Transmissions from God

This evening I stumbled over an article in the New York Times about a woman who claims to channel the dead. She also claims to channel Yeshua — Jesus Christ. Who apparently comes across with a bit of of a British accent. Really. The article treats this all with dead seriousness, including a flat assertion that she channels the dead, though it does include a couple of remarks from a skeptic. I found the whole business (and business it seems to be, with consultations at $1111 an hour and a book published by Harper One) to be…ridiculous.

Thirteen years ago today I pointed my Mini Cooper north, headed for Gloucester to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola following the 20th annotation. Leaving behind family and friends and comforts to spend 30 days in silence, channeling God.

I wonder what a similar New York Times Style article on my experiences of the Exercises would read like? Would it seem equally ridiculous to an outsider?

The Long Retreat

R2Me2, my trusty microphone, and my tea cup

We are not quite sheltered in place. The college has closed, we've pivoted to remote coursework. I'm working hard to create a situation for my students that lets them keep learning in all the different situations they are finding themselves. My students are scattered across several continents, some home, some not, some in quarantine.

I got up this morning, showered, pulled on my jeans, grabbed a white turtleneck from the stack on the shelf, and tossed a sweater over it all. I flashed back to the 30 days I spent in silence making Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, where each day I got up and showered, put on jeans and a white turtleneck and one of the two sweaters I'd brought. I made tea and prayed morning prayer. I went for a walk everyday. I didn't go into town or shop or read the news. I spent intense hours in prayer, then time processing it, in writing and with my spiritual director. All of us praying through those days joined together for the Eucharist each evening before dinner.

Now I'm getting up and making tea and praying morning prayer. I go for a walk everyday. I haven't gone grocery shopping or into the college. OK, I have read the news, but most of the day I've been so focussed on the things I need to do to make this work for my students that I haven't given the news a thought. I'm spending intense hours in class preparation, then in processing it so I can pack it up for my students. The rest of the house is equally focussed. And every night, I sit down to a meal with Math Man and Crash. I can feel my retreat habits kick in, attuned to the day's ebb and flow, holding a tight focus on the work at hand.

This retreat from daily life may be longer than 30 days, but I trust the graces of those 30 days in silence will spill over these more difficult days.

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Crash is home with us because the play he was working shuttered after one night and his apartment is sublet, since he was expecting to be elsewhere. If ever there was a moment to have a live in stage manager, this migh

Flash flood warnings

I looked at the clock in the kitchen.  "10:32 am," I announced, "and it's officially summer."  I'd dispatched the morning's batch of email and was ready to grab a fresh cup of tea and start to draft something less...administrative.

I long to turn off the faucets of email. The drip drip drip of offers from every company I've ever dealt with.  The political fundraising emails with five bright emojis embedded in the subject line is screaming "the world's on fire!"  Sometimes I can let them go, let them burble by like a stream, pretending the flow is just a soothing background noise.  Sometimes the drain is plugged up, and every email I send is immediately responded to in triplicate, the water in my inbox rising exponentially, until it spills over onto the floor, the flood washing away time to think, to write, to plan, to listen.  And sometimes it's a literal flash flood warning, tumbling into my inbox from the township I live, the township I work in and the college.

I'm tempted as summer marches in to leave an away message on my email.  I'm writing.  I'm thinking.  I'm leaving space to muse.  I'm cleaning my office and reading poetry.  Write back in August if it's still seems urgent then.

I've done it before. When I left to make the Spiritual Exercises in January of 2009 I put just such a message up: 

I'll will not have access to email for the next month. All incoming messages will be deleted. If you need a response, please email me after February 9.

I discovered three things.

I am not that important.  As far as I can tell, time and the world kept right on moving.  Nothing awful happened and two or three people wrote me emails in February about things that were important. 

Email has a short event horizon.  Once you are past that, you can't be dragged in.  Last week's full out emergency has been dealt with (or not).  The next one is already fulminating and will quickly wash away the dregs of the last .

You will simply not be believed.  One person wrote me over and over, begging me to respond. (She copied someone else on the emails, which is how I saw them. The other person in the list was seriously amused.)  Though the email said I had no access and would be deleting any and all incoming messages, she assumed this was mere hyperbole.  Fun fact: the task she was hoping I would tend to was not due until a full month after my stated date of return.

And perhaps there is a fourth piece of wisdom I gleaned from that experience. Despite having stepped out of email for a significant period of time, it remains difficult to consider doing so again.  There are practical concerns, it requires more than simply creating an away message. I do have responsibilities that must be taken care of even when I'm officially off the clock, and while I am privileged to be able to wrangle assistance with those, I still have to wrangle the coverage, and be aware that someone else is doing some work for me.

