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.

Lodging in Wisdom's branches

Happy those who meditate on Wisdom,
and fix their gaze on knowledge;
Who ponder her ways in their heart,
and understand her paths;

Who pursue her like a scout,
and watch at her entry way;
Who peep through her windows,
and listen at her doors;

Who encamp near her house
and fasten their tent pegs next to her walls;
Who pitch their tent beside her,
and dwell in a good place;

Who build their nest in her leaves,
and lodge in her branches;
Who take refuge from the heat in her shade
and dwell in her home. - Sirach 14:21-27

Yesterday was the feast of Our Mother of Good Counsel, the titular feast of my parish and the patroness of the Vatican Observatory. And by some miracle, perhaps the intervention of our Lady, my early morning meeting was canceled and so I found myself at the 8 AM mass, where the scent of the pastor's homemade sticky buns was creeping in the door.  There was breakfast for all comers afterwards!

The readings were taken from the Augustinian lectionary for the feast, rather than the Easter season, for we are an Augustinian parish. The first reading was this pericope from Sirach. Though I have heard it before, I was struck yesterday by this description of those who seek Wisdom, the Holy Spirit. So like the scientist that I am and the scientists who are my colleagues at the Observatory. We pursue the mysteries of the universe like scouts, we peep through the windows and listen at the doors. We encamp, settle in, willing to take our time dwelling with God's created world.

As I write this, I'm sitting in my study. The green leaves of the oak trees that surround the house have come out and I truly feel as if I have a nest in Wisdom's leaves and am firmly lodged in her branches.

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Photo is of a painting of Our Mother of Good Counsel (the original is a fresco at Genazzano, Italy) in the entryway of the Vatican Observatory outside Rome.

A litany for a pastor

The pastor of my parish, an Augustinian friar, died yesterday.  He was young, or least my age, which feels to me young. There will be a mass on Thursday at the parish, another on Friday at the Augustinian church on Villanova's campus.  I wrote the intercessions for Thursday's liturgy, reaching for the form of a litany, thinking, too, of a long ago theology grad school classmate and Dominican sister who would remind us that we should always be blessing.  May he be blessed, may we all be so blessed.

In baptism
John was marked with the cross, clothed in Christ,
and entrusted with the eternal light, undimmed in sharing.

        May that Light guide his way home.

In the Eucharist,
John was nourished by the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.

        May he be welcomed to the eternal feast in the halls of heaven.

In Holy Orders
John was anointed to sanctify God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people, a priest forever.

        May he now joyfully celebrate at the heavenly altar.

John tended the earthly gardens God entrusted to him with joy, tenderness, mercy and compassion.

        May the communities at Monsignor Bonner, Villanova, Maggie Valley and Our Mother of Good Counsel continue to grow in love and mercy.

        May the gardens he planted flourish for years to come.

For all who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith,
who await us in the heavenly kingdom.

        We pray.

Column: Summer reading

Fra Angelico The Conversion of St. Augustine

If you haven't encountered Pope Benedict's school of prayer, a series of general audiences from 2011, I highly recommend browsing them.  A convenient list with links is here. So far my favorite is the one about summer reading, linked below.

At the moment I'm reading The Hopkins Manuscript an early SF novel reprinted by the delightfully elegant Persephone Press. What's on your summer reading list?

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly on 6 July 2015, check there for more resources related to this column.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. —John 1:1

Chris was curled up on the sofa, recovering from getting his wisdom teeth out and reading. “Why did you pick up that book?” I wondered aloud. Biographies and American history are not his usual fare and we are finally past the summer reading list stage in my house. “It’s the book for all the first year students next fall.” Ah, and since he will be a new student advisor, he thought he’d get on board, too.

Summer with its long light-filled days seems the perfect time for reading, even for those of us no longer bound to lists. Many communities, from colleges to cities to entire states, take up a single book to read. This year, Philadelphia read Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train.

Reading one book gives us common ground to start conversations. It also lets us travel to new places and hear new voices together. Reading can move us, even transform us.

In July of 386, St. Augustine was sitting in his garden in Milan. He was ill and torn by indecision. Should he continue to teach, or should he follow St. Anthony’s lead and abandon everything for the sake of the Gospel?

Then over the garden walls he heard the voices of children calling out, “Tolle, lege!” Take and read. Augustine walked over to where he’d left his copy of St. Paul’s letters, picked it up and opened it at random to the 13th chapter of the letter to the Romans and read, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” And he did; he was baptized at the Easter Vigil the following spring.

This summer, my pastor, who is an Augustinian friar, invited us to “take and read,” to read one book from sacred Scripture from beginning to end. In the summer of 2011, Pope Benedict XVI, as part of his general audience comprising a “school of prayer,” made a similar summer reading suggestion, “to enjoy (the Bible) in a new way by reading some of its books straight through.”

My pastor proposed we try the book of Psalms, the 150 hymns and sacred poems the People of God have been praying for almost 3,000 years. In his remarks Pope Benedict recommended trying some of the lesser known books, even giving short teasers for the books of Tobit, Esther and Ruth. (Spoiler alert: he gives away the endings for all three!)

Whatever is on your summer reading list, stir in at least one by the best-selling author, God. May it move you, transform you and give you common ground with centuries of other faithful readers. Tolle, lege!

Improving my car-ma: blessings

I have a new car (Holy Spirit red, though I opted out of flames down the side), and after the last six months (in which I have had 4 car accidents), my community was taking no chances.

