Christmas 2012 Letter to my Readers

There’s an Irish Proverb that expresses  my sentiments as I open the cards, e-mails. and posts you've sent during this sacred holiday season. “When I count my blessings, I count you twice.” The messages, photos, letters, and notes tucked within each envelope remind us visibly of the ways you've enlightened  my life and fill me with gratitude.

A dear friend brought me to tears of laughter the other day as she told me about the cards she’d bought to send out this year --  happy elves leaping and dancing from tree to rooftop  and shouting gleeful greetings. And inside those cards, she’d be writing a “I’m sorry to tell you that . . .” message about the grief that recently overtook her life. “Whatever possessed me to buy such a card?” she sighed and we began to laugh. How good that laughter was. It reminded me that friends don’t expect our messages to be totally upbeat when our lives are mixed parcels of joy and sorrow.

This year, Bill and I decided to delay our winter sojourn in Florida until after Christmas. While snowfall has been elusive, we did have the chance to snow-shoe on an overcast winter day through forests laden with snow, accompanied only by the large tracks of a snowshoe hare. Snow captured the neat footprints of a fox that climbed the stairs to our deck, then wandered back along the trail to cross Francesca’s grave and head down to the lake. And every day, the chickadees, politely waiting their turn at the feeders along with the nuthatches and redpolls, rejoice our hearts.

For the past year, my husband Bill has been flying  back and forth across North America for three weeks at a time assisting businesses achieve their goals. I’m very grateful for the three week break Christmas provides, giving us precious time together and to celebrate the holidays with my son Tom and his family. While we've not traveled to exotic places this year, our children and grandchildren have visited us here and in Florida and we've traveled to Iowa  several times for Bill’s family celebrations. When Bill is home, we use every excuse to head to Duluth to dine out and take in a movie, especially if there’s a foreign film to enjoy.

A good deal of spring and summer disappeared while I recuperated from a bad fall down the stairs. Three fractures in the sacrum and hernia surgery reminded me how I’d taken my strength and health for granted. I’m back up and walking now and at work on the umpteenth revision of my third book. To spur the process, perhaps you could send hopeful thoughts in that direction.

Christmas on Lake Superior inspired me, for the first time since Francesca died eleven years ago, to decorate the house for Christmas. I had forgotten the intimate warmth of burning candles and a nativity crèche , the brightly colored Christmas lights shining through the windows. May the light of your lives shine on all you love and those who love you and may you find blessing in each day of the coming year.

For the first time in four years, we have remained in our northern paradise to celebrate snow. Since Thanksgiving, we've gone snowshoeing on dark afternoons on trails through white spruce forests  laden with snow. The only other tracks are those left by Snowshoe Hares, their large feet bounding from one side of the trail to the other and into the canopy of undergrowth that sagged with heavy snow. Seized with gratitude, I want to sing my joy but to break the silence of the woods seems almost sacrilegious. So I plod on silently, stopping frequently to savor the wonder of such beauty and to give thanks that this winter we've decided to stay until after Christmas.

Here on Lake Superior, the myriad ways in which God is with us are clearly visible, yet we so often neglect to note this presence. Advents comes to shake up our complacency. It reminds us to see the miracles that surround us as we await God’s gift of himself in the Incarnation. 

We spend so much time waiting. We wait on lines in the grocery store. We wait for the Stop sign to change to Slow during road repairs. We wait for fishing season. We wait for school to start, for school to end. We wait for good jobs. We wait for vacation days. We wait for our children, their births, first steps, first words. And now we wait for Christmas and the fulfillment of God's ancient promise.

Yet we are not the only ones who wait. In a beautiful meditation on Advent, Sister Sallie Latkovich, CSJ writes that in Advent we contemplate the three ways of Christ’s coming: in history, in our daily lives, and in the second coming. “ I've been thinking that we've got it all wrong,” she writes. “This Advent I've come to see that it’s GOD who waits for us . . . waits for us to notice the myriad ways in which God is with us, always.”

I think of God waiting as I watch the chickadees, red polls, and nuthatches bounce on an off the feeders, politely taking one seed at a time, flying off to a nearby branch to open the sunflower seed, then waiting their turn to return for another. I think of God waiting as I trudge through the new fallen snow into the winter forests. I think of God waiting as in the early hours I pray the morning liturgy and open myself to all the ways God reveals his love as I move through the day. I pray that you will experience a similar anticipation as you move into your every day. May God's waiting love surround and fulfill your deepest longing. May your Advent be blessed, exceedingly. 

