What is Spirituality? A POEM BY ROBERT WHALLEY

What is Spirituality?
3 possible answers to an impossible question


Poem by Robert Whalley
(Berkeley 1980)

1.
Because all the songs of heaven
Find expression in your eyes
And you speak morning
In fine firm tones

I will serve you
In kneeling adoration
Or with head held high
To the sky of your grace

I so pledge you my service
To witness your light and
To allow your light to unfold here
In Silence and in time

And I will sing
In ecstasy of unknowing
With music given me
Your song.

2

What is not spirituality
Where do I not meet God?
Where is the land where
The Lord will not speak?

I often meet God in the shower
Holy water and good soap
Cleaning up the dwelling place
Making spiritual sense

I encounter God over coffee
With fellow pilgrims at the Egg Shop
Being corporately bewildered
By sunrise and all the rest

I work out with God at the gym
I lift my limits; going with
The given resistance, in graceful action
Leading to new vistas and new limits.

I eat (am consumed)
God (by, with, of, God)
Daily (in and out of time)
I (Drowning in Love)
Drink (The blood is given)
God (To give life)
Daily (And what is time?)

I sing God’s song
With the voice I am given
And I learn to sing
In appropriate intervals

I wrestle with God
In stranger times
Then I am given a new name
And try to limp gracefully.

Is God the stranger
Who calls to be reconciled in new community
Is God the parent
Who constantly bares me
Into new beginnings
In God the child
who waits for my blessing with watchful eyes?

What is spirituality?
(It’s like dog shit
With rain and time
It provides a place for flowers).

What is spirituality?
It is place we are placed
It is song we are sung
It is word we are given
It is between, among, within,
It is note of creation
It is word it is Yes.

3.

Spirituality
is wrestling and resting
and growing and being with God
It is earth, air, fire and water
Gracefully received, raised up, given
Given up and taken to new possibilities.
It flowers in common ground
And blooms in wondrous place,
It kills, consecrates and makes new
And always and everywhere it is telling
To us our first and final name
And always and everywhere
It is gift.

Margaret Dewey SSM

Last week at the Library of the Community of the Holy Name we received a donation from the collection of Margaret Dewey SSM, recently departed. I had the somewhat giddy experience, for a librarian, of classifying some of Margaret's own books using the classification scheme invented by her grandfather.

When I say her ‘own books’ I mean books written by her. These tell their own story of Margaret’s life. The first was ‘The Messengers : a concise history of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’ (Mowbray, 1975). The USPG is one of the oldest missionary societies and her history tracks its rise and decline since the 18^th century. She herself worked in all different parts of the world – England, the Middle East, New Guinea, Australia – finding new challenges as she travelled. The other book was ‘Light from Within : Perspective on the Biblical Drama’ (Canterbury Press Norwich, 1993), which is, to quote the cover, “a new and imaginative approach to the Bible as the archetypal saga of how God works among and within people at different stages of their growth toward spiritual maturity.”

Margaret’s friend Diana Cherry delivered the donation to the Library, writing that some of the books though “will I suspect be of little value as Margaret had the habit of underlining, and sometimes annotating, what she read.  We have just had the Oblates’ retreat and I took one of her Martin Israel books — an early one I hadn’t read.  It would be easier to count the lines not thickly underlined than those she had marked!”  It is easy to make a decision about heavily marked books if a copy is already held, not so easy if the title is rare. The strengths of her collection for this Library are in Scripture, Church History, and the modern history of Israel-Palestine. But yes, thorough underlining in some books, indication of a thorough reader.

Margaret grew up in New York State before winning a scholarship to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to England, where she studied theology and ran a retreat house n Gloucestershire, before coming to Australia. She was for five years principal of Janet Clarke Hall in the University of Melbourne (1959-1963). Diana continues: “Margaret had many, many books.  When she arrived at JCH in 1959 it was with several trunks of books, and these were added to over the years.  In the following decades, many were well travelled across the oceans!   When she lived at the SSM Priory at Diggers’ Rest, most found their way into the library and she had only a couple of book cases in her room.   When the Priory was closed and Margaret moved to the Mercy apt. in Parkville, she kept the books she valued most.  And then it was down-sizing again when she moved to Mercy Place in East Melbourne.  The boxes I took to CHN contain most of those books.”

Margaret joined the Society of the Sacred Mission when the rules changed and women could be professed. She was the third woman to become a full member of SSM. Her many jobs included managing the Society’s library at Willen Priory, so librarianship was passed on in the family. She edited its newsletter, organised its archives and papers, and published the works of SSM’s founder, Father Herbert Kelly. His works are well represented in this collection. But just in case you think all of this defines Margaret in time and space, she is quoted on the SSM website as saying, “I could also have been with the Jesuits or the Quakers and would have lived quite happily with either.”