Alarms, Excursions and Stained Glass: A night at Wernersville

Excursions

On Wednesday I drove up to the Jesuit Center in Wernersville to see Patient Spiritual Director and spend a day and a night in silent silence (as opposed to the less quiet silences I've been writing about here and there.) Going at all was a near thing, as we had snow and howling winds the night before. But Math Man dug me out and once the boys were on their way to school, I headed out in time to make lunch, if not Mass.

Stained Glass

About a year ago, I wrote about this stained glass window by Dennis McNally SJ, depicting key movements from the Spiritual Exercises which I'd found through People for Others. I, along with Stratoz and others, wondered (to no avail) where it was - in hopes of spending some time sitting contemplatively in front of it. On Wednesday, I was walking down the 3rd floor hall and ran into a Jesuit friend. He was chatting with another gentleman. First names were exchanged, but when my lanky Jesuit friend mentioned that Dennis was an artist, at St. Joe's University, my brain put two and two together and asked, "Do you work in stained glass?" Yes, and yes, he was the artist who imagined this gorgeous window. Dennis McNally, SJ - you can read about the window here.

Alas, it does not exist — so sitting in front of it is not in the cards (unless you have a 8'x8' square in a wall somewhere that is crying out for a stained glass window). Apparently the center window — The Two Standards — was deemed too modern for the intended setting (the chapel at the Maryland Province Infirmary).

Alarms

Around 9:30 at night, I finished up what I was doing in the library, cleared up my books and papers and went off to pray in the main chapel. I went in my sock feet, clutching shawl and breviary, to sit on the floor in front of the altar. (There's just enough light there to pray the Office by!) I blessed myself from the holy water font at the front, and as I took a step in to the chapel proper suddenly lights began to flash (including around the tabernacle) and alarms began to hoot. My first thought was I'd transgressed some boundary - had I missed a message that said the chapel was off limits? Surely both Lanky Jesuit and Patient Spiritual Director would not have failed to mention this. Second thought was, Lord, I am not worthy to sit at your feet? Rational thought kicked in about 30 milliseconds later. Fire alarm. I headed (in my sock feet, no coat, the wind chill is in the single digits, and did I mention there was snow on the ground?) out the door, pajama and robe clad retreats streaming behind me. Mercifully the alarm stopped before I got out the door.

Just in case, I retrieved my shoes from my room. Back to the chapel. I sit on the floor, compose myself and breathe. Suddenly, I hear an alarm again. This time it's softer; it sounds like it's coming up through the floor of the altar. "The crypt?" I wonder. I get up, seeing if I can find the source. I track it out of the chapel and into the front foyer, where the alarm station reads "Fire Auditorium" Uh-oh. No sign of a response anywhere, so I head for a phone. On the way, I run into a security staff person. Yes, they know. Yes, they're working on it. I go back, alarm is off. I settle to prayer again. Breathe. Chirrup, chirrup…there's the alarm again.

I've been having trouble with distraction in prayer (which is the subject of a post for my conversation with Robin about Into the Silent Land!)- and all I could think was, "God, this is not funny." In the end I did manage to stay my hour. In silence. No further alarms.

Peacock of Doom

"It's the peacock of doom," intoned Barnacle Boy, looking over my shoulder at my dueling computers. The big screen on my desktop was cycling through a set of calm photos, with this one up as he came in. My laptop — onto which I was transferring some files — was working its way through my "calm" playlist.

I know that the Boy has a thing about pelicans, but didn't think it extended to other birds beginning with "p"...."Why doom?" "The music, Mom, the music..."

Ah....Arvo Pärt's De Profundis was playing. The text is Psalm 130 — the psalm for Night Prayer on Wednesdays in fact:

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine;
Domine, exaudi vocem meam. Fiant aures tuæ intendentes
in vocem deprecationis meæ.
Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine, Domine, quis sustinebit?

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication:
If you, O Lord, mark iniquities,
Lord, who can stand?

The Boy is prophetic, as it turns out, that was the peacock of doom. It's been a pretty intense semester for me, skating the thin edge of exhaustion far too often, but for the most part managing to keep things everything going that I needed to. Until yesterday...

