18,29 €
Mehr erfahren.
When Paula D'Arcy lost her husband and baby in a car crash, she began an inner search for a faith that was stronger than fear. She tells her story of spiritual exhaustion, her journey alone into the wilderness for three days, and the renewal she was blessed to experience. Now with reflection guide for reading groups.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 145
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2002
Ähnliche
Gift
OF THE
Red Bird
Gift
OF THE
Red Bird
A Spiritual Encounter
With a Guide for Reflection
PAULA D’ARCY
A Crossroad Book
The Crossroad Publishing Company
New York
Acknowledgment is gratefully given for permission to reprint from the following:
Page 7: “Sleeping in the Forest,” from Twelve Moons, by Mary Oliver, copyright © 1978 by Mary Oliver. First appeared in The Ohio Review. By permission of Little, Brown and Company.
Page 58: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver from her collection Dream Work copyright © 1986 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Page 71: Poem #816, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
Page 90: “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
Page 128: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, published by Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated, 1965, reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
The Crossroad Publishing Company
www.crossroadpublishing.com
Copyright © 1996 by Paula D’Arcy
Guide for Reflection copyright © 2003
by The Crossroad Publishing Company
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
D’Arcy, Paula, 1947-
Gift of the red bird : a spiritual encounter / Paula D’Arcy.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8245-1590-0; ISBN 0-8245-1956-6 (pbk.)
1. D’Arcy, Paula, 1947- . 2. D’Arcy, Paula, 1947- .
3. Spiritual biography – United States. 4. Vision quests.
I. Title.
BL73.D37A3 1996
209'.2 – dc20
[B] 96-19268
This printing: July 2016
For Eddie Sears,
the friend who taught me
about the power of prayer
I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars ...
— Mary Oliver, “Sleeping in the Forest”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One
July 1972, Age 24
Week One
Week Two
Week Three
Two
August 1975, Age 27
October 1975
November 1975
December 1975
January 1976
February 1976
March 1976
August 1976
Three
Fall 1982, Age 34
Winter 1982–83
Spring 1983
Four
June 1986, Age 38
Five
September 1988, Age 40
Winter 1989
May 1989
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Six
1990–95
Guide for Reflection
Acknowledgments
IHAVE BEEN WRITING THIS BOOK for seven years, and even wrote and published a different book in the interim. Living with a writer can be difficult. Much time is spent churning things over in my mind and heart, and I can often be far away in thought. So with love I thank my daughter, Beth, for loving me anyway, and for putting up with the distance that sometimes happens. I especially thank her for being glad for me to go so often to the Texas hills, following my heart and God’s call.
I am grateful beyond words to Laity Lodge in Leakey, Texas, for letting me live on their grounds in order to write, or simply to wander through the Frio Canyon, exploring my life and listening to the sounds of creation. That canyon home has given me more than I will ever be able to give back. It has been my teacher.
And I thank Lance Crawford (Strong Eagle), with whom I first led a Women’s Gathering in 1991. The intensity of his faith has been a fire for my own. By inviting me to the desert in 1995, he gave me an opportunity to discover for myself that the desert is truly a mirror of the soul. It was there that I began to understand more fully the experiences contained in this book. His witness has helped me to find my way.
Introduction
IWRITE THESE WORDS sitting on a small square of red beach blanket, savoring a rare sixty-five-degree March afternoon on the Connecticut shore. The day is a gift. Beautiful white gulls fly out over the ocean, and my eyes slowly follow their graceful flight. Across the water, to the south, is the clear outline of Long Island Sound. I take a deep breath and listen with my eyes. This very spot is one of my cherished places of peace, and the finding of such a spot is not something I take for granted. It is, for me, a place of great stillness and importance.
Two thousand miles away, secreted in the Texas hills, is another such treasured location. In that oasis there is no sand, but rather palms, cactus, and gentle gray song birds. There I trade today’s sandals for hiking shoes, and the sound of waves is replaced by the sweetest notes of the canyon wren. That land has also been my teacher. I have breathed in the wisdom of its canyon and have sat for hours watching midday light color the layers of rock, coaxing the tiniest petals to push for survival through dirt and stone. It was there I first learned to see what is essential. To see beauty. To see with my heart. To see that God, literally, is everywhere.
It is there that I first asked myself why we are able to master great technology, but do not yet understand our own hearts. Why, after centuries, are we still so far from understanding the nature of love? And why are we willing to make endless outer journeys, but are loath to make the significant one: the journey within. The inward journey may frighten us, yet it is this journey which holds the real treasure. There God’s spirit waits to reveal mysteries and beauty beyond our imagination: the secrets of what is holy, and the encounters with truth that change everything. It is the journey that opens the eye of the heart.
