by Helen Garvey
Contributor
Light streams through the ancient stained glassed windows into the silent chapel. Quiet figures steady their wavering bodies, grasping the familiar chair, coming to rest in the hallowed space.
Ready, ready are the pure white cloths, the corporal in its chaste folds, the cup, golden in the morning sun, the sisters in their irrevocable places.
Slowly they gather, these women of the Lord.
Early, the early ones always early for the Mass, the Eucharist, the meaning of it all. The walkers, abandoned by their defenders line up methodically as the sisters find their chairs.
What happened to these guardians of the nominative case? Who took these fiery protectors of the mathematical ratios from their scholarly eminence? Where sits the college president in her glowing robes?
The younger ones, from the missions, from Chicago, from Milwaukee, from “around here” make it at the moment of the opening hymn. Here they are unconsciously disrupting the routine with their casual vitality, with their late night laugher and with their morning fidelity. Here, perhaps, they ponder other Eucharists in other places, perhaps some with unresolved questions. Here they are home.
And then the “locals,” the independents, those who live close, those whose name is mercy and compassion, those who with the lay workers make the place go. They breathe out the air of an Iowa winter, as they claim a pew, undo a scarf and greet a friend. They too are home.
With his shock of white hair, his cautious step, his keen sense of his collaborators in mystery, the presider challenges us to examine the past year, to ponder as Mary did the essence of things, the meaning. How do we embrace 2015? What are our fears, our dreams? Where do we want to go?
Up front, the choir startles us with the beauty of its sweet voices. We feel the mystical moment in their clear song, in the sheer beauty of their music and in the melody of their lives. We sense a distilled desire for God. We forget the petty annoyances that mar our ordinary lives. We subjugate the mild irritations of close community. In the harmony of the choir, another world emerges. We hold the memory of that soprano who was the administrator we all respected, that flutist who was the teacher we all loved, that limping soloist who was the promoter of justice we all followed. We may even remember the clarion call of our novice mistress who counseled.
The body may grow poor and charmless,
and age inscribe its added jest.
The mind may stand, not too harmless
buffoon in its own blunders dressed.For God within her stoops to sharing
the splendor that is his alone
which still were hid had she come bearing
one spurious beauty of her own.*
But the beauty is not static. They are not done. They may leave here to protest their arthritis or to endure patiently and quietly their personal physical suffering. They may wonder, “What is for dinner?” but their song still echoes today in works of education, freedom, charity and justice. They will jostle those walkers propelling a mission: to visit the sick, to write to the congressperson, to protest the trafficking of women and children, or most heroically, to suffer the pain of not being able to serve as they have always served, to embrace God’s will in this present moment of disability, of surrender. They do not live in the past. Flawed and graced, they receive a New Year. They greet one another with affection and gratitude.
These are women religious, women of the Lord, “women who weep, not because they have lost something, but because they have been given so much.” (Joan Keleher Doyle, BVM)
* Powers, Jessica, Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, eds. Regina Siegfried and Robert Morneau (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1999).
[Sr. Helen Maher Garvey, BVM, is an organizational consultant for religious congregations. Presently she serves on the Board of the National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company. She held the position of Director of the Office of Pastoral Services for the Diocese of Lexington for 10 years and served in the presidency of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) from 1986 to 1989.]