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This thought remembers an old friend I wrote about on the first Sunday in January 2016: Alice Bailey.
Alice was a tiny English woman who played a very important role in the early life of my family. She was a surrogate mother to our mom and a surrogate grandmother to me and my brothers and sisters.
Most of all, she was the first person who gave me a lesson in — how to carry your burdens.
Mom had boarded with Alice during the World War II years at a time when Alice was a single parent raising three teenage children.
I never knew the story of how she:
- got to America
- came to be single
- made a living
All I knew was she brought light to our home whenever she visited.
She was different from others in the Moriarty circle in a number of ways:
She didn’t drink. In those days it seemed everyone in my parents’ world drank. Alice stood out as a sober woman.
She didn’t complain. Not about the weather, the price of eggs or anything else. Her demeanor was always calm and collected.
She actually seemed interested in the activities going on in our lives. Times back then were different. Adults were not focused on children. We were to be seen and not heard.
For most adults in the 1950’s the “hard times” were a recent memory, so talking about them was perfectly natural.
So many of our dinner table conversations centered on the suffering of the past:
- how many times my mother’s family moved to find work
- how much coal my dad shoveled to help support his family
The thing about Alice was her life had been just as tough, maybe even more so than my parents’ lives. But she never felt the need to burden us with the details.
She stayed firmly planted in the here and now.
There was a cloud that hung over our Irish family, what I later learned was known as “the Celtic Twilight.”
It was the shadow space between light and darkness.
We are all taught different ways to navigate through life.
I was taught to carry my burdens like one would carry a cross on the march to Calvary.
Indeed, my mother was a first class cross-bearer.
Alice, on the other hand, was taught something different. She carried no cross. She walked on a different road, one leading away from the empty tomb on the road to Emmaus.
From my earliest days I understood Mom and Alice viewed life differently.
- Mom’s cup was always half empty.
- Alice’s was always half full.
No judgment here — they were products of different teachings.
Mother treated Alice with a deference reserved for no other human being.
One evening years later Alice addressed my own cross climbing disposition.
She had invited me to dinner. It was at the height of the Viet Nam War. I had just declared myself a draft resister and was preparing to go to jail.
I was filled with grim acquiescence to my fate.
My mother had discussed my predicament with Alice and she knew we were crosswise over the matrer.
After dinner Alice sat me down and asked me a number of probing questions, including what I was hoping to accomplish by going to jail.
I stammered out some gibberish, but really had no answer.
As I was leaving I noticed I was siezed with fear and feeling like a little boy. I quietly asked her, “What do you think I should I do?”
Shs gave me a gentle hug and said, “Why don’t you just come down from that cross of yours and give your plan a little more thought.”
With that, she patted me on the back and sent me on my way.
The upshot was that I did climb down from my cross and did reconsider the matter.
I began viewing life from the empty tomb rather than from the cross
I discovered from that vantage point the future looks quite different.
My life was soon headed in a different direction: away from a McNeil Island prison cell, and off to the west side of Chicago, where I would begin an altogether different kind of journey.
Just a thought…
Pat