This past March, for two weeks participants from The Grail attended the 57th annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the United Nations.

So, what exactly is the CSW and why is the Grail involved?  Carrie Bowling, Membership and Outreach Coordinator for the Grail explains,

During the two weeks of CSW, the United Nations has ‘main’ events, where the delegates from nations around the globe discuss the theme – this year it was prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls. The delegates start with an opening session, then continue through the week with discussions until a document of ‘agreed conclusions’ is established. While these sessions are taking place at the main UN buildings, NGOs offer side events, also known as
parallel events, in buildings near the UN.  Some of these events explain what a specific organization is working on; provide helpful skills and knowledge about a specific topic; or they can just simply be informative. The Grail hosted two side events, cosponsored several others, and Grail members participated as panelists in others.”

This year, the Grail brought more than 20 participants from various countries such as Brazil, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and USA. For two weeks we were participating in various events in different ways such as being part of some panels; contributing on the writing of the girls’ and young women’s statements; sharing experiences and giving testimony about their life and work; organizing our own parallel events; following the work of outcome documents; lobbying in some mission delegations and engaging with some communities. Together with other NGOs, the Grail co-sponsored some events.

The Grail organized two parallel events as a result of the activities that we are doing in various countries. One parallel event was presented by girls between 16 and 18 years old. The title was: Challenges and Responses…Making Their Voices Heard. The girls from Brazil, El Salvador, Mozambique and USA, spoke and shared their struggles and stories that demonstrated that whatever the statistics, their daily experience causes devastating consequences. The event showed that violence against girls cuts across ethnic, racial, class, religious, educational and international borders.

Another parallel event organized by The Grail was: Changing Systems that Hurt…the Role of Girls and Young Women. The presenters, girls and young women between 16 and 24 years old from Brazil, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and USA, are involved in their communities in advocacy and awareness campaigns regarding the empowerment of girls and young women to take responsibility for all matters affecting their lives.

As always, attending this kind of event makes us take in both the breadth and depth of issues explored and in the commitment, passion, and talent of those present. We consider CSW the lead champion of the global campaign for women’s and girl’s equality and empowerment; a place of reporting progress on women’s and girls’ advancement in their own countries and opportunity for NGOs sharing their challenges and lessons learned.

To learn more about The Grail’s participation at the United Nations, click here.  https://www.grail-us.org/what-we-are/grail-link-to-the-united-nations/

Roaming Maasai tribesman are silhouetted against the horizon, flowing purple robes fluttering in the wind as they carry long staffs and drive forward the few scrawny cattle still alive despite the never-ending drought. Women trudge quietly along the road carrying great bundles on their heads, as the Maasai men and cattle weave in and out. Outside the city, few people have vehicles, so the Grail’s white van usually has the road to itself, red dirt roads as hard as concrete with potholes.

The week in Tanzania was a side-trip for me. The group of ten of us who had met in Uganda to plan the IGA had disbursed. One of the ten was Margarita Shirima from Tanzania, so I could conveniently accompany her from Entebbe to Kilimanjaro. It was an opportunity especially to see St. Teresa of Avila school.

The silence of the mountain pervades the air all through the Kilimanjaro district and lends a quiet intensity to the secondary school. I had imagined a much smaller place than the substantial compound that I found. Here there were highly professional faculty members and hundreds of teenagers concentrating on their studies with a focus I had never witnessed in an American school – amid skyrocketing mid-summer temperatures and no air conditioning. Future leaders of their country must excel.

• Biology, chemistry and physics every year, in addition to English, Kiswahili, history, geography, commerce and math.

• Standards high – the best in the Kilimanjaro district so far – but that means that students have to leave if they fail to maintain a 70% average.

• Four Maasai teens (14- and 15-years-old), wearing uniforms like everyone else, explaining that if they were not at St Teresa’s, they would surely be married by now.

Having heard about the need for dormitory space, I was not surprised to see perfectly made bunk beds packed into what would otherwise be classrooms, lined by straight rows of flip-flops and an array of brightly colored plastic buckets for carrying water. Outside, as I half expected, was the outline of a foundation and piles of concrete blocks, for a “hostel” soon to rise.

