Choosing a Lens for 2023

Many of us at the beginning of a new year make resolutions or set new goals for ourselves. Recently, I had the opportunity to view one of the TED Talks given by Dewitt Jones. Dewitt Jones is an American professional photographer, writer, film director and public speaker, who is known for his work as a freelance photojournalist for National Geographic. The title of his talk, Celebrate What’s Right with the World could easily be adopted as a very worthwhile attitude to adopt for 2023.

“… our vision controls our perception, and our perception becomes our reality” as Dewitt emphasises through his words and photographs during his twenty -minute presentation.

How might our moods and daily lives be altered if we set our personal compass on finding goodness, abundance, possibilities and what is right in the world.

Let’s pick up and use that lens of celebration!

-Sister Nancy Wales, csj

Christmas Message from the Sisters of St. Joseph

Christmas Message  

From the heart of silence leaps the living Word

like the dayspring rising where the dark is stirred

by our hope turned eastward toward the promised light

though the eyes see nothing but the depth of night.

(Genevieve Glen, OSB)

May Divine Love move us ever forward in acts of healing and whole-making.

Warmest Christmas wishes.

May Deep Peace be yours this Christmas Season,

The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada

Christmas Eve: The Long Night

Christmas Eve, in the experience of many, is of a night of exquisite expectation, of fulfillment of the pregnant waiting of Advent and new life coming into being. It is a time of searching hope in the darkness even when darkness threatens to overwhelm us. We seek in the silent night sky, a star of promise.

At an everyday level we gather to begin a celebration. We prepare treats to share. Our excited children can hardly wait at all, creating mayhem and resisting sleep, just in case they miss Santa’s visit to place gifts under the tree! In Christian families a young child may also have a special role focused on the very meaning of Christmas. In my family living in the United States the youngest child, able to read, waits expectantly to be called on to recite the Christmas story from the old family Bible and then to place the baby Jesus into the waiting creche.

Christmas is, of course, a celebration of the birth of Christ so long ago. But it is also much more! Our celebration cannot be reduced simply to a sentimental re-enactment of that familiar scene, lovely though it is. For the very heart of the Christmas story is the vivid narrative of universal incarnation – God with us, God in all things, for time and for eternity. Christmas is, above all, a celebration of Divine Presence in all lives, in all events and in every element of matter – an ancient understanding.

A powerful image of this understanding of incarnation, is found in the Carmina Gadelica, a beautiful compendium of ancient Gaelic prayers and poems collected from the Hebridean Islands by folklorist, Alexander Carmichael.

In a Christmas carol entitled “the Nativity” found in that text we read that on Christmas Eve … in “the long night, Glowed to Him wood and tree, Glowed to Him mount and sea, Glowed to Him land and plain, When that His foot was come to Earth.”

The carol speaks of the light of Christ’s birth penetrating all and reflected in the entirety of God’s creation. Later, these words find more contemporary utterance in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and paleontologist (1881-1955), as he exclaims,

“The Incarnation is a making new, a restoration, of all the universe’s forces and powers; Christ is the Instrument, the Centre, the End, of the whole of animate and material creation; through Him, everything is created, sanctified and vivified (The Phenomenon of Man).

This is what we celebrate at Christmas along with our more traditional practices. Truly it is a celebration, a joyful one but also one that de Chardin says, invites us into its deep mysterious significance not just for Christmas but for all of life in Christ. As we read in 2 Corinthians 5: 17, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, everything old has passed away; see everything has become new.” This is the birthing of Christ in our hearts and world as we celebrate Christmas Eve. In the “long night” we are to birth Christ in the world anew.

This year, the “long night” of Christmas is a seemingly “dark night” for many; a night filled with violent conflicts worldwide, of the sufferings of people fleeing persecution, torture and starvation, a night of ecological degradation. It is a night still struggling with the ongoing shadows and isolation of a pandemic. Rapidly escalating prices in stores mean that many families are desperate simply to provide their children with some festivities. We face a night where the possibility of the light being extinguished forever seems real in ways not previously experienced in our world.

