If there is room in your suitcase are you really ready to leave?

I am writing this sitting on a shady terrace at a little hotel perched above the Rhein, across the river from Bingen. It’s hot and humid for Germany, nearly 90F and not yet noon. Yet the morning breeze is pleasant, there are billing doves and assorted other birds providing a soundscape. The atmosphere reminds me of summer retreats at the Jesuit retreat center at Wernersville — now sadly closed — softly encompassing, encouraging a syrupy slowness and a deep appreciation of cooling breezes. (Also the noise of leaf blowers!) Despite the vibes I am neither on retreat nor on vacation, but here to give a talk at a chemistry conference.

One plane ride over the Atlantic, two train rides, and a taxi up to the hotel and I am still too early to check in. The desk offered to hold my luggage and suggested a “chilly” walk through the forest to pass the time until my room is ready after lunch. Or if I’d rather, I could use the sauna and pool. I refrained from saying I had already had the sauna experience today, on the train platform at Frankfurt airport where it felt like an August afternoon in Washington DC. Oof. I opted instead to read my book on the terrace and embrace the breezes.

I was also thinking of those retreats at Wernersville yesterday while I was packing. I am on the road for 6 days, and took only one bag, which zipped with ease in its unexpanded form. It worried me, what might I have forgotten?? Was I really ready to leave if I didn’t have to sit on the suitcase to zip it? I usually fill every inch. Then I realized, most of my recent travels have been to cold, damp climes. Sweaters. Sweaters take up a lot of space. I definitely brought no sweaters on this trip, where it is expected to be in the 90s all week. It also reminded me of a retreat where I gave a Jesuit a ride back to the Main Line.  When he tossed his one very small bag in the back of my Mini. I recall aspiring to travel that lightly. And perhaps now I do.

Light from light

I am giving a day of retreat at a retreat house in Bryn Mawr on the first Tuesday of Advent:

“God comes to us in light and in shadow. Aflame in a bush calling out to Moses, brilliant in the star that led wise men to a savior in a manger, and radiant in Christ transfigured on a mountain top. But as poet Rainer Marie Rilke noted, God can also be found deep in the darkness. A billowing cloud led Israel through the desert, the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary so that she might bear the Messiah, a voice from a cloud spoke of a beloved Son. As we await the celebration of the birth of the Light of the World, join us as we pray with these luminous images.”

I spent today sketching the texts for the four reflections that will frame the day and working out the discussion/sharing sessions that (I hope) will draw people into conversation with each other and the material. It was such a grace to have an entire day to devote to writing and thinking, to work at an unforced pace. This is what I am looking forward to in the next phase of my life!

And I learned how to use my phone to capture what I am thinking aloud and transcribe it for me. I had been using Dragon dictation on a PC when I didn’t want to type, but it’s nice to be able to not have to mov between devices (the phone syncs automatically to the laptop). 

Vampire diaries

On Tuesday morning I had a procedure on my eye which left me as sensitive to light as a vampire and with very blurry vision.  I came home and spent the afternoon like a Victorian lady with the vapors. In a dim room propped on many pillows, eyes closed while someone read to me. It lacked only the cool compress on my forehead and some smocked white lawn dress to be a woodcut right out of a 19th century novel, well that and my intrepid book reader was not the vicar's daughter but my iPhone. 

No email, no desultory browsing the news, no list of household chores to get through, I drifted along to the voice in my ears, letting someone else choose the pace at which the story progressed. All in all it was a tiny retreat, a meditation on surrender and control.

By bedtime I could see well enough to pray Compline, “Protect us, Lord, as we stay awake; watch over us as we sleep, that awake we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in His peace.” Two Advil (the local had worn off) and indeed I slept in peace, and rose in gratitude to a less blurred day. 

Receive The Body of Christ: The Weight of Glory

I slept at the shelter last week, drifting off to the sounds of the beeping delivery trucks at the Acme across the street on an air mattress in the hallway. The Virgin Mother and I stood guard at the door. I had arrived after everyone had settled in for the night, the lights dimmed and the air hovering between warm and cool. It reminded me of a summer's night at Wernersville.  Just enough of a breeze stirring, a sufficiency of grace, a heaping measure of silence.

I was up at 5:30, washing my face, thinking as I did of Jane Hirshfield's early morning icy, awakening slap.  5:38 am, the van appeared at the door, simultaneously the sun appeared over the horizon, its rays careening down the still and dim hallway. A little one popped out into the dimness, bright pink skirt, and brighter blue shoes, twirling in the sunlight with the motes of dust.

