Judith Valente's Blog: Mindfulness in the Age of Twitter - Posts Tagged "lent"

At a parish event I attended recently, a mother and father told the story of their son who had been sexually assaulted by his superior when he was a seminary student. Their son could not be there to speak for himself. He had shot himself in a hotel room after struggling for years with severe depression resulting from the abuse. He was 25.

This heart-breaking presentation was part of what the parish has billed as an effort toward “Purification and Renewal” in the Catholic Church. The parents’ talk was scheduled the same night as the Academy Awards, which likely cut down on the potential audience. Only about 30 parishioners came, nearly all of them women. None of the parish priests attended. Neither did any of the (all-male) deacons.

We owe more to those who have been sexually assaulted – and to their families. The parents described their son as a vibrant, creative young man who went off to an Orthodox Church seminary full of energy and high ideals. He returned to them withdrawn and depleted. He blamed himself, not the pressure placed on him by his seminary superior, for what had happened. It took courage for him to report his supervisor to church authorities. To its credit, the Orthodox Church swiftly removed the abuser from ministry.

The young man’s parents are now members of the Catholic Church. It took them 10 years — and the most recent revelations about the widespread cover up of abuse in the Catholic Church — to be able to speak publicly about their son. His was a life aborted by the church. The lives of so many who suffered this kind of abuse have been aborted in the same way.
I once interviewed a woman for a TV report who had been sexually abused on the day of her First Communion. Her abuser: the priest who gave her communion that morning. The woman, who was well into her forties when we met, still had her frilly white communion dress. She’d kept it all those years protected under a plastic cover. She told me that as an adult she could not bring herself to ever again go to communion. Hers was a spiritual life aborted.

In this season of Lent, we owe our prayers to victims like this young man, the woman I interviewed, and their families. Lent is not only a time for greater prayer, it is also a period of fasting, and for engaging in additional acts of charity. Perhaps we can offer up our Lenten practices this year in particular for those who have been abused and their families. But we need to do more.

As members of the church, we need to demand concrete reforms to the structures and practices that led to the clergy abuse scandal. We need to seek lay oversight of church finances. We need greater lay input into how bishops are chosen to oversee our dioceses. We need to advocate in our state legislatures for an end to the statue of limitations for prosecuting sexual abusers. Fortunately, the state of Illinois, where I live, has one of the most progressive statute of limitations laws regarding sexual abuse, but that is not the case in all states or countries.

A professional woman I spoke with recently, who has her own story of sexual assault, reminded me that those who experience this kind of violation never forget either the place or the face of the abuser. Their lives are never the same.

If our churches are to have a consistent ethic of life, we need to insist on changing a system that has for too long protected predators. To do less is to be complicit in the acts that led to the death of a promising 25-year-old seminarian and the countless others who committed suicide or were permanently scarred from what they suffered.

The best sermons aren’t spoken ones, but those we witness through the example of a person’s life. I experienced one of those living homilies when I spent four days recently with the Benedictine sisters at St. Scholastica Monastery in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Whenever I’m tempted to walk away from the Catholic Church, frustrated with its hypocrisy and faults, I need to think of these monastic sisters and the others like them.

The history of the St. Scholastica sisters represents a continuous response to various calls of need. Their example reminds me of Aristotle’s famous prescription for living a fulfilled life: “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.”

One of the things I admire most about this monastery is that it accepted women who had physical challenges at a time when many religious orders rejected candidates with medical difficulties. To this day, those sisters continue to offer significant contributions, some by serving in leadership roles.

The truly elderly sisters are a model for us all. Sister Marcella, the oldest member of the community, is 98 and still helps in the dining room. At age 96, Sister Pierre oversees the gardens and the grounds. Not a flower buds or a tree root spreads without Sister Pierre knowing about it.

Arkansas had been a state only 43 years when the Benedictines arrived in 1878. Their mission was to teach the children of mainly German and Irish immigrants who farmed the land and worked on the railroads along the Arkansas River. The oldest of the first four founding sisters was just 34. The other three were in their early twenties and hadn’t even made their final vows yet in religious life.

The sisters eventually established a boarding school for girls as well as an orphanage. One woman I met in Fort Smith, who volunteers at the monastery, told me her father had been raised in that orphanage. “My father used to say if it wasn’t for the sisters, he’d either be pumping gas or in prison,” she said. Instead, he raised a family and had a successful career. He never forgot his debt to the St. Scholastica sisters.

