Easter People: Cornelia Connelly

Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9

April 27, 2014

Easter continues; we celebrate the resurrection – the fact that no matter how broken we are, how broken the world is, God lives, hope remains, and we have the capacity to be a part of the divine movement in this world.  That is good news.

During this season, we will look at some Easter people – people who I think give us particularly clear pictures of what it means to live the resurrection.  We are, of course, all Easter people.  But it can be helpful to look at the lives of folks that, through their stories, might call us to our higher selves.

This year, in a kind of odd twist, I am doing all monks and nuns.  This grew out of an experience I had a few years back going through an exhibit about religious sisters – nuns – in the United States.  It showed the impact sisters have had on this country – and especially on the most vulnerable people in our country – and it was astounding. 

But then I realized that that shouldn’t completely surprise me.  The Catholic Social teachings, which have impacted millions upon millions of Catholics over the years, are unequivocal in their call to social justice:  Life and Dignity of the Human Person; Option for the Poor and Vulnerable; Rights of Workers; Solidarity; Care for God’s Creation…all fundamental principles of Catholic Social Teaching.

So, I thought it would be fun to look at people who were either influenced heavily by these teachings, or themselves were a source of the teachings.    

Religious sisters built our nation’s largest private school and nonprofit hospital systems.  They were the nation’s first large network of female professionals in an age when the prevailing sentiment was that a woman’s place was in the home.  They were, in some significant ways, America’s first feminists, battling for the rights and opinions of women.  And they have been relentless in their care of the poor, ill, marginalized, and oppressed.

I knew I wanted to do a nun from the 1800s who started schools in the United States.  There were SO many.  So as I was reading about a few, I chose Cornelia Connelly because, when her character traits are listed, they usually say something like:  strong, beautiful, lively, intelligent, and… untidy.  It was the untidy that caught my eye.  Though a 1922 biography – which was subject to the approval of the Pope – saw it necessary to say she grew out of this most unseemly quality, I like to picture her room as being a bit like my house.

As was happening with many religious sisters and orders at the time, in the mid to late 1800s, Cornelia Connelly, and her order of The Society of The Holy Child Jesus, brought their teachers to the United States and they started schools all over the country, and this order remains today.  Just one of the many ministries going today is the Bethlehem House in D.C. – a residential facility for developmentally delayed individuals. 

Cornelia – her story is so interesting, in part because of its twists and turns, but also because of the way she responded to whatever life brought her.  The way I read her story, she would not have had the fortitude she did were it not for the way she chose to live through suffering and loss.

Psalm 16 and the passage from 1 Peter are helpful for framing the life of Cornelia Connelly.  They are both about clinging to God, praising God, finding joy in God, despite sufferings.  Cornelia did this.

Cornelia’s story begins in Philadelphia, where she was born to a wealthy, Episcopalian family.  Giving a hint of the defiance that will appear again later, she married Pierce Connelly against the wishes of her family – he was not considered her social equal…(which I take a little offense at as he was a minister.)  The marriage began, by all accounts, as a happy one.  They were part of the elite social scene, well connected, and both very bright. 

They moved to Mississippi where Pierce pastored a church and they had two children.  But Pierce began to feel called to the Catholic faith.  He was sure they were meant to convert, and so they did – Cornelia along with him.

Then they moved to Louisiana where Pierce taught at a Jesuit school and Cornelia taught music at Sacred Heart School and raised their now four children.  Cornelia from the very beginning was interested in religion and getting answers to the bigger questions of life.  Both her and Pierce participated in spiritual direction, retreats, and conversations with priests and nuns. 

But then Cornelia experienced tragedy.  She gave birth to their fifth child, Mary Magdalene, and she died only two months later.  That was in 1839, and in 1840 she went on her first longer retreat of three days.  It is this retreat that she credits with a conversation of heart and mind.  She said that God touched her deeply and her life was profoundly changed.  She gave herself to God, desiring to “do God’s will as it was made known through her duties and events of daily life,” as she wrote.

Tragedy soon struck again.  Her two-year-old son, John Henry, was scalded in an accident and died in Cornelia’s arms.  Adding insult to injury, at that same time Pierce told her he now felt called to the priesthood; Cornelia was four months pregnant.  Now, we have to hop back to the mid 1800s and remember that womedid not have a lot of rights then.  When Pierce decided to be a priest, he told Cornelia she had to enter a convent and take a vow of chastity – it was not a suggestion.

