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4.8 The grandeur in the everyday
In this session, we discover how I AM is bringing us into a new family, all of the same generation, as elective brothers and sisters.
Receiving a new story
Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
Remembering Ourselves
Share a story from your childhood that you enjoy recalling with a sibling, cousin or friend close in age. After you share the story, answer the following questions:
- How do your parents or adults in the story remember the event you recalled?
- How do shared memories strengthen bonds?
- How do our memories remind us of who we are?
Food for thought
- Please share what Mary, Jesus’ mother, has meant to you and your faith journey.
- Has your understanding of Mary changed in response to this module? In what way?
- Given all the sibling rivalry in the Old Testament (Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, for example), how is Jesus making possible a new kind of sibling relationship?
- How do the stories you shared in Unit 2 reveal something of the process of how the new non-rivalrous stories we are learning to tell will shape us into a new unity?
- In going to his death, Jesus opened up the possibility for God to be our Father in the same way the he was Jesus’ father. What does it mean to say that God is our Father?
Wrap-up question
What grandeur is made possible by finding ourselves part of a real family, one that forms its unity around the presence of the Forgiving Victim?
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In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives.
Peaceful Listening, acceptance of people and situations that would have been bothersome before my time studying here come to mind as Forgiving Victim insights ‘showing up’ in my life more frequently now. James writes “[Our] being is given to us from what looks to us like a future that is opening itself into our midst, making us alive to it as it does so.”
These ongoing irruptions of ‘new beginnings’ seem to fit James’ idea of “secondariness,” which we encountered in section one of Essay Eleven: “While I’m held in that experience [of secondariness], part of the aliveness of the moment in which I glimpse my “secondariness” is that it is a moment of someone else’s presence towards me which opens up for me my own relationship, simultaneously, to my past and my future. The longer I’m held in their regard, the more easily I am able both to remember, to cope with, my past, and to imagine a future to which I can aspire.”
The concept of secondariness intrigues me. I need to follow Moses’ example at the burning bush. I need to stop, to leave my usual path paying attention to the unpredictable, Godly irruptions of ‘secondariness’ in my life.
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That is quite lovely Rich, truly “the grandeur in the everyday”. Or as James expresses it: “The grandeur of Creation has erupted quietly into some very subtle changes of relationship. What is being brought into being is a new family, one in which the elective has a huge priority over the biological. We find ourselves being brought into a new family, all of the same generation, brothers and sisters who are becoming secondary beacons of I AM.”
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4.8 The grandeur of the everyday: Remembering ourselves
How do our memories remind us of who we are?We were fishing for halibut on my friend John’s boat in Kodiak Island’s Roslyn Bay on the Gulf of Alaska one breezy June 1973 day. Our long-lines had been soaking on the seabed for a couple of hours, so it was time for us to reel them in. We hoped there were at least a few halibut caught by the sharp steel hooks. The day had been sunny with a slight breeze, but our timing was bad because we began reeling in the lines just as the early-afternoon onshore wind began to blow.
The rising wind made for choppy waves. We hadn’t caught any of the up to one-hundred-pound halibut when one of the hooks on the ocean floor got snagged on something. The big stern drum kept reeling in the line, which pulled the boat lower and lower in the water. My friend John believed that a big fish, not a snag, was dragging the gunwales down to the waterline, so he refused to cut the fishing line.
It was a snag that was dragging us down. We knew for sure only after clambering into our lifeboat, a dinghy tied to the stern, to escape a now swamping fishing boat. It all happened so fast. We could untie the dinghy only after abandoning the sinking fishing vessel. Untying the dinghy was now my job.
The North Pacific water was icy and very choppy that afternoon when I reached down into the water to undo the knot in the line holding the dinghy fast to the fishing boat. I wasn’t the most accomplished fisherman and had tied a square knot in the line. That square knot, underwater and under high tension, was impossible to untie. The swamping fishing boat was close to pulling the dinghy down with it under the water. John struggled forward in the dinghy with a knife. He reached down into the water, cut the line, and the dingy immediately bobbed free.
We were about a quarter mile offshore. It took awhile, but we finally made it. I’ll never forget the feeling lying there in the rough seagrass in the sun-heated, black sand. Gravity pulled me tight to the earth, and I wanted never to leave that spot.
John and I are still friends. We may have talked about this incident in conversation over the years. John went on to captain several large North Pacific ships in a long career at sea. Capsizing a boat on a sunny, breezy day in a protected bay for him is probably just a blip on his radar screen of years of sea stories.
The memory for me, however, reminds me now about trust, and dependence on others, and our frequent inability to control an unpredictable world. The story tells me that rather than individuals, we are inter-dividuals. Our actions can reflect new arrangements, or they can undo existing arrangements; for example when a knot in what was a safety line turns that line into the instrument of our drowning.
My story leaves me with a question. Where in my life do today I find the knotted lines working no longer to save but now to harm?
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What once was a safety line or a lifeline, can, under new circumstances, bring harm, not security, into one’s life. For example, unorthodox eating patterns that may have been healthy as an adolescent when carried unaltered into later life may be related to obesity or bulimia. When ‘bad habit’ patterns first come together, they meet some real or perceived need, which allows the person to see these practices as lifelines. It’s the personal perception that counts, whether or not the underlying reasoning, or lack thereof, is warranted.
