Overcast skies, a stiff morning wind, cool fresh air filling the lungs with each breath, that is the early autumn feel of this day as the summer season really begins to recede. Everyday changes as the sun takes a less direct path above those of us who live in the northern hemisphere of planet Earth. There is a kind of unknowing to the changes that follow the Fall Equinox as the daily sunlight shortens, nights become colder and the vegetation dries, wilts, and changes colour. As I step into my mid-50s, each annual shift into this season unknows me in ever deeper ways, unknows many of my lived relations as they die, hibernate or migrate; unknows many of my ideas and beliefs about who I am and the nature of this life. And yet, something in the autumn cycling of us toward the icy winter strangely makes me feel more at home in this earthly life.
Sitting within the spiritual depths of what this season teaches year-after-year, I am drawn to the journaling of the hermit monk and author Thomas Merton: “today is very autumn-like – cold clouds flying, trees half bare, wet leaves lying around everywhere, the broad valley beautiful and lovely. The wonderful, mysterious, lonely sense of an autumn evening… something hard, solid, yet more mysterious.” Such words leave me with more questions than answers. How do we choose to descend into the teachings of a “solid, yet more mysterious” time of year? How do we honour mystery in a modern screen-mediated life that assumes every answer is at our fingertips?
It was within the mystery of these autumn changes that I went on pilgrimage to old Montreal, Ville Marie, from the rural areas of my birth about an hour to the west of this isle that was home to the Indigenous village (kanatha) of Hochelaga long before this city. What initiated this journey was the offer to take a tour below the 1771 chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours into the archaeological depths of its original footings, a foundation that dates to 1657 and the vision of Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1700). By the grace of some kind Sisters and six months of unfolding dialogues, I was going to be guided into the depths of Notre Dame not far from the shores of the great St. Lawrence River along which I was born on the north canadien shores and where most of my ancestors have lived for centuries.
My autumn journey in 2023 took me to a mythic river-edge place where it has long felt natural for me to approach in a spirit of prayer, of pilgrimage. There is something powerful about this isle within one of the world’s largest rivers, for it is a place connected with the emergence of three women saints in the span of a century: Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1700) who founded this chapel and the Congregation de Notre Dame; Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) who became the first Indigenous-born saint of Turtle Island and Marguerite d’Youville (1701-1771) who founded the Grey Nuns and is the first Canadian-born saint. I write about the latter two in a few of my books: d’Youville in relation to maternal ancestors connected to Grey Nun missionaries and Tekakwitha in the context of paternal canadien relations with Catholic mission communities along this river. These cultural ancestors continually draw me into watery depths where so much is confused and mixed up by the legacy of colonial violence. Now I was going to begin learning from Bourgeoys, who was new to me, and her vision of Notre Dame.
Being not long after the Equinox, the country roads where my journey began were surrounded by trees clothed in red-orange hues that so beautifully contrasted the brown tones of the harvested farmer fields. But with each driven kilometre the autumn colours were steadily backgrounded by the expanding grey roads and traffic as I navigated my way into this urban isle. Split second decisions to turn left or right, horns honking and fast-moving traffic, both automotive and pedestrian, had its regular impact on me. The pressures of urban living is consistently linked with heightened amygdala activity. This part of the brain’s limbic system colours sensory inputs with memories related to survival and our evolutionary fight-or-flight programming, and as such is often activated in stressful situations like those I was experiencing as Montreal’s roads pressurized my attention.
It did not take long for my pilgrimage to be buried in a driven consciousness that in many ways mirrors the world around us. There is a dynamic relationality between our internal states and the world without, and as such the pervasiveness of our driven and virtual creations are inevitably having a host of effects on our internal awareness. This relation is clearly summarized by the psychiatrist Iain MacGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary. “A century ago,” he begins, “the physical environment was for most of humanity that of the natural world, with its rhythms and cycles, its organic, ever-growing and ever-changing interdependent life, a world to which it seemed intuitively obvious that we belong”. These long relations are connected to the burgeoning research on the positive benefits of nature experience on mental health, addictions and more.
