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asylum, Aztec, Blessed Mother, distress, Juan Diego, love, migrants, Our Lady of Guadalupe, poor, The Sophia Center for Spirituality
This evening the Sophia Center for Spirituality is sponsoring a prayer service in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Patroness of the Americas. (see details at http://www.thesophiacenterforspirituality.org) In this endeavor we recognize the appearances of Mary to St. Juan Diego, a poor native of a small village near Mexico City in the 16th century. Disbelief of Juan’s experience by church officials to whom Juan was directed led to amazement when he opened his cape to reveal a gift from “the Lady” – an abundance of roses. In addition was the image of Mary imprinted on the cape which has endured intact since 1531 and has been venerated by millions of people. Mary had appeared as an Aztec woman as a reminder of the need to accept all people, especially at that time, the poor indigenous population being treated cruelly by the conquering Spaniards.
On this day we gather to pray for the native peoples of Central America who still suffer and are in danger in their own countries and so turn to the United States to find safety. As I write, there are thousands of migrants at our southern border who have walked hundreds of miles seeking asylum. While immigration is a complex issue for our country at this moment in time, this feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe reminds us of God’s preferential option for the poor. Mary reached out to Juan Diego in a simple gesture of love. Must we not do the same for her children in distress? Won’t you join us today in prayer?
It’s raining again. This week we have had a taste of the destruction that has been rare for us, caused by soaking rains and flash-flooding. It’s as if the earth cannot take any more pain. Having cried too long, her tears now overflow in a mud bath on the streets and structural damage to homes and other buildings near our two rivers and the many outlying creeks. Today the rain feels soft and my desire is to go outside and stand, then walk in it, to listen and accept what is happening, to be washed clean of all distress and the insidious doubt that can invade the soul at times like this.
It seems as if we, like Noah, will soon have to begin building an ark to survive the rain that seems destined to go on forever taking lives, swallowing up cars and filling homes with muddy destruction. Would that we could gather it up and send it West to smother some of the wildfires that are devastating so many homes and lives on the other side of our country. Such environmental distress and human loss is difficult to take in as pictures on the news bring it all to the fore each evening.
That place of “not-knowing” that I spoke of yesterday still holds me today as I think of the storm called Harvey that just won’t quit. How do people recover from that kind of devastation – both environmental and human? Even here, at almost the farthest northern point in our country away from those swirling waters and broken lives, I feel viscerally the distress and death. Physical death, the death of dreams, of possessions – all must reside inside any of us who have even seen the images on television and more likely if we know people living in Texas – and today in Louisiana. I have rarely felt the draw of depression on such a scale.
Last night as I checked into the news of the day and saw the devastation that took the entire half-hour of the NBC Nightly News, I knew I ought to focus my words this morning on the terrible event that has been Hurricane Harvey. Ironically, Alan Cohen provided the words – from his book published in 1996! (Finding that publication date answered my question of why his entry for today in A Deep Breath of Life didn’t include the 9/11 attacks.) In his mention of Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii in 1992, the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 and even the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 (because of the unexpected “invasion” of 500,000 people overnight in this small town), Cohen does not focus on the damage and distress but rather on the heroic efforts of so many people during and after those events. While not diminishing the unexpected devastation of people’s lives, he says the following:
I was thinking yesterday how easy it is from here in our lovely, peace-filled location in rural Upstate New York to ignore all the turmoil in the world and in our country. If I don’t wish to allow the distress into my consciousness, I can just avoid watching or listening to or reading the news and go about my days in isolation. While I know that is not a valid choice for me, it is occasionally a temptation. I was reminded this morning of my need to be awake and aware by a page from Meg Wheatley’s book, Perseverance, that I will quote below in its entirety as a call to all of us to resist the pull of inertia in favor of responsible engagement in whatever way we are able to contribute to raising the level of light in the world. (This includes a willingness to discriminate between “fake news” and truth.) The page is entitled Non-Denial. It is not a message to be read quickly and dismissed. I would recommend reading it, as I plan to, several times, and seeking examples from our own life of applications for the message.
When I read the text of the first reading from the Book of Job this morning (JB 1:6-22) I thought – as usual – that it sounds like the synopsis of a bad movie. Satan, vying with God, bets that Job won’t be as faithful as he has been if bad things happen to disturb his idyllic life of favor as God’s friend. God disagrees. After he hears all the terrible destruction that his servants come one after another to tell him about, we hear the familiar line that “I came into the world naked and will leave it naked. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Of course Job doesn’t say these words as declarative, emotionless sentences. He does wail and rend his garments…and this is only the first chapter of his test.
Today’s first reading (1 COR 7:25-31) can be difficult if we forget to contextualize it. In St. Paul’s era, when he says: So this is what I think because of the present distress, historians and exegetes tell us that he was talking about famine. That could certainly be the opening line in a text for today because of all the starving people in our world, but then Paul launches into a series of advisory comments on states of life (marriage vs. singleness) that can cause a measure of distress for some of us. He wraps his statements in a final assertion that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he [she] is. For the world in its present form is passing away. Again, I think his intuition of things could be applied to today when we look at the state of the world and the news of every day but I wanted something that would help me to be a little more comfortable with his words.
I have wasted a lot of energy in my life worrying about outcomes: what might or might not happen in certain situations or because of certain events. I use the verb “wasted” rather than “spent” because of finally coming to the “right answer” to the question of Jesus in today’s gospel. (MT 6:24-34) He asks, “Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life span?” The answer is unequivocally “No.” All we have is the present moment. Jesus expands on the issue of worrying to anything in life (what to eat or wear…) and the answer is the same: it doesn’t help! All it gets us is headaches or emotional distress. The advice of Jesus is that we seek first God’s kingdom and spend some time observing creation – the way the world works, the cycles of the seasons – and (although he doesn’t say this we might intuit it) give up our need to control everything about our lives. Surrendering to “the now” isn’t easy but in the long run, when we learn to do it, it is much less stressful than the alternatives.
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