Sparrow Song
After the Christmas holidays we’re all back at Divine Word, beginning the second and last semester of our nine-month program. As soon as we’re back, we hear that we have to write a formal reflection paper, and we all give a deep communal groan. We thought that in this new kind of free-flowing lecture and discussion school we’d be spared time-consuming, labor-intensive academic papers. I hated them in college. Hours and hours of work and absolutely zero wattage of insight. And now that I’ve been entrusting to my journals what my own heart tells me to write, writing on demand to fulfill a requirement feels like a terrible intrusion. But obedience kicks in.
As I mull over what to write about, I get a big idea: Instead of writing the usual kind of paper, researching a topic and summarizing the ideas of scholars and experts, I’ll summon my own voice and tap in to my experience to sound out the faith mystery. Hadn’t Vatican II emphasized that the Holy Spirit is in everyone? I want to get past simply quoting doctrines and creeds, and, instead, crack open what they mean in my life, viscerally—the felt experience of translating these beliefs into my everyday life, the way I explore things in my journal. If faith is a living faith, shouldn’t it generate insight, strength, and courage to question, to test the edges?
I’ve had more than my fill of dry, abstract, neo-scholastic theology, which has attempted to use esoteric philosophical categories to explain religious faith. For example, making a big deal over the distinction between “sanctifying grace” and “actual grace.” Or defining Jesus’s identity as God and human as a “hypostatic union.” Or, talking about bread becoming “transubstantiated” into the body of Christ at the consecration of the Mass, the “substance” changed while the “accidents” remain the same. Early followers of Christ didn’t express faith like this. The philosophical bent to explain theology began in the Middle Ages, when Aristotle was rediscovered and Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica attempted to reconfigure the Christian faith in rational, Aristotelian terms. All kinds of dualisms sprouted up as a result: natural versus supernatural, nature versus grace, and so forth. This is why Vatican II was so needed.
In my paper I want to explore what faith as it is lived feels like, how it tastes, the way it illumines our path in daily life. Take the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. That’s held as a rock-bottom, core belief of the Christian faith. So what does it mean? Is it a historical fact that can be demonstrated? If there had been a video camera recording Jesus’s tomb on Easter morning, what would it reveal? Would it show a three-day-dead resuscitated, glowing body bursting out of the tomb? Was Jesus’s overcoming of death a coup de grâce argument to “prove” Jesus must be divine? Is it a guarantee to believers that when we die, we, too, will come through death with our ego-selves intact—me, still quintessentially me, Helen—but now understanding everything and shining? Or are we talking about a more paradoxical kind of truth, as Jesus talked about the grain of wheat having to fall into the ground and die to produce its fruit, or when he said that each of us must lose our life in order to save it?
Maybe the mystery of life coming from death is not only about end-of-life-on-earth death but also part of our ordinary experiences of loving and losing, of feeling our life is taking shape, getting purpose, drive, zing, only to plummet, sometimes, into confusion, darkness, and despair. Soar and plummet, soar and plummet. Is life bipolar at its very core? How do we pull free of the grinding sadness that haunts us, creeping into our sleep, waiting to taunt us when we awaken? Always the voice…we can’t stop the voice: What does it all mean? My life is fake, hollow. Whom do I love? Who really loves me? Time is running out.
We’re talking resurrection? Meaning life after death?
What about life before death?
When I go back to the people in Frances Cabrini Parish, how will I help them understand and live their Christian faith if my own faith isn’t real? It’s a confusing, dark process. Much easier to let the “authorities” assign meaning and follow their directives. Much easier to obey than to create.
I entitle my paper “Sparrow Song,” and in the introduction I write: “I came to realize that this paper would be of worth only if it expressed truth chiseled from my own life experiences—my truth—rather than a mere echo of the truths of other men.”
Later, I’ll learn that finding your voice and speaking out of personal experience was the heartbeat of women mystics in the Middle Ages. Cloistered in nunneries and barred from learning Latin, which in turn kept them from attending universities, they had only one field of exploration: inside themselves—their own interiority. And so they delved deeply into contemplation of divine mysteries and wrote down what they saw and felt in the earthy, colorful vernacular of the day. (The Latin root verna means “domestic, native.”)