Two mothers calmly juggled babies and bags out the door.  And the little one raised her arms, wordlessly asking for a boost to the van.  I leaned down and picked her up. Receive the body of Christ. Amen.

I was surprised at how little glory can weigh, and how much.

---

Jane Hirshfield's poem, A Cedary Fragrance, recalls the early morning routine in the Zen monastery where she trained.

Read this bit from C.S. Lewis's Weight of Glory

Soundings

It's the first day of final exams.  I always think it will be a quiet day, no classes, no grading yet.  But as always, it was a day packed with meetings: office hours, writing conferences with the research methodology students, award ceremony (two ! chemistry majors being honored), reception for a retiring colleague (with a surprise appearance from an alum, now herself a faculty member).  A steady stream of people through my office and in the hallways.

I came home and scrounged up a meal, savoring the silence along with the local bread and cheese. A neighbor was practicing the trumpet, beautiful jazz borne on the wind, dancing down the street and drifting in the window to languidly wrap itself around my ankles.  Now the wind is stirring the new leaves.  The insects are pinging against the screen door, and the neighbor's air conditioning whines like a giant gnat, which I only noticed when it ceases.

This silence sluices over me, cool and dark.

Winter tea: the scholar's mug

Summer yunomi on patio
at Collegeville Institute

Two summers ago I spent a week at the Collegeville Institute at a workshop on memoir.  The week before I spent time at the St. John's Abbey guesthouse, on a quiet retreat.  I took long walks, (mostly) timed to miss the thunderstorms.  One afternoon rain arrived before I was well back from my walk, so I ducked into the Abbey pottery, where a tea table, with sand and a charcoal brazier was set and ready to share with guests.  I had a cup of tea and enjoyed a delightful conversation with the artist in residence about Japan.

I bought two yunomi (the taller than they are wide Japanese everyday tea cups)  — a summer one and a winter one) — fired in the Abbey's wood kiln.  You can see the marks of the flames on the winter cup, which the potter named the "scholar's mug," and every time I drink from it I think of the abbey's hospitality and Abba Joseph, his hands aflame.

I quickly learned not to fill the handleless mug all the way with tea, the ceramic quickly becomes too hot to lift.  It's a lesson I keep re-learning, as I am tempted to add just a tad more in hopes of not having to return to the kitchen for a refill as often.

As I return to the classroom after my sabbatical, my scholar's mug reminds me not to fill my days or calendar too full.  It's a lesson I have to keep re-learning here, too.  Somehow I have three classes, in different parts of the building, in very different parts of the curriculum (an introductory class, a graduate class, a major's upper division class), scheduled back to back and through lunch.  By the end of the day on Wednesday my metaphorical mug was too hot to handle.

Every day, I begin again.

Advent 2: Jesus and Coffee

View from St. John's Abbey Guesthouse dining room near dawn

It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m sitting at the gate in Minneapolis. My flight doesn’t board for another 2 hours.  The smell of coffee brewing fills the air. There is a long line for at each of three coffee stands, and Midwest accents twanging brightly all around me.  The terminal is bright and bouncing (all that caffeine, I think).  Such a contrast to solemn vespers at the abbey last night, where light pooled around the altar, barely keeping the darkness at bay.  Quiet, even with a hundred voices chanting.  The scent of incense still clings to my sweater. Still.

I woke as if the bells were still ringing the hours.  12:11; 1:11; 2:11.  The rumbles of the snoring monk in the room next to mine reminded me of walking down the first floor hallway at Eastern Point at 3 in the morning, hearing the snores of sleepers, imagining the blankets rising and falling like in a cartoon.  The walls in the abbey guesthouse are not thin, so it took me a while to figure out what I was hearing when it began.

At 2:45 am I grabbed my bags and headed upstairs to drop off my key, stop in the church for a brief visit at the tabernacle and then be in front of the abbey church at 3:00 am as directed to catch my shuttle to Minneapolis.  Little did I know that Jesus would be dressed in blue sweats having coffee and reading the paper in the dining room.  “You can’t sleep either?” he inquires.  I’m packed lightly, but still, I’ve got a bag slung over my shoulder, and am dressed for a Minnesota night.  He offered me coffee, too, and I think might have been inclined to chat, but I had that shuttle to catch. No time now to stop in the church, I left the keys and dashed up to the bell tower to find the shuttle just pulling in.