This morning after Lauds, one of the Augustinians whipped up a new batch of holy water, we gathered up the Book of Blessings and the aspersorium (the bucket in which you put holy water to be used in an asperges — sprinkling — rite, the sprinkler itself is called an aspergillum) and processed (perhaps meandered would be a better word?) out to the parking lot to bless my car (and a couple of others as well):

"All-powerful God, Creator of heaven and earth, in the rich depths of your wisdom you have empowered us to produce great and beautiful works. Grant, we pray, that those who use this vehicle may travel safely, with care of the safety of others. Whether they travel for business or pleasure, let them always find Christ to be the companion of their journey." — from The Book of Blessings

I feel better, not necessarily because I think the car has been crash proofed (though please God, we're done with this game of bumped cars), but because I'm reminded that the boundaries between sacred and quotidian are permeable. God is present, in my car, as I drive, as inside the church walls.  And I love the reminder to have a care for others as I drive...

PrayTell today has a post about a story in the NY Times regarding spiritual cleansing of houses.  I was struck by two lines in the Times article:

"Running off the fumes of the big four religions, with a lacing of indigenous ritual and a dash of early 20th-century palaver — Madame Blavatsky by way of L. Ron Hubbard — the shamans and healers, mystics and mediums of the last century’s not-so-New Age have become indispensable exterminators for certain homeowners in New York and other big cities..." 

and

"Anyplace that sees a lot of traffic, she said, 'you really have to do it, just like you’re going to clean your carpets. You have a party, and you feel drained. Now we can explain it; we understand quantum physics.'"

I am a quantum physicist, and (a) I don't think we completely understand quantum physics (for example, there are these fascinating experiments that show that quantum mechanics applies to systems far larger than we thought) and (2) I don't think quantum physics explains the blessing of my car or the spiritual cleansing business.  But I still bless things.  For years (until Crash went to college) I blessed my children's heads with the sign of the cross before they went to bed.  Loaves of bread before I put them into the oven.  And remembering a priest friend who without fuss blessed my car before a late night trip back from a retreat, I blessed the car before the Boy departed for his first long solo trip (2 hours down to the beach).

Does anyone else bless the every day stuff of life? (The Book of Blessings has almost a thousand blessings in it...bridges, power stations, boats and fishing nets...)

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What Crash was shocked to discover long ago about where holy water comes from....

Feast of All Saints of the Order

The order in question would be the Order of St. Augustine, and today, the birthday of Augustine of Hippo, the Augustinians celebrate all the saints and blesseds of the Augustinian family.   In recent years, this day has also been one to pray for vocations to the Augustinian orders.



At Morning Prayer, we pray daily for vocations:

All glory and praise are yours
God of truth, light of our hearts,
for you guide your people
in the ways of holiness.

Help those who follow
in the footsteps of Augustine
to seek you through mutual love and worship
and to be servants of your Church
as examples that others may follow.

Enlighten men and women
to see the beauty of common life
in the spirit of Saint Augustine,
and strengthen them in your service
so that the work you have begun in them
may be brought to fulfillment.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

I'm not an Augustinian, but after praying the Office with them for more than a quarter century, I'm Augustinian.  I am grateful to all the friars over the years who have shown me, in the beauty of their common life, and in their worship, the ways of holiness.  I have been supported and strengthened in my own work by their steadfast prayer.

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For my take on what it means to be follow in the footsteps of Augustine, you could read what I wrote about Augustinians when Robin and I began our discussion of Marty Laird OSA's beautiful book, Into the Silent Land.

Photo is of Augustine giving the rule, the stained glass window on the north wall of the main sanctuary of my parish church.

Column: Education by ordeal

Patient Spiritual Director's take on the "Stand back." advice was to treat distractions like a train rumbling through a station. Things may be noisy, but the train moves in and out without disturbing things. Photo is of the basement at Eastern Point - a very settled place of prayer during the Spiritual Exercises.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 10 February 2011.

Search me, God, and know my heart, probe me and know my mind. And see if a vexing way be in me, and lead me on the eternal way. — Ps. 139:23-24

One evening long ago, in the days before I had even one teen in the house, I was sitting on the sofa, trying to draft a coherent e-mail to a colleague, while simultaneously answering the phone and fielding random questions about homework. When I couldn’t muster the answer to Mike’s seventh grade math question, I confessed that my brain was overloaded.

Mike gently patted my hand, picked up a marker lying on the table and placed it in the center of my forehead. “What are you doing?” “I’m sucking out the dead brain cells so your brain won’t implode.” Of course.

Of late my prayer seems to be suffering from a similar overload. I sit down to pray to find that my to-do list is playing in my head like a top-100 countdown and I can’t seem to find the mute button. I long for the spiritual equivalent of Mike’s impromptu brain clearing device.

Distractions in prayer are nothing new, for me or anyone else, I suspect. Nor are they a purely modern affliction. The early Christian men and women who sought God in the solitude of the desert were thoroughly familiar with the struggle to keep their minds on their prayers and not on their next meal.

If I lived in the fourth century, I might have made the trip to Scete, to consult a hermit wise in the ways of prayer. Instead I consulted my copy of The Praktikos — 100 sharply practical pieces of advice on the Christian life from Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth century hermit.

This wise-in-the ways-of-prayer desert father had two pieces of advice for me. First, stay concrete. Readings, rosaries, simple prayers breathed aloud, these are “the things that lend stability to the wandering mind.” A focus on the physical aspects of prayer leaves fewer chinks for distracting thoughts to crawl in.

Second, stand back. “Pay no heed to the concerns and thoughts that arise.” Don’t encourage the distractions, even by trying to banish them. Twelve centuries later, in her book The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila would echo Evagrius’ advice: “The very effort which the soul makes in order to cease from thought will … cause it to think a great deal.” My mother would have been more blunt than either of these saintly souls: don’t pick at them.

In the end, Evagrius reminds me that wisdom is not won without a battle and that distractions are simply part of the road that we all must face. Father Martin Laird, O.S.A., suggests in Into the Silent Land that we should not bemoan distractions in prayer when they come our way, but recognize that they are an “education by ordeal.”

My prayer still feels tattered at times; my consultation with Evagrius provided strategies and solace, but no cure. But I’m gradually recognizing that like Mike, God is as ready to respond in love to my muddled prayers as He is to my more articulate attempts. I may be vexed, but God is not.

