WATERmeditation March 2024
Follow-up to WATERmeditation
with Virginia Day
“Persistence”
Monday, March 4, 2024 at 7:30pm EST
Warm thanks to Virginia Day for focusing us on “Persistence” as a springboard for meditation. It was a memorable evening with many and varied appreciative responses.
The video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPKBxkTpgJA
Virginia is a nurse, a palliative care chaplain, and a spiritual director who brings deep experience and great insight to our midst. Her background both in nursing and ministry gives her a wholistic view of persons and situations. She has a knack for finding a theme and a way to present it that meets the moment. We need the strength and resources that the practice of persistence offers in these complex times.
Virginia generously shared the text of her presentation:
PERSISTENCE
I thank you for the opportunity to offer a few thoughts to guide your quiet meditation this evening, gathered here as a community and friends of WATER.
As WATER’S third Monday evening contemplation for 2024, I follow January’s offering by Brad Lutz on how challenging a journey like his, to Iona can be… especially without luggage! but one that opened his eyes to wonder – and an invitation to us to also enter a year of wonder.
In February, Katie Lacz introduced us to the art of Alma Woodsey Thomas, an African American woman whose art work merited a solo show at the Whitney Museum. Her arthritic limbs in late life did not limit her ability to create a 13-foot- long canvas.
It is only now, as I prepared for this evening, that it is no small wonder that I am drawn to the significance and implications of the quality of Persistence!
Even as we meet, the crocuses outside my front door are pushing up against the winter soil. Nature knows a lot about Persistence. One of the many definitions to be found in the Webster dictionary defines Persistence as “remaining long attached….like leaves of the oaks that cling to the trees through winter.”
I don’t know if you have ever had this experience that I have had. You might be involved in making serious choices, or developing a project, and suddenly the very subject or topic of your pursuit or concern appears everywhere — in the media, in conversation, and more.
That very experience is what I found. I was mulling over the idea and concept of Persistence as meditation reflection and suddenly the word Persist, and Persistence is everywhere…. Persistent fighting, persistent headache, persistent poverty, persistent work of dismantling oppression, and more. Recently, I read that women gathered at the tombs of ancient Roman saints were praying for persistence!
I am sensitive especially to each of your individual commitments to addressing the world’s needs and your awareness of the countless examples of prophetic witnesses to Persistence.
Many years ago, I discovered an artist’s representation of Persistence that I chose to accompany our meditation. Sister Marion Honors, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, now living and working in Lathan, New York, offers us a view of a homemaker, bending with her broom searching for the lost coin (a day’s wages).
The art work is based on a parable from the Christian gospel of Luke 15:8-11. Interestingly enough, I found stories in Arabic and even a child’s coloring book of a similar search for the treasured coin. The themes intended were related to the return of a repentant sinner and/or serious questioning about what it is we hold as treasures. Can’t we all identify with this woman? Haven’t there been occasions when we, too, have turned the house upside down looking for a credit card, a set of car keys, or even a tender last note from a friend?
I mentioned earlier that I sought out definitions of PERSISTENCE. As we sit with this print I selected for tonight, these are the words that come to mind :
To go on resolutely in spite of opposition
To be fixed
To be insistent in repetition of a question
To be dogged, tenacious, enduring
To guide our meditation tonight, I am suggesting several possible questions to consider related to your experience of Persistence:
–Who are the models of Persistence for you and to whom might a debt of gratitude be owed? Ancestors, public figures, past and present?
–How do I tend the quality of Persistence in myself and others?
–What communities of Persistence do I want to be a part of and can offer support?
Here is the image that Virginia chose to illustrate someone who persisted. The body language says it all. Voila, there is the coin!
Participants reacted with enthusiasm to the theme and to the image which conveyed it so well.
One told a wonderful story of going out into the garden where she met a neighbor who suggested that she snip off the single blossom of a white rose. Our colleague said she preferred to let the rose persist through its cycle of growth.
Another spoke of the persistence of her work colleagues, while several spoke of the persistence of Black women religious in a racist majority white church. Sister Helen Prejean who works to abolish the death penalty was lifted up as a model of persistence. A woman told the story of her base community persisting through the loss of a leader.
We were invited to ponder the difference between persistence and perseverance. And, we were asked if persistence can be confused with what is simply a bad habit, working on the same thing over and over.
Carolyn McDade’s song “Sister Carry On,” a snippet of which can be heard here: https://www.evangeliums.net/lieder/lied_sister_carry_on.html, pairs well with a helpful phrase that was mentioned: “The rising of the woman means the rising of the race” which is a lyric from the powerful union anthem “Bread and Roses.” See https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/bread-and-roses-song/ and for a beautiful rendition of the music see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94mSln34ZwA .
An arrestingly helpful comment was that maybe we don’t choose to persist but that persistence chooses us. There are many ways to persist—like marching and praying in their seasons. It is all part of the same struggles.
Virginia closed with gratitude to everyone for sharing and offered several insights. She purposely did not offer a list of people who persist, confident that participants would and we did! She observed that when persisting we can stay in the room too long, or find we are in the wrong room after all.
She cited the work of Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama, Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love (Eerdmans, 2024) as helpful on our topic. His recent podcast can be found at https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/podcast/hall-beside-belief .
WATER thanks Virginia Day and all who took part in a meaningful evening.