While we waited at St. Cloud for another passenger, I checked my mail, to find a string of emails from my sister, chronicling a night which included 2 ER trips for my dad, one by ambulance after he collapsed getting ice cream, a transfer to the bigger hospital 40 miles away and over the pass, emergency surgery and much worry.  (As I write this, he’s recovering well…and my poor sleepless sister is utter toast.)  I kept my sister virtual company by text message — glad at that moment to have had to get up at this crazy hour.

And when I pulled my sweater off tonight, I can still smell the incense of last night's solemn vespers.

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: In statio

I went for a walk around the lake abutting the St. John's Abbey today.  The fog was just beginning to close in again.  The bell rang, the geese honked and I looked out to see the geese swimming two by two, seemingly processing in statio toward the abbey.  Like the monks at Evening Prayer tonight.

Ask me about my vow of silence

Actually don't, since I can't answer you. My voice vanished completely on Thursday morning, lost on I-95 somewhere between Washington, DC and Bryn Mawr.  It went from squeaks and squeals to nothingness; at the moment it's back, though a bit rough and limited to very short conversations, as the Theologically Inclined Philosopher can attest.

This is mostly a non-issue as there is no one at home to talk to, the boys are back at college and Math Man has been at a series of workshops. I don't have to teach, I'm not cantoring.  Fluffy is content with silence as long as there are crunchies in her bowl (and doesn't accept excuses if there are not).

I posted on Facebook a photo captioned "Morning prayer at the hermitage" — taken in the backyard, and meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek commentary on my lack of voice and the absence of other residents of the household, but which led some people to assume I'd gone away on retreat.

I am at home, but it feels as if the rest of the world has retreated.  The neighborhood is cloaked in its usual August silence, not even the howl of lawn mowers or the grumble of air conditioners disturbed the quiet. The cicadas tweet, the cardinals pipe, the leave rustle, but that's about it.

I wrote, I read, I prayed the office for the feasts of St. Monica and St. Augustine and the Passion of St. John. I cooked. I did the laundry. And for three days I didn't talk to anyone.

It's been a fascinating experience, different from a silent retreat: I'm working, I'm not having a daily meeting with a spiritual director, or chanting monastic offices.

Today I went to Mass - the inability to sing was painful.  Wednesday I'm off to see Patient Spiritual Director for the first time since Lent (he's been ill.)  But there will be more silence to explore.

Go and tell my brothers and sisters

Noli Me Tangere by Fra Bartolomeo via Wikimedia 

From the 20^th chapter of the Gospel of John:  Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, “Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and what he told her.

---

One of the dynamics of a retreat we discussed at length during the practicum at ISI two weeks ago was how to send retreatants back into the world.  Underlying this was a conversation about the purpose of the retreat — to vacation with God, to 'unplug', a yearly spiritual 'cleanse', a moment to pick up tools to help one "make progress in the life," a step along the way toward magis  — keeping in mind that the dynamics of the retreat planned may not be consonant with the desires that retreatants bring with them, and that the magis Ignatius speaks of might not be for everyone. 

This was a practicum, so we had a chance to do a little preaching and were encouraged to sketch out retreat talks we might give.  I'm still grappling with how a weekend retreat framed around Ignatius 18th Annotation might move retreatants, how resurrection and mission might be presented in this context. 

The scene with Mary of Magdalene in the garden is what came to mind, perhaps because I was sitting outside in the heat, in a small rock garden, perhaps because her feast had been a few days earlier. 

St. Augustine called Mary Magdalene "the apostle to the apostles," because she was went from the garden to tell the apostles the good news. Magdala means tower in Aramaic and I frankly enjoy the image of Mary the Tower as a complement to Peter the Rock. The Church may be built on that rock of Peter, but Mary of Magdala ignited it with these words, "I have seen the Lord.” 

I found myself wondering what happened to Mary Magdalene next, after she returned and the disciples dismissed her as crazy (or so Luke's Gospel tell us).  The medieval legends says she went to France and lived in a cave, repenting of her sins and fed by angels.  I find myself more taken with the Orthodox tradition, which puts her with Mary, the Theotokos, the Mother of God, in Ephesus.