It's the more existential concerns that bite.  I worry about missing out on some incredible opportunity. What if the WaPo invited me to be a regular columnist? Right?  I worry about missing out what's happening at work. But what really worries me?  That the world won't miss me at all.

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There are two interesting and relatively recent pieces in The Atlantic on not responding to email.  One on ghosting your email from earlier this year; this one on the reaction of senders to discovering that you sent your email to the trash while you were on vacation.

Writing Exercises

It's a book.  In February of 2016 I created a document on my computer labeled "Not By Bread Alone."  Forty-seven reflections and 12 months later I attached a document with the completed manuscript to an email to my editor.  It felt oddly unceremonious. Somehow a book manuscript ought to have real heft, to weigh something more than a few electrons.  But off it went, weightlessly and nearly instantly, to Liturgical Press to return with edits and queries, and as proofs and as final proofs.  No version weighing my computer down anymore than that first blank file had.

In many ways it was like making the Ignatian Exercises again, this time in the form of the 19th annotation — a retreat in daily life.  There was assigned scripture. There were familiar themes: contrition, the Gospel stories, gratitude and humility.  The Third Week came again, and the Fourth dawned with joy.

There was repetition, as each reflection was visited multiple times growing from a sketched sentence or two to full length.  (Not to mention the repetition that accompanied the proofs.) Colloquies were made as I crafted questions for readers to grapple with.  And there was a prayer to end each day's contemplations.

It was a privilege to walk those roads again, almost a decade after making the 30-days.  It was a privilege to write a path to walk with others. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

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You can buy the book at Liturgical Press, $5 for the large print version, less for the easier to carry around version or for larger quantities, or for the weightless ebook!

Drinking from the mug of Indifference

Mugs are firmly embedded in my prayer life.   If I'm going on retreat -- even for a night of silence -- I take my mug.  Morning prayer with a hot cup of black, sweet, tea is both bracing and warming.  Outside when the weather permits, a window with a view if it does not.

The 30-day retreat to make the Spiritual Exercises was no exception. But three days into the Exercises, while washing it out, my mug slipped out of my hands and crashed into the sink.  So. I will not prefer my mug to one of the mugs set out in the dining hall.  #PrincipleAndFoundation #Indifference

Last week I took a group of students up to the Jesuit Center at Wernersville for three days to try an experience of silence. They are taking a linked set of courses on contemplative practices, one on the Buddhist rhetoric of meditation, one on the psychology of mindfulness, and mine, on the spaces of silence in the western contemplative traditions.  We are also headed to Japan in a couple of weeks, two weeks, no checked luggage, and so while reading the desert fathers and mothers, we've been talking about living and traveling light. 

I left my mug home.

I missed it.  I also didn't pack the yuzu tea I've been drinking for an awful case of laryngitis, or my favorite English breakfast tea.  I missed them, too.

It's not that they took up so much room in my bag, I could have tucked them in without effort.  There was something of the experience of simply going, of leaving without looking back.  No second tunic, no mug when I was sure there would one there I could use.  Fuge, tace, quiesce. Flee, be silent, be still.

_______________  

This lesson in indifference reminded me of the story of my mug at summer school for theology. I was taking an early morning course, and tea at the break was most welcome. There was a lounge downstairs with a kettle and sink and a place to hang your mugs, mostly used by the sisters who were in the MA program and staying for the summer in the dorms. I brought a bright yellow mug from home to use, hung it on the rack, and enjoyed my tea for the first two days. Day three and my mug is nowhere to be found. I brought another one in.   I couldn't imagine that any of the sisters would have taken it, we all had our own mugs. 

 A week later one of the sisters took me aside and told me she found my mug. The bishop had it, she said.   A bishop from South America had come for the summer to brush up on his theology. He was a delightful fellow student, but he had also wanted a mug for his coffee. He asked the dean where he might find one, and the dean had come down, unaware that the mugs on the rack were not "seminary mugs," pulled down my mug and handed it over. "This should do," she said.

My informant had the story straight from bishop, by asking him where he'd found the great yellow mug. And no, none of us told him! He was such a nice guy, we could not bring ourselves to embarrass him, or the equally delightful dean.

