Volume 21, No. 3-Fall, 1997
Table of Contents
An Organic Openness
by Tracy Andres
Why am I Telling This Story?
by Rose Mary Dougherty
The Shadow Side of Intention
by Gerald May
"It's All About Love"
by Lynne Smith
A Taste of Contemplative Love
by Bill Jamieson
Endings Are So Much Better Than Beginnings
by Tilden Edwards
An Organic Openness
by Tracy Andres
While working in a hospice, I was beginning a morning shift by checking in on a European-American female in her sixties, who was dying from cancer. After talking about her condition, she initiated a conversation about God and heaven. I asked her whether she was curious what heaven would be like, and she shared with me that she wasn't certain about heaven or whether she wanted to meet God at this time. I asked her why. She answered that she wasn't sure God would want to see her. She hadn't been very close to God, especially for the past year and a half while suffering from cancer.
My response was that God is always close to us, no matter whether we formally pray or not. I then asked her whether praying with her right now would be helpful for her, and she said that she would like that. I prayed aloud while holding one of her hands in both of mine. While I was doing this, I felt a great stream of energy flowing out of my hands. I then began to pray to God to help me remain present to the moment without panic and to help me discern when I could safely disconnect.
We prayed together for about ten minutes, then one of her daughters came into the room to visit her mother. I told the daughter that her mother and I had been praying together and asked her if she would like to take over for me while I went on doing hospice work. Her daughter was surprisingly grateful to do this, and I was relieved that I could detach myself from the situation.
After about twenty minutes, the daughter came out, crying, to the front room. She told me that she and her family had been trying to get their mother to pray with one of them during her disease but she had refused to do so. And the daughter was overwhelmed with emotion that she had the opportunity to pray with her mother before she died. Of course, I was overjoyed for both mother and daughter. The mother felt she had enough of a connection to God so that she could start talking to God about her suffering, pain and fear; the daughter could help her mother in a significant way. However, I was surprised that from that time on, the daughter seemed to assign the impromptu prayer session as a miracle I had somehow created. Though I tried to explain that it was very much a "thing of the Spirit," that it was merely a matter that her mother was ready to be open to God and the Spirit was helping her do it, the daughter was never convinced of this. I never mentioned the experience again with her mother; the mother herself never mentioned it to me.
After her mother died, the daughter still believed that I was just trying to be modest, while I still insisted that what I had done was just a part of my job. But, on reflection, I have wondered why a fear arose inside me about what had happened. I was indeed frightened of the presence of a power over which I had no control. I also asked myself why I had been reluctant to own fully my participation in what had happened. Why did I want to put it all on God and not acknowledge that I had been a very active vehicle?
This question is important to me because my whole spiritual, cultural and experiential life has been a lesson on the dangers of personal and institutional dulling of the awareness of the interdependence of life. I am a creation of a higher power, God, who through expending energy produced existence and through the same energy, shared and manifested as love, sustains that same existence. I am also a creation in the image of God with (among other abilities) the facility to contain, expend and share that same type of power. While I cannot control others' awareness and actions, what would happen if, in my fear, I would never take the chance to be open to and to act upon what I have? This raises the challenge for me as I continue to live out a life called to be prepared to be present to people as they explore meaningful spiritual questions and experiences in their lives.
Where I need to develop more, however, is in cultivating what I call organic openness. It is this way of being that creates space, not as if an outside force were opening a finite window but rather it would be like water, an element that of its own nature swells and contracts to the shape of the moment. Definitely God is this capability. Human beings, as images of God, have this potential engraved in their essences.
Contemplative prayer and meditation are crucial, ongoing practical disciplines in assessing this potential. I was encouraged that what contemplative practice I have engaged in paid off when I did find myself opening up to Divine Mystery at my point of fearfulness. Nevertheless, I believe that my capabilities are still underdeveloped. If I had been more at rest in the openness, I might not have hooked onto my fear of that energy connection or the fear might not have arisen at all.
Tracy, an Episcopalian working at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City, is a participant in Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program. This article is taken from one of her program papers; details have been changed to protect confidentiality.
Why am I Telling This Story?
by Rose Mary Dougherty
On a weekend in mid-July I traveled the New Jersey turnpike with two friends for a reunion in Connecticut. The ride up was pleasant and uneventful. I was a back-seat passenger with no responsibility other than doling out numerous tolls.