The sisters are a vivid example of why Benedictine spirituality has endured for more than 1,500 years– by adapting always to the necessities of the times. As needs changed and both the boarding school and orphanage closed, the sisters kept moving forward. They turned the school into a community center. When they no longer had enough sisters to staff the community center, they arranged for a local co-educational junior high school to use that space.
And still the sisters keep adapting. Last year, in one of the toughest decisions they’ve had to face, they moved out of the six-story gothic style monastery that had been their home for 94 or their 140-year history in Arkansas. They now reside in an attractive new single-story building across from the old monastery that is easier for the elderly sisters to navigate.

They keep on going. The sisters oversee a robust training program for spiritual directors and also offer spiritual direction and counseling on an individual basis. Their Hesychia House of Prayer in New Blaine, Arkansas, set in the shadow of the Ozark Mountains, allows those seeking an immersion experience of the contemplative life the chance to spend time in one of four hermitages the sisters own there.

Their ministry now extends beyond Arkansas. With other Catholic partners, the sisters sponsor a scholarship program for Colegio San Benito, which educates high school age girls in Guatemala. The ministry recently expanded to include scholarships for Colegio graduates who want to go on to university studies.

The Fort Smith community is also the home of one of my favorite spirituality writers, Sister Macrina Wiederkehr, whom I call a modern-day mystic. If you admire the writing of Thomas Merton, you will also love Sister Macrina’s books including: "Seven Sacred Pauses;" "Song of the Seed"; and "Abide." Her most recent book, "The Flowing Grace of Now", will be out later this year.Macrina Wiederkehr

The Arkansas sisters could use our help now to help pay down the debt on their new monastery. If we are looking for somewhere to place our Lenten alms, may I suggest helping these Benedictine women who have given so much. You can contribute via PayPal on the monastery’s website here: stscho.org

Thanks to Sister Hilary Decker, Oblate Director at Fort Smith, for inviting me to give two talks to the lay associates of the monastery based on my book "How To Live: What The Rule of St. Benedict Teaches Us About Happiness, Meaning and Community," How to Live: What the Rule of St. Benedict Teaches Us about Happiness, Meaning, and Community and to Sister Madeline Bariola, my fellow Italian, with whom I laughed until I cried).

Some of us react to trauma or the injustices we’ve endured with anger. Others withdraw and sink into depression. My friend Pat makes art. Pat is a survivor of clergy sexual assault. This Lent, in search of personal healing and reconciliation, Pat decided to create 1,000 “prayer eggs” similar to the traditional brightly-colored Ukrainian Pysanka Easter eggs.

Pat is a Benedictine Oblate, a lay associate of a monastery, which is how we met. She paints each of her eggs individually with either a traditional symbol or one of her original designs. She has given away about 300 of her creations so far.

“The eggs are my doorway to prayer, and the most fertile prayer time I have is when I go to God through art,” Pat told me.

Pat’s assault took place some 40 years ago, but the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings last fall revived the trauma. Many, including a majority of the U.S. Senate, refused to believe Dr. Christine Ford’s accusation against a powerful man. “Just as the person who attacked me,” Pat says, “warned me years ago no one would believe me because he was a priest.”

Pat already had a tradition of painting eggs at Easter and praying for the people who received them. This year, her work took on a larger purpose. “I was not interested in making my story public, but after some time elapsed, I realized that in order to be whole, I was going to have to reconcile somehow,” she said.
Her reconciliation was “a pretty huge thing,” she adds, because she blamed her attacker’s entire order for what happened to her. “Then I asked myself, what would St. Benedict expect me as an Oblate to do?”

Each egg Pat creates is a prayer for someone who has endured sexual assault or abuse. The work is also her way of healing. “I hope in some way I’ve touched others by letting them know they are a child of God and they are worth more than they know,” she says.
The mother of seven adult children, Pat works on her project five hours a day, seven days a week, from 7 p.m.to midnight, after she finishes teaching art.

She says eggs are the perfect medium for her message because they represent both wholeness and new life.

Pat’s inspiration was the story of Sadako Sasaki, a child who endured the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then took on the quest of making 1,000 paper cranes as symbols of peace. Sadako died before she could reach her goal, but thousands of others took up her cause. Pat hopes others will follow her lead by offering prayer eggs, or something similar, to those who need support.

So far Pat has given her eggs to people in nursing homes, to a Jesuit community, and to the monastery where she is a lay associate, often mailing them out at her own cost. She says, “I would never charge for the eggs. Never. They are prayers.”

Pat sent me two of her prayer eggs, one with a painted sunflower, the other with a circle of figures holding hands. They are the centerpiece on my dining room table this Easter.

Today at Palm Sunday Mass, we will pray the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Pat’s eggs remind us that we are not abandoned.

As Holy Week begins, can we think about what woundedness in our own lives needs healing? Is there a special prayer practice we can do this week to let others know they are not alone?

May we also remember to pray in a special way in these coming days for all abuse and assault survivors, including Pat, who is a model of Easter love.