Jubilee Time: Celebrating Women, Spirit, And The Advent Of Age - Softcover

Maria Harris was a writer, speaker, and advocate for religious education. A former member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, Maria dedicated her life to teaching and leading Catholic parochial schools. In addition to her grade school work, Harris was a very successful teacher of higher education at Immaculate Conception seminary, Andover Newton Theological School, and Fordham University.

INTRODUCTION
 
You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall be to you forty-nine years. Then you shall hallow the fiftieth year. It shall be a jubilee for you.
Lev. 25:8, 10
 
With these words as summons, I invite you to enter Jubilee Time. I ask you to join me in exploring the biblical Jubilee, a feast celebrating the fiftieth year and providing the basis of a spirituality for women in the second half of life. Too little known, the many facets of Jubilee are gifts to every woman facing who she is now and what she might become in the years and decades following her fiftieth birthday.
 
The first mention of Jubilee occurs in the Hebrew Bible, in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Book of Leviticus. There, a caring, attentive God speaks to a weary, exhausted people who are entering a new chapter in their lives. “When you enter the land I am giving you,” says this God, “the land shall observe a Sabbath. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyards and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land, a Sabbath for the Lord.”
 
This people’s God begins by establishing a foundation of rest and re-creation—a spirituality—for them. From the beginning of their sojourn in the new land, they are to alternate work and withdrawal from work. This creates a rhythmic pattern that increases in momentum with every seven-year cycle. During those sabbatical years, they are to step back from their ordinary routines and practice a reverent attitude toward one another, the land, and themselves. They are to forgive debts and return property. They are to honor the Divine Mystery Who is their origin. As they do they become readied for the great ritual of Jubilee.
 
Finally it arrives:
 
You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land.
 
   And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you; you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.
 
   That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you. (Lev. 25:8–12)
 
Ceasing work the way Jubilee commands—no sowing, reaping, or harvesting—is not a counsel to idleness. Instead, it is an opportunity to begin a process and to fashion an approach to life that embodies a very specific spirituality. This spirituality emerges from the command to hallow the fiftieth year. For once the fiftieth year arrives, work differing from that of earlier decades takes precedence. The work involves crossing boundaries, pausing to hallow our lives and our land, and proclaiming liberty to all the earth’s inhabitants. It involves revisiting and honoring ancestors, making mature assessments and judgments, and giving shape to individual stories. Each of these eventually spills over into a great song of praise and gratitude that affirms and completes life, even in the face of inevitable death.
 
In Jubilee Time, I offer each of these works as a component of spirituality for women in life’s second half. Although the biblical Jubilee is just as appropriate for men as for women, I have found that a variety of social, spiritual, historical, and biological factors mark the years after fifty as an especially fruitful time in the lives of women, and that our particular era is ripe with conditions that foster this fruitfulness.
 
I also offer each of these works as a ritual, a consciously shaped process and way of acting that includes specific steps. Rituals help particular groups of people to interpret themselves at important times in their lives: people in the United States celebrate the memory of their country’s birth on the Fourth of July; the Jones family gathers for Susan and Samuel’s wedding; the senior class graduates from high school as a rite of passage into adult life. But rituals also carry a spiritual power, especially when associated with the inner life. They point beyond what ordinary speech and action can convey.
 
Drawing on Jubilee, the rituals in this book are designed to help women interpret the second half of their lives. The first ritual is Crossing the Threshold, based on the biblical experience of entering a new land, and designed for women making the rite of passage into the land of age. This is followed by the Hallowing of Sabbath, a response to the command to “keep a Sabbath of complete rest,” and to the older woman’s discovery that as she takes possession of her life she needs on occasion to say no. Then comes the ritual of Proclaiming Freedom, which observes the Jubilee counsel to “proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” and to work for justice toward everyone, including our older selves. This leads into the Jubilee Journeys, the ritual returns to place and people, family and heritage—as important to women of age as it was to the first Jubilarians.
 
Having made the return to place and people, the next two rituals enable us to return to ourselves. One, based on Jubilee’s commands to “count off” and examine our relations to possessions, power, and persons, helps us take an Inventory of our lives. Having done that, the Jubilee woman can then accomplish the return to herself made possible by memory. Imitating the first Jubilee people, whose story begins with the counsel, “Remember: I your God led you out of the land of Egypt and into the land of Canaan,” we engage in the ritual act of Telling Our Story, including the naming of our own Egypts and our own Canaans.
 
These rituals culminate in a final step, based on the opening verses of Jubilee but equally fitting at its conclusion: “You shall have the trumpet sounded loud; you shall have the trumpet sounded loud throughout all your land. For it is a jubilee: it shall be holy to you.” The time has come for celebration, festivity, and thanksgiving. The time has come to render thanks for a life, for a calling, for a Giver at the heart of it all. The time has come to sing the Song of Gratitude.
 
The Hebrew word yobel, translated as “trumpet,” is the word for a ram’s horn sounded in times of celebration and rejoicing. Besides the Jubilee citation in the Book of Leviticus, the sixth chapter of Joshua mentions the yobel, when the trumpet sounds and the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. Yobel is one of the words from which we get the more familiar jubilee. The other is the verb ybl, which means a royal release from bondage and a return or a bringing back.
 
Both derivations give important insights into Jubilee Time. Each of Jubilee’s rituals has an essential connection to release, return, and forgiveness, especially toward those undergoing crushing debt or loss of land. Each of the rituals is also cause for celebration. As the basis of a spirituality for women living in Jubilee Time, each acts as a touchstone and a promise. For like those ancient Israelites, we too are entering a period of royal release, freed to become all that we are meant to be, committed to bringing the walls of ageism tumbling down at last. For those of us who are or are about to become Jubilee women, the trumpet is sounding.