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March 8, 2016 by Praxis

Reflection on Ferguson

by Katharin Blodgett

I grew up in a pretty diverse area in an Indianapolis suburb. But it wasn’t until I was 24 years old that I actually started grasping the truth, history, and scope of everything that had happened and was still happening in 2015. I worked for a summer with a racially diverse staff in racially diverse areas, including St. Louis, MO. But man I had so much to learn and listen to and experience. I remember seeing name after name of young black men who were killed by police brutality show up on the news; I was disgusted with it all. No longer could I think of that community as “other” and that the things happening were “their fault.” I was coming to understand systemic racism, white privilege, and how the definition of racism I’d been taught to understand all throughout school didn’t even touch the evil that racism really is. As long as I was nice and respectful of everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, racism didn’t exist and we were in a post­racial America, right?

I went through the feelings of white ­guilt. I wrestled with my privilege and had to start really looking at race in America and in my life. I naively thought the only difference between blacks and whites was our skin color. How simplistic of me. Thankfully I had friends this summer who were patient and open with me. So now, fast­forward to our retreat last week to Ferguson. It was amazing to be back in St. Louis, a place I’d spent 4 weeks in this past summer. The whole weekend was a great experience, but there are a few moments that really stuck out to me. We were able to attend a service at St. John’s Church (the Beloved Community), a church that is racially diverse, and seeks to care for the north side of St. Louis because they know their future depends on that community. There was a guest speaker, Rahiel Tesfamariam, who spoke a wonderful sermon about seeking validation from the right place, and continuing a fight for justice. This was an amazing sermon about racial justice and appropriation and captivity and intimacy. Towards the end of the sermon, she was talking to her black brothers and sisters. But then, she talked to her white brothers and sisters. It was actually refreshing to me, that she called me out by skin color, she recognized it and didn’t ignore it, and let me know that THIS IS MY FIGHT TOO. And it made me think of all the times I decided to ignore skin color, because it was easier, but when really I was missing an opportunity to recognize the purpose and value and passion in each of us.

Another part of her sermon that really stuck with me was when she said something along the lines that “so often we lose the capacity to see the world as God sees the world.” I mean, we’re living in Post­Racial America after all, right?! But I’ve lately been struck by how much of God’s creativity and beauty and individuality we’re missing out on when we say that. For me specifically, a blonde­ haired white 25 year old, I know that my life is so much richer having friends who are from different cultures than me. I’m not saying that we all need to have our certain “token” friends. Because that’s a whole other issue in itself. But I do believe that God created us all how we are. And that every body has value, regardless of skin color. We can learn so much from each other and, as iron sharpens iron, really mold each other. We are doing each other and our communities a disservice when we don’t recognize those differences, understand where we differ, but more importantly see how we are so much more similar than we think, and are in this fight for justice together.

So for me, I know some practical steps I took at the beginning of my journey and I’m still taking now are reading and educating myself about my privilege. About systemic racism. Listening to other people. Shutting my mouth because a lot of times, it’s the better thing to do. I think we are a people who like to ignore what makes us uncomfortable. But it’s great, because the more you read and learn and meet more people, the less uncomfortable you’ll get and the more fired up and passionate you’ll get about everyone’s value.

