Getting ready to go

It has been an intensely busy summer, and today , with the weather in Boston already hinting at Autumn, I have only four days left before departing for Rome for a biblical 40 days. My work there will be to serve as one of two English language interpreters (Sr Julia is the other) for a month-long international meeting of the Daughters of St Paul. Superiors and elected delegates from every part of the world will come together to elect our new Superior General and her council, and to establish the priority areas for our life and mission for the next six years. When I was first asked to perform this service, I reminded the provincial that while I can translate from Italian into English pretty well in real time, my spoken Italian is execrable. Functional, but "cave man Italian" nonetheless. I was still asked to go. (Good for humility!)

Packing has been going on a little bit at a time since I got back from my annual retreat. That is because I have also been involved full-time in the music apostolate during that same time. We learned and recorded several songs for a new Christmas concert CD and are now preparing for the concert itself, doing a kind of rough outline of the program and staging. Trying to follow Sr Nancy and Sr Tracey as they describe the pattern of steps and hand motions is good for warding off dementia, they tell me. It is certainly good for humility!

I also started facial neuromuscular retraining in mid-July, to try to gain more control of the left side of my face after an attack of shingles left the nerves to regrow in a weird tangle that is good for...humility. (Are you beginning to sense a pattern here? Because I sure am!!!)

Anyway, one thing for you to look for on the new Christmas CD is a song that will be "premiered" at our concerts.  Listen along with the sisters in the control room to one of the "takes" of a piece of this new song. (This is a very rough recording! It took us a while to get this very lovely song right.)

 

Mary Had a Son was written by Randy Cox, the music director who first heard our music playing in the gift shop at Gethesemane Abbey. He felt inspired to ask if there was a way he could work with us, just as we were praying for someone who could help us bring our music to a new level. Randy has helped us connect with a phenomenal arranger who has crafted settings made for our voices (not just generic "women's voices," but our own, having listened to our recordings to get a sense of our range and style). This has made it so much easier for us to sing, and made recording faster, too! Anyway, this beautiful new Christmas meditation which will be inaugurated this season was written by Randy Cox with music by Phillip Keveren, and is dedicated to the Daughters of St Paul. We think that is a first, too.

Speaking of firsts, this year we will offer our first-ever concert in Orange County, CA and our first concert in Mascoutah, IL (Belleville diocese, within driving distance of much of Illinois and Indiana).

Please look at the concert venues and dates and see if there's a way you can make a family event out of one of our Pauline Christmas concerts this year!

I hope to have a moment or two while in Italy to update you on things and share a few pictures... Two of us have permission for a quick trip to Florence (we'll be accompanied by an American sister who is stationed in Rome, and with whom I shared a year of novitiate). Then, after the mid-point of the meeting, we are promised a kind of field trip to a to-be-announced Marian shrine. (I'm hoping it will be a new-to-me shrine of the Blessed Mother!)

And speaking of Our Lady, today we welcomed the Pilgrim Virgin, not of Fatima, but of Aparecida (the Patroness of Brazil). This tiny statue (about 20" high) is a replica of the one in the national shrine, and usually visits the parishes of Brazil. She is truly a pilgrim, because some of those parishes are quite remote. Even now when she goes home to visit (every other year) it takes our Sister Liria three days to get to her parents' house from the nearest city. (She grew up without Sunday Mass: a priest would make the rounds of the villages, coming to her farming community every two months or so. The leading families would simply take turns hosting prayers on Sunday so that the Lord's Day was duly observed and his Word received with reverence.)

Anyway, for the next two months, Our Lady of Aparecida will be visiting the Brazilian immigrants in North America, a good many of whom are in New England, and she started her visit in our home!

TOB: As Timely as Ever

In the week since I've been back from the retreat house (and before I go back again, next time for my actual retreat), Theology of the Body issues have been back in the news.

Marc Chagall, The Four Seasons, det. (Chicago)

There was a veritable storm on #CatholicTwitter over changes at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Rome, which as of 2017 is being completely restructured (under a Motu Proprio from Pope Francis). In fact, the Institute founded by Pope John Paul has been dissolved, and a new one with a slightly broader name and mission (John Paul II Theological Institute for Matrimonial and Family Science) has been established in its place. Students who were already enrolled in studies will be able to finish their degrees according to the former program ("if they wish"!), keeping their same doctoral advisors.

At this stage, all of the earlier Institute's professors have been terminated, a few positions and one major course area eliminated, and there is general consternation over the future of the Institute. Those changes will obviously also eventually affect the Institute's branches in other parts of the world (including the US). Current and prospective students are in dismay. Since very little was coming from the official media office (at least in English), this left a lot of room for speculation, most of it on the negative side. I must confess that the response from the official media office in answer to the criticisms on social media did not really encourage my confidence, but it has increased my prayers. In the end, God is always in charge, no matter the human machinations.

Then there was the story of the baby on the doorstep. Ten days ago, a Florida man answered a knock at the door, and found the police there with a newborn baby. The infant had been left on the doormat of his apartment. A note with the child gave the time and place of birth (5:45 pm, in the bathroom) and asked that the baby be taken to the hospital, a safe haven. (Unfortunately this was not done, since neighbors had heard the baby crying and called 911 earlier.)

That mother, a victim of domestic violence, gave birth alone and unaided.  Alone and unaided, still under threat of unspeakable violence, she tenderly washed her baby and fed him, swaddled him in a t-shirt, and when the coast was clear, brought him to the attention of a neighbor she hoped she could trust with the baby's life. The note explained that the father "is a dangerous man" who "tried to kill us both," and asked that everything be kept secret.

And then there is the story of the sixth wife of the fabulously wealthy Emir of Dubai. According to yesterday's news, she asked a British court that a "forced marriage protection order" be applied to one of her two children, and that both children be made "wards of the court."

Pope John Paul said over thirty years ago: Woman is "the master of her own mystery" [TOB 110:7-9].

With the Bible, Pope John Paul insists that "The 'language of the body' reread in the truth goes hand in hand with the discovery of the inner inviolability of the person." This is precisely what we see those two women in the news intuitively and so rightly defending. The Pope goes on: "When the bride [in the Song of Songs] says, 'My beloved is mine,' she means at the same time, 'It is he to whom I entrust myself'... The freedom of the gift is the response to the deep consciousness of the gift expressed in the bridegroom's words" which had acknowledged her self-possession: "A garden closed, you are, my sister, my bride; a garden closed, a fountain sealed" (Songs 4:21). "One can say that both metaphors express the whole dignity of the woman, who, as a spiritual subject, possesses herself and can decide not only the metaphysical depth, but also the essential truth and authenticity of the gift of self that tends toward the union about which Genesis speak" [TOB 110:4].

Clearly, as in the two women's stories, this is not the way the world actually is. But the Pope's words are more than wishful thinking or the theme of the next Disney princess story. According to Pope John Paul, who clearly remembered the scores of couples who had bared their souls to him across the decades, this is the way we were made: this is God's real plan for us. To the extent that we live according to it, the family and society flourish. The farther we depart from it, the more the family (and each member of it) suffers.



How can we help society awaken from its delusions about atomized, individualistic freedom (apart from the "sincere gift of self" that is the secret of human fulfillment) and from the loss of a sense of the reality of the body?