I was content.
The ride home was quite another story. A half hour onto the New Jersey turnpike our car began to stall. We made it off a service ramp to a gas station. The mechanic diagnosed the malady as a clogged fuel line, probably caused by watered-down gas. We followed his directions for adding dry gas and premium hi-test gas and left feeling reasonably secure.
No time for security, however. Ten minutes back on the turnpike, we stalled out completely. Eventually a young woman, Ellen, stopped with her pickup truck and drove me to the next service area to call AAA. As she drove, she chatted amiably of people she cared for: her boyfriend whose truck she was driving, her little sister in North Carolina whose birthday party she was going to, and her mother whom she hoped someone would help just as she was helping me.
Ellen left me only after the service station attendant assured us that the tow truck would come for me and then go back for my friends and the car. It took some haggling with the man from the towing company to have that happen as he insisted that the company had no responsibility to pick up a driver who has left a car. Reluctantly he agreed to send someone for me.
In the meantime, my friends had been found by the tow truck driver, George, and put in the front seat of the car which was raised onto the flat bed of the truck. George then left with them to pick me up. But they got sidetracked. There was an accident on the other side of the road, and George stopped to attend to that. When he returned, he asked my friends for a description of me to pass along to a driver who was heading to the accident and would pick me up on the way. That driver recognized me immediately in a busy convenience store and took me to rendezvous with my friends and George.
As I was getting in the cab of the truck with George, he said, in an Alfred Hitchcock voice, "Watch my door." I wanted to tell him that if he hadn't parked so close to the guard rail he wouldn't have to worry about his door, but I refrained. As we started out, he asked if I had the toll ticket. In one breath I said, "Yes I have the ticket and I have AAA Plus, and I'm very sorry if I've inconvenienced you."
He drove about ten feet, stopped under an overpass and went into the bushes. After what seemed forever, he got back in the truck and said, "I have a terrible stomach ache." I looked at his ashen face and said, "Are you sure it's your stomach and not your heart?" He mumbled a few words, passed out, came to and got on the radio, calling for yet another tow truck driver and an ambulance, saying that he thought he was dying. The person on the other end said he would send help, then added, "George, just relax. You know how you hyperventilate. Just relax." In the meantime, George was unconscious again and had fallen over on me. I had some bottled water and some napkins with me. So with his head in my lap, I began putting cold compresses on his face. That's all I knew to do. I also talked on the radio, telling them why George was no longer talking to them. Then I heard from the radio, "Will the woman with George please get off the air. We need to contact his wife."
George and I were alone. Once I knew there was nothing else I could do for him, I relaxed. At one point George came to again and began murmuring, "Oh God, I'm dying." I kept wanting to pray out loud, but I didn't want to force it on him so I asked, "George, are you a religious man?" He mumbled, "Catholic." I told him I was a Catholic nun and asked if he would like me to pray for him. He nodded. I think whatever had been in my heart just found a voice in me. I don't know what I said.
Finally, a policeman opened the door and asked if I was his wife. "NO!!" I responded, then aded, "I think he just died." As the policeman felt for a pulse, he mouthed, "Not yet, but I'm afraid he's not going to make it."
A new driver took my friends and me to the towing station. There the atmosphere was like a wake before the wake. George's co-workers and friends began to arrive. They all wanted to tell their stories of George and to hear the stories of others, especially the three of us who were the last ones with him. Mostly, I think, they wanted to be together as they waited for news of George.
One of the men checked the car for us, removed the fuel filter and cleared it out by blowing through it with his mouth. At last the three of us were back together on our way home and able to share our individual versions of the last few hours. We finally lapsed into silence. Five and one-half hours after we expected to be home, we arrived. The car has been fine ever since.
And George, I'm happy to say, did make it. He had had a massive heart attack, but an ambulance got him to a local hospital in time. When I called to check on him two days later, I learned that he was still alive and that they had taken him to a larger hospital. As for me, my house is cleaner than it's ever been; my work files are in order; my correspondence is up to date; and I'm still telling this story, but not sure exactly why.
