Columbus, Ohio,
7/19/08
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle
A
Columbus, Ohio,
7/19/08
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
Romans 8:26-27
Matthew 13:24 -43
Long before the words bi-coastal and multi-tasking were a part of our American vocabulary there was a Dominican sister whose influence was felt from coast to coast as she lived the Dominican mission with absolute intensity. Historians have dubbed her as a ‘misguided maverick’ and the San Rafael Dominicans refer to her in their history as ‘a colorful and energetic figure who had a hard time acquiescing to authority’.
Raised as an Episcopalian in Baltimore, Dolores O’Neale was professed as a Kentucky Dominican in 1856 at the age of 19. She was a large, formidable woman who trained as a teacher, but whose heart called her to care for the sick. When the Civil War broke out she served as a nurse in field hospitals and at least once she was caught in the line of fire, barely escaping unharmed.
If we believe that our Dominican charism is a permanent element that constantly appears in a new form then Dolores’ life and its many stops: Kentucky, Memphis, Delaware, New Jersey, Nashville, California and Reno, Nevada give witness to her itinerancy and mendicancy as well as to her own misguided financial dealings. She is credited with starting schools, opening a novitiate and she laid the foundation for what today is a 376 bed facility in Reno, Nevada that is known as St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center. Dolores thought and moved ‘outside the box’. She was fearless and unencumbered by custom, clergy or controversy. She thrived on conflict and excitement. Failure became a sensation she was painfully accustomed to. She became a woman bound to bring misfortune even to those who had been her most loyal and trusting companions. With every change of address Dolores appeared more driven and yet fluent in the rituals of failure.
In a harness of her own making Dolores returned to Kentucky after nearly 25 years of itinerant wanderings. According to Sister Paschala Noonan’s, Signadou: A History of the Kentucky Dominican Sisters, ‘At the age of 57 Dolores was received as a “visitor” at St. Catharine’s because the community could not assume her debts’. Three years before her death at age 80 Dolores requested active and passive voice. That was denied her.
In the vastness of God’s providence as the spiritual descendants of Dolores O’Neale and other Dominican pioneer women we know that we have been blessed and formed by their struggles and their successes. Their stories live on in us and are acted out in our own. These noble women, our ancestors in the Order, come from fertile soil for in the words of today’s reading from the book of Wisdom, ‘they gave their children good ground for hope’.
Farmers, gardeners and landscapers tell us that no matter how fertile the soil there is a time when weeds serve a necessary function. Just as the master instructs his slaves in today’s gospel reading, ‘If you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest’. In the springtime, weeds help anchor the young plants and often keep the tender, new seeds from being washed away by torrential spring rains. It is only when the weeds crowd out the wheat and start aggressively monopolizing light, moisture, nutrients, soil and space that the master must act.
Farmers and gardeners constantly seek ‘that good ground for hope’. With the coming of each spring their seeds are always planted under the best possible conditions with a prayer for an abundant harvest or for the best looking garden in the neighborhood. Once planted, we know that the farmer trust their crops to the earth, wind, fire and water. Farmers live with the constant threat of foraging squirrels and other species. But seedlings never grow in pure isolation.
Jesus forcefully reminds us in this parable that the reign of God is a mixture of wheat growing alongside weeds. We all know that it is in the messiness of daily existence, sometimes conflictive and disagreeable, that God is truly revealed. Jesus’ instruction to allow the weeds to grow along with the wheat is his way of teaching us tolerance towards the excessive use of our good qualities. For often, it is in our strengths, our finely tuned skills, that sometimes our passion takes a wrong turn and persists in its overindulgence and we find our inadequacies, our addictions, our blind spots. And so we come face to face with our own personal weeds, our shortcomings.
Placing this gospel parable alongside the story of Dolores O’Neale we could perhaps conclude that though she had been planted in the ‘good ground of hope’ her life was more one of a weed than the wheat that was expected. With Dolores , I believe that her passion for mission never cooled. She withstood tremendous adversity, but never seemed to learn the fine art of negotiation and compromise. To some she was regarded as a prophetic figure and to others she was defiant and filled with self-importance. Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words apply to her, ‘Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.’ There is a part of Dolores in each of us, for as Timothy Radcliffe said, ‘There are ways of being Dominican we haven’t even dreamed of.’
As our seven congregations create a new congregation we pool our genealogies with women like Dolores O’Neale. We also claim the ‘good ground for hope’ from our participation in the Dominican Alliance. The expansiveness of mind and heart birthed by the Alliance planted seeds of creativity and energy that keep our focus on mission and ways for us to broaden our personal and congregational experiences of collaboration. We have now taken on a communal enterprise that requires radical hope.
Each of us brings our wheat and our weeds to this process. Our congregational stories continue to reveal that we are strongly committed Dominican women who are tenacious, opinionated, and often wildly suspicious of one another and each others’ motives. Even though we may believe with absolute clarity that our individual congregational decisions to enter the union was the right choice, we know that we have all borne some suffering through this discernment process. However, it is an enormous comfort to know that the life of Jesus gives witness that he knew what it felt like to suffer physically, emotionally and spiritually. Our Dominican brother, Meister Eckhart, reminds us that there is no pain or sorrow which comes to us that has not first passed through the Heart of God. Truly we can relate to Jesus’ suffering when we begin to understand that at times in our lives we are in the presence of a great lesson and a great teacher. We know we are being profoundly tested beyond our usual comfort and security.
Radical hope invites us to remember our sacred intention for beginning this move towards union. Our study and conversations have been a source of energy and hope. The stories, the struggles, not unlike those of Dolores O’Neale, and the successes of the thousands of Dominican women who have gone before us remind us that we come in joy and freedom. We gather around this one table of the Eucharist with grateful hearts. We were made for these times, times that produce wheat and weeds, but always planted in the ‘good ground for hope’.