November 14,2021
Texts:
Psalm 130: 1-6
Psalm 40:1-3
1 John 4: 7-19
Zoom recording of Maria's teaching.
When I was 16, my mother, sister, and two close family friends, Judy and Elizabeth, went on an epic road trip from Maryland to the Southwest. We made a stop to visit the Grand Canyon, but our main destination was Glorieta, New Mexico, to a religious retreat center. At a gas station in Texas on the way there, when the man pumping gas asked about our destination, he said, "Oh Glorieta, eh? Are you cussing Baptists or drinking Baptists?" My mother replied, "Neither! We are cussing and drinking Catholics!" We were on our way to a retreat of the Center for Action and Contemplation.
That's the kind of thing we did for vacations.
I was fortunate to grow up in a spiritual community steeped in the Catholic social justice movement. In fact, another thing we did for fun was to get together for prayer service on Friday nights – I did this pretty much every week until I left for college. That community was formative for me, and for my mom, Denise. I'm going to talk today about my mom's spiritual journey and how it rubbed off on me.
I'm grateful that Richard Rohr, of the Center for Action and Contemplation, is still around and I've been enjoying his books and podcasts lately.
In one of his sermons that I listened to, he offers four stages of spiritual growth (I suspect for most people, it's not exactly a linear progression).
Cleaning up – These are the basics – get with the 10 commandments – no stealing, no lying, no cheating, etc Growing up – Process of maturing. Rohr suggests that between ages of 20 and 50, learn what it means to be human, probably some suffering and loss, and some deep love. You move beyond the externals, the basic rules, even beyond the words. Waking up – You overcome your feeling of separation from God. When Jesus says "I and the Father are one," you know what that means, and can even relate to that. You know that God loves you much more than you love God. This understanding gives joy and gratitude, not obligation, duty, fear. Showing up – Overflowing with abundance that you can't help but share it
I'll get back to those in a few minutes.
This past Tuesday marked two years from my mother's death.
And what a long, weird two years it has been. Most of this time has been characterized by the pandemic, and I am really grateful that my mother, an anxious germophobe and claustrophobe, didn't have to live through it, never mind as a cancer patient. But, of course, I do miss her very much.
Also in the last two years, I've undergone some unmistakable signs that I am moving into a new stage in my own life physically. Early in the pandemic, I found myself needing reading glasses for the first time. Then I started to notice some more dramatic signs. Trouble sleeping, trouble "regulating my temperature." I find myself having a little less energy, and also having less patience for annoyances. I have a newfound appreciation for things I used to find pretty boring, like yoga, and classical music.
I've realized I'm moving into the second half of my life, and, while I'm plenty cranky about it, I'm also kind of excited. I can appreciate the need to slow down a little and to be more choosy about how to spend my time and my energy. I find a greater the desire to be more introspective.
This whole transition is one of those topics that I would love to have the chance to talk about with my mother.
I realized that my mother was in this stage in her life when I was a teenager. What that means is that my mother was in her own transition to the second half of life when I became aware of her as a person. You know what I mean – that I began to understand her not just as my mother, but as an adult with a complex life, and in her case, with a pretty dynamic spirituality.
To return to the stages of faith life that I mentioned earlier, when my mom was about the age that I am now, she was putting some serious work into growing up, and also having some profound experiences from that waking up stage. And it was a huge blessing to me that she shared so much of that with me and with the rest of the community that raised me.
I'm fortunate that my mother was a pretty prolific writer. She wrote for newspapers and magazines, for faith-based publications. She wrote bunches of essays and handfuls of prayer services, too. I have a lot of her writings and they show that dynamic spirituality that I mentioned.
She had a strong sense of her own faith timeline, and she often articulated the highs and lows of that. My mom's spiritual path was informed by her beginnings.
Her parents were both alcoholics: Walter, a dreamy union man who spent his salary at the bar most weeks and came home mostly happy, if also totally unreliable; and Anastasia, an agoraphobe with a fearful view of the world that she passed down through threats and criticisms, not to mention racist politics.
My mom went to pre-Vatican 2 Catholic church and Catholic school in her neighborhood, the Highbridge section of the Bronx. She went to college, got married, and moved away.
Shortly after that she lost both her parents and the most beloved of her siblings in 3 consecutive years when she was only in her late 20s. In her 30s, she had 2 daughters – which she reflected on as a happy, if challenging time. In her late 30s she had what she called a conversion experience, which deepened her faith, her sense of God's love for herself and everyone, and her ecumenism. At the same time, she grew politically active with faith-based groups. In those years, I was babysat a lot in church basements all over town during Bread-for-the-World and Nuclear-Freeze meetings.
Her marriage fell apart, which was devastating. And she became a single mom, raising two kids on a secretary's income, with essentially no financial help from my dad who'd moved to the Midwest. So, on top of being in a pretty dark time in her life over the divorce, our family had some pretty significant financial hardships and we got a tremendous amount of support from the spiritual community that helped raise me.
We were part of the biggest church – a Catholic one – in a small town – Westminster, Maryland. The church had three priests, and often a seminarian helping out, too, as well as several full-time staff, including a social justice minister. One of those priests was Brian, and the social justice minister was Judy. They, along with several friends -- including Anne, Joan, Marie, who knew one another from the folk mass as well as social justice activities -- got together and bought a farm outside of town that became a homeless shelter which was called Resurrection Farm. It was there that we met every week for bible study and what Protestants might call fellowship, but I just knew it as hanging out.