Sketching a retreat

Window, St. Ignatius Chapel,
Montserrat Retreat House

I was at Montserrat Retreat House outside of Dallas last week for a workshop on preaching the Spiritual Exercises, more specifically, thinking about the 18th Annotation in Ignatius' Exercises.  The 18th Annotation describes the sorts of exercises that might be given to those who could not or should not make the full exercises, either in their 30-day form (the 20th Annotation) or in daily life (the 19th Annotation).

"...each one should be given those exercises that would be more helpful and profitable..." — from Louis Puhl's translation of the Exercises, 18th Annotation

The practicum was designed to help us consider prayerfully and practically the movements of this sort of retreat, where the expecation is that people will leave with some tools to "make progress in the life of Christ." Including some thoughts about how the director might come to such a retreat.

The notion was that you could leave with a sketch, an outline, of a weekend retreat, with 10 or 11 short talks given over 3 days.  We were invited to preach an excerpt of such a talk along the way, and listening to others preach was not just an opportunity to see different approaches to crafting and presenting such reflections — watching a clip of a Disney cartoon, artwork, poetry, evangelical style preaching, quiet reflection, music —  but to hear the witness of people willing to return the gift they'd been given in the Exercises was a grace.

I sketched out a couple of talks for days of reflection, helpful in the sense that they helped me think through a couple of upcoming writing assignments.  (If anyone out there wants a talk on mission and Mary Magdalene in the garden or one on the sacredness of measured time within the context of the Examen -- I'm now set!)  I also sketched as the various presenters spoke, creating maps of the material and what arose in me as I listened.  I'm really not an artist, but as one of the Jesuits tagged me, "a good doodler."  Going back through them I can see what struck me.   Herewith some random bits of wisdom.

• "We are looking for a busy God."
• ...that I be not deaf to his call.
• We are icons, doorkeepers, witnesses.
• Never reveal your politics. 
• Sin is a mystery and if it is too clear, we are in error.
• Love costs.
• We are not on a mission, we are mission.
• Imagine your own resurrection.

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The full text of Puhl's translation of the Spiritual Exercises can be found at IgnatianSpirituality

My friend Wayne is an inspired doodler - and his are art!

Deep in the darkness

I love Rilke's Book of Hours, both the original German and Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows' spare and sharp translation. The end of this poem in German sounds like wind chimes stirred by a late night breeze to me, barely rippling the still coolness of the night:  Gott aber dunkelt tief... But deep in the darkness is God.

I, 50

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.


A reflection I wrote on darkness and light — with a bit of technical advice from Crash and The Egg —is up at DotMagis this week. I talk about praying in the depths of the night during the thirty days I made the Exercises:

"At that hour the retreat house was incredibly silent, the chapel so still I could almost hear the flame in the presence lamp shimmering. “Empty yourself,” said St. Romuald in his Rule, “and sit waiting, content with the grace of God.” In those nights, empty of noise, empty of people, God taught me to sit and wait, to empty myself, that I might be filled with the graces he desired to give me..."

Read the rest at DotMagis.

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For a warm and beautiful look at light and darkness, see writing as j(oe)'s post What Light.

Things I learned on the Long Retreat: Fires

 Last night it was chilly, both guys were out and about, so the cat and I curled up by a fire to read.  I did a lot of hauling of wood in from the wood pile at Eastern Point, mostly because I enjoyed sitting in front of it and knitting a bit each evening before bed.  And I learned, entirely by watching, how to build a fire that would draft well on a very cold night.  Lorcan, an Irish priest making the Exercises had the trick of it.  Careful stacking of the wood.  Lots of kindling and paper, so the pile would go up with a "whoosh"and the subsequent draft would provide a punch of oxygen that would keep the initial combustion going.

Last night I carefully built my fire, touch a match to it and watched it burst into exuberant flame. Then I stopped and prayed for all those who carefully hauled the wood, stacked the logs, arranged the kindling in my heart and soul and to the One who set it all aflame with a single touch, one dark night in Eastern Point's chapel.

What might you do with thirty days (or two million minutes?)

An amaryllis planted
as I began.

 Maybe the real question is what would God do with 30 days?  My friend Fran posted a link to this article about a British politician who, after making what was presumably the Spiritual Exericises of St. Iganiatius (a 30-day Jesuit retreat), decided not to stand for re-election.

My room when I first walked in.

Sunday it will be five years since I began the Spiritual Exercises, but today marks the fifth anniversary of the day I got in the car on what I remember being an unseasonably warm January afternoon and drove to Boston, where I spent the night before driving out to Gloucester.  The Boy wrote me regularly while I was in the silence, toward the end reminding how many more breaths I would take before I would be back home.

