Drinking from the mug of Indifference

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

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

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

I left my mug home.

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

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

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

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

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

Hallelujah

We sing it every week, some of us every day.  Alleluia.  Three times, nine times.  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.  A single clear voice chants in the silence.  Alleluia.  Trumpets fly and organs resound.  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Praise the Lord.  We sing it, we say it.  Do we mean it?  Is it just walking music, something to cover the movement of the priest from chair to ambo?  Or has it become mere punctuation, as I suspect we treat the "amen"?  (I often wonder if we stopped a liturgy after the opening prayer, to which we have all just assented with the word "amen," and asked everyone to say what we just prayed for, most of us would have not the slightest idea.)

The Boy sang Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah at his recital on Sunday.  I had heard it before, but listening to this I was struck with by all the ways alleluia sounds.  From the Chepponis Festival Alleluia to the flat spoken "alleluia" I sometimes hear at a daily Mass. I'm as puzzled as Cohen's David, "the baffled king composing hallelujah."

I am struck, too, by the thought that we might consider responding to everything that happens with that one word, "alleluia" — praise the Lord.  Chanted with passion.  Hummed in the ordinary.  Spit through clenched teeth.  Cried out in joy.  Howled in grief.  Alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia.

Could I stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but "hallelujah"?  Could I stand before God with anything on my tongue, but alleluia?

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Hear how Leonard Cohen sings Hallelujah.  The Boy told me that the triple over the duple beats in their Hallelujah is how you "make it dance"....

Column: Cold and Chill, Bless the Lord

Dean Brackley, S.J. died recently, my director shared with me a short excerpt from "Call to Discernment in Troubled Times" when I made the Exercises. It struck such a chord that when I returned home, it was one of the first books I read. I heard Jane Hirshfield read "A Cedary Fragrance" a couple of weeks ago at a conference where we were both speaking.

As warm as the light looks in the photo, you could see your breath!

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 27 October 2011.

Cold and chill, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all forever. Daniel 3:67

As the gong in the courtyard rang to summon stragglers to morning services, the thermometer in the first floor corridor read 10 C, which made it feel chillier than the 50 F it was. I wrapped my shawl more securely around my shoulders and hoped the dining room tucked deep inside the walls would be a shade warmer.

A dozen of my students and I were staying in a Buddhist monastery tucked into a half-mile high mountain valley south of Osaka. Shojoshin-in was founded almost 1200 years ago, so the lack of central heating is hardly surprising, but after Kyoto’s heat, my students shivered despite their layers, and the monks kindly conjured space heaters to take the chill off the long dormer in which they slept.

Trying not to be envious of the monk’s robes, I dug my faithful “Chemistry Chick” sweatshirt — which has kept me warm through many chilly nights of prayer — out of my bag and elected to go without heat. Cold and chill, could I bless the Lord?

Poet Jane Hirshfield spent many years in a similar unheated monastery, washing her face each morning in the stingingly cold water that was all the taps provided. In her poem, “A Cedary Fragrance”, she writes that she keeps to the practice still: “Not for discipline…but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted.”

In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola pushes us to think about our desires for comfort and wealth. Do our preferences for warmth, for security, come between us and God? Can we greet with equanimity what comes, wanted or not, comfortable or not? Would we “want and choose poverty with Christ poor rather than riches”?

Most of the time, I have the luxury to not think about heat. Programmable thermostats and automatic hot water heaters keep me from shivering in the mornings. In Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, Dean Brackley, S.J. notes that this sort of insulated life, while it can free us to pursue great goods, has its risks. When we don’t have to struggle with hunger, disease, violence — or the cold — it can “induce in us a chronic low-grade confusion about what is really important in life.” Life and love.

Church father, Origen suggested in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that our small daily practices of asceticism and denial accumulate, that with them we weave a cloak for a cold and shivering Christ. They teach us where to look for Christ. In those who hunger, who thirst, who are cold, who are poor. They sharpen our awareness of need around us, opening us in Christ to a generosity of heart.

