Lightning in Terre Haute
Hidden in the storm, you answered me in thunder.
—Psalm 81
Lightning strikes are startling, loud, and last only about one-quarter of a second. At temperatures up to 50,000 degrees F, five times hotter than the surface of the sun, the 3 or 4 discharges of each flash travel up and down an ionized path at speeds going down to the ground at 500 miles per hour and return along the same path to the cloud at ten times that speed. The superheated air along the ionized path of the strike expands drastically and produces a shock wave of thunder.
—A Yellowstone Journal by Tom Murphy
In nature it’s called lightning.
In philosophy, insight.
In the spiritual realm, enlightenment.
When it happens to me, the way I know it’s real is it jolts me out of the way I used to see and do things. It permanently alters the trajectory of my life.
The jolt happens in June 1980, at a community gathering in Terre Haute, Indiana.
En route to the conference from New Orleans, novices in tow, I’m hardly enthused. The chief presenter will be Sister Marie Augusta Neal, SNDdeN (nun-speak for Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur), a full-throttled advocate of social justice. It’ll be three whole days and nights of nothing but social justice and no chance of escape, with all of us housed in college dorm rooms out in the middle of the woods. (The college is not called St. Mary-of-the-Woods for nothing.) Augh. Brainwashing to get us all to be social revolutionaries.
I dread the arguments that will surely erupt in the small group discussions following each presentation. Discuss. Discuss. Endlessly discuss. That seems to be all we nuns do. I know the predictable questions: “What new insight struck you, challenged you? What part of the presentation stirred emotions—positive or negative?” (How we feel about things is always paramount.)
Group discussions are where I have the least control over my runaway mouth. I’m such an arguer, so impulsive, and afterward, I say to myself, What was that all about? So, on the bus trip up to Indiana, I’m steadying my soul: Okay, okay, it’s just one more conference. I will try to pry open a tiny crack of openness. Holy Spirit, help me. But that wisp of sentiment is quickly crowded out by the overriding passion that has dominated my soul for months: I must stand guard to preserve Christ’s spiritual message and our spiritual vocation as nuns.
The first day of the conference, I manage to come through unscathed. Sister Marie Augusta, who teaches sociology and the New Testament, lays out the sad statistics of how unfairly the resources of the world are distributed—the bountiful gross national product of rich countries such as the United States, and poor countries with all their misery statistics. I’m listening and saying to myself: I know that; I know that life isn’t fair. I know children are starving and women and girls aren’t educated and are being abused. I get it. All bad, sad stuff. But what, tell me—just what is one lone person like me supposed to do about such gigantic world problems?
Sorry, but misery statistics, even about little kids starving in droves, roll right over me. I feel bad for them but in a sort of general way. I don’t personally know anyone starving to death. I figure the big problems of the world are where God comes in. Planetary problems are God’s problem. Way too big for us mortals. Besides, tackling economic and social injustices involves political action, and as a spiritual person I’m above cantankerous, corrupt politics. I’m apolitical. Politics brings out the worst in people. The only time I ever heard my good Catholic daddy cuss was when he argued about Louisiana politics.
So the first night of the conference I sleep like a baby. As the day was ending Marie Augusta had announced that tomorrow she’d be talking about Jesus’s Gospel message. Yes! I say to myself. Bring on Jesus! I love learning about Jesus. Not to brag, but I do know a thing or two about his Gospel message, which I happen to have studied and meditated on almost every day of my entire earthly life. A refrain from an African American spiritual wells up: “Ride on, King Jesus!” My sentiments exactly. After a full day of nothing but global statistics, finally we’re going to get to Jesus. I am so ready.
When the bolt comes, it comes in a mere twenty-two words.
In the first part of the sentence, Marie Augusta says: “Jesus preached good news to the poor.” And I’m thinking, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know those words by heart, and I’m waiting, I’m sure about what’s coming next, what the good news of eternal salvation must be for poor people. Isn’t the best of Gospel good news that God, like a kind daddy, personally loves each of us, including the poor, and watches over every intimate detail of our lives, down to knowing the exact number of hairs on our heads? Jesus said that: Every hair of your head is numbered. And the psalms about how God’s ear is especially attentive to hear the cry of the poor.
Surely, certainly, the next words announcing good news to the poor will be the great, shining, glorious reward that will be theirs in heaven. At the heavenly banquet, their place will be right next to God at the head table. Of all the bejeweled crowns, theirs will be the shiniest. One day, by and by, when all the suffering, the struggle, the hurt and loss and grief and pain are done…
But that’s not what Marie Augusta says.
She says, “Integral to that good news is that the poor are to be poor no longer.”
Poor no longer?
What Jesus was telling them, Marie Augusta says, is that, far from accepting lives of oppression and misery as God’s will, they have God’s blessing to resist the injustices that make their lives wretched. Their very dignity as sons and daughters of God calls them to strive for what is rightfully theirs. Justice, not charity. Active struggle, not passive compliance.
I’m stunned.
Poor no longer. So that’s what our community’s social-justice debate has been about. But if this is true, being pious and charitable is never going to cut it.
