The women gather

I ran across an Easter reflection from 5 years about an Easter morning spent cleaning the kitchen…

“As I scrubbed last night’s sheet pans, I wondered if this really was how I should be celebrating Easter, clad in a well-worn apron and wielding a soapy sponge. Or perhaps this is precisely how Jesus imagined the celebration as he knelt on the floor, a towel around his waist, washing feet. Women, up early to do the work of feeding the hungry and tending to the needs of the living and the dead. Women with the courage to stay in the face of unspeakable pain, and a scandalous death. Women with the courage to profess what they had seen, in the face of mockery and derision.”

...which kicked off a search for a song I had heard from Sweet Honey in the Rock: The Women Gather. I could hear the spare repeating line in my head. “The women gather…” 

And the women still gather. To stand witness to the unspeakable. To accompany the undesirable. To bury the dead. To shelter their children with their bodies. To beg for peace.

We still gather at Easter — the women, the men, the children — even as we are embroiled in this “war of choice.” Though it not the choice most of us would have made. Our leaders demand we pray daily, “on bended knee” — in the name of Christ —  for military victory. I cannot. I will not. 

Yet. I will pray. For the courage to stand witness to the Gospel, that promises the utlimate victory, over sin and death, For an enduring and earned peace. Not one bought with blood and terror, awash in tears.

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The rest of the reflection is here. Listen to The Women Gather here.

Stripped of words: a homily for Good Friday

 

I am preaching at Morning Prayer at the parish today, a reflection which had its seed in an interview with Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe by Fr. Jim Martin SJ (you can hear the relevant piece here) and in a reflection in the forthcoming book for next Lent.

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…So shall he startle many nations,
because of him, kings shall stand speechless;
For those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.…Isaiah 52:15

As we move through the Triduum, we also grow silent in the face of the enormity of what has been accomplished by God. Later today we will sit with St. John’s account of the passion, invited as Isaiah implores us to watch and to ponder. When I hear this version of the passion I am often struck by how Jesus, too, gradually grows silent. Gone is the sharp give and take with the religious authorities. He offers virtually no defense to Pilate. There are no words to reassure the repentent thief crucified next to him about paradise.

Once Jesus wept as he fervently prayed for relief. Now, we no longer hear him lifting up long, eloquent prayers to the Father. In John’s account of the crucifixion, we do not hear him pray at all. He does not cry out to God asking why he was abandoned. He does not commend himself to the Father’s care.

In the end, there is only his battered body, wracked with thirst, hanging on a cross. 

Some time ago I heard Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe reflect on what it had been like to try to pray during his recovery from a grueling surgery. “When I tried to pray the Our Father,” recounted Cardinal Radcliffe, “I couldn’t get past the two words…Our Father…I was just a body lying in bed.”  Still, he thirsted, not just for the water he was not allowed to have, but for God.

Here is this man who preached to the synod — who preached to the pope about hope and prayer —  confessing he could not pray. How many of us have found ourselves in these straits? Caught up in the maelstrom of illness — our own or those of people we love —  or overcome by fear or despair in the face of events that upend our lives, or shake the world, and unable to find the strength to reach for God. When even the prayers we know by heart slip away from us.

I am reminded of a snippet of poetry from Ranier Rilke’s Book of Hours, “like sand slipping through fingers,  all my cells are open, and all so thirsty. I ache…in a hundred places, but mostly in the middle of my heart.” Thirsting for God in every cell, aching for mercy in the depths of our hearts, our physical body becomes the prayer. Like the disciples who ask Jesus to teach them the words to use in prayer, we, too, are looking to Jesus to teach us how to pray in our most desperate moments, when the anguish of our wounds  is more than we can bear, and we cannot find even those words, “Our Father”.

Jesus’ silence on the cross speaks volumes. His arms wordlessly stretched out between heaven and earth, his whole body is a prayer offered to the Father for our salvation. It is a potent reminder that when our strength fails us, we can still pray as Jesus taught us from the cross, arms stretched out in longing, every cell thirsting. That when injustice or illness or infirmity or age strips us of our words, our very body becomes a prayer.