And so, a couple of years later when Pierce began the process for preisthood, Cornelia entered the Sacred Heart Convent in Rome under what was called “special circumstances,” meaning she took her baby son with her.  Cornelia at this time was not happy – I think most of us can agree she had been through quite a lot.

However, during her time here, her commitment to follow God grew.  This is a quote from a journal she kept at a retreat while at that convent:

“In whatever state Thou shouldst please to place me I resolve by Thy help to reject and renounce all temptations to sin or to that which would lead to sin, in Vigilance, Humility, and Fidelity, by Prayer and Practice, in purity of heart and simplicity of intention.”

Also from her journal at that retreat we get the first glimpse of what would become her mantra and vocation.  She wrote, “Action not words,” and “Those who teach others shall shine as stars in Heaven.”

Action not words…that is a phrase that comes up over and over in her writings – and continues as the motto of her religious order today.  And it makes sense.  She was a woman of action, and that was soon discovered by the bishop connected to her convent.  She was asked to start a new religious order.

In 1846 she established the first house of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, or Holy Child, in England.  She was now poised to live out the vocation to which she believed she was called:  being a leader in education and spirituality.

“Its beginning were small and there were many deprivations,” writes one author, “but a spirit of joy and peace prevailed; Cornelia was able to inspire in her sisters something of her own serenity in adversity.”  But it is the mission of her new order that mattered most to Cornelia.  Theirs was a ministry of education, but specifically for mill girls and poor children, and they set up day and night schools as well as Sunday classes to accommodate the young factory workers.

Soon the order spread, across England and then, like so many other religious orders, to the United States.

Cornelia had very definite ideas about philosophy of education and how the order of nuns should be ruled.  But, so did other people, who tried, via their varying positions of assumed authority, to influence her.  In fact, Pierce, her now ex-husband, tried harder than anyone to have control over the convent and their activities.  This is where Cornelia’s strength and intelligence came to bear:  Each time, whether her husband or a bishop, someone tried to change what she had done, she won…things were done her way.

Reading her letters is incredibly enjoyable – and I didn’t even come close to reading all of them.  I don’t know what was normal for that time, but it seems to me Cornelia wrote reams of letters to her male superiors – I shudder to think what she would have done with email.  She had her hand in absolutely everything, from the education of the kids, to matters of property, to telling hired help how to fix a railing.  “My Lord like me to have a wee finger in the pie,” she wrote to a friend. 

I do know that her tone and defiance was not normal for a nun writing a bishop or priest.  “I shall be glad to hear from you simply that I am right,” she says when writing to a priest about a dispute about how the buildings should be used.

She argued often for increased salaries for the teachers and higher teacher to student ratios.  She believed children were best educated one-on-one and with great care and kindness.  Not exactly the stereotype we see today of nun educators.

Most of Cornelia’s life was spent in this first convent in Derby.  She established schools on her own principles and philosophy. But her sufferings did not end.  Pierce sought to once again regain control of her life.  He left the priesthood and then demanded that she return as his wife.  He removed their children from their schools and denied Cornelia contact with them hoping that would force her to return.  He even filed a lawsuit against her.  But in the end he lost, though at great cost to Cornelia of course – she almost never spoke to her children again.

Through everything Cornelia clung steadfastly to God.  She wrote in her journal, “I belong all to God,” and, as one person put it, “this total belonging freed her to give herself to others…she endured suffering and learned not to be embittered by it.  Joy became one of her hallmarks and a hallmark of Holy Child education.”

Cornelia died on April 18, 1879.

Psalm 16 reads, “I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.”  We might call listening to our hearts something like instinct, or intuition, or going with our passion.  We think of it as emotion.  But for the Psalmist, and for Cornelia, that verse must always be read in its entirety.  God gives counsel and the heart instructs.  The heart can only instruct because it has been informed by a relationship with God. 

Before any decision, Cornelia always spent time praying, in retreat, writing, and, maybe most importantly to her, praising God.  These were not perfunctory or disingenuous.  When she praised God even when her life was full of loss and turmoil, that was a faith decision.  It was a spiritual discipline. 

This will come up again and again with our Easter people – they all had spiritual practices that were essential to their faith, essential to keeping them going in hard times, and essential to motivating them to serve and care for others. 

Peter writes:  “By God’s great mercy, you have been given a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus.”  And he goes on, “In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith … may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.  Cornelia was able to rejoice in God, and to respond to what she heard God calling her to do with joy and enthusiasm, even though she suffered and could have given up.  Mass, retreats, prayer, reading the bible, confession, fasting.  I think that all had something to do with it.  She was able to rise above herself and see the bigger picture and calling.  “The best way to overcome ourselves,” she writes, “is to impose some acts of virtue, to be performed each day.”

