When Wisdom Speaks E-Book

Lyn Holley Doucet

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 248

Beschreibung

Female voices of the Bible have been silenced throughout much of history. What would it be like to get to know the women of the Bible as real, living figures whose lives can challenge our own? What can we learn from their faith journeys? What would it be like to pray alongside them? Two lively spiritual directors take us into the world of the women of the Bible. Provoked by the desperation of the Canaanite woman, empowered by Mary's fiat, affirmed by the loyalty of Mary Magdalene and challenged by Ruth's fidelity, Doucet and Hebert enter into a new sisterhood with these active and contemplative holy women who emerge out of history. All of the stories link these holy women from the past with contemporary women, all of them longing after God's own heart.

Leseprobe

When Wisdom Speaks

ALSO BY THE AUTHORS

When Women Pray

Our Personal Stories of Extraordinary Grace

When Wisdom Speaks

Living Experiences with Biblical Women

LYN HOLLEY DOUCETAND ROBIN HEBERT

A Crossroad Book

The Crossroad Publishing Company

New York

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.CrossroadPublishing.com

Copyright © 2007 by Lyn Holley Doucet and Robin Hebert

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.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1993 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and from the Revised Standard Version Bible, Old Testament copyright © 1952, New Testament Second Edition, copyright © 1971, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

The text fonts are Sabon, Goudy Sans, and Benguiat.

The display font is Liberty.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doucet, Lyn Holley, 1950-

When wisdom speaks : living experiences with biblical women / Lyn Holley Doucet & Robin Hebert.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8245-2570-5 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8245-2570-1 (alk. paper)

1. Women in the Bible. I. Hebert, Robin. II. Title.

BS575.D68 2007

0.9'2082-dc22

2007002712

This printing: September 2016

To those on spiritual journeys

Please know that we understand your ups and downs, the dark days and the bright moments — when unexpectedly you touch heaven. We know because we are walking the same rocky and grace-filled path that you are walking. This book is for you, our dear ones — to let you know that others so long ago walked along this same road. They traversed it with failure and with success, in many directions and in a hundred ways. Their trials and their victories belong to all of us; their stories help us to heal, help us to go on, help us to triumph.

Contents

A Word about the Book

Introduction

Two Ways of Seeing These Women

1. Mary and Elizabeth

Blessed Am I Among Women

A Special Community of Women

2. Martha

I Discovered the One Thing

3. Martha

I Want the Better Part

4. Mary of Bethany

How Could You Love a Woman Like Me?

5. The Canaanite Woman

Lord, Help Me

6. Sarah

Why Can’t I Have a Baby?

7. Mary Magdalene

It’s Time for Me to Let Go

8. Mary of Magdala

Da Vinci, Ya Never Knew Me

9. The Prodigal Daughter

I Want to Go Home

10. The Baker Woman

I Bring Bread to the World

11. The Hemorrhaging Woman

We Have but Touched Your Hem

Family Missions Company

12. Mary, the Mother of Christ

Blessed Mary of the Storm

13. The Woman Who Found the Lost Coin

Rejoice with Me!

14. The Samaritan Woman

I Will Give You a Drink

15. Ruth

I Will Follow You

16. Hannah

Help Me to Relinquish My Own Desires

17. The Bent-Over Woman

I Was Lifted Up

Daughters of Abraham

Study Guide

Transformation with the Biblical Women

Lectio Divina Shared in Community

Praying with Scripture and Imagination

List of Poems

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

A Wordabout the Book

An epiphany is described as “a feeling or a sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something.” So I had a minor epiphany about my role as an editor but not a full-blown epiphany about the meaning of life.

You would think after thirty years of working as an editor that I would have a fairly clear idea of what my role requires. Mostly, I think I do. But while working on this second book with Robin and Lyn, I learned something that I had not put into words before. It was that an editor’s duties include first a request, and then encouragement, for writers to go deeper into their own souls and their own experiences so that they write from a place that they have never accessed before. It is a call to deep personal authenticity and it is also a call to a literary adventure. In other words, they will bare their own souls in a deeper way to readers, and they will write more honestly and elegantly than they have previously.

The experience of working on this book will always now remind me of those duties. Lyn and Robin certainly answered that call in their first book, When Women Pray, even though the duty to issue that call was not as clear to me then as it is now. And in this new book they have answered that call again.

