Totally unqualified to write on the subject and requesting your indulgence, I continue your servant council’s Lenten reflections on this year’s topic though I am pretty certain that I am the least knowledgeable in our little order and perhaps even the most unsure-footed among all of God’s followers when it comes to discernment. Discernment is not easy for me and is one of the most frequent topics of discussion with my spiritual director. Discernment has almost never come through a still small voice that whispered into my stopped-up ears but a conk on the head that splatted me onto the ground.
Since three is such a nice number—it must be, given that nearly all writing teachers promote the construction of essays with some kind of threesome structure—I will share three examples, at least one of which may be, I hope, relatable. In each case, I was an atheist, an affliction that lasted into my mid-fifties, who knew nothing about discernment and would have scoffed at the suggestion that an all-knowing Someone might have been ready to guide intuitions, was skillfully sculpting the daily experience, and, in due course, shaped the ultimate reality.
The first incident involved my youngest son CB, who lay dying as an infant in a Pittsburgh research hospital, where doctors, convinced that there was no chance for him to live more than a few weeks and seemingly giddy with the discovery of an expendable body available for experimentation, wanted to do some inadequately tested surgery that I deeply questioned without knowing why and without articulatable reason. Reason had little to do with why CB survived. I refused to sign permission for the surgery, the doctors went to court to force it by gaining custody, and I felt compelled to take CB to Boston Children’s Hospital where earlier experience with my spina bifida daughter had built confidence in the doctors. I took the risk of confiding in CB’s pediatrician who said he could not support my planned action but gave me the telephone number of his partner’s son, an intern at Boston’s Children, who would keep him informed of CB’s condition were we to end up there. So, the next day, while the otolaryngologists were in court, with dramatic swiftness I unhooked CB from his hospital-room monitors, taking time only to wrap him in his blankets and pocket his bedside hand-held suction device to use in the event his trach tube clogged, made a soap-opera dash with him down five flights of stairs with security guards in pursuit, jumped into a curbside car with the patiently waiting Carl (husband) at the wheel who propelled it like a flash to the airport, finally relaxed on what turned out to be a quite rapid air flight to Boston (someone on the hospital staff found out we were on that plane and scared the pilot into thinking there was a medical emergency on board), and, with my brothers who had showed up from Maine to help, followed a blaring-siren ambulance to Boston Children’s, where CB’s life was adjusted from the path of near-immediate death projected by every single Pittsburgh doctor except his pediatrician, who trusted a mother’s intuition, to a path of life in which robust CB is now one of only a handful of CHARGE Syndrome adults in the world to reach four decades (and has become a case study at a medical school in Canada). It is a long and complicated story that comes with miracles and deserves its own book. I realize now 42 years later that God did the discerning for me back then, infusing me with compelling convictions that came from then I knew not where—less like gentle “snow on the head,” as the Russians say, and more like a conk on the noggin that knocked out all thoughts except the one that led to life for CB.
A decade later, in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia) where I was training teachers at a university-associated K-12 school, I met Natasha, now a long-time friend, from Akademgorodok pri Novosibirske (located on the Ob, one river west of Krasnoyarsk on the Lena). Her godson, Zhenya, was hospitalized and dying from spina bifida, which had a much better prognosis in the USA (my spina bifida daughter, a couple of years older than Zhenya, was proof of that). Natasha had been hoping to get Zhenya to the USA for help, a difficult task because in those days the US Embassy would not process visas for anyone in need of support and especially not in the case of a congenital defect and illness. The Embassy became secondary while I looked around for help, but the only Russian-speaking spina bifida family I could find was ours though I searched in great depth to avoid this “assignment.” I was already balancing full-time employment with 6 teenagers (two of whom had found their way into our home through sources other than being born into it). When the door to other families closed, the doors to Zhenya joining ours opened wide: consular officers I had trained while working during an earlier period at the Foreign Service Institute recognized my name and approved the sponsorship, doctors volunteered their care, and, through an unexpected circumstance, I was given a conduit to John Kluge, the third wealthiest American at the time, who immediately wrote out the $500K check that the hospital required for admission (later, he wrote another of the same amount). Thus, Zhenya came into our lives, bringing a string of miracles multitudinous enough to fill another book (a story told in part in two books already) and powerful enough to change the lives of dozens of people. Again, I realize now that God closed all the doors except the one that led to life for Zhenya, hit me over the head to see it (using a host of people not mentioned for lack of space), and then pushed me through it.