Jarred silence

[image or embed]

— TinyTalesDaily (@tinytalesdaily.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 9:01 AM

I am, you anxious one.
Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch? 
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings. 
Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness?
...And with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time.”
— Rainer Marie Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I used to dive into the silence once a month at the Jesuit Center near Wernersville and perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, would offer to bring back a bit of the silence for friends. I have been thinking about how to package up silence recently. Or rather, contemplating how to open a space for stillness and silence for those who are seeking it. What would it look like to set up that sort of portal in the parish church for an hour? What could you give people to take home...if not in a jar, but a gift of a way of drawing that cloak of silence and stillness around themselves if only for a few minutes?

It is so tempting to try to push lots of advice in, but I keep returning to Abba Moses advice, "Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." Or to riff on Mary Vorse's advice to young writers (including  Sinclair Lewis) “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”: to sit in prayer is simply to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. I don't want to constrain prayer.

As to the jars in the TinyTale, I am with Marty Laird OSA (Into the Silent Land) on the notion that contemplation will somehow erase the woundedness we experience. Opening that jar of permanent silence isn't necessarily going to hush the screams in the other jar she bought. Prayer is not snorting lines of euphoric peace, warns Fr. Laird.

Anna in the temple

 

I sat in the last pew in my parish church. Praying, enfolded in the syrupy warmth of a late summer day, alone except for God, and the spirits of all those who’d prayed here before me.  The light of the prescence lamp danced in the dimness of the chancel, ivory walls smudged with color from the stained glass windows. Cicadas buzzed, my phone did not. 

Prayer in this space seemed to be as simple as breathing.  Like the prophetess Anna, who Luke tells us never left the Temple, I longed to stay here, caught up in beauty, in prayer — caught up in God — for the rest of my days. Instead I went home and made dinner.

As I chopped vegetables I thought of a scene in the film Into Great Silence, which chronicles a year in a centuries-old Carthusian monastery. A monk is chopping celery in silence, awash in light from the kitchen window. The thunk of his knife on the well-worn cutting board echoed the rhythm of the psalms the monks chanted day in and day out, making a prayer of the ordinary.

I worry that I want prayer to be an extraordinary experience. That I want to keep prayer reserved to sacred spaces, to come to prayer completely tidy, my metaphorical counters cleared and the dishes washed, not up to my elbows in suds facing a sinkful of pots.  I want to be eloquent, I want to be silent and composed before the Creator of all things, I want to be wholly present. I want to be holy.

But I suspect God is unbothered by the awkwardness of my prayers or the unpretentious surroundings in which I make them. He is as delighted to join me in the kitchen amid the potato peelings and unwashed pots as he is to find me quiet and still before the tabernacle. As Teresa of Avila wryly told her Carmelite sisters, “entre los pucheros anda el Señor”. If you are in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots and pans.  Whether in the temple like Anna or in the kitchen like St. Teresa, God besieges us.

As extraordinary as it is to be drawn into a relationship with the immanent and transcendent Triune God, prayer is meant to be an ordinary part of our lives. Like the making of dinner and doing the dishes, it is what sustains us. In his short book, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer, theologian Karl Rahner, SJ advised, “Pray every day and pray the everyday.” 

Like the desert fathers who wove baskets to the simple rhythm of the Jesus prayer — Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me — ask for mercy as you peel the potatoes, place yourself in the presence of God as you fold the laundry. Say grace before your midmorning cup of coffee, trace the sign of the cross on your child’s forehead before they go to sleep. Bless the ordinary moments, every day. 

And perhaps then we can be like Anna,  praying night and day in the temple of this world, knowing every space holy, every moment sacred.

— February 2021 Opening essay in Give Us This Day

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Image is of interior of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the ceiling of the nave lit by sunlight through stained glass

The Spirit hovers over the chaos...and Tim Horton's

Actual photo of Holy Spirit on the streets of
Rome checking on a very tired and hot
pilgrim walking to the Holy Door in the 
Jubilee Year of mercy. 
 