As I type this, it's been roughly two and half million minutes — some two hundred thousand breaths — since the silence broke on the retreat, on a bright and cold February morning.  And while I didn't go home having discerned a seismic shift in my life, God has done a great deal of breathing in me since.

Ignatius of Loyola 3: Letters

I associate Ignatius with letters, not so much because of his prodigious output of letters, more than 7000, but because while I was away making his Spiritual Exercises, handwritten letters were how I stayed in touch with my kids.  The Boy was a wondrously faithful correspondent, writing me every third day; near the end, counting the breaths until I came home.

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Read Ignatius' letter of advice on writing letters here, a small selection of other letters from Ignatius here.

Ignatius of Loyola 1: Looking up to Ignatius

The image of St. Ignatius to the left hung in the stairwell at Eastern Point retreat house when I made the Spiritual Exercises there.  If you look closely, you can see my reflection at the lower right (the sleeve of my grey sweatshirt and the camera in front of my face).  Through his Exercises, Ignatius has had a substantial influence on my life, though our lives are separated by centuries, and an ocean.

In the Exercises, there is a contemplation which asks you to imagine standing before God and the communion of saints.  My image of Ignatius in that gathering was of a tall, thin man standing off to the side smiling — perhaps drawing on this image I looked up at each day on my way to meet with my director.  I was shocked to discover that Ignatius was only 4'11" tall.  I am a solid two inches taller than the good saint!

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Andy Otto's wonderful post about five ways to find God in all things is reprised on Loyola Press' 31-days of St. Ignatius calendar.  I love his suggestion to do something by hand that you might not have to.  Yesterday my kids and I baked bread, kneading and shaping the loaves.  This morning I was reminded of the sacredness of the everyday when I sliced a piece for toast and noticed that my oldest had slashed the sign of the cross in the top of the loaves, as his Irish great-great-great grandmother did.

Dancing with the Holy Spirit: Arts & Faith

The drawings in the photo are by Osamu Nakamura, an artist who lives a simple heremetic life in the mountains of Japan.  The contemplative traditions course I taught a couple of years ago spent two days visiting with Nakamura-san, getting a sense for how this sort of life looked on a daily basis — and enjoying a chance to do some art ourselves in a place that was steeped in solitude and silence.

I had visited Nakamura-san's aerie a few months earlier, and shared the photos with a friend who is a stained glass artist, who then created a beautiful piece of stained glass that we gave to Nakamura when we returned.

Wayne designed the piece while on retreat at Wernersville's Jesuit Center, which had more than one connection to the class.  Much of Wayne's work embeds shards of the prayerful silence, as he reflects in a post earlier this week.

When I made the Exercises at Eastern Point, at the start of the retreat a box showed up, containing a note from Wayne (who had recently completed the Exercises) and a jewel-toned star.  It hung in my window throughout the 30-day retreat, a potent reminder of the beauty that comes from letting the Light shine through you, rather than bounce back.  And a reminder that many others had walked these paths before us, and were praying for all of us there.

Loyola Press is launching Arts and Faith this week, celebrating the myriads of ways artists wordlessly dance with God, collaborating in acts of beauty.  Like Wayne's stained glass, through which God and light both stream through, we are each works of art, collaborations between ourselves and God.  Go take a look, and see if you can find God streaming through the people and the beautiful things they create at Arts & Faith.

Postcards from the Exercises: Reconciliation Redux

I'm retracing the Spiritual Exercises in an adapted form (though I think you could argue that the Exercises are always adapted) using the materials posted at The Ignatian Prayer Adventure and writing weekly reflections on my experience for IgnatianSpirituality.com's DotMagis blog. I joked with the editor of that series that I felt like I was sending her weekly postcards from my trip with Ignatius. Since I have more to say than fit on those virtual postcards.... 

As the First Week of the Exercises draws to a close, Ignatius suggests you might feel moved to make a general confession, to take even those sins already confessed and absolved to the sacrament of reconciliation.  Last weekend, when I pulled the copy of the Exercises I'd taken along on the 30-day retreat, I found the slip of paper on which I written a note to one of the Jesuits in residence at Eastern Point, asking if he would hear my general confession (and his response, written frugally on the same sheet), repurposed as a book mark.

As the third week of my Ignatian Adventure wound down, with its contemplations of brokeness — the world's and my own — I recognized a desire to sacramentally deepen the graces of this time.  General confessions, though, are not to be undertaken lightly, or frequently (and as practical matter, never without an appointment!)  In the spirit of this 8-week adaptation and Ignatius' notion of repetition as a tool to sharpen our focus, I decided to use an evening walk as a time to prepare, and take one single thread of brokenness to confession.

