I think it is fitting that our 3 month novitiate anniversary coincides with the beginning of Advent, a time of waiting. Waiting can be an active and intentional activity, rather than a passive one. This past week, we talked about the Annunciation in both our classes at the Intercommunity Novitiate (Personal Integration and Theology of the Vows). In our conversation, I was struck deeply by two things. One was the idea that while God initiated the call, God waited for Mary to answer just as God waits for us. Think about that ... God waits for us! The other was the idea that when Mary said yes, she said yes to a mystery. She didn’t know what she was saying yes to, and if anything she was saying yes to an adventure. As our Groovy Constitutions say: As we live our vows each day
we trust that Christ’s blessing promised
to peacemakers will sustain us,
knowing that God working in us
will accomplish more than we can ask
or imagine. (Constitutions 62)
That about sums up where I find myself right now. Taking each day as it comes, thanking God each day for the invitation, saying yes each day to the call to be a peacemaker, knowing that even though it seems impossible to me sometimes, all things are possible for God. When God dreams, God dreams bigger than I can imagine.
3 comments:
Someone sent me these two poems by David Whyte recently and both speak I think to the issues you raise in this blog. I hope you and all your bloogy friends enjoy them as we prepare to move into the Advent mysteries.
Terry
David Whyte Poems:
From The House of Belonging (Many Rivers Press: Langley, Washington 2004).
What To Remember When Waking (pp26-28)
In that first
Hardly noticed
Moment
In which you wake,
Coming back
To this life
From the other
More secret,
Moveable
And frighteningly
Honest
World
Where everything
Began,
There is a small
Opening
Into the day
Which closes
The moment
You begin
Your plans.
What you can plan
Is too small
For you to live.
What you can live
Wholeheartedly
Will make plans
Enough
For the vitality
Hidden in your sleep.
To be human
Is to become visible
While carrying
What is hidden
As a gift to others.
To remember
The other world
In this world
Is to live in your
True inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest
On this earth,
You are not
An accident
Amidst other accidents
You were invited
From another and greater
Night
Than the one
From which
You have just emerged.
Now, looking through
The slanting light
Of the morning
Window toward
The mountain
Presence
Of everything
That can be,
What urgency
Calls you to your
One love? What shape
Waits in the seed
Of you to grow
And spread
Its branches
Against a future sky?
Is it waiting
In the fertile sea?
In the trees
Beyond the house?
In the life
You can imagine
For yourself?
In the open
And lovely
White page
On the waiting desk?
ALL THE TRUE VOWS (pp24-25)
All the true vows
Are secret vows
The ones we speak out loud
Are the ones we break.
There is only one life
You can call your own
And a thousand others
You can call by any name you want.
Hold to the truth you make
Every day with your own body,
Don’t turn your face away.
Hold to your own truth
At the center of the image
You were born with.
Those who do not understand
Their destiny will never understand
The friends they have made
Nor the work they have chosen
Nor the one life that waits
Beyond all the others.
By the lake in the wood
In the shadows
You can
Whisper that truth
To the quiet reflection
You see in the water.
Whatever you hear from
The water, remember,
It wants you to carry
The sound of its truth on your lips.
Remember,
In this place
No one can hear you
And out of the silence
You can make a promise
It will kill you to break,
That way you’ll find
What is real and what is not.
I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
And I looked again.
Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
And spoke
For the first time
After all these years
In my own voice,
Before it was too late
To turn my face again
Hi Sr. Susan,
I am amazed that I have found your blog~...your story..sounds so much like mine...or the beginning anyway, I think I am somewhere in chapter 2...It is such a gift to read about your novitiate, ..and so great to read about someone who has discerned a vocation, as that is what I am working on now and always...Peace and blessings to you, Lisa in CA~
my blog is at : www.sanctifyme.blogspot.com
I've been thinking about you (and myself as well) and how being in transition is an Advent kind of situation. One is on a journey, but not there yet; new life is happening, but the time of waiting is not completed; and the inner and outer journey is both wondrous and terrible...and (alas) quite ordinary and excruciatingly boring at times.
Waiting in hope and trust is just about the hardest thing I've ever done (and not at all passive.) I understand more why the Church gives us Miriyam of Nazareth as an example.
Dare
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