Quantum Theology

Weather prediction

2012-01-30T22:01:00.004-05:00

I'm playing with text analysis for my sabbatical project, and my blog provides a ready source of data. One of the top search queries that lands at my blog is "snow day prayer" which lands at this column I wrote for the Catholic Standard & Times last winter (when it was much snowier).

Several years ago, Google noted that they could use search queries to track influenza cases. (For all the gory details, read the paper in Nature.) If I look at where the queries originate, I can do the same thing with respect to the snow prediction.

God walks among the pots and pans

2012-01-29T18:33:00.008-05:00

I've started blogging occasionally at This Ignatian Life. The blog explores the lived traditions of Ignatian spirituality, and current bloggers range from Jesuit scholastic Paul Lickteig to David Bayne who worked with street children in Argentina and Lisa Kelly, a mother and missionary. My first post is up:

"....what I did get was a place to pray. As I spackled and sanded yesterday afternoon, my mind wandered back to the First Week of the Exercises, meditating on the ways in which my life is dinged and damaged, and the world likewise. Much like the laundry room of my First Week, this 5 foot square space encouraged meditations on failure and redemption.

My impromptu orationis angulus has vanished. The walls are done, the drop cloth folded up, the paint brushes are drying by the basement sink. What remains, though, is a potent composition of place, a modern riff on Isaiah’s image of clay and potter: Yet, LORD, you are our father; we are the clay and you our potter: we are all the work of your hand. I can smell the paint, hear the scritch of the sandpaper, see the flecks of paint on the window, feel the smoothness of the sanded patch. I imagine God at work, perched precariously on a ladder, working cheerfully even in this cramped and awkward space."

Read the whole thing here.

Writing prompts

2012-01-27T17:34:00.005-05:00

lichen

Beatrix Potter

children's literature

windy

Mary Poppins

umbrellas

I am prompted to recall that my umbrella is still at English House, where I had been writing.

Photo is of my umbrella in Kyoto. And properly prompted, I once again I am in possession of it.

A well-wintered life

2012-01-26T18:48:00.004-05:00

(WARNING: substantial chemistry content. Theologians and others take a deep breath, I promise there will not be a quiz and that there's a point beyond the chemistry.)

The other day the Boy (who I'm coaching in thermochemistry for Science Olympiad) wondered why the freezing point of water on the Fahrenheit scale was 32^o, and the boiling point 212^o? (The Celsius scale is pinned to the freezing and boiling points of water - a sensible scheme.) I admit I had never given it much thought. Turns out that zero on the Fahrenheit scale is defined as the temperature of a "frigorific" mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride in a 1:1:1 ratio. (There are many such mixtures, which produce baths of a particular temperature, useful in the days before refrigerators when you needed to produce artificial cold.)

I had never encountered the work before despite years of teaching thermodynamics (frankly, it sounds a bit too pseudo-sciency for my taste - and I do have opinions about what sounds good in a science term) and headed for the OED (the online version, not the one that Math Man brought as his dowry), to find that it is attributed to Robert Boyle in the 17th century.

As it turns out, I was more intrigued by a turn of phrase in one of the quotes given under the figurative meaning: "a well-wintered life..." I tracked down the 19th century reference in Google books to find that well-wintered meant reflective. Winter was a time to be indoors, a time of darkness, a time of year that encouraged — nigh on insisted upon — introspection and stillness: no central heating, no electric lights in those days. You stayed indoors if you could and wrapped up.

How well-wintered is my life? I'm on sabbatical leave, wrapped up in my writing and in my research, but also trying to spend some time in reflection about life. And I'm starting to warm to the idea of wintering over, of letting some things sit out this time. What will happen if I let the ground in which these seeds are planted heave up with the frost, be blanketed with snow, and softened by the melt? God knows.

[Aside: The author rather appallingly posits the opposite as well, those living in the tropics, where light and warmth abound no matter what the season are doomed to shallow living.]

Photo is from a well-wintered walk at Wernersville.

Column: Expansive blessings

2012-01-25T21:55:00.003-05:00

I really was terrified of choking on a fish bone when I was little. I ate fish reluctantly in those days and only once it had been smothered in bright orange Kraft French dressing.

The spelling of Blaise here is not the spelling that is used in either Butler's lives on the saints (I have all 5 volumes on my iPad, is that at all eccentric?) or in the Roman breviary - both of which use "Blase"...

This column appeared in the February 2012 issue of the Catholic Standard & Times.

With the crossed candles touched to the throat of each person, the celebrant says immediately: Through the intercession of Saint Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God deliver you from every disease of the throat and from every other illness. — From the Book of Blessings

Difficult to come by in my tiny landlocked Midwest town, and not within the grocery budget when it was, fresh fish was not often on the menu when I was a young girl. Instead Friday dinners alternated between tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese. My mother, raised on the East Coast, missed fresh fish, and she couldn't figure out why I didn't share her enthusiasm when it made a rare appearance on our table. For this, I blame St. Blaise.

My childhood memories of the feast of St. Blaise are ones of damp wool and beeswax, of a warmly lit church and cold dark winds that sullenly shook the windows, hoping to find a way in. But it was the story of the fishbone that really stuck.

Little is known of St. Blaise's life, he was perhaps the bishop of Sebaste in the 4th century, who died a martyr for the faith. The story of St. Blaise that captured my imagination was of a mother brought her son to the bishop with a fish bone stuck in his throat. St. Blaise prayed and the young boy was healed.

When I was five, the enduring message of the story of St. Blaise (alas) seemed to be, "watch out for bones when you eat fish." Almost five decades later, it reminds me that the stories we tell of the saints and blesseds have an enduring power to them, a way of engaging our imaginations. St. Augustine wrote that we remember the particular deeds of the saints and martyrs "to excite us to imitate them and to obtain a share in their merits, and the assistance of their prayers."

St. Augustine's commentary challenges me to think beyond the assistance that St. Blaise may offer me or what merits he might be inclined to share with me, and to wonder in what way a suburban mother of teen-agers might be moved to imitate a 4th century bishop. What is there in St. Blaise's life that could excite me to similar feats of virtue?

In the many miracle tales told of St. Blaise, from the healing of the young boy to the return of a widow's stolen pig, he looks for help from God not only for the situation in front of him, but for the broader world. His prayers were always simultaneously for the here and now and the people of God in difficulties in every place and time. I'm quick to pray for the safety of my children each night, but do I remember to pray for other mothers' children? In asking for healing for my father, do I think to pray for the elderly who suffer with chronic pain?

I still get my throat blessed each February 3rd. No longer terrified of choking on a fish bone -- hoping that St. Blaise would notice the prayers of one small girl in a town far away in time and space — I find now in the crossed candles and Triune blessing more than an assurance that God is concerned with our worries (even if they are as irrational as mine over stray fish bones). God's grace spills over, reaching beyond the needs of one to all His people until the end of time.

Hear, O Lord, the supplications your people make,
under the patronage of the martyr Saint Blaise,
and grant that they may rejoice in peace in this present life,
and find help for life eternal. Amen. – From the closing prayer for the feast of St. Blaise.

Bound by prayer

2012-01-21T19:39:00.003-05:00

Bound by prayer

"Do you pray the Jesus prayer?" came the question from the gentleman I'd been introduced to a few minute before. "Are you Orthodox?" "No." (Well, yes, in the sense of orthodox, but I knew what he meant.) The rest of the table gave us a puzzled look, but the subject vanishes as people want to know how the start of my sabbatical is going.

I had made an appointment for sacramental shriving this week while I was up to see Patient Spiritual Director and to take a couple of days to reflect on where I might be going with this sabbatical. It was the feast of St. Anthony of Egypt and my confessor had used one of the apophthegmata of Anthony during his homily at the midday Mass (where he also noted that this St. Anthony is not the same as this St. Anthony).

After we celebrated the sacrament, I asked Lanky Jesuit for another favor - would he bless the prayer rope I wear around my wrist? The what? I handed it over and mentioned that it was apropos to bless it today as the method for tying the knots is attributed to St. Anthony of Egypt. He tied knots in a cord to keep track of his prayers, and the devil kept untying them. An angel then taught Anthony these seven-fold knots, crosses layered over crosses that the devil couldn't touch.

Prayer ropes are traditionally worn by Orthodox religious wrapped around their left wrist as a reminder to pray, but can be worn by anyone who wishes to keep to the discipline. Prayers on the knots can substitute in a pinch (and with appropriate direction from a spiritual father or superior) for one's Office. The Jesus prayer is one traditional prayer said on the rope, but others can be as well. It can be used to keep track of prostrations in prayer, if that's part of your practice. Though it's not a rosary, prayers to the Theotokos can be said on it as well. It differs from a rosary in that it's strictly for private prayer.

I've worn a chotki around my wrist for the last several years, as a reminder to "pray at all times." It's not the traditional 100 knots version with a tassel (to soak up your tears), but 33 knots tied in black wool, in groups of 11, with a simple cross of knots at the end. It's gone unnoticed, or at least unmentioned, all this time. Now twice in one day, I'm answering questions about it. I'm attributing this to St. Anthony....

Aside: The reason I asked to have my chotki blessed is because I lost the one I'd been wearing, somewhere in the potted plants at church (I was helping move stuff...) Perhaps I should have prayed to the other St. Anthony for it's return.

Second aside: Crash, who was reading this over my shoulder — we are traveling by train to Boston — tells me it's not gone unnoticed, just unmentioned.

Billy Collins on lanyards and helminthology

2012-01-18T16:20:00.004-05:00

I'm reading Billy Collins' The Trouble with Poetry. I love the rich imagery and dashing snark that characterize Collins' poetry -" The Introduction": "And you're all familiar with helminthology? It's the science of worms." It's good commuting reading, there's time to make friends with a poem or two on each leg of my journey. Beside the seriously refusing to take itself seriously "The Introduction" the collection includes "The Lanyard":

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past —
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

That stanza gave me a Proustian push into the past as well. I can see the picnic bench set out at the summer rec program, the spools of plastic strips, smell the warm blacktop and feel the whisper of my seersucker sundress in the early morning breeze that still held a touch of the cool of the night. I can't remember how many of these I made, and as far as I know none survived, but I can remember my delight when I mastered a spiral form, rather than the simple square. I wondered if kids still made these, or if like the translucent plastic flowers we made by dipping wires into a solution that smelled like my dad's lab, they were creations of memory only.

Yes, they are still made. The stuff from which they are made is called by some gimp, the craft itself is called boondoggle or scoubi. Apparently it's recently been a rage in the UK to make zipper pulls from it. It sounds more useful than my lanyards.

Photo is from Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Spirit 2-2-0

2012-01-15T22:40:00.006-05:00

Dominus vobiscum.

Et cum spiritu tuo.

Back in the not quite ancient days of phone systems, before 10-digit dialing and texts, phone numbers came as two letters and five numbers. In kindergarten I learned my phone number as MOntrose 5-0947. My entire village was on the Montrose exchange.

When I was small, my parents had only one car and so once a week, in order to have the car to shop and run errands, my mother would get us up early, dress us and pack however many kids there were at the time into the car and drive my dad to the next stop on his carpool. The process was reversed in the evening. Each trip seemed like an hour long to me (though I just checked Google maps and it looks to be 30 minutes each way!). In those pre-electronic days (no handheld games, no DVD players in the car or iPod or even much choice on the radio) it took ingenuity to keep munchkins from rioting in the back seat. My mother kept us entertained with word games of all sorts.

We memorized the Greek alphabet (in retrospect I wonder if this reflects just how desperate my mother was to keep a half dozen bright children amused, for who teaches pre-schoolers the Greek alphabet? Except for Greek mothers, presumably. Though it's been an amazingly useful bit of knowledge, I will admit.) We also learned our prayers, and the responses for Mass. My age shows, as I can clearly remember my mother intoning "Dominus vobiscum." and the voices from the back responding "Et cum spirit two-two-oh." Or at least that's how I parsed it, just like the phone numbers I'd been learning!

As I work to get the new responses off the page, onto my tongue and into my heart, I miss my mother's gentle drill, and long to hear her voice one more time: Peace be with you. Et cum spiritu tuo, Mom....

Crossed genres

2012-01-10T16:13:00.006-05:00

This molecule is called snoutane. In trying to track down the source of the name, I did a Google search. The Google was not much help, wondering as it did if I wanted to do a related search "what is a cassock?" for surely I had mistyped "soutane."

It's rare that my two lives intersect quite this sharply.

UPDATE: There is so little out there on snoutane that this blog post showed up 1 minute (!) later on the second page of the Google search.

Crash course: buttons and books

2012-01-09T21:20:00.000-05:00

Crash added two skills to his growing repertoire this weekend. He can now sew a button back on, which meant learning how to thread a needle and how to tie off the thread at start and finish. He even took the advanced course, learning to sew on a coat button (you need to wrap the thread under the button to create enough space between the button and coat to fit the other flap).

He also learned how to bind a simple folio - a skill that any historian should have, no? He was fascinated to see how a book went together (he and a group of friends created a medieval bestiary as part of a project for their humanities class), from sewing the folio (more practice in threading needles), to creating the covers, the flyleaves and the spine. He wondered about how you make a large book, so we looked at the techniques for sewing together multiple folios.

I wonder what other practical skills I need to teach him before he heads off to college?
He can cook a respectable number of things from scratch, though he laments being in a family of cooks, where the ability to make a cake from scratch is considered "basic" not "advanced."

Not quite ordinary

2012-01-07T22:57:00.003-05:00

In a few hours we will be back to Ordinary Time, Christmastide having run its all too quick course. A friend laments the abrupt shifts from great feasts to ordinary time, at Pentecost as well as at the end of the Christmas season. We will sing of the three kings (in all likelihood we will sing "We Three Kings") with their exotic gifts and accoutrements who will then depart, taking with them all the verve of the season, leaving the Holy Family fleeing for Egypt and us in the January doldrums. As antidote to "We Three Kings" I offered this Bach cantata up on for the RevGals Sunday afternoon music. It was first performed for Dreikönigsfest — the feast of the Epiphany — in 1724.

But the music that truly helps move me from out of this season and back to Ordinary time is Arvo Pärt's gorgeous and haunting Anthem of John the Baptist. I couldn't find an online version, but it is on iTunes and well worth the listen. It gives me an entirely different way to imagine the scene of the two cousins meeting. Less outward drama, but inwardly a seismic shift.

A second epiphany, or perhaps a third

2012-01-06T15:40:00.003-05:00

The trees outside my study window are gilded in the late afternoon sun, the stained glass gift that arrived outside my room one day when I was making the Exercises is glowing against the stark borrowed landscape beyond. I'm writing away in a not so silent house at this point. It's warm enough to lure the elementary school children out to ride bikes and the carpenter's radio plays softly just outside my study.

We celebrated the feast of St. Andre Bessette (a cousin of his made the Exercises with me!) at Lauds this morning, but I brought small gifts for Epiphany — and prayed for those beginning the Exercises at Eastern Point this week. In that spirit, I've reposted this podcast from last year.

This year, instead of contemplating the traditional three treasures (according to Gregory the Great: the gold of wisdom, the incense of prayer and the myrrh of self-denial) in light of my packed bags for the Long Retreat, I'm unpacking (and de-cluttering) as I move back into my newly restored kitchen (well, except for the hole in the ceiling).

Silent Spaces

2012-01-04T20:38:00.006-05:00

To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence. — Thomas Merton in Thoughts in Solitude

This is the passage with which I began my course on silent spaces last fall. We took a historical approach, working our way from the desert fathers and mothers up to present day contemplatives. I wrote early on that teaching this course felt like autologous dissection, a sense that persisted for the entire semester.

In some sense I don't belong completely to the silence that Merton is talking about here. I don't live in an enclosed silent monastic community, I am not a hermit. Yet a quick look at my calendar reveals that last year I spent 30 days in silence, albeit spread out over the year and not in one go as when I made the Exercises.

The class was framed around a few key questions. Is silence an exterior condition or an interior stance, or some complex interplay between the two? Is there a difference between being an occasional visitor to silence, and dwelling in it? Is silence necessarily the same thing as an absence of sound?

I may not yet belong completely to the silence, but I do let it soak into my bones, breathe it, and feed on it.

"Silence does not mean running away, but rather recollecting ourselves in the open space of God." — Madeleine Delbrêl

Photo is of the desert at the edge of an oasis near Al Alain in Abu Dhabi. I wonder if that is where I dwell these days: in the oasis, but a step away from the desert.

God always and in everything

2012-01-03T22:42:00.003-05:00

“Not the goods of the world, but God.
Not riches, but God. Not honors, but God.
Not distinction, but God. Not dignities, but God.
Not advancement, but God. God always and in everything.”

— St. Vincent Pallotti

Three years ago today I drove up to Eastern Point to begin the Spiritual Exercises. As I walked this afternoon in the chilling wind, wrapped up in the same wool shawl (bought in the Middle East ina place where it never snows!) and ancient, disreputable red down jacket that kept me warm during my walks on the Long Retreat, my mind drifted back the vigils I kept in the deep chill of the night.

Tonight I might once again get up in the middle of the night to stand vigil. The Boy is determined to get up and see if the Quadrantid meteor show is as good as they say it will be. I told him to wake me if there were meteors to be seen. One night, while sitting in the chapel around 3 am, through the bay window behind the tabernacle, I saw one single meteor streak across the sky. I wonder if I'll see another tonight?

Column: A fierce and wondrous light

2012-01-01T14:47:00.004-05:00

The photo was taken last winter at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, PA. There is an article in this weekend's NY Times on making an Ignatian retreat at Wernersville. If you've wondered about what it might be like to go on such a retreat, this is a graceful, albeit slightly quirky (sphinxiness?), description of a first time retreat. And I added a new word to my vocabulary, adytum.

