Kathy Coffey

Some of us pounce on the punch line. An inept gardener, I’m thrilled when a plant blooms in spite of me. There in my raggedy, bug-bitten patch, a scarlet spike, a creamy-crimson rose! I s’pose I could worry about being the choked or withered seed, but fretting about anxiety seems redundant.  

Even seasoned farmers must leave a lot to chance—they can’t control the weather, weeds, or various calamities that could befall something as small and unprotected as a seed. The crop, like our lives, must rely heavily on grace.

The stretch from metaphor to experience shouldn’t be too long. Against the wildly improbable odds, the Word sometimes blossoms in us. In every setting—filling stations, hospitals, prisons, bars, retirement centers, offices, stores—kindness flowers. Teachers, addiction counsellors, social workers, parents, therapists, spiritual directors all focus on peoples’ innate goodness and try to reflect it back. 

So maybe today’s parable, brought to us by Luke, is about the slow, mysterious working of unearned grace. Even through our cracks and weeds and fissures, a green shoot can sometimes sprout. “God, who gives life to all things” (1 Tim 6:13) compensates for flaws.

Jesus, ever the storyteller, knew how to make a dramatic point. Once mistaken for a gardener, (Jn. 20:15) he also told the parable of wheat and weeds growing up together in a non-dualistic field (Mt. 13:24-43). Facing opposition and betrayal, Jesus modeled how to learn from the thirsty deserts and dark crevices of negative experience.

And he might reach into our rockiest chasms to retrieve the frail and fragile tendril.

Kathy Coffey, “Grace in the Garden,” from the September 2023 issue of Give Us This Day http://www.giveusthisday.org (Collegeville, MN) 888-259-8470

After I watched a few episodes of “Astrid,” a French detective series streaming on PBS, I asked the nun-friend who’d recommended it, “Will it always be this dark?” She replied cheerily, “every episode starts with a murder.”

Usually murder mysteries aren’t my style, but this one has intriguing elements beyond the gory details. What I like best is the developing friendship between Police Commander Raphaelle Coste and Astrid, who is on the spectrum. Coste quickly realizes that Astrid thinks differently and sees things that “neurotypicals” miss. Wisely, she brings her to crime scenes where neither woman flinches at the bloody corpse. Astrid then works as an archivist in the police records department to uncover relevant cases; she has a photographic memory of files, and arranges evidence visually in a private room. There, she demonstrates an intelligence that breaks the mold, reaching her conclusions in solitude. A childhood fascination with puzzles surfaces when she treats each crime as a matter of fitting clues together precisely.

Gradually, Raphaelle invites Astrid to tea, then dinner. They exchange symbolic gifts, and become friendlier without some of the usual social cues. (Astrid hates being touched; it’s a real breakthrough when she gradually learns to touch Raphaelle’s hand as she lies in the hospital after a gunshot wound, and finally lets Raphaelle hug her, towards the end of the first series. Surprisingly, she smiles with joy.)

Astrid’s habits of punctuality and pristine order serve her well. In a complicated and perhaps implausible ploy, on the verge of being kidnapped, she arranges files in her workroom startlingly out of place, which Raph notices she’d never do. They send a signal as Bach once did, translating musical notes to letters and spelling out Astrid’s kidnapper’s name.

Like refugees in another country, Astrid’s social skills group–people on the spectrum–meet regularly to discuss how to function in the neurotypical world, how to read cues in another language. They may not understand jokes or social signals, but several are geniuses at computers, their skills helping the police unravel some baffling murders. Without spoiling the end of the second series, they come through like champions for wrongfully imprisoned Astrid and Raphaelle, brilliantly helping to solve a crime.

My nun-friend was sad when the second series ended; so was I, mightily impressed by the deep humanity of the show. But hope springs: a third series has been completed in France and awaits translation for export to the US. On the horizon: a brightness for the long winter nights?

At first, it sounds depressing. A squatters’ village of 5000 women and children, 50 miles from Guatemala City, without electricity, clean water or sewage treatment, with violence endemic. As some mothers in the US buy Barbie notebooks and backpacks, choose cute clothing for Back-to-School, mothers here rotate days when each child can eat, spreading out the meagre food.

But stay tuned: el salitre means “salt,” which has a rich resonance in Christian scripture. (See Matthew 5:13-16.) It’s the juice, the spark, the seasoning when everything seems tasteless. Now the women of the settlement are working to transform their community for generations to come, providing food, child care and meaningful work. In partnership with North American women, they are learning vital sewing and embroidery skills, earning enough to provide not only material support, but to give them hope and confidence in their own creativity and entrepreneurship.

