After Sweet Green Corn Ripens

I never knew that her given name was Maxine. Or that, as a girl, she dreamed of becoming a Rockette, and thus spent many evenings with her cousin Judith practicing those high kicks.

The very last time I saw Maggie, she was smooth-skinned, cheeky pink, and saucy. She wore a small brown pill cap on her head, which I thought looked smart and stylishly understated. Her explanation for it: “I’m having a bad-hair year.”

I laughed. “Well, gorgeous, you sure know how to make that work for you!” I’d been having challenges along such lines myself, wearing decorative scarves to hide a thinning area just past my hairline. Her ornamentation reasons, of course, were entirely different than mine: she had been through several months of the “bone-crusher,” aka the “soul-destroyer,” her personal nicknames for chemotherapy.

What a far cry from when we first met -- in the late 1980s, at a downtown San Diego protest against the Reagan administration’s policy in Central America. I was there in creative-intellectual-rebel mode, on the verge of entering graduate school, espousing a hip cause popular with many of my twenty-something peers. She, on the other hand, had actually been to Central America, living there for many moons, witnessing suffering, reading widely among the works of the post-war Latin American poets, and writing gritty and gripping poetry in empathetic response to the political and social injustice she found.  

So her objection in the poem “In The Distinguished Liberal,” (written for the poet Claribel Alegria) came from a wholeheartedly different level of experience than that of most who had gathered at that well-intentioned downtown demonstration. The title was simultaneously the first line of the poem, highlighting an irony that I probably did not fully appreciate all those years ago:

In The Distinguished Liberal

Newspaper

I read of the Salvadoran poet,

now living in Nicaragua,

who came here to speak

of her country – Neruda’s

delicate waist of America –

of the rich volcanic earth

of corona de cristo that blooms blood red

of executions in the dark …

The distinguished liberal

newspaper headlined its story

“Salvadoran Misery.” Of course

severed heads are a misery.

Mutilated Indians are a misery.

Military escalations promoted

as humanitarian aid are a misery.

Yet she speaks of revolution

in San Salvadoran factories

in liberation churches

in pueblo-owned milpas after

sweet green corn ripens.

To her mind, it was the “distinguished liberals” who seemed disheartened and overly focused on bad news, unable to hear the yearning and the hope in these grassroots revolutions. It was also the “distinguished liberals” in academia who were often writing beautiful award-winning lyrical poetry, paying lip-service to justice-making and solidarity with the oppressed, yet remaining at an easy distance from it all -- comfortable, complacent, tenure-tracked, safe.

Maggie’s track was never tenured. Early on, some critics claimed her work needed more lyricism and form, that it flirted too much with bitterness and despair (and admittedly, I had moments when I agreed...), that it was overly political and time-specific in content. Of course, would be her retort. That was, in good part, the point. Mutilated Indians lacked a certain lyricism. Prisoners of South Africa’s apartheid system danced with despair. Life in the world’s war zones was invariably fraught with politics and the specifics of time and place. When it came to poetry, perhaps, she tended to agreed with Che Guevara. As her poem “Death of Che,” attests, Che once said: “I can’t sleep/on a mattress while my soldiers /are shivering up there.”/ And he divided the men into two groups: / those who can sleep / on a mattress / while others suffer / and those who won’t.”

That line describes much of Maggie’s poetry. It doesn’t sleep on a mattress while prisoners are being tortured. It cries, rages, unveils, and refuses to cover its eyes.

I step out of my car

emptied of singing

to work, to work

Emptied by news of war

the hungry, radiation...

-- from "World of Dust," in Seventh Circle by Maggie Jaffe

Yet Maggie herself was no mattress-rejecting ascetic. A luxurious bed was one of her most treasured indulgences during the final months of her life -- along with cigarettes (she had quit a few times in her life, once for nearly fifteen years) and red meat (after losing too much weight after surgery and chemo, she enthusiastically renounced vegetarianism). She loved tasty food, good drink, exotic clothes, hefty books (her favorite: Moby Dick), opera, jazz, dangly earrings, thought-provoking films, liberation theologians, and left-wing activists. She had poetess-diva tendencies. Her cats – there were always one or two in her abode-- were registered and pedigreed. Despite many rough patches, she dug in to life with great verve and relish.

Maggie & I dug this flick.