I can relate to her description of showing up a bit late and not knowing where to go. The very first time I went on retreat at Wernersville (many years back) I arranged to arrive a day late. My bag and I wandered the halls (without noticing the posted list) until I ran into a random retreatant and asked for help. He kindly pointed out the list and suggested I go to my room. Where a delightful note from my director for the week awaited me.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times, January 2012

He has spoken to us through the Son,
whom he made heir of all things
and through whom he created the universe,
who is the refulgence of his glory,
the very imprint of his being,
and who sustains all things by his mighty word. Hebrews 1:2b-3a

A virtual jungle of tropical plants lines the south wall of my family room. Earlier this week, as I made room for the family crèche on the windowsill, I realized that every plant had turned its leaves until they were plastered to the window, their faces toward the sun, hungry for whatever light they can find in these short and dim days.

Yesterday, listening to the words of the second reading at Christmas Mass I was struck by the this line in Hebrews, Christ is the refulgence — the shining radiance — of God’s glory. The Latin, refulgere, implies more than just a light that shines forth brightly; this is a light that shines fiercely and intently. And like my plants, this is a light we hunger for; this is the Light that sustains us.

Standing to the side at the cantor’s stand, I could see that hunger in the faces of those who came to receive Christ in the Eucharist. The grandparents holding hopeful grandchildren in their arms, the convert received into the Church last Easter still beaming with joy, the exhausted mothers bent over holding the hands of toddlers determined to walk the aisle on their own two feet, the new widow veiled in grief, all reaching out for that fierce Light that sustains us in all things.

John’s Gospel begins with the Word resounding through the chaos, creating the heavens and the earth. But in a homily on the letter to the Hebrews, St. John Chrysostom reminds us that the Word did not cease to speak, “He holds together what would fall to pieces, for to hold the world together is no less than to make it, but even greater.” Even the discordant pieces we cannot imagine being part of the whole are held in that Light and fastened together. Proof, says John Chrysostom, of God’s “exceeding power,” of Christ’s refulgence.

I’m always tempted in the days after Christmas to give over waiting, to be done with watching. But this ancient homily reminds me that just as the Word continues to sustain what He brought into being, the end of Advent does not bring an end to being attentive to where the Light is, to where I should turn my face, for what I should be reaching.

For the next few weeks the manger scene sits among the plants on the window ledge. Each morning as I drink my tea, I contemplate the infant in the crib, brushed by the light that day by day grows in intensity. I wonder what happened to the shepherds who saw the glory of God around them and went to seek the child in the manger. Such an outpouring of Light, such a Word spoken could not have left them unchanged.

And I wonder what will God’s exceeding power make of me in the coming year? What fragmented parts will be fastened together? I hear the familiar words of St. Augustine, “become what you receive” and I know where to look for that fiercely wondrous and sustaining Light.

Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not
A lightning of fire hard-hurled.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., from The Wreck of the Deutschland

Reflecting 2011

2011-12-31T20:33:00.006-05:00

As I've done the last two years, I've dumped the text of the blog into a word frequency analyzer (Wordle) and made a word cloud. I'm struck by the consistency of my writing. Total words on the blog this year? 64840 Last year? 65299! 172 posts. God appears 297 times, prayer and its variants at 257. Last year's numbers are eerily similar, 311 and 258, respectively. I'm on message.

As one that longs to see God in all things, I'm amused that see is embedded in God. And I'm enjoying the accidental co-location of God's and Crash, which I can read several ways. Crash surely is God's (as I've written here, a column I was thinking about today when Crash again bore the cross into Church on a Marian feast). But in this season, where God crashed into time, I prefer to read it as a metaphor for the Incarnation.

And on what other blog might you find the words synchrotron and refulgence both in play?

Happy New Year!

Phaith: Ora et labora

2011-12-29T15:35:00.005-05:00

More on kitchen painting from my latest column in Phaith:

"But as one playlist ran down, inconveniently catching me up the ladder removing old wallpaper, soapy water running down my arms, a momentary silence descended. The quiet seemed to be doing as much to dissolve my tension as the hot water was doing for the remnants of the wallpaper paste. I left the music off.

I began to listen to the sounds of the task at hand, not obliterate them in a barrage of noise. The swish of the rag in the water, the scritch of the sandpaper on the spackle, the bass thunk as I tapped the lid of the paint can back into place at the end of the day. It reminded me to listen for the sound of God’s Hands at work in creation, in my life. To be attentive to the ways in which God would like to remake me."

Read the rest here....

Holy, holy, holy

2011-12-27T18:41:00.002-05:00

My almost 60 year-old house is undergoing the equivalent of a heart transplant this winter. Structual issues in the kitchen had to be addressed before the cabinets fell down, a leak in the upstairs bathroom had become crtical and as we got bids on the work, the downstairs bath sprung its own leak. So one by one the kitchen and both bathrooms are being gutted and redone.

The kitchen was finished about month ago, and I spent a weekend painting walls and ceiling, five years of culinary sins wiped away. Like confession, the most trying part is the preparation; I spent hours scrubbing away old wallpaper paste, patching nail pops, and masking trim. The only tough part of the painting itself was the celing. Even with my extension roller and step ladder it was hard going.

This weekend, with the walls out upstairs, Math Man seized the moment to insulate our woefully underinsulated roof. He and Crash cut batts, placed baffles and blew insulation into various corners that otherwise were unreachable. This involved, not suprisingly, crawling into tight space and balancing on the rafters.

While all this is going on, I'm in my study working on a column for the Standard & Times, deep into St. John Chrysostom's sermon on Hebrews (Christ is the refulgence of God's glory). Suddenly I'm wrenched from my contemplations of fiercely shining light and angelic choirs by the sounds of large bodies falling. "Oh (insert favorite swear word here), oh (insert second favorite swear word here)!!" I stand up, "Is everything OK?" Yes. And no. Math Man is undamaged, my beautifully painted ceiling has an 18" diameter hole in it. Oh my.

Measure of a good marriage, my relief that Math Man is unhurt far outweighs my sadness about the ceiling. Ceilings can be mended.

And speaking of ceilings, at the very end of the day, Crash slipped and took out part of the ceiling on the top of the stairs. Holy, holy, holy....that was the day!

Praying in/with pain

2011-12-26T21:57:00.003-05:00

My prayer has been painfully inarticulate of late, particularly public prayer. The new translation of the Mass means that I muff the responses about one time in four at both Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours (where the Ordinary still says "And also with you." but the prior of the community I pray with has sensibly decided we should use the new response, "And with your spirit.") Add in that the prior has been in the hospital, so we've had a shifting set of presiders at Morning Prayer (including me), with varying styles and ability to stick to the rubrics.

And this last week prayer has become literally painful, as health issues have made it painful to bow, to kneel, even to sit. As the postures of my prayer have become more limited, my prayer, too, feels constricted. I've been reading "The Body's Poetic of Illness" in Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul. Moore notes that science demands a single reading of a phenomenon — we're pretty sure we know what's causing my myalgia, and it's self-limiting, so all will eventually be well — but that poetry acknowledges multiple layers of meaning. Why not seek multiple readings of the body's poetics when we are ill? Such an approach doesn't deny the physical causes and effects of a particular malady, but does give reality to its effects on the other aspects of our being.

The coincidence of my prayer feeling shoved into an uncomfortable position and the discomfort of the physical positions I prefer to assume in prayer are nudging me into reading these experiences on multiple levels — or as Moore says, to have a "willingness to let imagination keep moving into ever new and deeper insights." It feels very Ignatian.

"Science prefers interpretations that are univocal. One reading is all that is desired. Poetry, on the other, never wants to stop interpreting. It doesn't seek an end to meaning. A poetic response to disease may seem inadequate in the context of medical science, because science and art differ radically from the point of interpretation. Therefore, a poetic reading of the body as it expresses itself in illness calls for a new appreciation for the laws of imagination, in particular a willingness to let imagination keep moving into ever new and deeper insights." — from "The Body's Poetics of Illness" in Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore

Photo is of my feet, praying on the rocks at Eastern Point.

Watching still

2011-12-26T10:17:00.003-05:00

By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust your strength lies. Is 30:15

"Though Advent’s expectant hush has passed, St. Augustine reminds us not to give over that sense of quiet and stillness just yet: “See what God became for your sake; learn the lesson of such great lowliness, learn it even from a teacher not yet able to speak. …for your sake your Creator lay speechless, unable even to call his mother by her name.” As I look toward Ordinary Time and the start of the next semester, I am tempted to move on to Christ preaching and teaching and healing, to my life packed with the practical and engrossing. Isaiah and Augustine remind me not to rush on, to remain engaged with the lessons of the infant. To experience again being unformed, speechless, of necessity trusting that what I need will be given. To grow slowly, to watch the child to see the signs of what He will become." — from my Christmas reflection of 2009

Today starts nine months of sabbatical leave, of time for writing and reflection, a time for rest and growth. I'm tempted to dive into the projects that hang (some of them literally) enticingly on the walls of my office and mind, but am reminded by this passage to start slowly, to learn the lessons of the child in the crib. As yet wordless...

When ages beyond number had run their course

2011-12-24T22:24:00.000-05:00

Never mind Facebook, this is the ultimate in timelines. The Christmas Proclamation sets the birth of Christ into time. To chant it feels like a cascade, one marker to the next, until hanging on the reciting tone for more than seven times seven syllables we wait and wait until the Word bursts into time at "was born of the Virgin Mary.."

You can hear it chanted here. By the time you read this I will have stood at the ambo, taken a deep breath and proclaimed again "The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh."

Merry Christmas!

The Twenty-fifth Day of December
When ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world,
when God in the beginning created heaven and earth,
and formed man in his own likeness;
when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood, as a sign of covenant and peace;
in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of the Ur of the Chaldees;
in the thirteenth century since the People of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt;
around the thousandth year since David was anointed King;
in the sixty-fifth week of the prophecy of Daniel;
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad;
in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the foundation of the City of Rome;
in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the whole world being at peace,
Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,
desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence,
was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and when nine months had passed since his conception....

was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man:

The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

The empty manger

2011-12-23T21:54:00.003-05:00

In 1996, when The Boy was a mere 5 months old and Crash firmly and wonderfully two, we spent Advent in Vienna. Math Man had an appointment at the Schrödinger Institute (blackboards everywhere, including the women's room!) and I was on maternity leave, so the whole family decamped to a small apartment off Leopoldsgasse.

It was an Advent of darkness and light. We had not a single day of sun during our time there, but buildings everywhere were swathed in white lights. The boys and I took daily excursions to see the sights, zipped into their double stroller. One afternoon we went to the Christkindlmarkt by the Rathaus. My mother-in-law had told me stories of this Christmas market (which had been there for about 200 years) and I was not disappointed. The trees were gorgeously lit, the street food wonderful (Crash managed to get covered in chocolate despite his snowsuit) and the little stands packed with treasures.

My father made the stable that went under my family tree, with a traditional ceramic set of figurues. I loved to contemplate the camels and the three Kings and wonder at the distance they had traveled, the strange lands they had come from. (Who knew that someday I would ride a camel in the Middle East?). I had a stable found on sale at an outlet when I was a graduate student, with a set of figures much like the ones I grew up with. As I wandered the market I happened upon a stall filled with creche figures, intricately carved and colored. They were gorgeous, and expensive. The budget stretched (barely) to Mary, Joseph, the babe and one other figure. Though I coveted the kings and their camels, it was not to be. I bought a shepherd and a ewe nursing her lamb (as a reminder of all those cold Vienna nights when I got up to get The Boy from his crib to nurse).

This year I found the shop's online shadow and ordered the kings and their camels. Who might be here by Epiphany....

Conditor Alme Siderum

2011-12-20T20:09:00.000-05:00

I love the clarity of the winter sky. Walking home from church on Sunday evening, the cloudless sky was a feast of colors, Venus was glittering above the tree line and the sharp, cold air swept out the last of the semester's cobwebs.

We chanted this piece (in English) on Saturday evening at the vigil Mass. Our Advent music has featured a lot of chant: I chanted the penitential rite, the presider chanted the preface, we chanted the Our Father. Like the cold air, chant seems to bring a clarity to our prayer. The thread held by the reciting tone keeps us focused, and the fluidity keeps us firmly moving forward, refusing to let us be ensnared in the language we've not all mastered.

Sticky writing fail

2011-12-18T15:07:00.003-05:00

I sat down to work on a piece for Phaith this weekend, opened my favorite drafting software to find a blank document titled "Phaith February" containing only this text:

Centering prayer…somewhere on a sticky you have an outline for this!

Really? Because I have no idea on earth where it might be stuck….

At least one advantage of typewriters (besides their inability to entangle you in the Interwebs when you are struggling to write) is that you can't archive snark in them.

Come, Holy Spirit, Divine Creator, true source of light and fountain of wisdom! Pour forth your brilliance on my dense intellect...

The Utility of Vigils (Advent 2)

2011-12-17T21:39:00.003-05:00

Indeed, while following the way of Your judgments, O LORD,
We have waited for You eagerly;
Your name, even Your memory, is the desire of our souls.
At night my soul longs for You,
Indeed, my spirit within me seeks You diligently
Is 26:8-9

My class on contemplation had been discussing Quaker traditions, in particular the Quaker dedication to waiting on the breath of the Spirit before speaking at Meeting. Waiting is hard, we noted, waiting quietly on God’s work, harder yet.

As we gathered our things at the end of class, I mentioned that one practice I use to learn how to wait is to let the person behind me in line at the supermarket go ahead of me. Particularly when it's really crowded. One of my students mused that just the thought made her anxious. I had to confess, “Honestly? Me, too. That's why I keep practicing.”

As the semester spins to a close and the holidays race toward me, the chances to practice waiting seem to proliferate. When only two cars managed to get through each cycle of the light on Haverford Road — as I’m trying to tuck a run into my office between dinner and fetching the boys from the high school; when I call the AAA for to come jump my mysteriously dead battery only to hear that “due to high call volume, please wait on the line,” I’m doing a lot of waiting at a time of year when I feel have little time to spare ‘just waiting.’

A friend commented on a blog post about my practice of waiting that it’s hardest to wait for something that you don’t know when, or even if, it will unfold. He turns to composer John Cage, famous for composing a piece that does nothing but wait — silently for 4’ 55”: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." Waiting itself can change us, even before what we are anticipating arrives, even if it never arrives. Perhaps there really isn’t such a thing as ‘just waiting.’

Today after work I had a mad list of errands to run. No time to wait, I thought, relieved that the lines at the grocery looked short. I pulled into a line, then realized I’d forgotten the milk. Abandoning the cart, I dashed for the dairy section, returning to find a grandmother merrily amusing her preschool grandson now in the queue behind me, and the checker just finishing the customer ahead of me. I am so efficient.

C. S. Lewis once remarked that God could be quite unscrupulous when He wants our attention, subtly bringing our focus to what we might otherwise fail to see. As I went to toss the milk onto the belt, I stopped. “Would you like to go ahead?” I asked the grandmother? She would. She did. I waited. It was hard.

On to Ardmore, where cars were circling the parking lot like sharks. I threaded my faithful Mini around a delivery truck, intent on beating the red SUV in the next row to the spot I saw opening up. But I thought of John Cage, and of a fourth century bishop who wrote to a friend “of the utility of vigils” — the practice of waiting — “It’s easier to begin a work if we keep before our eyes how useful it is,” and I waited. It was still hard.

Madeline Delbrel, who gathered a small community of contemplatives in Paris in the early 20th century, similarly used the tiny ever-present irritations of life as a contemplative practice. Bad weather. Late buses. Like John Cage, she too discovered that persistence in the practice slowly changed her view of the irritations, expanding her sense of time, until it seemed to her as an “epic film in slow motion.”

I’m slowly learning to see the utility of vigils, the shifts in perspective that come when I wait even as waiting doesn’t come easily, when the signs I am watching for are obscured by the night. As so I continue to practice, though I see little sign of progress, to diligently seek He whose day is near, whose coming is certain, He who is the desire of my soul.

My soul is waiting for the Lord,
I count on his word.
My soul in longing for the Lord
more than watchman for daybreak. — From the De Profundis

Praying with strangers

2011-12-16T07:11:00.003-05:00

A friend of a friend was reviewing a book of daily prayer (Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals) meant for groups drawn from multiple traditions to pray together, either on occasion, or regularly. An interdenominational psalter of sorts. It's hard to know how a prayer book works without actually praying from it (which prompts me to think what kind of review I might write for my various breviaries, now and when I first began using them, but surely that is another set of posts!). Quaker FOF thought that for this kind of prayer resources, praying it with others from various traditions would be even more helpful in assessing the strengths and frailties of the text.

And so I found myself on a wringingly wet Wednesday praying the Anima Christi in a packed campus center with a stranger. "Blood of Christ, inebriate me..." we proclaimed. I wondered at the end of it all what those around us thought, or if what we had done in this oh so public space was just part of the general hubbub, hidden in the noise as my scientist self might say.

Quaker FOF wondered whether it felt awkward to be praying with a stranger. My first response was no, it didn't feel awkward. (Which is in part a commentary on FOF's delightful welcoming and warm soul!) When I pray the Liturgy of the Hours, most days I pray with people I know well, some of whom I have known for decades. But part of what I treasure about the Hours is the notion that I am praying with so many people I don't know. That this specific prayer is arising in all corners of the world, all the day and all the night, from people I will never meet this side of heaven, but who have chosen as I have to join in the work of praying with and for strangers.