Invariably when I tell it, someone says, "It sounds like you were right where you were supposed to be." I've had the sense that this is true, and for a while I equated the "where I was supposed to be" with being with George. But now I'm not so sure. I have my own questions: Did God use watered-down gas and an obnoxious man at a towing station to get me where I was supposed to be? Does God have particular places in mind for us to be or is God just wherever we are, speaking to us in that place? Was being with George any more important than being with my friends, or with the woman who stopped to help us, or the service attendants who offered their help? Is anything really any more important than anything else or is it all a matter of really being where you are, for whatever might be called for or given?
Maybe the only important thing is the choice to get on the road, to enter the stream of life, to be there for whatever comes on the way. Maybe incidents such as this are only important because they help us appreciate all of life. And maybe I don't need to tell my George story anymore.
Maybe the only important thing is the choice to get on the road, to enter the stream of life, to be there for whatever comes on the way.
The Shadow Side of Intention
by Gerald May
The programs I lead for Shalem always touch something that is going on inside me. One theme flows into the next like a mixing of currents. At the moment, I'm moving from the Summer Retreat's "Letting God Guide" into the Fall Psychology/Spirituality Day's fresh look at Will and Spirit, so the question arising for me right now is, "How does our consciousness affect our willingness for God's guidance?"
Immediately I think of intentionality, the capacity of the will to claim and commit to a desire. When I wrote Will and Spirit, I contrasted willfulness (overzealous intention to accomplish self-determined ends) with willingness (open intention to participate in the flow of life with God's guidance). The difference, I felt, was all in the quality of intention. I agreed with Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook's forthright statement: "Intention is everything."
I soon discovered, however, that while claiming one's desire is very important, intentionality does have a shadow side. For example, I found it hard to claim my intention to be willingly guided by God without making it a willful enterprise: "I WILL be attentive to God no matter what!" In silent stillness I could honor my desire for God, but it seemed impossible to claim the desire intentionally without taking it into my own hands and making it my agenda. The line is very delicate between willingness and willfulness, between open desire and over-intentionality.
Gradually I discovered that for me, at least, the difference really does have to do with consciousness. More precisely, it has to do with contemplative awareness: awareness that is unfocused and immediate. I think most people in Western society have been conditioned to be very intentional and very uncontemplative. We've been taught to set goals and strive to accomplish them by focusing our attention on the tasks at hand. The way to be intentional, we think, is to be single-minded, tunnel-visioned, and in control.
It is this very conditioning, I believe, that makes it seem so difficult to be contemplative while thinking analytically or trying to complete a task under pressure. Try this: sit quietly and be open to the sights and sounds around you and the feelings and thoughts within. Be here now in the present moment, with whatever prayerfulness naturally arises in you. This is contemplative awareness. Now set yourself a mental task: add a column of figures in your head, or plan a list of things you need to do, or think about the best way to handle a conflict you're facing. What happens to your awareness?
When I experimented with this exercise, I saw that my inner atmosphere changed. My mind focused on my intended task, trying to shut out other sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings, labeling them as "distractions." I was no longer contemplative, and the open, present prayerfulness disappeared because my intention had kidnapped my attention.
This observation revealed a lot to me. It explained why people so often feel a need to cycle contemplation and action like a piston in an engine: in and out, back and forth, opening-closing, praying-thinking, centering-acting, being-doing. It also explained why the scriptural mandate to "pray constantly" is so difficult, and why in meetings where we try to make decisions prayerfully, the prayerfulness and decision-making often seem competitive.
Along with this artificial separation between contemplation and action, I also felt a fragmentation of my sense of myself. Instead of being wholly involved in a moment's flow of living, intentionality made me feel as though my will were out in front pulling, or behind pushing, the reluctant remainder of myself toward my intended goal. "If you want to get this accomplished, you're going to have to get going."
I came to call this self-prodding "project mind." It is the same drive with which I pushed myself to do homework when I was in school, the way I managed to accomplish many things in my life that didn't come easily. In the past, I've been rewarded for and even proud of this way of doing things. It represents diligence and discipline, overcoming laziness and lassitude, forcing myself through my resistances to get something done. Now, though, I can't escape the feeling that, at least for me, it is a kind of sinful thing--a betrayal of my own nature and a denial of God's guiding presence.