Maggie welcomed guests into her home with an effervescent hospitality. Once upon a time, she and her husband, also a professor, threw lavish end-of-semester parties for their students and friends, replete with wines, tamales, chocolates, Dadaism, and intoxicated sociocultural gabfests. I was a graduate teaching associate then, and I enjoyed most of those gatherings. But, introvert that I am, I loved more my solo visits with Maggie. An afternoon or evening with Maggie was always a step into a delicious, zestful Sabbath. Sometimes we’d go out for dinner and a movie – but more often she’d invite me over to her place and we’d stay in, noshing on Vietnamese take-out or some fabulous homemade delicacy, and watch rented films in her sumptuous bedroom-theater. This way we could get mildly, or perhaps deeply, buzzed without worrying about driving. Belly-full, wine glasses on night stand, and ashtray-ready, we’d prop thick pillows against the headboard of the king-sized bed. The windows to the room had these luxurious burgundy velvet drapes – which she would draw to block out any outside distractions. With the TV volume suitably adjusted and video forwarded to the film’s beginning, she would dim the overhead room light to some deep shade of sangria, and we’d be ready to surrender ourselves to Kubrick or Almodovar or Lee or Wenders. We watched a variety of movies, from the obscure and ponderous to the popular and current: El Norte, The Fringe Dwellers, A Dry White Season, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Mission.  Sometimes we would “preview” films – that is, check out a flick we were considering showing in a class, and pedagogically chew the fat. I recall one evening when her husband, on his way out the door to teach a night class, crankily sneered at us as we started to preview the movie version of Hair. “You’ve got to be kidding me -- Hair? Isn’t that just West Side Story on acid?” That sealed my decision to show the rambunctious hippie musical during the final week of one of my English 100 classes, although for the life of me I cannot recall how I managed to connect that movie with written composition. Maggie’s preference that semester was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which she saw as a smart and gritty critique of cold war politics and domestic racism.  

Liberate the lobsters!

Expropriate the best sellers!

Shoot the New Yorker in the kneecaps!

Interrogate the whole damn magazine rack!

--from "At the Writers' Colony" in Continuous Performance by Maggie Jaffe

Maggie loved exploring and teaching about portrayals of the oppressed in popular culture – particularly the working poor, prisoners, death row inmates, the “disappeared” in Central and South America, Native Americans, and the African diaspora. As an uprooted intellectual Woodstock-nation bard and secular Jew with a heart wide open to the cries of the downtrodden, Maggie staunchly refused to separate her hunger and thirst for justice from her writing and teaching.

From Continuous Performance, Poems by Maggie Jaffe

Because of Maggie, I came across ideas and histories and cultural moments that I might not have encountered otherwise. We went to hear ex-CIA agent Philip Agee when he gave a lecture at San Diego State, where we heard the horror stories about agents testing torture techniques on homeless people and crop-dusting viruses over American cities to see how well such biological invasions might disable a population. We went to the protests against CIA recruitment on campus, trying not to laugh as we chanted “The CIA is – you know – the US version of the Ges-ta-po!” When some local neo-Nazis littered the campus with hate literature, Maggie invited the president of the local John Brown Anti Ku Klux Klan organization to speak in her classes. She gave me one of the dozens of T-shirts she’d bought as a kind of payment for his lecture – across the front was an image of a thick-booted skinhead – crossed out with an X – and large bright letters proclaiming “No Nazis! No KKK! No Fascist USA!” I could not bring myself to wear this attention-attracting shirt in public, but she loved sporting it with her Indian earrings and beatnik beret.

Maggie lent me scads of books from her personal library: Black Elk Speaks, Soledad Brother, Rules for Radicals. One year for my birthday, she gave me a volume of artwork by the black collage artist Romare Bearden, a thoughtful and lovely gift. The first page of the book features a quote of Bearden’s: “The true artist feels there is only one art—and that it belongs to all mankind.” Bearden’s work – full of the specifics of biography, history, struggle, cultural ritual, and place – expressed a moral position that contrasted with the cynical detachment and disconnectedness reflected in the prevailing art of his day. Bearden rejected “art for art’s sake,” filling his collages with vivid images and tense energies that reflected the turbulence he experienced in the inner cities. As Mary Campbell noted in her accompanying essay, “In the urban scenes, on the city streets, there is a violence that is destructive, yet there is also a redemption and a transforming vision that allows hope.” Bearden bore witness through his art, and when Maggie gifted me with a collection of his work, I sensed her encouragement for me to join her in creating “art for bearing witness’ sake” – to find a way to do the same with my prose.

A birthday gift from Maggie

Maggie generally scoffed at institutional religion (as did I back in those days), but she had a secret appreciation for the yearnings and values that had given birth to it. Once, she sheepishly admitted to me that she had taken to lighting candles for her father on the anniversaries of his death. She also confessed that she had “a thing” for Jesuits (Perhaps we had just watched the movie The Mission). Together Maggie and I saw the movie Romero, about the El Salvadoran archbishop assassinated in church because of his love and support of the poor in his country. I’m pretty sure it was through Maggie that I first heard about the liberation theologians Gustavo Gutierrez and Ernesto Cardenal and the Jesuit antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan.