"This morning, a few of the monks had their chapel service at St. Timothy of Horton's, a coffee shop down the road. After sharing prayers and singing in four-part harmony, "The Lone Wild Bird" to a shocked crowd of retirees and truckers, they prayed for the tired and weary souls going through the Drive-Thru. The Spirit doesn't just hover over altars; She hovers over coffee tables, Tim Bits, and parking lots, too." — from a post by The Unvirtuous Abbey

In the midst of the end of the semester chaos, I wouldn't mind finding a group of monks (or anyone for that matter) at Lancaster and Pennswood praying for the tired and weary souls trying to find a parking space at Acme and grab the half gallon of milk they forgot and get home in time to make dinner before the kid's concert tonight. What would happen if the Augustinians moved Morning Prayer outside occasionally, setting up the choir on either side of the street instead of on either side of the chapel, pitching the psalms back and forth over the traffic?

I am also certain that the Holy Spirit hovers over chaos by preference, breathing on it and trying to coax it into shape. This post reminds me of a line in Wendell Berry's How to be a poet: "There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." Or maybe of the story of the desert father Abba Bessarion walking by the sea with his thirsty young companion: "God is here, God is everywhere."

I sometimes think we pull too many punches when we pray. I confess I am guilty of writing glossy but vague prayers. I pray for "the leaders of nations, that they might govern with justice and mercy" when I really mean, "Dear God, please send an angelic horde down to remind the leaders of my government that making children go hungry is a grievous sin; that mercy is due to immigrants as much as to citizens, for we are all children of God, images of the Divine; and that we should be distributing plowshares, not weapons of mass destruction. Amen?" I realize God knows far better than I just what is going on, so in that sense it doesn't matter, but the point of these intercessory prayers isn't to get onto God's to-do list. The point is, as Tomáš Halík notes in his book, Touch the Wounds, to open a dialog with God to discover just what we can (and cannot) do to address the problem.

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The Unvirtuous Abbey has been manifesting hope and humor on social media for many years. As a sometimes writing of intercessions for my parish, I appreciate their incisive and slightly sarcastic prayers —"For those who claim to know “what God intends” when most of us can’t figure out what our cat wants, we pray. " (Unvirtuous Abbey (@UnvirtuousAbbey) October 24, 2012).

Want to know more about the Unvirtuous Abbey? Here are a couple of interviews from years past. If you are still on social media (and I completely understand if you are not), you can catch them on Bluesky and Facebook.

Jesuit Post interview

Practical Catholic interview

What looks like prayer

I was listening to Rachel Martin's podcast, Wild Card, last night. Her interviewee was Harrison Ford (listen here). The basic premise of the show is that guests pick a card with a question on it. They can skip one, and turn one back on the interviewer. Ford flipped this question back at Martin: "Is there anything in your life that feels like praying?"

What does prayer feel like to me?

Prayer is redolent of incense, of a milk-drunk baby, of a piece of toast caught just in time.  It can taste bitter and hot and bracing all at once, like that first cup of tea on a cold morning. It feels like cold salt water on my feet after a long walk, like my husband's hand reaching out in the night to brush away my bad dream.

What does prayer feel like to you?

Prayers for Pope Francis

 

Pope Francis is very ill and he has asked for our prayers. I am praying for him, for his consolation and his recovery, but I’ve also wondered if we also should be praying for him, that is, for all those he prays for. To take on some of the burden of caring for those on the margins so that he might rest.

So I pray…

For Pope Francis
For all those struggling to breathe
For those who cannot afford medical care
For those laboring in brutal conditions
For those who are starving
For those without access to clean water
For those exhausted by caregiving
For those who have lost their jobs
For those fleeing war and economic disruption
For those denied their human dignity
For those...

Let us pray...

Keep us attentive to the needs of all

There are times when the second half of the Eucharistic Prayer just pours over my head, cascading off the altar, flowing down the aisle. Sometimes it murmurs in my ear, soothing, calming, a burbling fountain in a hidden courtyard. Other times, I regret to say, the grocery list starts jittering. Remember to get eggs and lettuce at Acme after Mass.

Then there are the moments when I really hear the words, battering at my defenses, badgering me long after we have been sent out the door. Ite, missa est? Not so much. We may have been dismissed, but I can’t so easily dismiss what I have heard.

Last weekend, the pastor used one of the Eucharistic Prayers for “various needs” (EP VN 3). Given the current political situation, and the insistence of some that Christian faith does not demand that we have a care for those beyond our immediate circle, those we love and those who love us back, these words struck home:

"Grant that all the faithful of the Church, looking into the signs of the times by the light of faith, may constantly devote themselves to the service of the Gospel.

