WELCOME HAPPY MORNING…

On Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays or Fridays, I get up before daylight and prepare to go out to St. Mary’s Convent at Sewanee for Morning Prayer and Eucharist at 7 a.m. I’m not a happy early riser and never have been. To me, 6:30 a.m. is a civilized time to greet the morning. So those mornings when I follow the discipline I’ve set for myself to attend early services a few times a week, I linger over a cup of coffee and grouse a little about “a retired person having to put on street clothes and leave the house before the sun rises.”

This morning was no exception, and in the darkness, I thought of a passage from FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT by Evelyn Underhill, my favorite spiritual writer. In my morning stupor, I couldn’t recall the words and began a frantic search throughout the semi-dark house for the exact passage in this book that my Godmother Dora gave to me on the occasion of my first visit with her in 1963. I remember her sitting in the middle of her high tester bed and reading passages aloud to me from this Anglican mystic and the excitement the writer engendered in me. The binding on my FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT is coming away from the spine and pages are colorful with aqua and yellow marks from highlighters and covered with asterisks, parentheses, and other interesting margin notes. Reading these pages at 5:30 a.m. lifted my pre-dawn dim-wittedness. I finally found the passage in which Underhill tells us that there is always a night shift and sooner or later we are put on it. She refers to the praying we’re to do during the spiritual night, which includes early morning before first light.

“When you have got to pray in mental dark and cold, think of the Benedictines, Carthusians, Trappists, Poor Clares, weary, sleepy, chilly, but faithfully rising in the dark with no incentive but obedience,” Evelyn writes. “Rising not to grouse about it (ouch) but to sing Matins and Lauds, the Church’s song of… adoration, the song of the birds before dawn. Lift up your hands in the dark sanctuary of your soul when you’re tempted to wonder what is the good of it all, and praise…and the Lord who made heaven and earth will send you blessing…”

The passage stayed with me on the short trip to the convent and throughout the Eucharist while rain pinged on the roof of the chapel and wind at the bluff’s edge roared under the eaves. By the time the service ended and we went into the refectory to eat biscuits, scrambled eggs, coffee cake, jam, tea, coffee, and juice, I was wholly awake and the sun had come out. I was glad that I had risen in the darkness to enter into the spiritual rhythm of the morning…yet I confess that I know I’m not suited to the life of the Sisters because I couldn’t heed this pre-dawn reveille daily.

On this day, Rogation Day, I thought mightily about the farmers who rise before dawn and begin their work in the fields, not to mention newspaper carriers, donut shop owners, garbage collectors, and people who must commute miles to reach their businesses. I admitted to myself that I was quite happy to be a retired person looking forward to rising at 7 a.m. tomorrow, leaving the night shift to the Benedictines, Carthusians, and the Sisters of St. Mary’s Convent… all those who have better quality of will than this not-so-early riser!

MOTHERS’ DAY

There it is–the symbol of Mother’s Day–a bouquet of pink and white roses, pink carnations and fern in a transparent pink vase sitting on the Creole table in the living room. The bouquet was sent to me by Daughter #2 and joined two pale green cards (and what prescience prompted both daughters to send the same color card?) from my daughters, Stephanie and Elizabeth. The cards carried messages like: “For a woman who is admired for so many reasons,” and “you helped me become the best person I can be,” and were acknowledgements of my mothering. Mawkish, no–heartwarming, yes!

Mothering, as most of us know, is a chancey thing. We often doubt that we’re doing the right thing for those entrusted to us to take care of and love. However, we love beyond the doubts, and most mothers I know do the best they can by their offspring. I once preached a sermon in which I talked about how we let moments that are important slip away and later regret it. Thornton Wilder made this point in his play, “Our Town,” through a character named Emily who has died and wants to go back to life for a day. Emily is granted her wish to go back and chooses her twelfth birthday. But that event is filled with pain, the pain of seeing that the daily meaning of life is important and that meaning is little realized while it is going on. Emily speaks into the past that cannot hear her. “Oh, Mother just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Oh, it goes too fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize…all that was going on and we never noticed.” She’s speaking, of course, of the small miracles of living everyday life–a life filled with faith, love, and hope. In Emily’s case, when she was alive she was unwilling to see and celebrate it. "You’ve got to catch it between the lines; you’ve got to over-hear it,” Wilder’s character says. And if we listen closely enough, what we over-hear is how much both children and mothers need and want sustaining love.

C. S. Lewis has said that to love…is to be vulnerable. “Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung out and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you have to give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable and irredeemable.” Mothers seem to know all of that instinctively, and most of them embody the opposite of that security-loving person with a casket heart that Lewis describes. Instead, they model the word “kalos” which means loveliness, kindness and sympathy.

Anne Lindbergh, in her book, GIFT FROM THE SEA, describes contemporary mothers as tending more and more toward the state William James calls “Zerrisenheit” or torn-to-pieces hood, otherwise known as doing too many things. And these mothers often have to oppose the centrifugal forces of today by taking time for meditation, prayer, and reading, even a visit to the seashore, so they can become “as still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities, become pioneers in achieving stillness, not only for her own salvation but for the salvation of family, society, perhaps even of our civilization.”

In an anecdote about southern womanhood, the ferocity and protective qualities of mothers are described aptly. A friend of a certain Senator Williams was asked why the rebel army had continued to fight when they knew defeat was certain. And Williams replied that the Rebs were simply afraid to quit and go home because of the women…who weren’t quitters and would have been willing to die for their children.

