Revelations and Testimonies
Solidarity
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I'm kicking this off with the rest of my story, begun at about Gramma Z
Later, when I graduated from high school early, I was bound and determined to go to college and picked N.Y.U. My father didn’t have the tuition (believe it or not, it cost only $15 a point. So, I went to work full time in the English Department as a Secretary, there earning $32.00 per week and taking free courses because I worked there. After a few months, I applied for a scholarship and won it, so I could work part time and take more courses. I gave up my religious faith at this point in my life and thought philosophy and particularly Humanism was the truth. I was 17.
I married at 19. My husband was 23. When he lost his job, I had to leave N.Y.U. to earn more. I found a job in a law office, secretary first, then office manager and finally apprentice so I could become a lawyer. ( One could do that then without going to Law School.) I continued taking courses for several years at other colleges and finally got my Bachelor’s Degree ( after I had three children). I continued working (which was rare for a woman with children, at that time.) My husband was 33 when we learned he didn’t have long to live, I realized I would have to take over the full responsibility for my supporting my family. By then I also had a daughter.
In the middle of one night I had the inspiration to become a consultant for law offices. They were generally a mess as far as their management, procedures etc. were concerned. I knew how to organize them and it occurred to me I could do that and get paid well for it. So I announced myself as a Consultant, got my first client and was quickly successful. By word of mouth recommendations, continuing from each firm to the next my clientele grew.
Because lawyers were involved with other types of businesses, I got one referral after the other and branched out to consulting for all kinds of organizations. Computers came on the scene
(not the kind you are probably familiar with) so I quickly attended all kinds of seminars etc. to learn about their potential workings and uses. (punch card days and big reels housed in large closet-sized cabinets. Desk top computers with visual screens were then only a dream.
I met some fabulous people, scientists, people with great vision in the field of management, cyberneticians who really understood how biological systems and physical systems and I began analyzing human service organizations as systems accordingly. It was a fascinating time! I became a charter member of the World Future Society.
I began to see how to apply all this to human social systems, (before anyone else was) and especially to multi-agency child care agencies who were my clients.
I DESIGNED THE FIRST MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR CHILD CARE
AGENCIES. It was a break through . It was the 1960s when so many other (the sky’s the limit)
things were happening. I made it into a New York newspaper.
SO ALL AT ONCE I WAS A WOMAN AHEAD OF MY TIME, leading the pack, giving seminars,
writing articles, becoming President of the Administrative Management Society, President
of my own firm, given a weekly newspaper column published in a two county wide newspaper with a circulation of 35,000 people. I traveled a lot, in the U.S. the Bahamas and other islands, 9 countries in Europe and East Africa.
At the height of all that, my mother, my husband and my father all died, within a year and a half. My oldest son, then 20, had a heart attack. My eight cats got sick all at once and six died. I stopped in my tracks. WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON?
I told my kids (now 20, 17 and 8 1/2) that I was going to sit in our library and not move until I knew what this was really about. They pitched in, as did the people who worked for my company, so I could take a few days off (usually unheard for me as a workaholic). Colleagues, some of whom happened to be priests and ministers, told me that God (as the hound of heaven) was chasing me down and that's why all this was happening to me. I thought they were a bit crazy because I was an agnostic. I told them if God was real he would have to show me directly because I wasn't about to take anyone else's word for it.
A WOMAN IN TIME
As I sat on the couch, closing my eyes, I suddenly saw the letters ISAIAH 6 about the size of a great big theater marque. I had no idea what that was. I called a colleague who was then the Dean of Students at Union Theological Seminary. We had been working on a project dealing with making models for social systems. He immediately said that God was calling me to be a prophet and this was the call to Isaiah in that biblical verse. Did I have a bible in the house? Could I go read it? I really thought he had lost his mind, or maybe I had. After reading it, especially: "they have not the eyes to see, or the ears to hear, or the wits to turn and be healed" I called my friend back. "If this is God, he is just telling me that I'm stupid, not a prophet" I told him. But my friend insisted and assured me I would see that he was indeed right.
It was the beginning of a completely new life for me. Many more "messages" came, dramatically. God was indeed real! More dramatically, he was talking to me ! Cryptically at first and then more clearly. I met some people from Taize, France. I felt strongly to go there and learn first hand what was happening there. Brother Roger had, with some 60 brothers, built a church of reconciliation and thousands of young people were flocking there each week, staying in large tents, to join in a dialogue. That was an amazing week for me.
From there on to Switzerland where I stumbled upon L'Abrie another spiritual place that had become well known. It was during the time of the Vietnam War, the shootings at Kent State in the U.S., the drop-out generation with flower power. I knew I simply had to go. I did. This was in May of 1975, with my 10 year old daughter.
By then I knew I had to give up my business, sell my winter home and my summer home and search for a place somewhere in New England to open a House of Retreat. I had seen a an old farm house on 130 acres, in a place called Unity. (The manuscript "The Road to Unity" I had written while there, was lost in transit. It tells this whole story and needs to be re-written).
Eventually I did open that House and among the people who began coming, several stayed to help. We never advertised. A great variety of people came, all searching: graduate students, several priests, two nuns, someone just out of prison, young singles, a couple of families, young and old, a few at a time, all by word of mouth, over the course of about 7 years a couple of hundred people. We became more of a House of Refuge and finally a House of Mercy (because of the amazing things God did there).
I had literally given up everything to enter into this way of life. Here I witnessed, and was part of seeing the Holy Spirit move in great power to bring inner healings to the people who came. Also to give them a new start and to help guide them into better lives for themselves and their loved ones. It was a most remarkable time in which God, in answer to our prayers, also provided for our daily needs in many different ways. He helped us through extraordinary "adventures", including a 3-week trip to Ireland on an authorized healing mission. All of this was not without a good deal of difficulty and suffering included. It was, for me like a woman dancing in time and unison, with God as my partner, dancing to music of the spheres. Truly I had, throughout those years, become A WOMAN IN TIME.
A WOMAN BEYOND TIME
Now, many years later, having raised my grandson from birth (now 30) and now raising a grand daughter who is 11, having been through several careers. By the grace of God, I became a contemplative which I experience as living in the Presence of God in my daily life. Sometimes in a heavenly "state of being" but often doing all the things that most every single mom/grandma/ American woman finds necessary to do.
What is vastly different is my constant companion (the Holy Spirit) and the way I have been changed as a human being, through and in this Trinitarian relationship. I see.! I used to have a great gift for hearing, for listening. Now I see things and people in a completely different way. What I know, I have been led to set down in writing. Hence the books listed and the covers of them pictured as the slide show at the top of this website (blog). (Thanks to my grandson)
A contemplative may be understood, or misunderstood, as many things. Because moving beyond time and space, led by God, one does not have one's own agenda. One is free in the fullest sense of that word. Freed from so many things that one has accumulated during a lifetime. Not just materially but as part of one's own personality, ways of thinking, and expectations. One is freed for the next possibility that opens up, the next encounter with someone (not necessarily of one's own choosing) the next disaster. Mostly, one is freed to love and free not to be afraid to find and face the Truth whatever it may be, as God reveals it. He is truly present to help, guide, move, act sovereignly or in everyone knowingly and unknowingly cooperating.
(My Adventures With God will eventually be published. I keep making entries for it as they occur). I would love to hear yours if you wish to share them.)
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