Camped on a bench

I'm working at the intersection point of science and religion today. Literally, perhaps, as I'm sitting on a bench at 17th & the Parkway in Philadelphia, in sight of both the Franklin Institute and the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul. I had two meetings this morning at the Archdiocese, and have another on science this afternoon. I had thought to head for the CHF in Old City and camp out in the library there between meetings, but the day is lovely and when I sat down on this bench to change my shoes and check my email, I decided to stay for a bit. The tours buses brush past, runners pound the pavement to my right, and sparrows tentatively touch down -- hoping that I might have left them some crumbs...but the only ones I have are snippets of conversations that drift past. The breeze blows and all I have -- or really need -- at the moment sits in front of me. My bag with book, breviary, iPad, phone, umbrella and wallet.

In some ways I don't look much different from my counterpart down the block. He, too, has his gear for the day weighing down the end of a bench. We're both peering up at the world moving past, perhaps both a bit leery of the dark clouds that have blown in over the last few minutes. And maybe he is wondering, as I am, where to find a public restroom.

Still, there are more than 6 lanes of traffic dividing us, I suspect. I'm connected to not only the world wide web, but to a vast set of supports that allow me to pack up a small bag and be comfortable on my feet for a day in the city. From a job, a family, a house with a roof that (mostly) does not leak, to the newly asphalted streets on which to ride my bike to the trains that run into the city.

And it's interesting to see the looks you get when you look at home with a bag on a bench....what do we see when we look at each other?

Via Crucis V: What of the crosses that aren't ours?

They press Simon of Cyrene to bear the cross. Perhaps it is not sufficient to bear only our own crosses, what of the cross thrust upon our neighbor?

I've been continuing to think about my response to the burdens of those around us. I often think about bearing my own crosses, responding to Jesus' in Luke's Gospel: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." This year, I'm thinking more about the crosses that aren't mine, that aren't voluntary. In the comments on the essay I wrote last week about responding to the invisible and marginalized on city streets, someone posted a link to a modern day study of the Good Samaratian. The conclusion drawn in a commentary about the paper, that we are compassionate as a hobby, in other words, when we have time, is one I find challenging, and I'm afraid all too true of myself.

In a conversation with Patient Spiritual Director yesterday, he noted that at one point in his career he was required by his superior to do a particular service assignment once a week. Each week he would internally lament that he didn't have time for this, and yet each week he found it a grace-filled experience. Even the week someone stole his jacket.

I'm reflecting on the press of time, the press of the needs of others, and how I can practice compassion in more than my spare time. Can I pick up the crosses that belong to my neighbor?

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Photo is of a 15th century pilgrim's badge, perhaps depicting Simon of Cyrene.

Ignatian Life: Custody of the Eyes

I've been following the conversation at the Deacon's Bench on the prudential judgement that needs to be exercised in deciding — in the moment — who should be admitted to the Eucharist. There is a lot of slicing and dicing of canon law, Eucharistic theology and moral theology being done (who has what rights, what is a correct disposition...) as well as a great deal of Monday morning quarterbacking going on.

It's been making me think, not about Eucharistic theology per se, but rather about the decisions we make — in the moment — when we come face to face with Christ in a "distressing diguise." Those can be tough, as a young Jesuit Volunteer courageously recounts here. What happens at the altar, does not stay at the altar, but plays out on the altar of the world. It's easy to be critical of the decisions made on all sides when there is time to think and discuss, not so easy when the decision is standing in front of you, asking to be fed.

I'm struggling with how to respond in these encounters with Christ as well — as you can read in my latest reflection at This Ignatian Life.

"We issue lists of grave sins, delicta graviora. We wrangle over translations, theological nuances and liturgical praxis. We worry whether we are sufficiently reverent with the body of Christ when we receive in the hand, and all the while the body of Christ lies crumpled and abandoned on the sidewalk. And I walk past, averting my eyes.

