There was a wonderful line in Call the Midwife on Sunday night - Sister Julienne is holding Sheila tightly as Sheila's labour progresses and it is hard ... Sheila had been a sister, developed TB, left the community, returned as a nurse and midwife and married Doctor Turner. In response to Sheila's uncertainty and anguish, Sister Julienne says something like: "Every woman is the sum total of all the girls and women she has ever been ..." (Later - watched it again - the quote is "Every woman alive is the sum of all she ever did and felt and was...") I love that. I've spent a long time integrating the girls and women I have been - anxious child, terrified teen, and especially the Sister of St. Margaret I was and therefore in some ways still am - along now with one who broke apart and put together (with God's help and a lot of others), parish priest, director of Mile End Mission, writer ... and one who is wondering what retirement will mean ...
Here is the talk: At a point when I asked questions, I didn't expect responses - especially the second question - What is the little girl in you afraid of. But many DID respond. So moving.
Women’s Day 2017
On one of my
first trips back ‘home’ to Bermuda, I walked to Grape Bay Beach and, alone
except for my friend Judy, I danced a dance of freedom in the soft sand along
the edge of the turquoise waters – imagining myself connected to my
fore-mothers – aware of a long history of strong, courageous, fearful, amazing
women - my Mum, Frances, my Gram, Emily Millicent, born in Bermuda, leaving as
a 12 year old for England and then Montreal – with ‘African’ features but fair
skin, passing for white because it was, and is, easier to be white in our
world… my great-grandmother, Laura Mary and her mother, Susan Jane Smith who
was born a slave in 1832. At the
abolition of slavery in the British Empire, August 1st, 1834 her
owner Elizabeth Hayward was paid 14L 10s 16p for a 2 year old slave’s freedom … Susan Jane’s mother was
Joanna Virgin and her mother Margaret Burrows … Smith, Virgin, and Burrows were
all the names of slave owner families in Bermuda. Since slave records are
difficult to find – that’s as far as I can go. My DNA shows 7% African, mostly
from Nigeria and Mali with 1% North Africa and 1% Central Africa hunter –
gatherer.
How Gram and
her sister, Auntie Jenny were teased about their colonial accents and probably
their hint of colour – and their intelligence. How Gram won a scholarship to
teacher’s college, but they emigrated to Montreal before she could finish – and
she was always saddened not to have become a teacher. How she had green thumbs
and then some. How she was always homesick for Bermuda – and returned (with my
brother Jim and me) in 1963 for the first time in 57 years – and died the
following year.
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from Google Images |
What women do you dance with? Do you dance? What kind of dance?
“Does it
hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,”
said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t
mind being hurt.”
"Does it
happen all at once, like being wound up,“ he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t
happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. …
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and
your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these
things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except
to people who don’t understand.” (page
17) “…Except to the people who don’t
understand…”
It’s scary,
though. We carry broken bits and sorrows as well as joys and triumphs.
If you were to stop and look inside – and
find the child that still exists in you – who would you find?
What does she love?
What is she afraid of?
My fears:
Katherine Paterson, a well-known author of
children’s books, twice received the Newbury medal (top prize in children’s
literature). Paterson was born in China to missionary parents. And yet, competent, creative, and well-known
as she is, she writes that every time she walks into a room full of people she
feels like the little girl she was who was dressed in clothing from the
missionary barrels.
Childhood – Deaths and insecurity in my first few
years led to my being an extremely anxious and extremely good little girl. I
made myself largely invisible – I remember the moment it began - unconsciously
terrified of being sent away or of people dying and abandoning me. Every morning before school, I’d run upstairs
to kiss my Gram good-bye … terrified on some level something might happen to
her if I didn’t. One morning I was late and going out the door – no – I ran up,
kissed Gram (who was in bed) good-bye, and ran back out. Control – imagining we are in control is, as
children, preferable to realizing the world is chaotic and unpredictable.
My little anxious child eventually led me
to look for a stable family in community – at St. Margaret’s Convent in Boston.
I also loved God. The first part I didn’t understand at the time.
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Google Image |
I see Lori. She’s here today. Lori who has awesome gifts with people of every kind – who is able to bring together, respecting both, a heavily alcoholic and difficult man in need of a new health card and the man behind the desk who tries to push them away and refuse to help. Lori who was told, in frustration, by a board member, “You never used to speak up like this.” Lori replied, “I didn’t have to. Ros was here.” That’s when I knew I’d done my job at Mile End Mission. Empowering women to recognize and live out their strength and wisdom. Lori’s good! So quick to respond effectively in situations that might take me 15 minutes to two days to come up with – to trust my knowing …
There are very few places where, or people with whom, I feel I can be confident - confidently say I’m doing a good job. I’m saying it now. I’m retiring. And I’ve done and am doing good ministry. Why should that be so scary? Will someone need to put me down? Can I/we be confident and show it? Can I/we stand tall and be less dependent on external acceptance?
“Our
deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are
powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens
us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about
shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant
to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that
is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our
own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates
others.”
Have you been put down by another woman – put in your place – had an experience of “Who do you think you are?”
Have put down other women, tried to put
them in their place – wondered about another woman : “Who does she think she
is?” If so, Why?
There’s a wonderful story of my great-grandparents. The Virtue family lived in St. George’s. Mr. Virtue, a white man, inherited a pew in the front white section – Pew # 26. The Virtues shared their pew with my great-grandparents. For years I’ve wondered how my great-grandma, Laura Mary, a woman of colour, got to sit in a front pew in the 1800’s. Two years ago, I met Sandra, the great-granddaughter of the Virtues. I asked her my burning question. Turns out Mrs. Virtue was also a woman of colour, but it wasn’t provable. I laugh every time I think of some of the white people at St. Peter’s looking at Pew # 26 and thinking to themselves, “Who do they think they are?”
From The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner concerning the Feast of All Saints'
...HOW THEY DO
LIVE on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even
death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right
enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or
however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they
live still in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no
longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where
everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with
the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The
people who, for good or ill , taught us things. Dead and gone though they may
be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to
understand us—and through them we come to understand ourselves—in new ways too.
Who knows what "the communion of saints" means, but surely it means
more than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not
ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years
since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of
the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but
continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I
assume—"increasing in knowledge and love of Thee," says the Book of
Common Prayer, and moving "from strength to strength," which sounds
like business enough for anybody— and one imagines all of us on this shore
fading for them as they journey ahead toward whatever new shore may await them;
but it is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry
something of them on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not
only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as
in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have
things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect
or the same things...