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Jesus, I feel within me a great desire to please you but, at the same time, I feel totally incapable of doing this without your special light and help, which I can expect only from you. Accomplish your will within me — even in spite of me. Amen. — St. Claude La Columbière, S.J.

Venturing Into the Silent Land: Gold is tested in fire

My last post in the silent conversation that Robin and I have been having on Into The Silent Land by Martin Laird OSA is up at Robin's blog. She has a wonderful illustration of Amma Syncletica on the post. Syncletica was a desert mother of the same period as Evagrius (image at left, who I've been reading and blogging about off and on for the last month or so). Syncletica is one of my favorites desert eremites, mostly for her advice for troublesome things: pray the Psalms!






Distractions: For gold is tested in fire

...Laird (and the rest of the advisors in my library) are clear: It's not a matter of whether there will distractions in prayer -- there will be; it's how you meet them. Will you let them put you off prayer, or will you and the clamoring hordes instead deal with each other?...

Read the whole thing at Metanoia

In search of the mute button

I started a last post in the book discussion that Robin and I have been having off and on since the summer. That post (like my prayer) is still in pieces, but I decided that posting this bit from the cutting room floor might help me see more clearly where the piece for Robin's blog is going, as well as the piece on distractions for my column in the Standard.

The photo is of a snowstorm on the Long Retreat; Braces Rock in the background.

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On Friday it will have been two years since I finished the Spiritual Exercises. Blizzards came and went over the time I was on retreat at Gloucester, and the current run of snowy weather brings with it memories of the profound silence that enveloped those days.

When I came back from the 30-days, I found the relentless soundtrack of suburban Philly to be, well, relentless. I sought out pockets of silence where I could find them. The radio in my car remained resolutely off. Television had even less appeal than the radio. Everything was a bit too loud, a bit too bright and a bit too bristly. Urban Spiritual Director summed it up well, my skin felt as if it were on inside out.

The sense of being battered by the soundscape gradually faded, but the other night as I slid through the snow shrouded darkness to retrieve Barnacle Boy from the far side of the township, Elton John spilling from the speakers, it returned full force. I hit off on the radio, and drank of the bracing silence.

My prayer of late has felt tattered, like a flag snapping in the wind until its edges shred. My to-do list plays in my head like a top 100 countdown when I sit to pray, and I can't seem to find the mute button. In Into the Silent Land (the book that Robin and I have been discussing on our blogs over the last few months) Marty Laird suggests that distractions in prayer are an "education by ordeal," a metaphor I would definitely endorse at this point.

I can't control the weather — real or metaphorical, exterior or interior — but perhaps I can seek out more of those pockets of silence. To turn off what I can, and contemplate in stillness what I cannot. To become what Catherine deHueck Doherty called a poustinik (after a dweller in the poustinia, the desert): someone who walks in inner solitude, immersed in the silence of God.

Column: Bound to prayer

The rosary in the photo is the one I took with me on the Long Retreat - next to my journal adorned with sticky notes, ready to see my director. This must be early on in the Exercises, since by the end, the journal was bulging at the seams with various inclusions.

St. Pachomius was St. Anthony's (not the Anthony of lost objects, but the Father of Monasticism Anthony) mentor in the ermitic life. One legend about the prayer ropes is that the devil kept untying the knots that St. Anthony tied, so Mary (or the archangel Raphael in some tellings) taught Anthony in a vision (or dream) how to tie the crossed crosses, which the devil could not untie.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 16 September 2010.

My times are in Your hand — O save me from the hand of my enemies, my pursuers. — Ps. 31:16

I’ve lost my rosary. Well, one of them at any rate. I had it when I went for a walk last week, but later that day, when my fingers sought out the smooth olive wood beads in my pocket, they came up empty. All afternoon, their loss nagged at the edge of my consciousness.

In my life, rosaries are a bit like socks. I’m always finding them in odd places around the house; I’m always missing some, and I always have extras, just in case. So why was I so bothered by the loss of this particular round of beads? After all, I could keep count of the 10 Hail Marys I was about to say on my fingers, and dig a spare set of beads out of the drawer when I got home.

Perhaps it was because the rosary I lost was, for once, not a replacement for a rosary I’d misplaced, but for one I’d given away to a friend for her sister who is ill. That rosary, which had accompanied me while I made the Spiritual Exercises two winters ago, was soaked in the prayers of those 30 days in silence. So when Marilyn sought prayers for her sister after Mass one Saturday evening, I surrendered my rosary. It carried with it not only my prayers, but Marilyn’s for her sister, and through the Augustinian friar who blessed it again for Peg’s use, those of the entire Church.

Every time I picked up the rosary in my pocket after that, I offered a quick prayer for Peg. When I saw her at Mass a few months later, she told me that even when she could not say the rosary, she found solace in just holding it — it was as if she had a handful of prayers cupped in her palm. I told I held her in prayer each time I held my own rosary, our prayers crisscrossing through these beads.

Legend has it that St. Pachomius, who founded a community of desert hermits in the fourth century, taught his monks to count their prayers by counting off knots tied in a rope. The purpose was not to say a certain number of prayers, but to use the rope as a reminder to be faithful to your prayer time, to hold you to the practice of keeping God in your mind and heart at all times.

Orthodox monastics still carry prayer ropes, sliding the intricately tied knots — seven tightly intertwined crosses in each — through their fingers when they pray. Even when they are not praying, the ropes are to hand, worn on their left wrists. Like Peg, they hold prayer in their hands, even when not counting the prayers.

I suspect I missed not the ability to keep count of my prayers, but the rosary that reminded me to be accountable to prayer. The rosary that reminded me, like the knots in the prayer rope, that our prayers are intertwined. The rosary that reminded me that we are held, at all times, in the prayers of friends, in the prayers of the Church and indeed in the very hand of God.