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March 1, 2016 by Praxis

Sing to the Lord a New Song! A Reflection on the Province V Gathering in Chicago

by Charlie Meszaros
Recently, I attended the Prov V Young Adult Retreat in Chicago as both a former and potential future college student, and as a friend of Dr. Bob Padberg and Dr. Ellen O’Shaugnessy.  The theme was “Sing to the Lord a New Song”, something that very much interested me, as I am somewhat of an aspiring musician who is also very spiritual (I am what some call a “seeker”- one who follows no organized religion, but believes in God).  Having attended the retreat last year (when the theme was improvisational comedy), and gotten quite a bit out of it (it was a big part of my decision to move from Columbus, OH to the Chicago, IL area), I was sure that this would be quite a wonderful experience for me, and I was right.  However, what I didn’t know was that I would feel even more spiritually and personally fulfilled than I did on last year’s retreat.
To start off, I was glad to see a lot of the same people at this year’s retreat that I saw at last year’s, including a Lutheran clergyman named Ben Adams, with whom I talked a lot at both retreats and with whom I have a great deal in common.  As soon as he saw me this year he said “I remember you from last year!”, and we began talking about what had transpired since we last spoke, including my move to the Chicago area.  Now that I have moved here, I plan on attending some of Ben’s services at Grace Place Church whenever I am available.  I also bonded with many of the students at the retreat, hanging out with them after each day’s events were finished.  Such camaraderie has contributed greatly to my spiritual and personal well being, especially as I have felt a bit lost in the past couple of weeks (I’ve been having issues relating to my job and a feeling that I lack a sense of community).
And then, there was the musical aspect of the retreat.  As I said, I am somewhat of an aspiring musician, so it was incredibly rewarding to be able to bring my guitar and play along with a big group of people (I even received compliments on my musical ability).  And then, to be able to sing and develop my voice in a non-judgmental choir-like setting was lovely.  I felt fulfilled to the point where I am considering joining a church choir.  And then, I was given the opportunity to find a music event in the area to attend.  I found a venue called Reggie’s just south of where the retreat was.  I saw four very talented local underground bands there, and this show affirmed my desire to be a musician.
I am absolutely planning on attending next year’s retreat (potentially as a student- I am considering enrolling at a community college in the fall).  I trust it will be as rewarding as the last two were.
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Sunday morning Eucharist at the Provincial Gathering.  Participants sing paperless music taught by members of Music that Makes Community.

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February 25, 2016 by Praxis

There has to be a Better Way

by Katie Guy

Our team from urban Columbus Ohio arrived in Dilley and made several turns down dusty roads and into the ranch that the CARA staff lives and works out of when they are not working out of the visitation trailer of the Dilley Detention Center.  It became clear very quickly that this was a grass roots initiative that was doing some important work that not enough people know about.  The CARA staff was able to cram masses of information into our heads in a 3 hour time span that would allow us to legally assist the women and children that are detained in the Dilley Detention Center.

These women are from Central American and have crossed the Mexican border seeking asylum and are now being detained in Dilley, Texas (population about 4,000) where there is no legal assistance available.  In response to the huge need the CARA Project has a team of advocates and lawyers that live full time in Dilley and handle the cases that come through the detention center.  They also take all the help they can get from volunteers like our team.  A large part of what we did is prepare the women for their Credible Fear Interview, the interview that decides whether they can stay in the US or if they are deported back to their home country.  If they are deported, they will most likely be returned to a country that is run by gangs.

All of the women that we encountered had horrible and heroic stories.  They faced abuse from their partners, or gangs in their neighborhood that have driven them to leave their families and their home country.  These are not women that are here in the United States to ‘take our jobs’.  They are here running from a life that is full of fear and by no fault of their own.  I found it most frustrating that not all the women that were living in fear had a case to receive asylum.  One women in particular fled because she was fearful that her son would get recruited into the gangs.  Her son went to a school where he was guaranteed to join the gang if he attended, but his mother kept him out for fear of the gangs.  She was proactive and fled before her son had the chance to be recruited.  Because her family was not threatened personally, her case was weak.   I find it quite appalling that a women that was solely looking out for her family is not able seek asylum because she didn’t allow anything to happen to her son.  Essentially, for any women to have a case they have to have to let a severe trauma happen to them or their child.  I keep telling myself that there has to be a better way.  Join me in asking these questions of ourselves and of our law makers.

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February 15, 2016 by Praxis

Ashes to Go at Good Shepherd, Athens

by Deborah Woolsey

It was a great experience this year.  Katharin Foster joined us for a little while and Elizabeth Thompson stayed with me the whole time and gave out hot apple cider. We were able to engage more people than last year despite incredibly cold temperatures. My favorite part was when someone stopped, looked me in the eye and asked me what Ash Wednesday is. Describing the day and it’s meaning when I felt pressure to do so quickly because of cold (there were a few times I couldn’t feel my face) and time ( people were on their way to class etc) as well as accurately and still be theologically sound all in a way that anyone could understand was an enjoyable challenge. The majority of the people who asked (I’d say there must have been around 6 people who asked) chose to receive the ashes after I explained it. We also had a few who were grateful for the reminder that it was Ash Wednesday and even walked out of their way to receive ashes. Two people asked if it was okay to receive ashes if they were not Episcopalian. We found out there was a great deal if conversation about Ash Wednesday at Free Lunch.  A few who had questions from that conversation came back outside to ask us.

