Living with affliction

There are only two things that pierce the human heart.
One is beauty. The other is affliction.

Simone Weil

Today's Gospel tells us of Peter's mother-in-law, "afflicted with a severe fever," and of the others in Capernaum who were suffering the ravages of sickness and possession. (Sometimes today we tend to identify biblical possession with mental illness, but that is probably reductionist.) A religious community can sometimes look like Peter's doorstep that day, crowded with afflicted souls desperately seeking comfort from Jesus. Sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming.

A few days ago I left the refectory (dining room) and heard a loud and desperate "Can you please give me something to eat?" As I rounded the bend I saw 92-year-old Sister M A hunched over her walker. The nurse at her side said (patiently but loudly), "That is where we are going now." Sister lost her hearing long ago, and her short-term memory is all but gone, leaving her open to frustration and bewilderment all day long.

Last week it was a different one of our senior sisters whose affliction could not be restrained. Sister C was a missionary who left her native Sicily for Canada where she became fluent in French and English, but Parkinson's has robbed her of not only her physical independence, but also the gift of speech. In the middle of morning prayers one day she burst into a plaintive wail. It wasn't long or drawn-out; it just escaped. Today as I returned to my pew after my turn as lector, I saw her sitting in her usual place. Right beside her was another of the seniors, her arm around Sister C's shoulders.

As we left chapel this morning, I noticed Sister M P walking with great difficulty. At 88, she is a spirited soul (usually high spirits), ready to burst into song at a moment's notice. Today just making the next step required all of her energy and concentration. "My feet really hurt today," she commented. And to the chaplain (quoting an old song?), "I'm getting ready for the last roundup!"

Right now I am experiencing these things in the shadow of the news from yesterday about the thousands of mass graves dotting Iraq and Syria: innocent family men (almost always it was the men, since women and girls have other uses in time of war), executed by the hundreds by terrorist "soldiers." Affliction inflicted on the innocent.

Today's Gospel, with Jesus leaving the crowds of Capernaum who had tracked him down in his place of prayer to go and "proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom" to other afflicted souls. St Paul's words reminded me, "Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more." It takes faith to hold on to that assurance that whatever evils we see or learn about, God's grace can, does and will more than fill up: "Where affliction abounds, love promises to abound all the more."

Notes from the Studio

This is where I am spending my days...

We're in the middle of a recording project right now (last week it was Christmas concert prep!), so--in spite of my expressed intention to post occasionally over these weeks, I haven't had much time for much of anything online. I keep the phone out of the studio, not entirely trusting that "do not disturb" setting. (All we need is a rogue "bzzz" as we aim for that one delicate note...)

Me, aiming a note at Sr Julia.

In preparing for our concerts, Sister Margaret Timothy also created an Amazon "wish list" of concert supplies. We go through a lot of batteries and gaffer tape in a concert season and "Concert Angels" have already begun helping us stock up! (For some bizarre reason, you have to be logged in to Amazon to see the list, though.)

I saw that the US bishops are calling for a special collection on Sunday to help with the Louisiana recovery.  While I was on retreat, the flood waters found their way into my youngest sister's house. The flooding in her neighborhood was not catastrophic (only three feet of water overall, and about 6 inches in my sister's house), but (as with Hurricane Katrina) that still requires pulling up floors, tossing upholstery and other furnishings that bathed in that muddy stew and cutting out drywall up to three feet past the flood line. For the first few nights, my sister and her husband waded through a hip-deep lake of flood water to a hotel about a mile from their house (where luckier locals delivered gumbo and barbecue for the flood victims) and are now in a rental. (To give you a hint of what things are like, just yesterday we siblings learned that one of my sister's cats is suffering from stress-related cystitis.) People in the flood zones have not only lost their homes (or the use of them): compounding the loss is the fact that local businesses were damaged or destroyed too, putting many flood victims out of work. Sis is a social worker. She has plenty of work these days, processing food stamp requests for thousands more households than the state could have anticipated.