“with the celebration of Christ’s birth we are called to be “God’s light in our world.” ”

And yet … as Christians familiar with mystical references to “the dark night” we find in our faith the light of Christ at the heart of all things, incarnation, the God we can touch. As we celebrate this Christmas Eve and the days ahead may we be reminded that with the celebration of Christ’s birth we are called to be “God’s light in our world.” The silent, enveloping waiting in the long night calls us ever to the primacy of prayer and love in and for the world. It invites us to prepare actions that will make a difference.  Let’s truly celebrate with joy this Christmas and in the “long night of promise” may we share that joy. On this Christmas Eve may we again hear a call to new birth in the face of the challenges of our times. As Christmas dawns in our hearts then all of creation will indeed “glow where His foot was” and will, through us, once again, shine Christ’s Presence “on Earth”.

 -Sister Mary Rowell, csj

Winter Solstice

Decades ago, I attended a Winter Solstice event at the Timothy Eaton Church in Toronto.  There was prayer and singing as the ritual evolved with a gradual lessening of the light until all were there, feeling each other’s life energy supporting one another in the seeming emptiness of complete darkness. All was still, a moment full of mystery blanketed by darkness and silence.

That trembling moment of standing in the absolute present, without guideposts to enable action also called forth an inner exploration of the energy moving within each of us individually as women, as beings, as one small part of the living being that is Cosmos and animates us all.  Imagine a Celtic cross, with energy moving north and south, east and west; from the Holy One to each individual and the depth of their being and then each individual sharing that energy with each other enclosed by a circle of safety, belief and wonder with the Centre bringing forth a cosmic crash of birthing light. There we were in one holy circle.

Our society stresses action and doing, not being.  It is difficult to remain in the darkness of expectant waiting when our world seems bereft and empty, when all that we have seen and known is taken away from us.  It is sometimes near impossible to remember that the light is ever-present while not visible and that life is gestating and preparing to birth again.  At least this was the case for me when our dearest daughter, Kristina, died in a tragic car accident on Easter Sunday, 1991. The powerful transmission of spiritual energy between the generations was suddenly curtailed; I felt suspended in the deep darkness of loss without knowing the way out. It would take years of psychological and spiritual direction before a safe path was hewed through the wild and untamed forests of grief.

Two experiences sustained me then and still do. That night at the hospital while praying with two Associate friends, the words from Isaiah, “You have given all to me, now I return it” were all I was able to articulate, yet their gift was the confirmation of a sure, unwavering faith in the cycle of life and the sacred mystery that is the Holy.  And then came the dream that called me “to the sanctuary, or spiritual center of my being” and took me “beyond linear and spatial limits” to a new consciousness (Geri Grubbs. Bereavement Dreaming and the Individuating Soul. Berwick, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, Inc, 2004). In the dream,

Kristina and I are walking along a dark alley when suddenly, she falls into a deep rectangular-shaped hole. Desperate to rescue her, I climb down the rocky face to rescue her.  The descent into the hole is slow and scary but I manage to do it. Lo and behold, there she is – just as she was – but cradled in a manger filled with straw! I am surprised that it is not dark down here; the space is filled with a deep, golden, warming light. I figure that we will have to climb up the way I came down but miraculously, over to the right, is a shiny, copper ladder fixed against the wall.  We climb up, me first; I woke before I ever knew if she made it out. 

She taught me that no matter how dark it may seem, there is always an ember of Light to sustain us; that, in fact, an ever-present Holy Fire animates our spirit if only we have eyes to see. And when it is time and we are ready, like the mythical Persephone we will be provided with all we need to rise up and out of the earth and flourish once again.  

Since that time thirty-one years ago, I have become a sacred circle dancer.  We always have special dances that honour the Solstices. Part of me never quite understood why dancers were asked to wear white during the darkness of our Winter Solstice Celebrations.  Now I do!

-Susan Hendricks, Associate of the Sisters of St. Joseph