I suspect that there is no such thing as praying with strangers. A willingness to join together to call on the Transcendent is a willingness to acknowledge an intimate truth, the sort of thing one does not share on first meetings with strangers or casual acquaintances: I believe in God. I pray.

FOF and I were both intrigued that The Prayer of St. Francis, and the Anima Christi are the prayers specified for Midday Prayer every day.

The wind in the pines

2011-12-13T22:10:00.003-05:00

In Japan the class visited the local tea teacher in Kamikatsu where we got a taste of the formal tea ceremony. She talked about setting up the kettle on the coals so that when the water came to the boil it made a gentle rustling noise - which she said was meant to sound like the wind in the pines.

I love the sound of the wind in the dried leaves at this time of year, rustling about above me as I walk in the evening. Even in the cold, dark and dry days of winter, there is a sense of purpose and energy in that sound. Life stirs even in the depths of winter.

It's the time of year when I too often run on short sleep rations (despite my best intentions). As a result, a cup of strong, sweet tea can be an enormous grace. Yesterday visitors came and went in my office. Quantum mechanics. Mysticism. (Yes, at the moment these are not the same topic in my office - which is not to say that I don't have some mystified quantum students.) Collegial errands. As I tried to gather the final bits for a talk I gave this afternoon in Washington, DC, I put the kettle on to boil.

I turned to my computer to pull another thread into the talk. Something kept tugging at the edge of my awareness. What is that gentle tinkling noise, too melodic to be a rattle? Window is secure. No one is knocking on the door (for the moment)....

The vibrations from the kettle are just enough to make the glass sugar jar jiggle the tea pot, with the resulting delighful sound. Grace's whispers.

Phaith in December: A contradictory Advent

2011-12-06T12:11:00.002-05:00

“If God’s incomprehensibility does not…draw us into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths…we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.” — Karl Rahner, S.J.

I find in Advent not so much a refuge from the noisy world, as a series of mysterious contradictions that leave me slightly off balance, coaxing me past the superficial trappings of the season, into an encounter with God made flesh.

Read the rest of my column (in which I admit that I am a geek) at Phaith....

Column: (Advent 1) What is my strength that I should wait?

2011-12-03T21:53:00.004-05:00

After I wrote the introduction to this column, Crash got some relief from waiting. He heard from one of his early action schools, letting him know that he would be offered admission. You can listen to a reading of "My Little Sister Ate One Hare" here. Warning, there are definitely violations of the Seven Motifs Ban in this poem. In retrospect, I shouldn't be surprised that such topic arise at the table on occasion. Clearly, it's my fault.

The photo is of rough ice on the beach at Eastern Point, taken the winter I made the Exercises there.

This column appeared in the print version of the Catholic Standard & Times on 1 December 2011. It is the first of four Advent reflections on waiting, the next three will be on the new Catholic Philly website.

What is my strength that I should wait? And what is my end, that I should be patient? Job 6:11

Advent aside, it is the season of waiting in my house. A month ago, Mike clicked “submit” on the last of his early college applications — his hopes for the next four years of his life gathered into a swirl of electrons and sent forth. Now, he waits.

Waiting is a way of life. We wait on line, we wait for news — good and bad, we wait for a change in the weather, we wait for the weekend and a chance to sleep. Like most us, I suspect, I find waiting is easier if I can find something else to think about besides how long I’m waiting. I can still remember most of the words to “My Little Sister Ate One Hare,” a particularly long and silly counting poem I would haul out while waiting in long lines with the boys when they were small. It was a great distraction.

Advent brings me face to face with the practice of waiting - undistracted. The waiting we are called to in Advent is one that focuses on our destiny, our hope, not one that tries to turn away from what is coming. And as Job laments, it is not an easy practice to undertake. It requires strength and patience.

Now that Mike’s college applications are sent off, the inevitable questions come from family and friends: “So where are you going to college?” All Mike can say is, “I won’t know for a while yet.” “When?” “I don’t quite know.”

Mike’s uncertainty about his future — and Job’s — makes me wonder if Advent’s steady countdown to Christmas has obscured the most difficult aspect of waiting. Waiting is different when we don’t know what precisely the future will bring, and when and how it might unfold.
Father Henri Nouwen writes in his essay “The Spirituality of Waiting,” that a practice of undistracted waiting is not only attentive to what will come, but is alert to the present moment. Mary carried Jesus, hidden from the world who waited for Him to come, yet Elizabeth sees her, attentive to the stirrings within her and knows that Jesus is already here. Perhaps Advent can teach me, too, to be attentive to what is stirring within me, to the encounters with God who is hidden from my sight, and like Elizabeth, be moved beyond passive acknowledgement, to prayer and to action.

An ancient commentary on this passage in Job suggests a similar practice of attentiveness in the face of open-ended waiting. To wait is “to be in love with the roughness of this world in hopes of the eternal.” To wait is not to be relieved of anxiety or difficulty, but to be alert to signs of hope rustling, to the breath of the Spirit upon chaos.

The last line of Psalm 27, sung at Mass on the first Friday of Advent, acknowledges the difficulty of waiting attentively. “Wait for the Lord with courage,” we are advised. “Let your heart be bold,” offers another translation of the same verset.

And to what end do I wait? What do I boldly ask for? What I am looking for amidst the roughness of this world? This I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

Almighty God, please grant that your people may watch most carefully for the coming of your only Son. As he himself…has taught us, may we be vigilant, with our lamps burning; and may we hasten to meet him when he comes. Amen. — Martin O’Keefe, S.J. in Oremus

The practice of waiting

2011-11-30T20:58:00.005-05:00

My contemplative class (whose traveling adventures were previously chronicled here) is reading and talking about Quakerism. We began class today by waiting until someone was moved to speak (we've spend enough time together in silence to be able to do this). We noted that it can be awkward to wait in this way. Will anyone talk? I found I had to remind myself to not talk merely to "coach" them along. Wait. Until. Someone is moved.

We spent some time talking about waiting, and its role in the contemplative life. Our last meeting had focussed on what constitutes obedience in the lay contemplative life — reading Madeleine Delbrel where she recommends using the vagaries of life to form oneself in obedience. At the end of class today I noted that one practice I use to foster patience is to let the person behind me in line at the supermarket go ahead of me. Particularly when it's really crowded. One of my students noted that just the thought made her anxious. "Me, too. That's why I keep practicing."

I'm writing about waiting for Advent...how do you practice waiting? or do you?

Jim McDermott, S.J. has some interesting thoughts about waiting on God, the Spiritual Exercises and Advent here.

Lex agendi

2011-11-29T19:57:00.007-05:00

A while back, the wondrously webbed-in Fran of There Will Be Bread posted this photo on her Facebook page; all unaware, their souls seem on display. I've been wondering off and on since what you could tell about me by watching. Could you tell, for example, that I was a mother? a teacher? once a dancer? a Christian? a Roman Catholic?

It's those last two that have me thinking, to paraphrase the words of Peter Scholte's 60's hymn, "Will they know we are Christians?"

If you happened to notice the Orthodox prayer rope I wear on my wrist — fifty knots of black wool tied in the tradition of St. Anthony, ending in a simple cross — you might guess that I'm a Christian of some sort. If you were in the parking lot last week when I dropped my purse (upside down - ack!) you might hazard from the holy cards I was scooping up and tucking back into a prayer book (my beloved breviary, now a bit the worse for wear) that I'm of the Roman persuasion.

But this is not the real question that photograph is asking me, the big question is could you tell I am a Christian should I be stripped of the externals? By what I say and do, not when I'm writing, not when I'm praying in Church, not when I know anyone is watching, but when I'm walking down the street, as unaware of being observed as these two people are.

Today Mike Hayes at Googling God is wondering if we Catholics are spending too much time caught up in our own internal concerns (liturgical or otherwise), and not heeding Christ's clarion call to help those in need. There is a robust exchange going on at The Deacon's Bench about Hayes' post. My contribution to it, echoing C.S. Lewis' comment in Weight of Glory, "Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses." is here. (Warning, I don't acquit myself as well as I might.)

It's not that I think that our concern with liturgy is entirely misguided, or in any way deny the reality of Christ's presence in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. But I will not delude myself, these things are not the principle things that I think Christ will be weighing in the balance when the time comes. He will ask when I fed the hungry, drew water for the thirsty, was mindful of those who were poor, or suffering. Nor will I delude myself into thinking that I measure up all that well in this regard.

The liturgy and the Eucharist are source and summit of our lives. Where we go to drink of the living water so that we can go forth and see and serve Christ in each other, where we go in gratitude to celebrate the presence of Christ among us. We become as a result dwelling places for God, Christ in our very being.

"Faith finds its strength and dynamism in the Sacrament of the Real Presence, because truly the lex orandi remains linked to the lex credendi which, in turn, is translated into the lex agendi of the Church’s life and mission. The Eucharist, then, has also a personal dynamism: it is the gift to celebrate, bringing a deeper knowledge of the mystery of salvation, accomplishing communion, leading to adoration, and finally affecting the Church’s life through mission and pastoral ministry, all the while fostering charity inside and outside the Church." (The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Life and the Mission of the Church, full text here.)

It's not difficult for me to sit an hour in front of the Eucharist; I willingly and joyfully participate in the Eucharistic liturgy. It's far harder to put on Christ and wear Him as I walk out the church doors, and I fear I've not the courage to live that radical of a life.

“And what about His hunger, cold, chains, nakedness and sickness? What about His homelessness? Are these sufferings not sufficient to overcome your alienation?” — St. John Chrysostom

Lent in the mail

2011-11-26T19:36:00.005-05:00

From the back cover:

What does the Church teach us about the penance we are assigned during the sacrament of reconciliation? In Living Your Penance, Michelle Francl-Donnay leads us to a deeper understanding of reconciliation, highlighting the importance of our penance to our spiritual growth. She encourages us to live our penances out each and every day and challenges us to pay attention to what it teaches us about ourselves and God's love for us.

I'm not sure I manage all that in this little book about penances, the small acts of satisfaction penitents are asked to make in as part of sacramental reconciliation in the Catholic tradition! But I do hope it is a warmly encouraging reflection on the ongoing graces of this sacrament.

And....I have a dozen copies to give away. If you'd like one to stash away for Lent, let me know in the comments.

Out of order

2011-11-26T19:13:00.005-05:00

I'm reading Connie Willis' Blackout about time traveling graduate students working out of Oxford in 2060. (It's a terrific read, and the sequel just came out, so you don't have suffer through the wait to resolve the coming cliffhanger.) Her historians suffer from time-lag, the symptoms not so different from the jet-lag I've suffered with this semester, their bodies refusing to aquiesce to the "when" all the evidence points to that they are in.

All signs point to the start of Advent today. I pulled Volume 1 of the breviary off my shelf, I rehearsed an Advent psalm, and Advent invocations for the penitential rite. I have the new text of the Mass marked up. I have written an Advent reflection (or two). It was pitch dark not long after 5 pm. But interiorly, I still feel utterly rooted in Ordinary Time. I want to reach for the green volume of the Office, and have no desire to crank up the Advent playlist. Advent is my favorite liturgical season — I look forward every year to looking forward — so I wonder why this uncharacteristic foot-dragging.

Is anyone else feeling unready to let go of autumn and/or Ordinary Time, or is it just me?

And now a package from Lent has appeared in a box in the mail....to further add to my sense of chronological dislocation!

To be grateful

2011-11-24T11:25:00.003-05:00

“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” Rabbi Abraham Heschel

Advice from the fathers

2011-11-23T13:19:00.002-05:00

‎"To be in love with the roughness of this world in hopes of the eternal..." from an ancient commentary on Job.

Litanies of Complaints

2011-11-22T20:22:00.004-05:00

In the last month I've only posted 10 times, and nothing in more than a week. Work has been pretty intense this semester, and time for writing for pleasure impossible to eke out before I slither exhausted (and crabby) into bed. My writing catch basin is overflowing with scrawled notes of things about which I might have written (and might still write): "the antiphonal radiators in the morning," "the sound of the sugar jar tinkling against the teapot as the kettle comes to the boil on the table in my office," AMDG Exterior Contracting"...and just what is a STAMPP point?

A few days ago, when a meeting was cancelled (and no one told me), I started a blog post about being overstretched and underslept, then realized with a start that I'd written some version or another of that post before. And recently. Of my last ten posts, almost half are basically extended whines about my overly busy life and how exhausting I am finding it. Enough, already!

I found this video posted by Paul Campbell S.J. at People for Others to be a delightful mirror to my own grousing. It's nine minutes long and I listened to the entire thing (the shots of the baby in the orange hat at 1:00, blissfully asleep while the chorus moans and grumbles around her, is a meditation in itself, I'm sure). I love the litany of complaints, "my boss prints his spam and hands it to me." It makes me wonder what my internal dialog sounds like to God!

If I were to add one complaint to the list in the song? "My students forget to put their names on their files." When I had four open notebooks on my computer the other night, none with names, all looking for some help untangling their quantum mechanics, trying to figure out who to send what back to in which email was a challenge! (And rest assured, I did gently share my difficulties with them and pleaded for their help in the matter.)

STAMPP is Systematic Technique to Analyze and Manage Pennsylvania Pavement. I'm still unsure why there would be a sign saying "STAMPP point" with a triangle on it on the highway, but at least part of the mystery is solved.

Faster than light

2011-11-11T20:26:00.007-05:00

The faster you travel, the slower the clock ticks. Perhaps that's why I'm having a hard time believing it's not only November, but deeply November. Surely it's just the beginning of October?

I've been running at the edge of the speed of light since before this semester began, packing into three and a half months what would have taken me three and a half years to travel in centuries past. I feel a bit like a particle in a synchrotron, rushed around in circles until I reach a critical velocity and come shooting out a beam port.

I may finally have been spit out of the subatomic particle's equivalent of a hamster wheel. There is at least an even chance that tomorrow I will get my laundry entirely folded and put away for the first time in six weeks. Or I could sleep....

Photo is from the DOE.

Column: Cold and Chill, Bless the Lord

2011-11-06T21:57:00.004-05:00

Dean Brackley, S.J. died recently, my director shared with me a short excerpt from "Call to Discernment in Troubled Times" when I made the Exercises. It struck such a chord that when I returned home, it was one of the first books I read. I heard Jane Hirshfield read "A Cedary Fragrance" a couple of weeks ago at a conference where we were both speaking.

As warm as the light looks in the photo, you could see your breath!

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 27 October 2011.

Cold and chill, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all forever. Daniel 3:67

As the gong in the courtyard rang to summon stragglers to morning services, the thermometer in the first floor corridor read 10 C, which made it feel chillier than the 50 F it was. I wrapped my shawl more securely around my shoulders and hoped the dining room tucked deep inside the walls would be a shade warmer.

A dozen of my students and I were staying in a Buddhist monastery tucked into a half-mile high mountain valley south of Osaka. Shojoshin-in was founded almost 1200 years ago, so the lack of central heating is hardly surprising, but after Kyoto’s heat, my students shivered despite their layers, and the monks kindly conjured space heaters to take the chill off the long dormer in which they slept.

Trying not to be envious of the monk’s robes, I dug my faithful “Chemistry Chick” sweatshirt — which has kept me warm through many chilly nights of prayer — out of my bag and elected to go without heat. Cold and chill, could I bless the Lord?

Poet Jane Hirshfield spent many years in a similar unheated monastery, washing her face each morning in the stingingly cold water that was all the taps provided. In her poem, “A Cedary Fragrance”, she writes that she keeps to the practice still: “Not for discipline…but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted.”

In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola pushes us to think about our desires for comfort and wealth. Do our preferences for warmth, for security, come between us and God? Can we greet with equanimity what comes, wanted or not, comfortable or not? Would we “want and choose poverty with Christ poor rather than riches”?

Most of the time, I have the luxury to not think about heat. Programmable thermostats and automatic hot water heaters keep me from shivering in the mornings. In Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, Dean Brackley, S.J. notes that this sort of insulated life, while it can free us to pursue great goods, has its risks. When we don’t have to struggle with hunger, disease, violence — or the cold — it can “induce in us a chronic low-grade confusion about what is really important in life.” Life and love.

Church father, Origen suggested in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that our small daily practices of asceticism and denial accumulate, that with them we weave a cloak for a cold and shivering Christ. They teach us where to look for Christ. In those who hunger, who thirst, who are cold, who are poor. They sharpen our awareness of need around us, opening us in Christ to a generosity of heart.

I struggled off and on with the cold during our stay, aware that while this small frisson of discomfort was a choice for me, for most of the world, it is not. Last Sunday, as Morning Prayer’s lines of praise tumbled off the page — Cold and chill, bless the Lord — I wondered again if I could bless the Lord if cold and chill were imposed, not elected. I’m still practicing making the unwanted, wanted.

Touch my heart with this grace, O Lord. When I reach out in joy or in sorrow for the things of this world, grant that through them I may know and love You, their Maker and final home. — Karl Rahner, S.J. In “God of My Daily Routine”

What happened to sugar cube replicas of the Forum?

2011-11-01T20:21:00.002-04:00

UPDATE: Today this page has gotten hundreds of hits...and I can't figure out why! Would any of the visitors like to let me know? The Boy and I are terribly curious!

The Boy has been working on a project for Latin class for the last couple of weeks. It's due tomorrow, and he just finished putting the finishing touches on it. Remember making those sugar cube models of pyramids and other classical buildings when you were in school? The Boy was having none of that. Instead he found The Classical Cookbook on my shelves and picked out the most complicated (non-lead based) recipe he could find. [Warning: violation of the seven motifs of disgust ban forthcoming.] This involved finding such things as fish sauce and animal intestines (cleaned and preserved in salt, these are otherwise known as natural sausage casings).