Perhaps that is why she was the first of my academic friends that I “came out” to about my perplexing return to the Catholic church in the year 2000.  By then, I had long since left academia and had moved away from the heart of the city where Maggie continued to teach and write. I had married; she had divorced. Our work lives had become busier and more stressful, and we both regretted that our visits had become fewer and farther between. She took my re-embracing of my baptismal roots as a fine reason to invite me over for dinner and a bottle of red wine.

“You know, you are partly to blame for my stumbling back to church,” I told Maggie, accusingly. “You and your Ernesto Cardenal. You and your Dead Man Walking and your Romero.”  

            “Well, my personal theory is that with a name like Mary you’re pretty much doomed to such a fate. You are what you are.” She took a sip of wine.

            “You are what you are?” I laughed and shook my head. “Holy Moses, Magalita! That’s right out of the Hebrew scriptures: ‘I am that I am’.”

            “Well see, then, there ya go. Neither of us can keep away from this religious crap. I yam what I yam too, apparently. Like Popeye the Sailor Man.”

            Serendipitously, Bob Marley’s Exodus album was on while we were eating. At the same instant, we both realized that the song “Jammin” was playing:

            we’re jamming –

            to think that jammin was a thing of the past

            we’re jammin

            and I hope this jam is gonna last

“Oh my God” – we raised our glasses for a toast, for this synchronicity was, well, truly jammin – and together, with Bob, we sang it: “We’re YAMMIN!”

Summer faculty. Maggie is fourth from the left; I'm on the right.

           

A decade later, things really were jamming for Maggie. She had won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled her to take a sabbatical and finish her sixth book: Flic(k)s, a poetic exploration of “cinema and life’s cinematic movements.” She was in a relationship with a kind man who treated her like a queen. College lecturing continued to be hard (and underpaid and underappreciated) work, but more often than not, she was enjoying it.

Then the crushing fatigue descended, along with a spate of urinary tract infections and various bugs that she initially chalked up to a weak immune system. “I tell those fuckers (her snarky-yet-affectionate nickname for ‘students’) to stay home when they’re sick but somebody always shows up to cough in my face. I don’t get it!”

            “It’s obviously a conspiracy,” I joked. “If they can get you sick, they figure they can weasel out of a quiz or get you to drop a paper.”

            “Well, I do think that they have figured out that I give better grades when I’m high on Sudafed.”

            But the Sudafed and homeopathics and healthy eating did not stop what was ailing her. It turned out to be bladder cancer, advanced to such an extent that Maggie’s entire bladder, along with her reproductive organs, had to be removed.

            Maggie hoped initially that the surgeon would successfully scoop out all of the cancer. When post-surgical chemotherapy was suggested, she resisted it at first – dreading everything she’d heard about its side effects. Eventually she was persuaded to give it a go. It was, in a word, ruthless—and having to navigate the challenges of a urostomy and urine drainage bag compounded the long slog of exhaustion, nausea, and brain fog. Fairly soon after she finished her chemo sessions, however, she experienced an encouraging return of strength. For a few months, her scans showed no return of cancer. Plans were made for a second surgery – this time to construct a new bladder from a section of her intestine.  She moved into a new, easier-to-manage apartment – a small place with a pool – and was looking forward to swimming again. We made tentative plans to share decadent “comfort meals” of rare steak, macaroni and cheese, and canned chocolate frosting. “And you know what?” she said to me one day on the phone. “This crap is getting me a whole two semesters off! In this world, the trick to getting a long paid sabbatical is: get seriously ill. Don’t that fuck all?”

Her vim and spunk had returned. I hoped this jam was gonna last.

One incision was as far as the surgical bladder-building team got with Maggie. They immediately stitched her back up, aborting the reconstruction after finding cancer inside her abdomen. The oncologist determined that it was inoperable and untreatable.

            It was one of cancer treatment’s horrible back-stabs—those false-negative scans, and the sensations of well-being and vigor that had invited hope and future plans. Maggie knew that there could be no guarantees in her situation, but she had been feeling healthy and had prepared well for another several months of post-surgical recuperation in her new abode, replete with her favorite legal pain-killers, tons of movies, and the possibility of being able to swim in a pool again by summer. Instead, she would have to procure new homes for her cats and experience the anticipatory grief of her family and loved ones.

