My spouse and I chose hospitality as a virtue we wanted present in our marriage, family and community. This has looked like a lot of things through our life together. Greeting our guests before our wedding Mass. Making sure we have a table that can literally expand to make room for more. Even once offering our bedroom for people who needed a space to stay. We love having people for dinner. And sometimes I look around and think my house is too small. Even when others have marveled at how much we have, I still find myself worried. Worried that we won't have enough room, enough to give. So I regularly grapple with my greatest perpetual challenge - making sure I have enough for everyone without anything going to waste.
It’s so easy and often quite painful to believe that there is not going to be enough. That whatever I am doing and working on will not be enough. That whatever I say will not be enough. That if I miss this chance there will not be another one. And as a woman, particularly a woman in the Catholic church, I have been told in so many ways that my very being is not enough. I have heard so many times -within my own heart and coming from those around me - these certain questions that sound almost as if they have a death grip.
“Will this be my one chance to do this thing?”
“What if I can fit this one last thing in?”
“What if we don't get to everything?”
“If I don’t do it now, have I missed my only opportunity?”
I have these kinds of questions. They slip right in and they wrap themselves around my joy and whisper in my ear and look around for where they can take root into my heart. But then I encounter this reading from Proverbs, and here comes Lady Wisdom, inviting me to this feast. Pointing out these questions and confusions curling around me.
And I am given the gift in this voice, the sound of Lady Wisdom’s voice inviting me in. “Come in come in!”, she calls. Wisdom invites not just me but my questions and my confusion and my wonderment. Not just my questions, but especially my Holy questions. We can learn and discern from any of our questions, even ugly ones. But the ugly questions can also keep our eyes on how little there might be. That keep my mind in the place of “but what if?” The questions that come from a place of fear. The questions that I am awfully sure are not the voice of God, and are not the voice of lady Wisdom. The voice of Lady Wisdom, she invites me to lay those down. So at her invitation, I leave them behind, as best as I can.
Those holy and sustaining questions that dwell within me and a part of my being are also invited in and offered a place of respite, sustenance and generosity. Scarcity, the fear of not enough, is not what leads to new life. The ‘not-enoughs’ I see are not enough. It is this love, this calling out to us to come rest among the abundant banquet in front of us, that is what will sustain us into new life.
Suddenly the ‘but what-ifs’ of my fears and confusion can be transformed into the “Oh, but what if?!’ that can imagine abundance, that can see the things that can grow and be new. My ‘but what-ifs’ are invited in to see what has been laid out before me, a feast for my spirit. And they are given nourishment - and not the scraps, not what is left over - but a glorious feast, the roast meats and select wines and silver and candles and rest and a home. They are given real hope, not wispy and thin but the kind that sticks your bones, much like a warm meal in winter.
We see the Holy Spirit as fire and as a dove and we so often forget this image of Wisdom’s feast - that there is genuine abundance in God’s love. That amid our confusion and questions there is an invitation to more. That whenever it seems there may be nothing, there could maybe be something, or maybe even everything.
When the voice of Lady Wisdom calls out, what do you hear? What does it sound like? What is the invitation Lady Wisdom is offering to transform your what ifs? Because there will be more than enough for us at this feast. And what we have to offer will not go to waste.
This reflection was originally offered to a group of women faculty, staff and students who are part of the CENTERS initiative, at a gathering in Rome in October 2024 hosted by UISG, with other women who were part of the Synod on Synodality.
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