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In memory of the mysteries of the life, death and resurrection of our Lord and in honor of the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ and mother of the Church, may those who devoutly use this rosary to pray be blessed, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen — from the Blessing of Rosaries

Venturing Into the Silent Land II: A Word into Silence

Robin of Metanoia and I are reading about silence this summer. We both were intrigued by Augustinian friar Martin Laird's book Into the Silent Land and decided it would be fun to have a blog conversation about it. The conversation began here and here (on Robin's blog).

This time we're talking about prayer words (if you're reading along, we're traipsing about in Chapter 4).

With that preamble, let me turn the space over to Robin:

OK, I admit it. I've struggled a lot with what Martin Laird has to say in Into the Silent Land about using a prayer word or phrase as a method for focusing one's way into silent contemplation. My readers are going to get the better part of this posting, because Michelle is going to write something thoughtful and eloquent for my blog, while what I have to say is: This is a lot more confusing and difficult than it sounds.

The concept? Yes, all good. It's been recommended for centuries that a prayer word is a useful device for stilling the mind, and Laird puts it well when he says that our minds are so incessantly busy that in order to quiet them we need to give them something to do. He offers three doorways through which a prayer word might take us: first, it is an anchor or refuge to which we can return, again and again, as our mind wanders this way and that, despite our best hopes and efforts for stillness; second, it helps us to let go and forget ourselves, so that we can release our commentary and live into the present moment; and third, it helps our attention move from our thoughts to our awareness of our thoughts, and to move into the silence out of which the Word emerges.

I'm sure that we can all imagine the comedy of errors that ensues for most of us when we try to pray this way, as the intent and committed mind rambles from prayer word to undone dishes to whether or not Monday is a holiday or a mail day to prayer word to did I let the dog back in to prayer word to the agenda for tonight's meeting to the need to pick up some milk to the condolence note I have to write to how angry I am at the person who overlooked my very important personal needs last week to oh, yeah, the prayer word . . . you get the idea.

If nothing else, that word lets us know how distracted and inattentive we truly are!

And yet . . .

There was a winter day, many, many months ago, when the text with which I was praying happened to be the one in the title, "Be still and know that I am God." I know that it was winter because I went for a three or four mile walk in the snowy woods, meditating on that text, word by word. It was, ironically, a discursive meditation in the extreme; I recall in particular that I was very interested in the word "know" and all of its possible meanings. (Yes, including the sexual one.) My son had died only a few months earlier and knowledge of God, whether cursory or intimate, seemed a most unlikely possibility. But there I was, tromping around in the snow, mind flying at about 500 words per minute, reflecting on the apparent predicate of stillness for knowledge of God.

It seems that God calls us into that stillness in spite of ourselves.

And so, I try. Not well and not effectively, but I do try, and sometimes my word is, in fact, like a shepherd's staff, pulling me back toward that first doorway.

And the word? I have a strange one. Some writers suggest "Jesus," while others urge something lacking in connotation. For a long time, I tried the word "Holy," but it is now a word attached to much of the sadness in my life. So my new word is "Grass."

No laughing, please.

It's a word that does have connotations for me, a girl who grew up in Midwest farming country and associates grass with a leisurely summer afternoon spent looking at the sky~ a childhood form of contemplation. More recently, it has both caretaking and Eucharistic associations; one of our seminary professors was found of pointing out his conviction that the grass upon which the people sit in the story of the feeding of the 5,000 in the Gospel of John is a detail intended by the writer to make a connection to the green pastures of Psalm 23. I almost got derailed a couple of weeks ago, when I happened upon a reference in which grass is a symbol of transience (Isaiah 40), but I found, in the end, that I am not disturbed by that thought. The prayer word is, after all, intended as an aid to move us toward silence; in this case the prayer word is transient while the Silent Word to which it directs our attention is not.

Yes, I sigh: as Anthony Bloom and nearly everyone else acknowledges, when it comes to prayer we are all always beginners. But a prayer word, however artificial and functional it may seem to the 21st century mind, is evidently a doorway into a silence not constrained by contemporary limitations.

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Read my response to Robin here.

Venturing Into the Silent Land I

And the dialog begins. Robin of Metanoia and I are spending some time this summer having a blog dialog with each other about the book Into the Silent Land, by Martin Laird - an Augustinian friar.

Robin, a recent M.Div. who is on the path toward ordination in the Presbyterian Church, writes evocatively and beautifully, about prayer and silence, studies and family and heart-wrenching grief. About God present and God absent. Her eye for the world, as she captures it with both camera and words, catches reflections of God and holds them still enough for the rest of us to enter into them. I'm delighted and honored to have her as a guest here!

My first question to Robin was about what Laird calls the Second Doorway of the Present Moment - the spot where a sensitivity to the patterns that elicit the feelings which steal away attention begins to emerge. This the place where we recognize the stories we tell ourselves about people and events that can pull our minds in a thousand directions. Yet who we are, and so what we bring to God, is shaped by events. Theophan is a 19th century Russian Orthodox saint and contemplative (who I wrote about in a column earlier this year). He holds that the use of a prayer word is not merely a refuge from distractions, but "will draw you together" (p. 65 if you are reading along!)— out of the stories. Who are we without our stories?

Meanwhile Robin wondered about what it might be like to be part of an Augustinian community. You can read my answer at Robin's blog.

Here is Robin's response to my first question:

It is an honor to visit Michelle's blog. Her exquisitely gentle writing is a grace-filled reflection of the contemplative life: attentiveness to the minutiae of daily experience, whether in the laundry or in the college chemistry classroom. That said, she has hardly made it easier to attend to my own life with her first challenging question: I might ask you about your sense of what it might mean emotionally and spiritually to let go of the narratives, of any need for the stories -- yet at the same time to let the prayer, as Theophan suggests, "draw you together" into a whole? Are we still ourselves without our stories?

