Column: With one accord

Looking up into the central vault.

 Last October, Math Man and I visited Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, an experience that I'm still trying to put into words.  I can say that I agree with Pope Francis' assessment, Gaudi is a great mystic.  (There is a movement to have Gaudi canonized.)

After I submitted this column, my friend Cathy shared this moving and beautiful video of the Apostles Creed.

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 2 Feb 2016.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures. — From the Nicene Creed

I could hear each and every voice, all 20 of us who had made it to Mass in the aftermath of last week’s epic blizzard, as we recited the Creed. The pastor, firmly starting us off, “I believe…,” the snow-suited youngsters in the back, the retired teacher across from me. We couldn’t let the tide of voices from a packed Sunday Mass carry us along. All of us were needed to bear the standard of the faith.

Last fall, I visited Antonio Gaudi’s magnificent church, La Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona. The words of the Apostle’s Creed, in many languages, are emblazoned on the walls of Sagrada Familia behind the main altar. I read this starkly simple statement of what we believe again and again — in English, Latin, Spanish and Catalan — each word taking on a new depth. Wondering at the way the bones of what we believe are built into the bones of this sacred place.

The quiet strength of our voices last Sunday pushed me again into this sort of slow meditation on the creed, to think more deeply about what I was affirming, word by word. In particular, I heard anew the statement of the paschal mystery that anchors my faith:  that Jesus suffered, died and rose again “in accordance with the Scriptures.”

The Apostles Creed in English on the interior wall.

The word we use in the English translation has changed with the new Roman Missal, from fulfillment to accordance. It struck me that the cor in accordance derives from the Latin word for heart, cor. Jesus’ coming, his death and his resurrection, was more than prophecy fulfilled, as the Gospel for the day proclaimed. Jesus’ sacrifice was of “one heart” with the Scriptures.

In retrospect, it’s obvious even without the new translation, how could Jesus, the Word made flesh, be anything other than of one heart with the Word we hear in the Scripture? But in this Holy Year of Mercy, it reminded me again that our faith principally resides not in a list of historical happenings, nor in a big book of rules, but the core of our faith lies in the heart. In the love of God, who as St. John reminds us, so loved the world that he gave to us his only Son. And so, with one accord, we pray and we believe.

Advent 4: A midwife for the holy

Leonardo da Vinci's study for St. Anne,
Mary, Jesus and John the Baptist

A homily on Sunday got me thinking about the voices we don't hear in the Scriptures, and Mary's mother, traditionally Anna, is certainly one of those voices of strength.  What does it take to let your daughter, on the verge of delivering her first child at a time when one in a hundred women died in childbirth, and one in ten babies did not live out their first month?   Mary's strength is perhaps a gift from her mother...

And I'm still thinking about St. John of The Cross, darkness and light, in particular the opening liens to Daniel Ladinsky’s luminous poem If You Want:

If

you want,

the Virgin will come walking down the road

pregnant with the holy,

and say…

“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,

My time is so close.”

Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime

intimacy, the divine, the Christ

taking birth

forever,

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us

is the midwife of God, each of us.

A version of this reflection appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 22 December 2015.

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town. And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, a to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. Luke 2:1-5

“What time do you need to leave?” I asked my oldest son, Mike.  He came home last night, and leaves this afternoon for Tennessee to spend Christmas with his girlfriend and her family. At 2:35, they tucked their bags in the back of my car and I drove them to Philadelphia’s airport, wishing them safe travels, watching as they walked off.

As I drove home, I thought of Anna, the mother of Mary.  What had she thought as she watched her very pregnant daughter walk out of Nazareth, headed for Bethlehem — 80 miles and a mountain pass away?  What advice did she give Mary, what might she have tucked in her bags, “just in case”?

There would be no phone call for her, letting her know they were safe in Bethlehem. No email with a photograph of her newborn grandson.  She must simply trust that all in the end would be well, letting go of her daughter and the hope she bears within her.  Parting with what she treasures, to let God’s will be done.

My reflections pushed me to pull German theologian Johannes Baptist Metz’s small book, Poverty of Spirit, off the shelf to read in these last days of Advent.  This poverty, he suggests, is where “the meeting point of heaven and earth…the point where infinite mystery meets concrete existence.”  It is how we encounter God, with empty hands.

Jesus’ life was characterized by the poverty of the commonplace from the moment of his birth — laid in an makeshift, last minute bed in a stable —  to the moment he was laid in a borrowed tomb. Living out in his daily life a radical dependence on God, a grace of openness to which we all have access in our own lives.