Thursday dawned, after a scant 6 hours of sleep. I got showered and out the door with 5 minutes to spare before Morning Prayer. Looking forward to a few moments in the dark and still church before the 8 am Mass finished, I pull open the side door to see the main church lit up and full of people. Puzzled, I walked around to the front. Had so many people showed up for 8 am that they needed to shift to the larger sanctuary? And what was Fr. Frank doing still preaching at 8:20 -- had he overslept again? When I saw the cantor up front, the light dawned at last. It was Acsension Thursday. I was the cantor for the 8 am Ascension Thursday Mass. Except I was 20 minutes late, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that read "Chemistry Chick."

The rest of day turned out to be an exercise in humility. Presiding at Morning Prayer, my cell phone suddenly chimes to announce a text message, then rings incessantly. Recounting my travails of the morning to Math Man, when I got to the part about not being quite clear about what was transpiring in the Church, he popped out with the punch line, "It's Ascension Thursday, a holy day of obligation, right?" He remembers, he's not scheduled to cantor, he's not even Catholic.

By the time my day wound down into the Examen, I was ready to ask, "Who Lord, could stand?" Alas, I was late for that, too. That was the psalm for the night before....

Column: We ask some share in the fellowship

The picture is Ruben's St. Cecilia...the saints in the list? my choice!

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 3 December 2009.

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For ourselves, too, we ask some share in the fellowship of your apostles and martyrs, with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Ignatius, Augustine, Monica, Felicity, Perpetua and all the saints. — From the Roman Canon


“Whoa, what is this?” wonders one of the teen-aged invaders in my study. Invited into my sanctum sanctorum to hunt through my yarn collection for a Christmas project, they were enjoying checking out what other treasures I kept hidden from them up here. Family photos are strung across one wall, outlines of essays are scratched on the blackboard and, sharing a shelf with the Mathematical Tables for the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, is the 100-year-old, worn leather bound volume that had caught Lindsay’s eye: Breviarum Romanum. The Latin version of the Divine Office — the Liturgy of the Hours.

I opened it to the page for the day: 22 Nov. — Sanctae Caecilae was written in red across the top. For the feast of St. Cecilia I explained to my (non-Catholic) visitor, “There are prayers for every day of the year, for different hours of the day, for the saints and for their feasts.” Her first impression? “That’s intense.” I certainly find it intense, but not quite in the same way.

The modern version of the Hours offers us “some share in the fellowship of [the] apostles and martyrs” as we ask in Eucharistic Prayer I. The Office of Readings, which opens with a triad of psalms, sets out a feast of readings drawn both from Sacred Scripture and from the depths of the Church’s archives. Letters from saints, accounts of their lives, homilies by priests and popes, excerpts from the documents of Church councils, a rich chorus of voices from the first century through to the last can be heard.

The saints have ceased in my mind to be stone statues tucked into alcoves or images — albeit colorful ones — caught in the glass of church windows. Instead, Thomas More springs off the page as he writes to his daughter from prison of his struggles to keep on the path God has set him upon, “I will not mistrust him, Meg…”

I feel a sudden kinship with St. Jerome when I hear him bring a bit of physics into his reflections on the interpretation of Scripture, “it was not the air vibrating with the human voice that reached their ears, but rather it was God…” Like the family stories that breathe life into the ragged black and white photos of relatives you never met, the Liturgy of the Hours keeps these saints alive.

On days when I can’t find a second to spare in my day for the Office of Readings, the structure of the Hours still let me peek through a window into the lives of the saints. Ernest Hemingway once wrote, perhaps in jest, that his best story was written in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

The prayers proper to each saint, that close morning and evening prayer, have a brevity of narrative that Hemingway would appreciate. “God our Father, you called St. Bruno to serve you in a life of solitude…” begins the prayer for the founder of the reclusive Carthusian order. St. Jane Frances de Chantal, I learn, is “renowned for her outstanding merits in two different walks of life” — she was both wife and nun. Like Hemingway’s tantalizing piece of prose, these prayers give me something small enough to hold onto during a busy day, but intriguing enough to feed my contemplations.

When my family gathers, we tell our stories — the long one of my parents’ courtship, the ones that with a mere six words can make us laugh until we cry: “Remember John and the turkey leg?” And when I gather with the Church family, I cherish those stories even more — most of all the one-liners.

