Anna in the temple

 

I sat in the last pew in my parish church. Praying, enfolded in the syrupy warmth of a late summer day, alone except for God, and the spirits of all those who’d prayed here before me.  The light of the prescence lamp danced in the dimness of the chancel, ivory walls smudged with color from the stained glass windows. Cicadas buzzed, my phone did not. 

Prayer in this space seemed to be as simple as breathing.  Like the prophetess Anna, who Luke tells us never left the Temple, I longed to stay here, caught up in beauty, in prayer — caught up in God — for the rest of my days. Instead I went home and made dinner.

As I chopped vegetables I thought of a scene in the film Into Great Silence, which chronicles a year in a centuries-old Carthusian monastery. A monk is chopping celery in silence, awash in light from the kitchen window. The thunk of his knife on the well-worn cutting board echoed the rhythm of the psalms the monks chanted day in and day out, making a prayer of the ordinary.

I worry that I want prayer to be an extraordinary experience. That I want to keep prayer reserved to sacred spaces, to come to prayer completely tidy, my metaphorical counters cleared and the dishes washed, not up to my elbows in suds facing a sinkful of pots.  I want to be eloquent, I want to be silent and composed before the Creator of all things, I want to be wholly present. I want to be holy.

But I suspect God is unbothered by the awkwardness of my prayers or the unpretentious surroundings in which I make them. He is as delighted to join me in the kitchen amid the potato peelings and unwashed pots as he is to find me quiet and still before the tabernacle. As Teresa of Avila wryly told her Carmelite sisters, “entre los pucheros anda el Señor”. If you are in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots and pans.  Whether in the temple like Anna or in the kitchen like St. Teresa, God besieges us.

As extraordinary as it is to be drawn into a relationship with the immanent and transcendent Triune God, prayer is meant to be an ordinary part of our lives. Like the making of dinner and doing the dishes, it is what sustains us. In his short book, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer, theologian Karl Rahner, SJ advised, “Pray every day and pray the everyday.” 

Like the desert fathers who wove baskets to the simple rhythm of the Jesus prayer — Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me — ask for mercy as you peel the potatoes, place yourself in the presence of God as you fold the laundry. Say grace before your midmorning cup of coffee, trace the sign of the cross on your child’s forehead before they go to sleep. Bless the ordinary moments, every day. 

And perhaps then we can be like Anna,  praying night and day in the temple of this world, knowing every space holy, every moment sacred.

— February 2021 Opening essay in Give Us This Day

Time present and time past: 2025 edition

 

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”  — TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

The winds are howling outside, gusting to 40 mph and more. Stripping off the few leaves still clinging to the pin oak and sending the last bits of 2025 tumbling down the block. Time past tangles with time future at this, the inflection point between years.

Time past? Steeped came out in paperback. I am in my last year teaching, retiring from Bryn Mawr at the end of the spring semester. (Forty years has gone very fast.) Math Guy and his beloved got married in a warm and sun-kissed garden in Philadelphia. Math Man won a golf tournament in Scotland. The apples did not fall far from the tree. Crash has a book out, which he co-edited.  Math Guy has a couple of papers out this year, including one in the Mathematical Monthly, a plum spot to publish I am given to understand.

I wrote:

• 60 blog posts (not including this one, and the most I have written for the blog since 2018
• 4 essays for Nature Chemistry (on acknowledgements, aliens (!), virtuous chemists, and being opinionated)
• 3 reflections in Give Us This Day (Holy Thursday, feasts of St. Thomas and St. Cecilia)
• 3 op-eds in the Philadelphia Inquirer (decrying the NIH cuts, on the loss of Pope Francis, on the president’s quasi-endorsement of health scams)

…and a book of Lenten reflections, coming out from Liturgical Press next fall.

I live blogged the papal conclave for the Inquirer, watching the Holy See gulls on the roof for hours on end and delighted to see an Augustinian from Chicago succeed Pope Francis.

I talked tea up and down the East Coast, and on radio programs in both hemispheres. I gave a half dozen retreats. I gave one last research talk. I gave the charge to the senior class at Convocation in September, the class that I will walk out of Bryn Mawr with. 

I solved the Wordle 500 days in a row and Math Guy and I have jointly solved the NYTimes crossword 1500 days running. I became a gym rat, clocking hours every week on the rowing machine and learning to bench press. Both serious cardio and weight lifting have been shown to slow the progression of Parkinson's, the former is in Phase III trials at the moment. 

Time future? I am working on a new book (women in chemistry). Sketching out a book proposal, or perhaps two. There are two more reflections queued up for Give Us This Day. Parkinson’s continues to be part of my daily reality. I am beyond grateful for the pair of molecules that have given me back so much of what I had lost, and for the care team (and the prayers) that help me make the most of what I have. 