© Beryl Singleton Bissell 2012

Shirking grace

Restless in your presence, Lord. As if You detain me. As if I have so much to do to avoid You.

Reading for spiritual nourishment

This morning, while meditating, these words formed in my mind. "Some books are prayers, you say, if they tell the truth, unzip culture's tight corset, reveal the wild longing creature within, release her to fly."

I'd just finished reading Kathleen Jesme's Motherhouse for the second time and taken a lyric journey into a shared past. Each page shimmered with a mystery grounded in the earth yet daring to breach the galaxies. Even the structure of these poems, latticed throughout with readings from the rule book used by her religious community and quotations from mystics and saints, quiver with mystery. One line of verse eliciting wonder, three lines of insight,


"Rain and more rain. Dense. I dreamed of green worms.
Saw a moth "open-winged on a tree trunk, looking like
a piece of bark. Like my selves --
some so perfectly camouflaged they resemble me. "5/17 Wednesday, Feast of St. Paschal"

Harsh, tender, reflective, brooding ... poems like a rosary of light and dark. A perfectly lovely read.

Favorite New Spiritual Memoirs

I'm a besotted book-lover. I have heaps of books piled on tables throughout the house waiting to be read or in the process of being read. Many of these books have been recommended to me by friends whose reading preferences I respect. When these books are spiritual, it makes sense to  recommend them on a blog dedicated to spiritual living? These are not exactly reviews. They are meant simply to share what I've loved. They are a get-to-the-point-and-do-it-quickly type of review that will perhaps inspire you to check them out and maybe buy a copy.

My two newest spiritual favorites are both memoirs and both were written by Jesuits. When a Jesuit writes, you can usually count on the work being erudite. Some Jesuit authors are also darn good story-tellers.The authors of the next two books are erudite and they know how to engage the reader.

I have numerous books on the lives of the Saints. I've recommended some of them here, in the past.While all of these books introduce us to saints and their lives, I've not found one that combines both the lives of the saints with a personal experience of these saints. Father James Martin's My Life with the Saints is a perfect blend: a personal spiritual memoir combined with the lives of the saints. This book is a delightful journey with a self-effacing, articulate, and often funny Jesuit as he meets and “befriends” saints both modern and ancient. Martin is a gifted story-teller and guide to those seeking to know the great friends of God. This book has instilled in me a new curiosity about my own and other's relationship with the saints. I question whether I've ever considered them friends. I wonder if reverence for their lives and the inspiration they offer qualify as friendship. I wonder what is your experience? Are you friends with particular saints?

I received Tattoos on the Heart from one of my best friends: a nun who spent the money I'd given her to buy books, to buy me a book! Actually, she bought several copies to share; she loved it that much. Tattoos on the Heart is a spiritual memoir of Father Gregory Boyle's work with the “homies” in Los Angeles. As we follow him into the heart of the LA ghettos, we travel with a priest who has dedicated his life to restoring hope and a sense of self-worth to hopeless lives. He introduces us to gang members who want more than anything to "to get a job." It is having a job that instills a sense of dignity to their lives. But even more than that, these young people need to be loved and it is love, unconditional love, that Father Greg offers. For the past twenty-years, Father Greg has run Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention program in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles ( the "gang capital of the world.") The lives of these young people, as told by a wise and courageous priest, propel this book with such urgency that you will find it hard to put it down. Some of the stories Father Greg tells will make you laugh. Others will break your heart. To my mind, they are certain to enlighten and uplift you. 

An Advent Question: How Do You Wait?

"How do you wait?" the priest asked us at Mass this Sunday. He reminded us that we've just begun Advent -- the liturgical cycle of waiting for the coming of the Christ Child.

I've been known to fall asleep during sermons. I never sleep when Father Tom gives the homily. He began this Sunday's homily by telling us that he was taking a group of students to Disney World. Having done so in the past, he knew that long lines for rides were part of the Disney experience. While waiting on one of those very long lines, he'd been struck by the different "waiting" behaviors of those on line with him. Some griped loudly and made their displeasure obvious. Others chatted amiably. Some even laughed.  They didn't seem to mind waiting.

Most of us spend a great deal of time waiting. We wait on lines at the grocery store, we wait to get into theaters, stadiums, restaurants, buses, subways, we wait --seemingly without end -- in the doctor's office. We spend much of our time in the car: waiting for our children, for the light to change, for the almost inevitable traffic jam to clear up. I remember once telling my spiritual director how painful that morning's drive to work had been. Road repairs on an exit ramp created a bottle-neck that took over an hour to clear.

