Week 09 (May 17-23)
By Joan Gannon, RSCJ
I love Rachmaninoff. Some years ago during a retreat, I found myself crying as I listened to his second piano concerto, and with a little musing, discovered it was because I realized that everyone’s life is Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. For some, the dissonance or the pathos is more pronounced; for others, the beauty. For all, the depth and the drama. A number of our sisters had died that year, and I think my reaction came partly from a sense of the transitory nature of it all.
Recently, I returned from my third trip to the Philippines, where I have had the privilege and joy of being a small part of life among my sisters there. Two of them, the first to enter with us more than 50 years ago, make my simile particularly apt for me. All the sisters there, though never more than 20, would qualify, but I choose to focus on these two because, though only in their mid-70s, illness has brought them to their elder years where their lives of courage and creativity have become increasingly lives of contemplation.
The Society wasn’t known in the Philippines when a good Irish priest and a professor who had wanted to become an RSCJ advised these two young women that if they wanted to become religious, the Society was for them. Both brave and generous, they separately left for the noviceship in Japan, never expecting to go home again.
When there were enough other candidates from the Philippines and they had made their first vows, five sisters did go home, but by then our two had gone to the United States to study. One continued off and on throughout her life to be something of a missionary: to China, to Canada, to Uganda, to Taiwan and then to Japan; the other, when she returned to the Philippines, risked her life to become an early participant in the “People Power” revolution, was an innovator in programs for young religious men and women who came to the Philippines for spiritual and theological renewal, and was something of a wandering theologian in search of new ways of knowing God in all manner of places, both geographical and theological. Their lives were rich and full.
Gradually, for both have degenerative diseases, their activities have been severely limited and their time given mostly to prayer, reading, rest, contemplation. For one who claims to be “a lazy introvert,” that change is more easily accepted, but for both of them, it is heroic. It is a wonder to me when I see, lived out, the truth that contentment – even joy – is in the living out of deep acceptance of what is, of the present moment, of the truth that “God is all.” Both of these RSCJ will celebrate their Golden Jubilees of Profession this July. Both so totally offered their lives to God that the “doing” part is not the focus. They are, daily more authentically, bearer of God’s love to a suffering world. I am so proud to be their sister.
