Sharp Melting Points

The Boy learned to make caramel at Thanksgiving (which seems so long ago).  Last night he asked me why the sugar melts so suddenly, not gradually, but collapsing into a puddle all at once. "Because it is a pure solid.  One test of the purity of a material is how sharp the melting point is."  I have a vivid recollection of a sample of something I synthesized tamped into a narrow glass straw, its crystals suddenly losing their structure and collapsing into a liquid.

I'm not pure by any means, but I think I may have reached the melting point tonight, and it was quite sharp.  I've been plugging away all week at a list of "things that must be accomplished" before weeks' end. Minutes ago I put the last touches on the exam that has to be ready tomorrow morning and just about collapsed into a professorial puddle.

One more task for the night and I really can collapse into bed.

Alert: Zoonotic hazards

Slate magazine has an article up about dangerous animals.  Bats top their list, but I would like to point out a little known danger associated with domestic cats.  These animals are potent soporifics.  Just one cat, left at the end of a bed, can stupefy two adults for hours.  Even in an open area, such as on a couch or easy chair, Felis domesticus poses a significant napping risk.

Fluffy was curled up, purring, at the bottom of my bed this morning.  The alarm went off, but my feet were warm and the cat was purring and the next thing I knew it was 8:30.  Be warned.

Hei-wa: still souls

Math Man and I were on a walk yesterday, and happened across an older neighbor, a regular reader of my column in the Standard. She had lots of questions for me, and one for Math Man. "How does she do all that writing?" Math Man: "She stays up late and she is very disciplined."

It's been a very disciplined month, as I finished out the semester and juggled a number of writing deadlines (about 7000 words sent out to three different editors, in eight different pieces, ranging in length from 250 words to just over 3000 words). I've missed writing in this space, with its lack of constraints regard topic, length, format or audience, but have missed more being able to read freely. Still, I've managed to stay on a relatively even keel, partly because, despite Math Man's comment, I've given up giving up sleep.

Patient Spiritual Director has been encouraging some discernment along these lines for some time, and so I've been experimenting with finding "the mean" in my sleep. I think I've found the sweet spot for now, but having done so, I've lost nearly an entire working day from my week. (You can do the math, but I'll save you the effort - an extra 1.5 hours of sleep a night times seven is...10.5 hours.)

One reason I've been juggling deadlines is because I'm off tomorrow on a 2 week trip to Japan. I'm teaching a course next fall on silent spaces in the context of Western contemplative traditions. It's one of a triad of courses looking at contemplative traditions: Eastern, Western and science. We are traveling with the students next fall, to Japan, to Wernersville, to a Benedictine community. This trip is to scope out some of the places and people we want to see when we return with the class. I'm blogging the course here, but will be chronicling travels as well as some of my reading on this blog, too.

What am I reading on the plane? Besides C.S. Lewis' Weight of Glory?

• Sacred Koyasan: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kobo Daishi and the Great SunBuddha, Philip L. Nicoloff, 2007.

• Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns. Mario Beauregard & Vincent Paquette, Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006) 186–190

And lest you think I'm all that high-minded, I've uploaded a season of Enterprise onto my iPad.

The kanji illustrating this post means "peace," and the two characters can be roughly translated as "still soul" - an layer of meaning I enjoyed discovering.

I've left some posts to appear while I'm gone, and posting on the road is likely to be erratic, I don't expect to have connectivity everywhere I go.

Column: Prayer of the exhausted - sleep

Patient Spiritual Director suggested (not entirely in jest, I think) I consider taking up sleep as a Lenten discipline, his theory being it would be a more difficult undertaking for me than giving up chocolate. (I didn't in fact give up chocolate for Lent, but am trying a modified version of what Mark Bittman and others are attempting. At the moment all I want to say about the experience is that it has been efficacious — and far more difficult than I anticipated.)

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 31 March 2011.

I will lie down in peace and sleep comes at once, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety. — Ps. 4:9

Last Thursday morning, the high school principal found Chris and his friend, asleep, on the floor outside their first block classroom. “Is everything OK?” he wondered. Roused from his slumbers, Chris responded with a laconic, “Tech week.” Those two words explained much. The principal left the two to drowse away the last few minutes before the bell rang.