I struggled off and on with the cold during our stay, aware that while this small frisson of discomfort was a choice for me, for most of the world, it is not. Last Sunday, as Morning Prayer’s lines of praise tumbled off the page — Cold and chill, bless the Lord — I wondered again if I could bless the Lord if cold and chill were imposed, not elected. I’m still practicing making the unwanted, wanted.

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Touch my heart with this grace, O Lord. When I reach out in joy or in sorrow for the things of this world, grant that through them I may know and love You, their Maker and final home. — Karl Rahner, S.J. In “God of My Daily Routine”

Contemplation in Action

I saw this video on People for Others (full disclosure, I have not watched it with the sound on, so turn on the sound at your own peril!). I'm drawn by the vibrant colors against the white background and by the ways in which the people engage (and don't) the cupcakes coming their way. But most of all I love the elegant, slow motion trajectories of the cupcakes as they fly through the air. In some weird way, I find it a very contemplative thing to watch!? Or very Ignatian? or both?

I kept thinking about the principle and foundation - and the ways in which we field or (do not!) what comes flying our way, but to contemplate how it might deepen our relationship to God and to others. And the slow motion made it feel like the Examen to me...like watching the day's graces and bobbles spin past. And it's messy - and I so often find grace to be a messy thing, overflowing its banks and moving in ways I do not expect, or could not predict.

Lost and Found

I've lost 2 pairs of prescription reading glasses in the last two months. One vanished after a day spent in a library working on an article. Somehow they didn't end up back in my briefcase -- which makes me wonder if I left them on a shelf somewhere. Will they moulder there until someone else wanders through the same spot in the stacks? And just how long might that be? I've been in some dusty corners lately.

The second pair vanished last night, seemingly into thin air. They were in my bag when we left for a student event, never used, but gone when I got home. I opened my bag but once, to check my cell phone at intermission, at which point the lenses clearly made their escape. The first lost pair was as old as Crash, and held together by prayer alone (the bailing wire having given way long ago), I didn't mourn their loss much. This funky pair, a one of a kind pair handmade in Germany, I adore. And more to the point, with almost 100 papers to grade this week, reading glasses are a necessity, not an accessory. So , I spent much of the day struggling for detachment and trying not to worry about what I would do if they did not surface (besides stock up on Advil for the inevitable headaches that would follow).

Thank heavens for Barnacle Boy, Math Man and the college patrol officer, who searched the balcony of the theater this afternoon and found...my glasses. Si quaeris miracula....

Tantum Quantum: Enough is Enough

A year ago today, almost to the hour, I pulled into my driveway for the first time in 5 weeks, returning from the Long Retreat. Birthed in silence, lived in the noisy chaos that is my life, the Exercises are still busy reshaping my life. The last few months I've grappled again with Ignatius' concept of indifference, what Patient Spiritual Director often calls "poised freedom." It's not so much a lack of personal preference, but a willingness to set those preferences aside to better serve God's purposes. Preferences are fine, in "so far as" (tantum quantum in Ignatius' hard won Latin!) they further the greater glory of God. My geeky brain often sees it as a critical point on a surface, not a minimum, but a transition point -- where you are poised to go uphill or downhill with a differential change in position!

Today we are effectively snowed in. My Mini is nearly drifted over, the driveway a mound of snow. We skipped the "whites for white" shopping trip (buying white stuff: milk, bread, salt -- in anticipation of the arrival of white stuff: snow) and decided we could live with and off what we had in the house. (No bread, so I baked two loaves this morning.) But as Math Man and I divvied up the dozen and a half eggs for various culinary purposes, and I checked on how much butter we had I began to feel the same vague anxieties that I had when I packed for the Exercises. Do I really have enough: socks, pens, butter, eggs?

I wonder sometimes if this is where a stance of poised freedom begins to seize up, when I worry that what I have -- either tangibly or intangibly -- is not enough, and then hold onto it. When is enough, enough? Annie Dillard gets it, I think:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give , give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you – you open your safe and find ashes.

So maybe I'll stop writing my name on the eggs in the carton?