Opening
Opening ...
I had the privilege of accompanying Michele during those adventurous and challenging last eight years. We were true soul friends, a "lightning rod" (her words) for one another's spiritual and personal growth. Even with her many health and financial concerns, these did not deter Michele from an ardent passion to use her best gifts. I was all in to give her whatever was needed for a last good run at her life.
Michele dictated her memoir during the year and a half prior to her death. Although she was an extraordinary writer and poet, by this time her eyesight and health were diminishing. Why did she expend the last of her best energies in this way? Perhaps it was because many people over the years had asked her to. As with her many callings - a Sister of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary, a professor of English literature and women's studies, a published poet and accomplished pianist, spiritual aspirant and mentor, cherished friend, and a bishop in the Roman Catholic tradition - Michele rarely said no to an invitation.
Throughout her life and without hesitation, Michele migrated wherever she felt called. She spread her wings and travelled widely on two continents: North America and Europe. When she became a priest and then bishop, her migrancy intensified. I'm certain with better health and financial resources, she would have continued expanding her horizons.
As a priest and then a bishop, Michele navigated the development of our Heart of Compassion International Faith Community in Windsor, Ontario, Canada and our burgeoning international women priest movement with an incisive mind, spiritual wisdom, political savvy, and a playful optimism. She was remarkably patient with us as we floundered about, personally and collectively, to embrace the values of our women priest movement: inclusivity, equality, non-clericalism, and justice-seeking.
Michele was genuinely hospitable to differences, and she used every opportunity to affirm and support our empowerment as women. She enthusiastically opened her table and home where we gathered to eat, sing, dance, laugh, and learn. Her best times were when we prayed our liturgies, whether in our chapel at Cardinal Place or in a house church setting.
Michele had endured significant abuses throughout her life, first by her adoptive father and then within family, religious, and health care systems. She knew the terrain of oppression and injustice but she rarely played the role of victim. With an uncanny survivor's verve, Michele found ways to dodge potential harm with an outward quietude, while quelling any underlying fear. In adversity, she had a "face like flint," an agile facility to meet the changing landscape of life with outward steadiness and deep listening. These qualities constituted the essential ingredients for being a bishop, a vocation she claimed fulfilled all her spiritual hopes and drew upon the accumulated wealth of her many life experiences.
Michele consistently sought healing for her mental and physical health and, even toward the end of her life, she was frequently open to examine her behaviours, in light of how earlier abuses had shaped her. Michele was a saint and she wasn't perfect. She had the humility to fall and to recover, to dust off her sandals and to walk on water again.
When Michele's health crashed, it was like climbing a mountain to surrender her fierce independence in favour of receiving our care. She did. And when she did, like everything else Michele put her mind to, she taught us, through her vulnerability and frailty, about our Divine-Human condition. We learned about giving compassionately and to reverence aging and dying through a spiritual lens. Michele raised our consciousness such that we could find ourselves freed and, oftentimes, this exacted a toll on her and us. In her thinking, this was the path of the transformational journey. She cared deeply about our soul development. How else would we discover the way of Jesus Christ?
In the last two years of her life, Michele was repeatedly struck with Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome, an affliction from early childhood. Our faith community moved her from an upper-level of a house (what we fondly named the ARCWP House of Hospitality) to a retirement home at Cardinal Place, a former convent of the Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary. Her next move was into long-term care a few months prior to the Covid-19 epidemic, when Michele needed additional medical support to manage her episodes. The isolation, while recuperative, was psychologically demanding. Many of the later chapters of this memoir were dictated or edited by phone from her room there.
Finally, Rhea from our faith community agreed for Michele to move into her apartment on the Detroit River. Life slowed to a mystic's pace. In addition to external health care providers, our faith community offered personal care support: preparing specialized food, driving her to appointments, and administering medications. Ultimately, we tended Michele in her dying process until four days before her death when pain management was less achievable.
With each of these transitions, I marveled at Michele's resilience. I once said to her, "You never give up."
"Why would I?" was her response.
At the beginning and end of her life Michele had pet canaries. The last ones had their home in a church-like cage at Cardinal Place. The skittery, yellow canary's name was Kairos (meaning non-ordinary time) and the contemplative, flaming orange bird was called Magda (short for Mary Magdalene). We enjoyed singing to and with them. Sometimes, Michele would pull out her buffalo drum and accompany our feathered friends.
Michele died on Sunday, October 11, 2020 on our Canadian Thanksgiving weekend at Y Emara Hospice of complications associated with Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome. Rhea was with her. I arrived soon thereafter. As Michele had requested, we anointed her body and shrouded her in white fabric. I read from scripture and we prayed a farewell to her. On All Saints Day (November 1), Suzanne, Rhea, and I held Michele's Mass of Resurrection in an online ceremony. Friends locally and from all over the globe attended. The next day, we cast her cremated remains into the mighty winds and waves of Lake Erie.
Michele, we miss you completely.
I trust you, our readers, will be inspired by Birdwoman: Memoir of a Migrant Mystic as I have been by this remarkable woman of faith and tenacity.
May Wisdom Sophia guide your every step.
Barbara Billey
Priestess, ARCWP
Intima-Anima Press
Windsor, Ontario, Canada
(519) 735-3943