In writing When Women Pray they entered into a spiritual journey that took them down deep within their own souls so they could write about their spiritual experiences in prayer. With this new book, When Wisdom Speaks, they have done that again, but they have also done something more. Imaginatively, and with that same sense of spiritual integrity, they have taken us into the lives and experiences of biblical women: Mary, Ruth, Sarah, Martha, Hannah, Mary of Magdala, and others. By doing this we learn valuable lessons about our own spiritual lives. Additionally, Lyn and Robin, along with these wise women whose lives shine through the biblical text, take us into a world wholly unlike our own — a Middle Eastern culture of long past. We are invited into that foreign world and find, unexpectedly, that it is for our own good. That is a major spiritual and literary accomplishment. Enjoy this journey, as it is a rare and fruitful one.

Roy M. Carlisle Editorial Consultant

Women’s stories need to be told and retold. For too long we have been deprived not only of a collective memory of women’s accomplishments but also an understanding of the spiritual fiber they embodied in the struggles and challenges that are now ours. We need to hear their stories and remember our own; but even more we need their passionate faith so we can carry on our own work.

— Mary Ruth Broz, RSM, and Barbara Flynn, Midwives of an Unnamed Future

Woman, with a candle lighted

To help her keep faith with her own life...

a centered presence

spreading in concentric circles around her.

— Judith Duerk, Circle of Stones

Introduction

RH Last summer, just after Lyn and I had submitted the final revisions of our manuscript When Women Pray, I was already experiencing the void one feels after completing a creative accomplishment. Moreover, I was missing the connection that she and I had shared during our collaboration time, the blessed linking of our writing experiences and of our stories being lived out as the writing progressed. We had laughed and cried and prayed together over those sixteen months and had shared much more than a writing partnership. We had encountered each other’s souls. I think that’s what I was missing the most.

At that time, I was leading a book study group, using the text A Woman after God’s Own Heart, with female college students and women from my church parish. As a spiritual director I always delight in the opportunity to offer a comforting environment where intimate sharing can occur and greater depth is achieved. Typical of my book study programs, I began each session by praying Lectio Divina with the group using a chosen passage from Scripture, so it made perfect sense to begin our classes connecting with women from the Bible — each a woman after God’s own heart. I found myself looking forward every week to the choice of which woman’s story we would share and with whom we would enter prayer. As we read the words surrounding their lives each session, I felt provoked by the desperation of the Canaanite woman, empowered by Mary’s fiat, affirmed by the loyalty of Mary Magdalene, and challenged by Ruth’s fidelity (to a mother-in-law no less!) as well as by Hannah’s relinquishment of her son.

Each prayed-with woman touched a different place on my own unfolding journey, and it was delightful to observe the same experience occurring in the other participants. All of the stories — the ancient ones, the accounts that were two thousand years old, and the current stories shared by the gathering women — remarkably linked all of our spirits together. By the end of the summer, I felt as if I had created a spiritual sisterhood not just with the beautiful souls that formed our community those eight weeks, but with those holy women who lived so very long ago and who ate and drank with Jesus — all of us women after God’s very heart. I wanted more time with all of them and in fact continued the group into the fall. I found myself wanting to write about what was stirring in me, and I spoke one day with Lyn about the possibility of a new shared project.

We saw immediately how our differences would contribute to our writing as they had in When Women Pray. As a cradle Catholic, I grew up with a limited exposure to Scripture and came late to its appreciation. Under gifted spiritual direction, the Holy Spirit seemed to woo me into a craving for God’s Word. I learned to trust my heart in prayer and discovered how famished my spirit had been without a daily connection to Scripture.

Although Lyn is an adult convert to the Catholic Church, her relationship with the Bible began in a Methodist Sunday school where Bible stories were told and retold. She knew that now, as those stories were retrieved, she would gain a more mature understanding of the lives they represented.

We recognized, too, that we grew up with very different role models of women of faith. Lyn’s exposure to capable and strong, yet very feminine women in her church (who didn’t ask permission to do things) was very different from my experience with nuns who were fierce disciplinarians and seemingly bowed to the priests’ direction. They often didn’t portray the soft feminine virtues that I craved in my own spiritual development, yet I found in my church the deep sense of awe and mystery that sustains me to this day. We had come at our shared faith from quite different places and knew it would be evident in our writing.

We noted, however, that our experiences as spiritual directors, as retreat leaders, and as Theresians immersed us in sharing, trusting, and growing alongside one another, and that our relationship could enable us to more deeply unite with the women we would be writing about. In addition, we agreed that we had come to trust our prayer experiences, that they would reveal, as they had in the past, a clarity and synthesis that could possibly open others to experience their own authentic walk.

We became excited about the possibilities of joining our creative energies once again.