Time present? My desk, I would like to see the surface of the second desk in my home office. A draft for a parish mission coming up in about a month. The laundry, which is certainly contained in time past and time future both.  And regardless, it will be 2026.

Happy New Year!

Chewing gum and baling wire

I grew up in rural Illinois, in a small dairy farming town west of Chicago. I belonged to 4-H. There was no store to make a quick run to if you ran out of something, so an expression I learned early was that things could be held together with chewing gum and baling wire. (It also means I know what baling wire is, it’s used to tie up bales of hay, and gets re-used for lots of ad hoc repairs.)

About 5 years ago my right hand got glitchy, so between books I took myself to see the orthopedic hand surgeon. His conservative (and effective) remedy was a small off the shelf splint which kept the joint stable. Lately the splint hasn’t been quite enough, and another joint has gotten into the act. A return trip to the orthopedic practice, and a consult with two amazing physical therapists who put their heads together to figure out how to stabilize the joints and still let me type and I now have two snazzy custom splints to wear when I am at the keyboard. They are fabulous, and fabulously violet. Most fabulously of all they work, so I can work. 

I feel a bit like I am held together by chewing gum and baling wire, but remain grateful for people who can problem solve.

The Spirit hovers over the chaos...and Tim Horton's

Actual photo of Holy Spirit on the streets of
Rome checking on a very tired and hot
pilgrim walking to the Holy Door in the 
Jubilee Year of mercy. 
 

"This morning, a few of the monks had their chapel service at St. Timothy of Horton's, a coffee shop down the road. After sharing prayers and singing in four-part harmony, "The Lone Wild Bird" to a shocked crowd of retirees and truckers, they prayed for the tired and weary souls going through the Drive-Thru. The Spirit doesn't just hover over altars; She hovers over coffee tables, Tim Bits, and parking lots, too." — from a post by The Unvirtuous Abbey

In the midst of the end of the semester chaos, I wouldn't mind finding a group of monks (or anyone for that matter) at Lancaster and Pennswood praying for the tired and weary souls trying to find a parking space at Acme and grab the half gallon of milk they forgot and get home in time to make dinner before the kid's concert tonight. What would happen if the Augustinians moved Morning Prayer outside occasionally, setting up the choir on either side of the street instead of on either side of the chapel, pitching the psalms back and forth over the traffic?

I am also certain that the Holy Spirit hovers over chaos by preference, breathing on it and trying to coax it into shape. This post reminds me of a line in Wendell Berry's How to be a poet: "There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." Or maybe of the story of the desert father Abba Bessarion walking by the sea with his thirsty young companion: "God is here, God is everywhere."

I sometimes think we pull too many punches when we pray. I confess I am guilty of writing glossy but vague prayers. I pray for "the leaders of nations, that they might govern with justice and mercy" when I really mean, "Dear God, please send an angelic horde down to remind the leaders of my government that making children go hungry is a grievous sin; that mercy is due to immigrants as much as to citizens, for we are all children of God, images of the Divine; and that we should be distributing plowshares, not weapons of mass destruction. Amen?" I realize God knows far better than I just what is going on, so in that sense it doesn't matter, but the point of these intercessory prayers isn't to get onto God's to-do list. The point is, as Tomáš Halík notes in his book, Touch the Wounds, to open a dialog with God to discover just what we can (and cannot) do to address the problem.

---

The Unvirtuous Abbey has been manifesting hope and humor on social media for many years. As a sometimes writing of intercessions for my parish, I appreciate their incisive and slightly sarcastic prayers —"For those who claim to know “what God intends” when most of us can’t figure out what our cat wants, we pray. " (Unvirtuous Abbey (@UnvirtuousAbbey) October 24, 2012).

Want to know more about the Unvirtuous Abbey? Here are a couple of interviews from years past. If you are still on social media (and I completely understand if you are not), you can catch them on Bluesky and Facebook.

Jesuit Post interview

Practical Catholic interview

A cup of grace

 

"You know that you are drinking a cloud; you are drinking the rain. The tea contains the whole universe.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh, How to Eat

How much grace is there in a cup of tea? Or is it all grace? If all the universe is caught in my cup,  can it be otherwise? 

After two weeks of a Goldilocks diet (nothing too hot, nothing too cold, nothing with too much texture...or I suppose, too little) I was cleared last week to eat pretty much what I please. Despite my general inclinations toward staying firmly in Advent and not anticipating the upcoming solemnity of the Nativity, "Gloria in excelsis Deo!” was my refrain of the day.

This afternoon's cup of hot tea was glorious, definitely a grace of the day (maybe the week).  Hot,  sweet, fragrant, the cup warm in my hands, its steam swirled up like incense. There is strength in there, cloaked in caffeine's bracing bite. Like Isaiah’s parched desert steppe I come to life.

I think I like my grace like my tea: fragrant and bracing.