            At first she still wanted to do the decadent-eating thing, so we kept making plans to eat at DZ Akins (an outrageously yummy Jewish diner in La Mesa) and return to her place with the worst possible take-home dessert for us to savor as we watched schlocky movies together. But our plans were consistently interrupted: she had to contact lawyers; she needed to meet with a doctor about an experimental therapy; a painful tiredness would overcome her and make visiting impossible.

            One night she called me up to apologize for having to cancel our plans yet again.

            “No need to apologize, Maggie. We’ll do it some other time. Whatever works for you. It’s okay.” I hated that she seemed to be feeling guilty about not being up for a visit.

             “I can’t believe how bad this sucks.” Maggie’s voice was a tense whisper. “Goddamned fucking cancer! I have so much to do, still. I hate it all. I hate everything.”

            As I mouthed some words attempting to express love and acknowledge the unimaginable suckiness of dealing with cancer, Maggie began to cry. Then to moan. Then to sob. And then to gulp for air between sobs. All I could do was listen and remain on the line, feeling absolutely, utterly helpless. The phone grew hot in my hand; the sky above glittered horribly; the workdesk in front of me exuded an awful woodenness. And for some reason, I could not cry at that particular moment. The energy in Maggie’s sobbing demanded all of the emotive space – and all thirty-five miles of air —between us. There was nothing to say or do. I listened as she sobbed, and I breathed in the thick darkness, wordlessly praying. My crying would come later.

            This was not despair Maggie was experiencing – I think it was more like a mournful anger. Despair usually lacks the energy that sobbing requires. It dawned on me later (slow, I am) that whatever usually brings contentment or happy anticipation – such as tasty food or a visit from a friend – might evoke an angry or embittered grief in someone who is expecting to die soon. It’s the encounter with a naked existential unfairness – i.e. the people and activities and life I love are being ripped away from me; it hurts too much to enjoy them now – that enrages.

Maggie and I never got together for that decadent meal. There were only two more times we connected – both times by phone. One time it was to talk about hospice. She had heard rumors that a residential hospice (rather than a hospital) might be a good way to go: “they give you good drugs there, I hear.” I shared with her my only experience with hospice, which had occurred two years previously when another friend, Kathy D., was dying of cancer. I had been deeply moved by the thoroughness and tenderness of the in-home hospice nurse’s care during Kathy’s last days. I told Maggie I had heard wonderful things about San Diego Hospice, which (at the time) offered a beautiful space for people to die. She said she would check it out as her situation progressed.

            In the fall of 2010, Maggie and I had our final conversation.

            I was thousands of miles away, visiting my hometown, Kansas City. I had taken some time to myself in the afternoon to walk around the lake at Loose Park. Maggie called me, still hoping that we could get together soon. She sounded serene – even jovial – and told me that she managed to get herself in a trial with an experimental anti-cancer drug. She was looking forward to trying some other alternative therapies, because “what the fuck? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Might be my final adventure.”

She also wanted to talk with me about “spiritual things.”  “Seriously, Mary, I’m wondering about what life really means, if there is a great beyond, and shit like that! Can you believe it?”

            “So then,” I shot back. “You must have made it into the psilocybin trial? Or the ecstasy one?”

            We both laughed hard. “I promise to save a little for you if I get some of the good shit,” she said.

            “Cool! So can we plan on shrooms and Fantasia for our next get-together?”

            “Marking my calendar, girlfriend.”

            All joking aside, Maggie really did want to talk about spiritual things, and we continued to talk for nearly an hour. I had recently taken a course in spiritual direction, and she was hoping I had some juicy cosmic wisdom to proffer. In all honesty, I felt I had had little to share in that moment that would not sound like some half-baked, paltry platitude. Furthermore, I am not much good at conversing via cell phone – communicating without eyes, gestures, facial expressions, and touch feels stilted and partial. And of course, a good friend’s impending death is intimidating as hell. However, when Maggie asked for suggestions on “something spiritual” to read, a name did spring to mind.

            “Check out the works of Rabbi Rami Shapiro,” I said. “I’ve seen him speak at a few interfaith conferences. He writes a column for Spirituality and Health magazine. He’s funny, wise, and deep. He has a more nondualist approach to religion and spirituality, and thinks of 'God' not as a Supreme Being, but Being itself. He translates YHVH as ‘the One Who Is’ rather than ‘Lord.’ I think you’d like him.”