He managed all of this on his own, including the calling around to find the sausage casings. Tonight he needed to grind the meat and put it all together. Did I mention that our kitchen was demolished about 2 weeks ago? I suspect the Romans had better plumbing than I currently have in my kitchen (not hard, as I have none at the moment). And all the useful equipment is packed away, requiring serious improvisation (just what did the Romans use to fill their sausage casings I wonder?).

The Boy requested my help. Why, I wondered aloud. He never needs my help on school stuff. "Because you're adventurous." "So are you!" I shot back. The "I've never made sausage" plea did not play with me, I've never made it either. Why could he not need me to help him artfully arrange photos on a poster or glue little trees to a sugar cube creation? Why, oh why, was I dealing with raw pork and a tangle of scraggly casings — without benefit of running water, counters or a pastry bag?

I have to admit he was right, there was no way to do this solo with the equipment we had on hand. It needed two sets of hands.

We did it. We are adventuresome. We are able to improvise. We laughed a lot. They look great. I hope his Latin class enjoys the fruits of our labors.

Perpetual Motion

2011-10-29T20:26:00.004-04:00

My at home to-do list is usually scrawled on the blackboard in my study. This morning, preparing to dash madly about before I left to celebrate Robin's sacring I grabbed the chalk to make a list of the essential chores I needed to accomplish.

I had to do one last read of Crash's college essay, sift through a few more choices with Math Man for the major house renovation that is underway here (both bathrooms leak, and the kitchen cabinets have reached critical -- the work seems on par with a triple bypass, if not a heart transplant, but that's fodder for another post), and pack.

The last few items from last week's scramble were still there. At the top of the list: pack.

What does it say about your life when "pack" is perpetually on the to-do list? I've packed for three different trips in the last eight days. Where am I? Where am I going? What am I doing?

Perhaps this: "Wherever I am, at home in a hotel, in a train, plane or airport, I would not feel irritated, restless, and desirous of being somewhere else or doing something else. I would know that here and now is what counts and is important because it is God himself who wants me at this time and this place." Henri Nouwen in the Genesse Diary

Epilog

There is a storm in the Northeast. I read, sifted, packed and left. I arrived at the gate one minute before....my flight was cancelled. As were the rest of the flights for the day. I booked a seat for tomorrow, and dashed for the train back home. Oops, downed lines on the tracks, no train from the city out to the 'burbs. Trolley to the rescue! So far, my flight for tomorrow is still on.

Signs from God: End Blasting Zone

2011-10-27T22:51:00.008-04:00

It's been a crazy week. At times it's felt like I'm living in the midst of an improv show (drama, not comedy) or as if one of those flash mob companies is staging something in my office (though no one has yet broken into song). As I drove up the turnpike last night to see Patient Spiritual Director, I passed a sign that said, "End Blasting Zone." Is this a sign from the Holy Spirit, I wondered? Is it possible that the fireworks will end?

One can only hope. And I can say that there were no outbursts of craziness in the silence. Unless you count the werewolf mask my confessor lent me....

Take a note, Siri

2011-10-22T22:02:00.003-04:00

It may be some measure of the chaos in my life at the moment that I viewed the three hour drive down to Virginia yesterday as a contemplative moment. Time shifts are still plaguing my days and nights. Not just the physical desynchronosis of jet lag, but all the things that were put aside when I went to Japan (meetings, papers to grade, essays to finish drafting, Crash's college essays to read, The Boy's chemistry questions to answer, did I mention the meetings?) have popped back into this time line. It seems as if I still need to live the last two weeks of my life here, despited having lived those two weeks already in Japan.

My talk for the conference had been put together before I left, but I was still mentally rehearsing and polishing it on the way down. I wanted to talk out a couple of the transitions and remind myself to add a few bits here and there. In days past I would hit the speed dial on my phone and record 30 second tidbits to be transcribed by the mysterious souls inside Jott. Transcripts would appear in my email, jogging memory, jumpstarting writing.

Now I have Siri (yes, I caved and have a new iPhone — my old one being old enough that AT&T doesn't even give it away for free anymore). I held the button on the phone and asked Siri to "Take a note." We had a brief argument about what I wanted to do, but finally she conceded, "I can do that for you." I dictated away in spurts, trusting that her chipper, "Got that." meant my ideas were safely drifting in the cloud, waiting to descend on me when I had a keyboard handy. I ended and had Siri email the notes off to me. And this is what I said?

"What else to think about the purpose of writing or reading about Jesus is on right track oneself integrating the table I want to bring with the idea that template basis.they've the burning layers on the BlackBerry."

Oh dear. I couldn't decode most of the notes, I tried reading them aloud, to no avail. (The last reference to burning layers is to a quote from Teilhard de Chardin.) Siri is a beta release. I can tell.

More about the talk (Melville, Moby Dick, Gloucester and flame) when I catch up to myself!

Parsing the universe

2011-10-19T11:03:00.000-04:00

I've two more trips coming up (to a conference in Virginia where I'm giving a keynote address about writing, the contemplative mind and the whole person, and to celebrate with Robin). After the intensity of the last few weeks, I'm looking forward to curling up with a book of an evening. But what to read next?

Crash found this guide to NPR's list of 100 best SF and fantasy books. I've read most of the books on the list, but what I really enjoyed was the flow chart! Snarky but on point..."Like a little time travel with your love story?" "NO" "Tough" (points to Time Traveler's Wife and Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series).

So what should I read next? Thoughts? I'm tending toward fiction and poetry...no zombies, please (I still feel too much like one after the jet lag for comfort!)>

Counterpoint: Chemistry and Calvin

2011-10-18T22:38:00.002-04:00

It's a frequent trope in musical theater, two solos sung in counter point — often underscoring two characters vying for affection, or perhaps attention. Cut to last night, in the living room:

The Boy (chemistry book open on lap): So, I'm not really getting this ratio thing. If you have a higher atomic number, you want to lose neutrons...
Crash (simultaneously, European history notes in his lap): Do you know anything about Calvin?

Mom (attempting to diffract): Yes/Yes.

The Boy: Why do you get beta decay?
Crash (at the same time): What is Calvinism now?

Math Man (entering stage right): What did they say about the kitchen?

Two simultaneous conversations I can almost handle, the third sent me over the edge. I diverted Crash by asking him if he knew Calvin's five points, suggested to The Boy that he might have done enough nuclear physics for the night and then fled for my study!

Read about Calvinist chocolates here.

Desynchronosis

2011-10-15T12:26:00.004-04:00

Jet lag. I crossed too many meridians. My clock and the wall clock have become desynchronized, and I'm waiting for one to catch up to the other.

I keep visualizing two circadian rhythms chasing each other, until they finally fall into phase which each other, which reminded me of the biorhythm craze in my high school days. I computed my biorhythms for today, which certainly well describe my physical sense (toast, totally toast). I suppose I could be at an intellectual peak, if I only I could rouse myself from the sofa to do something with all that cognitive potential! Instead, I think I'll do laundry...

Column: Lost and Found in Translation

2011-10-13T22:51:00.002-04:00

The new translation of the Roman Missal launches with the First Sunday in Advent this year — less than two months from now. There will be things I will not miss in the old translation (some of the institutionally prosaic opening prayers, for one) and others I suspect I will miss deeply ("one in being"). Fr. Jeremy St. Martin (in the video) works with the deaf apostolate in the Archdiocese of Boston. I learned some ASL when I was on leave at Livermore National Labs (a colleague was deaf), and kept it up (useful for communicating with children in public places). As a result, most of the neighborhood kids learned "stop" and "bother" (as in "stop bothering your brother!")

For another, more poetic (and yes, there is poetry in ASL), interpretation of a setting of the Lord's Prayer, see the video at the end! Play it with the sound turned off...

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 29 September 2011.

We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God. Acts 2:9-11

I hadn’t seen Israel for a couple of years when I ran into him while visiting my dad in California, but I was still greeted with a cheery “¿Como estas?” when he saw me on the path. We talked about the work we were doing and as I struggled to find the words to explain — in Spanish — the little book I was finishing, he good-humoredly noted, “Your Spanish has gotten a lot worse!” “Es verdad,” I sighed. It’s the truth, and I mourn the gradual decline of my second tongue. It hinders not only my conversation with Israel, but my conversation with God.

“To sing is to pray twice,” St. Augustine purportedly said. I feel similarly about having multiple languages to pray in — they lend a depth and a life to my prayer, much as a cathedral choir’s rich harmonies shimmer and dance above the assembly’s firm unison.

With more or less prompting, I can still manage to get from “Our Father…” to “Amen” in five languages. Each time I pray the Our Father, no matter what the language, the other four weave their harmonies over and under the melody line. Pater noster. Father, first and foremost. The assurance that sounds in the strong beat of santificada sea tu nombre. The unadorned ordinariness of unser Brot - our bread. The hand that moves from forehead heavenward in the sign language version, an embodied reminder of where I look for help.

I relish the murmurs of multiple English translations, too. Three years ago, when I went on retreat for 30 days, the instructions said to bring only two books along: a copy of the Bible and a copy of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. In my first meeting with the Jesuit would direct me in the Exercises, I sheepishly admitted that while I’d obediently left novels and science journals home, I’d brought not one, not two but three different translations of the Psalms along with me. The rich chorus of voices rang clearly amidst the silence of those weeks.

In mathematics, to translate something is to pick it up and move it to another place. In a few weeks time, we will move to use a new translation of the Mass. We will be reminded of our status as pilgrims — not curators of a static tradition, but followers of the living Word.

A part of me is braced for this journey into the wilderness, to a place where the words have yet to wear a smooth path through mind and soul. I will miss hearing aloud the words of the Eucharistic prayer that consoles me so deeply in my struggle to negotiate the demands of being wife, mother and teacher with the desire to “stone-still at God’s feet, listening to Him alone”: He stretched out his arms between heaven and earth. My tongue is sure to trip on the threshold of “consubstantial” — still hunting for “one in being.”

Yet I’m also looking forward to hearing new notes sounded in my prayer, to another layer woven into the glorious tapestry that is the Church’s public voice. No matter what language or what translation we use, how simple the melody or intricate the harmonies the words are set to, we are called to sound as a single voice. For we are a single Word, made flesh. The Body of Christ.

If you are the body and members of Christ, then it is your sacrament that is placed on the table of the Lord; it is your sacrament that you receive. To that which you are you respond "Amen” and by responding to it you assent to it. For you hear the words, "the Body of Christ" and respond "Amen." Be then a member of the Body of Christ that your Amen may be true. — St. Augustine

Another setting of the Our Father. Play with the sound off to better "get" the poetry of the ASL.

Missing

2011-10-10T20:48:00.007-04:00

I feel like I've lived through Monday twice (which I have, or at least through a Monday that lasted 36 hours). We left the hotel near Kansai Airport about 10:30 on Monday (Kansai time) and arrived at JFK at 1 pm on Monday (EDT). It took us another 2 hours to get all the students cleared through immigration (it's slow for non-citizens), collect bags, and rent two vans. And then there was still a 2 hour drive home (with a van full of sleeping students, very quiet!).

It was lovely to land and find text messages from The Boy and Math Man greeting me. I've missed them, and Crash and Fluffy. The Boy made his amazing pasta for dinner tonight, a perfect welcome home meal.

What else I missed (yes, I've noticed it's all food):

The Boy's pasta
Chocolate (I haven't eaten ANY since September 25th)
Pizza
Meat (most of my meals were meatless)
Apples (lots of citrus and Asian pears)

There's food for thought here....

Photo is of baskets at Nakamura's house in the mountains above Kamikatsu.

Tea kettles

2011-10-09T05:08:00.000-04:00

I have a tea kettle in my office — but not in my floor. And not one that makes such a delightful noise when it comes to the boil. This hearth is set into the floor, there is a tiny charcoal fire underneath the cast iron tea pot and is hisses and burbles and sounds much like the wind through the pines. What I could use in my office is a mizusashi, a stoneware jar to keep extra water!

Prayer, posture and tea

2011-10-08T08:33:00.000-04:00

This is a photo of where I sat for morning prayer today, taken after I walked up the road, across the bridge and a few turns up the mountain road. Later in the day, I waded out to one of the rocks mid-river and sat, watching the water. It flowed like thick glass over the rocks; I was sure if I touched it, it would be solid. In other places it burbled like a spring, throwing up drops of water like popcorn, that danced and dazzled in the sunshine.

In the afternoon we visited the local tea teacher, who patiently and kindly led us through the tea ceremony. My knee will only let me briefly kneel in seiza position (back on your heels, with your big toes crossed and about 3" between your knees), and as a result I definitely felt out of kilter. It was awkward to bow, and harder to stay upright. I ended up sitting with my leg crossed, which isn't great for the knee either, but I couldn't figure out any other posture that would be remotely polite. Among other things I wondered about what we think of people in liturgical settings (and there are direct and deliberate parallels between the tea ceremony and Catholic liturgy) who are not in the "correct" posture. I can't genuflect for example, and so substitute a profound bow. How do (or even should) we read each other's posture in liturgy, and even in private prayer?

You can read the adventures of the whole crew here, it's hard to believe that tomorrow we will pack up the bus and make our way back to Kansai, with a short stop in Tokushima to have lunch and do any last shopping (we need another bag!).

Diffraction

2011-10-08T05:03:00.007-04:00

I loved the patterns on the water, photographed from the bridge just upriver from where we are staying. The movement of each wave out from a clear center, their crisscrossing leading to constructive and destructive interference. Whose paths do I cross, how does what I do ripple out and interfere, positively or negatively?

Six Reasons Not to Lose Dr. Francl

2011-10-07T08:26:00.004-04:00

Part of traveling with a group is counting -- have we lost anyone? The current running joke is that we can't lose me for various reasons. The current list of reasons not to misplace Dr. Francl:

1. She has the device to upload photos to your iPad.
2. She does IT support.
3. She has the snacks in her bag.
4. She has the wi-fi hot spot.
5. She has the money for ice cream.
6. She has the Benadyl and the Dramamine.

Grains of wisdom

2011-10-07T07:37:00.005-04:00

Today we spent the morning working in a citrus orchard, picking fruit. What role does physical labor play in the contemplative life? In Koya-san the abbot Hideo told us the story of an older monk, who kept the strict rules of his sect, which do not permit any physical labor. One day when all his servants had the day off, he wandered around, hoping someone would refill his coffee cup.

The rice that I saw newly planted in the late spring is being harvested now, tied up to dry in the paddies.

The adventures of the crew are here.

A different kind of luxury

2011-10-06T09:24:00.005-04:00

How much stuff do you need? I had a wonderful lunch today, cooked over a mud hearth. Instead of quantum mechanics, I taught two students how to thread a needle.

We brought a gift from Pennsylvania to Kamikatsu - a piece of stained glass made by Wayne Stratz, riffing off the photos I had taken at my last visit to Nakamura. I bound photos of Wayne at work to show to Nakamura - and he very much enjoyed showing the students the hearth and tea pot that Wayne had captured in glass. The photo at the top is of the onions that got folded into the soup for lunch.

The adventures of the crew are here.

Walking the women's path

2011-10-05T09:47:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I walked part of the women's path that encircles Mount Koya. Until the late 19th century, women were not permitted to enter the mountain enclave, but would still make arduous hike up to the gates, then walk from shelter to shelter around the entire perimeter. It was not a simple stroll, this path clings to the edges of the mountain and certainly drives home the notion that women belonged on the margins.

This morning we met one last time with Hideo, the young abbot who has been giving us intsruction in meditation. His hands are always on his prayer beads, a constant reminder of the call to prayer. I gave him a copy of Meditations: On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life by Thomas Moore (there is an excerpt featured in last Friday's wisdom story at People for Others) as the concept of contemplation in daily life was one of the threads of the conversations we had had.

The adventures of the crew are here.

Photo is of Hideo's hands.

Structures of silence

2011-10-04T07:35:00.003-04:00

Enclosures aren't always physical. How do we enclose silence with a set schedule? Is silence easier in the morning? At night? While eating?

The adventures of the crew are here

Photo is of a Jizo image, nearly enfolded by a cypress tree trunk in the graveyard at Koyasan.

Pilgrims east and west

2011-10-02T22:23:00.005-04:00

As we made our pilgrim's way from Osaka to Koya yesterday (three trains, two taxis and a bus), we were rushing through one station to get onto a bus (track work - it made it seem just like home and SEPTA) when Hank called back, "It's St. Ignatius!" Sure enough, there is the Jesuit seal and a Jesuit gazing up at a cross. Given the rest of the stuff on the poster, we actually think it's St. Francis Xavier, who came to Japan in the 16th century.

We are staying in a very old monastery here. No central heating, though there are space heaters. It was 10 C (50 F) in my room last night, 14 C now (57 F). The hot bath last night felt amazing, I shared it with 4 older Japanense women, who spoke no English and enjoyed my "wakarimasen" (I don't understand) to their overtures. They worried the bath might be too hot and very hospitabilty offered to add cold water. Thankfully, I like the water hot.

Read about the adventures of the crew traveling here.

Hot springs and cool breezes

2011-10-01T09:40:00.005-04:00

The heat has finally broken here, just as we head up into the mountains where it will be cooler than Kyoto. The abbot at the temple where we have been staying looked at us as we left and said, "You're going to freeze on Koya." We assured him we have more layers. On the way from Kyoto to Osaka (where we are staying the night before heading off to Koya-san in the morning) we stopped at a hot springs/bath. I have soaked out ever single kink I might have, in waters that bubbled with minerals, slid down slate sheets, and poured into traditional Japanese tubs. And my students let fish nibble their feet....