—R.H.

LHD On a crisp April morning, Robin and I sat on my sun porch and pondered the women of the Bible. We ate magic tuna sandwiches from Ray’s Quickstop down the street in downtown Maurice. These sandwiches are famous; the recipe is simple, yet they feel like medicine for my body.

Robin and I munched and watched cardinals darting about the lawn, and rabbits making their brief appearances from behind the tallow trees before dashing away. We then centered ourselves in contemplation in order to discuss our call to write about the women of the Bible, and ponder how to create a new recipe for writing about them. We wondered whether we could stir the sacred alchemy between us as women and faith-friends and find the soul medicine that might again saturate our writing, bringing new energy and insight to this work, even though these women have been discussed at length by many other writers throughout the centuries.

I recalled my own Bible days growing up Methodist in a lovely old church in Bastrop, Louisiana. I was taught to read my Bible, but I wondered now: Did the women’s stories just get lost among those of the men who seemed to be having all the adventures? Did I truly understand the importance of these women to Jesus’s life and his ministry? And did the lack of awareness about these women exist in my own understanding and culture (southern girl of the fifties) or in those who taught me?

I could see myself in Sunday school coloring pictures of David and Goliath, Joshua who blew the walls down, and certainly Jesus. These male stories seemed filled with power. Then I learned that Eve lost God’s grace and that Delilah took away Samson’s power by cutting his hair. Oh dear, did I think then that Bible women had mostly to do with a loss of good things?

I remember generic pictures of some of these ancient women now — they wore cloths draped over their heads and carried olive jars — but I don’t remember learning many of their names. And I clearly recalled the charming pictures of the holy family with Mary so tender and mild. However, looking back, my memories of holy women seemed as flat as the coloring book pages they handed out in Sunday school.

I didn’t understand the importance of the New Testament women who had embraced Jesus’s person and his mission. Yet the women who surrounded me in my church were clearly empowered and alive with faith. They loved me and accepted me, making me feel at home among them. Perhaps that was all I needed to bring me to this quest today.

As I grapple now with a new understanding of Bible women, I do so realizing that I’m all grown up (well, in many ways) and women’s stories have become a passion for me. Today I ask how their stories and their very names got lost in the retelling, and I ask how we can uncover some of what was lost. These are basic questions: Who were they, and what really happened to them? And how does this affect all women and people of faith today?

—L.H.D.

Two Ways of Seeing These Women

As our essays began to unfold, we saw two ways in which we could discover these women and embrace them. Both methods involved meditating and praying, holding the images of specific biblical women and their stories close to our hearts and minds as we did so. In the first way of relating we would actively seek to communicate with their spirits. In doing so, we would solicit “a word” or message for our spirits. We sought from these Bible sisters internal bits of wisdom and holiness that would enlarge us and keep us true to an authentic spiritual journey; we would be women with candles lighted, seeking to further understand our own lives.

We believed that these holy women would speak to us, because as Therese of Lisieux says, “I believe the blessed in heaven have a great compassion. . . . They remember that when they were frail and mortal like us they committed the same faults, endured the same struggles, and their love for us becomes greater even than it was on earth, this is why they do not stop... praying for us.”

In the other way of being with and writing about these women, we would prayerfully consider how their stories reported to us in the Bible are similar to our own. We would meditate about this, knowing that the way that God worked in their lives could inform us about the way God works in our own lives. For the stories of women are archetypal; recurring themes center around those things important and special to us — as women — and as women who long for God’s heart. Ah, these dear women: battered, misunderstood, abused and challenged beyond hope — yet they found hope and holiness because God loved them. We sit before them now. We embrace them with love. Each one is truly our sister.

SISTER,

Sister,

You have rounded the corner just before me,

I see the scarlet of your sash disappearing from sight,

Now I hold in my hand a few linen threads from your robe, caught on roughened parchment as you hurried by.

They are golden with time, burned in an Eastern sun,

Speaking your story to me,

That once you embraced your husband under a canopy of silk,

Nursed a baby as you walked a desert landscape in search of water,

Sewed a tent, a bridal gown, a shroud.

Taught the secrets of Wisdom and remembered every treasured story.

Sister,

I try to knit these wispy threads together, to piece a fragment of your life for my life

From the scanty whispered words left behind,

The stencils faded and abandoned in a cave for long winters,

Words written and not written,

Your name lost in the telling.

So how can I speak of your passions and skills, all the ones who loved you?

And yet my sister, my grandmother,

you live within me now; your blood is in my very bones.