The school musical opens on Friday and rehearsals are in full swing. Chris is both performing and working as tech crew: alternately singing up a storm on stage and hauling huge pieces of scenery around behind the scenes. Mike is managing the technical end of the production; with a word whispered into his headset, he can cause witches to appear in mid-air and set a darkened stage alight.

There is no shortage of creative energy flowing in my house — this crew can get a paper mache cow to give milk. Sleep, however? No one is getting very much. That includes the parents who late each night collect the exhausted thespians, and sit vigil with them as they face the homework due the next day.

As Chris crept off to bed late on Thursday night, declaring he would fall asleep as soon as he was horizontal, this verset from Psalm 4 ran through my mind. He would indeed sleep in peace, his work for this day finished, his school bag packed for the next.

St. John Chrysostom, in reflecting on this psalm, would agree with Chris. Those who live virtuously, who possess God, will “in their waking hours enjoy life and at night rest with great satisfaction.” A clear conscience (or completed homework) doesn’t nag at you in the quiet hours of the night.

Yet there is more than just the rest of the righteous in the image of repose the psalmist evokes here. Recently, a friend lent me a little book of pithy advice on prayer by Keith McClellan OSB. Number 33: Sleep is the prayer of those who rest secure in God.

In his commentary on the fourth psalm, St. Augustine proposes that sleep is a metaphor for the presence of God. Just as we close the door and pull the shades at night to shut out any commotion on the street that might disturb us, Augustine suggests we foster a similar attitude with our interior world. He might be writing about our own time when he laments the ways in which a world that clamors noisily at the gates, which measures worth in terms of possessions, leaves us fragmented.

Augustine urges us to forgo the “countless images” and demands that take our gaze away from God. Cultivate a simplicity of heart, let this be the cloak we might wrap around ourselves to shut out the world and rest in God.

As the mid-point of Lent approaches, I wonder if I, like my kids, epically short of sleep these days, might look to Augustine’s wisdom. The exterior world makes many demands, fragmenting my attention and my patience. God has but one desire, that I rest in Him alone.

Can I turn off the computer with its countless images and burgeoning inbox, close the book, ignore the laundry, and sleep — secure in God? I suspect it would be harder than giving up chocolate, and likely bear more fruit.

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Lord our God, restore us again by the repose of sleep after the fatigue of our daily work: so that, continually renewed by your help, we may serve you in body and soul. Through Christ our Lord, Amen. — Closing prayer from Thursday Night Prayer

Five hours and fifty-four minutes

No, this is not a allusion to John Cage's 4' 33'' (though 5 hours and 54 minutes of silence has a certain appeal for me). It's the upper limit to the amount of sleep I got last night. My alarm is a zen bell sound, and one of the 'features' is a countdown timer. So when I hit the "start" button, I get instant feedback on the number of hours of sleep I might (under the best of circumstances) manage.

In the car this morning, taking Barnacle Boy to his radio gig, I mentioned that 5 hours and 54 minutes of sleep was just not enough. "How did you know to the minute?" he wondered. I explained. "That's creepy!" I wasn't going to argue with him.

In some ways it is a bit creepy to know to the minute the upper limit on the sleep that I can get. And depressing to be reproached by my own alarm about my sleep habits. It's sort of like opening the menu at a restaurant you've traveled a long way to eat at and seeing the calorie counts for everything, including dessert.

Silent sketches

Drawing a brief breath in the midst of the chaos of this week, I drove up yesterday to see Patient Spiritual Director at the Jesuit retreat house in Wernersville. It was quiet. Quiet enough to hear a squirrel gnawing on a nut from its winter store. Quiet enough to hear the geese call overhead as the Jesuit community gathered in the chapel commended the body of their brother Clarence to God.