The third instance came yet another decade later—time spent living and working in a land of Biblical significance: Jordan. Like so much else in my life, Jordan was not in my career plans. At the time, I was weighing three possible next steps—visiting instructor in Bahrain, an educational leadership role at a university in the Marshall Islands, or continued independent consulting internationally—when I got a call, asking if I would be interested in a chief academic officer position at a university in Jordan. That did not fit in with my imagined next steps in life, especially considering that I did not then speak Arabic. But, as I should not have been surprised, other plans got derailed, and then a Palestinian friend who spent summers in Jordan (I later learned that he enjoyed immense respect there) found out about the offer, took me to breakfast, and urged me to take the position (said it would be a perfect fit—and it was). So, somehow, I ended up there in rapid order. There I met my beloved Omar, for years now my closest and completely bonded spiritual friend, forever linked in the realm of mysticism, he a Sunni Muslim Sufi who studied with the famous Sufi cleric Al Bani at the White Mosque in Damascus, and I, initially the atheist, who, with Carl, enjoyed near-daily dinners at the inexpensive and lovely Farujna restaurant in Swafieh (a district in Amman) with Omar and his wife and spent time at his villa outside Damascus. Together with Omar, I tread upon ground that would ultimately prepare me for God’s next conk on the head (another book-length story in complexity): to walk through the doors of the Franciscan Catholic Mission where I currently live in San Juan Bautista. And yes, in that completed circle that God seems so fond of, Omar, who introduced me to a faith that I later came to share (albeit a different Abrahamic branch), has stayed with me in SJB and has attended Mass with me at Old Mission. All my family came to know him and his wife. Carl and I came to know all his family in Damascus. From afar, Carl and I walked with them through the agonies of war in Syria, including the non-fatal shooting of his father in Aleppo, and shed tears at the unexpected death of Omar’s sister Muna (who confided in me a premonition of her death just a couple of weeks before it occurred). They likewise walked with me from afar through the dying of Carl and shed genuinely grievous tears when he departed. It is a continuing story of one faith in two forms and God’s unseen but not unfelt guidance in mapping the intertwined paths of two unlikely spiritual soulmates, sharing experiences in San Juan Bautista (where the town and Mission, founded on the feast day of St. John the Baptist, bear the saint’s name) and at the Grand Mosque in Damascus (which, purportedly, gives repose to the saint’s head), at the Red Sea and Dead Sea (both integral to daily life in Jordan and yet exuding a sense of the divine reaching out from history), on Mount Nebo (where Franciscans today care for the ground walked by Moses), and along the King’s Highway where Bolis (St. Paul, whom I understand best of all the saints), temporarily blinded (hit over the head?), became a believer.
Still, when it comes to discernment, I find myself in a Siberian taiga, dense with white birches interlacing dark kedr trees. The birch trees bend, so climbing to listen for a still small voice dumps me back on the ground. Kedr trees with their high branches are beyond my ability to climb. So, I wait for the moon to rise in the darkness and reflect from the silvery birches so that I can follow the path of light until the next falling cone from a kedr conks me on the head, causing me to look up. Such best describes my awkward relationship with discernment.
Apologies for the length of this reflection, quite ironic for someone with impaired discernment capacity—or perhaps the length has resulted because of that impairment. (It is often easier to write more about things one does not know than about things that one does!) It seems that I have spilled many words to express perhaps one very simple observation: I have found that when my ear is deaf and discernment eludes and it seems I must just give up any effort at such a task, God simply takes over, which, I suppose, is the whole point of discernment anyway.
Peace be upon all,
Betty Lou