I have been a priest in the Catholic Church for 45 years this summer, and all of those years, with the exception of a few years as Newman Chaplain at UMD, I have been in parish ministry. I hope in those years I have grown on the job, that my spiritual life has deepened, that I am wiser now than when I was a callow youth, and that I am the conduit of God’s grace to more people now than when I was first ordained. The ideal would be that I touch the lives of far more people now than I did formerly.
But, I do wonder.
And the reason for my pause is the reading of an essay of one of my parishioners in her new book, A View of the Lake. Beryl Singleton Bissell has this for an opening paragraph in her essay, “A Name of Your Own”:
From the top of the ridge where I’d stopped to rest, I could see Lake Superior. It was early May and the lake wore serene blue.
Between the lake and the ridge stretched an undulating swath of woods that dipped into sudden valleys and then climbed the jagged edge of the Sawtooth Mountains. I made room for myself among the greening grasses and let my eyes rove over the landscape. The silvery and mauve hues of aspen and birch catkins dominated the valley below, punctuated by the dark spears of spruce, the lace of cedar trees and luminous with the sudden reds of budding maples. From where I sat, some branches looked like they’d caught a sunset’s brilliance; but it wasn’t sunset, it was noon.
Can I speak of God and His ways with the same eloquence that the author did when writing on nature? That’s what got me thinking and asking, am I up to the task?
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month our contributor is Father Seamus Walsh of St. John’s Catholic Church in Grand Marais.
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