A Binary Meditation: The Two Standards

On this day in 2009, Barack Obama was being inaugurated as president of the United States of America. I wasn’t watching, I was on retreat at Eastern Point on the Massachusetts coast, wrapped in 30 days of silence making the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. No TV, no newspapers, no internet. No conversation. No idea what was happening in the world.

Reading the news about today’s events (when I know all too much about what is going on in the world), I found myself thinking about one of the meditations from the Exercises, called the Two Standards. I pulled out my journal from the retreat to look at what I had written about it. It is, in fact, the mediation I was making on January 20, sixteen years ago. 

Ignatius asks you to imagine two armies arrayed on a great plain, their standards snapping in the wind. On one side, Satan. On the other, Jesus. Choose, says Ignatius. Easy, you think. Think again, says Ignatius. Choose riches, choose honors, choose to be puffed up with pride in what you have accomplished. Or. Choose to risk being stripped of whatever you have — wealth, health, positions, honors. Choose humility. This is the binary that matters, not the binary that the new administration wants to enforce. Choose. 

This is not the prosperity Gospel. This is not a stance that bulldozes the encampments of the unhoused or vilifies the immigrant or fails to provide for the millions of children in the US — and in the world — who are hungry.  This is a choice to reverence our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters (and daughters and sons) as we reverence Christ. This is a choice for peace.

I chose. To echo poet and priest Daniel Berrigan SJ, “Know where you stand, and stand there.” I know where I stand. I intend to stand there, for the next four years and beyond. 

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“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

Photo is of my bed in the shelter my parish hosts for unhoused families. I don’t so much stand there as I occasionally sleep there. But I sleep there because of where I stand.

MMOD: My mug of the day

 

I have so many mugs. Mugs that were gifts. Mugs that were swag. Mugs I bought because I was enamored of their shape or color or material. Mugs bought as mementos of a trip or event. Mugs bought out of desperation. (I'm thinking of one bought in South Bend so I could make a morning cup of tea that did not taste of coffee.) I still have the Sandra Boynton mug Tom bought me in graduate school during a particularly awful week, 45 years ago.

I keep a selection of mugs in the kitchen, and a few at the office. Periodically I rotate what's out. When I grab a mug for the day I often pick one to match my mood or one that speaks to the work of the day. Yesterday was a mug from the Vatican Observatory, to get me in the mood to talk about my work there with a group of 7th and 8th graders at a local parish.

I bought today's mug at the St. John's Abbey pottery when I was on retreat there for a few days in 2014. I met the potter who shaped  it. This is a traditional Japanese pottery, where the wood-fired kiln is loaded with a year's worth of ceramics, then sealed and fired for 10 days. After everything is cool, the pieces are dug out of the ashes.

I think about the shape of this mug, which feels so suited to my own hand, but also reflecting the hand of the potter. It looks delicate, thin. But cup it in your hands and you can feel its strength. Fire has turned clay to jeweled stone. The glaze pattern has a touch of cool blue at the top, yet you can see the marks of the firing on the side, like stigmata. Fire and water.

What do I feel like held in the hand of God, I wonder. Shaped by the divine potter, by water and fire. Dug out from the ashes, again and again. 

Germanium anniversary

[Written in September and left languishing in my drafts folder] 

Math Man and I have been married for 32 years (100,000₂ for the CS crowd). As we drove to dinner last night, we wondered what the traditional gift was for your 32nd. The 30th was pearls and the kids got us these beautiful oyster shells with bits of the nautical chart of the area we sailed on our honeymoon. The 31st? Last fall was a haze — between the college and Math Man's health issues. (Turns out the gift was "travel" — but the most travel we did was to UPenn's hospital.) 

The 32nd turns out to be bronze (at least on the couple of lists that include it). Most lists start to only give the “gifts” for the years divisible by 5 after the 25th, perhaps because 5 years goes by in such a flash at our ages? Though if you make it all those years, it seems to me it’s time to start counting each and every one, if not each day. That would be almost 12,000 days for us.

Frankly bronze seems a bit blah for any anniversary. 32 is 100 000 base 2, which seems to demand something more valuable. We batted various gemstones and metals around. I suggested germanium (Ge), which is atomic number 32. It’s lustrous and silver-white, like our hair these days. It’s a bit pricier than silver, not as precious as gold. Math Man suggested he get me a new laptop (germanium has applications in electronics) as a gift. No need, I said. The one on my desk is fine. 