Sister,

Come to me,

Inhabit my dreams, and in my prayer, shadow me.

Tell me the secrets that ran from the page, tell me the truth of a woman

So much like me,

Beautiful, willful, gifted, hurt, triumphant.

Tell me the story of the Lord of Life,

Who came to you just as rosy sunset

Called forth the dancing fires within your hearth,

Yes, dancing warm and russet-red, their shadows large upon your walls.

Lighted by the One, Lover of Lovers,

Who drew you close and whispered soft your name.

— L.H.D.

1

Mary and Elizabeth

Blessed Am I Among Women

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

—Luke 1:39–45

In everyone’s life there is a great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love you are understood without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half truths fall away, you can be seen as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. When you are understood you are home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of another’s soul.

—John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

RH I love the term anam cara. The Gaelic words mean “soul friend.” John O’Donohue poetically portrays this special type of companion, an “anam cara,” as a person to whom you can reveal the hidden intimacies of your life, a person of deep understanding, a shelter. When I imagine the visitation, I envision a sacred encounter of two anam ċaras: Mary, searching for a sister, a soul to share her life-changing news, who found a safe haven where she could let down her guard and be loved deeply by another; and Elizabeth, who relished the supporting strength and companionship of her youthful cousin. The two women provided comfort for one another’s souls, an offering of pure presence. I can’t help but wonder whether the greatest anam cara of all, Jesus, learned to be a soul friend in the presence of these women. Don’t we all deserve such a sacred harbor?

God has indeed blessed my life with a legacy of anam ċaras, women who have taken me into their hearts and their homes during the more trying times in my life, sisters who cared for my soul and my deepest needs when I couldn’t fathom taking care of my own. During a time of great uncertainty in my own life, two women in particular sheltered my heart and my family. Through their presence and care, my spirit sustained the transforming pains of labor that would eventually birth new life.

I had been visiting at my friend Barbara’s home one ominous fall afternoon, only hours before my own annunciation. I had lain on her sofa nursing a stomachache, a confirmation my body offered that something just wasn’t right. In my womb I must have known, as Mary had known, that soon my life would change irrevocably. Leaving Barbara’s, I arrived home just in time to receive a phone call announcing the eventual demise of my marriage, a memory that even today carries a tiny pulse of pain. Barbara provided solace that day, and, over the years that followed, offered the comfort of her loving hospitality, sustaining me through the unfamiliar territory of dreaded change.

We fostered our friendship by establishing Mondays, my day off, as our special day for connecting. Thinking about those priceless visits helps me to imagine how Mary and Elizabeth might have spent their time together over the months they shared. Our visitation day became one of the touchstones in my life; we would walk in her neighborhood, chat in her living room, and sometimes cook together in her kitchen — often my zesty spaghetti sauce recipe. There were grim days when Barbara was challenged to bear my pain with me while I wept by her side. But mostly, there was a warm sense of presence and connectedness while my heart slowly mended and hers grew in compassion. In When the Heart Waits, Sue Monk Kidd speaks of our need to sit in one another’s stillness and take up corporate postures of prayer, when we can be free enough to say to another, “I need you to wait with me,” or “Would you like me to wait with you?” Barbara and I silently spoke such words to one another throughout those healing years.

As I’m sure must have been true for Mary and Elizabeth, our visits were often filled with joy. On some Mondays I arranged for my children to take the bus to Barbara’s house after school, joining our two families. Our kids would all exit the bus gleefully, knowing that at least for an evening a visitation on a grand scale would take place along with a delicious meal shared at their large dining room table. To this day, the smell of simmering onions and roasting garlic offers a comforting remembrance of those precious times, even meals I shared with Barbara and her caring husband, Rick. Looking back on our friendship, I am filled with gratitude and the peace of knowing that each time Barbara and I gathered, I gained a bit more strength and a lot more grace for the continuing changes in my life.

My Theresian sister Ellen was another “Elizabeth” for me during those challenging times. She and I had found our way into our Open Heart Theresian community when our now twenty-three-year-old sons were infants. I love the warm sense of belonging that we all experience when our community meets in her home. I have discovered that walking into her kitchen is a stroll into Ellen’s soul. Centered amid family memorabilia, her own beautiful paintings, treasured sentimental collections, and a large picture window offering a view of her lush, oak tree-studded backyard stands the setting for sacred meals, meetings, and gatherings — a large oval kitchen table, indeed an altar of grace. I have been among the countless privileged who have been nourished there, and I fondly remember the first time I dined at that table.