My favorite encounter was after a student gratefully received ashes.  He turned and started walking toward a group of students he knew and one person in the group yelled out to him: “What the hell is on your face!?” He grinned and said, “Ashes, it’s Ash Wednesday.” Then she asked him what that was.  He explained it, and she said, “That’s cool,” and came and asked to receive ashes herself. Definitely one of the best parts of the day for me.

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January 21, 2016 by Praxis

“What we are sculpting is ourselves” – Duane McDiarmid on Art & Action

Start with two images, both from the Vietnam War, both famous. One is an Eddie Adams photo of a South Vietnamese police chief shooting a man in the head. The other is Malcolm Browne’s photo of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire to protest the war. For Ohio University art professor Duane McDiarmid, these two photos became symbolic of two different approaches to action. Duane believes that life is defined by action, and that there are always ramifications for the actions that people take. During our February luncheon, he told the Ministerium that art is the action of the artist, and not only those discreet actions that take place in either the studio or gallery. Instead, the art is found in any action that an artist takes. For Duane, this means that no action can go unexamined, and surety is always problematic. The South Vietnamese police chief is very certain of his point of view, and acts on that certainty. The Buddhist monk understands that all action exerts a price, and he’s awesomely and terrifyingly willing to feel the effects of his activities on his own body. Duane aligns himself with the monk. He wants to acknowledge the effects of his artistic actions on his own person, even as he hopes that they will have effects that reverberate beyond his personhood.

I first met Duane when some of his pieces were featured as part of a social practice art show at the EASE Gallery. He told me about his “Mismatched Drapes Project,” which began during a long drive from Athens to Santa Fe. Feeling sleepy, he pulled into an empty lot and fell asleep in his car. When he woke in the morning, he found that he was parked outside of an abandoned church, and went in to explore. He discovered graffiti and debris left by a motorcycle gang that was using the church as a headquarters. He was curious to find himself judging the gang, people he’d never met and knew nothing about, beyond the fact that they littered drug paraphernalia about on the floor and defecated on the carpet. Noticing some old orange velvet curtains that were torn down from the wall, he acted on an impulse and took one. Then he got back in his car and resumed his drive to Sante Fe, thinking about what he’d done and why he’d done it.

A little ways down the road, he passed an old abandoned hotel, and decided to stop and check that out, as well. He found that it was being used by vagrants and by gay men who were seeking anonymous sex. Again, he found himself facing his own judgement of these men, and again he discovered a found object, in this case a pornographic magazine, that he took without really knowing why. Back in the car, he thought about judgement, and proprietorship, and the way that groups work. Who really had ownership of the abandoned church and the hotel? Weren’t the people who were actually using the spaces the true proprietors? Could he think of the groups that were inhabiting these places as true communities? And which of the communities that he belonged to had taught him to look down on and exclude these people?

It was from these experiences and thoughts that the Mismatched Drapes Project was born. Arriving in Santa Fe, Duane decided that he would make a new curtain for the biker gang, and a quilt for the men in the hotel. He wanted these objects to refer back to the original proprietors (the church that hung the drapes, the hotel when it was functioning) and to speak to the current proprietors. When he delivered these two pieces of art, he did so at a time when no one was in the spaces, and with the understanding that he was truly giving them away. He could have no further investment in where they went or what people did with them. He wanted the arrival of these objects in the church and the hotel to be seen as a mystery, even as a miracle, to the people who would receive them. And he designed private rituals that he enacted as he was giving the art objects away. His intention was to join these communities of bikers and gay men without ever meeting them. Join them through giving as an act of communion.
Duane told us over lunch that one of the ancient roles of art is “to displace trouble, so that you can look at it and heal it.” One of the troubles that he’s trying to displace is the kind of deep prejudice we experience when encountering the truly other. Later, he found an abandoned indian trading post, and found himself engaging in a project that displaced a different but similar trouble, that of the unjust trade relationships that led to the subjugation of Native American peoples. As he worked on turning a half desiccated God’s Eye that he found in the ruins into a blanket that he would return to the site, he thought about his own participation in these trade relationships, and that the very act of taking an object from a place and making an object to replace it involved him in a kind of trade. He realized that there is a very thin line between participation and manipulation.