'And what about His hunger, cold, chains, nakedness and sickness? What about His homelessness? Are these sufferings not sufficient to overcome your alienation?' challenged John Chrysostom sixteen centuries ago. How can you continue to walk through the city, pretending not to see, failing to recognize what is before you? It’s not just new perspectives in science I seek on this sabbatical. What about His homelessness? I chose to work in the city on this leave, not just because the materials I needed were here, but because I wanted to look at this horizon, to struggle with my response to these challenging questions. To face what I had walked away from two summers previously."

Read the rest here.

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Photo is from rubygold, used under Creative Commons license.

A proper break

Food and drink are off limits in the reading room where my carrel is situated. (Years ago this would have been a given, but you can bring a cup of coffee or tea to your carrel in the college library at Bryn Mawr, as long as it's in a travel mug — or you are not working in the Rare Book Room.) I'm finding it hard to adjust, a cup of tea has been at hand when I wrote as long as I can remember, from the handwritten reports laborious copied with a ball point pen onto loose leaf of my elementary school days to the typed versions put together at the dining room table after my brothers and sisters had gone to bed — cup after cup of tea poured into a stream of sentences.

When I admitted to my difficulties to an Irish colleague, he responded, "Now you have to take a proper break." Indeed. I'm finding it both difficult and delightful to stop for 20 minutes midmorning to make a cup of Assam and sit on the sofa in the alcove — which is perhaps why I so enjoyed this song in last night's choral concert!

The trouble with the helter-skelter life we lead
is coffee in a cardboard cup.
The trouble,
the psychologists have all agreed,
is coffee in a cardboard cup.

....

The trouble with the world is plain to see
is ev'rything is hurry up.
There's ready whip,
instant tea,
minute rice....

Listen to the whole thing here.

Tea. In a mug. Sitting down. Without multi-tasking. #lessonsfromsabbatical

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Photo is from Wikimedia used under Creative Commons license.

Noisy silence

"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."

Rainer Marie Rilke The Book of a Monastic Life I, 50

After four full days of wading deeper and deeper into the practice of silence, I arrived at this retreat already clearly on retreat and my director gently suggested that I might forgo the talking dinner, and "carry on" -- which I did.

Until, that is, four days into my retreat proper and after eight days of virtually complete silence. I got up (long past the official breakfast) took my tea and prayer to the edge of the eastern cloister garden, where the only noise was of the small fountain and the birds who frequent its cool waters. I went to Mass and after a lunch of fruit and yogurt headed to prayer again. I came down the stairs, rounded the corner toward the chapel to nearly run into an grey-haired sister, who stopped me and inquired, "Are you afraid of bats?"

Taken aback by this seeming non sequitur, I was momentarily speechless, finally spitting out a respectfully quiet "Yes, Sister."

"Well, there's is a bat in the Holy Spirit chapel." Oh. My.

Bats on the floor in the middle of the day are not a good thing. It was the fourth of July, so staff were in short supply. The rector, however, was in his office. Recruited to the bat banishing project, I was issued a mop and we went off to do battle.

Bat duly dispatched and disposed of, I decided that a walk might be in order. Let's just say I needed to settle a bit more before sitting down to pray. Walking out to the far fields, I leaned against the fence to watch a vintage combine cutting straw. On it's next pass, it comes to a lurching halt and out pops the farmer to say hello. Silence??

Back to the house, by now hot, drenched in sweat and interiorly, at least, still disquieted. I was dreaming of a cold shower, a bag of ice for the knee that felt as if someone had stuffed a dish sponge inside, something very cold to drink and the quiet of the garden. Heading down the first floor hall, I run into (nearly literally) Urban Spiritual Director, here to start his own retreat that evening. Twice he wonders, are you keeping silence? Well, not that you would notice today.

Cooled off and once again settled (and quiet), I cautiously ventured forth in prayer again. Whew. No flying furry mammals, no farmers, no friends. I’m back...yes!

Or not. I walked that evening, down the hedgerow path. Halfway down, I startled an owl, who came plummeting through the tree above me. I screamed (like a girl, as my brothers would say).