            I had a paragraph from Shapiro’s The Hebrew Prophets scribbled in my journal and I shared it with her: “When the prophet speaks to you in the voice of God, you are hearing the deepest truths of your own being echoed in their words. It is as if your greater self, the self aware of itself as one with God, were addressing your smaller self, the ego that, while also a manifestation of God, insists that it is other than God. It is the ego that sees the world as an arena of competing beings vying for the biggest piece of a fixed pie. It is the ego that shifts from self to selfishness, and engages in unjust, cruel, and exploitative behavior. It is the ego that needs to hear the prophetic challenge; it is the ego that needs to turn. And when it does, it turns toward its greater self and reconnects with God and engages creation justly, lovingly, and humbly...”

            “Hunh.” She paused to write his name down. “He sounds like he might be a mensch. Thanks for the suggestion.”

            I want to take a moment to behold a couple of lovely ironies:

Through my years of exposure to Maggie’s cultural and political tastes, I discovered elements and strains of Catholicism that I had not encountered previously in church or in Catholic school. And there, in our final conversation, I had offered Maggie a nugget from within her own inherited, albeit largely rejected, Jewish tradition. Our mutual loathing of institutional religion had been so strong when we first met, yet as our lives ripened, we each handed over – almost accidentally -- something tasty and nourishing, like sweet green corn, from the others’ rejected tradition.

            The other irony is Maggie asking me about “things of the spirit,” when the truth was that she had, in her own fashion, already lived the spirit through her writing and teaching and politics. Her work was inspired by and dedicated to all the beaten-down of this world – and like an incorrigible Hebrew prophet, her poetry and her life proclaimed : “Spare me the sound of your hymns, and let the music of your lutes fall silent; I am not listening. Rather let justice well up like water, let righteousness flow like a mighty stream.” (Amos 5:24).

My attempts to contact Maggie over the next three months were unsuccessful. I left her messages by phone, note, and e-mail but never heard back from her. One day, her answering machine was too full to receive any more messages. She had mentioned to me earlier that she might simply “let people go” at a certain point, and limit her contacts to a small circle of loved ones. Perhaps that is what she chose to do. Or—perhaps she intended to get in touch with people at some point, but was interrupted by death, the ultimate diva. She died at the San Diego Hospice on March 5, 2011, at age 62.

            Several people among Maggie’s larger circle of family and friends spoke at the memorial service. Maggie’s sister recalled a favorite question they half-jokingly asked of each other over the years: Oy, what happened to us? Where are all the Talmudic scholars in our family? I shared humorous memories about the bad luck we both had with dentistry and our mutual idolatry of heavy, dangly earrings in the early 1990s – Maggie underwent surgery after ripping an ear lobe. Another friend and colleague mentioned that Maggie had actually felt rather well during her last two days – even “rallying” at one point to write a few lines and spontaneously hold a rambunctious poetry workshop for the hospice staff.

            I love knowing that little detail about her final days. It still hurts that she is gone – and I am sad that I will not hear that particular Noo-Yawk accent again, the timbre of her voice with its unique mixture of sarcasm and concern and chutzpah --  but I love knowing that she found her own way to stay in the flow as she was dying. That in her own fashion, she donned that mantle of Talmudic scholar – or, perhaps more accurately-- of chachamah (wise woman) -- teaching and subverting and loving well in her full, wild ripeness.

Maggie Jaffe's NEA Author Page.

In God's Womb: A Retreat with Edwina Gateley

God’s grace

is like a great dam

held back

within us, and God,

a longing mother,

waiting to break open

and immerse us

in her waters.

~Edwina Gateley, “Dam,” from Growing into God

This passage is just one among several of Edwina Gateley’s poems -- which often feature God as She -- that I have savored. There is an elegant simplicity and unadorned candor in her prayer-poetry that invites, engages, and refreshes. Edwina’s poems are like letters from an insightful friend who gently and persistently reminds you that God “loves us passionately right here, right now, amidst the wonders and messiness of life.” In early September 2013, dozens of retreatants got to experience Edwina Gateley’s divinely earthy wisdom during a Contemplative Outreach-sponsored weekend gathering at St. Bart’s Episcopal Church in Poway, California. Through verse, music, visuals, and personal storytelling, Edwina invited us to reconnect with and reflect on our own souls' journey with God through the stages of life. 

Edwina (yes, she is a first-name-basis kind of sistah) referred to the “three stages of imaging God” to focus and steer her animated—and frequently playful-- presentation. The first stage occurs during childhood, when one (if raised in a religious home) tends to have an innocent, magical, or mythical image of God. As a child, Edwina saw God as a light-hearted playmate, and her hometown cathedral – full of beautiful statues of angels and saints, was her “divine playhouse.” She found delight in the rituals, the Bible stories, and the liturgical seasons of the church year. Her family’s Catholic tradition was a source of solace, security, and joy for her.