“Go” Jesus told Mary Magdalene in the garden.  Jesus didn’t mean for her to take a walk and deliver a message, the end.  The Greek word translated here as go (poreuou) in John’s Gospel carries the sense of heading out on a journey, to re-order your life’s direction, to carry forward a message. Go out, cries Jesus, I want you to proclaim again and again, “I have seen the risen Lord.” The ultimate root of poreuou is aptly enough "pierced through" (as a needle carries a thread through...) 

Did Mary tell the apostles, give up when they laughed at the women's "nonsense" (leros) and then quietly retire to Ephesus (or a cave for that matter)?  Or did what she saw and believed pour out of her?  Does she pray, as C.S. Lewis would say centuries later, because "I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time — waking and sleeping. " Does she proclaim the resurrection as she was sent to do?  Does she meet Paul?  Are the two Mary's at the core of the church in Ephesus?

It's given me much to think about, not only in the context of retreat preaching, but in terms of my own vocation.

---

What is most often translated "brothers," adelphous, is literally "from the same womb" as are, of course, brothers and sisters.

Sketching a retreat

Window, St. Ignatius Chapel,
Montserrat Retreat House

I was at Montserrat Retreat House outside of Dallas last week for a workshop on preaching the Spiritual Exercises, more specifically, thinking about the 18th Annotation in Ignatius' Exercises.  The 18th Annotation describes the sorts of exercises that might be given to those who could not or should not make the full exercises, either in their 30-day form (the 20th Annotation) or in daily life (the 19th Annotation).

"...each one should be given those exercises that would be more helpful and profitable..." — from Louis Puhl's translation of the Exercises, 18th Annotation

The practicum was designed to help us consider prayerfully and practically the movements of this sort of retreat, where the expecation is that people will leave with some tools to "make progress in the life of Christ." Including some thoughts about how the director might come to such a retreat.

The notion was that you could leave with a sketch, an outline, of a weekend retreat, with 10 or 11 short talks given over 3 days.  We were invited to preach an excerpt of such a talk along the way, and listening to others preach was not just an opportunity to see different approaches to crafting and presenting such reflections — watching a clip of a Disney cartoon, artwork, poetry, evangelical style preaching, quiet reflection, music —  but to hear the witness of people willing to return the gift they'd been given in the Exercises was a grace.

I sketched out a couple of talks for days of reflection, helpful in the sense that they helped me think through a couple of upcoming writing assignments.  (If anyone out there wants a talk on mission and Mary Magdalene in the garden or one on the sacredness of measured time within the context of the Examen -- I'm now set!)  I also sketched as the various presenters spoke, creating maps of the material and what arose in me as I listened.  I'm really not an artist, but as one of the Jesuits tagged me, "a good doodler."  Going back through them I can see what struck me.   Herewith some random bits of wisdom.

• "We are looking for a busy God."
• ...that I be not deaf to his call.
• We are icons, doorkeepers, witnesses.
• Never reveal your politics. 
• Sin is a mystery and if it is too clear, we are in error.
• Love costs.
• We are not on a mission, we are mission.
• Imagine your own resurrection.

---

The full text of Puhl's translation of the Spiritual Exercises can be found at IgnatianSpirituality

My friend Wayne is an inspired doodler - and his are art!

On the verge of summer

My friend Fran at There Will Be Bread had a lot (or should that be a Lot?) on her mind after a whirlwind week; Crash (now in the midst of a summer that will take him from intensive Latin, to work with a church historian, to the Naval History and Heritage Command) is writing about writing again after a whirlwind of a sophomore year.  Do you just show up again without explanation?

I turned my grades in yesterday, and while there are still some loose ends to tie up as department chair, I suspect it might be summer on my calendar.

Ignatius talks about stopping a few paces before your prayer space to pray for the grace you desire in that time of prayer, and to once again commend yourself into God's hands.  In that vein I headed off Tuesday night through the rush hour traffic to spend the night at the old Jesuit Novitiate in Wernersville, and to see my spiritual director — to stop for this moment before my summer begins and ask for the graces I might need and to remind myself just how I live and move and have my being.

And like Fran, here are my scattered thoughts, more than a bit windblown...

---

The weather was, as the local news station kept repeating on the drive up, "unsettled," but I threw my umbrella in the back and walked twice in gentle rains. After dinner, I walked through the hedgerows and back up toward the cemetery.  The newly cleaned gravestones glowed blue-white in the dusk, bright ovals hovering over the high grass.  I walked through, stopping to pray for a couple of men I knew, and for Joseph Grady, SJ, a scholastic, because my late neighbor Marie Malloy prayed for him. Then I leaned against the wall down by the oldest grave in the cemetery, which belongs to Anthony Ryan, nSJ a novice who died 10 weeks after he entered in 1931, and prayed.  Despite the unsettled weather, it was a very settling spot to pray.