A walk amongst the changing trees of Fall can act like a release valve for the amygdala’s hyper-urbanity while also reducing neural activity in the prefrontal cortext, internal changes that reduce acts of rumination which are linked to depression and other mental health conditions. It is interesting to note that this research has emerged in a context where such natural experiences are increasingly marginalized by modern realities. As MacGilchrist goes on to write, “now it has been replaced for many by an unyielding, inert, confrontational environment of non-living surfaces, straight lines, concrete masses and largely generic shapes, which are widely experienced as alienating. The result is that the left hemisphere’s world has become externalized, so that when the counterbalancing tendency of the right hemisphere to check with the real world of experience is brought into play, it is already subverted: the world ‘out there’ is already colonized by the left hemisphere’s vision.” Within such a state, I had almost forgotten that I would soon be descending below this city into Notre Dame, Mother Earth.
Out of the car and walking toward the chapel I could see sitting atop the tower a statue of Mary Star of the Sea, Stella Maria. Here is a representation of Mary as the one who welcomes people from across the waters, a statue that dates from the late-1800s renovation as Montreal emerged as a major port for goods and immigration. In this form, artists often depict Mary as clothed in the blue waters (mer, sea) with the mariner’s guiding star to protect pilgrims who travel stormy waters to the possibility of a good life on distant shores. The Star of the Sea is consistent with the chapel’s original seventeenth century vision as a sacred place of pilgrimage and refuge for those who had no familial or community moorings in lands an ocean away from their birth. This spirit of support was central to the life work of Bourgeoys and how she conceived her guide, Notre Dame, as like “living water, crystal clear, springing up from the fountains of the saviour and refreshing all who come to it.”
Perhaps surprisingly, three decades of working with Indigenous communities and elders on the colonial roots of our turbulent climate of change had brought me home to my catholic roots; but with a transformed sense of life in Mother Earth. A central inspiration for my approach has been the Two Row learning I did with Cayuga elder Norma Jacobs. Many times I followed her way of giving thanks to Mother Earth as E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’, but throughout asking myself how I was going to culturally embody the spirit of gratitude carried in words like these on the autumn season::
It is late fall, and the trees, shrubs, grasses, rocks, medicines, fences, and buildings are all covered with frost… Relieved of all her stress, E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’ exercises her extremities by stretching, massaging, playing, laughing, smiling, rolling, and moving side to side. She is exhausted but happy, and now she can have a replenishing sleep over the coming winter.
The Indigenous matrilineal value of seeing ourselves as kin with all the relations who have arisen from the womb-like depths of Mother Earth is, in this view, the root from which a ceremony of gratitude arises. For the better part of thirty years, I have been engaging various understandings of Notre Dame for inspiration on offering gratitude for all that is freely gifted by this creation in the language of my canadien catholic upbringing; and to do so while also being truthful about colonial and modern violations. In this season of my life, Thomas Merton has become a vital ancestor in helping to mediate my sense of life’s sacred depths through his way of engaging the natural world. This is beautifully represented in his prayer to Hagia Sophia, Sister Wisdom, Notre Dame:
Sophia… is the tenderness with which the infinitely mysterious power of pardon turns the darkness of our sins into the light of grace… The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep. Night embraces the silent half of the earth. A vagrant, a destitute wanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road. A homeless God, lost in the night, without papers, without identification, without even a number, a frail expendable exile lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world and entrusts Himself to sleep.
By the time Stella Maria had guided me into Notre Dame, the quality of prayerful or meditative awareness needed a pilgrimage had almost totally receded from my driven awareness. At the same time, the act of entering the church brought back to awareness my original intention of reconnecting with something deeper. The internal dimensions of these depths are also being uncovered in research on the internal health benefits of mindfulness and spiritual practices. As with nature experiences, practices like prayer and meditation have been connected with reduced feelings of anxiety and depression. In contrast to the amygdala’s hyper-activity in our urban realities, the environment fostered in spiritual practice modifies the amygdala’s functioning while also activating areas of the brain associated with empathy and emotional connection. While knowing this can be helpful, the reality is that few of us can simply replace a driven state with a meditative one simply through a moment of awareness. We also need time, guidance and a spiritual practice or ceremony that can help facilitate such a descent, within and without.
For many of us these days ceremony more often than not happens to us without much awareness of what is occurring and how we should hold ourselves. In our state of technological amnesia, we have forgotten the role ceremony was meant to play in helping us to honour the cycling mysteries of this life. More than that, there purpose is forgotten or so transformed to modern purposes as to be non-existent. Looking at the contemplative practice of Merton and contemporary Trappist monks, Cynthia Bourgeault reminds us that the fruits of mindfulness practices “are not wellness, personal longevity, or neuroplasticity. They are compassion, equanimity, and love”, such that mindful attention “is gradually transformed into mindfulness as participation in a living relational field.” A spiritual practice is meant to transform how we relate in this world, and so the act of recall is a potential first step toward re-engaging ceremony.