"Oh, I love traffic jams," she laughed. "There's nothing you can do about them but you can use them. I look on the time spent driving as a mini-vacation. A time for me." Her words turned me into, while not exactly a line lover, a person who could greet time spent waiting as a gift. A time to slow down. A reminder to stop the rushing and simply be.

While "waiting," I can reconnect with the inner self I might have lost on the way. I can greet God and spend time listening. I can pray for the the people waiting in line with me. I can check the color of the tiles on the supermarket floor if I want, notice the dust motes in the air, observe the way sunlight strikes the cashier's hair.  The things I can do while waiting are limited only by my imagination. For the times my imagination fails, I usually have a book in my purse. And, because I'm a writer, a notebook and pen.

We can waste our time waiting, just as we can let Advent which is all about waiting, slip past without noticing, without participating, without longing for its apex. Why should we yearn for something that happened thousands of years ago? While we're at it, why should we wait  during Advent anyway. Are we waiting for that special gift under the Christmas tree? Do we wait for the excitement of the celebration itself? The family gathered together? The joy of giving to others? The arrival of Santa Claus? Is that why we wait? Yes to all those things but Advent is so much more. Advent is a time to come to life. It is God's reminder of His Gift to us: the fathomless love that sent Jesus to show us the way to Love. And to Life.

Our experience of Advent depends on our response to God's gift. The Church makes it easier to live Advent through the liturgies that comprise this season. Advent's scriptural readings capture the age-long yearning for a savior, it's hymns lift our hearts, it's ceremonies move us. Advent prepares us to respond to God's gift of Love. Advent comes round year after year, to remind us of  God's unfathomable love for us. And if we are listening, our hearts will break open to receive this Love. This Advent, I hope to participate as fully as I can, to experience the full meaning of its liturgies, to prepare my heart to open wide to greet the Christ Child.

I'm glad I'm good at waiting. I just have to work on Advent.

God's Besotted Love

During one of our Benedictine Oblate meetings at St. Scholastica Monastery in Duluth, Sister Edith handed us sample copies of a new publication from the Liturgical Press. “Give Us This Day: Daily Prayer for Today’s Catholic” is a treasure for those of us seeking to live a deeper life of prayer.  Morning and Evening prayers include Scripture and intercessory prayer and features models of holy living in a daily reading called “Blessed Among Us.” Mass texts include reflections by well-known spiritual writers.

Today, the reflection for the mass was taken from “God, Christ and Us” by Father Herbert McCabe, an English Dominican, theologian, philosopher and preacher:

“You do not have to be good before God will love you; you do not have to try to be good before God will forgive you; you do not have to repent before you will be absolved by God. It is the other way around. If you are good, it is because God’s love has already made you so; if you want to try to be good, that is because God is loving you; if you want to be forgiven, that is because God is forgiving you.”

I was especially moved by the words: “You do not have to try to be good before God will forgive you . . . if you want to be forgiven, that is because God is forgiving you.” It brought me back to the day I saw my daughter Francesca for the last time. When Francesca came to see me that day, it was September 11, 2001 and the attack on the World Trade Towers in NY had just hit the news. She’d called to tell me she was on her way from Minneapolis to our home on Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior. “I need you, Mommy,” she said. “I need to be with you.”

Francesca was a wildly loving, intensely vulnerable, and tormented young woman whose lifestyle placed her at great risk. When she came to see me on September 11, it was to tell me how much she loved me and agonized over all the pain and worry she’d given me. When I pulled her into my arms and told her I’d loved her through all her choices, she asked about God and God’s forgiveness.  

“What about God, Mommy. Can God forgive me for the way I’ve lived my life?”

“Oh Fran, honey,” I reassured her, “God has already forgiven you; you’ve always had God’s forgiveness; even in your darkest hours God’s been there, loving you”

I hope Francesca believed me for on September 18, one week later, my lovely girl – all of 24 years old -- was shot and killed. I pray that Francesca died knowing how greatly she was loved  . . . and forgiven. Seeing Father McCabe’s words this morning brought me to tears. This was the message I’d hoped to give my daughter. That is the message I hope to take into this day and the rest of my life. The knowledge of and belief in God’s “besotted”[i] love for us.

---

[i] Roberta Bondi, In Ordinary Time, Nashville, Abingdon Press, (1996) pp 22-23