The experience knitted some of the "crushed bones," leaving me ready to welcome a steadfast spirit and walk on the journey of the Second Week.

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Make me hear rejoicing and gladness, that the bones you have crushed may revive. From my sins turn away your face and blot out all my guilt. A pure heart create for me, O God, put a steadfast spirit within me. — Psalm 51:10-12

On the Ignatian Adventure: In the heaving of the sea

In the silence of the stars,
In the quiet of the hills,
In the heaving of the sea,
                  Speak, Lord.

— David Adam, Speak, Lord

This is a view from the rocks near Eastern Point Retreat House (on a warm summer day just after dawn).  I spent a many hours looking out at the cold, heaving seas when I was there making the Spiritual Exercises.  David Adam's poem evoked so many memories of that retreat, of the sharply cold and clear night hours, the quiet calm of the house, the heaving of the seas — and the longing of my heart.

Listen to Margaret Rizza's gorgeously clear setting of Adam's poem here and read my reflection on praying with music amid the second week of an Ignatian Prayer Adventure at DotMagis.

This Ignatian Life: The Art of Packing a Camel

I have ridden a camel at an oasis in the desert, but I freely admit I've never had to pack one.  I realize that there is no evidence in the biblical accounts that the magi came by camel, but as Ignatian composition of place doesn't demand a slavish attention to historical detail...I'm free to imagine a camel breathing down my neck.

I learned on the Exercises that there is an art to packing a camel. I learned to ask the questions that the magi must have faced with a long journey ahead, where the weight of what you carry could — quite literally — drain the life from your camels. Where you might have to sit on what you had packed, so that with each passing mile the lumps and edges of your luggage gives you, as well as your camels, galls. Where balance is not a metaphor, but a hard reality.

Read the rest at This Ignatian Life.

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory....

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow. — T.S. Eliot from The Journey of the Magi

Four years ago last night —  in the dead of winter, on the vigil of Epiphany — I walked (resolutely so my notes say) out of the dining room at Eastern Point retreat house and into the Spiritual Exercises.  Thirty days in silence.

Like Eliot's magus, I had had a long journey there, at a time of year not known for smooth travel in the Northeast, though it required not so much that I follow a star, but that the stars in my life align.  A sabbatical leave, children of an age that I could leave for a few weeks, openings in the winter retreat....somehow it all fell into place and just before Epiphany of 2009 I found myself putting a large duffel and two pillows in the back of my Mini and heading north.

A hard time we had of it. 
At the end we preferred to travel all night, 
Sleeping in snatches...

Eliot's poem evokes such strong memories of my retreat: I, too, had a hard time the first week.  And in the end, I preferred to pray all night, and slept in snatches.  There was a Birth.  And a Death. And most certainly the journey "was (you may say) satisfactory."

At the moment, though, I resonate most with those sore-footed camels.  Before I whine, let me say that my left ankle and foot are healing, albeit slowly.  I'm still in "the boot," but can tolerate some weight-bearing and have significantly more range of motion than even a few days ago.  My galls (the abrasions on my ankles) are nearly completely healed.  I start physical therapy on Friday and hope to graduate to a brace shortly.  Now for the whine:  I feel about as graceful as a camel, in or out of the boot.

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Photo is of what I wore for cantoring at the Epiphany vigil.  Bought in Singapore, it seemed just the right thing to wear to remember the kings who came from the East, and besides all those sequins distract you from the boot!

Listen to T.S. Eliot read The Journey of the Magi here.

AMDG: Feast of Ignatius of Loyola

I have a mug much like the one Ignatius is sporting in this picture, and it's the one I often take when I go up to the Jesuit Center at Wernersville.

Today my mug full of tea says on it "AMDG" — for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam to the greater glory of God — a gift from Crash after I made the Spiritual Exercises.

When I made the Exercises I kept an off-beat schedule, often awake until nearly dawn. I'd sleep for a few hours, then get up around 7:30. I'd make myself a cup of tea in my room, then sit by the window to pray Morning Prayer and make the first contemplation of the day. My view was of the tabernacle in the chapel, its flame bravely flickering in the pale winter morning, and of the heaving, achingly cold Atlantic. The warm cup in my hand, steam circling above the surface, rising gently like my prayers was an anchor. Like monastic bells, the caffeine brought me sharply back to wakefulness.