As he talked to us, it became clear that his mind is always dwelling on the ramifications and implications of the actions that he takes. It’s a very full, and also a sometimes exhausting, way to live one’s life. It’s also, in essence, a spiritual way of living, as self awareness and examination of motivations are a deep part of any authentic spirituality. Duane tells his sculpture students that “what we are sculpting is ourselves.” In the end, that’s true of all of us, and the tools Duane uses – introspection, self-awareness, creativity – are the tools of the Buddhist monk and the saint.

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January 6, 2016 by Praxis

Communities of Discovery

What Improv taught us about the spiritual life while we were at the Young Adult Retreat

improv retreat2

“Isn’t improv hard?” My wife asked me at breakfast, after I’d been waxing poetic about the 2015 Young Adult retreat, where my friends Barbara Allen and Bill Sabo led us in exploring the spirituality of improvisation.

“Not really,” I said, and then I thought about it. “I suppose it is hard, but in the way that yoga is hard, or powerful prayer is hard. You start with really simple things and build on them, to the point that after an hour, or in the case of the improv retreat, six hours, you’re doing and feeling things that you couldn’t right at the beginning.” I sipped my coffee and thought about how skillfully Bill and Barbara had done this, how they’d patiently built from nothing to the point where, at the end, people who had been shy and felt awkward at first were doing wonderful two person scenes. And I realized that they’d gotten us there by inviting us to be vulnerable, and creating a community of safety and mutual regard. How had they done this?

Mark Twain famously said that a joke is like a frog. You can dissect it, but first you have to kill it. So it’s with some trepidation that I choose to describe Barbara and Bill’s method and speculate on its meaning for Christian community. A two person scene usually starts with the improvisers asking for a setting or a relationship, or for some other prompt that will give them a context. In good improv fashion, I should give you the context of the retreat. We were at the Procter Center, right before Christmas. The sets of relationships were varied, or one might say hybrid. The Young Adult retreat started as a kind of reunion for Procter camp counsellors, but in recent years has expanded to include intentional communities, campus ministries, and any young adult who finds the theme intriguing and chooses to join us. So when we gathered on Friday night there were a lot of hugs and old friendships resumed, and a few clumps of people who live in community together but were strangers to everyone else.

Jane Gerdsen designed our opening worship, which involved candles and singing and prayers. Bill and Barbara said that it was the best introduction to an improv retreat they’d ever seen, so hooray for Jane! After we worshipped, Barbara and Bill began the work of knitting us together as a community by introducing us to the Zulu greeting, “I see you, you are here.” It was a call to recognizing one’s own presence in the room and inviting the other person to be fully present as well. Having planted this idea in our heads, Barbara introduced us to a game that, miraculously, got all forty of us to know each other’s names within the space of about twenty minutes. Then, in a huge circle, we played “Pass the Clap,” a famous improv game that consists of nothing but looking at the person next to you and trying to clap at exactly the same moment. The clap moved around the circle, all the others watching intently as each pair in turn tried to synchronize their clapping, looking into each other’s eyes, syncing themselves to each other. This, and a few other games, emphasized the deep need for attentiveness and awareness in improv work. Through these exercises, such work becomes contemplative, and participants are invited to live within the present moment without worrying about the past or planning for the future.

It was also an opportunity for Bill to teach us about discovery. There is an assumption that improv, and creative endeavor in general, is about invention – we prove how smart we are by inventing something new to do, think, or make. But improv posits that true creativity is based in discovery – finding out, through close attention, what the world is like, who another person is, what one’s own experience is all about. For Christians, who believe in God’s creation and gifts of grace, an attitude that’s open to discovery should be assumed. It isn’t, often, because our lives outside the church don’t reward it, and often our faith communities reflect the larger society’s emphasis on dominance and individualism. But what if we could assume that everything is a gift to us – each encounter, each observation, each emotion we feel, each environment we find ourselves in? Writing this at Christmas time, I can’t help but think of the nativity story, which is a narrative of discovery. No one says no to the miraculous truths that they’re discovering. Mary doesn’t say, “I can’t give birth to the savior of the world, because I didn’t think to do so all on my own,” the shepherds don’t say “angels can’t speak to us because we’re too unimportant,” the magi don’t say “a king can’t be hanging out in a stable.” All of them discover new truths about the world and God, and agree to that discovery.

