PRESENCE

 

Sister Mary Zita's cap

Here it is—a rose-colored cap with red and white stars on it—the last thing Sister Elizabeth slipped into a bag of snacks for us when we left Sewanee a few weeks ago. It was an object that brought forth in me a “gusher” of tears. The cap belonged to Sister Mary Zita, one of the Anglican Sisters at St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee who sat in her wheelchair before me at weekly Services. She died this year while I was in New Iberia, Louisiana.

Sister Mary Zita is memorialized in many of my books of poetry, and while I wrote about her gardening and flower arranging talents, a paramount thought surfaced when I pulled out the rose-colored cap that was of something called “presence.” Although this small Filipino Sister could read the liturgies in the Book of Common Prayer and was often an echo after each line we recited, she never conversed with me or others in chapel (except with Sister Elizabeth}. She just embodied “presence.”

When I was enrolled in Clinical Pastoral Education preceding my ordination as a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, I learned a lot about presence, the act of being at a bedside without speaking or reciting prayers—just standing alongside a suffering person in inviolate silence, perhaps inwardly praying or just being there in the co-inherence of suffering. Fully Present.

My good friend, Janet Fault-Gonzales wrote a powerful essay about Presence in her book entitled Road Home that I feel is one of the best I’ve read on the subject. It involves a eulogy written at the death of her beloved Grandmother Mae:

“In trying to prepare myself to give her up, I realized in the months prior to her death that my grandmother was the still point for me—the center of peace and stability inside of a world that has proven to be much harder than I anticipated. When everything else I had known seemed chaotic and changing, Mae had been the same. She had been there. That’s all she had to be. She didn’t have to be anything else … She’s the greatest loss I have had. Today, my heart aches for someone with whom I talked about pinks, bachelor buttons, glads, zinnias, and roses—grown from seeds supplied by the Standard Coffee salesman. It isn’t what Mae said or what she accomplished that affected and still affects all of us (family)—it’s simply that she was there.

“Once I heard a minister deliver a sermon about ‘being there.’ He said that our attendance at church makes a difference, not only in our lives, but also in the lives of others. I thought the sermon was about role modeling and influencing others by our attendance. But what I learned from Mae isn’t about role modeling, intentionally setting an example. It’s simply about being—having presence—contributing to others because you exist, hold a place for all you love. Mae remained in Eufaula as the same, the comfortable, the familiar that my relatives still hold dear—that place her sisters and brothers couldn’t get back to but they’re glad to have had—the place where it hurts most to lose: her presence. It’s a powerful thing to be who you are …”

I’ve read and re-read Janet’s essays many times, but the memory of that particular essay always comes up when I think about the word “presence.” I chided Sister Elizabeth for causing me to cry when she passed on Mary Zita’s cap to me, a soft cushion of stars hidden among snacks for the journey back to New Iberia. However it is now a “presence” in my bedroom that reminds me of a “center of peace, stability inside a world that has proven to be much harder than I anticipated …”

Thanks for the cap, Sister Elizabeth.