Going…Where we might not want to go.Going…Where we might not want to go.

It’s here. Lent has come. We’ve been here before. What might be different this year? What might be different is that we are different. We are in a different place. This is most obvious nationally and politically. But what about spiritually? What about the hidden garden of my heart?

Lent is the time for cleaning out the garden…of the soul. It’s time to get rid of the trash, the old growth, the dead stuff. Why? Well, if you look carefully, you will see all sorts of new growth starting underneath the trash. So, clear it away…give the new a chance to grow!

But if I’m honest, I may not want to go there and do that. So, where am I going to go in this garden of mine? The wise Mother-Church takes us by the hand in the scriptures and leads us through the gate. First, there will be the desert, and we will learn that this is going to take work, and forces are going to gather to stop us. Then we climb a mountain, and surprise! We are shown what we will look like when the work is done! Next, we are shown the Fountain in the midst of our garden, and it is a living Person. Out of him flows the Spirit-water that gives life itself to the garden. By the fourth week we are pretty clear that we really don’t see too well, and we need this life-giving water to clear our vision as we do our clean-up work. By the fifth week we are led to face something we want to avoid: dying. We are shown there is no need to fear. The One who has the living water will take care of that too.

Then we enter the final week, where before our very eyes, he shows us how we will come through the key-hole of death into a new life. We call it Holy Week, for it indeed is holy. We watch as he gets sweaty and bloody, working beside us to clear our garden of whatever gets in his way. So, in this Lent of 2017,  we’re going. We’re going where we might not want to go.

Loving Gardener,

Desert Dweller,

Transfigured Human,

Living Fountain,

Vision Healer,

Death Destroyer,

Saving God,

Lead me where I might not want to go.

Sweat beside me

as I work to clear away what hinders the new growth in me you want to bring.

Clothe me in your new life

that with a radiant face

I might be a laser-light to pierce the dark with a just word.

The Light that Shines in the Darkness

We are into “ordinary” time, which only means that we are in between the two great mysteries of our salvation: the incarnation and the redemption. But make no mistake. Things are far from ordinary. The light has just been toned down just a bit. We walk by faith.

What is faith? We are used to thinking it’s an intellectual acceptance of what we cannot see. But if we go back to the original Greek that the evangelists used, we get a surprise. The word is pistis, and it means “to cling to, to adhere to as with glue.” Now I don’t know about you, but that grabs me, no pun intended. Faith means we cling to God and God’s Word as a magnet clings to the refrigerator door. Faith means we “sniff out” where life is, like the newborn puppy with eyes tight shut, pumping its little legs until it finds where to nurse. Faith is newly hatched baby birds, eyes tight shut, and no feathers, with mouths wide open, waiting for the food that comes after they feel mom or dad land on the branch. Faith is another way of knowing. It is a knowing with another part of our consciousness. This might be a surprise to an atheist.

Early in our young life we learn how to use our consciousness to figure things out. We learn problem solving. We learn to think things through to be responsible. We learn how to deal with time-space. But beneath that practical reason is just being aware that we are aware. This is the place of awe, of wonder. This is our contemplative consciousness. This is where the Light shines, this is where we come before it in faith. It is knowing what we cannot see. What we cannot see is real, but our senses cannot grasp it. Here in this deeper level of consciousness, we do not hold, we are held. We do not figure things out, we are figured out. We do not grasp, we are grasped. Faith is being held by Mystery…and we don’t want to let go.

*****

Holy One,

I seek your Light in my darkness.

Shine, and draw me to Yourself

with the bonds of love.

So fix me to Yourself that nothing can pry me loose.

Hold me tight when the winds of doubt blow.

Grasp me by the hand when the waters of sorrow rise to drown me.

Teach my reasoning mind that faith has reasons reason doesn’t understand.

Quiet me with the fact that you are God.

Fresh from the Anniversary...

As we inaugurated our 45^th president of the United States, 600 Dominicans from around the world gathered in Rome with Francis to close the 800^th Anniversary celebration of the founding of the Dominican Order. We are fresh from that wondrous anniversary.