The second stage of imaging God emerges through the responsibility and discipleship that come with adulthood. As we grow and change, explains Edwina, so do our notions of God. The questions of obedience, sin, guilt, and judgment may come to the forefront in one’s spiritual journey (as it did for her) – but one still feels the urge “to continue the journey -- like idiots for Christ.” At this stage of her life, Edwina felt called to become a missionary and teacher in Africa. But because she took with her a God who was “white, Catholic, and British,” she was in for some surprises that would soon challenge and transform her perception of divinity. As she wrote in her memoir In God’s Womb, “In Africa my understanding of God changed because of the hospitality, openness, and generosity of the African people. Their notion of God seemed to be much bigger than what I had learned from my Church at home. I came to understand that we walk in God and God gets bigger to the degree that we are open and expectant.” After three years in Africa, Edwina returned to England and founded the Volunteer Missionary Movement, which offered a way for lay people to become more engaged with Christianity’s social justice tradition. Her experience in Africa had awakened her more fully to Jesus’ gospel call: “we [are] to share our gifts and talents with the poor. But not only that—we [are] to share the Spirit of Christ: the Spirit of love, charity, and friendship.”  

The growth and expansion of the Volunteer Missionary Movement was deeply fulfilling for Edwina, but eventually she began to feel a pull in another direction – an invitation to spend more time in silence with God. Thus she undertook a solitary three-month sojourn in the desert of Algerian North Africa. Here, she sunk into “the consciousness of the Divine” and experienced a deeper sense of belonging to and being loved by God. One of Edwina’s compelling Sahara stories involved a moment when she recognized her water storage tank was leaking and she would soon run out of water. She headed out into the desert on her own to search for water – fearful, yet placing her deeper trust in God. To her surprise, a Bedouin Tuareg woman appeared “against a thousand miles of sand.” The woman did not speak English, but she invited Edwina into her home built out of rocks and goatskins. As an exhausted Edwina sat down to rest, the woman exited into a nearby rocky cleft for a time, and returned with sweet hot tea to share. There was a spring in that rocky crevice! The gift of that Bedouin woman’s hospitality and that hidden spring gave Edwina a new perspective on the “water from the rock” that God made available to Moses and the Israelites in Exodus 17.

Edwina’s time in the desert was a deepening of her discipleship and relationship with the divine that characterizes a more mature level of the second stage of imaging God. Restored and renewed, she came to the United States to earn a degree in theology, after which she accepted another call from God to embrace the neglected and the marginalized. She founded Genesis House, a program serving women recovering from prostitution. After two decades of this ministry, conflicts within the organization culminated in her having to leave Genesis House – “perhaps the most painful and heartbreaking time of my life,” says Edwina. And yet even this upsetting change in her plans opened up for her a new and fruitful phase in her journey: of motherhood, of leading retreats and conferences, of openhearted sharing of her journey with others and of inviting people to embrace Meister Eckhart’s assertion that “we are all called to give birth to God” – to allow divine love to take root within us and freely flow out into the world.

This later phase – stage three of imaging God – is the expansive call to wisdom and to divine union. God is Lover and we are Beloved. As our former, more limited images of God fall away, we become more conscious of the divine presence in all people, all places, all moments. Religious rituals may not hold the same kind of significance as they did in earlier stages, since, as Edwina says, “we have a new Cathedral: in the streets, in the forest, in the universe, in every place … we deeply know that we are not alone and that God is bigger than our reality.” Here is where one most fully realizes the call to be a mystic: to be conscious and to carry the mystery of God into daily life. A mystic deepens in wisdom, intuition, authenticity and integrity, knowing that ultimately all is connected, all is in God, and, as Julian of Norwich proclaimed, “all will be well.”

Throughout this two-day retreat, Edwina included musical interludes and visuals as well as moments of silence and small-group sharing that allowed participants to reflect on their own soul-journeys and turning points with God. This interweaving of Edwina’s reflections with moments of silence and personal sharing invited us to recognize how our own ways of relating to the great Mystery have changed over the course of our lives and how, as Edwina says, “God grows with us.”

Edwina’s life – her early missionary work, her time in the desert, her further call to solidarity with marginalized women, and her writing and story-sharing and retreat-leading -- stands as a wonderful example of “modern-day mysticism,” that is, contemplation and action. While we are invited into a deepening relationship with the divine in a variety of ways, times of contemplative silence and solitude allow us to sink into God, to rest and to be restored – so that we can return to ordinary life with open, Christ-lit hearts and with the spiritual resources to walk through the challenges and adversities that inevitably come our way.