Not knowing Latin turned out to be a blessing. It saved them from writing in the mold of staid Latinate treatises, which would be as boring as nails to read. Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, Clare of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, Mechthild of Magdeburg—each took pains to make clear they were not speaking as theologians. Not in those heresy-obsessed times in which women, simply by being women, were already suspect. So it was standard fare for women to couch their writings in abject humility. St. Teresa of Ávila, writing her autobiography in Spain in the sixteenth century, when black-robed inquisitors were watching and sifting every word she uttered, adopted a shucks-I’m-only-a-woman style that steered well clear of the style of the letrados—the “learned ones”—who were thought to provide the only sure knowledge of God, and who, of course, wrote only in Latin.
“I should like to excuse myself from this since I am a woman,” wrote wily Teresa. “Seeing so much stupidity will provide some recreation for your Reverence” (Autobiography 11.6).
I’m feeling nervous about using personal experience as the main content in my paper, so, just like Teresa, right from the start, I profess humility:
I write these reflections humbly. I am well aware that there are people holier and more intelligent than I, whose writings on the Christian life, far deeper and more scholarly, can make my own words pale. Pale or not, the words are my own, and only I can say them because they have been born of my own experience….Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet says that you cannot command the skylark not to sing. Not that I think myself a skylark—a sparrow, perhaps. But Jesus has told us that in this world where God is Father there is worth even in a sparrow’s song.
I can see that everyone else at Divine Word is going to the library and writing regular, footnoted papers, and when I hear my classmates talk about this or that theologian they’re referencing, I don’t say much. What I’m doing feels edgy, arrogant, even. But it’s what St. Augustine did in his Confessions. He was the first Christian who drew on his own personal life story as the basis for theological reflection. He couldn’t have made it more personal, writing about his childhood acts of vandalism, his struggles with lust and how he prayed “Give me chastity, but not yet!,” and about how one day in a garden he heard a child’s voice say, “Take and read,” and he picked up a Bible and went right to one of St. Paul’s epistles and it was a thunderbolt moment of revelation, and he changed his ways and realigned his entire life to follow Christ and never turned back. That’s what I call a Jesus explosion, and that’s what I’m hoping for, though it’s not happening for me in one fell swoop as it did for Augustine. It’s happening more in dribs and drabs.
At this point in my life, I am still pretty much smack-dab in a very enclosed world of personal, privatized religion. The suffering all around me in the larger world does not exist for me. It’s not that I’m trying to block it out. I simply haven’t awakened to it. But I guess when you’re not awake, you’re not awake. That’s why when I do wake up to the call of the Gospel to resist injustice and get to work in the public square, I have to call it grace.
Cheeky or not, I’m doing it, writing my paper straight out of personal experience, and that carries me still. I’ve been keeping a journal for three years, and here in London my relationship with William fills a lot of pages. Sometimes, when the spirit moves me, I write down my conversations with God—which, I’m afraid, turn out to be mostly me talking and God just sort of nodding and going along. It’s hard to know when exactly God is talking, or only me doing the talking for both of us.
In “Sparrow Song” I’m determined to write about what is real, so I write about getting past “shell reality,” in which external forms substitute for the real: “We write a paper to meet a deadline, visit a person because social pressures demand it, work for the paycheck.”
From Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye I love Holden Caulfield’s exquisite castigation of fake Christianity, where he said “old Jesus would’ve puked” if he could see what people are doing in his name. In “Sparrow,” to illustrate “shell reality,” I turn to Salinger’s description of one character’s concept of marriage in his Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters:
My beloved has an undying, basically undeviating love for the institution of marriage itself. She has a primal urge to play house permanently. Her marital goals are so absurd and touching. She wants to get a very dark suntan and go up to the desk clerk in some very posh hotel and ask if her husband has picked up the mail yet. She wants to shop for curtains. She wants to shop for maternity clothes.
I write about how I’m learning to embrace the natural goodness of things, knowing that God is in the goodness, and I no longer have to practice a lot of penances and sacrifice to curry God’s favor. Not as we had learned in the novitiate: “If something was good, it was always ‘more perfect’ to sacrifice it,” I wrote. “I had in my mind that the more difficult a thing was for me, the happier it made God.”
This attitude that pain pleases God has a long religious history. In the novitiate I remember picking up a book on asceticism (stripping away attachment to earthly things), which recommended that if something really delicious was served at a meal, to counteract the pleasure, one should quietly raise a leg under the table and continue to hold it in a strained position. Keep that aching leg up. Don’t you dare enjoy that fresh, sweet, succulent corn on the cob.
In “Sparrow” I describe my old mindset:
As for knowing what I was supposed to be doing with my life, that was determined by obedience to the rule and my superiors. I constantly hankered for their assurance that I was pleasing God….My life was almost completely governed from without. My sense of initiative and vibrant aliveness seemed almost entirely dormant. The grain of wheat lay still in the dark earth without a hint of a green sprout anywhere.