And in our studio, we keep singing Christmas songs. We added a prayer for peace to our Christmas lineup this year, strongly suspecting that by the first week of December people will be feeling that need for "peace that surpasses understanding." (Yesterday's news about the murder of two religious sisters in Mississippi only confirms the need for an unceasing prayer for peace.) Please join us in that prayer.

Terrorism and Communications: An Invitation to Pauline Reparation

This Saturday we celebrate the 102nd anniversary of the Founding of the Pauline Family. It's always a significant day for us, and this year our Superior General has invited us to make it even more deeply significant. 
As Paulines, we not only "use" communications technologies, we are called to consecrate the world of communications, and to offer reparation for the sins that are committed because of the misuse of communications. It is easy to think of the more explicit ways in which human dignity is threatened or undermined through exploitative media. But in her letter, Sister Anna Maria reminded us that " Experts have said that 'a specific feature of terrorism is that it is a communications phenomenon'."
Somehow that reality never hit me in my Pauline gut before. The ideological corruption of  minds and the physical destruction of lives, property and social structures that we have witnessed in an increasing number of events this year call for a supernatural intervention. We are called to make specific reparation for communications that (in the words of a Pauline prayer) "warp the minds, the hearts and the activities of men and women," as well as for all the death, destruction and displacement that has been "spread throughout the world by the misuse of the media."

I am sharing a part of our Superior General's anniversary letter in order to invite you to share this August 20 day of prayer with us:

....it seems that in these days more and more space is being given to every kind of violence, to frequent and sudden terrorist attacks, to the mass migration of peoples: phenomena to which we cannot and must not remain indifferent…. It is truly a challenging time–one that can be compared to the period of “serious upheaval” (Alberione's memoirs) during which, with extraordinary faith, our Founder laid the foundations for what would become the Pauline Family. The date was August 1914, the eve of a horrendous world war.

But for the Pauline Congregations, tragic moments such as this have also been occasions for growth in faith, in reciprocal communion, in a spirit of atonement, in a more conscious apostolic participation “in the many sufferings of the world” (Mother Thecla).

Today too, the response to the darkness that surrounds us is faith and a reinvigorated witness to communion. Let us ask ourselves: “How can we, all together, try to conquer evil with good? How can we make our voice heard in this time in which millions of our brothers and sisters are suffering?” The Pope reminded us that “our response to a world at war has a name: its name is fraternity, its name is brotherhood, its name is communion, its name is family.”

 We have a tremendous responsibility to pray that communications will offer people increased opportunities to meet one another and manifest solidarity in our divided and war-torn world. And since our 230 communities extend from the Far East to the Far West, from Australia and Papua New Guinea to Hawaii, we are assured of 24 hours of uninterrupted prayer before Jesus in the Eucharist. Let us spend the day in active and heartfelt mercy toward one another, putting into practice the invitation of the Apostle Paul:

“Let no offensive talk pass your lips, only what is good and helpful to the occasion, so that it brings a blessing to those who hear it. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, for that Spirit is the seal with which you were marked for the day of final liberation. Have done with all spite and bad temper, with rage, insults and slander, with evil of any kind. Be generous to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:29ff.).

Greetings before I go into the Silence

I've been at our retreat house (between historic Lexington and Concord) for almost a week now, not for retreat but for our annual updating session. Retreat begins tonight and with it eight days of silence (including Internet silence--which may be why our Wi-Fi is not working?). Feel free to send me your prayer intentions before 7:30 Eastern time. (Use the comment feature, but indicate whether you want them posted everyone else to see and pray for, or if you mean them for my eyes only.)

Today was more than a clean-the-retreat-house day for us, though it was that, too: at Mass this morning on the Feast of the Transfuguration six of our junior sisters renewed their vows (the seventh had renewed her vows in January). I was really glad to be able to witness that sign of blessing, and to hear six times "I vow to live chaste, poor and obedient...I trust in the prayers of the sisters of the congregation." (There would be photos except for that Wi-Fi situation. Check my Twitter posts from this morning for a few scene!)

