Srs. Teresa and BettySr. Elizabeth Meluch, O.C.D. of Oldenburg Carmel entered into eternal life May 16, 2010
Sr. Teresa Boersig, O.C.D. shares some of her reflections.
For anyone to stand before you and give reflections about Betty’s life in community, with her family, with friends and colleagues, would either be hubris or idiocy. But to give you reflections FROM Betty is a “piece of cake,” for Betty had the gift to express her soul on paper. I’d like to share some of those reflections with you so that we can better know her, and through her know our own longings and desires for the Ultimate, the very Source of our Being.
Betty wrote in the book God In Ordinary Time which we published a piece about gratitude. Here are a few excerpts:
Some days I think that God has a need for gratitude. It keeps welling up inside me, and I find myself praying prayers of thanksgiving concerning just about everything. It is as though it is being pulled out of me…. The prayer of thanksgiving can also be a lifesaver when we feel empty at prayer times, when our hearts are dry and we seem to be wasting our time. When this state continues, along with being grateful for what we experience as blessings, we can thank God for the emptiness, and just give God the time. We are never left with empty hands before God.
Betty made a little commentary on this reflection. She said: “I think it says a lot about me. It is right that I was grateful, for my life was full of gifts of every kind. I am so glad that God gave me the grace to life a life of prayer and praise because it was the only honest response to the life given to me.
As most of you know, we contributed reflections to our website: praythenews.com: I’d like to share a few of Betty’s contributions:
What Faith Is Like….
Life is a mystery, and faith in God asks a lot of us. It is as though we were ice fishing on a little bench not far from shore, and God asks for the fish we have caught. We give. Then God asks for the fishing line, and we give that over, too. When God asks for the bench we are sitting on, we find ourselves standing on the ice, thinking we have given all. Then we hear a kind of cracking sound as the ice we are standing on begins to break away and we find ourselves adrift. Going with trust into the open sea of God’s way for us: that’s faith.
Origins….
The holly tree that reigns over our courtyard towers above the monastery. It is so beautiful that some days it takes my breath away. The holly shoots that crop up around it are the spitting image of the tree. If they had eyes, they would see their destiny in their source that shades them.
Mystics tell us that God is breathtakingly beautiful. We are shoots of God, “made in the image and likeness of….” Lucky us. We do have eyes—of faith.
Letting Go of Time….
When we believe that we are destined for something beyond time, we must wait for it…grow into it. Just as growing from childhood to adulthood requires letting go of being a child, moving from time to eternity requires letting go of being time-bound. When we are children, we can believe that we will become adults even though we cannot yet see ourselves there. Faith tells us that there is more beyond the life we know. Time is the youth of eternity.
The Ninth Beatitude …
Sometimes I think there should be another Beatitude added to the eight that Scripture offers us; Blessed are those who wait. With all due reverence, I feel that God owes us (that) one. God, in whose image we are created, is eternal, and here we are stuck in time, and we feel it! With all of the beauty and wonder of time, we know that something is missing, something is "not yet," and we wait. We wait to be born, to grow up, to be educated, to heal, to become wise, to uncover the image of God that we are, and we wait to die.
Waiting merits equal “blessing time” because, hard as it is, it is in the waiting that the work of the Spirit of God develops and bears fruit. Waiting is a blessing because God waits with us and in us. “Blessed are those who wait, for they do not wait alone.”
Trans-form-ation….(cover)
A bottle of seeds sits on a window sill. They have human consciousness, and they realize that sooner or later each seed with have to leave this world of glass. The day comes for Seedy, and as she is raised out of the bottle, those left behind mourn her passing. They even witness her burial in the lawn below…. After a few good rains, a lovely flower appears in the lawn below, and the seeds are comforted by its beauty and wish that Seedy had lived to see it.
We have the wrong name for death; it’s really just a whomping growth spurt.
To conclude, I’d like to share with you Betty’s answers to three questions posed to her in an interview.
Q. Tell me about God's love?
A. God's love is God. The energy of love² that's what God is. I experience it through very little things. For starters, I feel very blessed. I was blessed in a fantastic family, a head start with the faith, a vocation, I don't think I could ask for anything more than I've been given. Best way I can explain it: One of my brothers used to bring his wife home something every day, an apple, candy bar, some little, teeny thing every day. They were married over fifty years. That's the way God is with me. Candy bar, apple, but I know it's there. That's all I know.
Q. Tell me about your prayer?
A. My prayer is mostly a prayer of silent waiting. I'm in the vestibule. It's just trying to be totally open to whatever God wants to do through my life. I try to be quiet with that and just try to keep saying yes to whatever God wants me to do and be.
Q. Why do the Carmelites of Indianapolis exist?
A. To give God's love energy absolutely no resistance. So it's like: here I am. Use my mind, heart, will, life. Because God is constantly creating; love is constantly creating, constantly creating constantly redeeming (healing), and constantly inspiring. It's like a seed. God plants a person. We die in certain ways so that something new can happen. Not only that but out of this flower comes another seed. So the life is continued.some Random CCA Photos
