We’ve all heard “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” Dick Ryan uses a different image: “Suffering can be like a grain of sand in an oyster; it can create a magnificent pearl.”
I can’t hear the word “pearl” without thinking of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Even teaching the novel for the twelfth time, I am continually fascinated by the many layers of the word “pearl” with all its lovely and ugly connotations.
The pandemic has caused a tsunami of suffering. Yet it is my hope that the pandemic can create a magnificent pearl. With prayer and good will our global village can learn that our present modes of living are not sustainable. We need to reverse global warming. We need to flatten the curve not only of COVID19 but of economic inequality. The extra care given to the elderly may lessen the ageism that creeps into our culture. The news has heightened the plight of the homeless, making us more aware of all their needs, starting with a roof over their heads.
It is my hope that goodness, systemic change, care for our planet and one another will be more contagious than the virus. How terrible it would be if we let our present suffering not be transformed into pearls.
We hear the O Antiphons on the remaining days of Advent. Each day the Gospel Acclamation at Mass and the Evening Prayer antiphon before the Magnificat begin with O and include a Messianic title, such as O Wisdom or O King of All the Nations. These O antiphons probably began with monks in centuries past. The monks did something special on the days of December 17 through December 24. Maybe Advent had been a little too penitential, and they had to lighten up before the Christmas feast. Anyway, it’s said that they had treats made from peanuts on the day when the Messiah was addressed as Root of Jesse. They ate an orange on the day when the Messiah was named “O Dawn.” My favorite is the day of “O Key of David” when the monk in charge of the wine cellar used his key to bring out a fine wine for the monks’ dinner.
One time the superior in the convent in which I was living did the same thing; that is, she provided some little treat every day during the O Antiphons. Just something to look forward to during the last days of teaching before Christmas vacation. Try it! It’s sort of fun!
Did you ever look in a puddle and see treetops and clouds? Looking down you see the heavens. Looking down you see what is above. When Mary and Joseph looked down into the face of Baby Jesus, did they see God in his heaven?
There’s movement in Advent. We seem to be on a journey. Forward and deeper. Forward in crossing off the days until Christmas. Forward in opening windows of Advent calendars. Deeper into the mystery. Come, all ye! Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord! Let Advent be a pilgrimage. “Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain” (Is. 2). Join the parade with Jesus of Nazareth. See him with the centurion entreating Jesus’ cure for his paralyzed servant. Walk by the Sea of Galilee and experience Jesus’ compassion for the sick and hungry. Pass by the two blind men. (Was Jesus playing a game of faith with them?) Go around to all the towns and villages, proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom. Stand upon the heights. Wherever you are catch the joy, for God is coming to dwell among you.
Frederick Buechner writes in The Alphabet of Grace: “Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with the bush going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming down out of the sky.” Does Advent similarly start with “a lump in the throat”? On the very first day of Advent we pray in the Collect for “the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ.” There it is again—another liturgical year, another chance to meet Christ anew, another lump in the throat stuck there by humble awe, blessed anticipation, and awareness that we still haven’t awakened to all that we are meant to be. So let’s heed St. Paul’s admonition to the Romans (13:11f) to “throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” Stay awake! Be alert! The bush may go up in flames, clouds may rain flowers, and God himself may drop “dovingly” upon the earth.
If five persons gather during a grief support session, how many persons are sitting around the table? I have the privilege of leading grief support groups for nine weekly sessions. On the last day participants seem reluctant to leave. They feel it had been good to be together in a circle of acceptance and understanding. Each one felt loved, an occurrence that Frederick Buechner calls “this ancient and most holy miracle.” Over the weeks miracles of healing gradually surfaced, hesitant individuals became a community, pain became less poignant for oneself and more open to the pain of others. When speaking of loved ones, were these deceased spouses and parents and siblings present? As we walked out on the last day, there was something more than five grieving persons and a completed workbook. How many persons were really present? As Frederick Buechner writes, “A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is where one plus one equals a thousand.”
I’ve heard retired persons say that when they wake up, they wonder what day it is. They’ve lost the Monday through Friday routine when it makes a great deal of difference whether the coffee maker is plugged in and the trash sits on the curb. Each day of the seven-day week is significant and as insignificant as the day before. Frederick Buechner in The Alphabet of Grace writes, “It is an insignificant, humdrum kind of day with no particular agenda, nothing special to do or think or be in it. It is an any-day kind of day with little to distinguish it from either yesterday or tomorrow. You wake up, which is to say you pick up the threads again of your life. For one more day the world is yours. You are your own to name” (page 33).
Today as we pick up the threads of our lives, how will we weave them? It is very seldom that I have no “have to” event in my day. When those rare days occur, I feel disjointed, tendons not holding me together. Without urgency or requirement, I should be happy to have choices. Shall I read, exercise, clean, organize, work ahead? No matter what I choose, it feels as if I’ve picked up the wrong threads. Buechner may have the answer: “It is the first day because it has never been before and the last day because it will never be again. Be alive if you can all through this day today of your life. What’s to be done? What’s to be done? Follow your feet. Put on the coffee. . . . Live in the needs of the day” (page 40).
Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, said, “We do not have to be saviours of the world! We are simply human beings, enfolded in weakness and in hope, called together to change our world one heart at a time.” As church attendance shrinks, there is something we can do: invite one person at a time. Raise up in one soul a desire to worship, to serve, to form bonds. Then do the same tomorrow.
While I put effort into staying focused on the Mass, the effort escapes into a menagerie of thoughts: solving problems, outlining my day, and smiling at the baby in the next pew, Realizing I have no attention on the Mystery before me, I focus again only to become distracted the next second. Etty Hillesum claims that a quiet hour isn’t simple: “A lot of unimportant inner littler and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions.” As Hillesum writes about her desire for “a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view so that something of ‘God’ can enter you, and something of ‘love,’ too,” it seems appropriate that the title of her autobiography is An Interrupted Life.
Imagine driving between two walls of fire, almost impenetrable smoke hiding the road whose destination is far from certain. Engulfed in fear and impending disaster, how does one function? Watching the California fires and hearing of their ferocity, I think of these persons whose terror is beyond my imagining. Henri Nouwen writes, “As we feel the pain of our own losses, our grieving hearts open our inner eye to a world in which losses are suffered far beyond our own little world of family, friends, and colleagues.” In the face of others’ greater suffering, how can we bemoan a flat tire, a lost contest, a failed exam, a burnt dinner? Perhaps we should feel blessed to have such small things to bear.