We ended the evening by playing an amazing game called “three things.” The principle is simple. One person starts out as an object, animate or otherwise, a giraffe, for example. Another person gets up and says “I’m the giraffe’s keeper.” A third person gets up and says, “I’m the keeper’s secret desire to work with apes.” The audience then shouts out which of these three things should be kept to start the next scene with. “Keep the desire to work with apes!” That person stays while the other two sit down, and a new person gets up and says, “I’m a lonely ape who needs a friend,” and a third gets up and says “I’m a banana that’s hoping not to get eaten.” And so on. As we played this, we reached the point in the retreat when people really started laughing, when you could feel a sense of rising joy in the community. There was an understanding that any idea would do, that no one would be criticized for their choices, that supportive laughter was the norm.

The next morning, after Holy Communion, we returned to circle games, playing the scatologically named “Where Have My Fingers Been?” As we went around the circle, each person held up a finger as the person next to them did likewise, and initiated a brief scene based on a location prompt. Maybe someone would tell them “you’re in a zoo!” The first person would waggle a finger like it was a character and say, “I’m a giraffe.” The second would waggle a finger in response and say “I miss my zoo keeper.” The first person would complete the scene with one more line, “The apes have it lucky.” It seems easy on paper, but when the scene came around it was easy to freeze, trying to think of something clever or funny to say. In improv this is called “getting in your head.” It’s a response based in fear, in worry over acceptance, sometimes in a competitive desire to dominate others and prove yourself to be the best. Games like “Where Have My Fingers Been” are designed to get you out of your head, away from the worries over acceptance or criticism and purely invested in the moment you’re inhabiting. This is a very difficult thing to learn how to do, and the next exercises reenforced the lesson as we did more very brief scenes, initiating dialog and responding to the initiation.

In some ways, this process of remaining open to discovery even as we initiate ideas or respond to other people’s ideas is very like the concept of nepsis in the contemplative tradition. Nepsis can best be described as “the mind watching the mind.” It corresponds to Jesus’s statement in Mark 7:15 that “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” When I let my mind watch my mind, I become aware of all of the criticism, the competitiveness, the fears and anxieties that shape my thoughts on an almost moment to moment basis. It is those things that make it hard for me to be authentic in community, to open myself up and be truly vulnerable to others. One of the benefits of contemplative prayer is that it makes one aware of these thoughts, and then offers an invitation to let them go, to move beyond them and rest solely in God. Oddly, to me this is also one of the benefits of a game like “Where Have My Fingers Been?” It teaches us that moment to moment thoughts aren’t really that important, that they can be caught and released, and that there is always someone there to accept them without judgement.

And after practicing this a number of times, we found ourselves truly playing together, creating two person scenes of great joy and vitality. By Saturday afternoon, we had become a community, and the context had changed. We were no longer a reunion, or a conglomerate of different ministries and houses. We were a church. This became powerfully apparent at the very end of the retreat. Aaron Wright and Jane asked us to offer each other improv blessings. We broke into groups of three, and each person was blessed by the other two, prayed over, told what the others appreciated about them. I tear up just thinking about it. And I know, now, that true community comes into being when people let go of their internal editors, and even more importantly, their internal critics, when they don’t try to control the world but open themselves up to discovering it, when they find the freedom to play, and when they choose to bless the specificity of each other’s being. Community can’t be created, it can only be discovered.

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December 15, 2015 by Praxis

How do we develop experience-rich language?

Language can open the world to us. This is always true of descriptive language – by describing people and things we come to know them better. But it’s also true of language that isn’t trying to describe, but to convey a meaning or assert an opinion. Something about the world and our relationship to it is expressed in the way we say things, and something about ourselves is revealed in the words that we choose. This became apparent to Erin McGraw as she thought about the way that people express themselves in cyberspace. Often there is a gleeful meanness in the ways that people talk to each other while online, but its not hard to discover deep insecurities at the base of this meanness. People use phrases like “If you’re a student of history, as I am,” to assert their superiority over whoever they’re arguing with, and tell each other that “you’re opinions are just stupid.” And anyone who tries to express a reasonable perspective in the midst of an internet debate will be attacked from both sides, because the dialog isn’t really about learning from each other, it’s about winning a kind of competition. To Erin, these conversations belong to first order imagination. They follow scripts and rest in cliches and are always obedient to a rhetoric of dominance. How, she wondered, could we move beyond such rhetoric to second order imagination, which challenges cliches and moves us to words and ideas that are clearer, more thoughtful, more original, and maybe even wise? How can we use language to open the whole world to us, instead of just the scared little corners we’d like to hide in?

