Author: Tarella Spirituality

Once upon a time I was very careless about acknowledging the source of the quotes that I copied into my journal or stored on my computer. I’ve improved, but these words about Pentecost stirred me then and still do, and I have no idea who wrote them.

The Spirit is fire and flame,
a restless wind, a babble of tongues, an upsetter.
It is forever choosing the prodigal son over the dutiful brother,
the Samaritan heretic over Jewish priests,
the widow’s mite over large donations,
a lost sheep over 99 safe ones,
a maid of Nazareth to be the mother of the Messiah,
a befuddled fisherman to become Peter,
an enemy of the church to become the apostle to the Gentiles.

Or as Andrew Hamilton SJ says, the Spirit is wild. (Eureka Street 20/2/2013)

    Barely listened to homilies on top of childhood catechism class and Columban calendars had me believing that Pentecost was a one- off happening accompanied by severe wind gusts and dangerous looking licks of fire sitting perilously close to heads of hair. Prodded on by the necessity of teaching small children something about the Holy Spirit, I finally twigged that Luke, or whoever it was who wrote the Acts of the Apostles, had endeavoured to capture in words and images the excitement, the possibilities, the wonder that was Pentecost as it tumbled around inside him like a fire seeking an outlet, like a swirling wind ready to split open his whole life.

Paintings of the apostles gathered in a tidy circle, Mary in the middle, don’t capture that fired up feeling. Not that long back, in the years following Vatican 2, lots of quite ordinary people had felt all fired up – priests, pope and lay people, all in this church thing together. We were fired up, enthusiastically embracing new ministries, enjoying liturgies that touched the reality of our lives as well as our hearts.

Then the sins of a few brushed against us and all over the catholic world the fire seemed to go out. Today I find it difficult to capture that Pentecost feeling against a backdrop of pain, confusion, anger and outright indifference. More correctly I am challenged to recognise the voice and the actions of the Spirit of God amongst what is.

It’s hard to know. Do this voice come from the women and men labelled as zealots, crackpots, obsessive, driven, one-eyed, the kind of people who send slivers of discomfort and doubt into our cosy, materialistic lives. They live in the present but see the possibilities and drawbacks of what might be to come.

Some of these voices are religious – Christian and non-Christian – others without affiliation to any denomination. They may not be familiar with Jesus’ words, ”I have come to cast fire on the earth”, but there’s a God-fire that drives them to speak with a voice that just might be the Spirit of God, “who breathes where it wills.

Maybe cartoonists who draw it like it is, politicians who don’t stick to the party line, social activists who practice what they preach, environmentalists, women who don’t let cultural expectations get in their way, writers with a fire in their belly, and theologians who catch the eye of a watchful Vatican, are a twenty first century version of scriptural figures like Isaiah, Jerimiah or John the Baptiser.

That’s our Pentecost legacy and if I read the New Testament account correctly, it was a chaotic experience. If there is one thing that institutions like the church find difficult, it’s chaos. And there’s nothing orderly about scattering, is there?

Judith Scully

 

 

This weekend we celebrate mothers. My mother passed through my life leaving only faint footprints of the individual who existed beyond motherhood. I saw her through a lens that said Pat Scully, my mother, and not Gertrude Minnie Helyar, the name on the certificates that registered her birth and death. 

Gertrude Minnie was a country girl with seven brothers and one sister, who played a mean game of tennis and delighted in a joy ride in an early model crop duster plane. Against her mother’s strong opposition she moved to Melbourne, studied hairdressing and opened a salon, became a Catholic and married my father ditching Gertrude Minnie in favour of Pat Scully. She and my father sank their savings into a small lending library which she ran until I was born. Three boys followed and the go-girl of the Mallee gradually disappeared into mothering.

When I was in my mid-teens she gave me the freedom to follow my heart and God’s call, to swap my family home for the convent. I would be thirty two before I returned home. Those years were lost to both of us and neither of us were ever able to bridge them. She didn’t know the person I was now and I failed to recognise what it must have cost her to have her only daughter living so far away for so long, never there for things like mother and daughter shopping and lunches.

Whether it was instigated by my father’s retirement or some deep inner change, I don’t know, but in late middle age she began playing golf and as a result the china cabinet overflowed with trophies. She persuaded dad to convert the side veranda into a studio where she painted outback style landscapes. She invited her friends to the family beach house for ladies only card playing midweek stopovers. By now I was a mother myself and so absorbed in my own mothering life I failed to appreciate the non-mum like person my mother had become. Then she died quite suddenly.

It sounds weird to say this out loud, but now I’m older than my mother. It’s taken years of life experience to see her as someone with strengths and skills and unrealized possibilities of her own. Gone is the chance to explore the overlapping patterns that we shared, to wonder at the genes and characteristics I have inherited and to recognise familial similarities like my shape, my interest in things religious and the pull of a wide landscape. Maybe if I had been more receptive and she had been less closed-off, she would have told me about my birth and babyhood.

Looking back from my place at the edge of things I am struck by the difference a couple of generations has made. One of my tasks during years as a pastoral associate in a large parish was the recruitment of volunteers for all kinds of parish ministry. First responses would usually be; “Oh, I couldn’t do that. I’m just a mum.” It’s not a common response from today’s confident young mums.
My daughter and her friends are all mothers and all employed outside the home, either full time or part- time. They work really hard at mothering but the way they do it differs in many ways from the way they were mothered and I was mothered. The basics are the same.-they want their children to be healthy, happy, safe. And with their glowing skin, long hair and casual jeans they look years younger than their grandmothers did at the same age!

I love the independence and giftedness of mums today, but I suspect they don’t know much more about their own mothers than I did. Maybe it’s a generation thing, a mixture of the challenges and possibilities that accompany young adulthood and the demands of mothering. One day, like me, they too will find the space to appreciate the women their own mothers actually were – or still are.

To all who mothering women, whoever you mother and wherever it happens, you are never just a mum. You are your own unique self as well as God’s loving face for those you mother.
Happy Mother’s Day!                                                                                          Judith Scully

Words from the Edge invites edge sitters like me to look beyond the obvious and find the God-depths hidden there. Let me know what the view is like from your perspective. You can reach me at judith@judithscully.com.au