Piercing the Darkness

Ride the elevator to the top of the Empire State building at night; have your binoculars with you, and while others are doing the traditional looking down and out at all the human-made wonders and artificially lighted world, look up instead. Set your binocular focus to infinity if you want the best view, but even at regular settings, watch a miracle of movement and complexity and boundless life tearing or whirling through the dark skies, thousands of birds and insects coursing with life. 

Naturalist and writer, Helen MacDonald describes such a phenomenon in her book, Vesper Flights: “If I weren’t this high, and the birds weren’t illuminated by this column of light cast by a building thrown up through the Depression years to celebrate earthly power and capital confidence, I’d never have seen them at all.” I had no idea there was so much life and movement so high in the night skies and loved reading about it. There are gardens everywhere, and human ingenuity often makes such natural wonders visible…if we take the time and make the effort to pierce through and see all there is to see. 

The above quote is from Helen MacDonald’s essay “High-Rise”, and it made me think once again of all we miss when light is only permitted to shine in certain places and in proscribed directions. Certainly that is true in our Catholic world. How many of our stories, those of women and other-gendered specifically, are left in darkness, unseen and unsought, especially in our own Church. And the higher you go, the less these individuals, their stories, and their lives even seem to exist. Like birds and insects that fly through the night above the skyscrapers of power, they are invisible because those at the top determine where the light shines. 

This image struck me as I was thinking of homilies in particular. In traditional Masses only men give them. Men tell our stories (if they are told at all); men instruct us how to understand these stories (stories they themselves don’t fully understand) in the context of Scriptures; men interpret our spiritual lives for us. Then men continue on to do what they say they will never let us do: through consecration and communion unite us in Holy unity with Spirit and each other. Finally, men bless us and charge us to go forth without ever knowing us at all. No wonder so many of us leave feeling empty and emptied. 

I work for the ordination of women and all genders because I want our stories and our presence not only celebrated but profoundly interwoven into the great and ancient Story and spiritual enrichment the Mass brings forth. Retold through the Mass, it is this magnificent narrative that forms our faith, and I want us part of it. I want us brought out of the darkness and into the most holy light of consecration, of Eucharist, enacted by us, not just for us. For if they are never brought forth, how can our stories and our witness and our gifts go forth?

We know all of this only too well though, so what do we do?  

We continue to tell our stories – faithfully, religiously in every sense of the word – to each other. We tell them loudly and softly, in darkness and light, reaching each other and then beyond, until we finally pierce the duskiest corners of the world. We need to carry on doing what Helen MacDonald identifies as deepest in importance today: pressuring the world to find ways “to recognize and love difference…to rejoice in the complexity of things.” We are different. We are complex. Recognize and love us. Enrich not only the darkest but even the loftiest of places.

The losses of our presence and stories are only some of the great losses we experience in these days. We also have great emptiness and quiet in the natural world and in our communities and in our own lives. What if all of us passionately helped each other tell each other what those losses mean to us, what we value as individuals and communities and, therefore, what we want to work to save. As Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us in Braiding Sweetgrass, if we are impoverished, the scope of our vision will be, too, and, if we are to move forward, we have to understand the paths we have already taken, all of us, before we design the paths ahead. 

We should not have to go looking, with binoculars in night skies, for the value of everyone’s presence and everyone’s story. We should persist in showing up in the light and telling them and telling them until everyone knows and celebrates that we are here.