Noisy silence.

Column: Does silence have to be quiet?

Our God comes, he does not keep silence, before him is a devouring fire, round about him is a mighty tempest. — Ps. 50:3

On my travels last fall I spoke to a group of university students about contemplative practices. As we were talking about ways to set aside space and time for contemplation, I noted they had a well-used meditation space in their college library. The library stacks open onto an internal courtyard, with shops and a food court on the bottom floor. The whole building hums with noise, the characteristic hush of a library punctured by the sounds that bubble up from below.

When I mentioned that the space wasn’t very quiet, one of the students quickly countered, “It’s very silent. I usually study nearby because of that.” I agreed that relative to the rest of the campus and even the library, it is quiet. But on my scale, not so much. A nearly empty retreat house in the dead of winter at 3 in the morning — that’s silent.

Or maybe not. Conceivably the student was right, his meditation space is a silent spot. Lately I’ve been reading French Catholic laywoman Madeleine Delbrêl’s reflections on silence. Delbrêl, who founded a lay community dedicated to living the contemplative life within a city, has a very different definition of silence from mine. She poses much the same question as the student: “Why should the wind through the pines, the sand storms, and the squall upon the sea, all count as silence, and not the pounding of the factory machines, the rumbling of the trains at the station, and the clamor of the engines at the intersection?”

Why do I consider the stirring of dry leaves as silence, but the train clattering on the tracks and the babble of student voices as noise?

Composer John Cage’s most famous piece might be 4’33" — which consists of someone sitting at a piano without playing a single note for four minutes and 33 seconds. In a biography of Cage, No Such Thing as Silence, Kyle Gann suggests that Cage intended the stretch of silence as a frame, to hold our attention on the sounds neither audience nor musician controls, and underscores Cage’s contention that everything makes music.

Perhaps Delbrêl’s sort of silence is similarly a frame to hold up to the world, to focus my attention on the fact that God is present all around me. A way to remind me that I do not control how the world unfolds, neither the sights nor the sounds nor the people around me. “Silence,” she observes, “does not mean running away, but rather recollecting ourselves in the open space of God.”

Abba Poemen of the early desert fathers, too, points out that silence is as much an internal attitude as an external attribute: “If you are silent, you will have peace wherever you live.” As I take a deep breath, ready to start the new semester, I’m planning to tuck Delbrêl’s handy frame in my pocket — to pull out whenever the decibel level rises beyond what I can bear. Perhaps with its help I can recollect myself in the open space inside of my heart, and peer out to discover anew God is all around.

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“It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention…” — Mary Oliver, from Praying

Delicta graviora

It was 10:30 in the morning as I crossed Market at 7th and slid between the line at the food cart and the walls of the Free Library. The woman was heaped on the walkway to the library. Her green aluminum cane made a sharp contrast to the sun washed red brick of the entryway. She slumped, asleep, over her belongings, exhausted already by the heat that had just begun to rise. Her lined face, pink with heat, was turned to passersby. She looked like my mother, sleeping restlessly in pain.

I stood there for a fleeting moment. I wanted to reach out and hold her. I wanted her to bring her to a cool, safe space to sleep. I wanted to ask what she needed. I wanted to help. And yet...I did none of these things. I walked on down 7th, headed to a cool, dry archive where two librarians would bring me the books I desired, without my lifting more than a finger.

We wrangle over translations and whether we are sufficiently reverent with the body of Christ when we receive in the hand. We issue lists of grave sins, such as "the taking or retaining for a sacrilegious purpose or the throwing away of the consecrated species" and meanwhile here lies the body of Christ crumpled and abandoned on the sidewalk. And I walk past. This is what I will have answer for to Christ when he asks, when I was thirsty, did you give me to drink? This is delicta graviora. It’s not on the list.

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Photo from dgphilli.