I suspect that Mary learned this fundamental way of being from her mother, Anna, who waved her off on her journey, committing herself again to the uncertainties, depending on the grace of God to watch over her daughter.  I look to Anna in these last days of waiting to learn again how to let go of what has been entrusted to me when the time comes. In ways that are concrete, in the moments that are commonplace, in the places that are hidden, where I might not otherwise look.

Advent is helping my heart to empty out, not simply in preparation for this great feast celebrating a long-awaited birth, but emptied to allow me to become a midwife to the Christ.  That I might let him enter my soul, and willingly offer him to the world through my hands. Emptied that I might become a simple cradle for the holy one of Israel.

Column: The marriage of lament and joy

Santa Croce, Florence

The dark notes sound loudly these days, I hear them in the muzzy voice of my father on the phone, in the tired footfalls of refugees, in the exhausted sighs of those delivering packages to my front porch, and in the thrum of hate pouring forth from presidential candidates.  Yet out of the depths, comes the Beloved.

The photo is of the main altar in Santa Croce, where Galileo and Michaelangelo are buried, and there is a memorial to Enrico Fermi as well.  But you almost miss the cross amid all the beauty of the stained glass and frescoes.

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 15 December 2015.

Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete: modestia vestra nota sit omnibus hominibus: Dominus prope est. Nihil solliciti sitis: sed in omni oratione petitiones vestrae innotescant apud Deum.

Rejoice in the Lord always:  again I say, rejoice!  Let your kindness be known to all, for the Lord is near.  Do not be anxious, but in all things, with prayer make your petitions known to God. — Entrance antiphon for the 3rd Sunday in Advent

Rejoice!  Shout for joy!  The readings on Sunday rang with strength and shimmered with joy.  In case we missed it, St. Paul, repeats it. Rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say, rejoice! I hear fragments of this call to joy everywhere in these last two weeks before Christmas — from the glittery displays in the stores to the houses draped in lights to the relentless cheerful tunes playing on the radio. Rejoice!

But there is a counter-melody threaded through the trumpets and festive choral anthems.  Anxiety creeps in. When is the last date I can ship something to California to get there for Christmas?  Have I submitted all the letters of recommendation students need?  My father has fallen and is in the ICU.  Will I need to go to fly to the West Coast? A friend is very ill; another’s family is fractured by the loss of a young father.  How can I rejoice when the darkness seems to encroach from all sides?

I wonder if amid all the ringing bells and bright lights we miss the ways in which the Christmas story is one of dislocation, of Mary and Joseph — and surely many other refugees — on the road to fulfill the edict of an occupying force, of God infinite and immortal moving into flesh and time.  How it is a story, too, of abandonment, of a people who wonder if they have been forsaken by their God, who promised them so much in Isaiah, of Mary, who bore God within her very self, left spent and emptied of God in a stable.

Monday was the feast of St. John of the Cross, the 16th century Carmelite monk and mystic who wrote “The Dark Night of the Soul,” a poetic and spiritual exploration of the difficulties that can afflict us on our journey to God.  This commemoration always falls in Advent, pinned as it is to the day St. John died, December 14, 1591. Each time we celebrate it, I am struck by the contrast between the scouring darkness St. John experienced and the warmth and light so strongly associated with God’s coming among us at Advent — with its images of kindly innkeepers, shepherds and sparkling angelic hosts.

Yet it is just this juxtaposition of light and darkness, where lament plays a counterpoint to joy, that St. John of the Cross embraces:  “O living flame of love, how tenderly you wound my soul in her profoundest core!” In his poem “Del nacimiento” (Of the birth), he writes of “God-in-the-manger” weeping, not for us, but in his own distress and confusion, even as humankind rejoices to be swept into the mystery of the Trinity through this incarnation.

The full chord that Christmas sounds for us may have as its top note bright joy, but the deeper, dark notes, are what shake us to our core.  For in the end we are sustained, not by the songs of angels, but by the Body of Christ, given up for us.

---

Read St. John of the Cross' Del nacimiento (in Spanish and English).

H/T to my friend Cindy for this short piece on T.S. Eliot and John of the Cross, which quotes a bit of Eliot's East Coker.