I hope you will pray for these young women, too, as they (and our novices, as well) make their annual retreat. (If you would, spare a prayer for the Nunblogger!)

Summer Reading: Avenue of Spies

In keeping with my summer reading theme (World War II non-fiction), I accepted a review copy of Alex Kershaw's book, subtitled "A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family's Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris."

The subtitle alone reminded me that almost none of the World War II history I have read has been centered on France. I have read about the Russian Jewish resistance, the efforts of Germans to overthrow the Third Reich from the inside, the Norwegian resistance and the squads of double agents who sent Nazi secrets to England on a regular basis, in addition to books about ordinary people caught in or delivered from the Nazi scourge (The Zookeeper's Wife and The Nazi Officer's Wife are among the more recent titles in this vein that I have read). Of course, that's without mentioning (again!) all the books that look at specifically Catholic efforts at rescue and subterfuge. In all those books, the only glimpses of wartime France came through the English double agents. I have read nothing about the French themselves.

Even this book is not so much about the French, as it is about one family: an American surgeon, his Swiss-born wife and their only child. Approached by members of the French resistance, the couple agreed to turn their house on Paris' elegant Avenue Foch (the "Avenue" of the title whose mansions had almost all been requisitioned for the Germans' operations ) into a communications hub.

Actually, the family's quiet rebellion against the newly-arrived occupiers had already begun in the American Hospital in Paris. Before the US entered the war, the American Hospital was neutral territory, and friends in diplomatic circles kept the Germans from taking it over. Dr. Sumner Jackson worked long hours in surgery, trying to save the life and limbs of Allied POWs from a nearby camp. To the extent possible, he not only healed their wounds, but got them out of France entirely. (In some cases, the soldier's "death certificate" was delivered to the camp in lieu of his strangely vibrant corpse, which was already far from Paris...)

War was not new to Dr Jackson. He had been a volunteer in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I (defying US neutrality even then), a strange destiny for a man who had been raised in poverty in the back woods of Maine, and who had worked his way through medical school on his own. His wife "Toquette" could not bear living in the States, and so they had moved to France where her family had property and connections and Dr. Jackson's private practice catered to the "stars" of high society (many of whom gracefully transitioned into Nazi collaborators when the City of Lights fell so quietly that summer of 1940).

Perhaps one reason I have read so little about the French resistance is because it was so effectively dismantled by the Gestapo. Whereas all the double agents in the employ of England and Germany seem to have been working for the Allies, among the French it was not so. The Gestapo was able to monitor a great deal of resistance communications, even using French radio codes to summon unsuspecting agents from England to France, where they were arrested, tortured for yet more information and executed. (One of the most remarkable of the French agents who was betrayed into German hands was an unbreakable woman whose last, defiant word was "Liberté.")

It was the German's penetration of resistance communication (and the inexplicable failure of the Jackson's group to assign them an alias) that led to the entire Jackson family's capture. Toquette ended up in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, from which she was eventually transported to freedom in Sweden; her husband and son were interned together in Neuengamme. After Hitler's death, the men of Neuengamme were loaded onto prison ships, bait for incoming British bombers. Philip Jackson, age 17, was one of the few to survive and became the source of much of the information in the book (with 41 pages of end notes that are not to be missed and an index 14 pages long).

I would not say that Avenue of Spies was a page-turner in the same way as, say Church of Spies (do I sense a trend in those titles?), but it definitely kept my interest and gave me a beginner's sense of what happened in and with France as the Nazis swept through.

The author goes nowhere near this final matter, but I cannot help but suspect that part of France's embarrassingly tepid response to Nazi activity is in part the result of the French Revolution and the remaking of France ("the eldest daughter of the Church") into a rigorously secular nation and society.
The Reign of Terror had efficiently dismantled the religious houses and institutions that in other nations served as safe houses for the rescue of Jews and conduits of clandestine communication.


Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a free review copy of the book mentioned above with the expectation that I would mention it on my blog. I am committed to giving as honest a review as possible as part of my community's mission of putting media at the service of the truth. In addition, some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”