Gathering Grace
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by Connie Clark
I walked to the door of the suburban house on a hot September day. Just returned from the Shalem pilgrimage to Israel and Egypt, I entered a different desert when Susan Parker welcomed me into her home.Susan was the first person I interviewed for "the Shalem book," a history of the Spirit working in and through Shalem these past 20 years. Susan had cancer and was a few months from dying when I interviewed her. I had never met her, but I'd been told, "Here is a person who is dying, who knows it, who demonstrates remarkable grace. It's a gift to be in her presence."
Moving slowly, Susan fixed me tea. She asked about the desert pilgrimage and told me she felt she shared in it, since she was traversing the wild country of dying. As a nurse oncologist, Susan had accompanied many others on this journey. "But this is different," she said. "I keep asking, 'How do I do this? What's the next step to take, God?' "
Susan spoke of the Group Spiritual Direction Group she had been meeting with for years, a group that started at Shalem and took on a life of its own. "They are seeing me through this," she said. "I don't know where I'd be without them."
I left Susan's house greatly blessed by meeting her, especially now when my own mother was dying. Susan was the first dying person I'd known whose focus on God seemed to transcend the pain and fear that mark that landscape. When my mother died six months later, Susan's example helped keep me steady.
That extraordinary interview was just one of 30 or so I've done as I've collected treasures from lovers of Shalem. Founding mothers and fathers, staff current and past, friends new and old have shared their unique stories. But whatever the details of each story, there's one common theme: Shalem is home.
Shalem is home for the man who grew up in Orthodox Judaism and left it for transcendental meditation and Buddhist practices. At Shalem he continues to seek the face of God in the company of other pilgrims.
Shalem is home for the dutiful church-goer who one day was seized by an intimate knowledge of God's love "like a bolt from the blue." Feeling there was no room for that experience in her church community, she came to Shalem, "where people didn't think I was crazy."
Shalem is home for hundreds of ministers, lay and ordained, whose vocations have been supported and enriched by Shalem's Spiritual Guidance and Group Leaders Programs.
And Shalem is home for countless others. I'm sorry I could only interview a handful, and I pray that I can convey their experiences--our experiences--truthfully and clearly as I create this little book.
I began the interviews last September fresh from the desert, plunging into another desert momentarily with Susan Parker. I concluded them this April with Peggy Tucker, whom I met for dinner after the Sunday night healing service and Eucharist at the Washington Cathedral.
A Shalem associate staff and board member, Peggy is a medical oncologist at the National Institutes of Health. She too went on last year's desert pilgrimage. She patched me up physically and emotionally during the roughest spots on that trip, and became an instant soulmate through a conversation we had in a Cairo restaurant near the journey's end. In response to a question from a fellow pilgrim, I said, "My mom is dying, but what makes it especially hard is the cumulative losses--my sister died four years ago and my father and brother-in-law were killed in 1983."
Peggy stopped eating and stared at me. She told me that since 1983 she too had lost three of the people closest to her in the world, including her mother and sister. The factual parallels were astonishing, but what felt like a feast was that we shared our losses and our passionate desire for God, and that for both of us, they somehow fit together in mystery beyond our explaining. We didn't say much; our bond was cemented for us. In the ladies' room as we washed our hands, we looked at each other in the mirror. Then we embraced wordlessly, held together by a compassionate Love that "lured us into the desert and spoke tenderly to us," to paraphrase Hosea.
Only God could arrange such a journey, such a meeting--and God's creative love has been with me every step of the way as I gathered stories for the Shalem book. My final interview with Peggy came two weeks after my mother's death. We sat in a Thai restaurant and talked about the glories of God. Shalem is one of them. I praise God for it.
Connie, a free-lance writer, is also a member of Shalem's Development Committee. The Shalem Anniversary Book will be out in Spring, 1994.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.