The challenges we face now often draw from our charism, from our ministerial situations, or from our cultural realities. I’d like to ponder the “background music” to all of these. I mean the counsels we have taken upon ourselves by vow. The counsels are radical Christian values that identify us as folks living within the lifestyle called consecrated life. Like the married, we have a set of vows added to our baptismal vows. These public vows witness to something, just as the married, by their wedding vows, witness to the faithful love of Jesus for his people. Those in religious life witness to the counsels as signs of the kingdom already in our midst.

The counsel of Poverty has nothing to do with destitution. Destitution is not a sign of the Kingdom. But a non-consumerist stance in daily life is. The vow of Poverty means we live simply so that others can simply live. We live open to the needs of others making a claim on us. Now this witness is not just for us. It’s for the entire Church…indeed for the whole culture that is home to us. The mutual care we daily extend to one another, the sharing of material goods, the goal of reducing waste, and recycling what we can, is a value catching on gradually across the globe.

 What is unique to us as publicly witnessing to this value is its focus. We have one non-negotiable: we cling to the Divine Mystery that has captured our hearts. This is why everything else can be negotiated. This focus makes us quite free. There is only one thing that we cling to. When we clarify that focus for ourselves, then we can sort through those boxes…we can ask honestly whether our living space is uplifting and beautiful or merely cluttered…we can ask whether we really need something or whether we simply want it. This counsel, if it is truly operative in our daily living, gives us the clarity to discern wider community decisions. What challenges ahead keep us focused, and what is becoming a distraction?

We’ve been around for 800 years…but we are just beginning.

 

 

Pioneering...?

Pioneering in 2017...?

In a recent article on religious life sent to us by the Executive Team, the word “pioneer” is used several times. It brought back an image that was used after Vatican II to describe what was happening in the Church as a result of the Council. From being quite “settled” as a result of colonization, writers were calling us to become “pioneers,” a “Church in the World.” So we roused ourselves from our security and “got on the road.” We began to go to public universities. We started talking to folks in other faith traditions. Dominicans founded Network in Washington, D.C., and the term “political ministry” became part of our vocabulary. Women’s Dominican communities took this pioneering call very seriously. 

We are entering a new year. It is 2017. What might the term “pioneer” mean for us now, 52 years from the close of the council? In a time in our history when religious life as we have known it is not receiving candidates? Where are we to “go?” What is being asked of us as we continue “on the road?” What are today’s frontiers, those fringe areas of our culture calling to us?

Pioneering folks have to be ready to leave a familiar place to go to a new one. They gather what is precious to them and set out. They use whatever transportation is available. They pass through unknown territory. In the past they would now and then circle the wagons, build a fire, share food, and tell stories. They may not have known what their destination was, but they trusted they would know it when they got there. They were ready to “be” a new way in a new place, and it would be all right, because they had one another.

Being itinerant has always been part of being Dominican. We go out from our prayer to be truth-seekers and truth-tellers. Our personal prayer is fed by the fact that we gather, hear and share the bread of the Word. Then we go out to bring that good Word to wherever it is needed. Are today’s “frontiers” reaching out to people society would just as soon overlook? Those who are spiritually lost? Those whose lives have lost meaning? Those burdened with shame and guilt? Those belittled and voiceless? Those who don’t know who to believe? Those despairing over the election? We are committed to truth. What can we bring them? We are compelled to justice. How can we prevent it from being trampled?  It’s 2017. A new time, a new situation. Time once again for us to decide how to go pioneering.

January - Your Light has Come...

Pray, Ponder, Preach for January, 2017, Carla Mae Streeter, OP

                                                …your Light has Come…

Thomas Merton once wrote that people would be surprised if he told them they were walking around shining like the sun. I suspect they would be more than surprised – they would be incredulous. We don’t feel lightsome. We don’t see light streaming from us. It’s just not our experience. Yet feeling and seeing and our experience are often far from the facts.