A Night in the Museum or A Variant on the 30-days

When I was in elementary school we lived in a small town outside of Chicago. The local rec department had a terrific summer program, drop-in arts & crafts, boating lessons and field trips galore. My favorite trips (besides the outings to Cubs' games) were to the Museum of Science and Industry - what I called the "push-button" museum for all the interactive exhibits. I could go again and again...and did. We were on our own in the museum, something that is probably unthinkable in these hypervigilant days, trusted to return on time to our yellow school bus for the long trip back home.

When I read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler I didn't dream of running away to the Met in New York, I dreamed of hiding out in the Museum of Science and Industry. I would have slept in the U-boat.

My brother Geek Guru (who I think I could have counted on to be my co-conspirator in such an adventure) sent me an announcement for a competition to spend a month living in my all time favorite museum. The ground rules, oddly enough, are much like the 30-days: limited communications (no cell phone, but blogging encouraged), sleeping in small and odd spaces. Though instead of days of silent meditation hidden away, you essentially become an interactive exhibit.

Alas, I'm not on sabbatical, and am so committed for the fall that there is no way I could go, even if I could survive the competition. But a girl can dream, can't she?

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Photo of The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL. Photographed 9 April 2006. © Jeremy Atherton, 2006. Used under CC license.

A version of this is cross-posted at Culture of Chemistry.

Reversing Direction

I had my last meeting with Urban Spiritual Director today. My regular director is back from his sabbatical and I've made an appointment to go up and see him in a couple of weeks. It was a bittersweet visit in some ways. I will miss the regular visits to parts of the city that I don't usually visit, the chance to light a candle (yes - this parish church has the real thing burning in the sanctuary, with candles spilling out of the rack onto the shelf next to the altar), the visits to the chocolate shop.

As I walked up the alley to the entrance of the church, I spotted the man who regularly interrogates me on my visits coming in the opposite direction. "Oh, good," I thought, "I get to see him one last time, too." We reached the church door at the same time, and I held it open for him, expecting the usual conversation to begin. His face was slack, his eyes held no sign of recognition. I said hello, but got no response. He came in behind me, wandered around the Church - then left without a word. I found myself ineffably saddened by this.

I left Urban Spiritual Director with a piece of glass from Stratoz.

Column: Where is My God?

Matthew Spotts' writing about his experiences with the homeless in Washington DC, as well as my own encounters sketched here, were the seeds for this piece. I learned the story of the monks of Tibhirine from a poem by Marilyn Nelson, The Contemplative Life, published in Image (61, p. 15).

Abba Jacob wiped his eyes.
Interval of birdsong from the veranda.

He's seeing not an abstract God,
but a God who has assumed a face,
a God who shows him this face
in every one of those Muslim brothers and sisters,
including the one who kills him.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 25 June 2009.

My tears became my bread day and night, as they said to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” — Ps. 42:3

We have the same conversation each time we meet. Most often he happens upon me sitting in the pews of the city church where my spiritual director lives, though once we met on the street outside.

“What is your parish?” he wants to know.

“Our Mother of Good Counsel.”

“In Bryn Mawr?”

“Yes.” I am terse as he.

“Why are you here?”

“To pray.”

“What are you praying for?” And here is where I inevitably falter, faced with a question I’m unwilling to answer, even to myself.

At first my reaction was irritation. I’m there to gather my thoughts before I see my director, to slow down, to be still before God. This felt like an intrusion. “Why are you here?” I would think. Until the day it occurred to me that I was walking out of this recurring, slightly exasperating conversation into a recurring one with my director that sounded the very same themes: “How is your prayer?” he asks.

The psalmist struggles with these questions, too. “Where is your God?” he is asked. “Where is my God?” I wonder. Mother Teresa spoke of encountering Christ in His most distressing disguises, in the poor, the neglected and the rejected. The people who make us uncomfortable. Is this Christ standing here before me, distressing me with questions? Is this the God for whom I eat salt tears, for whom I thirst?

