Connecting…Everywhere!

Often when I read the newspapers, magazines, even books, I see the most interesting connections to our own struggle for equality and inclusion of all genders in our Church. I’m a lover of analogies at the best of times and sometimes go into full connection mode when I feel as if I – and perhaps many of us – can gain a new, fresh perspective on our struggles and what they mean.

As one example, I offer the New York Times Book Review from April 7, 2019 (Oh yes, I save way too many of these for way too long to the detriment of my housekeeping and, hence, complementary role as a woman in the Catholic Church!)

A little background first: I had just come back from our small Eucharistic Community gathering which had focused on the visit of the wise men with their, it must be admitted,  blatantly materialistic gifts.In the “reflections by the community” portion of our service, I had bemoaned, once again, the absence of women in a story in which they should have had (even if you consider it a mythological or metaphorical tale) an extremely prominent role. How many of us have ever given birth without the attendance of a bevy of women, nurturing, tending, comforting, caring, cheering us up, cleaning us up, swaddling our baby?  Remember the “Wise Women Also Came” poem? It was wise women who brought the useful gifts: water, firelight, blankets, food. Also, in the lines I especially love, these wise women were the ones: “holding Mary in the labor,/crying out with her/in the birth pangs,/breathing ancient blessings/into her ear.”  Certainly that role deserves a mention…with names named…and then a glorious hallelujah.

Back to that April NYT Book Review: in one article an author writes about the death of a physicist named Schwartzschild who had written to Albert Einstein ecstatically, and truthfully it turned out, that he had mathematically proved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Unfortunately, Schwartzchild had served on the German side in World War I, and so, if you wonder why you’ve probably never heard of him, the memorial to his achievement is “a crater named for him on the northern part of the far side of the moon.”  If you are not on the winning and thus more powerful side in life, it seems, even your greatest achievements are relegated to the dark side of the moon, i.e. the place no one ever gets to see.

In the same issue, author Nathan Englander’s protagonist in the novel, Kaddish.com, goes online to find someone to hire to say the Kaddish prayer for his beloved father who has just died. He cannot bring himself to say it since he no longer believes in either religion or the soul and, despite desperately loving his father, cannot bear the hypocrisy. His dilemma forces him to mine “the tension between the letter and spirit of the law.”  Isn’t that our dilemma as well? 

Then there’s author Albert Woodfox who endured – and survived – more than 40 years in solitary confinement, thanks to finding purpose, friendship among other solitary detainees, and educating himself and others in the law, The result: “Hunger strike by hunger strike, petition by petition, lawsuit by lawsuit, they attempt (at often great personal cost) to force the prison to reform.”

The reviewer of  Woodfox’s memoir, Solitary, quotes Camus: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” As all of us push that gigantic rock up whatever hill bars us from justice, mercy, fairness, hope, only to have it roll back down again just as we get within sight of the top can, actually, find happiness – in the friendship and sense of larger purpose we find along the way.

There are other examples just from this one issue, but I’ve probably gone on enough. I leave you with this one, different from the those above, but inspiring nonetheless. Author C.D. Wright in Casting Deep Shade, a meditation on our connection to nature, especially trees, quotes Simone Weil: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

We do have those sustainable and sustaining roots in the best our Church offers. The rest is just Sisyphus’ annoying rock and maddening hill. The author quotes the poet and activist, W.S. Merwin: “On the last day of the world/I would want to plant a tree.”  I think in our own work we are doing that every day.