During one of her retreats, Cornelia wrote a prayer, that surely deserves a place alongside our Psalms. 

Open to me, O Jesus, Thy Sacred Heart.  Unite me to it forever, that each breath, each palpitation of my heart, which ceases not even in sleep, may be a witness of my love, and say to Thee without ceasing:  “Yes, Lord, I am all Thine.”  Receive, O my God, the little good I may do this day, and give me grace to repair the ill, that I may bless Thee during this life, and raise Thee through all eternity.

Life will do what it will.  So much we can’t control.  But our faith tradition, beginning with our Hebrew ancestors, has always called us to religious practices to help shape us into people that can respond faithfully no matter what comes up.  What those practices are and look like have, of course, changed over time as our culture and understandings of God have changed.  We still are familiar with prayer, worship and reading the scriptures.  But we have added things like meditation, spiritual and theological reading, and communing with nature.  But I think Cornelia’s advice is still worth considering:  “The best way to overcome ourselves is to impose some acts of virtue, to be performed each day.”  Seemed to work pretty well for her.  Amen.

Mary

John 20:1-18

Easter Sunday:  April 20, 2014

It’s never easy to talk about the importance or meaning of the resurrection.   We know it’s supposed to be the most important part of our faith – the biggest day of the year – but let’s be honest, if we have given up on literalism, fundamentalism, and simplistic formulas, we’re left with a fairly elusive task.

This year, for me, it’s even more difficult – probably not what you want to hear from your pastor.  But you see, through Lent we have been reading stories from the Gospel of John in which Jesus encounters people, and we’ve been asking what difference he makes in their lives.  We’ve been asking what difference Jesus makes in our lives. 

It’s a good question – and one I think we can explore in the stories that take place before Jesus’ death and resurrection.  In some ways you can say we don’t need the resurrection to put ourselves in the shoes of the woman at the well or Lazarus, or to think about what it would be like to encounter Jesus.  I think we could argue, plausibly, that even if Jesus died on the cross and never rose, his life would still be pretty powerful.  The man would still have been given back his sight and Lazarus still would have had a couple more years on this earth.  In fact, Jesus might still – assuming the stories persisted – have an impact on many of us – much like Martin Luther King Jr., or Gandhi.

And so today, the resurrection question intensifies:  Today we have our last encounter:  Mary.  And I’m forced to ask if this encounter is any different because it is after Jesus has risen from the dead.  Is the impact on her greater than, say, on Lazarus?  Lazarus was raised from the dead – Mary heads off to talk to the disciples. 

In other words, today we ask not just what difference Jesus makes in our lives, but what difference the resurrection makes in our lives.  And it’s a much harder question – and the stakes feel higher.

To explore the meaning of resurrection in our lives, we have to stop for a minute and peel back some layers.  Our tradition, our church, our faith has grown to believe that resurrection, if nothing else, means joy, incredible music, flowers, new life, alleluias.  And in the end, it does mean all those things.  Resurrection is good news.  But the encounter with Mary – in fact all of the resurrection stories in our gospels – demand that we pause before the alleluias to see if there’s something we’ve lost in the rush to make this day as joyous and glorious as it can be.

All of the gospel accounts differ in what they say about the resurrection.  Each have their own way of telling the story.  But there is uniformity on what they do not say.  They do not say:  The tomb was empty, Jesus appeared, he said “great news..I’m back…I told you so.” – and then all the people broke into refrains of alleluia. 

In Mark, after being told that Jesus was risen, the women run away afraid…that’s it, end of story.  In Luke, the women were told Jesus had risen and they ran to tell the disciples – who, showing us misogyny was alive and well in that day, thought it was an idle tale.  In Matthew, the women were both afraid and joyful.  And in John, Mary goes to tell the disciples what she had seen, and in the very next verse we find the disciples locked in a room because they were afraid. 

I’m going up to my family’s this afternoon, and all of us will have gone to church – heard about the resurrection.  And I’m pretty sure when we gather none of the doors will be locked…and the only thing people will be afraid of is what vegetarian dish we will be bringing up there. 

The resurrection had a different impact on those who were there that day than it seems to for us.  Today it makes us feel good in the same way seeing the first flowers of spring does; it rarely reduces us to fear and trembling. 