But still, in this Catholic tidal pool at Divine Word, surrounded as I am by people just like me, it’s all green hillsides and blue skies of self-discovery. No purple shadows of human suffering fall across my path. Not a single lecture or reading or film calls us to respond to the urgent social problems of our day. Among my classmates there is not one poor person or person of color. Poor people never seem to have the luxury to study theology.
I am almost totally unaware of the burning social issues: the nuclear arms race and the appalling injustices heaped upon African Americans. Other Christians are becoming engaged in these issues, but not I. I am not even aware of the passage of the Voting Rights Act by Congress, nor have I heard any of the stories coming from the “freedom schools” in Mississippi, in which white college-age students from the North have joined African Americans in their struggle to secure the right to vote—some at the cost of their lives. Nor am I aware that at this very time that I am in London, Martin Luther King, Jr., is in the struggle of his life in Cicero, Illinois, as he leads a march to promote racial justice in the face of catcalls, screams of obscenity, spitting, and flying bottles and bricks from outraged whites. When I fly home for Christmas break, I’ll meet him in the Chicago airport, standing right behind me at the ticket counter, and I look at him there and can’t believe it’s him and look again and step out of line and go to him: “Excuse me, sir, but are you Doctor King?” He looks so tired, so crestfallen, and he’s just standing there in line with the rest of us, and he barely looks up at me as he takes my hand and says, “Sister, pray for us, we need a lot of prayers.”
Later, when I wake up to justice and read about his life, I’ll make the connection with the time, the airport, and his agonized conflict in Cicero. I wasn’t yet lifting a finger to help in the battle for racial equality. I thought that all I had to do was to be charitable to those around me and maybe make a contribution to the missions. I thought that praying was enough.
A year after I meet Dr. King, he’ll be shot dead in Memphis as he joins with sanitation workers in their “I am a man” long slog for a barely minimum wage. I don’t think my encounter with him in the Chicago airport is what you would call a real meeting. That would come only later, when, after encountering Jesus of the poor through my black brothers and sisters in New Orleans, I was set free to join the movement for justice for which Dr. King gave his life. Only then did I really meet him. What I still remember about the airport encounter is how very tired he looked.
As you can perhaps guess, if I’m oblivious to civil rights struggles being waged on my own doorstep, you can imagine the depth of my oblivion to much larger—global—issues, such as the buildup of nuclear weapons in the Cold War. I will be shocked to the roots of my being when I find out how during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, a few years before, we came so breathtakingly close to nuclear war. When I do find out, I’ll get on my knees and thank God that John F. Kennedy had the sanity to communicate directly with Nikita Khrushchev and the courage to resist the pressures of hard-liners among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, determined to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia. Only much later did the chilling facts of our close call become public knowledge, but news about the buildup of nuclear weapons had long been public knowledge, which I could have easily accessed had I cared enough to investigate and get involved.
As it turns out, even my hero, Thomas Merton, the cloistered Trappist monk who had written The Seven Storey Mountain, awakened to the nuclear threat long before I did and raised his voice in resistance in the only way a cloistered monk could in those days: He wrote a poem and had it published. It was entitled “Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces.” The speaker in the poem is a commandant of a Nazi death camp, who concludes: “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.” Merton’s poem, published without permission of his superiors, caused a storm of protest from both inside and outside cloister walls: What was he, a monk, with a vocation to pray for the world, thinking he was doing, getting involved in politics?
WHILE AT DIVINE Word, I, along with 140,000 other nuns, participate in a Sisters’ Survey, sponsored by the Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious, intent on assessing the impact of Vatican II on our ideas about our faith and our mission in the world. Who among us embraced a pre–Vatican II mindset, which sees our vocation as “called out of the world” to seek “God alone,” and who among us saw God as present in the world and guiding us to become agents of social change? The sociologist chosen to design the questions on the Sisters’ Survey was Sister Marie Augusta Neal, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur. Remember her. You’ll meet her farther down this river. She’s the one who will explode my spiritual consciousness and change the trajectory of my life.