Our capacity to engage the transformative potential of seasonal ceremonies is more often than not left to the whims of chance, of fate. And even when such a fateful gift presents itself, do we have the capacity to recognize what is before us? If we are lucky we may be able to recall a cultural practice like going on pilgrimage and the transformative realities they are meant to evoke; and thus for a moment take notice of unsuspected openings in the midst of all that drives us to forget. As I entered the depths of Notre Dame, these were the possibilities strewn all about me in the form of rocks and stories that turned the urban world above on its head.
About fifteen feet below the cobblestone streets and a wedding ceremony that was unfolding in the chapel, I could feel the pull to transform my sense of where I really was and how to be here. The footings for what was Ville Marie’s first stone church, completed in 1678 and consumed by fire in 1754, showed the extent of the city’s concrete accretion over the centuries of colonial and modern developments. It also brought up other mostly forgotten cultural depths in stories of what was found amongst these rock footings.
Popular reverence for Notre Dame’s protection was uncovered during the dig in the form of pilgrim offerings of beads and hairpins. The chapel became a place “of pilgrimage dedicated to Mary” at the western edge of Ville Marie, a practice that Sister Patricia Simpson describes in her co-authored book on Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours as “an important devotional act in seventeenth century Europe, a form of prayer that involved the participation of the whole body.” Looking into the historic depths of pilgrimage in the Catholic tradition, Merton traced it back to his sixth century Celtic Christian ancestors and pre-Christian traditions indigenous to western Europe. It was a practice of wandering exile, often to ocean isles, where, he explains, the pilgrim attempted “to find their “peculiar and appointed place on the face of the earth, a place not determined by nature, race, and society, but by the free choice of God.”
“A frail expendable exile lies down in desolation under the sweet stars”, these words from Merton’s prayer to Hagia Sophia represent the difficult challenge he experienced in letting go of so much as he renewed this way of hermit pilgrimage. For his journey also fostered an awareness of how a spiritual practice like pilgrimage could be warped over time to very different motives. As he writes in the chapter From Pilgrimage to Crusade, acts of Catholic pilgrimage were “gradually transformed through generations of crusades into a struggle to death with pagan adversaries who are wickedly standing in the way of one’s divinely appointed goal and perversely preventing fulfillment of a manifest destiny.” By the time Europeans arrived on Turtle Island, pilgrimage was increasingly coloured by political and economic interests that were supported by sword, musket and church policies like the Doctrine of Discovery.
Each ghostly reminder in these depths slowed my drive into the gait of a pilgrim who wants to renew a sacred relation with this earthly life. I say re-enter because the act recalled the journey I made twenty years earlier to honour the Black Madonna at Notre Dame de Chartres, the twelfth century French cathedral that is an hour west of Paris. Situated in the northwest side of the cathedral, I wrote in A Canadian Climate of Mind: “the Black Madonna… holds the spot of the setting Sun and where the ocean’s cold and wet winds originate. Softly lighting her dark presence is a red glow of candles that shines off her magnificent golden robe, crown, and sceptre, all of it evoking the swiftly approaching night sky as a mother who gives birth … to the moon and stars and each morning to the sun.”
While the Black Madonna points to the “realms of darkness, of grief, of death” from a position in Chartres’ ground-floor, I also descended into similar depths as those below Ville Marie. Through the south portal is “the crypt where a subterranean well of healing known as the Well of the Saints-Forts is found” with a statue known as Notre Dame de Sous-Terre, Our Lady of the Underworld. She and her sacred waters were worshipped throughout the Middle Ages as a place of pilgrimage, though the roots of these practices stretch back to the Black Madonna’s associations with “preceding Roman and Celtic pagan goddesses like Isis, Artemis” and Persephone. The dark stillness of her depths was a place for facing death as a vital source of healing. Each evening the sun goes into these realms from which they return each morning, and autumn is the seasonal initiator of that same journey.
