Intuition

 

The Church taught what I had instinctively always felt as a writer: the smallness of a life does not diminish it; the brevity of a moment does not reduce its importance; death is not the end.

Amen to that!  These words are from Sally Read’s Night’s Bright Darkness—a spiritual memoir. This book is a conversion story.  Sally Read is a poet, a writer, and a mystic.  I enjoyed her writing, not so much her experiences.   

I couldn’t exactly put my finger on the time (place, time, action) that her conversion happened.  It wasn’t an auditory message, like St. Augustine.  It wasn’t a personal apparition like Roy Schoemann had.  It wasn’t a physical occurrence as St. Paul had.  I think Sally’s was intellectual.  She figured out that there just might possibly be a God.  She wasn’t brought up as a believer, so she didn’t have eyes to see or ears to hear.  But she did have a mind to reason. 

Once she became open to God, grace flowed.  She was blessed with good friends who were spiritually mature, lay women and priests.  She also was a reader who voraciously read as much as possible.  Also her little daughter seemed to guide her thinking.  Her husband tolerated her new found religiosity and eventually accepted it as their family’s new normal.  

Personally, I think the quote I began with explains Sally’s conversion.  She was a poet, and as a poet she intuitively knew there was beauty in the world.  There is always more than what our eyes see, and ears hear, and hearts feel.  When Sally opened herself to the possibility of a Creator, she believed.

Spiritual Warfare

 Soon I will be posting a book review on Sally Read's Night's Bright Darkness, which I am currently reading.  This morning I read something that made me laugh so much that I'm still chuckling over it.  I just have to share because I hope you will find it funny, too.

Here's the situation. Sally is going to be baptized. (This is a conversion story.) Her best friend will be her sponsor, Christina.  Christina is very pregnant.  Sally's spiritual advisor is Father Gregory, who is a Ukrainian Catholic priest.  In Italy where they live, RCIA is two years.  Christine can't wait.  Father Gregory gets his spiritual advisor and academic mentor, Father Morerod to pull strings.  Not only does he make arrangements for Sally to bypass the two year requirement, he gets Cardinal Cottier to perform the ceremony.

As fate would have it, the date the baptism is also the date of an election change in Italy.  There is always rioting in the streets resulting from whomever wins the election.  These four people (Sally, Christina, two priests) walk from their respective domiciles.  But they somehow do make it to the church safely.  However, Cardinal Cottier did not.  He is in his nineties and since all transportation was in a standstill, he would have had to walk, which was impossible for him to physically do.  So the four amigos walk to him--in the Vatican.

That's what made me laugh out loud.  It was the picture of these four racing to the Vatican: one very pregnant, one in a long black robe (Ukrainian Catholic habit), one in a long white robe (Dominican habit) and Sally in her new red coat.  What an image!  I can almost hear the music "Charlie Chaplin's Walking Stick" playing in the background.

To top it off, a cloud of starlings flew overhead.

...They sank in their thousands as one mass and came so low they almost brushed our head.  We could hardly hear ourselves for the rush of air and wings.  Then they began to excrete.  They got us one by one..."It's spiritual warfare," Father Morerod smiled, "one last attempt from the demons for your soul."