The Christmas season is about light. Our light has come. The scriptures proclaim it, the songs sing it, and the decorations, indoors and out, celebrate it. So what is this light, and if it is already ours, why do we feel so heavy, so enveloped in darkness? The facts, please, just the facts.

The One who has entered our history is light. He said so. “I am the light of the world…” He has bonded with our very DNA, so wherever it is, he is. A transformed human in his resurrection, no physical boundaries can limit him. He holds all the cosmos in himself, and wears the Milky Way as a garment. So if these be the faith-facts, regardless of my feeling and my seeing, why this darkness?

Faith is a dark light. It is a veil. We see only darkly. Why? Because this Holy One has to protect us from himself. Seeing the light we carry would undo us. We would be good for nothing. We wouldn’t be able to pay our taxes, take out the garbage, or take the car for a tune-up. We would be so caught up in the beauty that nothing could pry us away. So God mutes it so we can be for others. God hides so we can tend to the things that need doing in this time-space life. So in the dark light of faith, we are tempted to forget. We are told we are to be “…wise as serpents and simple as doves.” So we practice whistling in the dark. We know that what you see is not what you get…even in our everyday life.

Yes, our light has come. And it is ours. For there he is, shining through the many cracks in our lives. In fact, it is in those weak moments, when the dark gets so thick, that we know he holds us. Despite the lack of feeling, the lack of seeing, those are the facts: your light has come.

Holy One

I don’t see you

I don’t feel you.

I feel alone and dark.

Yet there you are

Playing peek-a-boo and holding out those baby arms.

Then you are gone-and I cry out, feeling lost, poor as I am.

Teach me that I already have what I cannot see.

Promoter of Preaching for December

How we Do it...

The word contemplation can mean different things to different people. How do Dominicans understand it? As we continue to more intentionally reclaim this core of our spirituality in all our deliberations, it is good to revisit the distinctive take we Dominicans have on contemplation. Clarifying this would be an important step as we complete the celebration of our 800^th Anniversary.

The recently deceased Paul Philibert, OP, in his research has uncovered something rather interesting. The way Dominicans understand contemplation is revealed in Dominic’s Nine Ways of Prayer. For the perceptive eye, there is a flow in these ways of prayer. First, there is reverencing, shown in our customs of bows and prostrations. Then there is pleading, in the raised and outstretched arms, and finally there is the silent and absorbed meditative reading and study which ends up witnessing. The movement is a bit like breathing… reverencing, pleading, witnessing. The Dominican’s contemplation pushes the pray-er out onto the road, where we preach from the pulpit of our lives. We are transformed into a living, walking, talking, acting, word. This is a unique and very integrative approach to contemplation. It is a seamless garment. It never stops at any one stage, but is driven back, again and again, into the wholeness of the flow: active contemplation, contemplative action.

As we complete the joyful celebration of this anniversary year, we each take up once again the challenge it presents to us: to offer to the Church the gift of a formal vowed witness to active contemplation in the cause of justice. “Whom shall I send?” Send me.

Pray, Ponder, and Preach for December 2016

A Sign will be given you…a baby…

Carla Mae Streeter, OP, Promoter of Preaching

What?! A baby??? A baby is the long-awaited sign of God’s answer to millions of prayers for a redeemer…for thousands of years? Yes. And come to think of it, how ingenious. Not lightning from Mt. Saini, not a warrior on a white stallion, not even a powerful prophet thundering words of warning. A baby…a baby as a sign of God.

What newness might grasp us as we gaze at the crib? What might we see that we haven’t noticed before? If this baby is the visible sign of the invisible God, we need to take a long, loving look.