Hear the story in their own words.

• Judith, the sole provider for her family: “I worked first as a maid and then as a factory worker and had difficulty feeding my children. With this work I am able to feed my children, keep them in school, and have returned to school myself.”
• Lety: “I never attended school and have learned to read and write on my own since joining the cooperative, where I [also] learned to sew and embroider. With my work from the Center we are able to feed our children and keep the oldest two in school. If I successfully continue this work, the two smaller boys will be able to start school when they are old enough.” [Her photo in the annual report shows her holding smartly decorated tennis shoes and beaming.]
• Betsy Wack, board president: “in 2016, five of us asked five women living in intractable poverty, ‘How can we help?’ By 2022, we’d completed a new building, surrounded by a security fence, where ten women work and an educational center cares for 25 children. By now, the children no longer look malnourished, the women have bank accounts, health insurance and retirement benefits. They are poised to welcome new colleagues whom they’ll train on electric sewing machines.”

The products are marketed in Antiguan stores and on their website: www.elsalitrecenter.com. Vivid colors, sustainable natural fibers, and intricate hand embroidery make their clothing, purses and shoes immediately stand out from what we normally buy off the rack.  Besides, that purse has a story! How many people can boast that their shirt, pants or shoes are keeping children from starvation? Or that they’ve joined the noble effort to “transform lives, one stitch at a time”?

Full disclosure: Betsy Wack has been a dear friend since high school, and for several years, I’ve deeply admired this, her generous, dangerous, crazy, wise adventure.

Grandparents Day is September 10 & the perfect gift is Kathy Coffey’s latest book, A Generous Lap: A Spirituality of Grandparenting, is available from Orbis Press, 800-258-5838

A Generous Lap: A Spirituality of Grandparenting

Her service seems as simple as the pure blue and white lines of her clothing. Mother Teresa cared for the poor, dying and homeless in the slums of Calcutta. To those who face daily the quagmire of business decisions, tangled relationships and complex scheduling, her work by contrast seems a clear, uncomplicated gospel following.

Yet few of us abandon our routines, don saris and join her movement. Perhaps we want to believe that something of Teresa’s spirit can invigorate our lives; some of her clarity can penetrate our shadows; some of her compassion can move through us to those we touch each day. Our contacts may not be as abandoned and diseased as those Teresa cared for, but they have the same needs for attention and affection.

Teresa apparently had the same luminosity that attracted people to Jesus. Everyone wanted to be near her in life, and after death she exerts the same attraction. Her biographer Malcolm Muggeridge believed that for people who have trouble grasping “Christ’s great propositions of love… someone like Mother Teresa is a godsend. She is this love in person.”

No one was less sentimental or more “earthy.” She would engage in lively discussion with beggars about their “take of the day,” eager to hear how it went. One of her favorite words was “beautiful”—in the squalor of Calcutta slums! Indeed, she believed her vocation was to be beautiful. She gloried in life-surviving-against-all odds, exulting when a tiny baby survived: “There’s life in her!”

Like ourselves, she often felt exhausted, alone and miserable.With the publication of her diaries after her death in 1997, we’ve learned she often felt abandoned by God, lost in the “dark night of the soul.” So to one like us we say, “Happy Feast, St. Teresa of Calcutta!”

Grandparents Day is September 10 & the perfect gift is Kathy Coffey’s latest book, A Generous Lap: A Spirituality of Grandparenting, is available from Orbis Press, 800-258-5838 https://orbisbooks.com/products/9781608339891Get

The statistics show overwhelmingly that the American people want gun safety legislation. A Fox News poll (April, ’23) shows their support:

87 percent – Background Checks for Guns

81 percent – Enforce Existing Gun Laws

81 percent – Legal Age 21 to Buy All Guns

Given the inertia of the US Congress, or their indebtedness to the gun lobby which funds their campaigns, we can either despair, or say “enough!” and take action.

One active, faith-based movement that seems promising is Guns to Gardens (www.gunstogardens.org). A national organization, they use the buyback model to collect unwanted guns, disable them and use their parts for garden tools, art, or jewelry. Some of the most touching events have honored innocent victims shot to death. On April 15, 2023, 57 firearms were dismantled at Most Precious Blood church in Denver, CO in honor of Audra Dominguez.

Age 25, an A-student, Audra was attending a birthday party where a loaded and unsecured weapon brought out from the garage shot her in the head. Her family volunteered at the event, and posted pictures of her there. A similar event in Feb. ’23 at Columbine United Church in Littleton, CO collected 44 guns to honor Jayden Hoyle, age 13, killed in a car by random gunfire.