---

One retreat was wrapping up, another just beginning, so everyone was having a talking dinner.  Arriving near the end, I found an empty table, filled my plate and sat down with a book and crept into the silence held between its covers.  At the end of the meal, a Jesuit friend (and my long-time confessor) came over, offering tea and gentle conversation, both of which I gladly accepted. It was a grace-filled entry into the celebration of the sacrament of reconciliation, a celebration that was warm, joyful, grounded in my current challenges, bracing and above all, a deep experience of mercy.  Easter all over again.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Used under a Creative Commons License.  c. John Arnold

[The last bit of this is a much redacted piece of the reflection...]

Last night I gave a reflection at a local retreat house for their annual blessing of calendars and clocks. It is a lovely custom, starting with a simple dinner. Soup and bread, cookies and tea. As we moved into the chapel after dinner, people began coming up to the foot of the altar and leaving their planners and calendars on the steps, stripping off their watches and setting them on top. Here, in front of the tabernacle, we moved from chronos to kairos, not just in mind, but in body. We literally stripped ourselves of the things that which mark and measure, cajole and contain counted time for us.

As I stood in front of the altar and set down my calendar and took off my watch, I had a moment of angst. I wanted to say to God, "You want what?" My watch? How would I keep track of the time when I spoke? Mind you, I have a prepared text, and no tendency to stray far from it. At 1500-ish words, it's a 12-15 minute reflection.

Despite the two angels sternly guarding either side of the altar, no divine help was apparently forthcoming. No cherubim appeared to peel off my watch and bear it with glee to the altar. No seraphim stood before me and boomed, "Step away from your time piece." I just had to. Take. It. Off. And walk away.

I will admit to having a somewhat fraught and fragile relationship with time. As a scientist, I know something of time and how it measured by clocks and by calendars. One second, the time it takes for a particular atom (Cs-133) to move between two states 9,192, 631,770 times. Exactly 9,192, 631,770 times. The very atoms from which we are made are ticking clocks.Less than one half-life of C-14 has passed since a man named Jesus, the Nazarean, hung on a cross on a hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. As a person of faith, I get that God set time into motion with the creation of the universe. But time and I are still at odd with each other more often than not.

In an article written ten years ago in America, Jesuit Dennis Hamm suggests praying not just over, but with, one’s calendar in hand, as part of the Examen. I’m going to admit that when my spiritual director first suggested this, my reaction was visceral. After a crazy day, the last thing I wanted in my prayer space was my calendar. I wanted to meditate on the eternal, to sink into the vast stillness of God. Not contemplate the to-do list that chases me from one end of campus to the next. No. No way.

But my ever patient director kept gently suggesting it. At first I couldn’t even open the thing, it would sit on the carpet in my prayer space, where I would watch it carefully. Would the demons trapped inside fly out if I cracked the cover? Gradually I found the courage to open the @#$$% thing, and found that praying with my calendar helped me discover the moments of consolation, that even if I appreciated them in the moment — the uninterrupted lunch, the walk from one building to the next, the student who finally figured out the tricky titration proclems — by the time I reached the end of the day, were lost in the evening maelstrom of dinner making, homework and lecture preparation.

Crash calls once a week, via Skype from WJU (Wonderful Jesuit University), and when I ask “How has your week been?” he pulls up his calendar and uses that to prompt his memory. I’m delighted to be welcomed into his life, to walk along with him, through both the quotidian — the math test, finding a barber to cut his hair — and the memorable — he spoke to Madeleine Albright, he got into the class he really wanted to. To hear what he thinks these events mean, and a chance for him to ask me for what he needs. Books and key deposits. Calculus help.

I wonder if God takes equal delight in my invitation to be welcome within my calendar, my days, the seconds he set the beat for? As happy to hear how I feel about my finally getting the laundry not only done, but folded and put away, as He is to know that I went to Mass this morning. To know where I might have encountered “Garlic and sapphires in the mud."

My relationship to time is still a complicated one, but there are blessings here, year round. But God, can I have my watch back now?

What might you do with thirty days (or two million minutes?)

An amaryllis planted
as I began.

