Profound peace

Justice shall flower in his days,
and profound peace, till the moon be no more. — Ps 72:7

“Profound peace” — this is what we prayed for in the psalm for Epiphany.  Not just peace, a simple cessation of hostilities, but a peace so deep, we could not claw our way back to war. Not just peace, tenuously enforced with threats, but a just peace. 

We prayed for that peace, for justice, as the US went in with guns blazing to decapitate the government of Venezuela. It was hard to avoid the irony.

The government would have us believe that this invasion, police action, whatever, is to protect us from fentanyl (which their own data says is not produced or trafficked from Venezuela). Venezuela does traffic some cocaine, but even if every cocaine related overdose in the US could be attributed to this route (and it’s not among the top three sources) the number of cocaine overdose deaths is about the same as the number of people in the US who die from hunger each year. (More than 20,000 people in the US died from malnutrition in 2022.) The current administration didn’t think that suspending SNAP benefits to the hungry last fall was an emergency, so why is this? 

Could it be that feeding the hungry doesn’t make for stirring military videos? 

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For two weeks of the entire US military budget, we could fund a full year of SNAP benefits. 

There hasn’t been much support for addressing drug addiction either.

Pondering : A homily for Mary, Mother of God

This homily was written for one of the Homilists for the Homeless volumes. I have been rummaging around in my old writing as I prep for a couple of upcoming retreats. I am reminded of the need for prayerful reflection, not just at the New Year but every day. There are many frames for the daily Examen, but this list is a good starting point for me. What might you add?

• What astonished me? 
• What brought me to tears? 
• What made me howl with laughter? 
• What suffused me with joy? 
• What brought me closer to God?

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As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart. — Luke 2:19

These days in particular —  poised between seasons, teetering on the edge of a new year — lend themselves to pondering, to treasuring the past year in our hearts.  What astonished us? What brought us to tears? What made us howl with laughter? What suffused us with joy? What brought us closer to God?

We contemplate, too, what the new year will bring. Will it astonish us? What new griefs will we have to bear? Where will we find God? When will we desperately need God?

Luke tells us that Mary pondered the all the events that surrounded Christ’s birth in her heart. I imagine her cradling a young Jesus in her arms, still astonished at her visit from Gabriel, still overwhelmed with joy, still worried what Simeon meant when he promised her heart would be pierced. What, I’m sure she wondered, would the next days and months bring? How would she cope?

How can we follow Mary’s example and prayerfully ponder our past, present and future with God? In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola suggested a short daily practice called the Examen, a way to recognize God at work in every aspect of one’s life. Take ten minutes at the end of the day, advised Ignatius, and seek out God’s handiwork in your life.

Ignatius’ prayer begins by recognizing that we are always in the presence of God. Don’t be timid, ask God to help you pray, to bring his light to bear on your day. The line that opens today’s psalm well captures what Ignatius hopes for those praying the Examen: O God, be gracious and bless us and let your face shed its light upon us. [Ps 67:2]

Next, says Ignatius, tell God you are grateful. Ingratitude — not pride or greed — was the ultimate root of all sin, thought Ignatius. If we cannot see that all we have, our very lives and all that surrounds us, comes from God, then we are blind to God. God is our true treasure. Be specific, search your day for one or two luminous moments for which you are particularly grateful, and give God thanks for these gifts. 

The meat of the Examen is a review of the day. Take it hour by hour, noticing with God where you felt his presence, where you felt particularly beloved. Where did you love in return? The point is not to scour for sins, small or large, but to become more and familiar with how God is at work in your life. This is what God desires for us, as he asked Aaron to bless the Israelites, and by extension, us. May the Lord uncover his face to you reads the last line of Aaron’s blessing in one translation. May you see the Lord.

It is often the small things that turn out to be most important, the moment when someone unexpectedly waved you ahead in a long line at the grocery store, or the sense of awe you experienced walking out the door into a beautiful afternoon. As C. S. Lewis in noted in his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, “We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may be sometimes deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God's."  Don’t be too high-minded, share it all with God.

We are humans, and inevitably we fail in our love for each other and for God. So notice, too, the moments that make you wince as you review the day. Ask God to forgive you and prayerfully seek his advice on what remedy you might make. Who should you apologize to? Is it once again time to seek out the sacrament of reconciliation? What might you do differently next time? Ask God for the grace to walk anew in his pathways.

Pay attention to your feelings during the review of your day, what part of this prayer stirred your heart the most? Talk it over with God. Ignatius recommended doing this as one friend might speak with another, heart to heart. Finally, look to tomorrow. What are you worried about? What are you looking forward to? Close your prayer by asking for God’s grace and strength 0for what is to come.

As we begin this new year, resolve to take up the habit of sharing your day with God, treasuring its joys as Mary did, and pondering anew how you might in this moment grow closer to God. Like the shepherds and all who heard their stories, allow yourself to be astonished at what God has done for you, the small miracles as much as the large. 

May the Lord bless you and keep you, may his face shine upon you, and may you have peace, today and all the year to come.

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Image is Mary, Seat of Wisdom, at St. John's Abbey.

Anna in the temple

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— February 2021 Opening essay in Give Us This Day

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Image is of interior of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the ceiling of the nave lit by sunlight through stained glass

Time present and time past: 2025 edition

 

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

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

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

I wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year!

Chewing gum and baling wire

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

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

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