What that meant was that I was spending a lot of time as a kid around adults who were trying to create a real community that engaged in deep reflection, together. I got to see, and in a young person's way participate in, the opportunity to grapple with growing up spiritually.
As our friend Anne Russel wrote in one of the Resurrection Farm newsletters when she was mourning the death of a friend,
Perhaps the greatest gift that I have received from Resurrection Farm is the chance to meet with friends who are committed to helping each other grow spiritually. Whatever the activity, from prayer on Friday nights to partying in the barn, God is present in my life through my friends at the farm. These friends have shown me the love of God in times of happiness and times of sorrow.
My mother had a lot of interior struggles she worked through in those years. When she was in her 40s, she found out about the ACOA movement and it was life-changing. "Adult Children of Alcoholics" gave her great insights into the crazy-unhealthy dynamics going on with her parents and siblings. It gave her a narrative about her family that finally made sense, gave her a chance to mourn her parents – long gone – in a new way – with compassion through a new lens on their woundedness and limitations (to put it very mildly).
As the result of my growing up around her as she was growing through this stage – to say nothing of the fact that our primary community hung out at a homeless shelter all the time – I learned that life is complicated, that "You cannot change another person – never count on that," and I learned that you can love a person without loving everything they do, and what it means to have healthy boundaries. But I also got a really expansive sense to God's love, mercy and compassion.
She wrote regularly in the 80s and 90s for devotional publications, and in one she wrote:
What a relief to remember that Jesus has told us that it is God who saves us, not we who earn God's mercy. It is God who loves us first and most greatly. It is God who seeks us out like lost sheep, and brings us home. We need only be open to that love and receive that mercy, until we are filled to overflowing and can share our abundance of love and mercy with those around us. When we believe, as Jesus says in Mark 10:27 that with God all things are possible, we can cease our worry and allow God to be about the work of redeeming love.
To be clear, I don't mean to say that my mom had a linear journey, from darkness to light, or that her growing up stage was ever fully behind her.
I didn't realize until after she died, going through her writing, how much she struggled with anxiety. By her own account, it was paralyzing at times. I think the first Psalm reading characterized what may have been going on in her head a lot of the time.
When she was about the age I am now, she was particularly articulate about that struggle.
In an essay she wrote entitled simply, "Anger" she says:
In my middle-age crises, [I] have discovered my own dark side, I come to realize that there is a dark, aggressive, angry element in everyone's soul that needs to be acknowledged, though not acted out.
There is an existential rage in all of us, a recognition that the things of this world always promise more than they deliver. Life can be wonderful, it can also be very painful, friends can be loyal and caring, they can also be hardhearted and deceitful in their own human weakness.
[A]s God told Job out of the whirlwind, life is essentially disorderly, and only God can make it meaningful. Only in union with God do we find peace, do the walls of hostility break down (Eph 3:14-17) and we are able to make sense out of our lives. To think that we can bring about peace without God, by being nice, or liking people or never disagreeing and pretending we are never angry or hateful, is to ignore our total and absolute dependence on God for all that is good.
What I am old enough to see now, and what I think is one of the big lessons of this second stage of life, is to make peace with the fact that suffering is inevitable. What I mean is that if you have loved, if you are fortunate to have experienced great love, then great pain is unavoidable because that love leaves you vulnerable to loss – through death. Whether it is the death of that relationship or the death of the person, it's going to happen. The deeper the suffering, the harder this lesson is, of course.
There is grace in accepting that this is part of life, and to be grateful for the love that is given.
It takes courage, and faith, to take from this lesson the understanding that because we know there will be loss, we must love all the more deeply.
Which is what the passage from First John is about. "We love because God first loved us."
I know that my mom's faith upheld her. Knowing the love and compassion of God was an enormous gift to her, and kept her going. It is something she reminded herself of often, and her writings reflect that.
I'll close with this piece that my mom wrote in 1993 that reflects some of that "waking up" stage.
A quick reminder: My mom and I both grew up Catholic, and she lived through the great changes of Vatican 2. Now, as then, women cannot become priests, and it's something both my mother and I mourned.
So here is Denise's "One Homily"
Sitting in church on Sunday, watching the faces of people coming back from communion, I had this thought: If I were a priest or a minister, I would have just one homily and I would give the same one every Sunday. This is what I would say:
This may be hard to believe, but you are all, each and every one of you, a miracle. That you are here on this day and at this moment in the history of creation is a miracle.
You are infinitely loved by the eternal all-powerful God, the Father, Son, and Mother Spirit.
You come directly from the hand of God, and are held in existence by the breath of God, and every moment of your life and every breath you take and every thought you think is therefore infinitely important and meaningful. Every one of you needs every other one of you. God treasures you and is heartbroken when you are hurt or broken in spirit.
Do not sell yourself short or you will be underestimating God. Do not think yourself to be cheap or unimportant or inadequate or unworthy of being the child of God.
It is only by knowing how wonderful, how amazing, how infinitely lovable you are, that you will look upon your neighbor and see how amazing and lovable they are.
This is the only true thing that I know for sure, and if we all could believe it and tell it to others, we would have a very different, very heavenly world.