Somehow I had returned to these depths, but now closer to home. What had originally brought me into the Black Madonna’s crypt was a search for viable cultural ways of untangling Catholic-Indigenous relations around my birth waters. The inspiration was a letter written by Wendat at Lorette, Quebec in the mid-1600s to this cathedral that offered praise to Notre Dame. As with Merton’s critical sense of pilgrimage, part of me engaged this letter to more fully understand the colonial violence of missions focused on conversion. At the same time, I wanted to contemplate the relation of Notre Dame to the Wendat sense of the one Norma, who has Wendat connections, refers to as E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’ .
A few feet up from these depths in the museum is a painting of two Indigenous women who took up the vows of Marguerite Bourgeoys’ Congregation de Notre Dame in 1679. We know at least one, Marie-Thérèse, was related to the Wendat who wrote the letter to Notre Dame de Chartres and inspired my still unfolding pilgrimage. As Sister Simpson writes, her “grandfather was Francois Thoronhiongo, a Huron who had been baptized by Jean de Brébeuf.” These women were among the first Indigenous to join a Catholic order, and may have been the ones “who so impressed” Tekakwitha when she was in Montreal in 1678 that she took the path to becoming the first Indigenous Catholic saint, one who carries both the potential of intercultural dialogue and the burden of missions that extinguished such potential.
Uncovered at the edge of the chapel’s footings were rocks from two Indigenous hearths that are approximately 2000 years old, reminders of the long relation Indigenous peoples have with this isle. The footings of the oldest stone church were placed there centuries after those of the Indigenous hearths, and both these human-mediated movements pale in comparison to the large boulder that was left at the edge of the chapel by receding glaciers more than ten thousand years ago. This isle and river were shaped by melting ice, rocks and shifting waters, and in many ways the same is true of my Fall pilgrimage that followed a great river below a concrete world. A foundational presence is carried in these rocks that witnessed the cycling of seasons through the centuries and millennia.
“The rocks tell that they receive their firmness and strength from God.” These words of Marguerite Bourgeoys who was present when Notre Dame’s footings were placed on these shores speaks to the spiritual dimensions of these stones. If I try to deepen this catholic inspiration into our modern realities, I inevitably turn to some of Merton’s last words that he journaled while on an interfaith pilgrimage prior to his death in 1968. After seeing the sacred carved stone of the Buddha at Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, he wrote: “The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya – everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running through one aesthetic illumination.”
Something in these firm rock presences was filled with a mysterious emptiness that brought Merton to one of the core spiritual experiences of his life, one where the steady rock of compassion was experienced as the empty seed from which all life emerges. In a spirit similar to Bourgeoys, their firm strength is connected to the mysterious Creator of these earthly depths from which life emerges and into which it eventually returns.
Now if I want to contemplate the rocks of the Indigenous hearths from the perspective of these lands, then I find myself briefly reflecting on the sweat-lodge ceremony that is practiced by some Indigenous nations of these lands. Without getting into cultural teachings that are beyond my Two Row education, I can highlight a few basic points that were impressed upon me each of the three times I was invited into that darkness. First, the dark circular dome of the lodge that you enter is the womb of Mother Earth who is engaged through unique cultural stories, knowledge, language and ceremonies that are related to these lands. Second, the hot rocks that receive the water and prayers in the centre are grandfather teachers who carry teachings for living in good ways. Third, these grandfathers in the Anishinaabe tradition are known as Love, Respect, Bravery, Truth, Honesty, Humility and Wisdom; steady values that people are called to enact as foundations in their ways of living and engaging spirit.
Though Norma does not see the sweat-lodge ceremony as central to her Cayuga culture, she does describe the simple co-creation of a sauna that she and a friend ceremonially engaged in a similar Earth-based spirit. Reflecting on the healing power of rock and water, she writes:
Sitting and listening to the crackling of the wood and to the medicine sizzling when thrown on the hot rocks, we could feel the sweat pouring from our bodies… With the shadows dancing on the walls, we prepared to share our stories and memories… When the door opened and the coolness of the night met the hot steam from the sauna, they melded into one energy and swirled around the room before exiting the door. As the door closed once more, another teaching emerged about how people have so much to learn about love. It sounds easy to say, but in that moment, it was clear that we need to be dedicated to reflecting on the immensity and the depth of our alignment with love. Love creates a basket of interwoven legacies, values, beliefs, accountability, and responsibility.
