Advent

Today's the First Sunday in Advent, and I'm entering into that time of waiting and preparation with extra feeling this year. My own waiting and preparation - the boxes and suitcases stacked here and there in the cabin, the loads of trash and discards I've carried out - are a fine way to enter into the Advent spirit.

This will be a hard December for many, with jobs disappearing, savings shrinking, and the value of houses going down fast. But Advent expectation had never been about the glitz of Christmas, the shopping and the parties. It's a time of waiting for someone poor and powerless to be born in us and to transform our lives.

I light one Advent candle in hope of transformation.

Giving Thanks

Yesterday, as in the past six years, I enjoyed two family Thanksgiving feasts - one with the Sisters at St. Mary's at noon, and one with my sister and her family in the evening. I'm filled with gratitude for both my families and overfilled with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, pie. And I'm filled with gratitude to God for all these blessings of loving and being loved, being part of such good families.

Today there are 30 days left until I move to El Salvador, and today - filled with all that good turkey and the need to work some of it off - I cleared out a basement space where I'd stored camping gear, Christmas decorations, and old paperwork. Turned out to be surprisingly easy..... and I give thanks for that!

Living in Tomorrowland

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in one of the Tomorrowlands that were featured in the Sunday Supplements and World Fairs of my younger days. As, for example, yesterday: acting on a tip from Sister Chero Chuma, I discovered that Skype will not only let me call other Skype-enabled computers free, but will even let me purchase a local telephone number, so friends here can call a Bellevue number and talk to me in El Salvador without a long-distance charge. Amazing!

I also looked on Google Earth for a small town in El Salvador's Usulutan Province that may be a future mission site, and found myself hovering above it, able to identify the church and plaza and inspect the nearby fields.

I've heard stories from our Sisters who ministered in the Phillipines in the 1960s or Cameroon in the early 1970s about letters taking six weeks to get back to England or the United States, telephones that took days of hard travelling to reach in an emergency. Indeed our globe is now so much more intimately connected and that will make my mission so much easier.

But for someone who remembers her sense of awe when copiers first became available in libraries, it's Tomorrowland for sure!

And in Tomorrowland, it's only 32 more days until I fly away.

Cancelling the paper

Yesterday I cancelled my subscription to the Seattle Times, which has been my hometown newspaper of choice since I was a kid. Whenever I've lived in Seattle or nearby, I've read the Times. It used to anchor my evenings, then a few years ago the Times shifted to being a morning paper, and I wrapped it into my morning rituals (up, wash, dress, prayer, breakfast and the paper) with special attention to world news, the editorial cartoon, Mariners scores in baseball season, and the comics page. In many ways, it's been part of my sense of continuity, security.

But the newspaper world has been shrinking and the Times with it. The editorial cartoon seems to be appearing only on Sundays, and Doonesbury has been banished to the funny pages. The Mariners, in this year of misery, have not been fun to follow. The classified ads, once hefty, are now reduced to a few pages. Most of the news comes from the Washington Post or New York Times, and I can easily read that on-line. Announcements of staff layoffs are frequent. My sense of continuity and security gets battered! I can only imagine how difficult and frustrating it is to be a print journalist or editor these days, how tattered their security is.

I cancelled my subscription not because of all these changes - I would choose to be a loyal reader to the end - but because the Seattle Times doesn't deliver to El Salvador. I wish all the staff and management of the Times good fortune as they figure out how to change with this changing world.

Only 33 days until I get on the plane....

How long?

Almost everyone has the same two questions to ask me about my coming time in El Salvador: how long are you going to be there? and how's your Spanish?

How long? There's no time set for this mission. How long I'll be in El Salvador depends on so many things - PeaceHealth's continued involvement with the mission, my own health, the needs of my Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace community - but I hope it will be a good long time, a few good years.

And the Spanish? Well, it's one of my life goals to become really fluent, and I figure that living in a Spanish-speaking country is the best possible way. At present, I'm maybe at an upper-intermediate level (decent vocabulary, lousy grammar) and I figure that on the long path to fluency one of my best gifts to the Salvadoran people will be the unintended humor of all the words and phrases I get just a little wrong.

I'll find out about all of that in just 35 days.

A Room of One's Own

Only 36 days until I leave for El Salvador!

I’m a fortunate woman. Today I’m sorting books and belongings, getting ready to leave, but also getting ready to move to a room in Cusack Hall here at St. Mary-on-the-Lake in Bellevue. I’ll have a home base, a place for my spring-fall-winter clothes, some shelves for the many books that I can’t take down right away, a room that looks out on cedars and firs. I even have a newly-created closet in the basement where the overflow – of which there will probably be a lot – can be tucked. It’s essential, as Virginia Woolf said, to have a room of one’s own. When I come home - probably two to three times a year - this room will be home and this community of Sisters at St. Mary's will be home.

And after a while, El Salvador will also become home.

Remembering the martyrs and the viejitas

I've been sorting photos today - slowly moving through my six years of photos of our Sisters, events, ministries, and activities and moving them electronically from my computer to our system files. A tedious task, but also a nice trip through time. Among the photos were many from my time in El Salvador with a SHARE delegation in 2005 - we were commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 1980 martyrdom of four North American churchwomen - and among those was this photo of Josefina, the secretary for a cooperative farming settlement we visited.

Visitors to El Salvador are always taken by the children, who like children everywhere are beautiful, full of life. I love them, but I also love the elders who are tough and able and joyful, like Josefina. I'm an elder myself, looking forward to living in a society where las viejas are valued for their wisdom.

And it's only 38 days until I leave, so I'd better get back to sorting.