Amid your numberless stars let me place my own little lamp.
—Rabindranath Tagore.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Love wholeheartedly, be surprised, give thanks and praise—then you will discover the fullness of your life.
—David Steindl-Rast.
I just received the first copies of my new book, Becoming Flame, on the weekend of the Vernal Equinox. And as our homilist at church reminded us yesterday, this date is always very close to that of the Annunciation to Mary by the Angel Gabriel that she would bear Jesus into the world (March 25).
Besides all that, part of the Old Testament Scripture reading yesterday was Isaiah 43:18-19: “Do not remember the former things … I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”
All this … in the week that our daffodils poked their way up through the earth, only to be dusted with a late-March snow that is soon to be forgotten in the spring-like weather predicted for the rest of the week.
Spring, like the launching of a new work, a new thing, means setting aside former concerns and looking forward. While we know that growth and change are essential components of life, it is not always comfortable to experience them: new challenges, complications we couldn’t have dreamed of in order to pray them out of our path!
In the mother-daughter wisdom dialogues I wrote in Becoming Flame, I envision a mother teaching her daughter, through everyday moments and common experiences, an uncommon wisdom:
The Daughter feared the dark and wished not to be alone, away from her parents in the cold, inhospitable world.
“Do not fear,” said the Mother. “You are not a bruised reed or a flickering wick. The flame that burns within you is designed to withstand all weathers. Only trust.”
“But I do not feel its light, its warmth, at all moments,” the Daughter protested. “Sometimes it seems extinguished and cold.”
Her Mother answered: “Those are the moments at which it burns brightest.”
In the midst of our seasonal adjustments, our personal growth, our searching for a “new thing,” let us remember the reason for our being here—to grow together. And as a Chinese proverb puts it: “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.”
Thomas Merton wisely observed: “ … The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of the wedding feast.”
The Talmud tells us quite simply that “God wants the heart.” And Tennyson: “Love is the only gold.” So why are we not dancing in response, in joy, at this very moment?
—Isabel Anders
“What makes a melody sound like a melody is not the note it starts on—it’s the relationship from the first note you hear to the next one.”
—John Mauceri.
“Unless the soul goes out to meet what we see, we do not see it; nothing do we see, not a beetle, not a blade of grass.”
—W. H. Hudson.
Why mother-daughter wisdom dialogues? The form I employed in my new book Becoming Flame (Wipf and Stock, March 2010) actually came to me several years ago in the context of writing a novel. An older female character was setting down in her journal the wisdom she had tried to teach her daughter, now grown. It consisted of dialogues, of distilled insights that captured her philosophy—in images and small scenarios of home and hearth, field and wooded pathway.
I at some point gave up on the novel, Soul Fete, but extracted from it the dialogues that had seemed to come to me filtered through another’s voice. Nothing spooky, just imagining a woman confident enough to share her life’s wisdom as one might have done in earlier times conducting a “wisdom school.” Although such schools usually were exclusively for men, I imagined a “school” of two: mother and daughter.
Over time, I began to write about women and wisdom in an accompanying essay—how “women’s wisdom consists of understanding and application of appropriateness within a context. And so I have sought to express something of the flavor of such passing on of wisdom within a mother-daughter question-and-answer mode—a model that does not need to be limited to actual physical mother-daughter relations, but rather serves to embody classic inquiry and interaction in various circumstances between a woman mentor and anyone with ears to hear.
“Why a dialogical structure? An alternate translation of the Prologue to the Gospel of John is said to be: ‘In the beginning was the conversation and the conversation was God … and in the fullness of time that conversation entered into our flesh.’ Becoming requires understanding … an accumulation of human experience that has grown in response to specific challenges, a process that we enflesh.” —from my Introduction to Becoming Flame.
Amos Wilder wrote that “The early Christian vision and grasp of existence … had a dynamic character … a level of apprehension which the New Testament speaks of as that of the Spirit.”
Wisdom is interactive—it is about learning to speak “spirit.”
Here are two of my dialogues from Becoming Flame. All together, the 60 scenarios in the book paint a story of ongoing, interactive relationship—a model I am still exploring …
***
The Mother and Daughter saw a great ship on the horizon, its sails catching the red and gold of the morning rays.
“I long to be carried by such a glorious ship to the land of my hopes and dreams,” wished the Daughter aloud.
“You have been blessed with just such a Ship,” said the Mother.
“What is its name?” asked the Daughter.
Her Mother replied: “It is your Soul.”
***
“Some days I think I know the Truth and feel I am guided from Above. But at other times I feel lost and confused, as too many possibilities flare out on either side of me,” said the Daughter.
“Just as the sun is too powerful to look upon with naked eyes, yet we can observe it safely reflected in a stream of water,” answered her Mother, “so the Truth itself must be filtered into our lives through particular events and moments. Do not ask for more, but garner Truth as eagerly as you gather blossoms from the meadow—abundantly and joyously.”
Becoming Flame will be available on March 15.
—Isabel Anders
