I Think I’ll Stay

By: Andrea Beyke

Yesterday, many Christian Churches celebrated Palm (or Passion) Sunday.  I attended mass at St. Mary’s Village with my friend Kelly and one of our RCIA candidates.  Many other SMWC students were also in attendance.   Every year, I both dread and look forward to this day.  It seems very shallow of me, even more so now that I’m actually writing it for others to read, but I recall that in the Catholic Church, the Gospel reading on Palm Sunday is crazy long.  And it’s a depressing story, really.  This Messiah that was supposed to liberate the People of God from the government and from sin is killed…at the hands of the government.  It seems they’ve won.  And sin prevailed.  

With these negative thoughts in the back of my head, Sister Joan asked us to be seated for the Gospel (since it was crazy long).  So it began. 

Wait, WHAT?!  We’re reading the EXPANDED version!  This means we began reading from the Gospel of Mark at the plot to kill Jesus and the anointing at Bethany (Mark 14:1-9).  I typically don’t hear this part because so many churches choose to read only the shortened version…probably because of cranky parishioners like me.  But, I settled in, willing myself to have patience.  Here’s where my attitude changed.  

An unnamed woman anointed Jesus’ feet with a very costly ointment of nard.  The insightful woman seemed to understand Jesus' imminent passion the best. While her brothers accused her of wasting expensive ointment, she evoked Samuel's prophetic anointing of David as king in Israel. Her symbolic ritual must have been very reassuring to Jesus, who was facing a horrific death before entering his own kingdom.  She was intelligent.  She was compassionate.  And Jesus recognized that.  He said, “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” (Mark 14:9)

In remembrance of HER.  Do we remember her?  This woman whom we cannot even name?  Come to think of it, do we remember any of the women from the Passion?  As the Gospel continued, I paid special attention to the women in the Story.  

There was a servant-girl who questioned Peter about his connection with Jesus – leading to Peter’s second denial. (Mark 14:68) A small part, but pivotal to the telling of this story.  She reminded us of our human dimension.  We all have the tendency to protect ourselves.  

Then, finally, after Jesus breathed his last, Mark’s Gospel reads, “There were women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome.  These used to follow him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.” (Mark 15:40-41)  After the body was buried, “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.” (Mark 15:47)  

The women stayed.  Often during Holy Week, we hear it preached, “Jesus was abandoned by everyone.”  Everyone?    Everyone, that is, but the women, whose presence must have meant so much Jesus, if to no one else.  The women stayed.

Some say that the men could have been arrested and prosecuted for staying, so they left to protect themselves. But, wouldn’t that same law also apply to women?    

Sister Christine Schenk, CSJ writes about this, “I used to think the women stayed because it was less politically risky for them compared to their brothers who fled to Galilee. Not so. Turns out that the Romans had no compunction about crucifying women and even children to terrorize subjugated people.” 

The courage!  The love!  The compassion!  When I bear in mind these women, I can’t believe that I’d never considered the Story from their point of view before.  They risked their lives to be there for someone they’d come to love.  They cared for the body of their teacher and friend when very few others would.  They showed the world that their presence was sacred.  

Let us remember these women.  Actually, let us do more than remember these women.  Let us emulate them.  How can I stay with the afflicted?  How can I soothe the troubled?  How can I walk with Jesus?  How can I experience Holy Week through the eyes of these women?

Here’s how:  like the women on Calvary, I’ll stay.  I’ll stay and stand for what I believe...even if everyone else leaves.  I’ll wait it through until the end…even when the situation gets uncomfortable.  I’ll experience the pain and the grief…even when others take the easy way out.  And, I will continue to hope.  I will have hope always, because I know how the Story ends.  I know what we celebrate next Sunday.  So, in a very different way, I looked forward to Palm Sunday because I know that the Gospel doesn’t end with Jesus’ death.

I think I’ll stay and wait with my sisters for the glorious ending.   I think I’ll stay. 

 Faith and Service

By: Mike Aycock

I have read the posts in this blog with keen interest and an open heart, finding that they have been articulate and deeply genuine, each one giving me a new insight into this mystery of faith. I was asked to contribute one as well, touching on faith and service. Being human, that’s a complex topic for me. So I’m going to try to encompass it with a few verses and a few experiences to see if they add up to an insight.

