Seasoning
by Joellen McCarthy, BVM; Peggy Nolan, BVM and Mary Ann Zollmann, BVM

Undoubtedly many of you will open this issue of SALT with a special anticipation.

You have followed our unfolding of religious life for years, getting to know us in classrooms prior to Vatican II where something of the distinctiveness of our life was clearly visible in our manner of dress, the names by which you knew us, our daily schedule, and customs that seemed to distance us from the world of family, job and socio-political realities so familiar to you.

Much of who we were and what we did when we were not teaching you remained a mystery.  The meaning of our lives as women religious came to be defined by the separation between you and us.

Then, you—and we—experienced the radical shift that came with Vatican II and its encouragement to live our lives with and among the people of God.  We wore ordinary clothes, took back our ordinary names, came into your homes and invited you into ours, and moved into a classroom defined not by the walls of a school but by the needs of our world.

The external boundaries that had separated us dissolved and along with their dissolution, the sense of meaning derived from external difference.  Significantly, the sense of mystery deepened and intensified.  If our identity as women religious is not found in visible and tangible externals, then where is it found?

Indeed, as you ask these questions about the meaning and identity of religious life today, so do we.  We are grateful for the questions as the questions encourage us to bring to word and articulation the inspiration that underneath all of its external expressions, guides, energizes, sustains and surprises us.

The questions and our attempt to respond—both for you and for us—draw us into the deep mystery that both in and beyond what is visible and tangible, has always and will always give meaning to our lives.  Our response takes the form of the rich descriptions such as the ones you will find in this issue of SALT.

As you spend time with us in this issue, you will engage with us as women prayerfully open to God’s call, committed to being Sister to an ever-widening global and planetary community, sensitive to joy and suffering, and willing to take the risks involved in bringing about God’s dream for our world.

Yet, even in these attempts to respond to the meaning of religious life and our BVM expression of that life, we find ourselves saying, “But there is more; what we have said is not quite it.”  This is where poetry and symbol step in with their potential to draw us into truth that eludes explanation and definition in logical language.

A poem by David Whyte, entitled “The Old Interior Angel,” speaks to what the articles in this issue of SALT are all about.

The author is on a hike through the Himalayan mountains when abruptly his path ends in the sight of a broken bridge, its taut cables snapped and the bridge planks concertina-ed into a crazy jumble over the drop, four hundred feet to the craggy stream.

Facing the trembling bridge with a fearful mind and an emphatic shake of the head, the mountain climber is about to turn around and go back when 

Enter the old mountain woman
with her stooped gait,
small feet shuffling for the precious
gold-brown fuel for cooking food.
Intent on the ground
she glimpsed my feet and looking up
Said, “Namaste”
“I greet the God in you.”
I inclined my head and clasped my hands
to reply, but before I could look up
she turned her lined face
and went straight across
that shivering chaos
Of wood and broken steel in one movement.
One day the old interior angel
limps slowly in
with her no-nonsense compassion
and her old secret and goes ahead.
“Namaste”
you say and follow.

Beyond all description and definition, we are drawn—and we hope you will be, too—into the deepest meaning and identity of our lives: the mystery of women who have been grasped by the God of compassion and who can do nothing else but follow the lead of that love.

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© 2005 Sisters of Charity, BVM