Keep us attentive to the needs of all that, sharing their grief and pain, their joy and hope, we may faithfully bring them the good news of salvation and go forward with them along the way of your Kingdom."

It’s a potent examination of conscience. Made with the body of Christ right there on the altar in front of us. Can I — can we — constantly devote ourselves to the service of the Gospel in these times? Where are the signs pointing out the needs of the world? What do they say? How are we being attentive to the needs of all? Without exception. Do we think about their grief and pain? Do we share their hopes? Are we willing to walk with them?

I used this snippet of the prayer as the closing prayer for a celebration of the Liturgy of the Word last week, and as we creep toward Lent, I am thinking that I should let this prayer shape my Lenten discipline.

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Aside: I wondered how VP Vance reconciles the Gospel today, where Luke recounts Jesus’ command to love your enemies, to give more than the bare minimum to those in need with his version of  the “ordo amoris” a preferential option for those you love. Then I thought of the part of the Gospel which says I will be judged by the measure I judge others by…

Slot machine prayers

Representative Josh Breen walked out of last Tuesday’s prayer service, offended he said, by Bishop Budde’s hijacking of a religious service for political purposes. I came to pray, he said. For many things. For the newly inaugurated president, for his family, for success of the new administration. And for the nation — though apparently not for all the nation. Certainly not for the immigrants, or the LGBTQ+ community, or others frightened by the cruel and vindictive rhetoric that flows from the Trumpian right wing.

It struck me that Breen has a very limited idea of what constitutes prayer. That prayer is a solely a divine request line, directed at letting the Almighty know what we want. As if the omniscient God doesn’t know. Or perhaps, since not every prayer gets the answer we want — something Rep. Breen is surely aware of — a holy slot machine. Pull the handle and if you are lucky or deserving(?), three angels pop up and you get what you asked for.

Who does prayer change? Us or God? What do we hope to accomplish in prayer?

I was further stunned to hear Breen flat out accuse the Bishop of lying when she said Christianity asks that the stranger be welcomed. The Bible only means welcome the stranger who conforms to the norms of the society, says Breen. I went back and read (in Greek) Matthew 25:35: “ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in” ξένος or xenos, is rendered as “stranger” here. None of this carries any hint of limitations. The call is not to feed or offer water to or welcome only the deserving. Breen may not agree with my exegesis (or the Bishop’s) but to call it a half-truth, or an untruth? Or is it that it is an uncomfortable question that Breen prefers not to entertain? 

Breen says we might be better off if more people got up and walked out of churches in righteous anger. I agree. I have prayed and listened to the Gospel and a righteous anger is upon me. I will stand up and walk out of church, and seek to feed the hungry and see that the thirsty have something to drink and that the stranger is made to feel welcome. Without limitation. As was done for me on Calvary.

May God have mercy on us all, that is what I am praying for.

Portals

I have been thinking about Psalm 88 lately. The psalm is unusual in that no matter how dark other psalms get they tend to finish with images of redemption, glory, rescue. But not the 88th. It shows up every Friday at Compline (Night Prayer) in the Liturgy of the Hours. One might think it is not terribly consoling to pray such a desolate psalm just before bed. But to me it feels like a reality check, a reminder that I do not always find resolution at the end of each and every prayer, or closure at the end of every day. There are times in my life where I might despair of rescue, be unsure where God is in the darkness or in the waves that engulf me. Times when I must perforce sit with uncertainty.

I appreciated Sister Joan Chittester's wisdom in a reflection in Give Us This Day last fall. "Prayer is not an analgesic designed to protect us from life. It is, more times than not, part of the problem of life. One day we don't feel like praying. The next we pray but it doesn't make any difference… We try to pray but were far too distracted than we are soothed by the quiet or comforted by the sense of the presence of God." In his book, Into the Silent Land, Martin Laird, OSA, points out that when we go in search of peace in prayer, we often find instead what feels like chaos. But, he says, it is precisely in this meeting of confusion and peace that healing happens. Not by erasing our pain, but by offering a path for grace. 

