Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
This Friday, February 27th we are delighted to welcome back playwright, storyteller, and singer Dr. ValLimar Jansen to lead us in the mini-retreat Sacred Echoes: The Pathways of African American Visionaries.
ValLimar offers the following reflection and invitation.
Sit with me for a moment. Before I name any names, I want you to take a breath and remember: the God who called these men and women is the same God who is calling you. Right now. In your ordinary, sometimes messy, often beautiful life.
That is where mysticism lives. Not in the extraordinary. In the surrendered ordinary.
The men and women you are about to encounter were not holy because their lives were easy, or because the Church recognized them. They were holy because, in the particular fire of their own lives, they kept saying, “Yes.”
Venerable Pierre Toussaint: When Prayer Becomes Breathing…Presence
Pierre Toussaint was one of the most sought-after hairdressers in New York City, a man who had been enslaved. And every single morning, for sixty years, he went to Mass. Sixty years. Through grief. Through freedom. Through the deaths of people he loved. Pierre showed up because he had discovered that prayer is not something you do. It is someone you are with. He saw Christ in the enslaved and in the enslaver. He served according to need, not according to worth. That is radical presence. It asks us: Where is Christ in the person right in front of you?
Venerable Augustus Tolton: Held by the One Who Was Also Rejected
Father Tolton applied to every seminary in the United States. Every single one turned him away. Finally ordained in Rome, he returned to the United States and was undermined by the very brother priests he came to serve alongside. And yet. He spent hours in adoration. Not to escape, but to encounter. He went and sat with the One who had also been rejected…publicly, painfully, unjustly. His priesthood became a living participation in Christ’s own self-emptying. He died at 43, exhausted, on a Chicago street. But those who knew him said he died as a man who had arrived somewhere. That is what abandonment to God can do.
Venerable Henriette Delille: Choosing the One Thing Necessary
Henriette Delille lived in New Orleans when the plaçage had already mapped out her future. She said,”No!” Her words of “Yes” remain: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.” That is not sentiment. That is a declaration. She challenges us to ask: What have I chosen? And am I living like I mean it?
Venerable Mary Elizabeth Lange & Servant of God Martin Maria de Porres Ward: The Gift of the Dark
Mary Elizabeth Lange’s community, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, survived years without episcopal support, by washing, mending, begging. In that stripped-down time, she discovered what mystics call apophatic wisdom: trusting what we cannot see.
Martin Maria de Porres Ward walked a similar road in self-imposed exile in Brazil, ministering in a language not his own. In that emptiness, he discovered: when we have nothing left, we finally find we have everything in Christ.
These two ask us: Can you trust that the darkness is not absence, but perhaps the most intimate presence of all?
Servant of God Julia Greeley: Love That Doesn’t Need an Audience
Before Denver woke up, Julia Greeley was already moving through its streets, pulling a little red wagon filled with food and coal. She made her deliveries in the dark. On purpose. She didn’t want to be seen. Her devotion to the Sacred Heart was a mystical participation in the hidden suffering of Christ… the heart that burns with love and is pierced for the pain of the world. In a world that measures worth by platform and visibility, Julia Greeley is a quiet revolution. What would we do for love if no one ever knew?
Servant of God Thea Bowman: The Whole Body Glorifies God
Sister Thea understood that the body is not separate from the spirit. When she sang, preached, and told the old stories, those who were there say she became transparent — that you could see through her to The Light behind her. And then cancer came. She sat in a wheelchair. And she still proclaimed. She told the bishops of the United States, right from that chair, that they needed to let the Church be truly, joyfully, unapologetically herself…all of her children, all of their gifts. Thea is asking us: Are you holding back? Are you giving God all of you?
Taken together, these lives form a mosaic of mystical wisdom—presence, abandonment, hiddenness, silence, joy. What unites them is not merely the suffering they experienced but their refusal to let suffering have the final word. They descended into darkness and found the Divine waiting. That is the mystical tradition. They are calling us to remember that the mystic has always worn our face, spoken in our voice, and moved through our pain toward glory. Their stories are not finished—they live on in us.
Join us this Friday, February 27th to explore the lives and wisdom of these African American visionaries
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