Here are a few final tasty quotes from Edwina:

“God, the Eternal Seducer, is insatiable and is always urging us further. If you follow God, God will take advantage of you!”

“A mystic is that which you are already invited to become.”

“No matter how much our society represses it, there is a deep hunger for the spiritual – it is an essential part of our humanity.”

“In the Book of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit is free and wanders the marketplace [i.e., this world] looking for open hearts in which to make her home.”

Thank you, Edwina, for answering and living the heart-opening call. 

The God of the Mystic

Excerpted from Kabir Helminski's Huffington Post article (reflecting on the ideas of Christopher Hitchens):

"The God of the mystic is not necessarily the God of sectarian religion. The mystical conception of Divinity goes beyond the narrow sectarian conceptions of God that rule in some religious circles. The Divine Creative Power, from a mystical perspective, is that which has created human nature in its own image, imbuing all human beings, not just religious believers, with a capacity to act selflessly and generously, to follow impulses other than one's own self-interest, and that this tendency is innate, or latent, in the human condition itself.

Therefore, human virtue, whether it is rationalized by religious belief or not, is essentially inspired by the Divine Compassion inherent in existence. Mercy and Compassion are intrinsic to the universe and thus they are experienced in the interior spiritual life of every human being unless they are obscured by some other pathology or conditioning….

Furthermore, it is spiritual practice and the contemplative dimension of experience that perfects this inner possibility. The spiritual journey is a journey in which the individual human being overcomes all the fragmenting and dispersing tendencies of the human ego, all the contradictory impulses that weaken the soul. The spiritual project is a movement toward inner coherence around a deep center which is the spiritual heart, and this heart is the portal to the Infinite. And the dimensionless point inherent in every human being (whatever their professed beliefs), is the point of access for courage, wisdom, selfless service, and love. If one admits this, one admits that there is a spiritual reality that somehow is intrinsic to our human nature."

Read the rest of the article here. 

The Sacred Breath of God

"Deep Breath" by MelanieWeidner

“God’s breath it was that made me; the breathing of God … gave me life.”  

  ~Job 33:41

I recently told a friend that I thought the centering prayer movement is experiencing a beautiful new flowering. Later, the word that emerged was deepening. This “deepening-flowering” is, in good part, an effect of the spirit-led work of David Frenette, the contemplative teacher, writer, counselor, and spiritual director who led a weekend retreat with 80+ participants this past November 2012 at San Rafael Catholic church in Rancho Bernardo.

Frenette is a long-time practitioner of centering prayer. In his wonderful new book, The Path ofCentering Prayer: Deepening Your Experience of God, he explains how he encountered the mystery of God as a child: “In my dreams, I sensed that my life held a meaning deeper than any meaning society could provide . . . after waking, I felt a deep, radiant, unifying stillness in the night’s silence.” At the time, he had no religious language that would enable him to call that reality God or Christ, and these events faded from memory. But at age 19, his memories re-emerged and triggered an intense search for meaning. He came across a book on centering prayer and began practicing it daily. As his life “became a path of responding to the loving mystery” that he “learned to name God,” he signed up for a two-week retreat, where he met Fr. Thomas Keating. The two became great friends; Frenette came to see Keating as a mentor and spiritual father. In the thirty-odd years since that first intensive retreat, Frenette has been deeply engaged with contemplative community and service.

One of Frenette’s talents is concision and clarity. Observe how he distinguishes contemplation and centering prayer in his book: “Centering prayer and contemplation are often seen as two ends of a continuum. Centering prayer is at the active end of the continuum, where your actions predominate. Contemplation is at the receptive end of the continuum, where God’s actions predominate.” During the retreat, he defined contemplative prayer as “a prayer of wordless presence.” And Frenette’s presence and demeanor-- calm, warm, receptive, humble, unhurried, inquiring, gently humorous – conveyed a radiantly contemplative stance in daily life. 

One goal of Frenette’s presentation was to invite practitioners to try, if only for a weekend, a variation on the sacred symbol in centering prayer. We are familiar with the basic guidelines on centering prayer – first we choose a short sacred word as the symbol of our intention to consent to God’s presence and action; we then silently “say” it as we begin the prayer itself; thirdly, we ever-so-gently re-say the word when we notice we are engaged with thoughts. During introductory centering prayer workshops – or through Keating’s books – practitioners soon learn that a word is not the only form the sacred symbol can take: some might prefer using the “sacred breath” or the “sacred glance” to express their intention to consent. However, the explanation on these alternatives has been fairly limited – until now. Through his book and his teachings, Frenette intricately explains how one might use and deepen the sacred word as well as the sacred breath and the sacred glance (and other alternative symbols) during centering prayer.