The saving grace, I believe, is that it really doesn't have to be this way. I know now that it is possible to pray in action instead of alternating prayer and action. It is even possible to think analytically or add a column of numbers in one's mind without closing off one's immediate openness to other sights, sounds, thoughts...and prayer. With grace, one can indeed flow wholly in participation with God's presence in any given moment of life, moving through both pleasant and unpleasant undertakings inspired by rightness instead of driven by will. And what's even better...one can immediately appreciate and enjoy that it's happening that way.
One pays a price, of course, when one's willful habits of consciousness begin to change. Controlling things is out of the question. And intentionality must become increasingly delicate, the thinnest veil between desire and action. I suspect that what we know as intentionality eventually disappears entirely, leaving only sheer desire as the empty content of wordless prayer. This requires the simultaneous full-feeling of desire and relaxing our ego-grip on all our agendas, even those that are most spiritual. It means a continually deepening discovery that the fullness of selfhood lies not in claiming autonomy, dedication, or commitment--finally in not claiming anything--but rather in the magnificent being of who we authentically are in God, with God, loved and...embraced and infused by God, and as living manifestations of God's very Self.
"It's All About Love"
by Lynne Smith
These were Jerry May's opening words as he began leading my sister, Susan, and me and the rest of our Shalem group through The Living Flame of Love, the beautiful, intense poem by the 16th-century mystic, St. John of the Cross. It was early spring. Finally, after the long winter, life and resurrection were undeniable. During the following weeks, so much in John's poem and his rich commentary on it challenged and comforted me, particularly his description of the soul's experience as it transitions into deeper contemplative awareness, a process often marked by confusion, even seeming regression. I was emerging from a long period of painful darkness, and I was still unable to pray, could make no spiritual practices no matter how hard I tried. John's exact description of this state and his powerful defense of it, were very welcome to me.
During these weeks another powerful transition was underway, of which I was at first only dimly aware. My mother's health had been steadily declining and, last fall, Susan and I had helped her move from her cottage at the Lutheran Home in Rockville to the assisted living section. This move had been emotionally difficult for her--and for us--but we all knew it was time.
While Susan and I were studying John of the Cross, Mom and I went out to lunch together a few weeks before the onset of her final illness. Mom shared with me her frustration with her loss of independence: giving up her car, her cottage, the body's accelerating rate of failure, the unsteadiness of her memory, dimming eyesight. She was depressed. We talked about John's knowledge of this experience (he re-wrote his commentary on his poem during the last months before his own death). We talked about John's assurance that what we are actually losing here is "the illusion of autonomy" (Jerry May's words), that in God's great transformation of the soul, we are being gradually emptied so that the soul's profound longing for God can totally fill us.
A few weeks after our lunch together--after Easter, after Mother's Day--Mom's doctors found cancer. Mom at once made it clear that she did not want to undertake any treatment and, having made this decision, her whole manner changed from the spring's depression to cheerfulness and energy. It seemed that her spirit had opened out into joy in a way I had never seen in her.
From that time on, I witnessed what I believe to be the outward manifestations of this particular soul's final earthly transformation. Jerry had said in our group meeting that, through our life experiences, the soul's "illusion of autonomy" is transformed by the living flame of love, replaced by a deepening awareness of our union with God that has always been true. I think I saw that transformation of awareness in Mom during her final weeks. Earlier in the spring, she had been deeply depressed by what she was experiencing as a final loss of independence. Now, it seemed to me, she was joyfully relinquishing what had been only an illusion all along, and with it, many other habits that had weighed her soul down. There was more and more an incredible "lightness of being" about her. She became what I can only describe as simpler, "purer," more essentially her true self. Her effect on me and many others who were with her in those last weeks was more profound than it had ever been, and it came not through her words any longer but simply through her presence, her remarkable smile ("a gift from God," she called it), the look in her eyes. One day I found a book she had mislaid, and when I handed it to her, she looked at me suddenly and said, "That's where our life is: hidden under a pile of stuff." I think it was this "pile of stuff"--all that had obscured her awareness of her soul's eternal union with God--that she was feeling lifted from her.
John describes such transformed souls at the moment of death. Mom and I read these passages together (shown below) not long before her death, and she especially liked John's reference to Psalm 116, a favorite of hers. So in conclusion, I want to share John's words with you. I was blessed to be present with Mom at her dying, and that death seemed to me very like John's description of the death of a transformed soul. In any case, John's words are my hope for my own death, and they are my grateful benediction on Mom:
"The soul, then, conscious of the abundance of its enrichment...feels to be almost at the point of departing for complete and perfect possession of its kingdom, for it knows that it is pure, rich, full of virtues, and prepared for such a kingdom...
