RBWords - Volume 28 - Number 8: August 2015
Something to Think About
I have recently returned from a trip to New Orleans to attend the grand opening of a new Catholic student center at Tulane University. The new building is impressive and the Dominican friar who is in charge is a former student parishioner of mine at Tulane. The celebration was very successful and everyone had a right to be proud of the achievement. (I presided at the first meeting to consider "renovations" 17 years ago!) At the same time, the event made me realize how many places associated with my life have disappeared. The Catholic grade school and high school buildings I attended in Natchitoches, LA, no longer exist. Now the Catholic student center building that was part of my years at Tulane (1960-64, 71-74, 98-03) no longer exists. It is as if an eraser follows me around. Memory must take the place of the places.
Others have told me of the experience of going back to "the old neighborhood" to find the home where they grew up and their parents lived all their married life, only to find that there is now an apartment building or shopping mall occupying the space! A Washington, D.C., area twelve blocks east of the capitol building, where I spent a summer (1969) as a Dominican seminarian which was an inner-city slum is now "gentrified" into expensive condos even if the walls are still there. The places I where I underwent formation as a Dominican are no longer used for that purpose. Even the home I grew up in is being very nicely reconfigured and renovated by my nephew and his wife. It seems to me that memory has to be the soil in which roots find life. Places are changeable. God's providence has taken me many places as a Dominican friar and itinerancy has been my life. I try to remember the people instead, where my heart finds space to root. IT'S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
"To pray is to listen also, to move through my own chattering to God to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say. But if I pray only when I feel like it, God may choose not to speak. The greatest moments of prayer come in the midst of fumbling and faltering prayer rather than at the odd moment when one decides to turn to God.
from WALKING ON WATER by Madeleine L'Engle