Column: Where is God?

For another writing project I've been reading A First Initiation into Carthusian Life [Gracewings, 2010] which is the source of the quote below, advice for novices on both prayer and practical aspects of life in a charterhouse.

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 11 June 2015.

While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take it; this is my body.” Mark 14:22

Where is God? As I sat in church on the vigil of the Feast of Corpus Christi, it seemed very clear where God was. On the altar, the Body and Blood, under the appearances of bread and wine. In those gathered to celebrate, the priest and the assembly. In the Word proclaimed and preached. Christ is here, truly present in all these different ways. Then the Mass ended, we got in the car and went home.

On Sunday morning, I watch furiously as a woman runs a stop sign, all the while chatting on her cell phone. Sunday night, I’m sleeping at the local shelter, feeling helpless in the face of an inconsolable child and her exhausted mother. Monday finds me seething as two people cut in front of me in line at the grocery store. Where is God, now?

An anonymous Carthusian writes, “[God] is … wholly present wherever he acts, that is to say, everywhere. Open your eyes. You will see signs of him everywhere ….” It is, he points out, a practice, one that requires a continual mindfulness, a particular way of seeing the world. Can I see the many ways the Body of Christ is held up in this world?

I want to squeeze my eyes closed and avoid looking at the person cutting me off in traffic or ducking in front of me to take the last loaf of bread. I struggle, too, with the situations that I cannot put right, where nothing I can do in that moment will help. The friend in intractable pain, the child who is overtired and sleeping in yet another new place, replete with strangers.

Benedictine monk and liturgical scholar Godfrey Dieckmann, O.S.B., famously asked his students, “What difference does it make if the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, if we don’t?”

When I say “amen” to the Body of Christ, when I assent to bearing within me God made flesh, when I profess my desire to become what I am about to receive, does this mean I am willing to say “yes” to being helpless, to being crucified on another’s cross as well as my own? To be present to the exhausted mother, to listen to the friend in pain. Does it mean I can see beyond the mindlessly rushing drivers to see, however blurred, God’s presence?

I have less trouble finding Christ, as St. John Chrysostom would say, in either the beggar at the church door or in the chalice, than I do in seeing the face of God in the troublesome, than I do when faced with painful situations that call out for something I cannot provide. Still, I trust that Christ’s presence in the bread and wine has made a difference, that God-within-me will recognize God within my neighbor, and so open my eyes to see God within us as well.

Fire and Water

"Ginger ale bottles" by hugovk
Dandelion & Burdock, Ginger Ale.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Last week I sat down in the comfortable chair in my office (finally cleared of the accumulation of end of semester stuff) to read.  I had my notepad, my favorite pen — and a cold can of ginger ale.  Once settled in, I reached for the still closed can, but knocked it over.  It hit the floor, punctured and began spinning, spraying soda everywhere. Including on a bookshelf.  And on the three sorted-but-not-yet-shelved stacks of books on the floor.

My panicked mind fished out the line from a 14th century prior of the Carthusian charterhouse, Le Grande Chartreuse, "My fathers, my fathers, ad libros, ad libros; let the rest burn, but save the books."¹

I dried off my collection of Karl Rahner's writing and my books on the Exercises, and there seems to be no lasting damage.  But what does it say about my mind?

_____
Ginger has a fiery bite.  If you're up for some chemistry, you can read about chemical names and zingiberene, the molecule responsible for much of ginger's flavor on my other blog.

1.  As quoted in An Infinity of Little Hours (Nancy Klein Maguire), p 29.

Column: An active silence

I've been reading Wound of Love, by an anonymous Carthusian (or as Google books would have A. Carthusian). It's a miscellaneous collection of essays, conferences and homilies, written by contemporary Carthusians for their brothers. The essay referred to below is called "The Facets of Silence."

This column appeared in the June 2012 issue of the Catholic Standard & Times. Read it at Catholic Philly.

A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountain and crushing rocks before the Lord — but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake — but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire — but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. 1 Kings 19:11-12

“Take a look at measure 12, it’s the most critical thing you will do in the entire piece,” cautioned the director. “Note the two rests there? Do not sing! Stop, or you’ll be very lonely.” And embarrassed.

A couple of dozen parents of choral seniors are gathered in a small practice room, trying in twenty minutes to master a sung blessing (acapella, in four part harmony) to be sung to our graduating children at the end of the night’s concert.

The text is the beautiful blessing given in Numbers — “May the Lord bless you and keep you…” — set to two dozen measures of music, hundreds of notes rippling over each other, every space on the staffs filled, except for this beat and a half. Stop. Wait.