Because Jesus sets this idea out so elegantly and beautifully in the gospel of Matthew, I’m moved to start there, just as so many do, in the 25^th chapter. Near the end of a long response to the disciples’ questions about the end of the age, Jesus takes up the matter of judgment, describing those who will be chosen with a small piece of drama that is so powerful I simply can’t help repeating it:

Then the king will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him and say, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?” And the king will say to them in reply, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”

That last sentence, Matthew 25:40, was on the door of my wife’s office at Covenant Cooperative Ministry.

Whatever we say in the mission statement of CCM, that one sentence was her personal mission statement. And whatever impurities any of us, Rose included, might have in our hearts as we try to serve others, the unconditional love that Matthew 25:40 implies, a love that transcends our daily situations, can call us to do things we would sometimes not do. As for Rose, one only had to watch her interact with anyone who came through the door of the ministry to see the love of God come shining out through her in those moments.

I speak of my late wife because I will be the first to admit that she did more than anyone else on this earth could accomplish to move me toward serving for the love of God, to try to embody Matthew 25:40. I will also admit that I didn’t start at that place.

And maybe Rose didn’t either.

She had another quote on her door when we moved into our current offices that first spoke to me because it came closer to the way I made sense of service. This one was from the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

This, too, is an elegantly compressed way of saying a great deal about the deep fountains of our sense of altruism. For a sizeable portion of my life, it could have been my personal mission statement. I still love this quote.

You won’t be shocked to know that I was pretty full of myself when I was younger. (Some who know me may be thinking, “when he was younger?”) Like many of us when we’re in the exuberance of our twenties, I had a series of things that I thought I would do and be that were mainly about me, from being a writer to being an athlete. However, when eating my beans and rice in my walk-up apartment, and thinking how I would dazzle the world, it struck me I might need to have a job or two in the meantime. My uncle, who is about my age and who grew up pretty much as a sibling, was driving a truck for a national mission service at that time, and, hearing my dilemma, gave me some advice: “Many people find that they’re happy when they’re serving others.” This truism hit me hard enough that I saw all my best teachers, for example, in an entirely new light. So I set out to try to be the best servant I could be. I know this sounds like a chapter from Siddhartha, but it really did inform my life. It was what Rose and I talked about the day we met.

So, even though I thought it was a huge risk when she told me we were going to start a Christian social service from scratch with no money, I did understand where she was coming from. I knew there was nothing like the feeling we get when we truly do something good for someone else. I had helped her at several of the social work positions she had held, had taught and coached for years, and knew the joy we can feel serving.

The difficulty, of course, is that we may be doing all this, really, for ourselves.

I could cite hundreds of examples, but one particular client one Christmas season brought this home to me. She became angry when Rose told her that two of her children didn’t qualify for our Christmas program. The reason was very clear and was one we warned about in the application process, a rule put in place to keep resources from being duplicated among other services. The client didn’t want to hear any of that. She teed off with some power, her main argument being that she was entitled to this service. This was what we were here for, and we had better serve her or else. When she got near a boil, I jumped in to defend my wife, who had been listening patiently and trying to reason. I was hot. It ended in the client stomping out. I noticed our lead pastor following her out, and, looking out the door, saw him praying with her on the sidewalk. He had asked her something that Rose often asked: “What’s really troubling you?”

That was one of many lessons I was given by being part of Covenant Ministry. God provides us an unconditional, ever-renewable love that is beyond imagining. Any time that we can tap into that, on any scale, we have a better chance of reaching outside our self-gratifying reasons for helping others and can possibly even change a life. The same person I spoke of above returned a different person and has helped others since. We all meet times when we believe that those we’re trying to serve are unworthy or stubborn or self-destructive or, worst of all, ungrateful. It wounds our sense of how hard we’ve tried to serve. But God can see the beauty in every heart and can offer a redemption for every soul. The more we can put that light into our lives, the better servants we can be.

Faith and Hope

By: Tara Lane

How does your faith inform your actions?  Inform, an odd use of the word.  Merriam-Webster Dictionary noted, “transitive verb  1 obsolete:  to give material form to.”  How does your faith give material form to  your actions?  How do your actions manifest your faith?   “In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” James 2:17, New International Version.