Perhaps the phrase ‘old habits die hard’ sums up the idea that what met a real need at one time can later become a knotty problem, not the solution. For example, lying and deceit may protect a child in an abusive parent-child relationship. When such a pattern of lying and deceit lives beyond the abusive relationship, those behaviors become at best self-defeating and at worst self-destructive.
We need to look at the way our present habits, developed in us through past interactions with the social other, affect our openness to a new relationship with the Other other. We need to recognize that our social other conditioned past is behind us and become open to new growth into a future facilitated by the Other other. Our turning points may be dramatic, ‘road to Damascus’ moments, or they may come upon us gradually. In either case, we need to decide to turn, to repent, to trust in God’s grace, no longer driven by social other approval.
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4.4.8b-The grandeur in the everyday: Listen and Share — Please share what Mary, Jesus’ mother, has meant to you and your faith journey. Has your understanding of Mary changed in response to this module? In what way?
I think of Mary playing only a slight role in the growth and change of my faith journey. James describes Mary as one who “… patiently helps us undo the knots that tie us into the old creation, so as to help us come to reflect the new” and also how in her life Mary was “stretched.”
“And here it really is worth our while to spend a little time with Mary, for if there is any way at all that we can understand the things I’ve been trying to point towards here, it is in her company. Her personal history is one of being stretched out of myth and into history. There is a continuity between the old creation and the new, between the Old Israel, and its institutions, and the new, and it is lived out by Mary being stretched by what is done in her as she provides the flesh for the Lord God to come among his people; and then in what is done to her as the Lord God works among his people. She is the first, and most complete example of that “secondariness” that I’ve been trying to bring out in this essay, receiving who she is through the regard of the Presence which has come into history through her.”
While that’s a long quotation, I wanted to include it all, because it reflects my dawning understanding of the meaning of Mary’s life, its connection to “secondariness,” and the reality that grace stretches each of our lives into the grandeur of relationship with all generations of our brothers and sisters.
My wife’s Aunt Dorothy comes to mind. Dorothy left Emmetsburg, Iowa in the 1930s for Detroit where she began her faith journey as Mercy nun Sister Concetta. In the second half of her life, Dorothy left the Mercy Order and married. She and Paul never had children. No, Dorothy’s children lived all over the United States.
Dorothy dedicated the last half of her life to ‘parenting’ the growth of the Teen Encounters Christ (TEC) movement in the American Roman Catholic Church. I witnessed a small fraction of Dorothy’s life of sister in Christ to thousands all across the country as she regularly reached out to include her family of origin in the witness of her faith journey.
In those times I knew I was in the presence of something both ordinary and grand. Until now in this course, however, I haven’t had the theological framework through which to understand the real genesis of Dorothy’s life and work. God stretched Dorothy’s life to receive “… who she is through the regard of the Presence which has come into history through her.”
Am I saying that Dorothy was some latter-day Mary? I don’t know. And yet I remember that when Dorothy died, many at the celebration of her life witnessed to Dorothy’s help facilitating God’s presence and action in their own personal faith journeys.
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The story of your Aunt Dorothy is most impressive Rich, she obviously had a great influence on all who knew her.
I think that Mary is a symbol of the interior life, the loving, the compassionate, the intuitive, the ever faithful. As in the Magnificat “my soul doth magnify the Lord”. I advise you to read James on the Magnificat in Luke’s gospel. But I add a few of James thoughts about Mary from the JFV course:
“Mary, Jesus’ mother, becomes the portal through which Creation out of Nothing takes place, to be in historical fact what had been symbolized by the Tabernacle overshadowed by the Presence of the Most High.
Mary is the first and most complete example of “secondariness”, receiving who she is through the regard of the Presence which has come into history through her.
Mary is not in rivalry with the huge elective family that her son is bringing into being (Luke 8:19? 21). By the day of Pentecost, her motherhood of Jesus has been stretched into her being sister of her son’s sisters and brothers. The one who provided the raw material for the New Creation has become an insider within that new creation.”
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What grandeur is made possible by finding ourselves part of a real family, one that forms its unity around the presence of the Forgiving Victim?
Jesus, the Forgiving Victim, opens up each one of us to the grandeur of discovering our true selves as created daughters and sons of God. We are not the false selves, the patterns of desire, that the social other consistently works to create within us. The Forgiving Victim brings us to recognize and to love our neighbors even as God first loved us. We find the grandeur in this fellowship in both old and new friendships in the ever expanding family of God. The inner peace and the joy of life in Jesus flow within the regular cycles of the day where the warm embrace of neighbor happens in places as disparate as a grocery store aisle, in a church, or on a stage in front of millions.
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It is very heartening to listen to someone like yourself who has completely grasped the message and who is living it, Rich. Yes, we find ourselves as part of a new family, as James says:
“The grandeur of Creation has erupted quietly into some very subtle changes of relationship among very ordinary people. What is being brought into being is a new family, one in which the elective has a huge priority over the biological.
We find ourselves being brought into a new family, all of the same generation, brothers and sisters who are becoming secondary beacons of I AM.”
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