My religious upbringing was a hodgepodge of other people's priorities and did not lend itself to a prayerful experience of God. I was a little girl in a small town Methodist church in which we made things -- plaster of Paris praying hands, for instance -- but I am not a successful craftsperson. Sunday School was a tortuous experience for me. I was a young teenager in a pre-Vatican II Catholic boarding school, fascinated but baffled by shiny rosaries and golden chalices and Latin ritual, and intrigued but confused by the blend of a Catholic convent commitment to a faith of mystery and a Protestant family indifferent to all matters religious. I was a high school student in yet another boarding school, that one founded by a famous evangelist in which religion was presented as a blend of German scholarship, New England preaching, and alignment with social justice. When my husband and I found our way into a Methodist church in our late twenties, it seemed that faith was about familiarity with the Bible and participation in the community, and that prayer was a matter of petition and intercession. And when I wandered down the road to the Presbyterians, I discovered much the same.

I suppose that it was inevitable that such a conglomeration would produce a woman initially more curious about all religious paths than wedded to a single one, and one who would eventually become intent upon engagement with the God behind (and over, and under, and around, and beside, and within) it all. The God of prepositional being! It was perhaps also inevitable that someone who learned to read, like Scout Finch, by osmosis, and who became a student of literature as a college English major and a wielder of words as an attorney, would be drawn to the narrative of faith: the sacred writings and interactions of all faiths, the history of Christianity, the stories of its proponents and purveyors and, woven through it all, the Biblical texts: as revelation, as history, as literature, and as the foundation of prayer.

A couple of months ago, in a class focused on the work of ethicist Stanley Hauerwas (formerly at Notre Dame University and now at Duke Divinity School, and most recently the author of the very readable autobiography Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir), my classmates and I debated his sense of the foundation of faith: narrative or church? I argued vociferously for narrative: without the story ~ no church. Many of my friends argued persuasively for church: without the tradition to canonize, transmit, and interpret it ~ no story. I don't think that we ever reached a conclusion as to what Hauerwas thinks, but the debate occasioned a recognition on my part of how attached to narrative I myself am.

No surprise, then, that I should also have become, over the past few years, glued to Ignatian spirituality as a venue for exploring and expressing faith. While Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises suggests a multitude of possibilities for prayer, imaginative prayer is a hallmark of his approach ~ prayer as a movement into the story of Scripture and into the story of one's life. Prayer as an experience of companionship with Jesus by imagining the texture of his life; by observing or participating in the events of his days by seeing the sights, hearing the sounds, tasting the meals. Prayer as an invitation to Jesus to enter into my own life, via an ongoing and endless conversation with him.

I knew that behind the prayer of imagination, of conversation, of petition and intercession, of ritual ~ behind the revelation of God in the stories of Scripture, of tradition, of nature ~ was the silence of the God who is I Am. Other than through a brief flirtation with centering prayer, however, that silence seemed neither accessible nor particularly appealing to me. I was all for narrative, all for words ~ and as, eventually, a Presbyterian, the Jesuit tradition of "contemplatives in action" spoke directly to me. Prayer grounded in the stories of Scripture that propels us outward; prayer that helps us get to know God through the words and actions of Jesus and encourages us into the world in service of others. I was well versed in prayer as listening, and I tried to spend more time listening for God than talking to God ~ but I was listening for words.

And then. And then my son died and I was enveloped in silence. Excruciating, all-enveloping, deafening silence. For many, many months, I experienced and described it as the absence of God, as complete abandonment by God. I didn't stop listening for God, but I heard nothing in response. Nothing that I, at least, could interpret as being from God. And how, I think now, could it have been otherwise? Not only because the experience of a mother's grief is akin to the experience of a seabird drenched and weighted down by impenetrably viscous oil, but because I myself was so attuned to word and story, and those no longer provided adequate illumination.

I see things a little differently these days, as the second summer without my child begins. I see a God who is profoundly silent in the face of agonizing catastrophe, but a God who continues to labor ~ perhaps outside, or alongside, the stories we think we know. One of the ways God works is to make God's own silence more available, to enfold us in something greater than the stories we hear and tell and though which we have tried to understand ourselves.

Yesterday afternoon, as a friend and I walked to her car after an overnight stay at a workshop for spiritual directors, she mentioned having gotten up early to go for a walk, and asked me how I sleep. "I don't so much, not anymore," I said. "I don't usually sleep for more than a couple of consecutive hours at a time since Josh died." We continued to walk, in silence. Later, I told her what a gift it had been to me, that she had heard what I had said without any compulsion to provide words of support or to suggest solutions ~ she simply offered silent companionship. Perhaps that was the silence of God at work.

This book, Into the Silent Land, came into my hands via another spiritual friend, a Jesuit and former spiritual director of mine, who said that he had been told that it is the best book on prayer that there is. I tend to listen carefully to his eighty years of experience, and so I read the book, and told him that I wasn't at all sure that it's the best book, but that the last sections are, really, quite wonderful. I am so looking forward to unpacking the whole work more carefully and with Michelle this summer.

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The photo is of dawn at Eastern Point Retreat House.

Into the Silent Land

Tomorrow, at the very edge of dawn, I plan to grab my backpack and start walking -- at least as far as the train station. Then it's alternating trains and feet until I wash up on the Atlantic shore some 12 hours and 350 miles away from home. (Google suggests it would take 5 days -- walking 24 hours a day -- to walk the whole way). I'm off to spend 8-days in silence on retreat here.

I spent nearly 5 weeks here a year and a half ago, making the Spiritual Exercises (you can find some of my reflections on my experiences here). It was, and continues to be an enormous reservoir of grace in my life.

I've left some posts up to appear on the blog, including my columns - but have decided to leave my computer behind for the duration - so won't check in until I'm back.

Up and coming? A blog back and forth with Robin of Metanoia on Martin Laird's Into the Silent Land with a guest appearance from the author. Watch this space for the start of our guest blogging series!

Column: Orans or not?

