Essential Questions

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enduring, Meg Wheatley, perseverance, predicament, social consciousness, survive, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

It’s 7:11 in the morning – a lucky moment, (high spiritual numbers) if you’re interested in numerology. I just looked at the clock because it seems to be getting darker by the moment outside. After almost a week of glorious weather, punctuated with occasional freshening showers, we are bracing today for serious storms, which will surely darken the mood of most of us.

Things look bleak in the news as well. It could seem to New Yorkers that all our obedient behaviors have been for naught as we hear of soaring death counts in states where it seems that people define “liberty” as synonymous with “do whatever you find convenient” or “hang up your mask and have a party.” It’s true that the huge gatherings of protesters have awakened social consciousness in many but it seems also that the behavioral divide widens as the crisis soars again.

Ironic is the page in Meg Wheatley’s little book, Perseverance, published ten years ago, that states, “We have never been here before in terms of the global nature of our predicament.” As I move down the page, I find that each paragraph is descriptive of the level of upheaval that we are experiencing now. Different circumstances, different level of our own engagement, perhaps, but definitely in the same ballpark of experience. In the end, Wheatley asks three questions that I will leave you to ponder today.

If you reflect on your own life experience, what else have you endured? You’re still here—how did you stay here?

How have you come through rough times before?

What from your own personal history gives you now the capacity to get through this time?

Everyday Saints

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All Saints Day, Matthew, Revelation, saints, survive, The Beatitudes, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

On this feast of All Saints, I look at the time at the top of my computer screen as I type and find that it is – ironically – 9:11 a.m. Last night the winds were howling (How fitting for Halloween) and rain was pelting on our windows late into the night. Thinking of California as I lay awake, how I wished that we could stop the wind and send the rain to put out the fires there! I have a feeling of devastation that is different from 9/11/2001 but still catastrophic as I pray for the safety of our Sisters of the Los Angeles province and all of the people on the news whose houses have been reduced to ashes.

With all of that in mind, I turn to Scripture readings for the day where I find “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress” from the Book of Revelation. That sounds a little like today so then I ask myself, “Who are the saints of today?” I am quick to answer: “First responders.” But I can’t stop there. The networks of people who step up at catastrophic moments are legion and then there are the everyday saints who respond to their neighbors as a matter of course, wherever there is a need. See today’s gospel for the Beatitudes as an explanation of that kind of sainthood. (MT 5: 1-12)

We have our favorite canonized saints, of course: Francis and Clare, Therese and Teresa…and even some named in our own lifetime now – Pope Saint John XXIII, etc. On this day, however, my prayer list is wide and long of good people that I celebrate and for whom I give praise and gratitude to God. Why not share their names if you know them and pray to or for them, as the case may be? Maybe you will hear your own name coming back at you from this “great cloud of witnesses.”

Thoughtful Advice

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climate change, optimism, planet, survive, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Every Thursday, the Sisters in our Province receive weekly updates of events, issues of concern and news about province members and our Associates. Each time there is an introductory quote that makes us think. I thought yesterday’s offering was helpful in allowing some hope even in the midst of our concerns about the future of our planet. I share it not so that you and I can sit back and breathe relief, but in order to regroup our hope and willingness to participate in solutions.

The same way to look at the future on a warming planet — and the best way to survive it — is…to see what’s coming not as an inevitability, but as a work in progress: moldable reality affected by the choices we make today and tomorrow, and next year. Engaged optimism of this kind has been a critical ingredient of historical progress…The New Deal, forged amid the despair of the Great Depression, was not only an urgent response to the woes of the urban jobless and the displaced Dust Bowl farmers but also an act of optimism boldly spending resources not just to alleviate immediate pain but for the sake of the radically different future that FDR and others envisioned for American society. (Bina Venkataraman, “Why We Still Need Climate Optimism” The Washington Post, Sept. 16, 2019)