The death of such persons is very gentle and very sweet, sweeter and more gentle than was their whole spiritual life on earth. For they die with the most sublime impulses and delightful encounters of love, resembling the swan whose song is much sweeter at the moment of death. Accordingly, David affirmed that the death of the saints is precious in the sight of the Lord (Ps. 116:15). The soul's riches gather together here, and its rivers of love move on to enter the sea, for these rivers ... [have] become so vast that they themselves resemble seas."
This article is based on Lynne's remarks at the funeral of her mother, Nettie Dillon. Lynne, a Shalem Board member, is a long-time Shalem participant. The quotes from John of the Cross are taken from The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, Revised Edition, Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, p. 654.
A Taste of Contemplative Love
by Bill Jamieson
The anonymous 14th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote in the foreword of his book that the potential reader whom "I have in mind is a person ... who has first been faithful for some time to the demands of the active life ... I am thinking of those who feel the mysterious action of the Spirit in their inmost being, stirring them to love. I do not say that they continually feel this stirring, as experienced contemplatives do, but now and again they taste something of contemplative love in the very core of their being."
Most of my life has been spent pursuing "the active life."
I was unrelenting as I drove myself to achieve a culturally-prescribed standard of success in the varied arenas of politics, business, education and church governance. I operated on the principle that, if I stopped talking and doing, the world would cease to be--if I stopped scoring points for my side, the other side would win.
My work was focused primarily on issues of social justice, first as a manager of programs that served vulnerable people and then as an advocate. I immersed myself in a variety of justice issues, from welfare to homelessness, from racism and sexism to capital punishment. I was, in the words of The Cloud of Unknowing, "faithful for some time to the demands of the active life," albeit perhaps a bit too driven.
Through the early 1980s, my activity was rewarded with success. But in the mid-80s much of what I had worked for began to unravel. The new conservative mood in the country had changed both the leadership and the climate of politics. A person with a passion for justice and a belief in the politics of compassion was dismissed as a well-intentioned but fuzzy-headed liberal. Programs that had taken years to establish were abruptly reduced or dismantled. I (and others like me) became increasingly irrelevant, and the people we served became increasingly marginalized.
It was during this period that I became conscious of feeling "the mysterious action of the Spirit" in my "inmost being." It began when a friend and mentor invited me into the process of seeking ordination as a deacon. One of the requirements for the diaconate was a two-year, eight-retreat program called, "Contemplation in a World of Action."
I approached that program as I approached all other assignments in my achievement-oriented world, as something to complete with excellence. At the first retreat, however, I was introduced to two things that eventually changed my life: a spiritual director and contemplative prayer. Both were incongruous with my ways of living and praying, and my first reaction was to dismiss them as irrelevant. What business is it of anyone else, I thought, how I live my spiritual life? Why would I want to share my spiritual confusion with another person? And I certainly didn't want to be directed or be in silence. For one thing, God and my colleagues wouldn't know what to do if I quit talking; for another, I would be wasting my time doing nothing when there was much to do.
Gradually I understood that my antipathy to spiritual direction and silence stemmed from my insecurity and from a fear of being vulnerable. Everything I had learned in politics and business taught me to hide my insecurities and to never allow myself to be vulnerable. Now I was being prepared to abandon these principles for something that seemed strangely inviting.
It took time and help from my spiritual director for me to move beyond seeing contemplation as merely another skill to be mastered. As I let go of my insecurities and fears, however, I began to taste something of that contemplative love in the core of my being. This love, radiating from my inner core, transformed my outer life and radically changed my ways of thinking and doing. I realized, for example, that the programs I had devoted my career to developing and managing were not the answers to deep-seated social problems. The programs were important, and they helped ease the pain of people who were battered by economic and social injustice, but they were only temporary solutions built on the sandy soil of our culture.