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God, the rock of our salvation, whose gifts can never fail, deepen the faith you have already bestowed and let its power be seen in your servants. We make our prayer 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

Column: Creating Thin Space

There is much to delight in my usual spot for morning prayer with the Augustinian community: the mix of voices, the shape of the chapel, the lingering scents of incense during Advent. But even when I'm not there, I am in sacred space. During the Long Retreat, I prayed Morning Prayer sitting in my seat by the window overlooking the Atlantic at the same time my regular community gathered - 8:30 am.

This is the first of four columns written for the Standard's Advent series on the Liturgy of the Hours: We Wait in Prayer.

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 26 November 2009.]

It is you whom I invoke, O Lord. In the morning you hear me; in the morning I offer you my prayer, watching and waiting.
— Ps. 5:3

It was a scene right out of some 1950s movie: four women from two countries in their pajamas sitting cross-legged on the floor of a dorm, having one of those midnight philosophical conversations you’re supposed to have in college. Except these women were not students, but professors — of chemistry, English, and of course, philosophy.

I had given a talk that morning at a retreat for faculty on contemplative practices. I told the 80-odd professors that I had prepared for that first talk of the day by taking my breviary and cup of tea to an overgrown garden behind the dorm. I prayed morning prayer.

In my talk, I had quoted one of the two psalms set out for that hour: Mercy and faithfulness have met; justice and peace have embraced. “What is the rest of it?” wondered the English professor in that late night conversation. So I fetched my breviary, opened it and invited three contemplatives from very different traditions to explore the treasures of my tradition, to enter my monastery without walls, the holy space I had lived in for more than 25 years.

I discovered the Liturgy of the Hours when my first husband entered the Church. A friend had suggested he read convert and monk Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. In it, Merton writes of his discovery of the Hours, which eventually led him to enter the Trappists, to let his life be enveloped entirely in the cycle of psalms that anchors the Office. The Trappists were certainly not my calling, but I was drawn to this practice that could, in this small way, consecrate my days, and bind me more firmly to the Church. I found a breviary and began.

Like Merton, the breviary was tough for me to navigate at first, and in the bustle of a move 3,000 miles to the East, I set it aside. A few months later, settled in our new parish, Tom and I signed up for an hour a week of Perpetual Adoration. I brought the breviary along and in the quiet night hours, sitting with Christ before me, unworried about doing it exactly right, I slowly unraveled its mysteries.

My patience this time was richly rewarded. It was like opening a door into another place, or as the psalmist sings later in Psalm 5: “I through the greatness of your love have access to your house.” The psalms slowly traced their pattern onto my days, gracing the dawn with joyful praise, offering a breath midday. Soon, Morning Prayer was as indispensable a part of my day as my first cup of tea. One woke me physically, the other woke me to the presence of God.

I discovered that I did not need sacred space to pray the Hours; this round of prayer creates sacred space. The Celtic tradition speaks of “thin places,” places where God seems particularly near. The Liturgy of the Hours is a bit like fine sandpaper in this respect. It gently rubs away at what separates us from God, making even the most mundane of spaces thin — and so, sacred.

Each time the new liturgical year begins, I open my breviary to see Pope Paul VI’s warm invitation to join in this eternal cycle of prayer, to make whatever place and time I find myself in sacred. As we begin this year, I invite you join me in applying some prayerful sandpaper and making a thin place for yourself — and God.

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Father, creator of unfailing light, give that same light to those who call to you. May our lips praise You; our lives proclaim Your goodness; our work give You honor, and our voice celebrate You for ever. Amen. — Prayer after the psalm, Morning Prayer, Sunday of Week I.

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.

Bravely Repaired

My breviary is only half as old as I am, but like me, is beginning to exhibit some age related pathology. On Easter, the back of the Easter/Lent volume fell off, and the front cover was clearly loose. I couldn't bear to replace it (budget aside), for reasons I can't quite express. Do I lack detachment? It and I have been through a lot together, but I would not lose the experiences with the book. Who knows! I decided to give repairing it a whirl, and thanks to a class a few years back in book binding and manuscript illumination, have the skills.

Barnacle Boy watched me start the project, and was fascinated with seeing the "insides" of a book. Tonight he was rummaging in my purse and took it out. "Hey, your bravery [sic] is fixed!" With great pride in my work I inquired of my beloved sons, "Can you believe that the back was completely off?" In chorus, "Yes!"

It's functional again, and I'm pleased!