As Frenette pointed out, practitioners often find that their use of the sacred symbol naturally evolves over time. The sacred word can become fainter or disappear; it may even “say itself” beyond our choosing to. Moreover, Frenette maintains, a totally different sacred symbol might be more suitable for a different season of one’s spiritual journey. Since our walk with God deepens over time, we do not need to cling to just one way of doing centering prayer – a way that may no longer reflect how we relate to the great Mystery.

The sacred breath, for instance, can help to bring centering prayer more fully into the body – allowing the practice to deepen into a contemplative prayer that is integrated with one’s active, physical life. For many, the breath allows for a more natural way to be receptive and present – in contrast to a repeated word, which might keep some people feeling trapped in concepts or “in their heads.” The breath serves as a rich symbol because it is ever-present and effortlessly within us, like God is, explained Frenette. Teresa of Avila once said, “All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one thing: praying as if God were absent.” With the breath, however, prayer may more readily proceed in, through, and with the presence of God. Frenette offered an example of how this practice assisted a client of his whose husband had recently died. The woman found that changing from the sacred word to the sacred breath enabled her to connect with unexpressed emotions that were held in her body. In effect, the sacred breath helped her to sink in to her sadness and process her grief in the presence of a God who, as the Cloud of Unknowing states, “can well be loved but not thought.”

Frenette guided the retreatants through two experiences of centering prayer with the sacred breath. He began by inviting us to use our sacred word, or whatever symbol we were accustomed to using. Then, gently, (ever-so-gently!) he suggested that we simply let go of our word – similar to the way we let go of a thought that has engaged us. Or: we could let our word simply be along-side our breathing. In a slow, dip-the-toe-in-the-pool fashion, we were invited to notice our breath, and then to allow the breath to become, even if momentarily, our expression of consent to God’s presence – regardless of what our more established word or symbol was “doing.” We were encouraged simply “let be,” and to welcome what occurred – even if what occurred was our own resistance.

There is so much more I could say about this weekend – so many more wonderful stories that were shared, questions that were responded to, and various other illuminations. Here are just a few highlights:

Prayer bumps: Frenette coined the phrase “prayer-bump” to describe “an everyday opportunity to stop, pause, and pray.” One can use an ordinary event in daily life (traffic, events in the news, and so on) as a reminder to slow down, pause, and pray to God. It’s a way to bless a moment, and a day, with more intention.

Contemplative dread: More seasoned practitioners might experience a profound sense of doom as they approach the death of the “separate-self sense” that has been so much a part of our human condition. Sensing its own death, the false self retreats from God.  Frenette suggests that we open up and allow God to touch us in this human experience – for this is a transformative moment. We can step off this “cliff” of dread and trust that a bridge will emerge.

Apparent obstacles in prayer: One of the biggest obstacles to transformation is the mistaken belief that “we are not getting anywhere.” There is actually nowhere to go but here! God can turn every obstacle into an aid for spiritual growth when we relax our hard grip on surface-level details and open up to God’s eternal presence within the suffering and the struggle. As Jean-Pierre du Caussade wrote, “Without God everything is nothing. With God nothing is everything.”

Humor: The words “human,” “humility,” and “humor” have the same Indo-European root.  According to Frenette’s mentor, Fr. Keating, “there is no sanctity without humor.” Laughter allows the light in. And do you know what the centering prayer police officer’s favorite saying is? – “You have the right to remain silent.”

Ever-so-gentle: Frenette told a story about how Fr. Keating felt the guidelines to the centering prayer practice needed to be revised. “We have to stop stressing gentleness with the sacred word,” Keating said. “Instead, people should be ever-so-gentle when they turn back to their sacred symbol in consent to God.” Practitioners can sometimes become very rigid and hard on themselves in their daily prayer practice. They should instead be ever-so-gentle, simply allowing themselves to be found by God, and easing into a “homeward-turning love.”

A final comment: If you have not already, read David Frenette’s book, The Path of CenteringPrayer. I suspect it will inform and liberate your practice in surprising ways. Fr. Thomas Keating, with gracious humility, describes Frenette’s work as “the best, most comprehensive, and most practical book on centering prayer.” I also agree with Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, who writes “this is an important moment in the centering prayer lineage tradition, when a faithful student emerges into mastery…I have found my own practice much illumined by this book.” And the next time the opportunity arises, attend one of David Frenette’s presentations. Your cup will overflow.