A deep experience of living values like compassion, sharing, love and gratitude are the foundations of the living way that Norma gives thanks to as E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’, Merton honours as Hagia Sophia, and Bourgeoys saw as Notre Dame’s strong footings. This does not mean they are the same in a fundamental way that leads to acts of converting diversity. It was the unfolding of Merton’s interfaith dialogue with Buddhist monks over the last decade of his life that initiated his pilgrimage to the Buddhist lands of Polonnaruwa and an opening to “the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction.” This relational point resonates with Norma’s teachings on how values like gratitude and love bring us to the sacred meeting place she calls Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s. Values that honour the gifts we each bring is held in common, but what is brought arises from unique cultural stories, dialects, wisdom and practices.
Through sharing, we come to a deeper complementary sense of this mysterious Earth life. In my experience, honouring Norma’s Cayuga sense of Mother Earth is a vital starting point for me as I deepen my sense of how to relate with the spirit of these lands. Her stories remind me to give thanks for the diversity of relations that make our human life possible; how our diverse gifts are what we came to honour on this Earth pilgrimage; and our values for walking in this life connects us to a unique spiritual path that also fosters life. This all makes sense to me, and it has been the search for a similar sense of values in my catholic roots that has guided me toward Merton and his prayer to Hagia Sophia. In contrast to the mistaken Catholic understanding that I grew up with and which, he says, other Christians assume about Catholics, Hagia Sophia “is blessed not because of some mythical pseudo-divine prerogative, but in all her humanly… limitations… “full of grace” that enables her to be the perfect instrument of God.”
From within the depths of this autumn season, I am learning through ceremony and dialogue that Notre Dame is not divine in some kind of immortal transcendence of this life. Rather, these earthly depths, of which our bodies and brains are apart, are sacred because of their mortal openness to the sacred energy that continually transforms the ever-changing seasons of this life, from womb to tomb. Such a living presence is who I must continually honour by giving gratitude through my unique ways of living. In a way, I connect Notre Dame’s mortal openness to the non-cloistered religious life fostered by Marguerite Bourgeoys as a way of embodying spirit in the support of communal relations (though I have much to learn about this), and perhaps also the in-between burdens carried by Tekakwitha from the Indigenous side of the Two Row. Clearly the stories and practices I engage have a different complexion from Norma’s E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’, and yet there are valued points of connection that reflect the spirit of our common humanity and earthiness.
Though I had never been to this chapel before and had only walked the cobble streets of Old Montreal a handful of times prior to this day, the way the rocky past was strewn about had the feel of distant memories, not my own as much as the ancestors of these depths. A ceremony like pilgrimage can help us come into felt relations with firm stone-like values that often seem difficult to embody in our modern reality. I can hear Norma’s voice echoing a wisdom I have heard her share often: all of life is a ceremony and our unique ceremonial practices are meant to experientially remind us of that reality. With practice and some helpful touchstones, even the changing colours of Fall can wash over us like a flowing river on rocks that slowly become more polished with each annual turn, a yearly reminder of the letting go needed to honour the sacred depths of the one I have come to call Notre Dame de wherever I am.
Descending into Notre Dame: Ceremonial Touchstones
1) All of Life is a Ceremony, which is to say we are called to recognize the sacred nature of our earthly relations in the seasons of Notre Dame, Hagia Sophia, E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’.
2) Regular Ceremonial Practices remind us of what it means to engage all life as a ceremony, which is to foster values like compassion, love, humility, truth and peace so as to relationally participate in the sacred nature of everyday. Renewing this practice is a delicate process that needs to honour our unique stories and common embedding in historic truths of a quickly changing world.
3) Falling into Mysterious Experiences, seemingly out of nowhere, can remind us of how sacred life is in Notre Dame, and if we foster cultural ways of attending those experiences then we may recall deeper layers of our roots and practices for taking our next step on this pilgrimage.
4) Autumn is a season for letting go of cultural baggage while renewing ceremonies aimed at fostering change in our depths. The intention of such seasonal ceremonies is to better align ourselves with the living values of Notre Dame during this climate of change that is mixing everything up, externally and internally.
