Abundance flows in your steps

All of these look to you
to give them their food in due season.
You give it, they gather it up:
you open their hands, they have their fill.
Ps 104:27-28

Four years ago I planted three (3, yes 3) small thornless raspberry canes in my backyard along the edge of a raised bed. This year, they've taken over both beds and the aisle between them and Math Man suggests we won't be able to get out the back door soon. But we have raspberries, an abundance of raspberries. Starting last weekend I could walk out (barely) the back door and fill my bowl for breakfast. They were ripening almost faster than we could eat them. Then yesterday I took my bowl out -- to find none. Not one red, ripe berry to be found. "A break," I thought, "tomorrow, there will be even more." Except there weren't. The birds have found the feast. And they have their fill - as the psalm says.

I don't mind sharing, but I'm having a hard time watching all of the berries go to feeding the multitudes. I can hear my Carmelite friend's voice: "Having issues with detachment, my dear?" Or is my berry desire a "disordered attachment" to use Ignatius' language?

I think it might be time for some netting, that's what I think! Then I, too, might have my fill.

Abundance flows in your steps... (Ps 65:12)

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No column this week, the Catholic Standard and Times is on their summer schedule.

Last Chance

Today is the last day to vote for the Catholic New Media Awards...will anyone beat "What Does the Prayer Really Say"? Vote for me instead...or The Deacon's Bench or Adam's Ale or....

Contemplative Sailing: Waiting on Grace

The gang went sailing today, hoping for good wind and no rain or thunder. The forecast called for "winds variable between 5 and 10 mph" - and the weather was as advertised. I took the boat out mid afternoon and as soon as I got to the far side of the lake, the wind died to a whisper. I set my sail, and patiently drifted back. There was nothing else to do - other than hold my course and contemplate. I felt like I was waiting on grace. I'd done my part, now it was in the hands of God - who sends the winds or not!

Later in the afternoon the wind started to pick up as the promised front moved through. Here I'm hiked all the way out to hold the boat down! I had one gib where I thought I might end up in the water.

Column: Where is My God?

Matthew Spotts' writing about his experiences with the homeless in Washington DC, as well as my own encounters sketched here, were the seeds for this piece. I learned the story of the monks of Tibhirine from a poem by Marilyn Nelson, The Contemplative Life, published in Image (61, p. 15).

Abba Jacob wiped his eyes.
Interval of birdsong from the veranda.

He's seeing not an abstract God,
but a God who has assumed a face,
a God who shows him this face
in every one of those Muslim brothers and sisters,
including the one who kills him.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 25 June 2009.

My tears became my bread day and night, as they said to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” — Ps. 42:3

We have the same conversation each time we meet. Most often he happens upon me sitting in the pews of the city church where my spiritual director lives, though once we met on the street outside.

“What is your parish?” he wants to know.

“Our Mother of Good Counsel.”

“In Bryn Mawr?”

“Yes.” I am terse as he.

“Why are you here?”

“To pray.”

“What are you praying for?” And here is where I inevitably falter, faced with a question I’m unwilling to answer, even to myself.

At first my reaction was irritation. I’m there to gather my thoughts before I see my director, to slow down, to be still before God. This felt like an intrusion. “Why are you here?” I would think. Until the day it occurred to me that I was walking out of this recurring, slightly exasperating conversation into a recurring one with my director that sounded the very same themes: “How is your prayer?” he asks.

The psalmist struggles with these questions, too. “Where is your God?” he is asked. “Where is my God?” I wonder. Mother Teresa spoke of encountering Christ in His most distressing disguises, in the poor, the neglected and the rejected. The people who make us uncomfortable. Is this Christ standing here before me, distressing me with questions? Is this the God for whom I eat salt tears, for whom I thirst?

Laid out here on paper, the answer seems easy. Yes. Yet when I’m confronting the reality in the aisle of Old St. Joe’s, my response seems muddled and I wonder what to do.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ reminds us that in caring for our brothers and sisters, particularly those on the margins, we are caring for Him. Mother Teresa was so drawn to Christ in these challenging guises that she founded a religious order to care for the poor and dying. Yet John Chrysostom, in reflecting on Matthew, knew that meeting Christ in these places was potentially uncomfortable. “And what about His hunger, cold, chains, nakedness and sickness? What about His homelessness? Are these sufferings not sufficient to overcome your alienation?” Or to overcome my reluctance to answer?

While we might think it enough in these moments to care for the need that immediately presents itself, Jesus invites us to enter more deeply into a relationship. To listen to what He is asking and to respond, in word as well as deed. To engage him in conversation, to answer hard questions.

What might we say to Christ encountered under difficult and even harrowing circumstances? Perhaps thank you. In 1996 seven Trappist monks of the Abbey of Tibhirine in Algeria were brutally murdered. The monks had known they were in danger, but mindful of their vow of stability they remained, continuing to be present to their neighbors who were not able to flee. Prior Christian de Cherge left behind a letter with a message for his killers “who would not be aware of what [they] were doing. “Thank you,” he said, “for in you, too, I see the face of God.”

Where is my God? He walks among us, bearing the welcome embraces of friends and the disconcerting questions of strangers. What will I say the next time Christ, in a distressing disguise, walks up to me and asks, “What are you praying for?” I’m praying for gratitude, for the gift of His presence in your presence.

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God and judge of all, You show us the way to Your kingdom is through humility and service. Keep us true to the path of justice and give us the reward promised to those who make a place for the rejected and the poor. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen. — Opening prayer, 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Ignatian Principles

I left early Friday morning on a train to New York City -- with plan to see my brother midday (and give the lunch talk where he works), then out to Fordham for a weekend conference on Ignatian spirituality - organized by the Jesuit Collaborative. I elected the theology track, the focus of the conference was on the Foundation and Principle, which more or less frames Ignatius' pre-requisites for giving the Exercises.

Four hundred people came, three hundred and ninety eight strangers and the director who gave me the Exercises - who walked in the door of the registration area right after I did. I had no idea he would be there (though in retrospect I might have expected it), and with so many people and so many possible tracks, I might never have seen him otherwise. On the other hand, when quite a few in the crowd are trained spiritual directors, adept at making people feel welcome, it's hard to remain strangers - I left knowing far more people than Jim Carr, SJ.

I enjoyed the talk by Ed McCormack from WTU on the mystical underpinnings of Ignatius' spirituality most of all - it made me miss my theology courses (though not quite enough to sign up for one!). The conference was bilingual, and it was nice to realize that I would respond in the right language in the elevator. The oddest thing was to share a suite with two other (I presume) women - neither of whom I ever saw. Our schedules were totally off. (The first night I crashed early - Barnacle Boy had been up the night before with a bad asthma attack, so I too, had been awake.) The boys teased me about traveling light - "you are a woman of the Exercises" they joked. My bags for the weekend are in the photo - there would have been a bit less if I hadn't talked at DESRES.

My favorite translation of the Foundation and Principle is the one by David Fleming, SJ from which this excerpt is taken:

We should not fix our desires on health or sickness,
wealth or poverty, success or failure,
a long life or short one.
For everything has the potential of calling
forth in us a deeper response to our life in God.
Our only desire and our one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life in me.

- St. Ignatius as paraphrased by David L. Fleming, S.J.