When I sent this piece in, I noticed that at this time last year I wrote about stillness too. There is something about the chaos April stirs into my life, or in the academic calendar, that makes me long for the still, humid days of summer.

While writing this, I asked my FB friends for their thoughts — the responses were as varied as my friends — which led to the litany of bodily postures for prayers: We can sit, stand, kneel, walk, dance, bow, genuflect, lie prostrate...

I tend to walk in prayer quite a bit (and I'm not alone), a posture that Ignatius leaves off his list, but suggests for reflecting on meditation. Patient Spiritual Director reads this omission less as a concern about walking being too "itchy" for deep meditation, as that praying deeply while walking could lead to a (non-metaphorical) fall! My feet know the paths I walk when I pray well...so not a worry for me.

I wanted to write more about walking and prayer, but space kept me focussed on still prayer postures. Another piece is brewing about prayer on the move!

The full quote from George Herbert is: “[pray] not in a huddling or slubbering fashion, or scratching the head, or spitting.” Somehow I think the spitting advice was helpful for my current readership?

I was fascinated (OK, stunned) while doing a bit of research for this piece that some people think the orans position was invented out of whole cloth in the 1960s by radical liturgists.

(The photo is of a 4th century gold glass medallion of St. Agnes, her hands in the orans position found embedded in the walls of a Roman catacomb.)

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 22 April 2010.

May my prayer stand as incense before You, my uplifted hands as the evening offering. Ps 141:2

Final exams are looming large in my students’ lives these days. Much is at stake, many of them have returned to the classroom from time spent in the Peace Corps or working in community health care to prepare to apply to medical school. A poor grade in my class will put an end to those plans.

So there is a steady parade through my office, wanting to review the details of computing pH or to understand why a molecule behaves as it does. But often the question that brings the pilgrims to my door is broader, and deeper: “how should I study for this class?”

One of the things that I tell them is that cognitive research has shown that effective studying is not all in your mind, but that it matters what your body is doing as well. That if you study listening to loud music, you’ll do better on an exam if you listen to loud music while taking it — and of course, the converse.

Contemplative traditions have long known about the intimate relationship between body, mind and soul in prayer. And men and women of faith have struggled with the question, “what should I do when I pray?” It matters.

Screwtape, C.S. Lewis’ sharp-witted devil, advises his nephew to persuade his quarry that “bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget…that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.” I’m not sure that Screwtape is as fictional a character as Lewis would like us to think. All too often I find myself making the sign of the cross to begin grace at dinner — while dashing into the kitchen to grab the napkins the teen-aged table setter forgot.

Does it matter that I’ve not taken that extra second to sit and collect myself with my family? After all, the words of thanksgiving are being said, certainly God understands that the adolescent boys He created are ravenous.

True, but I wonder if I understand. The right words, even the right thoughts, are perhaps not sufficient. Early Church father Gregory of Nyssa pointed out, “His divinity is such that it cannot be adequately manifested through verbal signs, no matter how exalted they are.” Am I saying all I could say when I stick to the letters of the prayer and ignore what my body is doing?

Long before C.S. Lewis’ tongue-in-cheek manual on how to fall from grace, both Tertullian and Origen had definitive advice on what posture to take in prayer, echoing the psalmist. Stand, with arms outstretched, eyes uplifted, carrying in the body the very image of the stance that the soul should have in prayer.

There are many postures we can use in prayer. We can sit, stand, kneel, walk, dance, bow, genuflect, lie prostrate. Our hands can be raised, or folded, or held open in our laps. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola lists many ways to be still in prayer, and recommends none, except that which brings you closer to God. He further advises not being “itchy” in prayer — if you encounter God while kneeling, don’t suddenly decide to stand up.

Christian contemplatives, from the times of the desert fathers on, have counseled bodily stillness in the presence of God. Drawing on these traditions, Augustinian Father Martin Laird, in Into the Silent Land, offers clear and excellent advice on still and stable postures for prayer. Be firmly grounded and upright and open. (Eighteenth century English poet and mystic George Herbert put it more bluntly, “[pray] not in a huddling or slubbering fashion, or [while] scratching the head.”) It’s hard to imagine a better stance for body or soul.

So I’m on the alert for Screwtape and his ilk, resisting the temptation to pray with anything less than the whole of what God has given me: mind, spirit, soul — and body.

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I will beg God our Lord for grace that all my intentions, actions, and operations may be directed purely to the praise and service of His Divine Majesty. St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises [46]

Column: Murmuring Octaves

I really do hear shouts in my head when I encounter this passage at Evening Prayer in the Office! Tony is infamously in a hurry for Morning Prayer to start - he needs to be at work by 9 down the road. He's also five minutes faster than any other priest in the priory when presiding at Mass -- and manages it without seeming rushed and giving a cogent homily. Needless to say we tease him unmercifully. And yes, I have his nihil obstat on this piece....

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 15 April 2010.

Every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: JESUS CHRIST IS LORD! — Philippians 2:11


“707, 427, 440,” Father Tony rumbles, thumbing through the breviary and calling out the page numbers for Morning Prayer. “It’s still Sunday.” It is the fourth day of the octave, the eight days the Church devotes to this great feast, a week of Sundays following the Sunday. Father Tony, like most of us gathered, has other places to be by 9 a.m. The sooner we are all on the same page, the sooner we can be out the door.

After the thundering glory of Easter’s liturgies, it’s always a wonder to me that these workday Sundays do not feel more awkward than they do. I’m lugging a tote bag overflowing with papers to grade, lectures and meetings are twined around my calendar like invasive vines, yet for these few minutes of my day, alleluias arise and resound from the walls. Garbed to toil in the kitchen, suddenly I am pulled into the feast as a guest. For me, at least, this week of Sundays is a swirling mix of expectations and hospitality, of sacred and secular.

