Last Sunday my beloved spouse and I attended the 50th Mercy celebration of the retreat and conference center, Mercy by the Sea—a place where we both had experienced the grace of divinity and humanity in long hours of retreat silence and solitude in a contemplative setting—merciful to body and soul, inside and outside. We had not been there for retreat in some twenty years. It was a long, tiring day, and worth the renewal.
It was lovely and quite wonderful for me to roam the bounds of this cherished place, heart of my spirituality and place of my deepest self-knowing and God-knowing. After fears of financial ruin, Mercy by its small portion of seashore lives!! I belong there, not as a nun but as a one-time wannabe nun turned Episcopal priest and Mercy Associate. Somehow the enormous grandeur of the Weeping Beech Tree overlooking the entrance to Mercy Center will always be to me an icon of Creative Divine Mercy.
How Divine Mercy Recently Whupped Me Upside The Heart!
An odd little healing story from my own life helps me find deep Mercy within a small sliver of realized connection.
My mother suffered a great loss at age twelve when her Jewish father died. She grieved but never told me and my sisters about their Jewish grandfather, save to say how much she adored him, and that he loved music and worked in New York City as an Impresario who imported European musical talent to the United States. We learned of her secret from a cousin. The knowledge was, frankly, thrilling, but my mother couldn’t share this because she was dead.
Given the social contexts and cultures in which Mom grew up, as well as her aspirations to marry into a wasp-ish family, and live in Darien, Connecticut, it is understandable that she hid her Jewish identity. The consequence of her hiddenness tailored her extraverted personality to be bright and happy on the outside and vulnerable and pained on the inside. As her oldest daughter, I received extravagant praise while I longed for her warm heart. The inner cool of her secret made her unable to hug, hold close, and nurture with open-hearted warmth. Her own heart I suppose needed inordinate attention. My sisters felt this distance as well. The grandchildren loved her fun-loving cheer and the attention she lavished on them all, especially the girls.
All my life I have searched for that warmth in myself and in other relationships while also grieving my mother’s distance. Recently, I saw a television special on Stephen Spielberg in which his story revealed that many, many Jewish musicians, created and gave yiddish chutzpah to the Broadway Musical genre. Think Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Spielberg, Stephen Sondheim, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, and more. Who will ever forget the yiddish flavor of Tevya singing the song “Tradition” and the mournful plaintive tones of the fiddle in“Fiddler on the Roof”?
Mom pushed Broadway musicals and had a profound affection for Broadway. In college I fell in love with classical music, some of which my grandfather brought to America from Europe. Both of us, I think, paid tribute to our Jewish roots and to Mom’s father, Avon Franklin Adams, who, as a young boy, emigrated from Prussia to America with his father Adolph Adams and his Polish Roman Catholic mother, Marie Kaleski. A curious second cousin and I researched and actually found Adolph’s gravesite in a cemetery near Boston, Massachusetts, as well as the marriage certificate of my mother’s mother, Marguerite Hall of Medford, Massachusetts, married to Avon Franklin Adams in an obscure chapel in NYC. All hidden yet all blossoming through music.
It occurred to me recently, in the way sudden flashes of intuitional insight happen, that my mother found her father’s love of music and his Jewish soul in these musicals. No wonder my mother was so attached to the. Every time she went to a show she heard her father and her own Jewish soul call out.
No one, of course, can prove the factual truth of an intuitive insight yet everyone can experience the joy and the healing mercy that accompanies an awakening. Aha!