The first bracing sip of tea in the morning remains a grace as far as I'm concerned, and one that often nudges me to do a bit of Ignatian repetition. Like Alice tumbling into Wonderland, I sometimes find myself tumbling into my teacup and back into the Exercises. I am drawn momentarily deeper “wherein the fruit chiefly lies”, as an old manual for Jesuit spiritual directors puts it.

I like my tea strong, black and sweet. There is something in the balance between the sweet and the bitter, the soothing warmth and the bracing caffeine that speaks to me of God, of a love poured forth in bitter anguish, that yet fills me up, sustains me in joy and gives me strength.

"Give me only your love and your grace and I'm rich enough and ask for nothing more."

Happy feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola!

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Read this about the first mentions of tea in Europe, and its links to the Jesuits.

And my evening activity is sending the last of the notes with St. Ignatius bookmarks. If you'd like one, drop me an email at mfdcst@gmail.com.

The illustration was made here, courtesy of Ignatian Spirituality.

Images of Ignatius of Loyola: Call Me Lopez

When I began making St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, at Eastern Point in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the winter of 2009, my director began by sharing one of his encounters with Ignatius — an accidental encounter in an elective class during his seminary years that rapidly unfolded into a Jesuit vocation — and a bit of Ignatius' life. It was, he thought, important to have a sense of the man who had crafted these Exercises I was about to make.

He handed me a postcard with an image of Ignatius writing at his desk, noting he had picked it because it was the least intimidating of the images of Ignatius he could find.

Frankly, I had never thought of Ignatius as intimidating, having first met him casually over coffee with a friend in Bryn Mawr, we have a relationship that has grown gradually deeper and richer over the years and decades. Enigmatic, yes. Challenging? Absolutely. But I always found the saint's persona to be inviting and invigorating, rather than intimidating. The postcard sat on my desk for the duration of the Exercises, one link among many across the centuries to this extraordinary man, and now hangs over my desk even as I write this.

The image of Ignatius that is most firmly stuck in my mind is not the one on the postcard but the one that hung on the stairs up to my director's office at Eastern Point and therefore greeted me each morning of the Exercises (top left). It's the mix of the smile and wise eyes that still delights me in this picture. Each morning as I mounted the steps, I felt as if Ignatius knew the road I was walking in these 4 weeks, its difficulties and its joys, and was shooing me upstairs to talk about it, and have my feet gently set on the next step of the path he had sketched out 500 years ago. (When I showed the picture to my regular spiritual director, more than 50 years a Jesuit, he said, "Can it really be Ignatius, he's smiling?" I pointed out that the name on the shield seemed to unequivocallly identify the bearer.)

Loyoal Press has just published Margaret Silf's Call Me López, an imaginative spiritual biography of Ignatius of Loyola, framed as a conversation between Ignatius Oñaz López de Loyola — "call me López" — and Rachel, a fictional 21st century spiritual writer and giver of retreats. [Full disclosure: Loyola Press sent me an advanced copy of the book, and a copy to give away to readers of my blog, with no strings attached. Really full disclosure, I'd already pre-ordered the book!] Having my own strong images of Ignatius, I worried if reading Call Me López would be like seeing the movie after reading a book you adored, where the beloved main character's voice and appearance are at utter odds with the images in your mind.

Short answer. No. I was swept away from the first pages, so much so in fact, that reading it while I waited for someone to come fetch me, it took an effort of will to recall myself to where I was and what I was doing when she arrived.

I loved the image of Ignatius inside the front cover, so like the one on my wall, but warmer and lighter. There is a terrific timeline of Ignatius' life in the back cover. I wish this book had existed when I made the Exercises. I would have left it for my husband and sons to read, to let Ignatius companion them as he companioned me.

Reading this book gently drew me back into some of the movements of the Exercises, not so much in their details, but in their depths — a welcome touch of Ignatian repetition in a year where my week's retreat was more Carthusian in tone than Ignatian.

I have more to say about the book itself, but will save that for another post. If you've wondered about Ignatian spirituality, or the Exercises, Margaret Silf's book is a wonderful way to discover what lies at their heart.

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If you'd like to win a copy of Margaret Silf's Just Call Me López to read, courtesy of Loyola Press, enter by leaving me a comment on this post. I'll fire up my random number generator and pick a winner next Tuesday (July 24th) If you like, tell me how you met Ignatius, and what your first impressions were.

If you can't wait to see if you win, the lovely people at Loyola Press are offering a 30% discount on the book through July 31 (the feast of St. Ignatius). Use the code LOPEZ before 8/31/12 at Loyola Press' site.

