{"id":1940,"date":"2017-04-09T02:00:45","date_gmt":"2017-04-09T06:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/?p=1940"},"modified":"2017-04-09T15:49:59","modified_gmt":"2017-04-09T19:49:59","slug":"portrait-of-sister-carol-as-st-cecilia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/portrait-of-sister-carol-as-st-cecilia\/","title":{"rendered":"Portrait of Sister Carol as St. Cecilia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"8\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In celebration of National Poetry Month, this blog will continue to feature guest posts by our published poets. This week we welcome Susan L. Miller with reflections, stories and poetry from her newly released book Communion of Saints: Poems<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

My poem \u201cPortrait of Sister Carol as St. Cecilia\u201d was inspired by my friend Carol, the first nun I ever met. \u00a0I converted to Catholicism in my late thirties in a parish in Brooklyn, run by Franciscans. \u00a0Two of my priests, Santo and Timothy, were often referred to by our parishioners as \u201cMary and Martha,\u201d partly because of Father Timothy\u2019s extraordinary work efforts. \u00a0Along with Wellington, our handyman, and a number of young men in our parish, Father Timothy remodeled an apartment behind the church. \u00a0The apartment, he told me one day during a two-hour confession-turned-church-tour, would be for our sisters. \u00a0He had drawn up plans by hand, showing the built-in bookshelves he would create in the living room, and despite the disarray of the project at the time, I could tell he had planned something very special. \u00a0He was even using the original wood to recreate the floors.<\/p>\n

When I saw Sister Carol\u2019s grey veil in the side aisle of the church for the first time, I made a point of sitting close by. \u00a0She remembers me greeting her by saying, \u201cIt\u2019ll be nice to have some women here!\u201d \u00a0I didn\u2019t realize at the time what good friends we would become–but I did have hopes.<\/p>\n

It was also Father Timothy who suggested to me during confession one Saturday<\/span><\/span> that Sister Carol needed help in the Religious Education office. \u00a0He knew I was a teacher too, and I think he had hopes that I would eventually teach, but I started (and ended) my work there just doing simple data entry, registering children into their classes. \u00a0Sister Carol spoke so quietly that I would have to listen closely to her–being a little hard of hearing due to garage band hours logged in my youth\"Communion-of-Saints\"<\/a>. \u00a0She listened to me patiently as I ranted, often, about parts of Church doctrine that I found difficult to understand. \u00a0I knew her family lived up North, that she had spent years in Assisi and Massachusetts, and that she cared deeply for Sister Mercedes, our eldest nun. \u00a0She told me other stories. \u00a0When I asked if she had ever had a boyfriend, she told me the one about how, in her teens, she had a crush on a friend of her brother. \u00a0He had apparently planned their future together, but after she went away to college, \u201che found another young rose.\u201d \u00a0Sister Carol did things her own way: the office key was marked \u201cU,\u201d for \u201cufficio.\u201d \u00a0We laughed a lot. \u00a0We spent many hours together. \u00a0We had tea in the office at Christmas, and in the summer, once, she asked me to give her a haircut. \u00a0I was a little terrified to do it, since I hadn\u2019t cut anyone\u2019s hair since college, when my friend Travis had traded a pack of cigarettes for a haircut. \u00a0I figured that under her veil, very few people would see it if I made a mess of it, so I went ahead and gave it to her. \u00a0The soul of charity, she thanked me, but she never asked me to do it again.<\/p>\n

It also didn\u2019t take long for each of us to admit to the other that we wrote poetry. \u00a0I immediately encouraged her to show me hers, and brought poems of mine for her. \u00a0Sister Carol was more reticent, but one day, she e-mailed me an attachment. \u00a0When I opened it, a tiny poem was there–no more than ten lines. \u00a0No one wrote this kind of poetry in my graduate school–this poem had taken a walk in the wintertime dark and distilled it into its essence. \u00a0It was a lyric poem in the best way–concise, with a precision of language and image, and a mystery at its center. \u00a0I\u2019m not sure I even knew how to read a poem like that, though of course I had, many times. \u00a0I wrote her back asking a bone-headed question about it. \u00a0I think she was disappointed, though, as with the haircut, she was kind.<\/p>\n

It was only later, when she posted it on Facebook the next winter, that I read the poem and finally absorbed it. \u00a0She had editedit only slightly, but suddenly, it shifted into focus for me, and I understood what she might have seen and heard on that winter walk. \u00a0Sister Carol may have been quiet, but I realized what power she had as a speaker, if only I could find the right way to listen.<\/p>\n

Winter walks at night<\/em>
\nNot under a scrutinizing glance<\/em>
\nBut under a benevolent sky;<\/em>
\nEven if dark and cold surround,<\/em>
\nClear and calm ring out<\/em>
\nAnd I listen and hear.<\/em><\/p>\n

For a long time, I thought that friendship was challenging because we must learn to love people who make such different decisions than we do. \u00a0I still think that\u2019s a challenge, but I\u2019ve also come to think of it as a gift. \u00a0And poetry, like friendship, makes us listen, even if just for once, to the way the voice in someone else\u2019s mind might sound.<\/p>\n

(Poem reprinted with permission of Sister Carol Woods, S.F.M.A.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In celebration of National Poetry Month, this blog will continue to feature guest posts by our published poets. This week we welcome Susan L. Miller with reflections, stories and poetry from her newly released book Communion of Saints: Poems. My … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paraclete-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}