You can read the adventures of the crew here.

Photo is from the Moss temple.

Seeing green: Moss temple and kiwi ice cream

2011-09-30T09:01:00.003-04:00

We went to the Moss temple today, an amazing place with an ancient tea house. It's still hot and humid (though the weather promises to be cooler tomorrow). The adventures of the crew are here. I'm hoping to get a chance to post some photos here and there and perhaps write a bit for this blog on the bus trip to Osaka tomorrow.

Jesuit bells and Zen abbots

2011-09-29T09:54:00.003-04:00

My class is in Japan, exploring Zen Buddhism and contemplation, but not forgetting the work we are doing on Western contemplation and on psychology and neuroscience. I'm way too tired to blog twice (we were up at 5 am today for services up the hill), but you can read the adventures of my crew here. Find out what Jesuits, bells and a Zen temple have in common.

Into great silence

2011-09-27T07:35:00.001-04:00

It might be the modern day equivalent of a medieval monastic enclosure. Everyone sleeps in a common dormer; we sit in our assigned places, as if in choir; once the doors are closed, you can't leave; you eat what is served, when it is served; we have made temporary promises of obedience; bells rings and we tighten our belts. There are no cell phones, no landlines, no wi-fi. It is a remarkably silent place, and I imagine not a few of us are praying.

No, I'm not on retreat, I'm on a China Air 747 somewhere between New York and Osaka, traveling with my students and two colleagues to Japan. We're off to see and experience Buddhist practices of mindfullness and meditation in particular, but we are also keeping our eyes open to the ways in which silent spaces are constructed. What constitutes a sacred architecture of silence? of solitude? of stillness? How many of these constructs, physical and metaphorical, cross traditions?

I watched Into Great Silence during the night, preparing to watch it with my students when we are back. This time, I was struck by the sheer physicality of the monks' lives, not only in the quotidian chopping of wood and hauling of water, but in prayer. The young monk lifted off his feet by the bell, the monk prostrate on the floor in his cell, the elderly monk with his canes hurrying to the church.

And I wondered if the monastery I long for is right under my nose.

Extravagance in the desert

2011-09-27T06:43:00.001-04:00

I am reading Stones laid before the Lord, a history of monastic architecture written by a French Trappist monk in the 1960s (which thanks to Cistercian studies is translated into English). He opens with a brief history of the growth of monasticism from its desert roots in which he mentions the competitions between ascetics to see who could fast or go without sleep the longest. This notion of competitive or heroic acestism has been showing up occasionally in the readings/discussions from the other two courses. How much of the current (or even the past) interest in meditation and contemplation is fueled by curiousity about the physiological external effects, and less about the internal landscape? How long can you go without sleep? Who can dry their wet cloak fastest? more completely? Your pulse during meditation is what?! Can learning to meditate make your psoraisis better? (We read a paper by Jon Kabat-Zinn and co-workers on MBSR as a co-adjuvant to phototherapy for psoraisis.)

The author of is wary of these heroics and sees them as extragavances which were rightly curbed by monastic rules of life. Only a Cistercian of the Strict Observance would call the desert fathers "extravagant."

I'm less intrigued by the physiological side effects than I am by the sheer extravagance of it all. There is an extravagance, a sort of luxury, to the desert ascetics who threw themselves, for the most part without the protection a community affords, into the torrents of prayer, into the fire of God. It's like setting sail for England from Gloucester, MA in a rowboat — alone.

I have a memory of a small fishing dory in the musueum at Gloucester that I visited on one of the days of repose during the Exercises that made the trip, but can recall none of the details!

Schrodinger's cat

2011-09-24T22:09:00.001-04:00

Fluffy double checks my marking of the quantum mechanics assignment. But no, she's not substituting for mPublish Poste while I'm away. I've got a real quantum chemist doing that for me. (Thanks, Dr. Lisa!)

I'm off to Japan on Monday with my contemplative students. The Boy is having separation anxiety, Crash wonders how many essay drafts I can read on the road, I'm in denial about packing, Math Man is watching football. A regular Saturday evening....

What all the cool kids are doing...

2011-09-23T21:44:00.002-04:00

...on a Friday night.

Overheard in my sunroom: "So, do you need a domain restriction?" The Boy and Math Man are discussing Riemann sums. How long before The Boy re-invents the calculus? Place your bets below.

The Rules: Seven Motifs of Disgust

2011-09-23T10:42:00.003-04:00

[Warning: This post offers no deep spiritual insights. Contains references to adolescent humor.]

The house rules have been posted on our refrigerator since 2005:

1. If you open it, close it.
2. If you use it up, throw it away.
3. Put it in the hamper.
4. Flush.
5. No Greek choruses.

Last year, when I was writing this piece on urban legends of chemistry we added an unwritten rule to the list. Conversation invoking one of the seven motifs of disgust were banned at the dinner table.

Tonight The Boy asked me if I could list the seven motifs for him. "Uh, not off hand, why?" "In Latin class today my teacher told us three topics that should never be raised in polite conversation and I told her that at my house the seven motifs of disgust were banned. When she asked what they were, I told her the only one I remembered was bestiality."

Oh, no. Now I wonder just what this teacher thinks we talk about at the dinner table.

The legendary seven 'motifs' of disgust were described in a paper by a colleague ("Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: a scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors" Haidt, McCauley and Rozin, Person. Indiv. Diff. 16, 701-713 (1994)). I promised The Boy I would look them up, so here goes (with examples mostly drawn from conversations vetoed under the policy at our dinner table similar to the items on the "official" scale - these are not for the faint of heart, and after reading them you may understand why I ban the topics).

Food: Eating olives and vanilla ice cream at the same time.
Animals: You are walking barefoot and step on something that Fluffy left on the mat.
Body Products: I have teen-aged boys...do I need to say anything else?
Sex: (This is the bestiality one...and no, we don't talk about that at the table, it's just what they invoke when I bring up the Seven Motif ban.)
Envelope violations: Remember when The Boy cut his foot and....
Death: Picking up one of Fluffy's offerings...
Hygiene: Learning that someone else was using your toothbrush in the (mistaken) belief it was his.
Sympathetic Magic: Thinking that tongs that have been used to pick up a dead mouse can be used for food if well washed (a proposal actually made by a male person in my house and which I firmly squashed)

And who said that psychology research is merely an academic exercise?

Invisible gorillas and me

2011-09-22T11:12:00.000-04:00

The commentary I wrote on women in science led to an invitation to be on Future Proof - an Irish weekly radio show on science (it's a great show - subscribe on iTunes, do....). The interview was recorded on the first day of classes, sandwiched between my history of contemplation in the West class in the morning and quantum mechanics in the afternoon. I was so nervous that afterwards when Math Man asked me what I'd been asked, I had to tell him I had not the slightest clue. Complete anterograde amnesia.

It made listening to the broadcast with my guys all the more fun, it was like an all new experience. Really, they asked that??

And the gorillas? They interviewed the author of the Invisible Gorilla. Watch the video and tell me how attentive you are!

My interview starts at about 31:00

Do I have the strength?

2011-09-21T22:19:00.004-04:00

"But shall I have the strength to write this book? For there is a great distance between the words we speak uninhibitedly to a friendly audience and the discipline needed to write a book. When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching, and at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection." Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space p. xxxix

Gaston Bachelard ends the introduction to his philosophical exploration of the architecture of intimate spaces (which my class on silent spaces and the history of contemplation in the West has been reading) wondering if he has the strength to undertake the hard work of turning words that shimmer and dance in space, words that have a life and breath of their own, into words that burrow in between the covers of a book, that wait on light to breathe again. It takes strength to corral words like that, to hold them in place long enough to pin them onto paper.

It's become clear to me over the last few weeks just how much strength and energy it takes for me to write. I've been juggling the teaching of two quite different classes (and despite her delight in my desk and my pen, Fluffy has been no help in grading papers or writing lectures!), Crash's college angst and various unblog-able work issues. The result has been too many fifteen hour days and six hour nights.

It's not just the energy to grab a pen or keyboard and pull the words into place, the ideas themselves seem to mope about in my head, draping themselves exhaustedly around my neural pathways, ashen shadows utterly unwilling to dance for me.

I have a work meeting this weekend, so am taking tomorrow afternoon off to shake the cobwebs out in the silence and see Patient Spiritual Director — holding a friend in prayer as I go, offering my exhaustion and burnt out spirit for her intentions.

For the record, I did have the strength to finish the little book I wrote this summer on the hidden graces of penance....

What's not to do?

2011-09-17T21:12:00.004-04:00

Sometime midweek tasks were landing on my desk (and in my inbox and tossed onto the kitchen counter and...) at such a rate that I couldn't even manage to jot them on my to-do list. I felt like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice scene from Fantasia, the pails — uh, tasks — multiplying with abandon.

I scribbled reminders on post-its, ran through mental lists of emails I had to answer as I dashed up the stairs from meetings to teach class and reminded people to remind me later (just in case). Half-forgotten tasks lurk around mental corners and jump out at me at the least provocation. (Write check for choral uniforms ambushed me even as I sat here on the sofa nominally relaxing.) I keep looking over my mental shoulder — sure there's something major I've forgotten to do stalking me. (So far so good, but now that I mention it, am I supposed to cantor this weekend?)

As I was flipping through a magazine (which promised a month of stress-free dinners, if only people in my house would eat pork loin with sauteed cauliflower and capers), one piece of advice caught my eye: write an "ignore list."

I wonder if what I need more than a to-do list is a not-to-do list. What can I let go of before I even pick it up? or spend mental space and energy on coralling?

(P)haith

2011-09-11T22:17:00.003-04:00

The Philadelphia archdiocese not only has a new archbishop (who rumor has it is a Star Trek fan), but a new archdiocesan publication. I've yet to see a print copy, but this is modern evangelization and so "there's an app for that": on the iPad, and on the web. My article is here. (If the text in the call out looks familiar to anyone who's made the Exercises, that's because it's St. Ignatius, which the article makes clear!)

And while I may look dressed up on top, the photo was taken this summer, and I've got on capris and tennis shoes along with the pearls!

Zen and the art of mother maintenance

2011-09-11T21:52:00.005-04:00

I'll admit straight off that I've never read Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Excavating my desk this afternoon, I found a note to myself which says only, "Zen and the art of mother maintenance." Would that I could remember exactly what I meant by that!

Could it have something to do with the conversation I had two weeks ago with Patient Spiritual Director in which I said I wanted to find a Carthusian abbey? Where my cell is sacrosanct?

Breathing space has been in short supply (as the lack of blog posting suggests!) and my guys have been doing their best on the home front to help me maintain some equanimity. Math Man had a class tonight and as the boys and I cleaned up after dinner, we talked about who had what for homework. I told them I had a column to write and they promised me at least one uninterrupted hour (and gave me two!). At this point in my life, a more cherished gift than roses or chocolates for the maintenance of their wishfully contemplative mother. It's an art!

Photo of 1954 Triumph. Used under Creative Commons license.

Pneuma

2011-09-01T22:34:00.004-04:00

Classes began on Monday. I'm a veteran of 48 first days of school (will I ever grow up?), I know what to do to be ready the night before. My books were collected, my lunch organized, my clothes laid out (though no shiny new saddle shoes). Alarm set, check.

My alarm went off on time, but hearing Math Man in the shower, I hit the snooze button. And snooze I did. I didn't notice that Math Man was done, and long gone downstairs to have breakfast — or that my alarm was gently chiming — before I woke up again. Yipes. Well, at least I was organized, I could still make morning prayer.

At 8:13 I was ready to sail out the door. Math Man offered to put some air in my bike tires, but I demurred. "I really need that prayer time with my community." I reached for my keys. Which. were. not. there. Or any of the next four logical places I looked. No keys, no way to (un)lock the bike. And no morning prayer.

"Breathe," I chanted under my breath. I hadn't had my keys since before the hurricane hit. Where would I have tucked them on Thursday afternoon? My contemplative stance is fraying fast. Breathe. I finally located them tucked into the bag I taken to the academic fair. Too late for morning prayer, but still in time to get set up for my class on spaces for contemplation. Breathe.

Math Man offered again to add some air to my tires. I decided my soul could use some pnuema as well. Now. Not when I got to my office. I pulled a chair from the garage (stored there against the winds of the hurricane), set it on the lawn, pulled my breviary out of my bag and prayed morning prayer. (It was the feast of the beheading of St. John the Baptist, by comparison, I was having a fine day.) Breathe. Math Man pushed air into my tires, the Spirit gently wafted Her way into my soul. Air. Spirit. Breath.

My bike ran more smoothly with full tires. My day felt less frantic with a full soul (though it wasn't at all smooth!).

Breathe in me O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may all be holy; Act in me O Holy Spirit, that my work, too, may be holy; Draw my heart O Holy Spirit, that I love but what is holy; Strengthen me O Holy Spirit, to defend all that is holy; Guard me, then, O Holy Spirit, that I always may be holy. Amen. — Prayer of St. Augustine

Column: Calming storms

2011-09-01T16:18:00.001-04:00

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that they aren't after you. Could I extrapolate that to just because I'm anxious, doesn't mean that there isn't actually something to be anxious about? Who knows, but out of 4 classes this week, I've had serious tech fails in 3. The teaching week is over for me, but next week brings travel for the course on contemplation. I'm about to discover the difference between being a retreatant on a silent retreat and a director on a silent retreat. I suspect the former is more restful than the latter.

The music is Margaret Rizza's Exaudi Nos Domine:

Exaudi nos Domine. Dona nobis pacem. Hear us, O Lord. Grant us peace.

Just listening to it, calms the storms....

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 1 September 2011.

A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” The wind ceased and there was great calm. Mk 4: 37-39

The wind runs up the canyon most afternoons at my dad’s, sending anything imprudently still hung out to dry sailing into the hillside rosemary patch.

Late one day, I sought the solitude of the old lath house by the south pasture. The silence was so profound I could sense the wind gathering strength at the bottom of the canyon, a mile or more away.

I could hear each gust hit the almond trees at the canyon's mouth, set the live oaks shivering in the gully below me finally tumbling through the high barley until like a giant's breath — or perhaps the Spirit's — it burst through the open wall of my temporary hermitage. Not even the chapel at Wernersville in the depths of a winter's night is this silent, this still, this pregnant with possibility.

Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote of the way in which silence teaches us to be in “the grip of the present,” to be alert and aware of what might be possible in this moment. The contemplative, Merton notes, attends closely to what is, not what might blow through the door in the next moment. It is a silence that doesn’t cling to itself, that doesn’t “demand light instead of darkness,” or even, I suspect, soundlessness instead of noise. It “waits on the Word of God.” Silence is open to possibility.

I’m tucked in my silent study at the moment, literally and figuratively in the calm before the storm. Hurricane Irene’s clouds shroud the sky, and a multitude of new students are ready to pour through the college’s hallways, their voices rolling like thunder off of the stone walls. Like the disciples bobbing in a tiny boat on the Sea of Galilee, I’m anxious about possibilities. About my flood prone basement, about the course I’m teaching for the first time, about the tumult the fall will inevitably bring.

St. Cyril of Alexander, a fifth century bishop and theologian, is not critical of the storm wracked disciples’ nerves — and perhaps by extension, mine. He suggests instead that such anxiety “sharpens our sense of what is to come.” My start of the semester jitters remind me, even after a quarter century of teaching, to be attentive to what is unfolding in the hubbub. We become watchful in storms of all sorts, alert to ports where we can shelter, open to stepping into places where we can be still with God. Storms, too, are open to possibility.

The winds of Irene batter at my study window and questions from students and colleagues pop in and out of my inboxes. Suddenly I am sharply aware of my need for Jesus to speak His Word to the churning sea of my life, “Quiet!” and keenly alert for God’s invitation to be still within Him. I can’t cling to the silence much longer; I wait instead on the possibilities.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,While to that refuge clinging;Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,How can I keep from singing? — From the traditional hymn “How can I keep from singing?”

Marie and me

2011-08-30T13:08:00.001-04:00

Last year the editor at Nature Chemistry invited me to write a commentary for the International Year of Chemistry on women in science, framed around Marie Curie (since this year is also the 100th anniversary of her Nobel prize in chemistry).

I leapt at the chance, given that Marie has been a hero since my childhood (and beyond, into widowhood). Last March I started thinking about illustrations for the essay, and dreamed up the idea of using photographs of women chemists to make up Marie's face. It took a lot of effort to get the permissions worked out (we take a moment here to say 'huzzah' for my editor, Stuart, who really made this happen). Collecting the photos was a wonder, as I asked students and friends, who asked their students and friends, until we had more than 250 photos (including one of the current director of the chemistry lab at the Institut Curie in Paris).

The editors decided to make this the cover image, and so last week, Marie and I and 269 other women graced the front of Nature Chemistry.

The essay itself, which asks if we send a message, through subtle visual and architectural clues, that women don't belong in the world of science, has been provoking some interesting conversation on Twitter and elsewhere — particularly around the color coding. Chemistry labs are primarily blue (Google it if you don't believe me), which in our culture is rather hard to read as anything other than as "for boys" (walk down the toy aisles, check out the clothing sections, peer into the ladies' room...).

You can read the essay, Sex in the Citadel of Science, at the journal — which I suspect is way better than the interview I did this morning for the Irish radio station Newstalk.

I'm in there in two photos, one in my baptismal gown in my then graduate-student-in-chemistry mother's arms and once as my current self (just above the "a" in Nature).

