From the Dowry of Mary

Today is a kind of double Marian feast in England, and it was pretty confusing to me. My missallette had it as Our Lady of Walsingham, the title of Mary at the medieval pilgrimage destination also known as "England's Nazareth," where a replica of Mary's little house represented the whole mystery of the Annunciation of the Lord and the hidden life of the Holy Family. But the sisters kept talking about it being "Our Lady of Ransom." We prayed the Evening Prayer of this second memorial, and the closing prayer made it very clear that this was a kind of feast in which the English church, calling itself "the Dowry of Mary," reaffirms its connection to Peter.

Actually, I liked the Walsingham liturgical prayer better, the way it tied in the concept of pilgrimage, the Annunciation and our becoming the dwelling place of God:

Our Lady of Walsingham,
enthroned today in Westminster Cathedral

Grant, we pray, almighty God,
that as in the mystery of the Incarnation
the blessed and ever Virgin Mary
conceived your Son in her heart
before she conceived him in the womb,
so we, your pilgrim people,
rejoicing in her motherly care,
may welcome him into our hearts
and become a holy house fit for his eternal dwelling.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

UPDATED: Humble Thanks on Buy a Nun a Book Day

It's not even September 17 and three lovely people have already showered me with blessings (of the literary kind) for Buy a Nun a Book Day. Thanks, V.P., M.S. and C.S. (from Malta!); I am humbled by your kindness. I've already polished off one book (The Lost Painting, about that Caravaggio that showed up--after a 500 year vanishing act--in a Jesuit residence in Dublin; fascinating!) and I look forward to pondering the riches of the other titles (especially the Kindle edition of the Bible!).

Just wanted to say thanks so very much.

September 17 update:
I just learned that our sisters in San Antonio, a community that was just started up this summer, are seeking books (and key subscriptions) to build a community library from scratch. If you'd like to contribute, here's their "wish list."  (You might have to sign out of Amazon to see it; my friend kept getting her own list!)

"Let it go": the Jesus version

Today's Gospel is where Jesus really proves he is out to change the world. Nothing he tells us today comes "naturally." Nothing he calls for is intuitive. It's all evidence that he is introducing a new and unfamiliar world, a greater one, based on foundations that most of us have trouble imagining, never mind ordering our life by.

What struck me today in a new way was the command that we not try to get back stolen goods. In the translation used here in the UK it reads "do not ask for your property back from the man who robs you." (So polite!) My community runs bookstores, and we have had more than a few experiences with theft. We tell grand stories about the few sisters who have gone after a thief and actually gotten the stolen item(s) back: the Infant of Prague statue hidden in a coat, the stack of CDs, things like that. (We never did recover the Stations of the Cross that vanished, one by one, from our downtown Boston bookstore back in the day.) Once I watched a customer chase a thief down Michigan Avenue after she witnessed him shoplifting in our Chicago center. (Her family had worked in retail, so she knew what it was like to suffer from walking inventory.) Then there is the man who comes in, on a regular basis, to slip individual volumes of the Liturgy of the Hours into his open backpack... But, in the words of the song, Jesus says, "Let it go." Why?

I got a hint of where he is coming from (and where he means to take us) from the last sentence in today's passage of Luke: "full measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over..." Jesus is testifying to a world of abundance. Who is it who would shrug off a theft? The rich person who knows "there's more where that came from." Yesterday we heard Jesus tell of woes for the rich, but today he is turning that around. He is telling us to have the kind of poverty of spirit that St Paul witnessed to: "We seem to have nothing, but everything is ours!"

It is not enough for us to be created in the image of God like a static portrait; we are meant to make the living God, "kind to the ungrateful and the wicked" (moi?) manifest amid all the "gods and lords" of this earth.

On Reporting Savagery

I gave a digital communications workshop over the weekend, and in updating my resource links for the participants (my online chart of links was swallowed up by the cloud sometime over the spring, I just realized), I came across some timely advice from a really important (in my opinion, unsurpassed) Church document on communications, Communio et Progressio.

Since the barbarians in Iraq and Syria are using social media so effectively, it would be very helpful for our media, and for all of us readers and writers and re-tweeters of social media to keep this in mind:

43. The reporting of violence and brutality demands a special care and tact. There is no denying that human life is debased by violence and savagery and that such things happen in our own time and perhaps more now than ever before. It is possible to delineate all this violence and savagery so that men will recoil from it. But if these bloody events are too realistically described or too frequently dwelt upon, there is a danger of perverting the image of human life. It is also possible that such descriptions generate an attitude of mind and, according to many experts, a psychosis which escapes the control of the very forces that unleashed it. All this may leave violence and savagery as the accepted way of resolving conflict.

Meanwhile, back on the home front...

Thank goodness for social media! This was a big week for my community back in the States, and through the marvels of Twitter and Facebook (and, yes, even e-mail), I could participate with more attentiveness.

In the lead-in to the main event, the sisters in the concert choir got together to rehearse for this year's Christmas program. (Ouch.) While they were all in the sound studio, a camera crew from "Fusion.net" came for some interviews...

The really big event of the week was the first profession (vows) of two of the novices. They received their habit in a simple ceremony the day before, but couldn't actually wear it until the morning of their profession Mass. (See all the pictures here!)

First vows is also the time when a sister gets a new name. We don't actually change our name, but have the option to add a name to our Baptismal name. (After all, Baptism is the primary vocation, the sacrament in which we were already definitively "claimed for Christ.") Well, one of the novices had always gone by her first name, while her Christian name was not really used. So she decided to reclaim her very Christian name--Khristina. The other sister added a new name: Aletheia (Greek for "truth"). Her explanation was beautiful, but personal enough that I will see if she comments on it in her blog and will link you to that if the opportunity arises. Suffice it to say that since Jesus IS Truth ("I am the Way, the Truth and the Life"), both sisters appear to have taken the same name--and in a very Pauline way, since it was Paul himself who said, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."

And then last night, the Fusion.net spot aired in Miami--but you can watch it here! How many nun stereotypes will the sisters blast away as they talk about what it means to be a vowed person who is active on social media?