Column: Before dawn - Mary of Magdala

I generally prefer the night hours for prayer, perhaps as a hold over from the days when I wrote papers on the dining room table after the rest of the family had retired for the night, perhaps because even now it's a time when I'm unlikely to be interrupted by anyone but the Holy Spirit and the cat. When I made the Spiritual Exercises, I was such a night owl that I was sometimes turning in just as my spiritual director was headed to the dining room to make the first pot of coffee for the morning.

The description is of the Easter vigil at which my first husband, Tom, converted to Roman Catholicism. It was a holy and graced time.

Photo is of an early dawn on Eastern Point, taken on retreat in 2010.

This column appeared in the April edition of the Catholic Standard & Times

It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb. — Jn. 20:1

Twenty-nine years ago, near midnight, I walked out the door of my campus apartment. One by one, we gathered on a windswept hillside. The moon had not yet risen, far below us wisps of light wound through the parking lots and puddled around the campus buildings.

Under a vast shower of stars, rank upon rank of darkling hills arrayed before us, we tramped in a thin, almost invisible line, up to the top of the ridge. There, shivering in the cold breeze, we kindled a fire and we prayed, “The light of Christ. Thanks be to God.” The great vigil of Easter had begun, as that first Easter, in the still, dark hours before the dawn.

Easter is a feast of light. A festival of dancing fire, sparkling water and dazzling white garments. Yet it begins not under the blazing midday sun, or even amid the crimson and gold fury of a sunset, but in the stumbling murkiness of a night not quite spent, in a dim, cold cavern hewn of rock.

It was still dark. I hear in St. John’s account of Mary Magdalene’s discovery of the empty tomb echoes of Jesus’ own prayer. St. Mark’s Gospel tells of Jesus going off to pray, alone, “in the morning, long before dawn.” I think, too, of my own preference for prayer in these still and mysterious hours before the sun bursts over the horizon.

Why these night hours? Anthony Horneck, a chaplain at Oxford College in the 17th century, thought “midnight prayers strangely incline God’s favor.” For then, he said, was the soul “nimbler, subtler, quicker, fitter to behold things sublime and great.” In his Spiritual Exercise, St. Ignatius, too, advised prayer after midnight, when body and soul were rested and receptive.

In was in this liminal time, when the regular demands of the day had not yet crept from their beds, that Jesus met Mary in the quiet of the garden, and opened her eyes to see Him as He is, risen and glorified. He came, not striding down the streets of Jerusalem accompanied by a chorus of seraphim, but in the midnight hours when Mary Magdalene’s soul was better able to grasp the mystery of our salvation.

Seeds are planted and nourished in the darkness, reaching toward the light as they grow. Though St. John reports that Mary thought Jesus at first to be the gardener, St. Gregory the Great suggested in a homily on this Gospel, that she was not perhaps as confused as we might think: “Was He not a spiritual gardener for her?” The seeds planted in this long-ago encounter in the darkness of the garden have grown over the centuries to encompass the whole world.

We sing in the Exsultet, the great Proclamation of Easter, “This is the night of which it is written: The night shall be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.” We learn that night is not a time to fear, or one that obscures the truth, but the place from which joy and salvation erupt.

As I watch the Easter fire kindled again this year, not in the bleak darkness of a California hillside, but as night edges into being a block from Lancaster Avenue, I will wonder what seeds the Gardener will plant within my soul, within the souls of His faithful, that will be nourished in the Eucharist, and bear fruit in our churches and communities. What favors will God shower upon us in these midnight prayers? What will erupt with joy from this holiest of nights?

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Redeeming God, source of life and light, bless this new fire, and grant that we who are warmed by the celebration of this Easter feast, may share in the everlasting festival of your radiance, through Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Amen.

— A blessing for the Easter fire (1985 edition of the US Sacramentary)

Column: Praying in Pain

Times are difficult in the local Church of Philadelphia. Schools are closing and being reorganized, parishes will close, there are financial difficulties. There is scandal. Times are difficult for family and friends. A friend's husband will die, tonight, or perhaps tomorrow. My brother has lost his job.

In the months after Tom died, I found an odd sort of comfort in this passage from Habakkuk, which appears regularly as one of the canticles of Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours. I wanted to be able to hope, I wanted to be able to have such faith. I had the desire for the desire. But I prayed in pain. Years later, the passage returned to played a role in my experience of the Spiritual Exercises, prompted in no little part by an excerpt my director gave me from Dean Brackley SJ's book, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, and has become a place of prayer that I return to regularly.

