Back in February, Leeanna Varga interviewed Sr. Cynthia Bauer and Sr. Madeleine Tacy about their ministries in South Dartmouth, MA.

MT: I’m doing some ministry online which makes it easier for everybody. On Mondays I have two Bible study groups, and on Tuesday night I have the meditation, and on Wednesday night I belong to the Christian Zen Sangha, and I am the lead teacher there. On Thursday I get a day off. I do a little bit of spiritual direction. All of that keeps me busy, because there’s preparation for all of that.

On Friday night I’ve been going to Thai Chi. On Saturday the Christian Zen group has a meditation from 8 am – 8:30 am – sometimes we have five people, sometimes we have 12. The Sangha also has a book we’re reading. Right now we’re finishing up a commentary on Goegan’s Teaching to the Cook, which was written by Bernie Glassman who founded Greystone Bakery in Yonkers. It’s about the cook, and how you should go abount it, and you can make a meal out of just about anything , and also how the practice has to spill into your life, it’s a Christian social justice thing.

On Saturday there’s a retreat at the Christian Zen Center in Rhode Island.

I have a shop downstairs where I’ve been making some walking sticks. And there’s a garden.

CB: She made the garden, it has sand, and a rake. She made the rake.

MT: The stones are done in an odd number. It has five right now, but usually I use three for it. You should be able to see all of the stones from any view of it. There’s one in Kyoto, it’s big, it’s very famous and the stones are there permanently. It has to be raked. This is a place to sit and be quiet, and meditate.

I’m connected with a group here, the Naijuro Whitfield Museum. It’s the story of some Japanese sailors whose boat sank. They were picked up by a whaler from New Bedford. Naijuro was young, and he wanted to stay with Whitfield, so Whitfield brought him here. He eventually went back to Japan and became a go-between between this country and Japan. There’s a monument to him. Every year there’s a festival, one year it’s in Japan, the other year it’s here.

Composting and Gardening

MT: We offered our services but they were not accepted, so we’re on our own. We sent out invitations to the community around where we were, to people we’d come to know. Most of them were parishioners of the parish we attended. We’ve been doing it since 2010. It has expanded from one group to two. The morning group is retired professional people. We had a whole series on icons. Different topics.

CB: There was a video series on Catholicism, we’d watch together and have a discussion. We taught them the Liturgy of the Hours, so we were doing evening prayer with them. Richard Rohr, CS Lewis, the documents of our Holy Father, it followed whatever was going on, whatever people were looking for. Madeleine did the Old Testament last year, she’s doing the New Testament this year. We have some interesting conversations, people participate, what goes on in the group stays in the group, so people ask questions they would never ask if they were in a group where Father was there.

MT: Cynthia has a large group of spiritual directees.

CB: After hospital chaplaincy and doing nursing homes and hospice, the other certification I worked toward was spiritual direction. We both did it at the same time at Our Lady of Peace Retreat Center in Naragansett. We would go every Wednesday night, we would travel an hour and a half. It was a two-year program. And then I also got certified for bereavement, to do some support groups, that was at Mount Ida College. When I retired from hospital ministry, the opportunity was spiritual direction. That was by word of mouth. Because I was involved in the hospital, there were a lot of chaplains, I would do a retreat for chaplains. There was another retreat center in Wareham, MA. I would do some bereavement and spiritual direction, and also offer some programs on mysticism, doing whatever I could to keep that retreat center afloat. A lot of the people I met on the Cape were coming to Wareham at that time. Then we would do it online, and if I get to know a person well enough, then I can do the phone, so they don’t have to travel. It has allowed me to continue offering what I gleaned from the monastery living there for 38 years, Our Lady of the Rosary in Sumit NJ, it’s simply what I was given that I share with them, helping them with their spiritual life, their spiritual journey. It’s my privilege and I’m grateful for that.

Some come to the house, some I see online. I have a supervisor, a Sinsinawa sister, we do a Zoom once a month. That keeps me in line. When you have that many people you need a supervisor. I have about 10 [directees]. The retreat center closed, and there was no other opportunity [for retreat work].

She sees them once a month.

CB: Madeline and I have a monastic schedule of prayer. We’re up at 5 every morning in order to have prayer time, so we can have morning prayer together after sitting for half hour in silence together. Then we go to Mass. And we have lunch together, and take a rest after lunch. In the evening we have evening prayer together around 5 pm. The two of us do have about an hour together in the evening after she finishes her programs. We have a schedule that allows us to have a community life and a prayer life together, even though there’s just two of us. That’s the springboard of how we approach what’s going on today. It’s from that source of prayer that we support people who are struggling with what’s going on. That’s the heart of our life, our prayer life. It’s from there that both of us, whatever we’re doing has value.

Even though we’re retired, we haven’t stopped.

MT: We have a prayer room, a couple boxes of icons

CB: Sitting is a springboard for compatibility, allows us to share an organized day around a monastic schedule. It’s easier when you’re retired.

MT: It’s also easier when there’s more than one person involved. I’ve been doing the meditation since 1972. It’s easier when there’s another person there.

I am involved in the parish in the social concerns organization that does a lot with helping families that need assistance at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, and there are some other things they do…once or twice a year I do a day retreat for them. There’s been some good outcomes from that for some of the people.