But the multipurpose building that I thought was still a dream – efforts to raise money still clearly in progress – there I found workmen ready to put the roof on a building designed to hold a thousand. A thousand people in a building the size of a church! No money yet for windows or floors, but if the roof were on, at least the building could be used. Down the hill, Maria Goretti Semvua pointed out, was where faculty housing would go eventually.

Among the Grail women of Tanzania, there is an amazing confidence and determination, despite the lack of money, the scarcity of water or the absence of external funding. The extent of development at St. Teresa was only one piece of evidence. The dispensary at Mwanga I had always pictured as a room-sized clinic. Instead, I found a whole hospital. Maternity, malaria, HIV-AIDS: those are the real areas of medical need. An empty building next door, recently purchased by Cecilia, the Tanzania Grail doctor, stood ready to become a maternity ward. We joked about “only 26 million” needed to implement the plan. The amount sounded enormous until translated from Tanzanian shillings to dollars ($20,000).

Meanwhile back at Kisekibaha, the 8-acre national center of the Grail in Tanzania, the whole community revolves around the training of (nine this year) young women as committed Grail members: prayer and drumming early in the morning, then tasks (sweeping the walks, carrying buckets of water for the tiny plants in the nursery, grinding maize for porridge, picking fruit, feeding the pigs and goats and milking the cows) all before classes start.

The spirit of camaraderie among the young women is apparent, as is their respect and affection for every Grail “Dada” who lives in the community with them. Hortensia, Justina and Mary organize courses; Honorata heads off for work with the Maasai elders, Rosada organizes meetings with community leaders about pre-school, Margarita (national leader) camps out in the office before the day’s heat makes work there unbearable.

Imelda is still at Rau, delighting in the antics of tiny children enrolled in the interfaith pre-school; and so is Edeltruda, helping young women learn a trade so they can support themselves. The bookstore in Moshi, staffed by a whole set of competent Grail women, is packed with customers as soon as they open the doors.

Simply by their stance in the world, the Grail women of Tanzania spoke powerfully to me of generosity of spirit, creativity and determination in the face of great odds. I was grateful to share their life, even for so short a time, and I am proud to be their sister.

We are called to create a sustainable world, transforming our planet into a place of peace and justice.

We acknowledge that we are part of the whole of creation, striving  to live simply and to nurture a culture of care for all the earth.

We are determined to look for signs of hope in a complex world.

We are strengthened by the compassionate energy and creative action of women.

Born in the Catholic tradition, the movement is grounded in the Christian faith and challenged by the radical call of the teachings of Jesus. Today we are women of various religious traditions and on life-giving spiritual journeys. We recognize that in each of our Grail countries, our expressions of faith, religion and spirituality reflect our own realities and cultures. We respect and acknowledge these differences.

Recognizing the global realities we confront, we are committed to growing together and learning from one another’s wisdom, experience and spiritual search.

Approved by the International General Assembly, September 23, 2011

I grew up folk dancing in Yellow Springs, Ohio. As a little girl I was immediately taken by it — the entire town seemed to be dancing and I was swept up by the music, a light and lyrical Israeli dance. Without thinking, I jumped right in.

We are all familiar with social rituals that strengthen the integrity of a community. From singing our national anthems to cheering for our favorite sports team to our more private rituals of living with partners and families, these rituals enable us to interact with our world in a way that is safe and promotes well-being and happiness for ourselves and those around us.  The village folk dance is a social ritual in which the citizens set aside a time and place, (usually the village square) to join their neighbors and dance. Where gatherings for religious rituals bridge the world of the people with an understanding of Divine Presence, so the village dance bridges the individuals’ personal world with the larger community and sometimes with the surrounding landscape and natural elements.

Folk dancing creates a sense of well-being, not just because it’s fun and the music sounds great (especially when it’s live). When the individual joins the dance, the person becomes extended into a larger organism. The songs and dances cover the entire spectrum of human experience – love, joy, sorrow, the pain of unrequited love, lilting courtship, bringing in a harvest, mining, celebrating the coming of rain or honoring the power of fire. These are not the dances of the aristocrat; they come directly from the earth, the peasant people.

