Fireflies

In those days of youth, I traveled to Duluth in June with my grandparents and was photographed with a sister and brother looking at a train, a post card still sold in their tourist attractions. In those days of youth there were fireflies in the summer. I recall the jars uses as cages, punctured with airholes. The fireflies have since departed Minnesota for the most part where I live.

Time. And the waters. The waters for the most part keep on flowing by in the Land of 10,000 lakes. The waters used by all living thing. The only way to journey in this world is to give yourself over to it. To the journey, that is.

I grew up in an age when immersion described the Catholic way of life. Mark Massa is a Jesuit who wrote a piece in Company, discussing passing on the faith. In his piece, he quoted Alex de Tocqueville’s famous observation of religion here in his journey in the 19th Century, with the United States the most religious nation of the industrialized world. What he observed here and not in Europe was that religions were in competition, surviving as a voluntary activity, where the economic survival was from the religious group and not the government. Tocqueville wrote about the two different kinds of religious groups here. The culture model offered either a religious identity of total immersion or the evangelical outreach variety.

Total immersion defines my upbringing. I lived on a Catholic street, if the religion of the neighbors defined the neighborhood. I went to parochial school where, as I vividly recall, tuition was $35 to $60 a year over 8 years. The generation after me never has had this total immersion into a culture that I experienced. Not across the Catholic board.

My identity came from the immersion into a culture in what Mark Massa, S.J., described through a unique language and music that defined us. This Catholic culture met individual needs for social location, family values, and group interaction. This was the world of the 1950s and 1960s for Catholics and Jews. For the most part, Protestants were without a total immersion, or the ones on my block any how, when we moved to the Scandanavian enclave one mile away.

Last year I wrote down a quote on retreat from a priest about how few Filipinos know how to float. Father Foley had observed the fear of immersing the head, and a resistance to immersion. I had the same fear, about swimming. He said that once you learn how to float, you never forget to relax in the presence of water.

The fireflies have since departed Minnesota for the most part. Yet I see them once a year, in a weekend that I spend on retreat. In Lake Elmo, on Lake DeMontreville, mostly the retreat master watches in awe as God enters into their lives in very specific and individual ways. As one priest said, it was as though God had been waiting for so long to have this time with us. The retreatants. I don’t do much talking there, when individually most meet with the priest to discuss their relationships with God. The priest was there to help mediate.

This was a place of welcome and rest. Over time you become aware of perspective. DeMontreville was a space cared for by 3 Jesuits, where the Trappists farmed next door. Over time, you discover that you were absent a view, a perspective, and a focal point within, something much bigger than yourself. For me the spiritual excitement began after Benediction and the first night conference.

There was meaning in certain physical things I witnessed each of the June nights I have been there. There was a mystery. It was everywhere. It was in the fireflies on Thursday nights, at dusk. And it was with the stillness of the lake on a Sunday morning, with a glass effect to the lake, before morning prayer. And believe it or not, I witnessed these things each of the last 10 years. I felt a spiritual presence in this ritual of nature, before the fishermen and the water skiers came out of the near-by homes, before and after the first and last prayers of the day.

Oh the past six months! In these times, the whole concept of a path is a bit ridiculous. To wander for the year, without much of any income, to go forward with no clear destination in mind, is a dangerously foolish plan. Considering how inhospitable the financial world can be, the rising taxes, the rising health insurance premiums. But being here one begins to see the sense of the journey.

Pain and suffering taught something mysterious. Or on all matters of health: the physical, mental, fiscal, spiritual. There was a mystery in the caring. And the degree of this caring about someone was the mystery.

There was a different degree of the caring in each human. And suffering played a role in teaching that mysterious something. What did people say about God’s work of creation? In the study of God, Judaism can teach a lot about this world. Where Midrash was the commentary on the Torah. The degree of caring about the stories. In a sense, the mystery of life was the commentary here about creation. Where you and I were the Midrash. About the caring.

The importance for me in going on retreat was to hear the commentary of a Jesuit on his own life. And to see it in my own. Considering how inhospitable this financial environment can be, that commentary on creation with my life made the chapters worth writing. The degree of caring about the world all around me.

The Mystery. How does one not know, not feel God? How does one feel not close to God? Not everyone does. I had learned to wait for those fireflies of my youth. I had learned to wait for God, who, like those fireflies, had a way of appearing when I took the time to look at this particular place.

The Mystery. Wanting more. “I suspect in wanting more, in fact, we always feel distant,” wrote Larry Gillick this week. Wondering of the meaning of people who say they would like to grow closer to God, “how would one feel if they were 50 or 70 Godmeters closer?”

The Mystery. Soon it will be time to pick up and pack my belonging and go about again. With the home field advantage in this land, I had found support and God’s grace in the company of friends and family. I sense that it soon would be a time to let it happen. That journey again, only with a sense of mastery. Of divine power. Wanting more. The Jesuits used the word “Magis.”

I saw that divine power once a year on display in those fireflies. Up close. The Magis. On the shores of this lakeside retreat. And the fireflies refreshed the degree of caring I had, while immersed, about this creation.

http://www.jesuitswisprov.org/demontreville.html