So what are we to do? In her lovely book An Altar in the World, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor reflects on keeping an altar: “Since I am a failure at prayer, I keep an altar in my room. It is really an old vanity made of rosewood, with fancy scrollwork around the oval mirror and a small stack of drawers on either side. At worst I think of it as a piece of furniture that I offer God as a substitute for my prayers. At best, I think of it as a portal that stays open whether I go through it or not."

This makes me wonder about the altars that we keep, metaphorical and literal, that leave the door open to God, even when we think we are failures at prayer. Like a doorstop, keeping us from being locked out when our hands are too full to open the door, or when we need a breeze on a hot day. For me that might be Night Prayer at the end of the day, it might be the literal prayer space that I keep in my study upstairs, or the prayer rope I wear on my wrist. Sometimes it is my parish church, bathed in warm light. What portals do you keep propped open in your life?

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This got its start as part of a homily I preached for the memorial of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whose last days were marked by spiritual darkness. The photo is of St. Thérèse on my home altar, along with a small first class relic of St. Thérèse. And of course, there are roses.

Praying with a cardinal

 …and a squirrel, a chipmunk, and various bugs. The weather has been just perfect these last few days to sit outside to pray and work. I’ve written a talk for an upcoming conference on Complexity, Simplicity and Emergence (the Fourth Annual Thomistic Philosophy and Natural Science Symposium in DC). I’ve read papers and a book and enjoyed some peaceful time in prayer. It’s been amazingly restorative.

Sunday I was interrupted mid-psalm by a quiet chittering. From the cover of the flower bed under the cherry tree that canopies the back patio emerged a squirrel. It scampered up the trunk and then froze, it had seen me. We were eye to eye. And it was terrified. I could see its heart pounding in its chest. I froze, too. We were in a stand off. Finally it decided that retreat was called for and bounded up the tree, across the branches to the pear tree, then danced down the electric wire to vanish into my neighbor’s yard. 

I wonder how often I am startled by God as I dash about, or am I like the squirrel, too intent on my own projects to notice whose garden I’m in? And would I be as terrified as the squirrel if I recognized who I was eye to eye with in prayer?

Here in our midst

Here in our midst, O God of mystery, 

you disclose the secret hidden for countless ages. 

For you we wait; for you we listen. 

Upon hearing your voice 

may we, like Mary, embrace your will 

and become a dwelling fit for your word. 

Grant this through him whose coming is certain, 

whose day draw near: 

your son, our Lord Jesus Christ, 

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 

God forever and ever.

Amen.

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From Opening Prayers - Collects in Contemporary Language 

Can I drink tea while I pray?

There's an old joke — you can tell the age by the reference to tobacco — about a Franciscan and a Jesuit discussing a conversation with their spiritual director. The Franciscan said he'd asked his director if he could smoke while he prayed. Horrified, his director had said absolutely not. "Ah," said the Jesuit, "I asked if I could pray while I smoked. The answer was 'of course!'"

Drinking my tea with morning prayer this morning, I thought about that joke and a comment by my pastor earlier this week that perhaps people have become accustomed to going to mass online and having their coffee along with it, something you simply cannot do in person. I miss joining my community for the Office, but also find joy in praying it bathed in sunshine with a cup of tea in hand. This morning, as I drank, I noticed the way in which the ribbons of steam curled and billowed above the cup. At times it seemed to be breathing, suddenly puffing out a cloud of steam, then pausing, seemingly gathering strength for the next emanation. My prayers rose like incense along with the steam. 

What is normally hidden was suddenly revealed in all its intricacies. The air  is warm and seems still but in truth it is lively and complex. Its unceasing movement is momentarily revealed by the intersection of the condensed water within the vapor and the bright morning light of the sun, low in the winter sky.

Prayer too, has those moments, where what is hidden is suddenly revealed. Where God's breath puffs out, and we are suddenly aware of its presence, rising from the depths, twining upward, wrapping like silk around my hands.

New Book: Prayer

It’s a book! I’m proud to announce that my latest has just launched from Liturgical Press. 

The book is designed to be used as a point of departure for reflection, either individually or in a group. I wrote it as a retreat, the questions for reflection in the margin mirroring my own reflections as I wrestled with the material.

In addition to the biblical wisdom, there is wisdom from the desert mothers and fathers (Amma Syncletica and Abba Poemen both have their moments and saints and blessed from Augustine to Ignatius of Loyola to Dorothy Day. I sought to pull in a diverse set of voices, women and men from many eras.