Autologous Dissections

2011-08-29T20:44:00.007-04:00

What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. — Thomas Merton

I'm jealous of Merton's ability to sum up his way of life in three lean sentences, fifteen spare words. I'm teaching a course this fall on the contemplative traditions in the West. The desert fathers and mothers, Rabia and Rumi, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas Merton and Madeleine Delbrel.

It means I'm teaching out of both sides of my brain this semester: a humanist in the morning, a quantum mechanic in the afternoon, and in all likelihood, a puddle on the floor by evening.

It's giving me an identity crisis. The course is framed around space: the desert, the monastic enclosure, the world. I realized this afternoon that my usual way of organizing my identity (identities?) is precisely by space and less by time. At home, I'm a writer, principally a Catholic writer. At the college, I'm a scientist. Now what I write about so often — the desert fathers, Ignatius, Merton — has leaked into my classroom. I feel a bit as if I've put my own body on the dissecting table, lecturing away as my class peels off my skin and peers at my heart and my lungs.

Sketch is from Thomas Merton's journals in Dialogues with Silence: Prayers and Drawings

Column: Some share in the fellowship of the saints

2011-08-25T21:45:00.006-04:00

For the record, all my sibs are saints, not the least for putting up with me as their oldest sister all these years! Photos are of The Boy, The Artiste and The Little Princess cooking one night (when there were only (!) a dozen plus one for dinner) and of the eggs for Sunday breakfast (three dozen eggs, and just about that many people).

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 25 August 2011.

For ourselves, too, we ask some share in the fellowship of your apostles and martyrs, John the Baptist, Stephen, Barnabas, Matthias, and all the saints. - from Eucharistic Prayer IV

As my oldest son lifted high the cross in the back of the church, I began to chant the Litany of the Saints. The procession accompanying my great-uncle Norb’s body moved slowly up the aisle. Three generations of nieces and nephews were altar servers, readers, cantors, and pallbearers.

The family that gathered to pray for Uncle Norb was large. It was a challenge finding beds for thirty plus people at the farm, and feeding them tested the limits of my father’s kitchen. It seemed like there was always a pot of coffee brewing and at least one batch of dough rising for bread — sixteen loaves kneaded, baked and eaten over the week. But his family was far larger than it appeared to casual visitors.

When Fr. Ray came the morning Uncle Norb died, we prayed the Litany of the Saints, people spilling out of his tiny room into the hallway. “St. James, pray for him." I imagined those who had gone before him, likewise spilling through the gates of heaven.

"St. Phillip, pray for him.” I was comforted by the thought of all of these holy men and women praying for Uncle Norb. “St. Anthony, ora pro eo.” The family of God, gathered on both sides of heaven, prayed together.

I find challenge as well as comfort in this roll call of the saints. In “Faith of our Fathers” Eamon Duffy asks, “What do we want from the saints?” He suggests that we treasure the saints not only for their prayers for us when we are in difficulty, but also for their ability to “domesticate the holy,” helping us understand that holiness is not out of reach, but possible for us all. Saints could be our neighbors, friends, family — even perhaps ourselves.
For all that saints may walk unremarked among us, Duffy points out we should not let the ordinary aspects of a saint’s life blind us to the miraculous, to the “God of surprises who can shake our lives open” in ways we could not expect or fathom. The stories of the saints remind us to be alert to the reality of God at work among us in the everyday things, but they also tell of God for whom nothing is impossible, no situation beyond help.

When we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, we ask God for some share in the fellowship of His saints. I admit that while I find it difficult to imagine any way in which my life could compare to that of St. John the Baptist or St. Monica, I can catch glimpses of saintliness in those around me. In my sister's patience with her troubled students, in my goddaughter's gift of a year to work with the poor. They give me hope that with God's grace, I too, might have a moment of heroic virtue.

It's the miraculous aspects of this prayer for sanctity that I struggle with. Am I truly willing to pray for my life to be shaken open by God, in ways that I might neither expect nor fully understand? Am I willing to let God work through me in inexplicable ways?

Yet this is precisely what we offer when we pray at each Eucharist for some share in that fellowship of saints. For the sake of the Kingdom, we agree to welcome into our lives the unexpected, the shatteringly different. I find it far easier to believe in miracles in principle, than I do to believe that I could be a part of one of God's unfathomable surprises.

What do I want from the saints? Their prayers. Their example. And from God? The courage and grace to ask for a share in that fellowship, whatever surprises that might bring.

O God, whose word burns like a fire within us, grant us a bold and faithful spirit, that in your strength we may be unafraid to speak your word and follow where you lead. Amen. – from the Opening Prayer for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

I digress

2011-08-23T21:02:00.002-04:00

francl, v. intrs., /'fran səl/ to discursively digress with minimal prompting. Usage, "Did you know that you can use purple cabbage to make an acid-base indicator?" interjected into a conversation on coleslaw.

It's cold at night in the California desert - though the daytime temperature hovered near 100^o, the nights were in the low 50s. One night last week, we were sitting around the fire at my brother the Irreverent Reverend's house, roasting marshmallows (Do you know how many different types of marshmallows Campfire makes? Hint: it's more than just mini marshmallows and regular size.) Facebook Nephew wondered if we would see any meteors from the Pleides shower (without any humidity or significant light pollution, the viewing at the Reverend's is pretty amazing).

I responded (undoubtedly chirpily, but I'm taking the fifth here), "Do you have any idea how many objects the size of a minivan enter the earth's atmosphere in a year?"

From the darkness on the far side of the fire came the Boy's deep voice, "To francl, a verb. To describe in great detail. To answer questions no one has yet asked...." His monologue included a drop-dead perfect imitation of me, soon we were all laughing so hard we had tears on our faces.

His cousins and sib wondered if they could reproduce the "frindle" effect (from the book of the same name by Andrew Clements) and coin a new word. The Boy has threatened to add it to Urban Dictionary. He has high hopes; fueled by a text from a friend not present at the fire using the new word.

Update: The Irreverent Reverend has submitted "francl" to Urban Dictionary.

Bonus point: How many times did I francl in this piece? (Not counting the example in the definition!)

Come to think of it, this is why I keep another blog - it's a place to work off my urge to francl without driving my family crazy.

Feints and faints

2011-08-19T23:30:00.000-04:00

Two verbally adept teen-aged boys confined to a small space is a learning opportunity for their mother. I took Crash and The Boy to the local hospital this morning to get some routine blood work done. This meant folding them into my Mini (putting either of them in the back seat requires facility with human origami), where they spent the 10 minute drive reading the lab order slips and suggesting what might be inflicted on the other with the merest flick of the wrist and the making of an additional check mark. I learned that they can't pronounce "progesterone" and that I should hold onto the lab slips in the future. Just in case.

The receptionist in the lobby enjoyed calling them back with a cheery, "Mr. Donnay and Mr. Donnay?" and sent them both off to the same room for the draw. I had learned some years ago that the exam rooms at the pediatrician's had grown too small to hold them both. I learned today that the same holds true for these spaces. Even though the sparring was entirely verbal, I felt like I was continually trying to referee a bout between two fully armored knights holding lances -- on horseback -- in a small castle courtyard.

The Boy was all done and waiting for the tech to release him, when Crash says, "Hey, your hair is weirdly standing on end." For sure. Because he's about to faint. They brought him apple juice and put him flat in a chair and his color gradually returned. Thankfully he pampers well. (The one time I fainted, after giving birth to Crash, I was still saying "I'm fine." as I went down.)

His Facebook status today? "Sigh...I'm a fainter." Just like his uncle, The Artiste!

A wind in the trees

2011-08-17T23:50:00.004-04:00

How do you know you've been traveling too much? When you walk into the concourse at Denver airport's terminal C and say, "There's a pretty good sandwich shop at the end." My kids were duly amused. The Boy wanted to know just how many times I'd been in Denver recently, and I found I wasn't certain.

I will miss the pockets of silence at my dad's. Though at one point there were thirty five people sitting down to eat, and the crush in the kitchen threatened the resident Labrador retriever's tail, it was a short walk down to the edge of the pasture. The wind runs up the canyon most afternoons, sending towels and suits hung to dry on the wall near the house sailing into my late mother's rosemary patch. The rosemary on the hillside hums with busy bees, making the retrieval of items caught in its clutches a perilous undertaking.

Late one afternoon, I sought the stillness and silence of the lath house I had appropriated early in my stay. I sat on the old steps, and watched the hawks circling lazily above. I could hear the odd horse nickering in the field down the hill. The silence was so profound I could hear the gusts gathering strength at the bottom of the canyon a mile or more away. I could hear the wind hit the almond trees at the canyon's mouth, stir the live oaks in the gully below me, finally tumbling through the high barley until like a giant's breath, or perhaps the Spirit's, it burst through the open wall of my temporary hermitage. Not even the chapel in the depths of a winter's night at Wernersville is this silent, this still, this pregnant with possibility.

I've been reading Evelyn Underhill for the course I'm teaching on silent spaces this fall. She writes of St. Cuthbert, who longed for his hermitage on the river Farne, but enjoyed it rarely, and of St. Francis Xavier, who wanted a orderly life on Rome with his companion Ignatius, but found himself bound for the far side of the word on a moment's notice. She is unsympathetic. The externals of place and how it is ordered toward prayer and contemplation seem very much secondary considerations to Underhill. Prayer is simply what you do, whether in the deep silence of my hermitage, or in the press of the boarding line for the plane. Prayer may be an interior work, but it orients what is external, not so much the reverse.

In the end, I return to the Principle and Foundation, I desire not so much silence or tumult, but whatever draws me closer to God. Or so I pray.

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.

David Fleming, S.J.'s paraphrase of Ignatius' Principle and Foundation.

Photo is of the lath house at sunset.

Good luck with the raisins!

2011-08-13T16:31:00.001-04:00

Good luck with the raisins!

The funeral for Uncle Norb was yesterday at the Mission (San Miguel Arcangel - founded in 1797, still in use as a parish church). The liturgy was well celebrated. We came back to the house to eat and talk. Between sandwiches and dessert my brother the Irreverent Reverend (brother #3) excuses himself from the table and his wife responds, "Good luck with the raisins!"

It's the punch line to a story about The Artistes (brother #2 and wife) where they take their leave from a breakfast table. The story, of course, must be now be retold for the benefit of the young ones, and newcomers. Once begun, the stories flow...old ones and new.

The newest is on me. I had asked my sister to read the Prayers of the Faithful and at dinner on Thursday (29 of us?!) had given her a copy. I did remember to mark up the copies for the first and second readings (Isaiah and Romans). However, I forgot to (1) mark the Prayer of the Faithful in the Rite, and therfore, failed to show my sister its location in said book and (far more critical) (2) did not mark up her practice copy. The set of intentions I selected included options for bishops/priests, religious, and laypersons. The text for the presider was also there (and not marked as such, you just gotta know, which I do, but my sainted sister does not).

At the proper time, Sainted Sister gets up, and I suddenly remember items (1) and (2). I'm trying to gesture to her to wait for the presider (who was wonderful about gently cuing everyone involved). She gets that I'm trying to tell her something, but not what, so decides she will just plunge ahead. She does. The presider lets her go. She reads the brief introduction. All is well, intention follows intention. Suddenly I hear her say, "for our brother Norbert, bishop and priest...." Oh. No.

You can hear a pin drop in the place, but we are well trained. She says, "we pray to the Lord." We respond, "Lord, hear our prayer." I'm wincing, waiting for her to go on to the one about religious, but the presider smoothly retrieves the strands and launches into the concluding prayer.

I apologize at the end of Mass, but by now my brothers have hold of the tale (and my tail) and are lovingly describing (and embellishing) the expressions that swept across my face as this whole thing goes down.

Lord, hear my prayer.

Column: Tangling with time

2011-08-10T18:37:00.004-04:00

Time is still all knotted up here. The peach marmalade remains a marvel -- a moment of summer held captive, a half-dozen jars of the color of the sunset sit on my dad's counter waiting for me to take them home. Uncle Norb has passed away at 93; the weekend's family BBQ party now follows a Friday funeral. I'm writing out of Lent, penance on my mind.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 11 August 2011.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. — Ecclesiastes 3:1

For most of this summer I have been working off the clock. Somewhere in early June I stopped wearing my watch unless I had an appointment to keep. Now it’s August and I can’t figure out where I put it.

Quarks, the tiny particles from which the universe is constructed, come in six flavors. As a scientist, time always seems less complicated to me than matter: There is only one sort of time, and it marches in a single direction. In my heart, I know this can’t possibly be true.

Time has flavors, some bitter, some sweet. Watches and clocks purport to measure it, but their fixed rhythms never seem to quite match the meter of my life. Time is not a single strand, but a loose tangle of threads. It’s August, I’m at my dad’s for a family reunion, while my mind wanders through next May to write a reflection for the feast of St. Athanasius.

St. Augustine wonders about the tangled nature of time in his Confessions. “For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it?” We agree on a way to count time, but are hard pressed to explain to each other how time works. We experience the present moment as a breath between past and future. God is eternal, ever-present, alive in a present that doesn’t require the past and the future to hold it in place. God holds all our time lines in His hands.

When I reflexively glance at the clock, I tie myself to human time, an agreed upon ticking away of seconds. Working on God’s time keeps me looking toward a time that doesn’t push and pull me to the next task, but takes its cues from the eternal.

Living without my watch has encouraged me to notice the many ways time tastes. This morning I stole out of the blossoming chaos at my dad’s, taking my writing to an abandoned lath house on the edge of the south pasture, hidden beneath years of weeds and spider webs. Now the wind has just begun to rustle in the feral rosebushes that shelter me, while a cold-slowed lizard that looks like it was carved from the weathered wood of the floor shuffles into the sunshine that laps at my improvised desk. The moment has the flavor of noon — time to return to the bedlam at the top of the hill.

My prayer time is off the clock this summer, too. Morning prayer comes with my first my cup of tea, whether that’s 7:30 a.m. before the gaggle of teenagers have slunk from their beds, or 11:15 on a morning that felt like I tumbled out of bed into a roller-coaster car.

I’m more attentive to God’s call to prayer where and when I am: as I help my dad lift my 93-year-old uncle out of his chair, make peach marmalade with my 9-year-old niece, or listen to my brother Gene talk about his work as principal of a local middle school. It’s a way of prayer that willingly entangles itself in the times — and needs — of others.

I’ve stopped watching my watch. In fact, I’ve stopped looking for my watch. While summer lasts, I’m just watching.

Father, yours is the morning and yours is the evening. Let the Sun of Justice, Jesus Christ, shine forever in our hearts and draw us to that light where you live in radiant glory. Amen. — Closing prayer, Evening Prayer, Tuesday Week II

A fox is the most excellent of company

2011-08-09T12:23:00.002-04:00

Rule 1 of blogging - if you write it, someone you know will read it. Rule 2 of blogging - do not reveal the location of your hermitage. Your niece reads your blog, your son talks to his cousin. I have been discovered.

Despite no longer being quite so mysterious (and no one has tipped off the littlest niece and nephew yet), the lath house remains a secure refuge against the burbling chaos (though another fifteen people are due in on Wednesday evening, so who knows how long this will hold).

I'm not alone for all that the people don't seek me out. The lizards scurry under the floorboards (at least I hope they are lizards and not rattlesnakes) and bask on the pile of old wooden beams. The owl that perches on the pine tree has gone to bed for the day, but left a pellet at my doorstep so I can see how very good a hunter he is. The birds fly through the open rafters to serenade me.

Late yesterday morning, I heard what sounded like my dad's dog plunging through the brush. Imagine my surprise when I spy, not the chocolate brown arc of a labrador's tail, but a bushy red tail with a white underside waving in the weeds. It's a fox, come to curl up in the shade under the bush on the other side of my porch - eight feet away. (I'm under the ferociously thorned rose bush on the other side, which is less inviting for napping amongst its branches.)

We are agreed to ignore each other, at least until I bend over to pick up a book and startled my companion from her slumbers. She bounced (rather literally) out of her hiding spot and in a blink was at the far side of the pasture. I reached behind me to pick up my camera, and when I turned around she was gone.

Take all of you and eat

2011-08-07T22:47:00.007-04:00

It's interim time here. All the tasks that can be done for Uncle Norb at the moment are done and we wait on the administrative wheels of the local sheriff's department to turn tomorrow. Meanwhile, everyone still needs to eat.

There are eight of us at my dad's, add in my brother and his brood from next door, my niece who is on her way from San Francisco - and that makes a baker's dozen for dinner (this will more than double by Wednesday night) The Boy and I are cooking - his famous pasta and my dad's recipe for Malverne rolls.

As my boys worked on beignets for breakfast (a treat that was put on hold yesterday morning), i started the rolls. My youngest niece appeared, wondering if she could help. I set her to measuring out the ten cups of flour (yes, ten!) into the bowl with the proofing yeast. She scoops up the first cup from the bin that holds fifty pounds, and requests the metal spoon to carefully level the flour in her measure. I asked her if she learned how to do this in Girl Scouts. "No, from The Boy."

Her little brother peers into the bin of flour and wants in on the game. His sister bestows the honor of "cups eight, nine and ten" upon him with all the gravitas of a princess offering him an earldom. He's so short I'm afraid he'll topple head first into the bin as he reaches to the bottom (we need more flour). The Little Princess shows him how to scoop and level.

The dough well begun, I turn it out onto the counter to knead by hand. My dad pulls out the large rising bowl (the one so large I can barely get my arms around it). As I turn and stretch the dough, my hands work in a rhythm learned from my father. I leave the finished dough on the counter, while I grease the bowl. I turn back to find my father's strong and sure hands on the dough giving it a few last turns, checking my work not by eye, but by feel.