It may sound odd, but as a cantor, my favorite part of singing the psalm is not the moment when the Church first fills with our response to the first reading. It’s not even the moment of exquisite relief when I’m sure I’ve found the note that I was tentatively hunting for in practice. No, it’s the thirty or so seconds of silence my parish keeps before the psalmist stands and goes to the ambo. We stop. We wait.

Unlike my students, who often let me know it’s time to move on to their next class by noisily packing up their books and papers, these silences are still. We aren’t collectively itching to get on to the psalm and second reading; we are as engaged in listening as we were when the lector was reading.

“Reading is bound to silence,” wrote Peter of Celle, a 12th century Benedictine abbot, in his lessons for monks. Like composer Claude Debussy, who 700 years later defined music as “the space between the notes.” Peter suggests that silence is not just empty space, but something that is active, that tunes us in to words just spoken and words to come. The silences in our liturgies aren’t accidents, the inevitable result of the time it takes to move one person off the ambo and the next person on.

As Elijah stayed safely in his cave while rock-crushing winds and harrowing fires swept past, emerging, head covered, to hear God calling him in the near total silence that followed, we hear God approaching us in the reading. So, too, we emerge, wrapping ourselves in the silence, to hear what God is calling us to, here and now.

Last week I read a series of reflections on silence by an anonymous Carthusian novice master who pointed out that sacred silence is a communal activity, that it’s not a private affair between individuals and God. We are entrusted to each other’s care in these silences, he notes, safeguarding the silence for our neighbors.

While my parish does not practice the profound silence that the Carthusian monks and nuns do, even in these brief moments at Mass, I sense the support of the assembly as we craft a silence — together — to listen to what God has to say in each of our hearts.

The novice master encourages his young monks to consider the ways in which their silence wells up and flows out over the earth, supporting God’s revelation of Himself to those far beyond the boundaries of the monastery gates.

In the end, the parents did not have to carry the sung blessing on our own. We were supported by the rest of the chorale, their gloriously well-trained voices welling up and flowing out, their eyes pinned to their director’s hands. Holding us in song, and binding us together in perfect silence.


Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear. — Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. in The Habit of Perfection

Carthusian laundry

I have a good sized collection of books devoted to elected silence and the contemplative life, ranging from Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence to Thomas Merton to St. John of the Cross to the desert fathers, and I'm always on the look out for new additions. I recently stumbled across First Initiation into Carthusian Life — an introduction to life in a Charterhouse written for Carthusian postulants and novices.

My first thought was it might be useful background reading for my students for the next time I teach the course on contemplative traditions in the West. Two pages in, I am ready to tuck the book into my bag for my upcoming retreat (a week in solitude in a hermitage here).

The anonymous Carthusian author invites the postulant to read the book slowly, as lectio divina, to reflect deeply on the scripture passages that treat of a contemplative life. It's a rich banquet set out, one I want to do more than taste, one I want to linger over — or to use the novice master's metaphor — to get past the rind and into the interior.

The section on community life is a helpful meditation for anyone living in community - and we all do. (This Carthusian community is male, hence the non-inclusive language.) "We listen carefully to each other and try to understand each others' point of view. We never condemn, or judge a person. We never repeat any evil we have heard. We do not look at the speck in our brother's eye. We avoid all criticism. We try always to adopt a positive attitude, to see the good in our brother's actions and to discover the face of Christ which is gradually being formed in him. At times, one has to accept the fact that one is not understood nor can one understand the other — but all all times we can love." The italics are mine, as that's the piece I need to think about before I start typing into com boxes, or rehearsing arguments in my head, but it all bears contemplating.

What might we have the time and breath to say if we were not criticizing others? If we gave over trying to convince each other to change entrenched positions, particularly on matters principally of style (Communion in the hand, Latin in the liturgy, partisan politics)? How might we "offer each other discrete but very precious mutual help along the steep paths" we follow?

But as my friend Lisa is fond of saying, it all comes down to the laundry. The last two pages of the book deal with the practicalities of getting your laundry done when you are living in solitude and silence within a community of other silent solitaries. There is almost as much as instruction given about laundry as there is about meditation. Which as postulants and novices, might be more what they need. There is almost a scriptural character to the advice given about bloodstains: "If anything is stained with blood, it should be put at once into COLD water and it will be found that after a couple of hours, the stain has been entirely removed." My experience with newborn sheep suggests not, or maybe my faith isn't strong enough?