I have to thank my delightful editor, Amy Ekeh, whose deft surgery on my too-long manuscript managed to keep the structure intact and who was behind me all the way as we sought illustrations that would be in the budget, but still reflect the diversity of the People of God. Also, no blonde, blue-eyed Jesuses. My favorite image has to be the great doors to Sagrada Familia in Barcelona with the Our Father on them in 50 languages. 

I am grateful, too, to the spiritual directors and soul friends who have walked with me, literally and metaphorically, through the years. 

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Autocorrect tried to replace Poemen with  Pokémon. The desert mystics, catch them all?

Stripping the altar

 

That sunlit corner is my prayer space, now with a window onto the to heavens. As part of the Great House Renovation Project of 2021(TM), we got  a new roof. And if we were getting a new roof, this was the moment to put a new window in it. Now it needs painting (as do various other spots in the house). So yesterday I stripped the altar. The vase of blessed palms, the bowl of prayer cards, the candles — all were moved to the far corner of the room. And the relic of St. Therese of Lisieux and the roses I leave for her have translated to a small table in the window dormer.

Now that the altar is bare, I can see that it is dusty, the glass votives need cleaning and perhaps the overflowing bowl could use some pruning. I suspect the same could be said of my prayer life, which might benefit from a close look,  a brisk cleaning and a bit of pruning.

It's almost fall break on the college calendar, and my hope is this weekend to be able to put back the altar and perhaps bless the space anew. And then to spend a bit of time laying my prayer life bare.

Whales, Atoms, Psalms and Star Trek

 

“Never and always touching and touched.” This line from “Amok Time” kept surfacing as I read Peter Wayne Moe’s Touching This Leviathan. (I bet you thought this would be about Star Trek IV.) Leviathan is a composition in the literal sense, deliberately placing psalms next to essays on sentences, side-by-side with reports of 19th century whaling vessels against lines pulled from cetacean necropsies. And of course, Moby Dick. 

There is more here than we can grasp, says Moe. We can pace a whale’s length out on the ground, embodying the knowledge of its vastness. But we can stand underneath their skeletons and not be able to see them for what they are. We get only glimpses of them in their natural habitat; it is the rare human who has seen them alive and entire soaring through the sea. 

It’s like the psalms for me, in my body after all these years, in my body from the very beginning. Andre Chouraqui — “We were born with this book in our very bones." Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer:  "The only way to understand the Psalms is on your knees, the whole congregation praying the words of the Psalms with all its strength." 

I catch glimpses of the Divine as I pray the psalms, but like the whales surfacing, what I see does not convey the whole. Sometimes all I see is a brief mist on the horizon and I wonder if that was a spout and if I should steer in that direction. And every once in a great while, the Transcendent breaches, water sheeting from its sides, shimmering in the light, suspended for a moment against the sky, until all its torrents and waves crash over me. Always and never, touching and touched. 

I suspect atoms for me are a bit like whales. I’ve never picked up a single atom in my hands, handled it like a marble, yet my hands are always touching atoms, on this keyboard, the nitrogen in the air battering at my hands, thousands upon thousands of unnoticed touches every second. I am wrapped in atoms, I am atoms. Always and never, touching and touched.

Faithfully footnoted

 

Summer is closing in once again. Paradoxically, summer for me is the time that feels more closed-in than the bitter cold winter months. As the trees around my house in the neighborhood grow flush with leaves, I can no  longer see more than the house next door peeping past the young oak and magnolia. The setting sun that blinded me in February barely limns the leaves come the end of the day. The bustle of students and colleagues who fill my days at the college is traded for time in my study at home or to sit on the back patio and read and write and think and rest, enfolded within the green canopy that encloses the house and the neighborhood. 

Last summer I was writing a book about prayer, struggling with the notion that I might have anything of value to say about prayer. I'm neither Teresa of Avila nor Abba Joseph of the desert — all flame. But I took heart from a wise friend who suggested that it wasn't so much my competence that mattered here (for who can be competent in God), there could be someone more competent (who is this generation's Teresa?) but my willingness to show up and do the work did matter. 