Laid out here on paper, the answer seems easy. Yes. Yet when I’m confronting the reality in the aisle of Old St. Joe’s, my response seems muddled and I wonder what to do.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ reminds us that in caring for our brothers and sisters, particularly those on the margins, we are caring for Him. Mother Teresa was so drawn to Christ in these challenging guises that she founded a religious order to care for the poor and dying. Yet John Chrysostom, in reflecting on Matthew, knew that meeting Christ in these places was potentially uncomfortable. “And what about His hunger, cold, chains, nakedness and sickness? What about His homelessness? Are these sufferings not sufficient to overcome your alienation?” Or to overcome my reluctance to answer?

While we might think it enough in these moments to care for the need that immediately presents itself, Jesus invites us to enter more deeply into a relationship. To listen to what He is asking and to respond, in word as well as deed. To engage him in conversation, to answer hard questions.

What might we say to Christ encountered under difficult and even harrowing circumstances? Perhaps thank you. In 1996 seven Trappist monks of the Abbey of Tibhirine in Algeria were brutally murdered. The monks had known they were in danger, but mindful of their vow of stability they remained, continuing to be present to their neighbors who were not able to flee. Prior Christian de Cherge left behind a letter with a message for his killers “who would not be aware of what [they] were doing. “Thank you,” he said, “for in you, too, I see the face of God.”

Where is my God? He walks among us, bearing the welcome embraces of friends and the disconcerting questions of strangers. What will I say the next time Christ, in a distressing disguise, walks up to me and asks, “What are you praying for?” I’m praying for gratitude, for the gift of His presence in your presence.

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God and judge of all, You show us the way to Your kingdom is through humility and service. Keep us true to the path of justice and give us the reward promised to those who make a place for the rejected and the poor. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen. — Opening prayer, 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Meme

Math Man and I enjoyed a lovely, last second dinner in Philadelphia last night. We parked near Rittenhouse Square and walked in the rain until we happened on this place. I loved the logo (choosing a restaurant by the sign, like wine by the label?) - which is not the meme of the Internet but Mémé. The food was terrific (sizzling mussels in a pan with lemon and garlic and...), and I could write a forever about the people watching. The two young women at the next table, with the Bohemian young man, one saying breathlessly, "so you get a stipend? You must be set, for like six years, in graduate school!" The woman of my age with curly dark hair in the most amazing red dress, it looked comfortable and chic - that I was too chicken to ask where she found it. The Palm Beach crows in Lilly P and heels and hair that was just too, too, done. The grey haired geeky couple...oh wait, that would be us!

Going it alone

Matthew Spotts, a Jesuit novice who made the Long Retreat at the same time I did has written a short reflection about the film The Soloist. The film looks at the relationship between a journalist (Steve Lopez, who used to write for my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer) and a homeless man - and gifted cellist - he tries to help. Coming as he is out of a short period working with homeless men in Washington, DC, Matthew's comments are thought provoking.

As I traipse into and through Philadelphia every few weeks, homelessness and the mental illness that is so often part and parcel of it is more visible to me than it is in my sheltered surburban neighborhood. Nearly every time I go, I encounter the same gentleman in the church where my spiritual director is pastor. We have the same conversation each time. He wants to know my parish, if I'm a nun, why I've come, what am I praying for. At first I resented the intrusion into my silence, into my time to prepare to see my director. Until the parallel to that very meeting struck me. My director often begins by asking, "How is your prayer?"

Who am I encountering in that space between spaces? Between the street and the pastor's office? Would I brush off Christ if he stopped by me in the pew and asked, "What are you praying for?" As, of course, I was. And I'd likely be just as tongue-tied in response.

God's grandeur in the city?

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 27 November 2008]

Wisdom calls aloud in the streets, She raises her voice in the public squares; She calls out at the street corners, She delivers her message at the city gates. Prv. 1:20-21


"Glory be to God for dappled things" priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., exclaims at the start of Pied Beauty. Last summer I very nearly stepped on one of God's dappled things. In the early hours of a warm, hazy morning, ambling down a familiar path, my mind was miles away. A commotion in the bushes brought me up short.