I wonder what the first days after the resurrection must have been like for the disciples. Confusing, I imagine. Terrifying, I am certain. But Jesus comes again and again to them, opening doors that remained locked even by those who saw Him and believed, offering bread and fish and gentle humor. The Church echoes this hospitality, allowing us to soak again and again in these Easter mysteries.

In the midst of these warm invitations to rejoice, to join in the great feast, to know our redemption, there are other invitations being extended, harder questions being asked. The same questions that those first disciples must have asked themselves run through my mind. Jesus was gone from the tomb, where should I look for Him now? He has risen from the dead, how does this change what I have to do today? I suspect many of the disciples were as torn between the demands of the everyday and the intensity of the events of the previous days, as I am now.

Every time I see this passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians my mind, conditioned by modern email etiquette to read all caps as a shout, turns up the volume, like the DJ at a raucous party. Yet the very next line reminds me “God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Easter Sunday trumpets He is Lord, but in these quieter octave days it murmurs: feed the hungry, heal the sick, let the Word be heard through all the Earth.

This year the flowering trees came into their glory for Easter and already they are giving way to a faint haze of new green leaves. No longer distracted by the brilliant hues adorning bare branches, we see again the winter’s detritus — the dead foliage and old leaves, the bits of trash blown into the garden by winter winds. The first triumphant beauty has faded, leaving a gentler growth in its wake, one that calls us to weed and clean, to tend what has been planted, in expectation of a yet greater glory to come in the summer.

What are we tending now that was planted in Lent and set its fruit in the burgeoning triumph of Easter? Can I sing alleluia, rejoice, and be glad — and get out the door to work in the vineyards before 9? I trust that God is at work in us all.

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This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad, alleluia. — Response to the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours for the octave of Easter

I have entered the depths

It was a steamy 91 F when I drove through the gates of the old Jesuit novitiate at Wernersville this afternoon. Now I'm sitting in the dark on the cool marble floor of the east cloister letting the cool breezes and the silence wash over me.

There is a bug on my virtual keyboard, attracted no doubt by the light of my electronic gadget. I elected not to turn on the lights when I came out here, so I'm playing the flame to every moth in the neighborhood.

There are a few others here on retreat beside me, but they are mostly of the silent and still sort. Even so there is one gentleman who I encountered on my walk, headed for the gate at a near run, rosary beads flying while his prayers bobbed behind in his wake.

I went for a walk after dinner and before seeing my confessor. As I walked along the road down toward the small creek that bounds the property I enjoyed the touches of hot and cool air that swirled around me. Much like the mix of emotions that I drove through the gate with, they were hard to sort out, coming and going almost too quickly to identify. That said, I feel like I've waded into a deep still pool. The silence seems extraordinarily deep this visit, though I couldn't tell you why.

There are a mix of retreatants here, some keeping silence, others not. Several have on a large name tag marking them as SILENT. I don't have one, and wonder if I would even want one. The silence I seek is somehow an interior one, and the silence here and my own commitment to seek it seems sufficient at the moment to further my interior journey to the still point. I brought along Marty Laird OSA's book Into the Silent Land. I enjoy the swirls of elegant prose and frank language. Somehow it makes the text feel more real, more like advice from a good spiritual director, one who is clearly and comfortably grounded in his or her own prayer life.

"This is why most people don't stick with a contemplative discipline for very long; we have all heard all sorts of talk about contemplation bringing inner peace but when we turn within to seek this peace, we meet inner chaos instead of peace. But at this point it is precisely the meeting of chaos that is salutary, not snorting of lines of euphoric peace."

Passiontide

I cantored for the evening Mass today - the first (successful) outing since I lost my voice last Advent. (One of my Augustinian confreres joked that I gave up singing for Lent, for Christmas, for Ordinary time...) We began outside with the Blessing of the Palms, on the plaza in front of the church, across from the busy grocery store parking lot. People slowed to watch Fr. Tony, brilliant in his red chasuble, proclaim the first Gospel, telling of the triumphal entrance into Jerusalem.

On cue, the organist inside broke into All Glory Laud and Honor and from the corner of the church I began. Ah...my breath control is not what it's been. Can I walk, and hit a high C with enough punch to be heard in a carpeted church (it has surprisingly good acoustics for all that)? The answer is no.

The sung response for the Passion was a marvel of sung community prayer, sustained, plaintive. My community, always pretty comfortable with silence, committed anew this liturgical year to being attentive to the silences. Today, when we all knelt at the moment of Jesus' death, in the stillness you could hear the kneelers hit the floor, rumbling like thunder through the church. Then, of course, there was the moment that the phone in the back sacristy started ringing, clearly audible through the open doors. I stood there, trying to remember how much time I had before the next sung response and could I make it there and back before I had to lead the next response....

I wonder what the medieval equivalent of the ringing phone liturgical interruption was? From the homilies I've read from the the early days I suspect that disruptions from the assembly are not a modern phenomenon!

Column: Seeking a measured tempo

This column began as a post from a couple of years back. Patient Spiritual Director had told me that the desert fathers and early monastics considered "overwork" to fall under the heading of the deadly sin of sloth, which seemed to him surprising. But given sloth's roots in acedia, the draining away of prayer through inaction, I can see the connection. Prayer can vanish into the whirlwind of action, too. It's all about tempo...

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 11 February 2010.

In vain you get up earlier, and put off going to bed, sweating to make a living, since He provides for His beloved as they sleep.
— Ps. 127:2

Acedia, what the desert fathers called the noontime demon, baked the life of out of a monk’s prayers, leaving the day to stretch emptily before him, the hours passing with syrupy slowness. In my life, sloth’s succubus stamps in the door in February, and is nowise as gentle.

It’s cold, dark and damp in the world. The semester seems to stretch endlessly ahead of me, and the crisp breezes of energy and hope that swept through my office in September have become a howling blizzard of commitments and complications. I despair of finding my desk again.