This child is the bridge, the restored link between the Divine and our humanness. This baby, wanting to play patty-cake on my cheeks until I scoop it up and cover it with kisses…is this the peek-a-boo God who knows just how to get a rise out of me? A rise out of its mother? An anonymous writer put it this way…

    
“The soul’s prayer of union is something like a baby in its mother’s arms. Eagerly it lets itself be gathered up into her outstretched arms, curling itself up to be cuddled at her breast. The mother clasps it, glues it, so to speak, to herself…kisses it. Her darling, won by caresses, concurs in this union. It clings to her, presses as hard as it can against her, against her face, as though it meant to bury, to hide itself in its mother, creating a union, a state to which mother and child each contribute. The little one does what it can, tries hard to join itself to its mother by its tiny efforts. The Lord does to the soul what the mother does to the child. The soul, captivated by the delights of these favors, not only assents, not only yields to the union God affords. With all its might, it acts in concert, striving to join itself and cling ever closer to the divine goodness.”

Yes, a baby. A sign has been given to us…

You knew.

You knew exactly how to get to me.

Pudgy hands playing patty-cake on my cheeks.

Your toothless giggle rising up as I peek from behind your smiling mother.

Yes. I get your message. Yes. I read your sign.

Healing, forgiveness, restoration, mercy…all in the love-bundle that is a baby.

Thanks to associate Jean Gfall for these reflections

December 4, 2016 – Second Sunday of Advent – IS 11:1-10 – ROM 15:4-9 – MT 3:1-12
MORE THAN WE CAN ASK OR IMAGINE

John’s message, as hell fire and brimstone as it was (even as he announced this new thing God was doing) set up a contrast to what would come beyond him. It set people to thinking. The election has set many of us to thinking, wondering what in the world is going on. But we trust that in God’s big picture, something is, even if it’s only to set more of us to thinking. That’s how God works, of course, in ways we wouldn’t think to ask or imagine. So it is. So it has always been….and, thank God, so it will always be. Don’t you think?

         

December 11 – Third Sunday of Advent – IS 35:1-6A, 10 – JAS 5:7-10 – MT 11:2-11
IT’S HARD TO BE “LEAST”

One of the hardest things for me to be – and to admit to being – is “least.” How about you? I really like to be listened to as though I have some authority because of my vast knowledge and expertise. I don’t know about you but I LOVE it when someone searches me out because they believe (and often then, so do I) that I know more about some topic than many others. Anyone that wants to compliment me is certainly welcome to do so because it makes me feel really good!

Then I read these words and find that it’s the PARCHED land that will bloom. It’s being patient and waiting to see what God will do that brings life rather than the instant gratification of knowing and being known. I guess I don’t have to like being least but clearly I’m going to have to get used to it because it’s at the bottom of the heap where we see God face to face. I don’t want to miss it!

December 18 – Fourth Sunday of Advent – IS 7:10-14 – ROM 1:1-7– MT 1:18-24
CALLED TO BE HOLY

We’ve heard Mary’s story of her willingness to bear a child that could have left her in shame. We’re told that Joseph said “it came to him in a dream” that he should still marry her and he did. Not an easy place for either of them. But, like you and me, they were called to be HOLY and they did their best. We talk about being holy or at least what it means to be holy, but what does that really mean? Most of the time we just say it, assuming we know what “holy” is. I wasn’t sure I did so I looked it up. It means morally and spiritually excellent. Hmmmm….. Mary and Joseph had their own challenges. We have a whole different set of challenges in this time and place. How will we find our way into being holy today, I wonder.

December 25 – The Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) – IS 62:11-12 – TI 3:4-7 – LK 2:15-20
WHAT MIRACLE NEXT?

So this day we celebrate the birth of a child, Jesus of Nazareth, that would change the world forever. I sincerely doubt that my birthday will ever be celebrated much beyond my family and friends, although some people’s are. Yet, I believe that on December 7, 1948, my parents believed they witnessed a miracle as I came to them safe and secure, unharmed by my journey into this world. We see miracles so often that we miss them, be it the birth of a child or the last breath of one who has brought us into this world and now leaves it for another. But the kindness and generous love of God is forever giving us one miracle after another. This day, in particular, reminds us to keep our eyes and our hearts wide open lest we miss even one small one.

Blessings on this day when we celebrate
the God of Endless Miracles.

Carla Mae Streeter