And as I consider that thought, I begin to get it. Something deep within me must have been waiting for it. How can I claim to be a follower of Jesus if I’m not aligned with poor people in their struggle for simple human dignity? Where have I been? Why have I been so resistant to the Gospel call to work for justice?
I realize that in all the theology courses I’ve studied, there has been a subtext that fed the conviction that if some people were poor, then somehow that historical reality must be God’s will—a fate in life that poor people must simply accept, relying on God’s merciful grace to help them, even as global corporations steal their land, tax their crops, and destroy their natural resources. I thought this was what Jesus meant when he said “Blessed are the meek.” Accept God’s will. Endure. Don’t resist.
Then I realize that I don’t personally know one single person or family on this earth who is poor. I’m always hanging out with middle-class or affluent white people like me.
Marie Augusta has one more zinger. She explains that working for justice necessarily means working for just policies, which means getting involved in the political process. Simply praying for people is not enough. Marie Augusta further explains that in a democracy like the United States, there’s no such thing as being apolitical. If we sit back and do nothing, leaving all the policy making to others, that is, in fact, a position of support for the status quo, which is a very political stance to take.
Bam! Bam!
Twice the lightning strikes. There in the auditorium, I stay sitting still, I don’t move, I don’t say a thing. Something in me must have been poised and waiting for these words to catch fire as soon as I heard them. I think of the opposition I had put up in the community debates. Yes, Alice Marie has been on the right side of this all along. She is still in New Iberia, teaching African American plantation workers how to read. My childhood friend Sister Kathleen Bahlinger is living in the St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans. Margie Navarro is now serving in Nicaragua.
After Marie Augusta’s talk, feeling stricken, I follow her into the elevator and blurt out, “I’m the director of novices.” I feel a need to confess, to acknowledge how slow I’ve been to understand the heart of what Jesus was about. What took me so long?
What I remember most is Marie Augusta’s kindness as she looked at me. Evidently, I’m not the first shuttered soul she’s helped to understand the challenge of Jesus’s message. Nor am I the only soul whose life purpose has been ignited by hearing a cluster of words. There are similar moments of awakening in the lives of the saints.
For St. Francis of Assisi, the crucial moment came as he was gazing at a crucifix in a dilapidated chapel. He saw the lips of Christ move as the command came: “Francis, rebuild my church, which has fallen into ruin.”
St. Clare, a rich, young noblewoman, heard St. Francis preach the invitation of Jesus: “Sell what you own and give to the poor and come follow me.” She became Francis’s most devoted follower.
For Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher, a moment of awakening came when she stayed up all night reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila. As the sun rose the following morning, she said to herself, “This is the truth.” It was the beginning of a path that led to her conversion and becoming a Carmelite nun (and ultimately dying in a Nazi death camp).
For Father Thomas Berry, it was a childhood view of a meadow filled with yellow flowers that sparked his passion to care for our planet: Whatever is good for the meadow is good; whatever harms the meadow is bad.
What gets me the most in Marie Augusta’s interpretation of Jesus’s message to the poor is the realization of how passive I’ve been. All these twenty years living in New Orleans and I’ve never once ventured into a single neighborhood of struggling people. The only African American people I know are those who serve in our schools and hospitals and our motherhouse as cooks, gardeners, or maintenance workers.
I’m in disequilibrium, free fall.
I think of St. Paul’s question when he was still Saul, lying there on the ground after being jolted by his vision of Christ: “Who are you, Lord? What do you want me to do?”
The bus trip from Terre Haute back home to New Orleans feels mighty different from the ride up.
FUNNY, BUT IF I were to rely on my memory to describe the transformative effect of Marie Augusta on my life, it would go like this: Marie Augusta’s words about Jesus and poor people shook me out of the way I used to see and do things and forever altered the trajectory of my life. As if—kaboom!—I returned to New Orleans enlightened and immediately moved to the inner city and began working with poor people.
Not quite.
My journal tells a different tale—a chronicle of unreal plans, false starts, and a lurching soul still living far too much in my head.
As it turns out, it’s going to take me a whole year to catch up with the new understanding of the Gospel that Marie Augusta has opened up. But the journals record an even more startling surprise, at striking variance with my recollection that I reached the decision to move to the inner city entirely on my own. The reality is that my religious community had to take me by the hand and lead me every step of the way. That included steering me clear of a pie-in-the-sky plan I proposed to establish a Catholic training program out in the countryside for young adults (suburban white kids, naturally) who, through prayer, living in community, and a bit of inspired teaching, would become impassioned to roar out of the woods into the slums of America as champions of justice.
Getting inspired by Marie Augusta’s words is one thing. Translating those words into flesh-and-blood action is quite something else.
Back from Terre Haute at Joseph House, I continue my work with the novices and retreats for young people. For a few years the dream to develop some kind of training center for young Catholics has been brewing in my soul. Through encounters with young people in retreats, I feel the intensity of their spiritual thirst, and I’m looking for a way to respond to that need more comprehensively than weekend experiences can offer. Somehow there must be a way that such young people could be a part of a faith community that would sustain them in their spiritual quest.