Her answer is that we must relearn the art of revision. When she and I got together to plan her talk to the Ministerium, we knew that we’d want to ask our members to revise a piece of writing as an exercise in avoiding cliche. Erin generously decided that she’d create a piece for us to pull apart. She sent it to me in advance, and I laughed out loud when I read it. It was full of every cliche about suffering and providence that I could imagine, and reading it felt a little convicting, since I’ve heard, and maybe even spoken, some of the platitudes on offer while in worship.

During the meeting, we realized as we were revising Erin’s document that people of faith have to battle cliche on two levels. Being part of the world we live in, we’re immersed in the languages of society, the internet, politics, pop culture, etc. Being part of our faith communities, we’re immersed in the received languages of our traditions. Such language isn’t necessarily bad, but it can become so insular that it loses all ability to communicate beyond the doors of our churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. More, it can become shallow, not because the original ideas or formulations were shallow, but because we’ve repeated them so often that we’ve ceased to think about them. A piece of writing, Erin told us, is like a piece of clay. The more one works it, the more malleable it becomes. Revision allows us to sharpen ideas, or to shift them, to disrupt an old way of thinking and allow a new way of thinking in. It allows us to stop merely saying the things that sound good, and start saying the things we really mean. Solid and believable, she told us, is better than flashy. Deep considerations are better than empty ones.

She offered us some principles to guide revisions of our thoughts and statements. Revision, she said, requires patience. When revising, we should be wary of all-or-nothing statements, and entertain the possibility that different points of view might be valid. What we really want is dialog, and it’s hard to achieve this when we use a dominating rhetorical tone. We should keep in mind that cliches started as surprising and new formulations of ideas. They weren’t cliches when first uttered, and Erin pushed that idea to say that cliches were the very first things that human beings made. They were invitations to more creativity and a deeper pursuit of truth. Our problem is that we allowed them to become resting places.

In occurred to me, as she talked, that she was describing revision as a kind of spiritual discipline. One of our members, Michael Jupin, pointed out that the revision process challenges each of us to become more of a self. Cliches don’t differentiate us from the worlds that we inhabit. But to cultivate patience, hold ourselves open to mystery, and invite real relationship with a willingness to be vulnerable and, even, wrong, is to develop that deep humility that the mystics always describe as the key to knowing God. Something about the world and our relationship to it is expressed in the way we say things. Hopefully, when we move beyond cliches, we’ll find ourselves expressing our real beliefs and hopes as honestly as we can.

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December 2, 2015 by Jane Gerdsen

Dorothy Day and the Holiness of the Mundane by Alyssa Pasternak Post

As we enter Advent, I am reminded of Wheeling Jesuit University’s motto: Luceat Lux Vestra, or “Let your light shine” (cf. Matthew 5:16). In my youthful idealism I found inspiration in my alma mater’s motto and in those whose light shines so brightly. We tend to recognize them as saints, or holy people. So, with St. Ignatius I stood ready to be a contemplative-in-action, with one foot on the ground and one foot in the air, ready to go wherever there was greatest need, while Pedro Arrupe’s words of finding God and falling in love captured my heart and imagination. In concrete actions this led me to the School of Americas protest, to missions deep in Appalachia and in Haiti, and to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

Fast forward a little more than a decade to my present life as a spouse and a mother of young children, which feels quite different from those college and post-college days. I reinterpret now what it means to let my light shine. And I seek to recover the complex memory of those whose lives and testimonies were voices crying out in the desert, and who gave a substantial part of themselves to the raising of children.

Prayer with Holy Women

dorothydayOn retreat earlier this month with a few mothers of young children, I created a prayer space for a candlelit night prayer that included icons and images of holy women throughout Christian history who were also mothers. Let it be known that finding icons of virgins is way easier than finding icons of mamas! Yet several holy women emerged in my study and prayer, including Mary of Nazareth, Perpetua of Carthage and Emmelia of Caesarea from the early church, and Elizabeth Ann Seton, Zelie Martin and Dorothy Day from the last couple hundred of years. To this “great cloud of witnesses,” we added our personal photos of ourselves with our children, lit candles, and let our light shine among the chorus of saints throughout the ages.