So, today is the day to celebrate the good shepherdesses who guard the home for those who come in and go out, those who provide a reservoir of love and are the true centers of home life. I salute my daughters for remembering me with such caringness, and I celebrate and appreciate their “daughtering,” as well as their own mothering. Thanks for the pale green cards with the wonderful sentiments and Happy Mothers’ Day to two precious offspring!

Note: The child in the bathrobe is Stephanie, and the one in the sombrero is Elizabeth, ages three and two, respectively. Photo of bouquet by Victoria I. Sullivan.

MISSED PHOTO OPS

There are times when you wish that you carried a camera with you everywhere. Those times are called “missed photo opportunities,” and I experienced that loss Sunday. I’m attempting to retain the image I wanted to photograph by writing about it. Sunday, I preached at St. Mary’s chapel on the bluff and following that service, I went further down the mountain to Grace Fellowship church, a non-denominational congregation of approximately twenty worshippers who are Christian but not affiliated with any mainstream church. I went there to preach another sermon, accompanied by Srs. Elizabeth and Mary Zita, two of the Anglican nuns who belong to the Order of St. Mary here at Sewanee. Mary Zita, a Filipino nun who first served with the sisters at an orphanage in Banga-an in the Philippines, wore a straw hat that could only have been exported from the Philippines and was dressed in her typically-layered clothing—blouse, blue jacket, and shawl—despite the warm temps.
When we drove up to the concrete block chapel with a traditionally Anglican red door, I noticed a small bell tower, bell and rope attached, beside the entrance and was told that it was Mary Zita’s job to ring the bell for church to commence. This was the missed photo op–a picture of a tiny, frail nun who doesn’t tell her age but who must have passed the age of seventy, pulling vigorously on a rope at least a dozen times, grinning with each pull. It was a sight that caused a lump in my throat because I remembered last year when she was unable to walk due to loss of balance, dizziness, and strength to manage her usual gardening duties–she’s the world’s champion leaf raker and weed puller and loves the outdoors. Nowadays, she walks with the aid of a walker or someone’s arm, and I was amazed that she had the strength to make that bell swing and peal so loudly. She beamed with pride each time the bell rang, and I prayed that she wouldn’t be pulled up by the rope on the upswing.

Sr. Mary Zita sits in front of me during chapel services, and I always resist the impulse to put my hands on her shoulders and encircle her with prayer, but she is a devoted worshipper, and doesn’t want to be disturbed as she follows the worship in the Book of Common Prayer intently, using her finger to follow the lines and saying the words in English. Otherwise, I’ve never heard her converse in English. She’s a joyful nun, always meeting people with a wide smile, and when she shakes hands at the Peace, she pumps it up and down in the same fashion as she does when she operates that bell at Grace Fellowship.

Mary Zita has been a sister for over fifty years, and in 1992 she was transferred to Sewanee from the Philippines where she ran an orphanage. She served at the House of Prayer in Los Angeles four years before coming to the convent at Sewanee. The beautiful flower arrangements throughout the convent are her specialty, but like Brother Lawrence, she has more mundane duties in the kitchen and dining room. Once, when I was invited to stay for dinner and thought I was being helpful by stacking the dishwasher in the kitchen, Sr. Mary Zita walked up and began taking the dishes out of the washer and plunging them into soapy water in the sink. I had committed the faux paus of assuming duties assigned to her!

The Community of St. Mary at Sewanee can be traced to the Memphis order of St. Mary, and the Sisters formerly ran a girls’ school in Sewanee which closed in 1968. The site of the school is now a renowned retreat center located on a bluff where group and individual retreats take place, along with workshops, contemplative prayer sessions, and other spiritual activities. St. Mary’s on The Mountain was actually dedicated in 1888 and began serving Tennessee mountaineers who were part of three million people living in the Appalachian Mountains. According to TEN DECADES OF PRAISE by Sr. Mary Hilary, these people were proud and reserved, honest and independent, lived in windowless one-room cabins and eked out a living on mountain slopes or distilled corn whiskey. When the Sisters arrived for their first summer, they discovered that the mountaineers regarded them as heathens who worshipped an idol. The so-called idol was discovered to be their large brass altar cross. “It was the first of many instances which demonstrated how the mountaineers had passed down the rudiments of a Biblical religion, despite illiteracy,” Sr. Hilary writes. However, the Sisters persisted and when the dedication of St. Mary’s on the Mountain on the Feast of Transfiguration took place, people came from cove and cabin for twenty miles surrounding the convent to acknowledge their work and to worship with them.

Today, the Sisters have expanded their order to include transferring Sisters of Charity and Sr. Madeleine Mary, and are joined by four hundred associates, and seven oblates, who are a part of this sacred community on a bluff overlooking the Cumberland Valley. The Sisters say the Office according to the Book of Common Prayer four times daily and serve breakfast following services to those who attend every day except Wednesday.

And to return to the subject of missed photo ops, I’m including a picture of Sr. Mary Zita taken by Sr. Madeleine Mary for their annual publication, “St. Mary’s Messenger.” The smile is her natural, spontaneous expression. Beside her picture in the newsletter are the words of Mother Teresa: “Be the living expression of God’s kindness.”