Compost, Dorothy Day, and Transformation
by Marina McCoy in Reflections

Last year, we acquired a large compost bin to dispose of many of our leaves, weeds, and food waste. Our backyard compost bin is smelly. It’s stinky. In the spring, I placed the bin a few steps from the back door, with the thought that I’d be more motivated to throw away every eggshell and potato peel if it were nearby.
Fast-forward to late summer, and the location made sitting outdoors unpleasant. The pungent odors of decaying vegetable matter did not go well with strawberries and tea on the back porch. We moved the bin further away, close enough to access, but not so close to prevent enjoying the rest of the yard. Still, the compost is rich and full of nutrients.
It’s amazing that what starts as weeds and garbage can be transformed into life-giving food for plants in the next round of growth. Sin and suffering are like the weeds and the waste that go into compost. Both are capable of being transformed by God into something new and fertile. I’ve been reading Dorothy Day’s House of Hospitality.

In one passage, she tells of a woman screaming in a nearby tenement building. The neighbors wonder at the cause: is the woman giving birth? Drunk? Insane? But they do nothing, just wanting to go back to sleep. Day then recalls being out with a friend as a young girl, when an angry dog attacked them and tore their clothes into ribbons.
She writes, “I remember how people witnessing this miserable sight, in their own fear, had not come out to help. We welcomed the policeman who rescued us and I could have kissed his hands with gratitude…Why didn’t someone call the police now?”

Dorothy Day did not ignore human need. She devoted her life to standing in solidarity with the poor and developing houses of hospitality. It’s clear that much of her great reservoir of energy for this work drew upon her own past experiences of suffering—not only dog attacks but also losses such as being abandoned by her longtime lover, who left her when she became pregnant and converted to Catholicism. Such experiences seem to have deepened Day’s capacity to engage with poverty and loneliness in others. In St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, the movement from Week Three to Week Four is a movement from the cross to the Resurrection, from suffering and death to new life.

In my experience, it’s not so much that God removes suffering, as though it had never occurred. Our pasts remain a part of our identities. Jesus himself still bears the bodily marks of his Crucifixion. Day’s personal history informed her post-conversion work. God takes the difficult material of our lives and makes it capable of bearing fruit. We may want to keep the sinful, broken, “smelly” places of our lives far away—and surely God wants us to enjoy the blossoming gardens and not to remain in darkness. But the compost in the corner has its place, too. 

God takes all and transforms all—even the “garbage”—

into new life.

Martha at Rest

 by Maureen McCann Waldron in Reflections

When we hear the story of Martha and Mary, the sisters who were such close friends of Jesus’, we most likely know which one we are.

I have always been a Martha, and like most Marthas, perhaps a little smug about it.  We Marthas might roll our eyes when this gospel comes up, picturing Mary sitting on the floor listening to Jesus and feeling Martha’s slow burn at her unhelpful sister.  Martha was the one who got things done.  

Those of us who are Marthas suspect deep down that they somehow translated the ancient words incorrectly and that instead of stopping Martha from her frantic pace in the kitchen, Jesus was really saying to her, “Way to go, Martha.  If you weren’t running around getting things done, we wouldn’t have dinner tonight or a place to gather.”

Martha was the one who would argue with her dear friend, Jesus, and complain to him about things that seemed unfair.  She had a spark to her that I admire.

My Martha life has always been guided by To-Do lists and priorities.  I am all about productivity, tidying things up and closing the cupboard doors that stand open.  I am efficient and self-reliant.

And then I got sick.

This summer, after a small but nagging headache that lasted a few weeks, I found myself in the emergency room of the hospital.  I had a bleeding on my brain.  I was in intensive care for six days.  My head was shaved and I had surgery and was sent home - to do nothing.

I have spent the last four months at home, recovering, waiting for my energy to return.  For the first time in 36 years, I don’t go into an office every day. I don’t “do” much of anything.