For another take on prayer and pain, particularly in Lent, I highly recommend Matt Spott SJ's thought provoking piece on the Jesuit Post: Spiritual Painkillers. His piece reminded me of a snippet from Walter Brueggemann's little book: Praying the Psalms, where he wryly observes that we often strive for a “cool, detached serenity” in prayer. (Full disclosure, Matt made the Exercises at Gloucester at the same time I did!)

Our own pain can strip us of our dignity, of our focus. It can distract us from we conceive of as prayer, a time with God that is serene and well collected. It can strip from us even the desire for the desire to pray. Yet this plaintive exultation of Habakkuk's reminds me that even when I cannot see the triumph in travail, nor even bear to think about the possibility, trial and exultation remain mysteriously intertwined, and that whatever I bring before God, in whatever state I am, is prayer.

(You can listen to Paul Campbell SJ's short and vibrant reflection on desiring the desire, part of Loyola Press' Lenten Retreat series here.)

This column appeared in the March 2012 edition of the Catholic Standard & Times.

For though the fig tree blossom not nor fruit be on the vines, though the yield of the olive fail and the terraces produce no nourishment, though the flocks disappear from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet will I rejoice in the Lord and exult in my saving God. — Habakkuk 3:17-18

The trumpet soared, the organ thundered, my voice echoed off the ceiling in the packed church “joyfully sing out all you lands!” as I led the psalm on Christmas morning. The whole of Christendom rejoiced in the Lord and exulted in our salvation at God’s hand.

But even as I sang of joy and comfort and peace, I hurt. Every breath, every step, even my bow before the tabernacle as I crossed to the ambo was a source of unremitting pain. To kneel, to stand, to sit, to move to prayer, was an act of endurance, not an occasion for rejoicing.

To be frank, the pain that insinuated its way into my prayer a few months ago was more than physical. The words which once moved effortlessly from heart to lips at Mass, tangled on my tongue. It was like learning to waltz again, except instead of relentlessly counting one-two-three under my breath as my partner twirls me round, I was mentally chanting “And with your spirit.” as the priest carried the book of the Gospels to the ambo.

Even now the hinges on which my prayer turns each day, Morning and Evening Prayer, rasp at my serenity as I hold out the intentions of family members who have lost jobs, of friends who are grieving, and of a local Church tried by difficulties secular and spiritual. In the midst of all this pain, distress and disruption, how can I — how can anyone — rejoice in the Lord?

The prophet Habakkuk, trembling at the difficulties he sees ahead, pleads not for relief, but brashly insists he will still rejoice no matter what comes: Though the fig tree blossom not…yet will I exult in my God. It’s an almost unimaginable faith. Yet underneath the almost swaggering surety of this prayer, I sense uncertainty. For at the head of the text is placed the note: “sung to a plaintive tune.” I wonder if the prophet struggled as I do, with the mystery of exultation and travail inextricably intertwined. Is Habakkuk’s prayer as much a plea for assurance as it is a declaration of faith?

Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, suggests that just as our modern scientific selves seek the one magic bullet that will cure our illness, we want events to speak in a single voice. Exult in this moment. Mourn in that. He urges us to read difficulties as we do poetry, to listen for a multitude of meanings that can continue to enfold us and unfold for us. Endure and exult. Rejoice and mourn. Stumble and stride forth. One reading does not overwrite another; the meanings interpenetrate, weaving into an intricate and mysterious whole.

Mysteries by their nature do not have a resolution. There is no simple salve I can apply to my raw prayer. Pedro Arrupe, SJ, prayed to learn how Jesus met suffering, His own and that of others, desiring most of all to know “how You supported the extreme pain of the cross, including the abandonment of Your Father.”

I suspect that some things can only be learned in the doing. I learn to pray with certainty in the face of tribulation, by praying as Habakkuk did, with certainty. I learn to pray with pain by praying in pain, by praying within the space that Jesus holds open for us, arms outstretched between heaven and earth. I reach as He did for the familiar words of the Psalms: Into your hands I commend my spirit. I sing exultantly, I sing in hope and with certainty, but in a plaintive key.

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Teach me how to be compassionate to the suffering, to the poor, the blind, the lame, and the lepers; show me how you revealed your deepest emotions, as when you shed tears, or when you felt sorrow and anguish to the point of sweating blood and needed an angel to console you. Above all, I want to learn how you supported the extreme pain of the cross, including the abandonment of your Father.
— Pedro Arrupe SJ from Hearts on Fire: Praying with the Jesuits