Communion of Saints

Communion of Saints

The point at which one begins story is arbitrary, a bracket put around an experience to help understand and/or savor it.  I am choosing to begin this story by recollecting my dream in January 2009 featuring both Jesus and Sheela-na-gig.  I could have begun it with my son’s birth or with his death.  I could have begun it with an imaginary encounter with monks of the Ceile Day order whose footsteps I follow.

It is before 6 a.m. on April 27, 2014.  This day marks the 45^th anniversary of the birth of my first child, Arthur Donovan.  I stand on an ancient stone on the beach near the ferry dock on the Isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland awaiting the appearance of the sun so I might sing the words that have been sung here for centuries.  As the point of light appears on the horizon and begins to intensify, I start to chant and to bath myself in the first 9 rays of the sun.

The timing of my pilgrimage was dictated by the date of the silent retreat I am attending on this Isle so important in the spread of a unique form of Christianity in the Celtic lands.  Until a few weeks before my arrival I was unaware there was a Sheela-na-gig on the island.   It is on the exterior wall of the medieval nunnery ruins I walked through on my way to my hotel after disembarking from the ferry yesterday afternoon.  It was they who called me here, Jesus and Sheela-na-gig.  The dream foretold it, and set me on the path of inquiry that brought me here on this day.

Senility - the Passage from Life to Death

During a recent Centering Prayer meeting, we were practicing Lectio Divina with recording of Fr. Thomas Keating.  An excerpt of the recorded message follows.

“What you mean by happiness is pretty important. Success, fame, fortune and wealth, these tend to get drained of their excitement as you get older, especially in the mid-life crisis, and not to mention senility, and in the passage from life to death which is really a very special time in peoples lives. Of its nature it is a transformative period because the process of dying takes away the capacity for every other kind of passing, or, this world, of satisfaction that we might have hoped for. Everything recedes and there is nothing left but you, whoever you are. And so the spiritual journey is really a deliberate anticipation of the passage of death in which one freely and deliberately makes friends with this process that frees one from the limitations of happiness in this world and opens ones whole being to the possibilities that are unknown to us at first but which we finally come to know in the dying process is not going to work here in this world.”

The phrase that shimmered for me, wasn’t actually spoken.  What I heard and what I took into contemplation was “Senility, the passage from life to death.”  What Fr. Keating actually said is highlight in red above.  Praying with the phrase changed my relationship with senility which I interpreted as dementia. 

Celtic Knot

The path of my life is like a celtic knot.  The unbroken thread twists and turns in unpredictable and unexpected ways.  The pattern unknowable until the thread’s very end is tucked behind the final connection.   

The first time I became aware of birth and death days touching was on October 16, 1987, the day of my father’s death.  October 16^th was the day my mother had chosen for my planned caesarean birth.  

I met Elle hours after my husband I returned from Ethiopia.  So strong was our commitment to Dare’, a community of healers, even extreme jet lag, brain fog, emotional exhaustion couldn’t keep us away.  I tried not to allow shock register in my expression when I saw the bulge on the right side of the jaw of this beautiful woman who had come to us for healing.  She was to become both a precious sister and wise teacher to me over the coming years, but in that moment I saw only a woman in need calling forth the healers in all of us. 

It was heartbreaking a few years later when Elle told us we weren’t the community she needed to hold her at end of her life.  I wished it were otherwise, but I knew she was correct.  She returned to a tiny community on the northern CA coast precious to her earlier in her life.   Her life contracted so she could pay careful attention to her healing and to the spiritual teaching of her cancer.

Bleed Through

During a Women’s Dream Quest, I received a dream of my husband punching his brother in the face.  I woke with blood on the knuckle of the ring finger of my left hand.  I went to the men’s room for my morning toilet, and found blood on the sink.

I now have a new name for the experience of encountering the same image in dreams and waking life.  I call it bleed through.