Celebrate Our Story
September 26, 2008

Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!

One of the privileges of this ministry is the opportunity I have to welcome you home.
This summer on my retreat I received a poem by Mary Oliver that I’d like to share with you.

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.

It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.

Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –
so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

Mary Oliver, Dream Work,
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986, pp. 52-53.

 

The spirit likes to dress up like this
10 fingers
10 toes
shoulders and all the rest
The spirit likes to dress up like you....and you .... and you
Eleanor----Helen-----Lois----Chris----Janice----John----Joan----Tuyet—
Look around you—at your table. Look around you—throughout the room. The spirit likes to dress up like you!

The spirit hovers within these walls having dressed up as Angela—Ulicia—Joanne—Ellie----Theodore---Pius—Sheila—Francis Gertrude---Rita—Virginia—Rose Imelda----Mary Dominic...and many more...

Look beyond the focus of the faces can you sense the spirit of those gone before us?

And we pray: Presente—be with us

The spirit dresses up in black branches, jonquils, Cartwright Creek, locust trees, hydrangea bushes, the campus queen....remember her? The spirit dresses up as a blue heron, bright red cardinals, holly trees and ripe red tomatoes.

The spirit enters us.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.

The spirit surrounds us, hovers near us, calls to us. We call her by many names: Sophia, Ruah, Holy Ghost, Mariah, wind and fire, the Great Mystery, the "really" real.

As we gather this weekend, may we recognize her in one another, in the beauty of our homeland, and in the sacred spaces and memories we share.

The spirit likes to be dressed up and be noticed. Let’s do her that honor. Namiste!

--Joye Gros, OP
President of Dominican Sisters of St. Catharine of Siena

 

the jonquil will take you back to Celebrate Our Story