While each of these holy women is amazing in her own right, the Catholic Worker Movement founder Dorothy Day, who died 35 years ago this past Sunday (just a few months after my birth), is one of my personal heroes. Like many holy people we remembered this November – including all Jesuit saints on November 5, Pedro Arrupe on November 14, and the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador on November 16 – I was introduced to Dorothy Day’s writing and life while in college at Wheeling Jesuit University. Her commitment to justice for the poor, her faith, her simplicity, and her intelligence have been a source of inspiration for many. Letting her light shine in such ways afforded her Pope Francis’ affirmation his recent address to the U.S. Congress.

Finding Consolation in the Musings of Dorothy Day

For me these days, however, I find great consolation in her life as a mother and grandmother, which I discovered in her musings about daily life on a visit to West Virginia to help her daughter Tamar with her young children in 1948.

Here’s her description of her normal day:

Sue is at the age when food goes in her ears, her hair, all over the floor. She will not be fed. Fortunately, there are the chickens to eat all that she tosses riotously around. Becky, aged two-and-a-half, is neat and tidy in her eating, but her toys, papers, books, anything she can lay her hands on is also flung here and there. My back aches with constant bending. We are trying to buy one of these wonderful dustpans with long handles.

Lunch next, and dishes and hanging up the wash, and today to the doctor, which meant a bath and all clean clothes for the children. Then on the way to town Becky got sick and vomited all over herself and me and the car, which means more washing and cleaning. She had insisted on helping with the bread-baking and eaten large hunks of whole-wheat dough, apples, topped by milk, potatoes, and baked cabbage for lunch.

Home just in time for supper, and more dishes and bottles and undressings and so on.

Not to speak of their innumerable rescues from imminent danger all through the day from the time they wake until the time they sleep.

How to lift the heart to God, our first beginning and last end, except to say with the soldier about to go into battle – “Lord, I’ll have no time to think of Thee but do Thou think of me.” Of course, there is grace at meals, a hasty grace, what with Sue trying to climb out of her high chair on the table. Becky used to fold her hands and look holy at the age of eighteen months, but now she does nothing. If you invite her participation, she says, “I won’t.” If you catch Sue in a quiet, un-hungry mood, she will be docile and fold her hands. But rarely. She is usually hungry, and when she starts to eat she starts to hum, which is thanks, too…

Meditations for women [and men], these notes should be called, jumping as I do from the profane to the sacred over and over. But then, living in the country, with little children, with growing things, one has the sacramental view of life. All things are God’s, and all are holy (On Pilgrimage 78-79, 110).

Sound familiar to anyone? Sweeping with those luxury long-handled brooms, wiping food out of kids’ hair, cleaning vomit out of cars, trying to model prayer. To me, this is messy light shining.

As I live in West Virginia and give myself to this space and time raising young children, I find consolation that Dorothy Day – the great Catholic Worker who received a papal shout out a couple of months ago – gave herself to the very mundane tasks of caring for a family. This space and time are God’s; this space and time are holy.

Advent is beginning. The darkness of night is winning. As we await the true Light, let us add our light in whatever context we find ourselves. Luceat Lux Vestra, Let your light shine.

This post was first published on the Ignatian Solidarity Network “Just Parenting blog” here and is reposted here with permission.  Alyssa Pasternak Post is a parishioner at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Marietta and a Praxis Communities collaborator.

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November 24, 2015 by Praxis

Living in Community at Confluence House

by Katie Guy

It has been a new experience to live with a group of people and to have the specific intentionality that we have living together.  At the beginning of our service year we came up with a Rule of Life that organized our intentions for the year.  I’ve always been someone that appreciated honesty from the beginning and no beating around the bush.  I loved that we were able to start our year together thinking about ways that we could grow and learn together.

Living together has also helped me to see how similar we are when we give each other the chance to get to know each other.  When we get down to the heart of it my roommates and I are all 20 somethings that are searching for more meaning, for that purpose and for that sense of belonging.  When I was going through my undergrad at Ohio State I was looking for purpose, but in a more specific way.  I was searching for my purpose through a job title, not through my relationship with God.