While on the quiet orange-red hued country roads of my morning drive toward Notre Dame’s isle, I offered a prayer that I could be conscious enough to see what I needed to see and feel what I needed to feel; that I could continue to sense my way forward on this pilgrimage through the autumn season of my life. As I closed the prayer, something in the corner of my eye drew me to look right. Standing in the middle of an empty corn field, I could see twenty yards away a great blue heron. What was she doing there, no water in sight and the St. Lawarence River about a kilometer to the south? Being spiritually inclined, my initial response was to see heron as blessing my journey, though there was something more that I only began to intuit in the months of contemplation following that beautiful day in the depths of Mother Earth.
At the heart of my prayer was a call for help, for a sign as to where I belong. Decades of being a disillusioned catholic had coupled with an awareness that my deep appreciation for the land’s Indigenous sensibilities would never sustain me. Tired of having no spiritual home, I was hoping Notre Dame would offer some guidance. And just as that prayer ended heron showed up, as they have so many other times. As I reflected on their solitary stance within a barren field, it slowly dawned on me that I should continue to patiently foster a different home grounding than the pre-established institutional Catholicism of my birth or, for that matter, the Indigenous traditions from across the water. And yet, the spirit of Notre Dame’s depths and the practice of pilgrimage continue to resonate at the core of my being as the mother root of a small “c” catholic canadien approach that awakens my heart.
What draws me to the seemingly solitary way of heron is what also draws me to the Catholic way of Merton, a hermit whose practices continually opened him to interfaith dialogue, civil rights, critiques of institutionalized white privilege and spiritual relations with creation. Being a Trappist monk, he was clearly grounded in the Catholic tradition and its practices. And yet, Merton’s relational evolution with other cultures and the land also created uncertainty for him about where he stood in this life. As he wrote a few years before his death: “What hurts me most is to have been inexorably trapped by my own folly. Wanting to prove myself a Catholic – and of course not perfectly succeeding. They all admit and commend my good will, but frankly, I am not one of the bunch am I?” His life-long pilgrimage brought him to the autumn-like certainty of a position that is “solid, yet more mysterious”; not unlike heron in the farmer’s field.
In an unexpected way, the prayer for my pilgrimage had been answered. My search to belong somewhere continually leads me to places in-between, to a mysterious sacred place that I can only truly sense through the way my heart beats more strongly and firmly. In our world of global changes and social dislocations, I am likely not alone in this searching struggle for the birth of a mystery that seems so amorphous and solid. At the same time, the way we pilgrimage is unique to the spirit of our birth. The way I express gratitude for Notre Dame is unique to the relations I have engaged and place I was born along the St. Lawrence River. As with Merton, I am simply “a frail expendable exile [who] lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world.”
The drive of our urban highways often put me to sleep, and thus it took a year of contemplation after the autumn pilgrimage to wake-up to where I really was in Notre Dame’s tomb-like, womb-like, depths. A regular ceremonial practice can bring us to a state of mind far below our seemingly all-pervasive driven and virtual ways of being, and thus deepen our spiritual roots in this life, in our life. Such a pilgrimage can be evoked by the presence of a heron, a seasonal change or the teaching of an honoured guide, but it ultimately depends on us clearing space and time in our lives for mystery to take a lead. With that in mind, I return one last time to Merton describing what it is to wake-up:
Who is more little than the helpless man, asleep in bed, having entrusted himself gladly to sleep and to night? Him the gentle voice will awake… Not for conquest and pleasure, but for the far deeper wisdom of love and joy and communion.
My heart is broken for all my sins and the sins of the whole world, for the rottenness of our spirit of gain that defiles wisdom in all beings – to rob and deflower wisdom as if there were only a little pleasure to be had, only a little joy, and it had to be stolen, violently taken and spoiled. When all the while her warmth, her exuberant silence, her acceptance, are infinite, infinite!
Some Books that Inspired these Fall Equinox Reflections
Jacobs, Norma Gaehowako, edited by Leduc, T. B. (2022). Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s: Reflecting on our Journeys. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. https://www.odagahodhes.com/
Leduc, Timothy B. (2016). A Canadian Climate of Mind: Passages from Fur to Energy and Beyond. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
MacGilchrist, Iain (2009). The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.
Merton, Thomas (1962). Hagia Sophia. Lexington, KY: Stamperia del Santuccio.
Pramuk, Chrisopher (2009). Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.
Simpson, Patricia and Pothier, Louise (2001). Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours: A Chapel and its Neighbourhood. Fides.
Simpson, Patricia (2005). Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665-1700. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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