” a National Geographic film which will appear on their t.v. channel June 16, is streaming on Hulu and Disney+ and showing in a few theaters.

At first it seems unlikely that a newlywed, middle-aged couple who had amassed a fortune through North Face, Esprit, and Patagonia clothing lines wouldn’t want to luxuriate in the beach homes, yachts, cars, penthouses, designer jewels and clothing that seem to appeal to many millionaires. Instead, they created Tomkins Conservation which bought and “protected approximately 14.8 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through the creation or expansion of 15 national parks in those countries, in addition to two marine protected areas of 30 million acres.”

Their initial efforts met with criticism and resistance from the Chilean government. Many people were skeptical of multi-millionaire Doug’s efforts to buy huge swathes of their country: what was his ulterior motive?  Chile had a mining-based economy—why not simply continue reaping its profits? Furthermore, the US had supported the oppressive Pinochet regime: was this prelude to another dictator? As a Chilean senator who was once an ardent foe admits later, “we treated them very badly. 98% of people would’ve just gone home.”

Knowing the insurmountable odds the Tompkins faced makes their largest private land donation in history even more spectacular. Add in the stupendous scenery of Patagonia, and the viewer can’t help root for their efforts. A terrible tragedy finally becomes the turning point: when Doug is killed in a kayaking disaster and buried in Chile, native people start appreciating the gift. Kris’ efforts to carry on the work despite her heartbreak come to a dramatic climax at a ceremony where deeds for the parks are signed and she embraces Michelle Bachelet, Chilean president. Almost as if two women have finally pulled it off!

The nonprofit organization Kris and Doug cofounded, Tompkins Conservation continues to bring back endangered species through rewilding, and to help communities thrive through nature-based tourism. Patagonia outdoor clothing line, founded by Yvon Chouinard, Doug’s best friend, works hard to ensure the sustainability of their products and donate some of their profits to preserving wilderness. The documentary offers extensive interviews and footage of these guys who began as skiing, climbing and surfing buddies, had a tremendous knack for business, yet manage to preserve a certain flannel-shirt naturalness. Kris Tomkins herself is luminous; she recorded long, rigorous, often frustrating efforts in her diary and she shines when climbing a peak Doug named for her, symbol of a larger success. The film has a pervasive tone of joy, filled with exhilaration that some people really are trying to save our beautiful, threatened blue-green planet.