Some, like the Shepherds Dance that celebrates the winter solstice, are pre-Christian, giving folk dancing a feeling of timelessness. During large folk dance parties at which people dress in the style of different counties, it feels like the whole world is on pause and for that moment, has joined up and is dancing together. In some villages, the role of the community dance is as much a priority as going to church; taking time out for community dance was as important as taking time out for communal prayer.

This has been adapted from an article in the March 2011 edition of Gumbo.

 In her first book, A Priceless View, Grail member Deirdre Cornell returns to her childhood home, Newburgh, NY, to share the life of the burgeoning migrant community there. But by the last few pages, she knows that she will leave. And her prediction is fulfilled: in 2004, Deirdre and her husband Kenney and three children move to rural Oaxaca, Mexico, as Maryknoll lay missioners, to deepen their understanding of the migrant cultures surrounding them in upstate New York. In American Madonna, Deirdre welcomes us into that experience.

At the heart of Deirdre’s reflections is Mary, the Mother of God. Here in the U.S., what with women’s liberation and the assimilation of white ethnic Catholics into the American middle class, devotion to the ostensibly sweet, passive Virgin Mary would seem a thing of the past. Yet as Deirdre observes, pilgrimages to sites of Marian apparitions around the world have mushroomed in the modern period, while the Madonna, bearing the marks of her various local inculturations, helps huge numbers of Latin American migrants in their journeys across the border to a new life in the North. Indeed, as Deirdre makes clear, the Virgin Mary is an ideal patroness for our globalized age, crossing borders during her lifetime between Israel and Egypt, and in her Assumption, between earth and heaven, even as she has accompanied travelers, missionaries and migrants across borders over the centuries.

Deirdre organizes American Madonna around three different manifestations of Mary: the Virgin of Solitude, the mourning Mother at the foot of the cross who watches over the capital of the southeastern Mexican province of Oaxaca; Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose apparition to St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in 1532 marks the beginning of the inculturation of Christianity among the indigenous
peoples of Mexico; and my own particular favorite, Our Lady of Juquila, whose diminutive triangular figure has protected hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at her shrine on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca since 1719. In all cases, the Madonna crosses borders with her devotés, whether they are the Spanish missionaries who brought her with them to the Americas, the pilgrims journeying over hazardous
terrain to reach her, or the migrants who bear her north and sometimes return home to her motherly embrace.

It would be a pity for you to conclude from this that American Madonna is a theological study of the Virgin Mary, however.  It is that, in part, but it is also much more. Indeed, what makes this book a wonderful read is the deftness with which Deirdre weaves together the multiple strands comprising the reality of the Madonna. The lives of Mexicans encountered on both sides of the border
comprise one such strand; the history of the various Marian apparitions and the communities they inhabit is another. A third is the complex figure of the Virgin herself, her ancient history, her sexist appropriations, the protection and liberation she bestows on her followers. Yet another is the anthropology of pilgrimage and community, rendered accessible by clear writing.

And pulling it all together is the lyric voice of the author herself, from the wonderful portrayal, in the first chapter, of her own journey away from and back to Mary, to the traditional benedición with which her Oaxacan neighbors send her and her family back to the US at the conclusion. Indeed, it becomes clear as one drinks in this book that the “American Madonna” of the title is as much the
mother who brings her high-risk twins to term in the middle of her time in Mexico as it is the Madonna with whom she crosses and re-crosses borders throughout.  Those of us still inclined to wonder how the Virgin Mary can inspire communities and individuals to resist their oppression have only to read Deirdre’s mesmerizing connection of the bonding process between mother and child–in this case, her own–with the solidarity engendered by devotion to the Virgin Mary in Oaxaca. As she asks, “Can we from the dominant culture catch new glimpses of our mother–even when she does not look like us–in images that originated beyond our borders?”