My perfectionist alter ego huddles in the corner, muttering dark comments about my work, trying to goad me into polishing this task or that, to the detriment of those in the ever-growing queue. It’s not the heat that shrivels my prayers; it’s the demands of the day that suck the life from my soul. I long for a desert hermitage — preferably one occupied by someone else’s demons.

Unable to escape to warmer climes or a hermit’s cell, on a bitter cold Friday, I found myself making soup. Soup demands my full attention, perfection is forced to take a back seat to completion — driving off the demons of demand.

Heaps of roughly cut vegetables grew on the cutting board, then were cast into the pot. One layer followed the next, the flavors intensifying in the confines of the pot. The individual chunks finally surrendered to the blender, and what had 30 minutes previously been unscrubbed carrots and onions buried in the vegetable crisper was gloriously whole and sustaining. I filled my bowl, to find I was no longer hungry. The mere act of making the soup had left me fed.

A few days later, I went to Morning Prayer. The psalms began, each side’s words piling up until they slid into the silence and the other side took up its work, layering on top of the previous strophe. The intensity gradually built, our voices created a complex harmony. We followed the antiphonarian into the depths of the Benedictus, suddenly whole.

There we all were, like my soup; the ingredients ordinary, perfection a hope not an expectation, gradually cooking down into a fragrant and complex whole. Here again, I was fed not by the results, but by the work itself.

In neither case was the end product of prayer or stove my only recompense. As C.S. Lewis points out in “The Weight of Glory,” “The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.”

The psalms are not effective only as pleas for God’s eventual grace but, like the steam of the soup that eased the winter dryness of my kitchen, are breathed in to gently renew the soul in that very moment. The mere undertaking of these prayers, as the making of soup, is healing.

I wasn’t surprised to find fifth century desert monastic Amma Syncletica’s prescription for dispelling the soul-draining demons of perfectionism: “This spirit must be cast out, mainly by prayer and psalmody.” Both soup and psalmody keep me to a rhythm, beating out a pace that is neither too slow nor too fast.

When the pace of my life tries to distort time, excruciatingly stretching it out or compressing it until I gasp for breath, the psalms bring me back to a more measured tempo.

Soup-making and psalm-singing remind me not to confuse frantic busyness with productivity. Some things only yield their full flavor when cooked slowly.

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To God whose power now at work in us can do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine — to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations, world without end. Amen. — St. Paul to the Ephesians

The Touch of Sound

These 'monks' are too funny! But there is a bit of irony here, too. I'm on vocal rest - not speaking. It's interesting how much you can get done in the public sphere without speaking. The pharmacist quickly figured out what was up, and put my stuff aside so when I came back I didn't have to ask for it; the checker at the grocery store was miffed that I wouldn't give her my card number aloud -- but for the most part, you can do what you need to and say nothing in response (just smile and nod or not) and no one seems to notice.

I'm still going to morning prayer, since I feel fine. The pastor noted yesterday that they were "giving me voice" (another colleague teased that perhaps we should have a "silent Office in deference to" me...hello, if I wanted a silent office I could stay home and pray it with Fluffy!). Sound is tactile, air physically hits your ear. So to hear the words prayed, even if I can't pray them aloud, lets me engage a bit differently. To listen, is to let yourself be touched. Maybe that's what happens when our words are stripped away...

Preaching with hands and voice

Lay people, women or men, are not allowed to give the homily in the Roman Catholic church -- though canon law (and the complementary norms approved by the US bishops) allow them to preach on the scriptures outside of the Eucharistic celebration under some circumstances.

On Holy Thursday I stood up at morning prayer and preached -- not a homily, since I'm not ordained -- but a ... reflection? sermon? I'm not sure there's a good word for it. I regularly reflect on the scriptures in print so in some sense the ground I trod on Maundy Thursday was not unfamiliar, but it turns out that it is a one experience to write for a community I do not see and for the most part do not know, and quite another to stand before a community I know, who knows me and preach. I think it went well -- and it was nice to have the series of short homilies for morning prayer during the Triduum. There's generally no preaching at morning prayer the rest of the year.

For the record -- here's what I had to say:

The text (from morning prayer, Holy Thursday):

We see Jesus crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, that through God’s gracious will he might taste death for the sake of all. Indeed it was fitting that when bringing many children to glory God, for whom and through who all things exist, should make their leader in the work of salvation perfect through suffering. Hebrews 2:9-10

The homily:

My youngest, Chris, is 7 weeks short of being a teenager, and in anticipation he is getting wiser by the minute. At dinner the other night he pushed a pile of green vegetables to one side of his plate, declaring firmly, “I don’t like these!” “Did you taste them?” Uh- no. In his wisdom he knows that tasting something is not a half-hearted exercise, it’s an all or nothing proposition. One bite or the whole thing, the taste is the same; its memory will linger on his tongue regardless.

In this reading from Hebrews, we are reminded that Christ tasted death for us - as an all or nothing proposition, it all its fullness and — and as we will hear tonight — offering to keep the taste of his death and our salvation alive for us in the Eucharistic we offer.

St. Cyril, a father of the Church and a fifth century patriarch of Alexandria suggests that Hebrew’s author was “stupefied” by this mystery of God in all his divinity electing our impoverished humanity with all its messiness and pain. Cyril reflects that Christ was willing to do this, even “…at times allowing his flesh to feel what is proper to it, in order to fill us with courage.” The psalms set out for this morning fittingly sing of strength and courage, and in the canticle from Isaiah we hear what Cyril will echo back to us centuries later, “My strength and my courage is the Lord, and he has been my savior.”

In his poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, John Updike challenges us to face this reality of God who would willingly taste of our lives and suffer unto death:

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages;
let us walk through the door.

We must taste what Christ tasted for ourselves, not push it to the side or dilute it and thus be satisfied with mere pale memory. As we begin our celebration of the Triduum, let us walk through that door, and taste what has been prepared for us — our salvation. All of it.