This story is the telling of my own efforts to know God through listening within and by taking this journey. Following an inner call is not an easy task. It is contrary to all our conditioning, and especially to our culture’s belief that logic is supreme. I had always admired those who were learned and wise and was convinced that those attributes of the mind would reveal the truth I sought. How unexpected to discover that the mind only supplied knowledge about God. Knowing God was different, and its sole requirement (in fact, the only way) was to be open like a child. That is the great step of faith: to become open and innocent in spirit. To see a familiar world for the first time. Nothing is more difficult.
As the story of a child must be, this story is simple and filled with surprises. The experiences which seemed least likely to further my awareness of God were precisely the ones which taught me the most. But new insights were often followed by years of inattention. I’ve learned this is not unusual. Awareness of God’s presence seems to weave in and out of the fabric of our years, often followed by prolonged periods of apparent heavenly silence. But fruitfulness can never be measured by activity. Whether or not I was aware of it, I was always “on my way.”
I was also surprised at how often I heard God’s voice with the greatest clarity through encounters with traditions that were not my own. I’ve come to understand that the “familiar” can be a great barrier to new revelations. My original expectations about the manner of God’s presence were so set. Bit by bit those expectations had to be dismantled so I would be able to see what was, rather than what I expected or had even been taught. It was surrendering to God, rather than to my cherished image of God. The difference is the key.
I fill these pages with deep humility. My story, as history, is unimportant to anyone but me. But all of our stories, as spiritual journeys, matter. We affect one another. We are all reflections of a great Mystery.
As I write these words a seagull calls out boldly above my head, and the wind blows sand into my thermos of tea. I consider the wonder of a bird’s flight, or even the journey of the wind. I envy them. They know their way already, and I am just beginning.
Always be in a state of expectancy,
and see that you leave room
For God to come in as He likes.
— Oswald Chambers
One
THE GOD OF MY CHILDHOOD was masculine. He was stern, judgmental, remote, and allcontrolling. If I was good enough, he approved of me. So I tried to be very, very good and said rote prayers with all my heart. I considered “sinful” half of my human thoughts and most of my moments of expression. Sacrifice atoned for my sins. Sacrifice, and striving toward perfection. I also believed that priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, and religious masters reached God. Those ordained or chosen, not ordinary people. Otherwise, why did we consider them the authorities, and why were we always looking to them and not to our own hearts?
I understood revelation as something that had begun and ended two thousand years ago. We learned about it, past tense. There were two worlds, one secular and one spiritual. Good people learned to control their secular impulses. The spiritual world, though dry and uninteresting, was the goal. It was the world that was good.
I had many questions about God when I was young. But I could not find adults with satisfying answers or with a theology expansive enough to contain any of my questions alongside their truths. So my understanding of God was confined to the head of a pin, and the little, narrow, remote God who could fit there held very little attraction. All through college I continued to worship this small idol, equating faith with being on my knees and equating spiritual journey with restriction, deprivation, and “shoulds.” Unconsciously, religion and guilt became linked in my psyche.
Who could love a faith so burdensome? So at age twenty-two, without much forethought, I simply walked away from the whole dreary package. Enough perfection. Enough sacrifice. Enough being “good.” If the message was that miserable, I could find other avenues to express my joy. It was an abrupt choice. It happened in a moment. I turned my back on everything I had learned before and felt a taste of what I called freedom. I stopped going to church and stopped having “religious” thoughts. I simply began to fully experience my life.
I read once that the soul is not discovered in the heavens, but on earth. Some inner instinct of mine must have known that. At the time I was only aware of a desire to discover and be who I was. In theological terms, I suppose I was finally risking incarnation. My incarnation. Ironically, at this very moment when I believed myself to be walking away from God, I was closest to encountering him for myself. I was only walking away from someone else’s conclusions about God and from someone else’s roadway. What beckoned me was the roadway which was my own and the God who would not be an idea, but a Presence I was invited to encounter. Every sincere seeker wrestles with this moment and the Mystery beyond it.
July 1972, Age 24
It’s just six months prior to my wedding, and I’m packing my lemon yellow VW convertible (bicycles strapped to the back) and am heading west from New England with my sister, Beverly, to visit our sister, Barby, and her husband, Jim, in their Bozeman, Montana, home. I feel young and in full charge of my destiny.