You can link to Marian Ronan’s blog, “An American Catholic on the Margins of World
Christianity,” at http://marianronan.wordpress.com/

• Letter in Support the Leadership Conference of Women Religious
• Letter in support of NETWORK

If you want to learn more about what is happening in regards to the Women Religious here are a few more links:

Recommended reading:

• We are All Nuns: Nicholas Kristof, New York Times
• We are All Nuns: Mary E. Hunt, Religion Dispatches
• Bullying the Nuns: Garry Wills, NYT Book Review
• Rome vs. the Sisters: Marian Ronan
• The Inquisition of Today and U.S. Women Religious: Ivone GebaraWriter
• Having the Sisters’ Back: Jim Wallis, Sojourners
• WOC Responds to Vatican Crackdown on U.S. Nuns
• Bishops Play Church Queens As Pawns: Maureen Dowd, New York Times

When Trina was evacuated from her Grail work in Akhmim, Egypt in 1967 during the 6 Day War, she landed at the International Grail Center in Paris, and fortuitously found the Hope manuscript in one of the office cabinets. She began to carry the book around with her.  After she arrived back in the states in 1969, she had a providential encounter with a Paulist priest at a liturgical week event where she was attempting to sell Egyptian weaving from Akhmim. He agreed to read it back in his hotel room that evening and then asked her the following day to visit them in New York to discuss a publishing deal. She did visit and was given a publishing contract and $500 advance to complete her Theology of Hope.

One fateful April day in 1970 as Trina struggled to complete The Theology of Hope, the 2 caterpillars we know and love, Stripe & Yellow, crawled out of the earlier Hope manuscript and Hope For The Flowers was born. The story was 90 percent complete in that first day. Trina skipped meals as the story seemed to flow right out of her onto the paper. It took the next 2 years to add and polish the other 10 percent, hand-letter and laboriously hand separate each color and tint layer for all the illustrations in those pre-computer days.

With its 40th Anniversary coming up in September, we are risking to transform Hope For The Flowers again, this time into an animated film. It takes a lot of money to make a quality animation. On Valentine’s Day, the ever-growing Hope team launched the initial fundraising effort to raise enough money to create a quality pilot on www.Kickstarter.com, which is a “crowd-funding” platform for creative projects designed to create a community of producers.

Individuals may pledge any amount of money for the project and choose to receive one of the rewards (located at the right of the project page – see link) or “no reward at all” (they just want to support the project) and then they become part of the team and the creative process from start to finish.

Check out: http://kck.st/yAoyrw for more information (or a more easy to remember way is to visit www.kickstarter.com and enter “hope” in the search bar then you can access the project by clicking on the picture of the familiar yellow book as). It’s an exciting process with suspense and new people joining the Hope team and making comments every day.

The way Kickstarter works is you can pledge only with a credit card. You will ONLY be charged IF we reach our goal of $150,000 by April 14th at 6pm. If we do not hit our goal, your card will NEVER be charged. We happily accept checks directly, but you will not have your name as a backer on the Kickstarter list, just on our gratitude list and the Hope website!

(See every question about pledging Kickstarter you could ever have answered here: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/backing%20a%20project)

THANK YOU to all the Grail members who have joined the Hope team so far! We really appreciate your support with this exciting project!

THANK YOU also to The Grail Council which has agreed to serve as fiscal sponsor for larger contributions (details still being worked out with Noreen ~ stay tuned!).

P.S. (from Trina). I read Una’s draft with surprise and some emotion. To have her help and eagerness to spread the message of cooperation rather than competition which is at the core of Hope For The Flowers, and to have caught so much of the spirit and history of Hope and its coming out of the Grail’s and my own continual search for meaning, is a tremendous blessing to me. Una actually thrives with the possibilities and demands of the social media, which seems essential for major outreach in 2012. Some of you met Una at Grailville during the General Assembly.  

In her simple way, Yellow, our female hero, is the stronger and the leader of love. She is the first to truly understand that the juice inside pushing her, is asking her to not crawl back on the pillar just because all the other caterpillars seem to be climbing on it. She knew something wasn’t right and resisted even when her dear love, Stripe, pushed her to go back with him. Broken-hearted, but willing to wait rather than do something she didn’t believe in, she wandered. When she sees an old Caterpillar who seems all twisted up in something, she asks the essential Grail question in a very basic and simple way, “You seemed in trouble.” “Can I help?”  

In response to her question she is given the gift of understanding her own destiny –  accept the cocoon and be transformed. She “risked for a butterfly,” is transformed and is able to inspire her love to change his life. At the end, without either of them knowing the further amazing results of their own change, the whole horrible pillar dissolves.  And there is lots more “Hope For The Flowers.”