Now, looking back at my journals, I realize that the way I always framed everything was around forming community: a movie-star club in school, a Blessed Mother club, an acrobatic club (okay, that was just two of us, Harriet Jacob and me, but, hey, you’ve got two people? you’ve got yourself a club). These clubs came into existence quickly and disappeared just as quickly, and I never seemed able to imagine any kind of action to better the world that these clubs might address. That’s always been the fuzzy part. So many needs in the world, so many hurting people, so very close by here in New Orleans. But where to start? (Maybe the lack of focus has something to do with the fact that I was still living out in the suburbs with all my needs cared for, sincere as all get-out and pious as ever, but…isolated.)
To help me get real about my proposed training center for young people, it’s going to take an open forum of all the Sisters in the region gathered together to discuss the proposal. I seem to have a special talent for building fantastical plans in my head, convinced that they come straight from God’s mouth to my ear. All I can say is, thank God for my community. They are the ones who finally help me translate inspiration into action.
Here’s what happened at the open forum.
First though, a little background. My way of praying and discerning God’s will at the time are recorded in my journals, cast in revelatory language like that of the Old Testament prophets.
Jesus: The young people are drowning in materialism. Who will gather them into community and teach them my Gospel?
Me (à la Isaiah): Here I am, send me.
I am drawn to journal writing because words take away fuzziness and make things explicit (maybe drop-dead deluded but at least explicit). I can see on the page what I’m thinking, feeling, and imagining as well as what I feel in my heart that God is telling me. It is probably a holdover from my wannabe mystic days. Mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Ávila were always writing down their visions and revelations from God.
Along with prayerful discernment, I have for several years been consulting with different Sisters in the congregation about my idea for this training center (which I sometimes call a Christian Leadership Boot Camp—not for the fainthearted). When Scotty Scardina, whose daughter, Leigh, is one of our novices, purchased a tract of undeveloped land in the country seventy miles out of New Orleans and offered us ten acres for our use, the idea blossomed to locate our center on this land; that is what led to the proposal that I am presenting to the community. Of course, locating the center on undeveloped land would mean having to do virtually everything: dig a well, erect buildings from scratch, plant a garden, install electricity (though I am toying with the idea of going natural with kerosene lanterns)—all this before we could begin to hire staff, plan programs, and recruit participants.
You can imagine what’s going to happen when Sisters start raising even the most basic practical questions:
Where will you live while buildings are erected?
Will the buildings have indoor plumbing, electricity?
If novices are part of the project, where will they study theology? Isn’t it a long commute from the country to Loyola University in the city?
Way out in the country, how will young people even meet poor people?
And here comes the hardest part. When Sister Barbara Miller, whom I could count on to question me at community meetings, stands up to speak, I brace myself. I know it’s going to be a critique, and I wait, standing there at the microphone in front of the group. What surprises me is not Barbara’s critique of the egregious impracticality of the plan, which, by the third or fourth question, has already been devastatingly exposed as a Prejean-feet-firmly-planted-in-midair Mission Impossible, but her stinging judgment about my credibility.
Journal entry:
Barbara Miller stood up and challenged me to live and work among poor people myself before I try to inspire young people to work for justice. How can I teach them what I don’t live?
What hurts the most is that I know it’s true. I’m all talk, all glowing, spiritual-sounding ideas and no action. All preach. No practice. The forum on my proposal happens fully six months after the conference in Terre Haute, which reveals just how long business-as-usual has been going on in my life. If I hadn’t consulted my journals, right now I’d probably be writing this: After Sister Marie Augusta Neal awakened me to Jesus’s call to serve the poor, I came home, packed my bags, and moved in with poor people in the inner city.
With my airy dream shattered at the forum, my life begins to move forward on a more solid path, a path I still walk. A month later I meet with Sisters Lucy Silvio and Cynthia Sabathier on our leadership team. The open forum with the Sisters had been such a disaster and they feel for me, a compassion I welcome clean down to the marrow of my bones. They too see the need for more challenging Christian formation for young people, and commission me to continue to create a justice-oriented program (not in the bloomin’ woods, but no need to utter a syllable of those words). They confirm my decision to begin a new ministry at Hope House, a Catholic service ministry in the inner city here in New Orleans. For the last several months I’ve been volunteering there on Tuesdays, a small first step to getting to know poor people that I had put into practice as soon as I returned from Terra Haute, where the Jesus lightning struck. (Good news to the poor: you will be poor no longer. Translated: There’s no authentic following of Christ if I don’t work for justice.)
Hearing God’s voice and recording it in the pages of my journal has proved to be exceedingly tricky business. God talking, me talking, all mixed up together. Responding to a summons to serve poor people in my own backyard is shocking in its ordinariness. Not to mention humbling. My untethered spirituality is crashing.
I guess the sheer grace of it is that I woke up at all.
In June 1981, one year almost to the day after hearing Marie Augusta at Terre Haute, I walk into the St. Thomas housing project to begin work at Hope House.