Advent 3: On the birth

Ya que era llegado el tiempo en que de nacer había, así como desposado de su tálamo salía, abrazado con su esposa, que en sus brazos la traía, al cual la graciosa Madre en su pesebre ponía, entre unos animales que a la sazón allí había, los hombres decían cantares, los ángeles melodía, festejando el desposorio que entre tales dos había, pero Dios en el pesebre allí lloraba y gemía, que eran joyas que la esposa al desposorio traía, y la Madre estaba en pasmo de que tal trueque veía: el llanto del hombre en Dios, y en el hombre la alegría, lo cual del uno y del otro tan ajeno ser solía. —St. John of the Cross

In the fullness of time he was born, striding like a bridegroom from his chamber, to embrace his spouse, to hold her in his arms, The child, born of Mary, laid in a manger, among the animals guesting at this wedding. We came singing, the angels exultantly caroling, The Beloved joined to the beloved in one flesh. But God-in-the-manger wept and moaned, His tears, jewels, brought to this marriage bed His mother wonders at the price paid: God laments as man, while man rejoices in God, each tastes what was once the other's sole domain.

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Translation is loose, rough and mine.

Advent 3: John of the Cross

Santa Maria sopre Minerva in

Rome.  St. Catherine of Siena

is entombed here

I'm always momentarily taken aback when the feast of St. John of the Cross appears in Advent — as it does almost every year (well, not last year, and not in 2025, or any other year the 14th of December falls on a Sunday).  The feast of St. Lucy which precedes it by a day, with its candle adorned maidens, seems like a better fit for this season of light and birth than John of the Cross, consigned to a dungeon by his Carmelite confreres, mired in a darkness both literal and spiritual.

I pulled out a copy of his poetry, written during those months of confinement, this afternoon to read.   I had forgotten about his triad of poems on the incarnation (maybe because most scholars diss them as "perfunctory") but today found them again, tucked into the appendix.

The last poem of the cycle plays with the tension that I always feel around the incarnation, or at least the current celebration of it, between the sweet, warm scene at the manger and the cold reality of it all.  Mary, stripped of God's presence within her.  Her son, the Word, left wordless.  Maybe John of the Cross' dark nights are not so far off the mark.

Pero Dios en el pesebre
allí lloraba y gemía,
que eran joyas que la esposa
al desposorio traía. 

Y la Madre estaba en pasmo
de que tal trueque veía:
el llanto del hombre en Dios,
y en el hombre la alegría,
lo cual del uno y del otro
tan ajeno ser solía.

But God-in-the-manger
wept and moaned
His tears, jewels
brought to this marriage-bed. 

His mother wonders
at the exchange:
God laments as man
while man rejoices in God;
Each tastes what
was once the other's
sole domain.

Read the whole thing here.

Column: Deus absconditus. Deus revelatus.

I'm taking a few days of quiet retreat to end my sabbatical leave, staying in the guest house at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota.

The waning light, the monks processing in for Sunday Mass, their chant heard long before I can see their outlines in the cloister, long before they flow into the church on a river of incense have made this a time of enclosure.  Even outside, the horizon seems very close, and everywhere, God, a deeply hidden mystery.

A version of this column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 7 December 2015.

Truly with you God is hidden, the God of Israel, the savior! Isaiah 45:15

The door was not easy to find. Look next to the elevator, says the note in my room. There, in 24-point font, discreetly grey against the pale wall, it says “Abbey Church.” I push open the door and peer into the warm darkness. The lights flick on and I enter. Huge gleaming white pipes are braced to the walls — “Low Press Steam” and “Ret Cold Water” — while bundles of wires snake across a tray set on the floor, trailing off into the darkness, connecting the guesthouse to the abbey proper like an umbilical cord.

I follow the tunnel, turning left, then right, trusting that the lights will turn on when I need them, and surprised at the end of a long series of doors to find myself on a staircase that leads without barrier into the back of the church.

I rummage through the binders on the shelf in the choir stall, hunting for the setting of the canticle listed on the board. A monk appears over my shoulder, and quickly flips to the correct page — 10, as it turns out, is in the back, hidden behind a tab labeled “Canticles.” “Do you need a marker?” he asks. I slide a crumpled note from my pocket to hold the spot. Grinning, he taps the books I’ve arranged, “one, two, three” and returns to his spot behind me.

Incense rises in front of the altar, iridescent white against the night-dark walls, winding around the cross suspended in midair over the altar, shrouding the monks arrayed across from me.

The tabernacle in the chapel is close enough to touch, the flame burning in the doorway reveals its contents, while the matte planes of its surface obscure the infinite Beauty confined within. Deus absconditus. Deus revelatus. God hidden and God revealed.

It’s Advent, where we remember God hidden, shrouded within Mary all those months, and yearn for God revealed, for the child given to us two millennia ago, for the Christ risen in glory we await now. A living God, breathing in and out, at each moment both emptying himself and filling all the universe. God hidden. God revealed.