I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of different people over my time in Franklinton and what I have come to learn is that no matter where we come from we all face the same fundamental questions and longings.  Jerry that loves to walk, Bruce that hitchhiked a crossed America and Sharon who mows lawns in the neighborhood.  We are all children of God and we long to be in fellowship with Him, in whatever way that may look like.  For Jerry it may be sharing a walk and conversation with a friend.  Bruce seeks fellowship with people by his positivity and kind spirit.  Sharon shows her love for God’s children through giving what little she has and making sure everyone is taken care of.  I see God in each of these people whether they recognize that or not.  I’ve learned to find the consistency of God in the people around me when my own future feels so unsure.  That consistency brings me so much peace, comfort and strength to keep dreaming and to not give up on what God has for me and the people around me.

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November 7, 2015 by Karl Stevens

What does it mean to be wise in today’s world?

The night before, someone had asked me if I thought that life was primarily comedy or primarily tragedy. I said comedy, without really knowing why. Then, as sometimes happens in the most surprising way, I found myself sitting at our Ministerium lunch the very next day, listening as Rabbi Roger Klein supported my sense that life is more comic than sad. Rabbi Klein was talking about wisdom. He had just finished speaking about Richard Sewell’s book, The Vision of Tragedy, in which Sewell asserts that wisdom is a recognition of the tragedies and problems of life, with a corresponding refusal to avoid them, and, most importantly, refusal to submit to them. Now he was speaking about Socrates. Socratic wisdom, he told us, has two main aspects. The first is humility. The second is the sense that life is comedy.

Not, the Rabbi assured us, comedy in a “laugh out loud” mode, but comedy as an ordering principal. He described tragedy and comedy as two species from the same genus. Comedy reflects a fundamentally ordered universe. Tragedy reflects a fundamentally disordered universe. Tragedy reflects the unacceptable contradictions of life, comedy the acceptable contradictions of life. I’ve been taking improv classes for awhile now, and I instinctively understood what he meant. When an improv actor steps out onto the stage, she doesn’t know what prompts she’ll be given or what her scene partners will say or do. She steps out prepared to create a scene from whatever comes her way. She has dedicated herself to the task of finding order in the raw materials of words and emotions and movements, and when we find improv funny, it is not only because of the incidental jokes and ridiculous situations that arise. The true joy that we take in improv arises from the fact that we’re watching order take form out of chaos, and the form that order takes is surprising, sometimes even shocking, but also deeply reassuring, because we human beings can do this. We can, through the simplest actions, reflect a fundamentally ordered universe.

Before talking about Sewell, Rabbi Klein led us through an investigation of David Brooks’s thoughts on wisdom, and Robert Nozick’s. He described Brooks’s point of view as primarily theoretical, given that Brooks is more concerned with thinking through what wisdom is than what it does. There’s a need for the cultivation of factual information and knowledge as we grow to be wise, but also a powerful need for experience. Knowledge gives us the capacity to create and evaluate, but the cultivation of wisdom takes time – it emerges from experience, and, unlike knowledge, it can’t be taught or transferred simply from one person to another. Differing from Brooks, Nozick is more interested in the practical aspects of wisdom. It comes about when we make meaning out of the practical truths that we encounter in the world, and through doing so change our perspective on life. Some of these practical truths are revealed when we attempt to achieve certain goals. We craft means of doing so, become aware of lurking dangers, and eventually come to accept unavoidable limitations. Through this we gain glimmers of self-knowledge. But also through it, if we’re truly wise, we detect, and even participate in, a current of joy. The wise person takes delight in wisdom itself and loves to share it, so that wisdom becomes an overflow of love.

All of these aspects of wisdom are found in scripture. Scripture speaks of the cultivation of the virtues as part of wisdom – do good deeds over and over again until they become your disposition, part of your temperament, inseparable from who you are. Scripture speaks of the transformation of loss, which is part of wisdom. The right response to loss, scripture tells us, is holiness – the redemption of the bad by turning it into something sacred. But most appealingly to me was the idea of comedy. The Bible, Rabbi Klein told us, is comedy, not tragedy. Again and again in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the contradictions of life are reconciled and a necessary order is reasserted, even in the face of violence and horror. The Sinai event is a comedic act, an act of creating a new order out of a devastatingly destructive old order. Resurrection is a comedic act, the act of reconciling the contradictions of life and death. In all cases, these acts of God are an overflowing of love, and in the grand comedy, creation itself flows out from God’s wisdom, and we are invited to learn and imitate it.

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