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    Songs That Are To Come
    Songs That Are To Come
    Songs That Are To Come
    Ebook67 pages57 minutes

    Songs That Are To Come

    By Maria Theresa Stadtmueller

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    About this ebook

    Years after rejecting the Catholic faith of her childhood, the author shows up at an "environmental spirituality" center--and it's run by Catholic nuns. She has spent two decades in the trenches of environmental activism, and wonders why the same problems persist. Why don't people "get it"? She isn't sure she trusts these nuns--after all, she grew up with nuns, even wanted to be one, and remembers their strictness and rigidity. But these women, most of them older, are a surprise. They're funny, educated, and irreverent. Most surprisingly, they're teaching that the Earth is sacred and that religion must catch up to what science has learned about our evolving Universe. As she spends time with them, she learns the "New Story" they're teaching--how the Universe evolved, how we belong to it, and how Earth is "our primary Scripture." She questions them about whether we need redemption, whether Jesus was God, and how a story can change how we live on Earth. Songs That Are To Come tells both an intimate childhood experience of convents and a compact, vivid tale of evolutionary history, showing us the cultural story we've inherited and the science-based one we need to embody.

    Maria Theresa Stadtmueller received an MFA from The University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and has studied theology and religious history. A former stand-up comic, she has published in major literary journals and blogs at www.MeetYourMyth.com. She lives on a farm in Vermont with her husband and rescued animals.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMaria Theresa Stadtmueller
    Release dateAug 19, 2015
    ISBN9781311264992
    Songs That Are To Come
    Author

    Maria Theresa Stadtmueller

    Maria Theresa Stadtmueller is a writer and podcaster living on a permaculture farm in northern Vermont. Her podcast, the Big Chew, asks, "How do we live on Earth without the Stupid?" She received a B.A. from Kirkland College, which was the women's affiliate of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. She earned her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing program at The University of Iowa, where she also studied Christian history and theology, learning even more reasons why she doesn't believe in it. She was a stand-up comic based in New York City and a writer for several colleges and universities. Her environmental nonfiction has been published in The Iowa Review, Dark Mountain, and other literary journals, and has also been anthologized by SUNY Press and in the upcoming book Walking on Lava for Chelsea Green Publishing. With the Big Chew Podcast and her blog, Meet Your Myth, Maria explores how we can create a more fulfilling culture based on science's story of our shared evolution and our deep belonging in nature. But some of it's funny. http://www.TheBigChewPodcast.com

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      Book preview

      Songs That Are To Come - Maria Theresa Stadtmueller

      Songs That Are To Come

      An Ex-Catholic, A Sacred Earth, And

      The Nuns Who Reunited Them

      Copyright 2015 Maria Theresa Stadtmueller

      Smashwords Edition

      This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      An earlier version of this piece was published in The Iowa Review, vol. 34, no.1.

      The title of this book comes from Wendell Berry's great poem "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," from The Country of Marriage, 1973. 

      Cover art by SelfPubBookCovers.com/TerriGostolaPhotography

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1: The Labyrinth

      Chapter 2: The Convent Girl

      Chapter 3: Held in the Curve of Life

      Chapter 4: The Story of Everyone

      Chapter 5: A Narrow Path

      Chapter 6: A Crack in the Enclosure

      Chapter 7: At the Source

      Afterword

      About the Author

      Connect with the Author

      Chapter 1: The Labyrinth

      From the beginning of the cosmos…standing still is an unknown stance.

      --Elisabeth A. Johnson

      You can't tell where you're headed next, and that's the point. The path is convoluted, rich with asides. It's like listening to old relatives talk about the past, how they veer wide of the story they started and take the winding roads of subplots and intrigues and I-tell-you's and right about when you've worn down, suddenly there it is—some pearl spun from the sand in their story's shoe, and it shines something on who you are and where you belong. But you've got to forget your agenda and just come along. Same with walking a labyrinth. You must step in and follow your feet.

      I'm following someone else's feet. This is supposed to be a meditation, and I should be emptying my mind, empty, empty, but we've all taken off our shoes to walk the warm sand paths and I'm worried about the funky toenails of the woman in front of me. That would be ironic—picking up some fungus on a path toward enlightenment. Twelve of us gathered this morning to hear a nun talk about this 5,000-year-old metaphor for pilgrimage, for life; unlike a maze with its tricks, but very much like life, there is one way in and one way out, and many turns in between. This kind of labyrinth is open, without walls. Lines of yellow brick lie end to end to form intricate, sand-filled paths of wide arches and tight curves, all of which whorl within a large circle. The labyrinth meditation has three stages, the nun said: walking in toward the center is called Purgation, when you quiet the mind, shedding what you no longer need or want or think; the second, Illumination, comes at the center, where you listen for clarity or insight. In the third stage, Union, you move back out into the world, stilled, perhaps, and more authentic.

      We thread the path at discreet distances, at a common and unspoken pace, like animals scouting new territory. Four of the women in this group are nuns. I only know this because I happened to sit with them at lunch and asked them. Otherwise you couldn't tell them from any other well-scrubbed older women; for a long time now nuns have worn earrings and gotten perms and bought clothes off the rack. These sisters are from a branch of Franciscans but don't wear any insignia—a pin, a crucifix on a neck chain—that might identify them.

      Sister Sophie walks toward me in the adjacent path, her eyes lowered. Custody of the gaze is what my school nuns called it. Sophie's probably in her early seventies; I'm sure she's had lots of practice at gaze control and is not busy looking at other people's toes. She's tiny but straight and solid, and looks like someone's pastel Irish grandma. Also like the kind of grandma who would pleasantly humor the doctor and then cure you herself with some homemade rooty tincture. We sat next to each other in the lecture this morning, where she introduced herself with a casual Hi, I'm Sophie. I work here. Near us, several older laywomen chatted about grandchildren, and I wasn't sure if Sophie was one of them until I dropped my pen and had to duck under the table to get it. Her cropped summer pants gave her away. The skin of her ankles and calves was as smooth and unlined as a 20-year-old's. None

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