M. Collot
During these first eight months at Oakwood (the community of retired sisters in California) the pieces of my life, past and present have gradually been coming together. Prayer, too, has moved to a new place. It feels rather like something I am than something I do. It happens in the dark, the way lifeblood courses through arteries and veins without my knowing it. And the heart that is pumping it is not mine but Christ's heart in me. And the body is not mine alone but that of the whole human race.
At least faith tells me this when the night is full of stars.
But at other times prayer can be bleak and cold. "When one member suffers, the whole body feels it", Paul told us in today's readings. The daily news and the frustration I often feel about being able to so little about it, hangs heavy at times. Then I can feel like the useless servant in the parable, banished to the darkness outside.
Eventually God does something about this situation, usually through another human being.
A few weeks ago I was sitting in the chapel feeling miserable, waiting for Mass to begin. Someone wheeled Connie Welch, 98, up beside me. Connie and I don't really know one other, but she gave me a big smile and reached out to shake my hand.
No big deal, one might say. But at the touch of her hand my whole inner landscape shifted. I was no longer in the darkness outside, but, along with every other human being on earth, in the darkness inside the embracing arms of God!
And that's where I still am though probably not for long. Mood swings are a part of my chemistry.
But I have finally come to realize that it really doesn't matter. God has the rudder of the universe in hand, and my job at 87 is largely to sit tight through all kinds of weather.
In the boat with me, along with countless others, are all of you, beloved sisters and friends. I shamelessly admit to pride of ownership in everything you are and are doing to spread the love of Christ on earth. I thrill to read about it and hear you talk about it when you come by. And all your setbacks and uncertainties and sufferings are mine as well. I hold them in my heart in prayer. They are the bread and wine of every Eucharist, blessed broken and shared for the life of the world.
In fact the spiritual energy I sense going out around the planet from our chapel during Mass each morning is sometimes almost tangible.
So all in all, I find my horizon stretching wider in old age instead of shrinking, as I expected it to do, with the end of active ministry.
In 1982 Concha Comacho (then Superior General of the Society)said in a conference that the Society was "re-discovering the meaning of apostolic contemplation." Maybe that is what I am experiencing.
A few mornings ago I woke up at four a.m. and knew I wouldn't fall asleep again. So I lay there on my back wide awake. There were no words, just darkness and God. Soon the room was crowded with all kinds of people known and imagined: Iraqi children, Dinkas from southern Sudan, Indonesians (Nance O’Neil rscj among them) and Egyptians like Maud Boulad rscj from whom I had recently heard by e-mail, and Norma and Edmondo Flores in East Harlem, still waiting for their immigration papers to be processed, and homeless women and children I had known in Opelousas, Louisiana, and thousands of internal exiles I do not know, waiting to get back to their homes in New Orleans, and, and, and… All of a sudden it was six o'clock. Had I been praying? I don't know, but I felt pushed by that experience to try to love the people around me here at Oakwood as practically as I could during the day that followed. And I recalled that the motto of our Probation back in 1949 was taken from the Song of Songs: "Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm, for love is strong as death."
So somehow, to change the metaphor, this old wineskin is being changed for a newer, softer one. Fixed ideas are giving way to open-ended questions, alternatives, “what ifs?"
Our loving God is readying me, I think, for the new wine of the new Society that is now in the making.
Beatrice Brennan rscj
Province of the United States
Remarks made at the Teleconference of the United States province
January 21, 2007
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