I showed up and did the work and yesterday got the final proofs. It's a short book, some 10,000 words or so, framed as a meditation on three scriptural passages: Psalm 63, Paul's exhortation to the Thessalonians to pray always and Luke's account of the Our Father.  I tried to pull in a rich set of voices, to make up all I lack in expertise and authority, including Amma Syncletica's tart advice as well as the reflections of modern scholars such as André Chouraqui. The Spiritual Exercises get some space, as does the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which has some beautiful things to say about prayer even if you aren't Catholic.) And I do not fail to quote both St. Augustine as well as St. Ignatius of Loyola. There are pictures —of sere deserts and the incredible Sagrada Familia.

And it's all faithfully footnoted, a map of sorts to a pilgrimage through the practice of Christian prayer. I even provide the correct reference to the quote oft (and incorrectly) attributed to Teilhard de Chardin SJ: "Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God." You can find it in Léon Bloy's letters to his fiancée  (Léon Bloy and Barbara Wald, trans. Letters to His Fiancée, Sheed & Ward, 1937, p 57.)

 

Midwives for the Holy Spirit

...for each of us is the midwife of God...

I find this line from Daniel Ladinsky’s poem If You Wish, which riffs on lines from St. John of the Cross, regularly surfaces in my prayer. It reminds me we are entrusted not only with bearing God within, but with bringing God to birth in each other, bound to supporting each other's prayer.

For Lent I am following Mary Forman OSB’s Praying with the Desert Mothers. Even the cover draws me deep into the stillness. Each chapter begins with a scripture passage and a prayer, then follows on with a reflection that draws on the writings of the desert mothers and their contemporaries. My academic heart delights in the copious footnotes that accompany each chapter. They are like deep wells, ready for me to draw from if I thirst for more. For now, what is here is enough.

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Now with you is Wisdom, who knows your works
and was present when you made the world;
Who understands what is pleasing in your eyes
and what is conformable with your commands.
Send her forth from your holy heavens
and from your glorious throne dispatch her
That she may be with me and work with me,
that I may know what is pleasing to you.
— Wisdom 9:9-10

Of celery and prophets in the temple of the ordinary

I wrote the opening essay for this month's Give Us This Day.  I riff off the story of Anna the prophetess who appears in today's Gospel for the Feast of the Presentation. We hear that Anna prays day and night in the temple precincts but not a single word of hers is recorded. She stands as a saint of the Ordinary, her prayers beating out the rhythm of her days.

"As extraordinary as it is to be drawn into a relationship with the immanent and transcendent Triune God, prayer is meant to be an ordinary part of our lives. Like the making of dinner and doing the dishes, it is what sustains us. In his short book The Need and the Blessing of Prayer, theologian Karl Rahner, SJ, advises, 'Pray in the everyday; pray the everyday.'"

The whole essay is posted at the Liturgical Press blog if you want to read the rest.

Truly Pray(TM)

Not everyone likes my writing, something that doesn’t surprise me or particularly rattle me. I don’t find delight or inspiration in every piece of writing I pick up either, sometimes for reasons weighty and sometimes for reasons irrational. 

Occasionally someone writes to let me know that they thought I’d missed the mark in a piece or in a book. Several years ago one such critic let me know they found a set of Lenten reflections insipid and shallow, an opinion offered after having apparently spent Lent reading each day’s offering. I have the deepest respect for that letter writer, whose judgement was clearly not based on a cursory read and delivered without drama. Though I’m not sure my writing has improved in the interim, I do think of that note often, and ask myself if what I’m writing is weak or without depth. 

A few weeks ago someone wrote to tell me I was cancelled in his book for writing something contrary to Catholic teaching.  His prerogative to be sure (though this particular book had an nihil obstat - a declaration that it is free of anything contrary to Roman Catholic doctrines, faith, or morals...so.) I responded (I know, I know...) with a reference to the Catechism. His response was surprisingly thought provoking (though I suspect not in the way he imagined) "I often wonder if people like you Truly Pray..."

As I've just finished writing a short book on prayer, this is perhaps the key question. What does it mean to "truly pray"? And do I do it?

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By "people like you" he means sinners. A point I won't contest, in prayer or otherwise. 

Also, I was captivated by the capitalization. Does he think this is a trademarked term?

Photo is of the space where I go to pray as best as I can, truly or not.