Day by day, week by week, I can feel my energy slowly returning, but in the meantime I have been cared for tirelessly by my dear husband.  I had meals delivered by a dozen people in our parish – some I hardly knew.  People sent flowers and cards, letters and plants.  For the first time, I wasn’t the Do-er but the Receiver.

And for these past months, I have been Mary.  Sitting quietly.  Reading.  Watching my husband put together every meal. Seeing my colleague at the office carry on with our work.  Receiving.

It has been a wonderful experience not to be rushing all the time; to take naps a few times a day and to be what I might have called “unproductive.” Now I have a new respect for the art of “restoring” the depleted resource of my energy.  I pay more attention now. I watched my summer garden in fascination and have really noticed the spectacular fall leaves.

Mary listened to Jesus as she sat on the floor, while Martha just picked up the general ideas — she was so very busy with her preparations.  Now, after all of these months at home and contemplating that story, I understand that I didn’t get it right.

I don’t think Jesus was telling Martha to stop everything she did.  I think he just missed her.  He loved her fiery intelligence but wanted her not to be so distracted.  He invited her to sit next to him and simply be with him.  He wasn’t looking for her productivity or her finished To-Do list.

And he isn’t checking my list either.  I won’t find a higher place in heaven because I have finished more or been more productive.  Jesus is simply calling me to sit next to him and listen and not be distracted by Doing.  He wants me to notice how much he loves me and to relax deeply into that love.

I know that as my energy returns, so will my To-Do lists.  But I want to keep my life a little slower.  I want to pay more attention to the world around me.  And I want to sit on the floor next to Jesus and to lean back comfortably on his shoulder, basking in his love, his stories and his laugh, and remember what a graced life this is.

TAKE COURAGE. 

By Maureen McCann Waldron in Reflections

One thing about Ignatius —he had courage. Common sense isn’t always apparent in his early life; humility came later, too, and Ignatius grew into his relationship with God, as we all do. But whether it was misdirected or not in his youth, his fearlessness has always been apparent.

Maybe because I never feel like I have enough courage, Mark’s Gospel about Bartimaeus caught my attention recently. The blind man sits at the side of the road begging until he hears that Jesus is passing by on his way out of town. He puts up a fuss—another thing I am not likely to do. He starts yelling for pity and even when people try to silence him, he continues to yell for Jesus.
But then Jesus realizes someone needs him and tells the crowd to send Bartimaeus over. 
They say to him, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.”
What an amazing thing: Bartimaeus’ call to healing starts with the words, “Take courage.” He is told to get up and get going—“Jesus is calling.”
Some days the idea of Christ calling me makes me want to stay in bed and hide under the covers. What does he want now? What kind of hard thing will he ask me to do? Will it be too big or too difficult for me? Take too much courage? Apparently, whining goes hand-in-hand with fear in my prayer life.

But it’s not just the crowd inviting me to courage—it is Jesus, who says it over and over again to his disciples and to me. I can tremble with what Jesus might ask of me. Will it be to step before hungry lions in the Coliseum, stand in front of the oncoming army of an unjust government, or join with Mother Teresa’s sisters in India? OK, probably not.
Maybe courage is really the invitation from Jesus to have a big heart. Could it be that Jesus just wants me to live the way he lives—with love and compassion for others—and be unafraid when it comes to speaking up for the poor?
Pope Francis, recently suggested to a group of students and teachers that they be magnanimous. 
He said: What does it mean to be magnanimous? It means to have a big heart, to have a great spirit; it means to have great ideals, the desire to do great things to respond to that which God asks of us, and exactly this doing of daily things well, all of the daily acts, obligations, encounters with people; doing everyday small things with a big heart open to God and to others.

So maybe the real call from Christ is simply to live my own life doing the daily things well and doing them with a big heart. Not very dramatic, but challenging. I just need to remember that it is Jesus who is calling me and who is with me.

And on the days we want to pull the covers over our heads and stay in bed, we get up and take courage. Jesus is calling us to be healed.