 Maybe the real question is what would God do with 30 days?  My friend Fran posted a link to this article about a British politician who, after making what was presumably the Spiritual Exericises of St. Iganiatius (a 30-day Jesuit retreat), decided not to stand for re-election.

My room when I first walked in.

Sunday it will be five years since I began the Spiritual Exercises, but today marks the fifth anniversary of the day I got in the car on what I remember being an unseasonably warm January afternoon and drove to Boston, where I spent the night before driving out to Gloucester.  The Boy wrote me regularly while I was in the silence, toward the end reminding how many more breaths I would take before I would be back home.

As I type this, it's been roughly two and half million minutes — some two hundred thousand breaths — since the silence broke on the retreat, on a bright and cold February morning.  And while I didn't go home having discerned a seismic shift in my life, God has done a great deal of breathing in me since.

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.)

On the green: US Open and Ignatian Retreats

Last week at this time I was still on retreat, sitting in an Adirondack chair in the eastern cloister at the Jesuit retreat house, looking out over the expanse of lawn that tumbles down to a stand of trees that was (at least this week) the favored hunting ground of the hawk that spent the week riding the thermals up to the top of the hill.¹  Tonight, Math Man is eagerly anticipating some time contemplating expanses of green.  No, he's not going on retreat, but to the US Open which is being held about a half-mile from our house (as the hawk flies).

He's wandering only 120 acres, compared to the 240 I had access to, but otherwise, it's not such a different experience:

• No cell phones or other electronic devices.
• Silence prevails; necessary speech needs to be taken to the fringes (and done in hushed tones) lest you disturb those praying, uh, playing.
• Lots of walking.
• Weather.  There will be interesting weather.
• Companions along the way (25,000 folks for Math Man, 40 for me).

---

1.  Don't ask how I know this. All I will say is that Fluffy had prepared me well, and that while the practice of looking up has much to commend it, it pays to watch where you are walking on occasion.

Reflecting in the Light

Last Wednesday night I climbed off the hamster wheel I'd been on for the last few weeks (watch these hamsters to get a sense of what it's been like!), the result of a calendar clogged with evening and weekend meetings.  I went from class to office hours to class to a faculty meeting to....giving a reflection on the extravagance of being "unbusy" at a local retreat house.  Yes, I get the irony there.

One of my Jesuit friends says, "first we preach to ourselves" and as I wrote it, I heard in Martha's encounter with Jesus in Luke's gospel, not her whining, or Jesus' remonstrance, but her bone-deep longing for time with God, her almost overwhelming desire to be able to let go her grasp on all the stuff that bustles bossily through our days.  So I tried to preach to myself, and let God take care of the rest.

I felt as if I let go my grasp as I walked through door, from the brisk night air into the warmth and gentle light of the retreat house.  The sisters were warmly welcoming (tea!).  There was no bustling about, just enough direction to get us gathered and centering.

When I laid my notes atop the Gospel and spoke, I was suddenly and deeply aware of God undergirding my work.  God behind me, God before me, God underneath me. The stillness in the chapel was incredible, we sat there, women young and old, and listened to God, enfolded in the warmth and the light and the Word.  The service was short, less than an hour from start to finish, but just right for a midweek night.

I'm talking again on December 12th, but am looking forward to going to the one the week before where I'm not talking, but can just listen.
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Upcoming programs at the IHM Conference Center are listed here.  Recording of my talk, coming soon!  If you are in the area, stop in, it's an oasis of stillness on the Main Line...

Photo is of my back step, a place of prayer, set with a cup of tea and my breviary.

Hatching

There are four things I would not consider venturing on an extended retreat without:

post-it notes

my pillow

a good (but not too good) SF or mystery novel

chocolate

The post-it notes are put to different uses in nearly every retreat. They've ended up decorating a wall-to-wall window, a visual panorama of the passages suggested from Scripture each day by my director. I used them on the long retreat to make notes while looking over my prayer of the previous day, which I would then stick onto the front of my prayer journal — though I never once looked at them in any of my conversations with my director. Another retreat found me putting a blank one on the front of my journal to jot one or two lines to jog my memory about prayer suggestions from my director. Whatever I end up using them for, I don't go on retreat without them! I'd sooner leave my pillow behind.