In this kitchen, in this moment, my mind's eye sees my great-grandmother's (Uncle Norb's mother) kitchen, four generations moving purposefully around it, each learning from the previous, the skills and stories handed on. I can imagine the Little Princess forty years from now, my age, showing a young niece how to level the flour, and pulling a nephew feet first out of the flour bin.

Do this in memory of me.

Malverne Rolls

7 tsp yeast
4 1/2 cups of warm water
4 1/2 tsp salt
10 cups of flour

Proof the yeast in the warm water, stir in the salt. Add the flour, a cup at a time, to make a stiff dough. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic. Leave in a warm spot to rise. When the dough has doubled, punch it down and let it rise until doubled a second time. Turn the dough out and knead few turns. Cut the dough into 24 pieces, roll each piece into a rope about 8" in length, tie into a knot. Brush rolls with beaten egg, sprinkle liberally with poppy seeds. Let rise until the rolls double. Bake in a 375F oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until the rolls are brown and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Enjoy warm with butter.

Transfigurations

2011-08-06T18:23:00.006-04:00

I knew the moment I heard the tone of my dad's voice, rising softly, "Norb?" My brother came down the hall, "Uncle Norb died." I abandoned my brewing tea on the counter. My 93 year-old great uncle, here to escape the upheaval of selling his house down south, had unexpectedly died in his sleep early this morning. His rosary was on the table next to him, tucked into his pajama pocket were two medals — St. Anthony and Padre Pio.

The priest has been here, the deputy sheriff, the funeral home. As people came and went, I sat there with him, praying the Office — for the Transfiguration, not the Office of the Dead, somehow that seemed more apt — and the rosary. As we prayed the Litany of the Saints, invoking Augustine and Ignatius (and even my friend of the moment Athanasius), I imagined the heavenly court, out there to greet him.

Now I'm exhausted — even such a gentle transition as this one seems to have been leaves us mourning and shocked. I wonder if we're tired because a part of us has departed as well, we are stretched between heaven and earth.

Hidden in plain sight

2011-08-05T15:03:00.005-04:00

I'm at my dad's in rural California for a couple of weeks. The entire clan is gathering next weekend -- all six of us and our entourages (that's thirty some people at the dinner table, as I'm counting). For all the surrounding quiet, the house hops. The age range here at the moment is 7 to 93, and every decade in between.

Writing anything requiring sustained thought just didn't seem possible — but write I must, I have a couple of pending deadlines. Conversations swirl around me no matter where I am, which I am loathe to tune out because they involve people I love and don't see all that often. While there's lots of empty space here, most of it is pasture -- llama territory. Not a great place to sit and write, unless you find being kissed by a llama inspiring.

Then I remembered the old lath house, which used to abut the pool cum water reservoir (fire is an ever present danger out here). The pool moved to permanent digs up the hill some year ago, but the lath house remains. Wild mustard and grass fill the depression where the old above ground pool rested, the entrance is equally filled with weeds and spider webs. An abandoned set of steps has been repurposed by the local lizard population as a basking bed. Roses, barely held in check when this was a regularly used space, have grown feral, their thorns jutting out pugnaciously from canes as thick as my wrist.

I borrowed a broom from my dad (swearing him to secrecy), bundled my writing things into a furoshiki and walked down to clear a space. Leaves and dried rose petals flew, sending the lizards franctically looking for new spaces. I hauled up the old steps, brushing off the start of a hornet's nest, to make an impromptu desk and set up shop.

It is the hermitage of my dreams, even if I can only inhabit it for a couple of hours a day. Yesterday my niece and nephew and son came in search of my hiding spot. They walked past - twice - once as the little timer I set to remind me to stretch when I'm writing went off. I though I was done for, but though they peered over the fence, they failed to see me tucked into the shade -- and the roses are a real deterrent to anyone trying to make an opening in the foilage!

My nephew wondered if I had climbed up one of the pine trees at the edge of the pasture. "She doesn't climb trees," the Boy informed him. "She's just not that agile."

I beg to differ. I spent many happy and cool hours on retreat ten feet up in a weeping beech tree just a few weeks ago. I'm agile. As well as hidden in plain sight...

The lizards have decided that my occupation doesn't preclude their use of the space. I like the shade, they like the sun. When the shade goes, so do I!

Offhand comments

2011-08-02T00:25:00.004-04:00

Crash, on the way out the door, "I wonder where the rest of it is?" I'll spare you the details, but part of the ensuing conversation involved explaining the difference between gerbils and voles. Fluffy is on the prowl.

I don't mind. Last year I got zero plums from a tree overflowing with them. The squirrels were very efficient. This year, I want at least one plum.

Entangled in time

2011-08-01T11:24:00.005-04:00

I'm going to admit to being not quite oriented x3 (to person, place and time) these days. Time feels like a loose tangle of threads, not a smoothly running line. Just in the last week, it's been August, and I'm off to see family. It's been September, and I'm prepping a lecture for quantum chemistry. It's November and I'm writing about running the holiday rapids. It's been (last) April and I'm giving a talk on contemplative practices. It's been (next) May and I'm hearing the readings and prayers for the feast of St. Athanasius.

I cantored on Saturday for the vigil Mass. Earlier in the week I'd prepped by reading the psalm in the context of the other readings. The second reading is on my top ten list of all time, so I spent more time in that space than in the Gospel, but I did read the text, I know I did. But by Saturday, I had fast-forwarded to May, immersed in those readings for Athanasius (Acts 12:24-13:5/Psalm 67/Jn 12:44-50). I chanted the Gospel acclamation (with the correct verse), turned and faced the ambo and....was startled, nigh on shocked, to hear Matthew's story of the loaves and fishes proclaimed. I was expecting to hear John.

The struggle to place the Gospel actually let me hear the familiar words afresh. I wonder if tying myself too tightly to time with ordos and calendars stunts my ability to hear what is new and alive in words familiar and worn. Surely when I say, "I love you." to Math Man, I don't mean what I meant 20 years ago? or yesterday? or tomorrow?

______

Why St. Athanasius? I'm writing a reflection for this feast for Liturgical Press' Give Us This Day - first issue is today!

Feelings

2011-08-01T11:21:00.002-04:00

Crash is going to breakfast with two guy friends. "So do guys talk about their romances over breakfast?"

Crash, "Mom. Guys don't have feelings."

Right.

An Inconvenience Rightly Considered

2011-07-28T11:08:00.001-04:00

I'm back up at Wernersville for the night. Yes, I know I was just here — on retreat and to see Robin when she came on her retreat. But I've an appointment to see Patient Spiritual Director and a need to spend some prayerfully unplugged time with my writing. Crash is along for the ride. Literally. He enjoyed flying up the turnpike in my Mini. I doubt I'll be allowed to drive back either.

He's silent, too, and I haven't seen him since dinner last night. I haven't tried to find him, either, as I think this is a bit like going off to sleep-away camp and then having your mother decide to stay. (He's writing poetry about his visit to the Silent Land.)

Last night I took two long walks, the second with the intention of ending up at the pool for a late evening swim. As I walked down the front steps and out of the house, I noticed it had grown overcast and breezy. What a relief! The thought briefly occurred to me that it look rather like it might rain, but I knew the forecast was for sun and heat, so clearly it wasn't going to precipitate. When I was at the far end of my planned loop, it started to rain. Just a bit at first, the pond looked liked like a mirror with polka dots. Perhaps I should head back.

The rain is falling harder now, the surface of the water sparkled with tiny effervescent explosions as drops hit, sending water up, and leaving a visible trail of turbulence as they slid into the pond. I notice the few dry patches on the path, shielded by both looming cypress and dense oak trees, and took refuge in one. Now the wind has kicked up, pushing the water across the pond in puffs. The drops are setting up their own interference patterns. The water hits the retaining wall on the far side, and weaves its way back across, creating a series of furiously oscillating standing waves just in front of me.

Now I'm getting more than a little wet. But no matter which way I go, it's the same distance unless I want to risk going straight up the hill through the brush -- but having seen Patient Spiritual Director's case of poison ivy a couple years back, I think I'd rather be wet. G.K. Chesterton's line, "an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered" floated through my mind. If I got soaked, just how inconvenient would it be? Not all that much, since my plan had been to get cooled off with water in the first place.

By the time I reached the pool, I realized that the rain was letting up, so I stopped and swam. Why not, I was already wet!

Photo is of the pond at Wernersville, when it's not raining.

Column: Fierce prayers

2011-07-27T21:32:00.005-04:00

The image of praying fiercely comes via the late Fr. Eric Werts here. The essay project is almost ready to go to press, it's been a wild and wonderful ride so far -- to hear from so many friends and colleagues was a great joy.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 28 July 2011.

I cry aloud to God, cry to God to hear me. On the day of my distress I seek the Lord; by night my hands are raised unceasingly; I refuse to be consoled. — Ps. 77:2-3

I’m in the midst of a project that has gone viral. Last week I asked a number of colleagues for photos to illustrate an essay I wrote. They asked their friends, who in turn invited yet more people to help out. Now my inboxes — e-mail and postal — are brimming with several hundred photographs, inquiries and release forms that must be downloaded, scanned, answered, filed, printed and collated.

As a result I’ve dashed off more than a hundred notes of thanks, resisting the temptation to resort to a blanket e-mail of gratitude. Tucked into this delightfully helpful deluge were two e-mails from friends, seriously seeking my help in ways far less tangible. Each ended with “Prayers, please.” My response flew back, “Of course, I will.”

In assuring each of my friends that I would pray for them, I wasn’t offering to make some generic noise in the direction of God’s ear and move on. I meant that I was willing to wrestle with God on their behalf, to cry aloud to God that He might hear them. To ask God for what they need, specifically and repeatedly.

Walter Brueggemann, in his short book “Praying the Psalms,” notes that we often strive for a “cool, detached serenity” in prayer. We want to approach God gracefully and well collected.

Yet the prayers and songs that are the psalms, Brueggemann points out, are uncomfortably concrete. The psalmists do not shy away from asking God for exactly what they desire, couching their petitions in everyday words and images. Wheat and water. Bees and mud.

Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner in “The Need and the Blessing of Prayer” similarly warns against an overly resolute detachment in prayer. It is tempting, he says, to try to limit our prayer to the interior, to dispassionate requests for the “noble goods of the soul.” Rahner advises us to look instead at Christ praying, gasping out His prayers that the cup might pass Him by. He is not afraid to ask directly. He is sure He is heard. And yet simultaneously He offers His unconditional submission to what God wills.

These are not diffident “whatever you wish” prayers, these are fierce prayers that transfigure “I beg You” into “I offer all that I am for You.” The mystery of this sort of prayer — our determination to express our desires to God, our willingness to accede to God’s desires for us — is ultimately the mystery of Christ, both true God and true man.

So I reach for the Psalter, for the Liturgy of the Hours, to enfold my friends’ prayers in these ancient songs from one end of the day to the other. I press my ongoing round of psalms into this service, not because I’m afraid I will forget to pray otherwise, but because the psalms themselves sing candidly and fiercely of our needs in this world as much as the next. They speak of a world that is messy and uncertain, that seeks “the ear of God’s mercy.”

Most of all I pray the psalms for my friends and their needs because these are the words that Jesus prayed in his most difficult hours. Jesus trusted He was heard in these words. I trust, too, that nothing in God’s inbox, however overflowing, goes unheard, or is answered with anything less than God’s full and loving attention.

Beg so that your continuing prayer of petition appears to be a pledge of your faith in the light of God in the darkness of the world, for your hope for life in this constant dying, for your loyalty of love that loves without reward. — Father Karl Rahner, S.J., “The Prayer of Need” in

The Need and the Blessing of Prayer

Time will tell - or not

2011-07-25T23:39:00.004-04:00

After realizing last summer how much having clocks in my face created an artifical sense of urgency, I made a conscious effort to keep them out of sight. I turned off the clock in the corner of my computer screen, take off my watch unless I have a reason to wear it, and have moved the clock off my physical desktop as well.

I really didn't need to know what time it was as often as I looked to see what time it was. I watch the clock when I teach, I wear a watch when I have an appointment (or set an alarm), but most of the time I can be "off the clock." And more and more I'm choosing that option.

Last week Math Man had some minor surgery done. There's a lot of waiting involved, but once you are there, no real need to know the time. It takes what it takes, as my mother might have said. At one point, I looked at my wrist, wondering what time it was, only to realize (1) I had been writing before we left, so wasn't wearing it and (2) I didn't need to know, they'd be done when they were done. It was just a reflex. (And it's clearly a hard habit to break. I've been trying for a year!)

Somewhat counterintuitively, I tend to wear my watch more often on retreat. Meals, Mass, meetings with my director -- none of these are good to miss, and unlike at home, no one is going to come looking for me for the first two. Still, on principle I prefer not to use my watch for prayer, but instead set a timer (I have a lovely virtual meditation timer on my iPad). On retreat at Wernersville last month it was hot (though not as hot as it's gotten lately) and my favorite spot for prayer in the chapel (third floor balcony) was unbearably hot. Instead I went outside and lay on the grass near the eastern cloister, looking up at the midnight stars.

The second night I went out there, I realized that I'd forgotten my iPad with the timer and wasn't wearing my watch. I thought about going back to my room to fetch a timing device, but given that my knee was seriously unhappy about stairs and taking the elevator at that hour threatens the peaceful sleep of those whose rooms are nearby, I decided to simply stay until I was done and trust that I would take the customary hour.

As I lay there, I realized that the constellation that had fed my contemplations of the previous night was once again overhead (the heavens do run like clockwork). I remembered that as I had finished, the constellation was just edging out of my sight behind the cloister roof. And so I let God's clock time my prayer, aware again of God turning my face toward the immensity of creation, letting one more strand fall from my hands.

You can watch me talk about unplugging during the Spiritual Exercises and afterwards here. Click on the square with my name (and find out how old I am).

The column I wrote about watching the night on retreat last year is here. And if you want to see a magnificent photo of the night sky at Wernerville, check out Robin's vignettes of her retreat.

Gateway vegetables

2011-07-25T09:55:00.005-04:00

It's been hideously hot here for much of the last week, with the heat index topping out above 100^oF. Cooking without heat is decidedly an oxymoron — but I've been trying to keep the number of BTUs generated in the kitchen down. My solution has been sandwiches, which not only are cool to make, but quick and relatively easy to vary.

Or at least I thought I was changing things up enough. Math Man, however, pleaded on Saturday for anything but sandwiches for dinner. As Barnacle Boy and I were headed out on a couple of errands, he wondered what was for dinner. “Anything but sandwiches! Dad's had enough of those. I was thinking of salad, with chicken or salmon.” There was a long pause.

"You know I only like the unhealthy kind of lettuce." Barnacle Boy is more than a bit of a foodie, and I think is chagrined that he doesn't find a spring mix of greens enticing.

"Iceberg? I know. It's OK, it's how I started. When I was your age I loved cold iceberg lettuce with way too much French dressing on it. And now I eat all kinds of stuff in a salad." I reassured him.

"So iceberg lettuce is a gateway vegetable." He's got it.

At dinner (where there was one bowl of iceberg lettuce for the teen set and another with more interesting stuff in it for those of us who appreciate the bitter with the sweet), Crash Kid and his girlfriend, Cupcake Artist, wondered just what iceberg lettuce might be a gateway too.

"Brussel sprouts," I shot back. Only for the hard core.

For the record, I adore brussel sprouts, but I know I am nearly alone in this. My family thinks I'm nuts.

I've been musing on my other blog about how keeping cool works — or doesn't, if you need a bit of a science fix.

Column: Frenetic Diligence

2011-07-20T21:33:00.002-04:00

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 30 June 2011.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat, nor about your body, what you shall put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Lk 12: 22b-23

The smell of steaming starch and suds transports me to my grandmother's laundry room. I was fascinated by the mangle, which could wring water from bed sheets I was sure were not even damp. I loved watching my grandmother's expert hands folding and feeding the laundry through the rollers, marveling at her skill — a skill the operation of the electric dryer in our basement didn't require.

As I ran the iron across yet another linen shirt last weekend, while the boys’ laundry chugged away nearby, I wondered (not for the first time) why I buy summer clothes that need extra maintenance. While my grandmother had no choice but to starch my grandfather’s collars and painstakingly press the wrinkles out of my aunt’s sundresses, I am a child of the permanent press era. Wash, dry, hang and wear. It’s nothing if not efficient.

These days I’m not so sure efficiency should be the overriding goal. The minute or two it takes me to stuff a load of clothes into the washer and toss it wholesale into the dryer, sandwiched in between starting dinner and grading a stack of paper, leaves me feeling simultaneously inattentive to what I have — food for the table, clothes to wear, a job — and anxious over keeping all the tasks in line and efficiently moving along.

Yet here is Jesus in this passage in Luke telling his disciples, “do not be anxious about your life.” The body is more than just what our soul wears, we are created to do more than put the next meal on the table. Reflecting on this Gospel in the 5th century, St. Cyril of Alexandria warned his congregation to foreswear a “frenetic diligence” that drove them to gather more than what they needed. I suspect my efficient ways are an attempt to gather more time than I need. I sense, too, that my frenzied diligence isn’t always producing more time for God or family or rest, but just more time to be frenzied.

It remains hard for me to remember that for all I pour into getting dinner on the table, or the laundry done, or the next lecture written, the success of these ventures does not ultimately depend on my efforts alone — frenzied or otherwise. If the smallest things are outside your control, asks Jesus, why worry about the rest?