I walk through these dim Advent days, yearning to know that God is here among us, yielding to God unseen. I search for the subtle signs that He is just around the next corner, concealed in my day-to-day encounters. God hidden. God revealed. Emmanuel, God with us.

Advent 2: Making raids on the ineffable

I crept through a tunnel on the bare edge of dawn today, intent on raiding the ineffable.

The pines outside my window, ghostly pale in the lights from the patio above, stood guard as I pulled on black turtleneck and dark pants and slipped out my door, what I need to jemmy open the gate on the other side in my hands.  I came to the surface in a dark corner,  and keeping to the shadows made my way to the pool of light at the front.

I bowed to the tabernacle and took a place in the choir section reserved for guests, put my reading glasses on and opened wide the gates into the mysteries, finding the psalms and the canticle and the hymn.  Habits rustled and seats eased into place.

We rose and fell, breathing our way into the day.  Lord, open our lips, we said, and proceeded to raid the psalms, foraging ruthlessly for the day's food.  We followed St. Ambrose, as he ransacked Luke's account of Mary's visit to Elizabeth, shaking it until each word gave up its worth.

One by one we slid across the altar and out the door, hands empty, but not empty-handed.

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The image of raiding the unspeakable comes from this op-ed by Gile Fraser in The Guardian.

Drinking light: induced mystical experiences

I signed the release, put my things in a drawer next to the sliding bed and lay back. The attendant put the emergency button in my hand, handed me a pair of headphones and with a final word of advice, "You might want to try it with and without your glasses." she slid me into a sphere of deep blue light.  Then I had an experience, of an texture some people might call mystical. [Spoiler alert:  I'm not going to discuss any previous mystical experiences of my own or lack thereof.]

It's hard to know where viewing Turrell's installation Light Reignfall begins and ends [to see a photo of the bare installation at LACMA go here, or a similar installation in action here].  Does it start when you first see the installation?  when you speak to the attendant (whose uniform is part of the installation)? when you are slid into the interior compartment?  What about watching someone else be slid in or out?  Or being interrogated by some one after you have emerged?

The last time I taught my class on the contemplative tradition in the West we had several spirited conversations about whether an experience that appeared to be mystical, but was induced (through the use of drugs) was a true mystical experience.  Can you induce a mystical experience?  Much of the tradition in the west would say an unequivocal "no" (see this paper on fMRI and mystical experiences in Carmelite nuns where a subject tells the neuroscientists "God cannot be summoned at will.")  We read a Johns Hopkins study on the experiences of hallucinogen-naive contemplative practitioners who took the hallucinogen psilocybin.  Is there a neurological difference between undertaking a contemplative practice that might make you more prone to mystical experiences and setting up the same state using a chemical?  Or light?

We certainly didn't resolve anything over the course of the week we spent on the material, but the discussions were among the best I've had in all my years of teaching.  I'm working on the syllabus for the course again this fall, and this time have added some reading about Turrell's work with light and perception, particularly in these cells, along with some readings from Zig Zag Zen [edited by Allan Hunt Badiner].

So back to that sphere of light.  I had a choice of the "hard" versus the "soft" experience and elected the latter (partly because I had read that of course, everyone chose "hard").  I agree with this reviewer that the light within the cell feels almost viscous at times (I suspect that a generous admixture of UV light with a color produces this effect).  The first time the lights blacked out entirely, I momentarily wondered if I had lost my sight.  The auditory portion of the experience, fed in through headphones, added to the sense of detachment.  You could neither see nor hear the outside world, it was as if it had simply melted away and I was suspended in a bath of pure light.

My experience of the cell was entirely fortuitous —tickets to the cell are sold out for the remainder of the exhibition, but there happened to be a cancellation on the afternoon I was visiting and I was able to secure a ticket (thanks to the helpful staff woman at the will call).  I'm grateful, too, to the art professor from San Francisco, who pounced me just after I emerged.  I sat there putting on my shoes while she tried to get me to articulate what I had experienced.  I doubt I would have retained as much detail if she had not.

---

Photo is of spiral galaxy NGC 406, NASA.

Ignatius of Loyola 4: Hearing voices

On the 4th of July some years ago I was on retreat at Eastern Point, which is near Gloucester's harbor.  Sitting out on the rocks to pray, I kept hearing voices, names and tantalizing bits of sentences floating on the breeze.  To say I was distracted was an understatement.

The silence at Eastern Point is pretty profound and the waves pounding against the rocks tended to muffle any noise from the surrounding neighborhood, so voices caught my attention.  But I couldn't figure out where they were coming from, though they sounded nearby and vaguely mechanical.