Week One
We travel as interest and stamina lead us, some days accomplishing five hundred miles, other days only twelve. I feel as if I’m soaking up the towns along our route, and I love listening to the stories of the different people we encounter. Today we found a drugstore with a 1940’s soda fountain. We bought old-fashioned cherry cokes made with squirts from the original seltzer pump.
I do a lot of thinking as we drive. I think about my upcoming marriage and the possible loss of independence it could mean. I wonder about freedom, imagining it to be a sustained state of “being able to do exactly as I please.” I like the freedom I’m experiencing right now, navigating our way through cities and towns. After the crowded East, the endless highways of the West are thrilling. The miles offer astonishing mountain scenery and desolate, flat lowlands.
Week Two
Today we reached Montana, and the famous sky ... which is richly and memorably blue! The sheer space and the smell of clean air make everything seem freshly created. Barby and Jim have now joined us for further adventures. First we’ll head toward Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Yellowstone Park. Then Jim wants us to visit an Arapaho Indian reservation in Wind River, Wyoming, where one of his college students has invited us to be present for the Sun Dance, a sacred Indian ceremony. I suppose this will be a pleasant aside. My trip has already been filled with high moments and many attractions.
Week Three
Today we arrived at Wind River Reservation. The reservation is dust swept and hotter than I’ve ever been or wanted to be. The relentless sun of Wyoming, I think to myself. My eye and senses have grown accustomed to Glacier Park and lush Montana. Now this: miles and miles of brown clay mixed with dirt, scant vegetation, and a poverty of shade. We meet Jim’s student, Dennis Sun Rhodes. He greets us warmly and talks about the Sun Dance, which will begin the next day. He says that the ceremony symbolizes his people’s close relationship with the supernatural. For four days the dancers will fast and dance, their actions a prayer and offering to God, whom they call the Great Spirit. I am struck by how closely these people live to nature. Even the time of the Sun Dance is related to the cycle of the moon. It is strange to me.
I watch the final preparations of the Sun Dance Lodge. Every item placed inside the lodge (drums, feathers, tufts of sage) is brought in and laid down so carefully. I ask and am told that everything they use is a symbol relating to nature, and to human nature. That remark catches me. Dennis speaks about human beings as interconnected to every living thing. His people understand nature as filled with meaning, created by the same Spirit whose breath fills all living things. Observe and listen to nature, they believe, and the Great Spirit will teach you about your own nature and the truths for which the heart is hungry.
And suddenly I am standing apart, still watching, but thinking about my life. I think of the boxes of Corning Ware, silver, and crystal already amassed for my upcoming wedding. I think of the hours I’ve already spent debating furniture styles and choosing fabric for bridesmaids’ dresses. I live, supposedly, in the hub of a very enlightened twentieth century. I have attended churches and cathedrals with magnificent stained glass and massive steeples whose painting and repair require committees and by-laws. I have access to Bible translations and interpretations, histories of the church and libraries of theological criticism. And yet, baking in the sun on this forsaken stretch of dirt on the Western Plains, I am oddly wondering if all my knowledge has possibly brought me precious little truth.
I wander back to a small pavilion and buy some beaded earrings, fingering the array of blankets and baskets displayed there. I note the bright colors and remember once reading that to Native people seeing is sacred. Something about seeing the real world through the eye of the heart. The thought makes me uncomfortable. I know I take seeing for granted.
I keep walking around restlessly. I watch the Sun Dance preparations for a while, then I pace. I’m certainly not uninterested. I just feel overwhelmed, and I don’t know why. I came here as a tourist, to take a polite look at another culture’s ceremony. But instead, I am feeling confused by mysterious stirrings in my heart. I can’t help but wonder, if Eden had not been destroyed, would this consciousness of theirs be everyone’s? Could it be mine? I shut out all the conversations around me and consider the idea that nothing is separate, and that the earth, stars, trees, animals ... everything ... might be a sacred expression of God. Is everything holy?
A cottonwood tree is positioned at the center of the lodge. I learn that when the upper limb of a cottonwood is cut crosswise, the grain reveals a perfect, five-pointed star. The star is understood as a sign of the Great Spirit’s presence and the tree’s holy nature. Even the breeze blowing through the cottonwood leaves is understood to be its prayer.
Prayer. I think in feeble contrast of my experience of thees and thous ... of sanctuaries and proper meeting houses ... of booklets, printed by the hundreds of thousands, entitled “How to Pray.” I think of my many prayers of petition, prayers for comfort, prayers to be protected from harm. But prayers always very unconcerned with any meaning of life which didn’t spill onto my own doorstep. I wonder, watching, if I really understand what it means to pray, and if I would lose my inner restlessness if I did.