Not two feet away, curled up in the middle of a hedgerow that came right out of Hopkins' "landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow and plough" was a newborn fawn, her dappled skin nearly invisible against the sun speckled grass, her nervous mother poised to run me off. At that moment, it was not so hard to see how, in Hopkins' words, "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."

This fall, most of my walking has been through Philadelphia's streets, on days far less gentle than the misty morning I encountered the fawn.

One afternoon, an icy rain was falling as I trudged from Old City to the train station; even wrapped in my raincoat I was damp and cold. At 13th and Market, I watched a toothless man walk bent into the beating rain with no coat, no umbrella, no shoes - just flip-flops and soaking socks. I walked past a woman with all her worldly goods in bags, pressed up against a building in the narrow dry strip of pavement. Where was God's grandeur now?

In his homily on Christ the King, Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx points out that while we might seek God among the great and powerful (or perhaps in glorious country walks), "Jesus lets us find God among the little ones and those of no account." Though we may not realize it, we are standing before God now, even as we will at the last judgment - at 13th and Market.

Like the doe crashing through the brush, Wisdom's challenge in Proverbs brought my attention sharply back to the prospect of uncovering God's grandeur in the city streets and public squares.

Could I bow down before the man with no shoes, throw myself at the feet of the woman against the wall, as I imagine I would before Christ the King? I could not help but think of Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, who believed that in touching the broken bodies of the poor, she was touching the body of Christ himself. I also could not fail to see how far short of this vision of the kingdom I fall.

As I rehearsed the majestic music chosen for Sunday's Feast of Christ the King, the royal fanfares and flourishes resounding in the church, my mind kept returning to the faces of Christ the King on the street corners. What other gifts was I preparing, fit for that King, to bring before His altar?

In his commentary on St. Matthew, Church Father Origen speaks to us of weaving "a garment for the cold and shivering Christ." What cloak am I weaving in both word and deed to wrap around Christ, our King, who is cold and shivering on the streets?

Can I bring myself to look at that cloak, to face my ultimate end, my judgment before God, every day? Not easily. So I listen for God's wisdom at the city gates, poised now to notice God's dappled things tucked nearly invisible against the buildings, continually praying for God's grace not to let my own nerves run me off.

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Lord Jesus Christ, we worship you living among us in the sacrament of your body and blood. May we offer to our Father in heaven a solemn pledge of undivided love. May we offer to our brothers and sisters a life poured out in loving service of that kingdom where you live with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Opening prayer from the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ

Photo is on Avenue du Général Leclerc in the Paris city center, taken by vlastula. Used under Creative Commons license.

City Directions

There is the Ignatian concept of "finding God in all things" or "contemplation in action" - that one's spiritual life and life are congruent. For me it's certainly an aspiration, and sometimes a reality.

Walking, either in my neighborhood or at Wernersville, I often enjoy the many and varied realizations of God at play in the universe: leaves rustle, squirrels duck and cover, the color of the sky. Walking the streets of Philadelphia makes this a bit more of a challenge.

Besides the proximity to a terrific chocolate store, one unexpected benefit of seeing my spiritual director in the city has been the chance to try to find God in the city scape.

Last week when I went, it was cold, rainy, sleeting. I walked the mile there and back from the train station - and was therefore glad of the chance to get warm in the church before my appointment. I wasn't the only one seeking a dry warm space, a man challenged me at the door (concerned, I suspect, that I was going to turn him out), "Are you going to tell me where to go?" On my return trip, as the rain intensified, I walked past a woman with all her worldly goods in bags, pressed up against a building in the narrow dry strip of pavement. At 13th and Market, I watched a toothless man walk bent into the beating rain with no coat, no umbrella, no shoes, just flip-flops and soaking socks.

Can I see God here?

City Escapades

I went into Philly today to see my spiritual director. It was a lovely day for a walk, sunny and crisp. As I crossed 12th street, I watched a very plump pidgeon waddle along the curb like a balance beam, then slide down the "ramp" the curb made when it reached the cut at the corner. It look all the world like a penguin sliding down an ice chute!