hope and healing – Page 3 – Deena Pavinato

After a busy week of finishing baking and gifts, family gatherings and Christmas, I watched the BBC version on The Nativity on Saturday evening. This version took a lot of poetic license with the scriptures and I can’t say that I was pleased with their depiction of Joseph and his rejection of Mary but still, I was moved by all the various dynamics of family life, the travel of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem and the journey of the Magi. I am currently praying with a 10-day Ignatian Christmastide Retreat and scenes like those depicted in the series certainly help with my imaginative prayer of the Holy Family and their experiences. It’s easy to romanticize all that unfolded for Joseph and Mary, like a storybook we’ve read a hundred times, everything easy and coordinated. This year I have found it helpful to see Jesus as a child, in need of the care of others, born to a couple who were faced with difficult decisions and less than perfect circumstances. Jesus comes in his littleness and models for us “how we are live in a relationship with him. We are invited to come to him in our poverty, weakness and littleness.” (Encountering Emmanuel, Heather Khym)

I hear a plane overhead as I write this, easily heard in the thick cloud cover of the day, and say a silent prayer for all those traveling today from family gatherings and heading back home to their own family lives and work. It was a joy to spend time with my extended family and to see the many pictures friends posted of their own Christmas celebrations. Having chosen a single contemplative life though, the holidays are different. There are certain events and experiences, invited and included or not, that aren’t the same without your own family and children. There is a distance and separation that can’t be filled, try as you might. Having lost both of my parents, it is a little like being orphaned, alone in the world. Most days I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. But holidays always bring a certain bit of melancholy for times past and sadness, missing loved ones.

On Christmas Eve, when Pope Francis opened the Holy Doors in Rome, we began a Jubilee Year of Hope. Pope Francis reminded us that hope is there for us (Spes non confundit – Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee Year of Hope). Yes, we will still worry and have times that hope feels hard to hold on to, but within each of us there lives hope. Hope that inspires each of us to look up and believe that there is more and can be more, more than this broken world and the challenges it presents. It is a hope that we carry with us, every day, despite the things that are happening in our lives and the world. It is a hope that isn’t about “happy endings” but a hope that calls us to be pilgrims of light even in the darkness, pilgrims willing to share the reason for our hope, especially to those who are feeling they have little hope to cling to. A hope that is shared with others reaches out to them as people of worthy of dignity and honor, a family sharing the Love of Christ.

Today’s Feast of the Holy Family celebrates the families that we belong to biological and spiritual. This spiritual family models for us love, respect, dignity and contemplation. My desire for this Jubilee Year is to have hope and share hope. When it is difficult I know I can look to the “supreme witness” (Spes non confundit) of hope, Mary, as Mother of God and our mother for guidance. Under her various titles, Undoer of Knots, Mother of Good Counsel, Morning Star, and so on, Mary’s mantle is large enough to encircle and protect us, to point us to the reason for her hope.

Whether your tribe is big or small, local or distant, close-knit and affectionate or detached, there is a Holy Family to which you will always be a member of. On this Feast and on the Solemnity of Mary, New Year’s Day, I invite you to reflect and spend time with this Family. You are loved here. As Sr. Miriam James says as each week with her podcast, Abiding Together, “welcome home”.

Wishing you abundant peace and hope, Deena

Photo: Our Holy Family window at Holy Family Church

During my mother’s hospital stay, after falling and needing neck/spinal cord surgery then rehab, she mentioned a lump on her neck which the biopsy indicated was cancer. We left the hospital on Saturday with an appointment to meet with a doctor and discuss cancer treatment the following Monday. I was so fortunate that I worked from home and for two amazing women, Brigid and Trish, who understood that sometimes I would be working from the cancer center and that there might be interruptions during the day to care for my mom. I couldn’t have had a better situation at that time, the flexibility so helpful for her two-year battle and the care it required.

After she died I was in a deep despair. I went through the motions of work and the holidays. My mother lived with me, so everything in this house reminded me of her. I would get up from my desk and look toward her chair or the dining room table, as if still checking on her to see how she was doing.

The following January we had an organizational change at work and I was asked to meet with the new director of our department and discuss a supervisor role for the support team for our department that were working in a local customer service center. I met with him, instantly liked him, and he asked me to consider the job. I said that I enjoyed working from home, being productive in the quiet of my home office versus constant activity of a customer service center and asked whether it would be possible for me to work at 2-3 days from home and visit the center and the team the other days. He said yes and we agreed that I would begin the new role. The Friday before I was to begin he called to say that he thought about it and felt that my presence with the team would be required 5 days a week. I was so disappointed and thought about quitting but convinced myself to give it a try. It was exactly what I needed but it took me a few months to see it. Being somewhere else, outside of my house, forced me into new rhythms and being with others. The job gave me a team to care about and make changes that the organization wanted. I had tasks to focus on. I had to trust that life was going to be ok for me again. I had to turn to hope as the way out of my pain.

I read a beautiful post this week by poet and author, David Whyte, (from his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words) who describes despair as a haven, a last protection, “a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest; it is a loss of horizon, it is the place we go when we do not want to be found in the same way anymore.”

He goes on to say that the “antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying a profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath, independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold it, and which we realize, was never ours to own and to hold in the first place.”

If you are feeling despair for any reason this week, please honor that within your spirit. Take the time you need to honor the healing that is required. Don’t run from it. Don’t brush away the feelings as if they don’t exist. Breathe and find ways to honor your body, your spirit and what you need to feel energized again. When you are ready, find activities that nourish your spirit. Be with like-minded people. Ignore negativity as best you can. Realize that true healing only occurs by going through and not around the source of the wound or hurt. Move forward with compassion and curiosity.

Then when you are ready offer the light you are to others. Be a source of hope. We need it now more than ever!

Wishing you abundant peace, Deena

Photo: Butters in his happy place. If you have one, watch your cat or dog, they embody resilience!

Deena Pavinato – Journeys

Category: hope and healing

A family to turn to in all things

Despair can turn to hope