But I find those first responses helpful, because it means I can be more honest about my own doubts, fears, and hopes.  If we can’t quite figure out what the resurrection means, we’re in very good company.

Which brings me back to Mary.  When I set aside for a moment the modern day expectations of Easter, I can more honestly step into her shoes. 

And I have no difficulty relating to Mary’s response to the empty tomb…which I imagine was not much different from her response to Jesus crucified on the cross:  Weeping.  She’s looking for something, and she can’t find it.  She’s looking for hope, salvation, life, healing…and not only was all that killed on the cross, now it is nowhere to be seen.  Absence.

I find God’s absence the most difficult to deal with.  God’s death is more helpful to me – morbid, maybe, but true.  At least with Jesus on the cross, I can imagine how that puts him in the company of all who are crucified, all who suffer, all who are victims of injustice, all who cry out in pain and thirst.  It’s terrifying, and certainty does not make me happy, but it does provide me some assurance that God is with us in our darkest moments.

Absence is much more difficult.  Now I am weeping at the world’s suffering, and God is not there weeping beside me, God is not in the faces of those for whom I weep…God is just plain gone.  I can almost imagine Mary’s weeping at the tomb… exasperated, weary, totally defeated.  How in the world can this get any worse?  She weeps for the world, and she weeps that God has exited stage right.

We should weep for the world.  I hate to advocate feeling bad…I really do – and especially on this day.  But, at least in the gospel of John, Jesus appears to a weeping Mary.   In fact, she is weeping so hard she can’t recognize him through her veil of tears.  The risen Jesus comes to the ones who weep – the first hint of the good news of resurrection begins in the midst of suffering the loss of hope.

We shouldn’t always weep…joy is at the heart of our faith.  In fact, just hang in there with me…we’re getting to the fanfare.  But resurrection begins when we are connected to the suffering of others.   Without that…the connection, the compassion…I’ve become convinced that we cannot be touched by resurrection.  When we try to celebrate the resurrection as the thing that nullifies all else – conquers death once and for all, we say – I think we stymie resurrection. 

Think about Jesus.  He was connected to the world and especially those who suffered.  He wept when Lazarus died.  He wept over Jerusalem because it had become a lost cause.  He felt the pain of others.  He felt his own pain.   We just spent this whole week reminding ourselves that resurrection comes out of passion…the passion of Jesus.  We should weep. 

And we should weep because it does seem like God is absent sometimes.  Whether God is actually absent is a theological discussion…but it certainly feels like God is absent in some places in our world.  When Jesus cried, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” from the cross, I doubt if he was trying to solve the problem of theodicy.  For him, God was absent, and that was painful.  And I don’t have to list the places in our world that seem abandoned by God or anything good at all.  We are there with Mary, at the empty tomb, weeping.

And then resurrection comes to us…slowly, confusingly, with more questions than answers.   But finally, calling our name.  Mary.

Now, Mary’s response is so interesting.  “Teacher,” she says.  In Hebrew, apparently.  Again, part of me expects “You’re here!  You’re actually here?  Praise God eternally.  It has all come true.  Everything will be okay.”  Instead, “teacher.”  It’s almost as if she doesn’t quite get it yet.  Instead of the resurrection, it’s like she ran into her old friend that she thought she would never see again.  She’s confused and tries to keep him with her like the friend he used to be, though he tells her he has bigger things to do. 

That seems more like resurrection to me:  Looking at the world and wondering if it’s ridiculous to claim a God of life and hope.  Allowing myself to feel the pain and sorrow of others and wonder at the absence of God.  And then, the divine whispering to me – maybe in a prayer, maybe in the compassion of another – resurrection is there, asking me to believe that there is hope in the world…God is still present, even if I can barely see it through my tears.  And my response to this kind of resurrection fits almost perfectly with those first friends of Jesus:  disbelief, suspicion, joy, confusion, awe, fear.

Which, I admit, still leaves us a little bit shy of the fanfare of this day – we’re not supposed to whisper today.  But that’s just because we never read enough of the story on Easter.  Starting next week we begin the Easter season; the Easter story doesn’t end with Mary telling the disciples what she saw and heard.  We see, in the rest of the gospel of John, and especially in the book of Acts, the ultimate effects of the resurrection – the bold, amazing new life the followers of Jesus lead…once they get past their initial responses. Empowered by the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised was coming after he died, they went on to do even greater things than Jesus…just as Jesus told them they would. 