An inspirational quote:

Deep within us

Is the power to change our lives

Heal the broken

Loose the bound

Live welcoming to all.

(author unknown)

Sisters of Providence, Spiritual Integration Units,

Unit 7 by Sister Kathleen Desautels, Page 9-2

In the 1960’s and 70’s the women’s movement came into its own.  The oppression of women was not limited to secular society.  It was, and still is, an issue in religious organizations as well.  For women that challenged the norms of women in laity and clergy, there were consequences to be paid.  I was one of those women.   Reconciling the personal mystery of God experience and the dogma of religion has been a lifelong conflict.  Seeking deeper spirituality rather than religious integration has reframed and diminished the struggle.  However, the result has been more solitude than necessary and less community than required.

More solitude culminated into unpretentious acts of kindness to circumvent traditional tithing and church work.  To be quite honest, it’s great fun to provide an unexpected gift to an unsuspecting person for no good reason, to pick up the check at lunch, to offer humble resources at the point of need.  It’s even more fun to make a successful delivery without being found out. 

The inspiring quote became real to me in community of the Sisters of Providence.  That community has resolved a great deal of personal conflict.  Deep within us is the power to change our lives.  That “power” can be called by diverse names.  That same power, spirit, indwelling, spark of life, etc. is the unity the community, the Providence that mysteriously connects us, empowering us in that continuous electrical circuit to change.

Let go.  Think big.  Change our lives, not just individually, you or me but collectively.  Deep within us, plural, WE, together, have the Power, THE Mystery to change OUR collective lives.  With that collective power WE, through the mystery with Providence heal the broken, loose the bound and live welcoming at all.

In that humble surrender, allowing our individual sparks to be exponentially changed within the closed circuit of community.  That radiant Power in THE miraculous is the change life often yearns for.

How does my faith inform my life?  It hopes.  It believes our world can change.

How Lent Looks at The Woods

By: Andrea Beyke

The Church all over the world marked the beginning of Lent this week with Ash Wednesday, and it was no different here at The Woods…indoors, at least.  The word “Lent” comes from an Old English word in the 13^th Century that means “spring” or “springtime.”  In this way, it looks nothing like Lent here…outdoors.  

Photo Credit: Sisters of Providence

Yesterday, some students and the campus minister gathered for a faith-sharing group during dinner.  The planned activity was to pray the labyrinth.  Upon waking up on Thursday morning, this was the feared outcome…

Needless to say, we decided to try finger labyrinths and paper labyrinths instead. Therefore, we were able to stay indoors and warm, and we were also able to write on the paper labyrinths the baggage we wanted to drop on the way toward the center and then write the virtues we wanted to pick up on the way back into the world with God.  This exercise was just as effective, if not more so.  

With this amended group sharing, I discovered how Lent looks on the inside of The Woods.  Lent looks like a pilgrim journey, bending and curving around the obstacles.  Lent is naming the obstacles and what we can do to remove them.  Lent is finding and following the path that makes us our best selves.  This is exactly what’s happening here. 

On Ash Wednesday, the student body gathered with some Sisters of Providence for prayer and to receive ashes.  The beautiful service, led by Sister Jan Craven, SP, brought students together: Catholic and non-Catholic alike.  One student posted later Wednesday evening, “Even though I myself am not Catholic, I am very thankful for all the opportunities I have at St. Mary's to learn and participate! Tonight I attended my first Ash Wednesday service and I gained a new perspective on what it and Lent itself are all about thanks to Sister Jan. Never miss an opportunity to broaden your perspective and have new experiences.”

Snow on the ground, grey days, frigid temperatures, and slippery sidewalks have nothing on us here at The Woods!  I’m reminded of the old saying, “When it is dark outside, the light that makes the stained glass window beautiful comes from the inside.”  Lent may have a snowy beginning per the natural world, but from where I stand, the warmth within the walls carries us through this journey.   Before we know it, the outside will follow suit, bringing spring, and the growth that we experience on the inside will manifest itself.

So, how does Lent look at The Woods?  Like this…

Photo Credit: Sydney Wilderman

"So let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made, and the stars that blaze in our bones, and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear." Jan Richardson