And I rarely eschew bringing a pillow. My faithful travel pillow came to Japan with me, and gets tucked into my tote for car rides of even a few hours duration. I joke (or maybe it isn't a joke) that I'll have reached a new level of detachment when I no longer need my travel pillow, even for one night away. It is with a bit of pride, though, that I announce that I forgot said pillow in the car the last time I spent a night on retreat and DID NOT change out of my PJs at 10 pm, go out to the car and get it.

The novel became an essential after a rather tightly strung retreat, where midway through my director marched me down to the retreat house library, pulled a mystery novel off the shelf and said, "you need some down time, read this!" (Yes, Ignatian directors can be directive.)

Chocolate. Do I need to say anything more? I don't travel anywhere without chocolate. Several colleagues know that I can be counted on to have a stash of dark, dark chocolate in my desk for those dark, dark moments that strike now and again — or to celebrate with.

Before I left for my retreat in Big Sur, my sister-in-law, The Reverend's Wife, reminded me that there is nowhere around there to get even essentials, so to be sure I had what I needed before I left. She was probably thinking about toothpaste and shampoo, but I was thinking about chocolate! I duly made sure I was well stocked. The first evening came and went, and the chocolate stayed in the drawer. And the second, and the third. By day four, I was starting to wonder what was up. I had no taste for chocolate. Zero. Zip. I could open the drawer, look at the lovely dark chocolate orange truffles nestled in their fancy papers and think, "nope, doesn't appeal!"

The only time I've had no appetite for chocolate for an extended period of time has been when I was pregnant (no, this is not an roundabout announcement of any miraculous news). I began to wonder what else I might be pregnant with, if not a sibling for Crash and The Boy. There was a lovely image in the poem Visitation by Harry Hagan, OSB included for the feast of Mary's visitation to Elizabeth in Give Us This Day of the restlessness of God. What would it feel like to have God — literally — restless within you?

About a month ago when I was up at the Jesuit Center to see Patient Spiritual Director and take a deep start-of-the-summer breath of God, I took my morning cup of tea out to the east cloister garden. It's my favorite place to sit and pray outdoors there, regardless of season, regardless of the time of day. This morning there were bits of nest material scattered in the center of the walk. The shards of shell and yolk, veritable signs of dashed hopes, tore my heart out. A bird had made her nest in one of the light fixtures, and the heavy winds of the previous night had knocked it down.

I looked up, to see a finch perched on the edge of the fixture. She was puffed up and panting, despite the warmth of the morning. I watched, worried, what was wrong? Suddenly, a small round globe appeared. She'd laid another egg. Perched on the edge of catastrophe, here was a tiny sliver of hope. She sat for a moment, then flew off, leaving behind this precious bit.

On retreat, as I sat on my precious sliver of time, wind blown and panting as I climbed the hills, I wondered how God was restless in me. What might be hatching in my life? How willing am I to give birth to something fragile and precariously perched, to take on something risky and wild?

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Photo is from California last year. A small egg found while sweeping out the lath house to use as an ad hoc hermitage.

Aside: What was I hatching that was risky and wild 16 years ago? The Boy was restless within me, and at 11:04 am 16 years ago today, decided it was time to be born!

Application of the Senses

One hallmark of an Ignatian approach to prayer is the way in which engages all the senses, both in its composition of place and as a way of deepening and sharpening the focus of a contemplation. Smell the dust, says Ignatius. Hear the raucous crowd. Stop analyzing and feel. This isn't about God, or even about talking with God, this is an encounter with God.

Though my recent retreat was not formally Ignatian — no spiritual director, and four hours a day spent in the liturgy — it retained a distinctly Ignatian flavor in the ways in which my senses were drawn into times of prayer, pulling particular strands from the external into the interior space of my meditations.

The turquoise of the small bay far below against the yellow hills and dark rocks boasting their lacy ruffs of surf is stunning, but the smells were as intriguing as the view is breathtaking. Something smelled of licorice [note: it turned out to be licorice, which grows wild in the area] which reminded me of Menotti's opera about the Magi. The smell of the fox's den announced itself brightly as the drive began to descend in earnest, marking off the beginning and ends of walks more sharply than the cross embedded in the rock face. And at the very end of a hot afternoon's walk, I looked down to see a single tiny wild strawberry, then realized I could smell the scent of warm strawberry sifting up from a small patch in the sun. The cold damp on my skin as I walked early one morning through the bits of mist that still clung to the canyon walls like lint left from the bank of fog that lingers off shore.

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After I posted this, I read this post by Jim Manney on how the physical gets all too easily neglected in our prayer....