The Church is not educating their people. I keep telling people the Churchs give you a foundation, but it’s your job to build the house, and they don’t help you. [the retreats] have helped some people get in touch with church again, and it’s also answered a lot of questions that some of them didn’t even know they needed to ask.

CB: I lector at a parish during the week, Madeliene is also a eucharistic minister on the weekend too.

MT: She’s one of the better readers!

CB: When people tell me how they appreciate my reading, I say but it’s not about me, it’s about the Word of God, it’s about praying that before you read that gives it the message you want it to carry. It’s not about ourselves, it’s about God’s gift to us in the Word. I try to encourage the lectors to pray with it beforehand, and it will sound altogether different when it comes out. You know, anyone preaching, it comes from their life, their spiritual life. If it doesn’t come from there, it doesn’t sound like anything that has value. When something really touches you, it’s because the preacher has done their homework, you know, that it reaches the people. At least that’s my philosophy about it.

MT: So at five o’clock in the morning, when I’m taking a shower, she’s doing the reading for the day.

CB: I’m preparing the reading certainly, but I’m praying with it as well.

What is their sitting like?

MT: No guided meditation. We sit in silence, no music or books.

CB: We’re sitting, and breathing, being quiet.

MT: Everything that goes on has to have some kind of organization, you have to have some kind of structure. What happened with the Church is that the structure that was put in place for a reason has now become more intent on its survival than using it for what it was put in place for. Then you have a whole group of people that like their power, their position, so they don’t want it to change. And much of that is unconscious. Then they hide behind theology for it. And that’s really sad. One of the other parts is much of what’s going on is how the Church is organized is influenced heavily by the culture of the time. And now the culture has changed, it’s over 1500 year ago and youre not reading what Vatican II said, the signs of the times.

There’s a lot of traditionalists, Yves Congar calls them “Nostalogists” because they want to go back to something that never was. They don’t know the history of the Church. Take the language thing, as an example. Jesus spoke Aramaic. He didn’t speak Latin, he didn’t speak Greek. The people who came after wrote the story in Greek, because that was the educated language of the time. And when the church moved from Greece to Rome, the people didn’t understand Greek, so we change it into Latin. It’s the same kind of upheaval that’s going on now. So the real tradition is, it’s in the language of the people. The problem is, when it was in Latin, supposedly everybody could understand. If you went to mass in France, if you went to mass someplace else, you knew what was going on. That’s one of the big things, my soapbox issue, that people are no longer peasants that can’t read and write. Many of them have more education than the person that’s preaching to them. The church also moves very slowly, so there’s that too. The preservation of the structure is the main problem. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a structure, we need one, but the one we’ve got is based on Roman law, which is not helpful. You’re not living 1500, 1800 years ago.

CB: This is how I respond to my directees are so anxious about what is going on in our country today, or around the world today. I go back to the value of the contemplative life, and its place in the Church. Personally, those 38 years of contemplative life, it was a way of life, it wasn’t just prayer all day, it was a contemplative way of living. The value that we believed it had, reached people we did not know around the world whoever needed our prayers, that gave it great value, I believe, or I would have thought those years were wasted. I try to tell people, the value of their prayer life is their faith that our Lord is using their prayer, their life, in a way they just have to believe in a loving God who hears them and knows what their anxiety might be, their concern. It requires a faith. And there’s something to be said for a ministry of presence that our sisters have. I don’t think they realized the witness of their lives at this point in their life. There’s a ministry going on of their presence and the legacy that we’re leaving behind us.

MT: I think sometimes especially with prayer that when we pray “such and such needs to be fixed.” We bring it to God and we pray, and then we get upset when it doesn’t looks like it’s working.  There needs to be trust there, we never voice the subtext to that which is the 27 ways you want it done, and if what happens doesn’t show up on that list,  then what good is it to pray? It’s to pray and then let go of it. Which is I think the real trust, you don’t know if nothing happened. We’ve lost our connection. It’s like my favorite song, Carrie Newcomer’s “Singing in the Dark” that came out of when she went up to Gethsemane. The thing that she brings out is that every day somebody is saying that Office at some hour some place in the world. And to do that is to be connected to that. It gives you a feeling of I’m not here alone. When you’re not, somebody else is. We’ve lost that idea of being connected to other people. Especially in this country, we’ve become so individualistic. We’ve lost that sense of belonging to something greater. We’ve replaced that with football. We’ve lost the connection. They’re filling it with things, like eating food that doesn’t have any nutritional value. They buy a lot of stuff, they get a big car, they get a bigger house, where we live the big houses are going for over a million dollars, but they’re not at peace. As one person told me one time, the main thing is to leave the parking place that belongs to God empty, so that when God shows up, it’s there. It’s so hard to let go of all that stuff.

I just read a book by Meister Eckhart, he said you have to let go of everything. He’s not saying you don’t use things, we’ve lost all that to realize you’re part of something that’s bigger than we are.

Whatever I’m doing, it has an effect on other people. We’ve lost that idea that we’re connected with anybody.

CB: There also is the need for balance. That balance is really what we’re called to. It includes not just our relationship with God, but bringing others into that relationship as well. But also in our life the balance of meeting and supporting others in their needs and reaching out to them. It’s not all about ourselves. It’s about being present to others in their needs. In a personal way and in a collective way.