It was a dismal New Year’s Day, my first as a single mom, the commencement of a new year that offered little hope and celebration for my family. As I gathered up the kids for Mass, I felt a much-needed sense of stability, even though I dreaded the loneliness I would bear without their dad at my side. My pain during Mass was fierce. Although the holidays were coming to an end, like a tidal wave, they had ravaged my heart and carried back to the sea my emotional belongings, leaving me with the barren reality that my sense of family would never be the same again. I sat in church trying to be strong for the kids and falling apart at the internal seams.

Turning toward the pew behind me during the sign of peace, I felt immediately warmed by Ellen’s presence. I hadn’t noticed that she and her lovely family were seated behind us, like a protecting shield. She could sense my pain. I could feel her compassion. I cried as we embraced, feeling like a stray with orphaned children. Without hesitation, Ellen affectionately whispered an invitation to join her family for dinner that day. I felt overwhelmed by her thoughtfulness, the kindness that has always surrounded Ellen. The kids and I spent a blessed day of belonging in her home, again linking together two families as one. My children and I were graced by a hospitable spirit that held us tenderly and offered hope in the midst of our turmoil. Like Mary, I had been offered a loving home, the heart of another woman. I felt the same comfort that she must have sensed in the arms of her cousin. Sister Joan Chittister speaks tenderly of this reality in The Friendship of Women: “Real friends are simply there for us, no matter the pressure, no matter the pain. They are home for us when no other home is open.”* That is the soul of the Visitation.

The food offered at Ellen’s and Barbara’s tables was more than sustenance for the body. Like Mary, fearfully finding myself in unfamiliar territory, I was blessed with two Elizabeths who fed me in many ways and with countless others who held my hand and my heart during those tenuous years. The grace that God offered me was a consistent knowing that one of the best ways I could care for my soul was to claim time with my anam ċaras. Diverting the energy I might have spent on needless shopping and careless time-consuming activities, I nurtured the relationships my spirit most needed.

But we don’t need loss and pain to cultivate soul friendships. All we need is the same hunger for intimacy and belonging that Mary and Elizabeth shared. At the heart of the Visitation rests a desire for deep sustaining friendships that we women must nourish because we need them as much as we need to come up for air in the ocean of our stress-filled lives. My friendship with Ellen has sustained me for a quarter of a century. Her kitchen table, where I’d sat on that painful winter day, was a setting of celebration ten years later. Ellen, our friend Carolyn, and I gathered for lunch just days before my marriage to Easton, lightheartedly calling our sacred meal my bridesmaid’s luncheon.

One of the greatest sustaining sources of anam ċaras in my life has been my Theresian community. For over twenty-three years, my Open Heart sisters have gathered for a monthly visitation, lasting from morning coffee through shared lunch with lots of time for building intimacy and strengthening faith in between. I find our meetings reminiscent of that historical gathering of holy women in Luke’s Gospel, as we seventeen Theresians have stood with each other, offering a holy presence to one another in the best and worst of times. We shared hospital duty when our sister Georgia’s cancer threatened her life and held each other close in the church pew at her funeral. My sisters cried with me during the turmoil of my divorce and rejoiced at the announcement of my second marriage ten years later. We have prayed together, called forth each other’s gifts, gathered our husbands, challenged growth in one another, and are now beginning to collectively age, gracefully I believe. Mostly we have come to see each other as God sees us. On the fourth Thursday of every month, we gather as women of shared faith, taking up “corporate postures of prayer,” bringing to each other the presence of God. We are indeed each other’s soul friends.

These and so many other women have in their healing embrace taught me to be an anam ċara. Of course my ministry as a spiritual director offers that safe presence for a longing soul, but sometimes just a hug, a phone call, a card, or a compliment can present a needed touchstone, an inkling of hope, a harbor from the storm. I have come to recognize that the gift that is given is always returned, for by its very nature, a visitation is a mutual affair. Elizabeth’s warm hospitality and caring heart were reciprocated by Mary’s service of assisting her hostess through the last trimester of her pregnancy. They gave life to one another. I never reach out to another without my own heart being touched.

If we look closely at our own lives, we will notice a myriad of visitations, times when we are blessed with opportunities to both give and receive love. My friend Pat shared with me recently about a visit to her nephew’s home to assist his lovely wife and brand-new baby while her nephew was attending a family reunion with the older children. Pat spoke of her chance to be alone with that precious infant, embracing the wonder of innocence and pure love that was surely its gift back to her. Pat’s offering of reassurance and attendance to the new mother was returned with love at a time when Pat felt inadequate and hopeless. The gift given is always returned.