This lesson from the arena of social welfare can also be applied to the institutions of business, politics, education and religion. The answers to seemingly intractable problems are not found in programs, political ideology, economic systems or management techniques. The answers, rather, lie in the spirits of women and men, in an eternal wisdom implanted deep within our being. To find this spirit we must move beyond the easy slogans of our culture and begin to listen prayerfully for what Julian of Norwich called the "words formed in my understanding."
I believe that if the people who lead our institutions would ground their rational decision-making process in contemplative prayer, we would begin a national transformation of unprecedented magnitude. I am not suggesting that the bottom-line logic in corporate decision-making be abandoned but that decision-making be undergirded with prayerful listening and discernment.
This insight has had a profound effect on me, and it has changed my life by drawing me to a radically different ministry. My wife and I, accordingly, left our home of nearly 20 years and moved across the country to become part of The Institute for Servant Leadership. I am uncertain about what this new life in this new place will become, but I am certain that this is where God has called me to be.
Many people have commiserated with me about how difficult it is to leave friends and community and to become a stranger in a strange place. My response is yes, it is difficult. But when the process of prayer and discernment led me to a clear understanding about embarking on a new direction, it was not possible to stay behind. Such is the "taste of contemplative love in the core of my being."
Bill, vice president of the North Carolina-based Institute for Servant Leadership, is also on the staff of Shalem's newest extension program, The Soul of the Executive.
Endings Are So Much Better Than Beginnings
by Tilden Edwards
While the nursing home attendant was taking a blood sample from her at five o'clock in the morning, Nettie Dillon told him that the day before had been the happiest day of her life. Her five grown children had gathered from various parts of the country to have a last celebration with her. She was dying of pancreatic cancer. Her decision not to have chemotherapy had left Nettie with a great sense of acceptance of her death to this life.
The attendant challenged her: "What would your deceased husband say about that time being your happiest?" Nettie thought about that for a few days. When he came around to take some blood again, she told him, "Endings are so much better than beginnings: better than my wedding day, holding my first baby in my arms, or anything else, wonderful as they were. There is just so much more wonder and glory ahead of us than we can possibly imagine."
Hearing of this exchange, I was reminded of Teilhard de Chardin's insight that "Death is our deepest communion." Here was a woman who understood that from the bottom of her heart. She was on her way to a larger life. She was celebrating the gift of this life and her utterly confident expectation that God was drawing her into the more, not less. She loved her family and friends and prayed for her last days to be filled with energy and a freedom from "careless words" that weren't of the Spirit. At the same time, she had become marvelously carefree about all the things she had been attached to or worried about.
I commented to her that she seemed to have a lot of trust in God. She responded, "There's too much 'I' in saying that 'I' trust God. It's more than trust. It's a realization that God holds me so tight and that's just the way it is." She had what the tradition would probably call the surety of a real "faith-knowledge." One of her daughters, Susan, said that she was becoming more and more transparent; any remaining hardness in her personality was melting away. Her personal radiance and exuberance blossomed, which deeply touched the hearts of each of those people who had the privilege of being with her in those last weeks.
I was one of those privileged people. The last time I saw her she gave me an ancient, unpublished booklet of hymns written by Amy Carmichael, a courageous missionary who lived among poor children in India early in this century. Nettie turned to the verses of one of the hymns and said, "This is the intercession that I prayed again and again while I was raising my five children." The end of it goes like this:
"Read the language of our longing, Read the wordless pleadings thronging, Holy Father, for our children. And wherever they may abide, Lead them Home at eventide."
Nettie was led Home on August 5th. In the minutes before her death, her other daughter, Lynne, noticed flock after flock of geese flying by the window, honking loudly. They seemed to be participating in the communion of her ending, calling her mother ever more urgently. Lynne exclaimed, "Mama, the geese are calling to you. It's all right to go with them ... We'll all miss you so much. But it's all right for you to go." Very soon after that, Nettie took her last breath.
It was such a blessing for me to be with this amazing woman briefly toward the end of her life and to hear from others about the many ways God's Spirit shone through her spirit. She has given me a fresh perspective on endings. I don't think I ever again will value beginnings over endings. We can't have a new beginning without first having an ending. Endings are part of the mysterious economy of divine creation. God seems to be present in the endings in a special way, not only for ourselves but for others. In her last graced days, Nettie was a powerful witness to the wondrous presence of the Spirit within and around us, a witness to the mystery of holy endings that draw us deeper into communion with the Beloved.