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow…I learn by going where I have to go,” said the poet Theodore Roethke. And in my awakening to new worlds in London, I am thoroughly engaged as I set out to write theology out of my personal experiences in “Sparrow Song.” And then there’s this interesting, blossoming relationship that is happening with this man, William. Our classmates at the center expect to see us together. We’re not the only nun-priest friendship happening. A number of duos have been springing up. For almost all of us, strictly kept apart during our novice training, this coed experience is a first. And in the new spirit of freedom and experimentation, a new kind of man-woman relationship called “the third way” is being widely discussed among us: A man (priest) and woman (nun) commit to love each other with a “preferential love” but stay in their vocation and remain celibate. Rumor has it that some exchange rings as a sign of their “spiritual marriage.” And if this sounds confusing and tricky in the extreme, that’s because that’s exactly what it is.
William and I are nowhere near that kind of relationship, but I like being linked to him, and I’ve welcomed him into my life. I’m glad to round out in my life an unfinished part of me that only a male relationship can complete. He is attractive, yes. Very masculine, yes. Smart and spiritual, yes. Just what I like in a man, yes. Our relationship is deepening, and when he says he loves me, it’s like breathing, and I say I love him, too. I like the way we talk about everything, and I feel comfortable telling him about the absence of men in my life—until he came along. He likes that. He likes being the first. He went out with girls in high school, like going to the prom and ballgames, but it was all pretty lightweight, and, like me, he entered the seminary right after high school. I tell him all about my friend Chris, and show him her picture, and talk about the fun we had at Grand Isle, and he says he wants to meet her. We’re a good match, William and I.
So, it’s William at the door to take us all out sledding and William calling me on the phone and the two of us talking for a long, long time, and Rache trying to get through on the line and teasing, saying we’re just like a couple of moony teenagers.
William and I are out for a drive one day in April. Spring is poking its sticky green leaves out of the dark, skeletal trees, and we’re aware of the time, the season, the winding down of our last semester. By mid-May classes will end and we’ll both be home. We drive and talk and then he stops the car out by a farmer’s field, and he moves over close and puts his arms around me and kisses me—a sweet kiss and gentle—and I’m not at all surprised and I kiss him back. It’s all so natural. It’s all so good.
Later, when I’m back at the apartment and lights are out and I’m lying there in the dark, I think about the kiss. I know things with William are taking a more serious turn. Here he is, a man in my life, a wonderful man, who obviously is growing more serious in his love for me. But there’s a shadow. It’s not that I’m afraid of sinning. I’m not afraid of God’s displeasure. I know I’m truly free to fulfill my life in a way that makes me happy. So what’s the worry? Can I name it? Maybe this—maybe his growing need to be exclusively just with me. He is talking about wanting to spend the rest of his life with me. Is he looking to me to fill his loneliness? I like a lot of streams feeding my river. I can’t picture settling into life with just one person. I’d shrivel, trying to focus most of my soul’s energies on one man. And I know I need hunks of solitude the way I need sleep and food. I’d lose a sense of who I am without it.
I’ve heard from a friend in the men’s apartment complex that my friend William drinks too much. But, then, a lot of priests I know drink, and everybody at some time or other drinks too much. In my French family, I started drinking good Bordeaux on Sundays when I was six, and Daddy and Mama had great parties with Daddy serving his prize martinis and everybody having an uproarious, wonderful time. At the center, we had a session on pastoral care of alcoholics and attended an Alcoholics Anonymous conference at the civic center here in London. I hadn’t noticed the “Anonymous” part of the name, and as I met people in the lobby, I was immediately struck that one family in particular had been hit especially hard by the disease. I met Bob London and Mary London and Louise and Dick—every one of them in AA. Imagine what a suffering that must be for that poor family! Finally, inductive reason kicked in.
So, okay, I tell myself—sometimes William drinks too much. Maybe when he’s in his groove, back at work in Boston he’ll be all right.
The words of E. E. Cummings spring up, words I’ve written in my journal, words I try to live by:
be of love (a little)
More careful
Than of everything
When Rache and I board the train to go home, William is there to see us off, and I’m there at the window with Rache to wave goodbye. I’ve promised to call often, and write, and he says he’ll come to New Orleans soon—very soon. He’s standing there in the station alone, moving from foot to foot, and looking forlorn and miserable. He’s been telling me about how plans for his life are very unsettled. He hasn’t heard from priest personnel about his assignment or even where he’ll be living. I feel for him, I want him to be okay, but I’m excited to be going home—I can’t help it. My community is waiting and Chris is waiting, and I’m champing at the bit to take on Cabrini Parish as the new director of religious education.
As the train begins to pull away, I wave and wave until I can’t see him anymore, and Rache whispers, “Lou, that guy is smitten bad,” and I say, “I know, Rache, I know.”
What that means for William and for me will take seven years to figure out.