Grace, Years, Love and Challenges

I’m sitting in a chapel pew with my fellow-jubilarians a few weeks ago on a summer Sunday morning as rays of sunlight gently stream through the windows and fall on the gathering crowd below. We older jubilarians are sitting in the front pews because we have walkers and wheelchairs and nursing assistants. Younger jubilarians – those celebrating 50 and 60 years are behind us. They have families present and friends with whom they have worked over the many years. We, in the front pews, have outlived most of our family members and our friends are mostly as physically compromised as we are. 

The choir is practicing the Mass hymns, and the musicians are touching up their instruments to make sure there is not one discordant note in the ceremony about to begin. I look to my right and hardly recognize two of our ‘band’ members. (Band members are part of the group with whom one entered the community. In this case, that was 70 years ago.) These two are done up quite well; nurses have coiffed the hair and straightened the blouses and blazers; one thinks of the popular song, “I Feel Pretty,” as the two look around wondering with smiling eyes “What on earth is going on?” I, and two of my band members who have been blest with good health, will also sit with them at dinner and watch as aides help feed these women who continue to glow and wonder about all the fuss. They are residents in some unknown region of the mind left vacant by an unseen captor, a tyrannical kidnapper of the mind and its once hallowed memory. They once held positions in education where they led schools and countless students; one organized a thrift store for the poor, another – who is in fairly good health and celebrating 80 years – was a brilliant scripture professor.

My two colleagues and I are honored to be among them. We have been considering our blessings, three women in a group that numbered over 30, now in heaven looking on the remaining six of us and, I’m sure, cheering us on. 

A few weeks later I am surprised by a gathering of alumnae I had taught in our all-girls Catholic High School. They wanted to be part of the jubilee celebration! I have been in touch with many in this large group and others over the years as they shared their own stories of joy and pain and blessings and disappointments. The evening was full of recounting innocent teen-age escapades: smoking in the woods by the Stations of the Cross, skating on the pond on icy mornings before the principal arrived to work, hiding in the gym locker room over night, reciting the soliloquies of Shakespeare tragedies, dressing the statue of St. Christopher in the middle of the pond in the school uniform, and Freudian slips, sometimes made on purpose, at the morning announcements: “Sister Patricia Ann, our biology teacher is missing ten little pots of new seedlings which are now blooming. If anyone finds Sister’s new bloomers, please return them to the office.” 

Reflection

Jubilee has a resounding Biblical genesis. It means ‘Sabbatical rest.’ Leviticus 25:1-55 provided fervent Jews with the regulations for a jubilee year. There was to be no growing of food; animals and humans were to eat what was wild and provided by God for sustenance because the land belonged to God. Slaves were to be freed because people belonged to God. The Jubilee Year is a “cultural, economic, environmental re-set,” says one scholar. It is a homecoming, a time of liberation. 

In a Jubilee year, we celebrate what was done and not who did it. Even though certain people make the mark of a jubilee, they could not have done this without the people who accompanied them: families, friends, co-workers. That is the importance of community. No Sister could have done what she did for all these years without community. Nor could we have done it without faith, spirituality and the love of a generous God who made these achievements possible. Each of us sisters is acutely aware that God has brought us this far. God is the center of the Jubilee and when we celebrate a Jubilee, we are celebrating the harvest, the work that was done and the people who benefited. We are not celebrating ourselves. 

The Catholic Church will initiate a Year of Jubilee in 2025. It will be a chance for dioceses to do extraordinary things to set captives free, to feed the hungry, to praise God’s bountiful blessings by giving, giving, giving.

This week, read Leviticus 25:1-55 and then meditate on the beautiful passage in Luke 4:17 in which Jesus announces what his ministry will be acknowledging that the “Spirit of the Lord is upon me…” This is a powerful rendition of the passage in Leviticus and will no doubt be among many writings and prayers in the coming Jubilee Year. 

What will you do to celebrate a Jubilee Year? 

To all my readers and Anonymous Angels, be well and reflective as you look forward to fall and the harvest of love from the actions you have taken in faith.