What did I get him? A new water bottle! Not made of germanium, though roughly the dusty green of geranium leaves. Maybe he should have gotten me a potted geranium.

Fifth week epiphany

Sixteen years ago, as the feast of the Epiphany approached, I packed my bags and drove north to Gloucester, MA to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola  — the long retreat. You can do the Exercises in daily life, devoting time each day to the meditations over 30 or so weeks, as Ignatius suggests in the 19th annotation (he prefaced the Exercises with 20 notes). Learning to balance prayer and work in real time. Or you can spend 30 days sequestered in silence, moving through the four “weeks” or movements Ignatius proposed, then be pushed back out the door into the world — the fifth week. 

For a mother and wife and scientist, the second version was a luxury (ok, either version is a luxury TBH). It was the longest stretch I had ever spent away from home. I was a commuting student in college, so packing up for an extended stay away was a new-to-me experience.  Like the Magi, I would return home by a different route, or rather, routed in a different way. (Unlike the Magi, I didn't have to ride a camel into town to get what I might need. Post-it notes, as it turned it out).

I had a star to orient me. A gift of a lovely friend and talented artist. It now hangs in a west window at home, still bringing color to a winter landscape, still leading. 

I remarked to my spiritual director last week that the fifth week of the Exercises has a long tail. "Like the rest of your life?"  Yep. 

I left the Exercises with the Suscipe in my heart, "Receive, O Lord, all my liberty. Take my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Whatsoever I have or hold, you have given me. I surrender it wholly to be governed by your will. Give me only your love and your grace and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more." 

These days, what surrendering my entire will looks like is not at all what I imagined at 50. And I still come to prayer with desires and entreaties, asking for much. But with enough grace I can occasionally recognize how richly beloved I am.

What does the fifth week look like? Like a carpenter smoothing a piece of wood by hand. The plane peeling a layer off here. Sanding down rough spots there.  Oil to keep the wood from drying and breaking, a balm, a guard.

Portals

I have been thinking about Psalm 88 lately. The psalm is unusual in that no matter how dark other psalms get they tend to finish with images of redemption, glory, rescue. But not the 88th. It shows up every Friday at Compline (Night Prayer) in the Liturgy of the Hours. One might think it is not terribly consoling to pray such a desolate psalm just before bed. But to me it feels like a reality check, a reminder that I do not always find resolution at the end of each and every prayer, or closure at the end of every day. There are times in my life where I might despair of rescue, be unsure where God is in the darkness or in the waves that engulf me. Times when I must perforce sit with uncertainty.

I appreciated Sister Joan Chittester's wisdom in a reflection in Give Us This Day last fall. "Prayer is not an analgesic designed to protect us from life. It is, more times than not, part of the problem of life. One day we don't feel like praying. The next we pray but it doesn't make any difference… We try to pray but were far too distracted than we are soothed by the quiet or comforted by the sense of the presence of God." In his book, Into the Silent Land, Martin Laird, OSA, points out that when we go in search of peace in prayer, we often find instead what feels like chaos. But, he says, it is precisely in this meeting of confusion and peace that healing happens. Not by erasing our pain, but by offering a path for grace. 

So what are we to do? In her lovely book An Altar in the World, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor reflects on keeping an altar: “Since I am a failure at prayer, I keep an altar in my room. It is really an old vanity made of rosewood, with fancy scrollwork around the oval mirror and a small stack of drawers on either side. At worst I think of it as a piece of furniture that I offer God as a substitute for my prayers. At best, I think of it as a portal that stays open whether I go through it or not."

This makes me wonder about the altars that we keep, metaphorical and literal, that leave the door open to God, even when we think we are failures at prayer. Like a doorstop, keeping us from being locked out when our hands are too full to open the door, or when we need a breeze on a hot day. For me that might be Night Prayer at the end of the day, it might be the literal prayer space that I keep in my study upstairs, or the prayer rope I wear on my wrist. Sometimes it is my parish church, bathed in warm light. What portals do you keep propped open in your life?

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This got its start as part of a homily I preached for the memorial of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whose last days were marked by spiritual darkness. The photo is of St. Thérèse on my home altar, along with a small first class relic of St. Thérèse. And of course, there are roses.