Volunteers (40 at each site) make the events run smoothly. People drive into the parking lot with the unloaded gun in their car. They remain anonymous, and receive a gift card, ranging in value from $50 for a shot gun, to $100 for a hand gun or semi-automatic to $200 for an assault rifle. Trained volunteers use a metal chop saw to dismantle guns; leftover metal parts are transformed into something life-giving. Best of all: the weapons aren’t returned to the gun marketplace.

With 400 million guns in American homes (that’s more than one per person), this effort may seem to make a small dent in the problem. In 2021, US citizens bought over 20 million firearms, for a total (including the cost of ammunition) of twenty-eight billion dollars. With that much money at stake, no wonder legislators court the wealth of gun manufacturers! But Christians know the power of an alternative: a baby born far from the seat of power who changed the world, the symbolism of a tiny mustard seed growing into a huge bush where the birds of the air take refuge, or the small measure of leaven lifting the whole lump of dough.

Ironically, we’re familiar with the example set by other countries: many like Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have enacted strict legislation resulting in almost no gun-related deaths there now. In contrast, 43,000 Americans die every year from gun violence. Approximately 60% of these deaths are from suicide, followed by homicide, family violence and accidents. Having a gun in the home increases the likelihood of such events dramatically.

Understandably, some people want to get the guns OUT of their homes for multiple reasons—children now present, owner no longer hunting, gun returned by the police after a suicide or accident. That’s where Guns to Gardens comes in. Their safe surrender events were scheduled during June ’23 for cities in OH, CO, WI, CT, CA, NY, and MA.

Why not add your city to the list? Many churches, mosques and synagogues have a parking lot, and could find 40 volunteers to sponsor a buyback event. Or make a donation: received by Gun by Gun, a 501c3, they’re tax deductible. What a fine, practical enactment of Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Grandparents Day is September 10 & the perfect gift is Kathy Coffey’s latest book, A Generous Lap: A Spirituality of Grandparenting, is available from Orbis Press, 800-258-5838 https://orbisbooks.com/products/9781608339891

(Some Christian denominations hear this reading this weekend: Matthew 15:21-28)

I yelled to attract his attention in that crowd, competing with noises of braying animals and bellowing vendors. But he said nothing. My last chance vanished.

Sunk in exhausted depression, I couldn’t consider what must’ve raced through his mind: that precarious history of Israel, a tiny band of nomads meandering through a postage-stamp-sized country, their improbable survival, outgunned and surrounded by superior forces, their clinging to identity, his mission to those dear and familiar, whose scriptures he revered, whose psalms he sang and whose customs he observed. Could he brush aside all that for me? No wonder he was silent.  

When he insisted on his mission to the “lost sheep of Israel,” it called for a response more powerful than shouting. Abandoning any shred of status I had left, I knelt before him, right there on the rutted path, rocks digging into my knees. I had nowhere else to turn and my daughter’s image haunted me: the spastic jerks, the face etched with pain. I’d do whatever it took to heal her.

Totally defenseless, I cringed at his racial epithet, the worst insult ever: comparing me to dogs? Well, so be it; at times they’re treated better than women. But from long fatigue, I dragged one last spark of spunk. If it’s all you’ve got, give me the crumbs.

His response startled: it was the first time anyone had ever called me great. Chattel of my father, then my husband, this was probably the first time I’d ever raised my voice. And he commended me for sass? I was so bewildered, I almost missed the next sentence; “Let it be done as you wish.”

Did that mean her healing? He had intuited my heart’s deep desire; that had to be his meaning. In that moment, expanded when I saw her cured, I knew we must always stand in hope. It felt like I sat enthroned at a big table, chewing the whole, fat loaf. Or, to put it poetically:

You might ask why I spoke of crumbs.

My days a trail of them, prayer beads

of desperation as I scan the dirt floor.

I’ve harvested scraps, pitifully grateful for

kernels others ignore. Hunger can numb

a woman, make her mean. Bossiness

hardens her bread.  What broke me,

finally, was seeing the grim cycle repeat in

my daughter’s haggard eyes. Not her,

too! Awkward and stiff, I bend.

I never dreamt how crumbs would serve me well,

small pivots to humor, juicy dollops after grinding need.

I who scavenged from garbage, served a heaping plate!

With a lopsided grin, he awakens her.

Her eyes fill with merriment; she holds health

like a bouquet. Even in hunger, we break abundant

bread, chewing morsels with the relish of gourmets.

Excerpt from More Hidden Women of the Gospels, Orbis Press, 800-258-5838, OrbisBooks.com.

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.