As the line of pressed shirts hanging on the rack grew, I realized that the scent of starch brought back more than nostalgia for the summer days of my youth. I learned in that sunny space off my grandmother’s kitchen a certain rhythm of work. I learned that an unforced pace attentive to the present moment, not caught up in what was coming next, could get done what needed to be done. Diligence and care did not demand frenzy or undue anxiety.

I have tucked the shirts into the closet, but left the lesson out where I could be reminded. Life is more than the sum of my to-do list.

Be with us, Lord, as we take up our daily tasks: and help us to remember that it is in your world that we live and work. — From the Intercessions for Morning Prayer, Monday Week III

Photo is from the National Archives of the Netherlands

Passing notes

2011-07-19T23:08:00.004-04:00

Last Thursday I moderated a panel discussion on getting your scientific work into print for the American Chemical Society. About 1000 people registered for the hour long event. And I did it from the little cafe table in the sunroom on the back of the house. No need to get packed, on a plane or wear pantyhose. I like this tech.

While I'm engaged in this high tech communication, headset on, I realised I'd left my notes for the presentation in the printer. Crash Kid is sprawled in front of the computer on the far side of the room. I can't get his attention (he's got on headphones) and he doesn't have anything with chat capabilities open. I finally resorted to a low tech communication tool - I made a paper airplane with a note in it and flew it across the room.

I want to tell Sr. Jane that I've finally found a use for paper airplanes and notes passed during class. As Crash would say, it's a mad skill.

Noisy silence

2011-07-17T23:06:00.003-04:00

"I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the refrain which is God
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still
and plain:
no more words."

Rainer Marie Rilke The Book of a Monastic Life I, 50

After four full days of wading deeper and deeper into the practice of silence, I arrived at this retreat already clearly on retreat and my director gently suggested that I might forgo the talking dinner, and "carry on" -- which I did.

Until, that is, four days into my retreat proper and after eight days of virtually complete silence. I got up (long past the official breakfast) took my tea and prayer to the edge of the eastern cloister garden, where the only noise was of the small fountain and the birds who frequent its cool waters. I went to Mass and after a lunch of fruit and yogurt headed to prayer again. I came down the stairs, rounded the corner toward the chapel to nearly run into an grey-haired sister, who stopped me and inquired, "Are you afraid of bats?"

Taken aback by this seeming non sequitur, I was momentarily speechless, finally spitting out a respectfully quiet "Yes, Sister."

"Well, there's is a bat in the Holy Spirit chapel." Oh. My.

Bats on the floor in the middle of the day are not a good thing. It was the fourth of July, so staff were in short supply. The rector, however, was in his office. Recruited to the bat banishing project, I was issued a mop and we went off to do battle.

Bat duly dispatched and disposed of, I decided that a walk might be in order. Let's just say I needed to settle a bit more before sitting down to pray. Walking out to the far fields, I leaned against the fence to watch a vintage combine cutting straw. On it's next pass, it comes to a lurching halt and out pops the farmer to say hello. Silence??

Back to the house, by now hot, drenched in sweat and interiorly, at least, still disquieted. I was dreaming of a cold shower, a bag of ice for the knee that felt as if someone had stuffed a dish sponge inside, something very cold to drink and the quiet of the garden. Heading down the first floor hall, I run into (nearly literally) Urban Spiritual Director, here to start his own retreat that evening. Twice he wonders, are you keeping silence? Well, not that you would notice today.

Cooled off and once again settled (and quiet), I cautiously ventured forth in prayer again. Whew. No flying furry mammals, no farmers, no friends. I’m back...yes!

Or not. I walked that evening, down the hedgerow path. Halfway down, I startled an owl, who came plummeting through the tree above me. I screamed (like a girl, as my brothers would say).

Noisy silence.

Extreme retreats

2011-07-16T11:44:00.004-04:00

My retreats often seem to feature extreme weather. There was the retreat where it rained. And rained. And rained. Or the year of the relentless heat, where five retreatants went off to the hospital. Or the Long Retreat, where blizzards (plural) and below zero temperatures were on tap.

This year was it was the heat again (though truly, what do you expect when you go on retreat over the fourth of July), and though there is no air conditioning in most of the Jesuit Center the heat wasn’t a particular distraction, and in many ways, welcome. A few days after my retreat, I was back up to see Robin (of Metanoia) who was here to make her retreat, and the talk at the dinner table was of ways to cope with the heat on retreat.

There are the obvious. Windows: open them. Shades: close them. Fans: turn them on. Water: don’t neglect to drink it. The pool: go — multiple times.

And the not so obvious. Use the wastebasket, or your running/walking shoes, to prop the door open enough for air circulation while preserving privacy. Look for cool places to pray -- the small air conditioned chapel, outside on the grass at midnight, sitting on the cool stone of the cloister or on the marble of the main chapel. Climb the weeping beech tree. Go to confession. (I teased my confessor that an unlooked for grace of celebrating the sacrament with him was a brief respite from the heat -- his office was air conditioned!)

And I will admit that one day, out to pick up a prescription, I made an unauthorized by my director stop at Rita’s Water Ice and had a vanilla custard with hot caramel sauce (for dinner). My director’s comment the next day when I confessed to seeking grace outside the gates? “If you turn right instead of left on 422, there’s a much closer ice cream place.”

Usefuls (Furoshiki)

2011-07-15T21:23:00.008-04:00

Years ago I read a sci-fi novel in which beautiful fabric squares called "usefuls" played a role. Everything from tents to packs to hammocks were ingeniously made by folding and tying knots in the fabric. I've forgotten the rest of the plot,but have been reminded of the usefuls whenever I pulled out a shawl from my bag to keep me warm or stuff one into the bag cushion my camera or pulled one over my head as an impromptu rain shield in a drizzle.

In Japan, I discovered real life usefuls — furoshiki. Fabric squares of various sizes that can be folded and tied into all sort of, well, useful shapes. I have four, two different size and fabrics.

I’ve learned to tie them into a bag to bring home tomatoes from the farmer’s market, to pack clean clothes, to carry my swim stuff to the pool, to keep all my lunch stuff together in my tote bag and to make a great little package for my books on retreat. And I used one to provide a cheery disguise for a bag of ice to take down the swelling on my knee...

(see the photo on the lower right)

Instructions for 86 different ways to fold and tie a furoshiki into anything from an apron to a backpack are here.

Column: Old landscapes and new eyes

2011-07-14T17:55:00.005-04:00

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 14 July 2011.

I rejoiced when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD." And now our feet are standing within your gates, Jerusalem. Ps 122:1-2

The suitcases were hauled up from their basement resting places, while the kitchen door sprouted lists of chores that must be done, things that must not be forgotten before we headed off in three different directions. Water the plants; be sure to take the sandwiches from the refrigerator. Did anyone remember to close the windows upstairs?

Mike and Victor were headed north to look at colleges, Chris, east to the shore for a holiday with a friend. Me? I was bound west to for an eight-day silent retreat.

After a year in which I circumnavigated the globe — twice — and packed and unpacked my bags so often I lost count, I longed for silence and stillness. I rejoiced as I drove through the Jesuit Center’s gates, to plant my feet firmly in one spot for a week. Pilgrimages were the last thing on my mind. God had other plans.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,” suggested French essayist Marcel Proust. I had come to be still, in a familiar place, where I did not have to struggle to negotiate a strange landscape. Instead God sent me on pilgrimage, to see with new eyes rather than to see new places.

In reflecting on the reasons for his own pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope John Paul II mused, “We go to see where God has pitched his tent.” If we ourselves are dwelling places of God in the Spirit, as St. Paul tells us, then God has pitched his tent within us, and there is no escaping the pilgrim way - familiar landscapes or not.

A Christian pilgrimage, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People tells us, has four movements: the departure, walking, the visit to the shrine, and the return. So, too, this retreat.

Though I didn’t move physically far from my usual neighborhood, I did depart from my usual ways, leaving behind both my writing and my customary prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours. I ventured onto unfamiliar roads, seeking God.

Not only did I literally walk miles through the hedgerows, but I walked in silence with the other men and women come on retreat with the same desire — to let God be at work in their lives. I walked with Jesus, meditating on the Gospels, seeing with new eyes the places where God had pitched his tent in my life.

I stopped, again and again. Held in the warm stillness of the chapel, supported by the cool stone of the cloister, overshadowed by the expanse of creation above my head as I slipped out to pray on the grass at midnight. I listened to God’s Word echo in my inmost being.

And I came back, only to find I’m still on the road. Seeing with new eyes where God has pitched his tent, in the aisles of the grocery store, in my email, in the kitchen with my sons. In me.

You teach all the faithful to perceive the signs of your presence along all the pathways of life; grant that like the disciples of Emmaus we may come to recognize Christ as the companion of our journey and know him in the breaking of the bread. — From the intercessions for the Blessing of Pilgrims After Their Return

Occam's razor or mom's?

2011-07-13T11:43:00.005-04:00

Crash Kid — now the proud holder of a junior license to drive — has been getting up early (well, actually late by his usual academic schedule, just early for summer) and taking The Boy to his rehearsals for summer stage. They tooled out of the driveway at 8:30 am (precisely, The Boy is nothing if not punctual, and reproducibly so). Crash is usually back by 9. At 10, Math Man wanders into my study upstairs and says, "Where's Mike?" Whoosh. All the air flies out of my lungs. Where is he?

"Ah...he did say he was going walking with The Chem Obsessed One today." And of course, given the heat, early would be good for that, but I don't remember when he said they were going. Neither phone call nor text raises any response. Occam's razor suggests the simple explanation is that he is walking or running and has left his phone in the car rather than bouncing in his pocket, and assumes that his wifty mother has remembered since last night his stated plans. As the kids would say, "Let's go with that."

But Mom's razor can't quite slice things so neatly. Did something happen with the car? Would they call if the Boy didn't show for rehearsal (he has a lead, they would miss him quickly)? Was there an accident? Rationally I realize my history makes me think zebras when I hear hoofbeats, but when was being rational ever a criteria for being a mother?

Forty minutes later the phone rings, caller ID reassuringly announcing it's Crash on the other end. He pops into my study a few minutes later to reassure me in person, with an "Of course, if he's not answering his phone, he's been squashed by an 16-wheeler." He teases me that I wasn't too panicked. Only 2 phone calls and 3 texts. I point out one phone call is Math Man's. So a rough estimate of the ratio of maternal worry to paternal worry would be 4:1.

Breaking silence

2011-07-10T13:50:00.003-04:00

The wind blows hard against this mountain side
Across the sea into my soul
It reaches into where I cannot hide
Setting my feet upon the road

....

Kyrie eleison
Down the road that I must travel
Kyrie eleison
Through the darkness of the night
Kyrie eleison
Where I'm going would you follow?
Kyrie eleison
on the highway in the light — from Kyrie by Mr. Mister

I'm back from almost 2 full weeks of silence, the last 8 days of them on retreat here. When I got back in the car to drive home Friday and hit play on the iPod, this song by Mr. Mister was at the top of my play list. Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy down the road that I must travel. I loved the joyous beat of it all, propelling me back out into the world.

I gave up two things for the duration of the retreat — praying the Liturgy of the Hours and writing — as I waded deeply into the waters of the Exercises. It was hard to let go of these stalwart companions. And it was easy at the same time. All the while that wind reached far into the place where I could not hide....

Column (Redux): Doing Dishes

2011-07-05T10:28:00.000-04:00

(Michelle is on retreat here, but thanks to the scheduled post feature, she virtually inhabits this space as well. The ability to bilocate used to be considered a saintly characteristic....)

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times March 27, 2008 - the very first one I wrote for the Standard. It resurfaced as I packed for a retreat where one thing on my mind is what it means to dispose of things. What I discard does not simply vanish, what responsibility do I take for what I acquire?

When they climbed out on shore, they saw a charcoal fire with fish on it and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish you just caught.” So Simon Peter went over and dragged the net ashore full of one hundred fifty-three large fish. Even though there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come, have breakfast.” [Jn 21:9-12]

It’s nearly 6 p.m. and the lab is dark. My students have gathered up their things and retreated to the dining halls for a well-deserved meal. I’m in the small departmental kitchen, up to my elbows in hot, soapy water, washing the mugs we used at the mid-afternoon break.

“You could use styrofoam cups,” offers a colleague, clearly perplexed at the sight of the department chair doing the dishes. My offhanded, “We’re trying to be green” satisfies her, though truthfully, the environment is the least of my reasons for taking on this mundane chore.

How else would I have known how many of my students this year drink milk, not coffee? Do they like chocolate chip or lemon cookies? Each week I brew less coffee and make an effort to pick up a quart of milk.

Slowly, over the course of the semester, I grow to anticipate what they need — I hold the signs in my hands, they’re not tossed aside in the trash. It’s in my power not to do the dishes, but I suspect I’m missing something critical if I don’t.

As I read this passage from John, I am caught not so much by the miracle of the groaning net, as I am by Jesus’ anticipation of the needs of the men He had called to serve His body, His Church.

The fire is lit, there is bread waiting — made ready with His own hands, not called down like manna from heaven. “Come, have breakfast.” Appended to a Gospel rich in theological reflection on the mysteries of the Eucharist and the mystery of the Incarnation, I wonder what inspired the author to record this decidedly unmiraculous encounter, this unadorned invitation.

In her essay “The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and ‘Women’s Work,’” Kathleen Norris remembers being struck how, in the Mass, “homage was being paid to the lowly truth that we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink. The chalice, which had held the very blood of Christ, was no exception.”

She reflects that our culture’s ideal self aspires to be above the doing of “humble, everyday tasks.” If we must wash the dishes, we want to make the work as undemanding as possible — get paper plates and toss them. Let someone else take care of the trash.

I suspect that the early Christians hearing John’s Gospel struggled as much as we do with the uninspiring chores of daily life — with loaves of bread that do not multiply and nets that do not fill with fish at a word. And so John’s heady and mystical Gospel ends by reminding us of the sacredness of the quotidian, of the daily.

We follow Christ not only through His passion, death and resurrection, but in the everyday ways we tend to each other’s needs. “Come, have breakfast.”

As we join the Apostles in encountering the risen Lord in our daily lives, may we be inspired by Christ’s example to become quotidian mystics. Finding God in the dishes, the laundry and the making of breakfast.

God our Father,
work is your gift to us,
a call to reach new heights
by using our talents for the good of all.
Guide us as we work and teach us to live
in the spirit that has made us your sons and daughters,
in the love that has made us brothers and sisters.
Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Column (Redux): Let your imagination off the leash in prayer

2011-07-02T10:41:00.000-04:00

(Michelle is on retreat here, but thanks to the scheduled post feature, she virtually inhabits this space as well. The ability to bilocate used to be considered a saintly characteristic....)

I've never been able to hear this passage from Isaiah in quite the same way, every time it appears at Morning Prayer I can remember the frantic beat of the lamb's heart against my (now utterly ruined) shirt. This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times April 10, 2008.

He is like a shepherd feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms, holding them against his breast and leading to their rest the mother ewes. [Is 40:10]

My 75 year-old father’s faint call for help drifted over the top of the hill.

The clang of the kitchen garden’s iron gate echoed behind me as I pounded down the vineyard steps to the back pasture, worst-case scenarios flashing through my mind. Ducking under the huge cypress that shades the gates, I was momentarily taken aback to find my father on his feet and apparently fine.

“Here — take her.” He thrust a wet, bloody bundle of wool over the fence at me and jogged back down the hill. Heedless of my white shirt, I cradled a terrified newborn lamb against my chest, feeling her pounding heart slow as I held her close. Meanwhile, my father was trying, without much success, to corral her mother as she struggled to deliver my charge’s twin.

Holy cards of the Good Shepherd favor white robes, fluffy lambs and bucolic scenery. After my summer sojourn as a shepherdess, I realized we’d been sold the sanitized version. Newborn lambs are not fluffy and white, the ewes do not always trot sweetly along at your side, and those white robes will never be the same after a day in the pasture.

Our urbanized culture pulls a misty, nostalgic curtain over Isaiah’s images, impeding our ability to use this gate to enter into the mystery of God’s relationship with us. We become like the people that St. Gregory the Great once chided in a sermon about the Good Shepherd: “foolish travelers who are so distracted by the pleasant meadows … that they forget where they are going.”

In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, offers us a remedy for our tendency to fasten onto the pleasant superficialities of the rich and enduring images in Scripture: Pray with our imagination.

Ignatius encourages us to ask God for the grace to enter into the scene, itself. Don’t merely read a passage from Scripture, but take a part in it. Engage all your senses. Historical accuracy is not the point; opening yourself to hearing God at work in your own history is.

Slowly read the verse from Isaiah. Who are you in this encounter? Who else is there? What are you doing?

Smell the hay. Hear the ewe bleating for her lamb. Feel the dust tickle your nose. See the Good Shepherd try to charm the panicked ewe to His side — and never mind that he is wearing khaki shorts and a trout fishing t-shirt. Share His joy as He brings new life safely into being.

What does God want you to know? Ask God to reveal His will for you as the scene unfolds.

Ignatius challenges us to let ourselves be surprised by God in these lively, yet prayerful, encounters. Before the summer of the sheep, I had never quite understood how hard it was to lead a ewe. Now, when I pray with this passage, I wonder how hard God finds it to lead me.

Let God escape the confines of the holy cards. We need to move beyond our static, two-dimensional images of Creator, Redeemer and Spirit, and experience the reality of these Persons active in our lives.

Use your imagination. Allow the Word to become flesh in you.

Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, faith in Your word is the way to wisdom, and to ponder Your divine plan is to grow in the truth. Open our eyes to Your deeds, our ears to the sound of Your call, so that our every act may increase our sharing in the life You have offered us. Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen.