My husband and I are on vacation experiencing wine tasting in Avignon.
Mistral winds blow cold and fallout from the actions of seemingly heartless leaders across the world swirl around us and within us. What counsel will help us now?
Rilke, one of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote:
…Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me…
These lines are from the poem, ‘God speaks to each of us as he makes us,’ in Rilke’s Book Of Hours: Love Poems to God. This is Rilke’s take on what God is sharing with him as counsel. This translation from the German is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. I particularly like, ‘Don’t let yourself lose me.’
A little more than twenty years ago, my friend, American nun, Sister Mary Luke Tobin, the only woman invited to Vatican II and close friend to Thomas Merton, wrote to me as she retired to the Mother House of The Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky. About the same time, I and my husband returned to live in Canada after nearly a decade of living in the southwest of the U.S. The character-building advice Mary Luke gave me was this:
Just give yourself away in everything you do.
In 1961, Dag Hammarskjold the second Secretary General of the United Nations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was honoured this way because, despite many setbacks, he always worked towards peace. The peace he worked towards included integrity and justice.
Here is a prayer by Dag Hammarskjold which for decades has deeply influenced people learning to be peacemakers. They are from his book, Markings: Spiritual Poems and Meditations:
Give us pure hearts that we may see thee, a humble heart that we may hear thee, a heart of love that we may serve thee, a heart of faith that we may live thee.
Today, on a white board in a room which holds slightly vanilla scented oak barrels containing the finest aging red wine at the Chateauneuf du Pape winery in Avignon, I read these words. They were printed in French blue block letters and are indelibly in my consciousness:
Rien ne se perd Tout se transforme. (This translates into English as ‘Nothing is lost. Everything is transformed.’)
We will receive counsel in these fraught times and always. We will likely give some counsel, whether we are conscious of it or not, to others who will remember what we say. My hope is that we and others will set our intentions that we act from loving hearts.
Last month we were on vacation in Nayarit, Mexico. The photo which my husband, David, took of this Snowy Egret reminds me of the holiness of the lives and homes of everyone.
He stays very still on his golden slippers until he sees food for him – salamanders, frogs, insects, fish, crustaceans or more. Sometimes he stirs up the bottom with his golden slippers in order to stir up his food. He seems to be enjoying his life. Later, on the afternoon when we took this Snowy Egret’s photo, we witnessed a Cayman or Crocodile attack and within seconds swallow a small feral cat. Living is complicated. Living our lives in ways that honour the other members of creation requires our careful attention. Good community and good leadership help us with this.
I hope that my new pantoum, which I wrote when we were in Mexico, will interest you.
This year, twice in the week before Christmas, our outdoor Christmas lights, which are set to go on at dusk, flashed on before ten in the morning and stayed on all day. It has been a dark, damp and cool December. The tension of this time broke as the days of Christmas and the light of the winter solstice entered our consciousness. Christmas arrived. Peace and trust in God’s promises were strengthened.
I have for many years appreciated that this time of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, is a time of preparing for transformation. As usual, a flurry of shopping and welcome yet distracting parties with friends and family inserted itself into what we had hoped would be quiet times for contemplation, preparing ourselves for the birth and rebirth of God in us and the world.
This year I was again aware of the yearning in the hearts of people I spoke with who were hoping for this miracle in themselves and in their communities. People spoke of their efforts to surrender their desire for self-control. The hope is that we will surrender what we have wrongly prioritised above our relationship with truth and goodness and our Creator. It is very demanding work to surrender old habits that hold our hearts hostage. It is difficult to clear the space within us and within our communities that takes up the space the new birth will need if it is to be viable. Our hope, our goal, is that our emptiness will be enough to make room for the new birth.
We want the nothing within us to become the gift that is everything. We dearly want our hands to be open to receive this gift.
We fail in many ways to achieve this emptiness. The miracle arrives anyway. It fills us with gladness and hope that we will be able to nurture and protect this new birth. Our awareness that the miracle is gift fills us with awe. We realize we are all in this together. We say yes to the miracle of being given everything.
Part of the Christmas miracle is that we are better able to see ourselves as part of our world in our time. We are not anymore the babies we were at our births. We are grown- up people who can find ways to serve our hurting brothers and sisters who are made in God’s image. We are ready to participate in new ways.
Here are words that came to me as a gift over the past ten years. They fit into the beloved music of Gustave Holtz’s Jupiter from The Planets. The tune is known as Thaxted.
Last week, I saw a video on PBS, on the program Nature. It is also on YouTube and is named Befriending a Sperm Whale.
We enter the story of Patrick Dykstra, a videographer, and a female sperm whale. We see them hanging vertically, face to face, in deep water. Patrick has named this sperm whale “Dolores” and trailed her for years. He speaks of his love for her. We can imagine what they feel, and perhaps we feel with them.
There is footage in the film of large groups of sperm whales touching while looking warmly into each other’s faces. To me, this feels rather like affectionate hugging. We also see film footage of paintings depicting the slaughter of sperm whales during the nineteenth century. The brothers and sisters of the sperm whales being slaughtered have gathered around the bloody scene, making it worse for them all. It seems as if they are in solidarity with each other, even to their deaths.
I remember TV footage in the 1960s and seventies of young white people being beaten while sitting at lunch counters with their black brothers and sisters in the southern U.S. during the Civil Rights Movement.
What is it that changes what we dare hope for?
The picture book story of a pig named Wilbur and a spider named Charlotte, Charlotte’s Web, changed the menus and the minds of many children forever.
As for me, my interest in whales bubbles up again within me. Whale-watching, open boats full of people eager to catch glimpses of whales, pass through the waters of the Salish Sea outside my study window.
Years ago, I was seriously taken with the novel Moby-Dick, the tale of an old ship’s captain, a whaler named Ahab, who madly pursued, for years, Moby Dick, an old male sperm whale turned white with age.
Years before where the novel Moby-Dick begins, the old man’s leg was taken by this whale and replaced by a wooden stump. Captain Ahab’s vengeful goal to kill Moby Dick was framed by his rage. We learn that this whale has been attacking whaling boats with a kind of vengeful rage like Ahab’s. The desire for the death of each other seems outsized.
The first mate on board, a man not young and not old, named Starbuck, chose a course of inaction—not to kill Ahab. Starbuck was a Christian who thought that killing is not Christ’s way; so, even though he saw the whale’s murderous intent toward the ship’s crew and their captain, Starbuck did nothing. Then, the story tells that the vengeful old whale, Moby Dick, dragged all the people on board down to their watery grave.
There have been many stories written to change our minds and hearts and open our consciousness. We know true stories from history that resonate in many ways with the story of Moby-Dick.
The continuing history of how this story turns out for us will somehow come up from the deep and change what will happen in our consciousness and in our world. I dare to hope.
What are you reading, rereading, or watching this season? What comes to mind when you read stories these days? For me, these cooler months set the scene for changes in hearts and minds.
An Anna’s hummingbird with a gloriously ruby head hovered just now for a moment outside my window—then flew on by.
A new year begins in September for many children and for all of us who love children and remember our own and our children’s September energy. There is movement coming. In Victoria, as I look over the Straits of Juan de Fuca towards the Olympic mountains in Washington state, I see flocks of geese practise flying together as they prepare for their yearly migration to warmer climes. I recently saw a hummingbird, familiar to me from last spring, hovering near the flowerpots on our deck. Only this week I read that some species of hummingbird return to their winter homes after summers lived up in the mountains. It is a migration of sorts.
There is joy in the air. And the promise of a future. Students and teachers and families are imagining the new people they’ll meet this school year, books they’ll read and perhaps places they’ll go during holidays. There are tall stacks of school supplies in big box stores. Last week my husband and I were in such a store buying a new printer. In one of those stacks, I saw a child’s backpack in ocean blue with pictures of swimming sharks all over it. There was also a pinky mauve backpack featuring a feminine faced octopus with long eyelashes and a pink mouth right in the middle of the backpack for anyone who followed behind to admire.
I am excited about the joy of new beginnings for our grandchildren. Three of them will be going to school this year in cities far from their families and homes. One of them is crossing the Atlantic Ocean to begin his studies at a British university in London. The youngest two are going to live at home here in Victoria but will begin the next stages of their studies in new schools in upper layers of the school system. One will begin Middle School and the other will enter high school.
There will be sports to play, music lessons to attend and homework as well as special events of many sorts. There will be pain and happiness and moments of joy.
As I sit at my desk looking over the Straits of Juan de Fuca, also known as the Salish Sea, I try to put myself into this present moment in my own life. On my way to finding a place of emptiness and silence within me. I bump into the immense human experience inside this moment. Intimate experiences of past, present and future are in my heart. I feel twinges of deep sorrow and knowledge of great suffering and death in our world at this moment and in moments past. These memories are alongside moments of almost pure happiness, for which I am extremely thankful. At times these feelings come together as something that is a huge peace, I call this peace ‘joy’ and am thankful for it even though it does not stay with me.
In moments of joy, I feel an expectation of what is beyond our moments here and my heart is restless for that. Perhaps this is a kind of homesickness for the future. Perhaps this is the way we humans survive in this world which seems unaligned with the rhythms of our time. The book of Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time and a season for everything. Perhaps fleeting glimpses of an eternal home strengthen our attempts to come to terms with our restlessness and to meet our present moments on the lookout for joy.
Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest who wrote many beautiful books for spiritual seekers, lived in a group home with delayed or mentally challenged adult men, adults who needed a special community in which they could live and participate. Henri Nouwen’s group home was near Toronto. I saw him in person several times at conferences and lectures when I lived and went to seminary in Toronto. Henri Nouwen would come into the lecture space running with several members of his household running with him. Then they all stopped near the middle of the stage and Henri Nouwen would tell a story. I remember a story he told about going to the beach- probably on Lake Ontario – with members of his group.
The planned activity was for each person to draw in the sand something which meant a lot to him. One of the men ran wildly around the large space of beach and then concluded that joy is much too large to fit into such a small space.
It is interesting to me that I cannot remember whether I witnessed this story in person with Henri Nouwen and a large group of people or simply remember reading about it. The point of the story for me is that joy is very large and arrives mysteriously in the company of peace. Is this a small piece of heaven which begins in this world?
For all of you who have read this blog, I wish you ‘peace and joy’ for the present moment and always.
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