I shared the mystery with my director, she hadn't heard them, but she hadn't been out of the house yet that day.  (To be clear, I was never in doubt that there was a ordinary explanation for the voices!) Out for my walk, the voices were louder, but not quite clear enough to catch more than a word or two.  As my walk took me across the small land bridge toward the harbor, I finally achieved clarity.  There was a Navy ship in the harbor, as part of the celebration of the 4th...and what I was hearing was its PA system.

At La Storta, as he headed to Rome with his companions in 1537, Ignatius heard voices, but unlike me, he heard God sending him to Rome, to be part of Jesus' company. I would guess that mystic is not the first association many people have with St. Ignatius, but Ignatius' early mystical experiences (and experiences that posed as such) are part of the ground from which Ignatius' rules for discernment of spirits grew.  (Read about the rules here and a longer but fascinating piece about Ignatius the mystic here.)

Webbed identities

I was chatting with someone at some event this last week (Crash graduated from high school yesterday, so there have been many events in the last week, where I have spoken with more someones than I can sort out — so if this was you, please accept my apologies now!) who discovered that I wrote about both science and spirituality, and assumed that I commingled the two. "Only rarely do I mix my genres," I assured her (?). From the expression on his (?) face, I'm not sure whether the thought that I wrote about them together or apart made my conversational partner's brain hurt more.

To be honest, I'm not sure which makes my brain hurt more. For various reasons, I've recently needed to create both a resume and a website for my writing — all of it. Creating a map of my writing left me wondering what a map of my brain would look like....could you color code it by scientist versus contemplative?

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Illustration is from Wikimedia.

For an interesting peek by scientists into the minds of Carmelite mystics, read this paper. The thought that I could be both investigator and investigated in a study like this absolutely makes my brain hurt.

The website for my writing is here - I'm offering chocolate for any typos or broken links!

Column: Prayer and Patience

I learned about writing reminders on the mirror from Crash - who started writing his list there when he started high school. On the long retreat, I wrote my schedule on the mirror in my room - principally the graces sought in the exercises of the day.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard and Times on 17 September 2009.

Pray without ceasing. — 1 Th. 5:17


The reminder taped to the kitchen door read “cake.” My lunch? Hung on the doorknob. The phone rings. Can Victor bring Chris his trombone at the bus stop? He forgot. Mike plops onto a chair in my study, “Did you remember to put money in my lunch account?”

With four of us starting back to classes at three different schools, lists and notes are tacked everywhere from the back door to the bathroom mirror. Until it all becomes routine, I need the prompts. Case in point, the bright yellow sticky note on my binder notwithstanding, I arrived at my class today to find I left the problem set for my class behind in my office.

Maybe the unfamiliarity with the routine life of a Christian community is what impelled Paul, Silvanus and Timothy to end their letter to the newly formed Church at Thessalonica with their version of a to-do list for the community: Be at peace. Care for the weak. Be patient with everyone. Pray constantly.

Maybe I should tape this list to the door? Paul’s rapid-fire words of advice — a style scripture scholar Calvin Roetzel colorfully dubbed “shotgun parenesis” — seem to fit my life these days. Short and to the point, I don’t need the details right now, just the reminder. For all things give thanks to God. Hold onto what is good.

As the pace of life picks up, I need to cultivate patience, peace and unceasing prayer more than ever. But what will it take for me to remember to pray, not off and on throughout my day but as Paul advises, incessantly? Somehow I think sticky notes will not do the trick.

Maybe it would just take a small reminder? Benedictine monk Bede Thomas Mudge says of his experience of wearing his prayer beads, “The feeling of having the beads on my wrist is an almost constant reminder to prayer.” Brother Bede also writes about what happens when he forgets to put his beads on one day, realizing that their absence prodded him to pray just as effectively.

Or maybe what I need is the absence of a reminder in a life overflowing with them? Perhaps when I feel most frazzled, when I long the most for patience and peace, conceivably that longing itself, like Brother Bede’s absentee beads, is my prompt for prayer.

The anonymous 14th century English author of a classic guide to the mystical life, “The Cloud of Unknowing,” had this advice about prayer: “Let your longing relentlessly beat upon the cloud of unknowing that lies between you and your God.” So it could be that my relentless longing for peace is an incessant prayer to God. But to be sure, I scribbled a note on my mirror. Prayer, patience, peace.

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Blessed be your name, O Lord, you are the fount and source of every blessing, and you look with delight upon the devout practices of the faithful. Draw near, we pray, to these your servants and, as they use this symbol of their faith and devotion, grant that they may also strive to be transformed into the likeness of Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you for ever and ever. Amen. — Prayer of Blessing of religious articles