In other words, the Easter season tells the story of the disciples after Jesus is gone.  That’s our story!  We are the disciples after Jesus is gone.

The story of Mary is different from that of Lazarus or the woman at the well– but it’s because of where it begins.  It begins where we do – without the physical Jesus.  It begins where we do…weeping over the fact that suffering continues, even though God raised Jesus from the dead.

And it’s different because of where it ends – at the precipice of a new beginning.  One where Jesus is gone, and we have to decide if we will carry on God’s work with our own lives.  It ends with the promise and challenge of resurrection.

Because of our willingness to carry on the passion of Jesus – to connect with the suffering in this world – slowly, step by step, in the midst of our weeping, fears, doubts and outright disbelief, we are able to carry on his ministry as well.  In the passion and the ministry, Christ comes alive in us.  We become the living Christ – the resurrection.  It may start with weeping in the garden, but the truth is we are the resurrection!  And that’s big – and the possibilities for healing the sufferings of the world are endless...and no amount of fanfare can live up to that…but certainly we should try with our shouts of alleluia, our songs of joy and hope – maybe even with the Halleluiah Chorus.  Halleluiah; Christ is risen; amen!

Resurrection

Easter Sunrise Service

April 20, 2014

In this first service I thought I might reflect in a more general way on the resurrection.  It’s not an easy thing to get at.  Each year I find myself struggling with something to say about the text.  At 10:30 we will use the story from John…we just heard the story from Matthew.  I try to read the text and think about what it – in its particularity – has to say on this most holy of days.

But there is a kind of futility in that…not that that kept me from trying J.  One person compared the resurrection to the sun – we know what it is because we see the effects of it all around us, but we are not meant to look at it directly.  It’s why, in some ways, I think a worship service of poetry is more appropriate on Easter than what we will do later on.  Poetry is the medium for things that can’t be described directly.

But I think therein might lay the point of the resurrection.  God took on human form, and the world tried to nail God to a cross –to nail God down and in place, as our prayer of confession says…to reduce God in to something that could be controlled and looked at directly.  Then, the world tried to seal up God in a tomb – put God away forever.  The resurrection reassures us that God can’t be nailed down or hidden away…no matter how hard we might try.

There are many ways we try to nail God down – some are obvious:  creeds and dogma.  But some are more subtle and seductive – too often we exclude God from parts of our lives – we compartmentalize God off in a tomb somewhere.  We make God so nice that we don’t believe God has a place in war – or hell for that matter.  We contain God by choosing only images we “like”:  father, mother, soaring eagle, hen gathering her brood.  We move past images we find more troubling:  fire and judge.  We use our limited understanding of God to nail other people to crosses.  We want what God gives, but reject any idea of obedience to God.

I can’t tell you how many times I spend hours and hours carefully crafting a sermon, making sure it says exactly what I want it to say, and someone comes up to me afterwards telling me how much they loved the sermon, but their reason is not at all related to what I wanted them to hear.  In other words, I think they totally missed the point.  This used to drive me crazy.  But now I think, that’s resurrection.  Right?  My ego makes me think that I am saying something about God that people need to hear.  That is nailing God to a cross.  But luckily, God doesn’t stay nailed there very long – people shake me out of my narrow thinking and remind me that resurrection is real.

If I look around me, I notice that no matter what I do with God, God is all over the place.  God does not depend on me to exist, or move, or live.  Divine movement in this world does not come to a halt until I have figured everything out.  And nothing – no matter how terrible – can keep God from moving and living in my life. 

I love the end of Luke’s resurrection passage:  Peter was amazed.  That seems to me to be just about right for the posture we should have before God.  It doesn’t say whether Peter believed anything.  It doesn’t say if he was amazed/scared.  It doesn’t say he was amazed/ecstatic.  It doesn’t say he was amazed/angry.  Amazed can go with all those things.  An inscrutable God will cause us to feel all those things – scared, betrayed, ecstatic, angry, and more.

But always we can be amazed –surprised by the inability of the world to lock God up or wrap things up nice and tidy. 

This is what good poets know.   They know you can’t lock things down, wrap things up nice and tidy.  They leave room in poems about Easter for death.  They let secular words speak of the divine.  They find redemption in places most of us don’t look.  They use what’s around us to point to something we can’t look at directly. Then they put their words out there, knowing they will be received and interpreted in myriad ways – which is the point. 

So that’s my early morning take on resurrection:  that God, mystery, life, and hope cannot be nailed down or closed up in a tomb.  And I think that’s pretty good news.  Amen.