God's gentle humor was evident here and there. My confessor, trying to find just the right psalm for a penance. Could we Google it? My attempts to take advantage of an earlier than planned arrival (no traffic!) and take a quick nap were foiled - first by Patient Spiritual Director briskly knocking on the door, hoping to leave a note on the desk before I arrived; then by the housekeeper double-checking that the room was ready. I gave it up as a lost cause, and was so exhausted by back to back spiritual direction and shriving, that I turned in early. And so got nine (!) hours of sleep -- a grace, in retrospect, I so clearly needed.

Threads of poetry seeped into my dreams:

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

--John O'Donohue, For One Who is Exhausted in To Bless the Place Between Us

The calmness has claimed me, and so I can face the gaping maw that is the rest of the week (thanks kb for the image!) with some equanimity, if not complete calm...

Where your strength lies

By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust your strength lies. Is 30:15

Somehow this line from Isaiah ended up printed out and stuck in the interstices of my wall-mounted cache of folders early this fall. I can't recall why I printed it out then, but now I'm finding it a single, sharp point of contemplation for these last days of Advent. I'm still fighting off pneumonia, still wired on the various medications that ease my breathing, still unable to sing. So I wait, calmly (not calmly is not good for breathing, perforce), quietly (no voice - ack), and trusting that it will be fine. And it will.

This is a different kind of Advent stillness, not a full stop, not even a slowed pace. Not entered into as an elected discipline, it instead feels like a quietly directed contemplation of the vast landscape between uncertainty and trust. I feel like Mary, enormous with child, contemplating the roads ahead: the ones visible, the ones unseen, the ones unimaginable. If I were to do the Exercises again, I suspect I would see the road in that second contemplation of the Second Week -- the one that asks you to "to see with the sight of the imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem; considering the length and the breadth, and whether such road is level or through valleys or over hills" -- with different eyes.

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While I'm musing about hidden strengths here, my eldest is thinking here about his hidden strengths (which I would argue are very much what the world might need - if not so valued by the high school social scene).

Foundational Lessons

About this time last year I was starting to get things organized to leave to make the Spiritual Exercises. During the Long Retreat by 3:30 am, I would usually be just finishing my last contemplation of the "day." Tonight I'm up at 3:30 am contemplating - drawing once again from the Exercises, this time the Foundation and Principle and indifference.

We should not fix our desires
on health or sickness,
wealth or poverty,
success or failure,
a long life or a short one.
For everything has the potential of calling forth in us
a deeper response to our life in God.
Our only desire and our one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better leads to God's deepening his life in me.

From the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, translated by David Fleming, S.J.

I spent a chunk of today in the ER, working hard - and not terribly effectively -- to move air in and out of my lungs. These lines kept bouncing through my head "we should not fix our desires on health or sickness." Could I really say that in all honesty about this experience? I desire to breathe deeply, I want my voice back. When all the drugs kicked in, the sense of relief and gratitude was exquisite. But I certainly was not indifferent, I know which end of this experience I desired.

A week or so ago, Paul Campell, SJ posted a wisdom story on the People for Others blog. A young man seeks wisdom from a hermit, who pushes him face down into the river. When he comes up gasping, the hermit asks what he wanted most at that moment. "Air!" (I can relate.) “Very well,” said the master. “Go home and come back to me when you want God as much as you just wanted air."

I'm still not indifferent, but maybe I have an inkling of what it means to want God like air.

Column: Long Before Dawn

The back story to this column is that I ended up praying on an odd schedule while on this retreat. I would get up around 7:30 in the morning, see my director at 10. I'd pray twice before dinner, sometimes with a nap in between, then fall asleep (usually with my knitting in my lap!) around 8 or 9, sleep until midnight or 1, then be up until around 5.

This all came to an end the day that I saw the dawn from the night side, at which point my director decided it was time to shift me back to Eastern Time. Which I did. It was only slightly painful...

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times 5 February 2009]

In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. -- Mk. 1:35

“I wonder if I will have jet lag when I go home?” I mused to my spiritual director one morning. While I’ve never left Philadelphia’s time zone, my schedule looks more like I’m somewhere in Madagascar. It’s 3:18 EST in the morning as I write this. The last time I saw this hour with such regularity, I was getting up to feed a 3-month-old Christopher.

During these 30 days that I am making St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, my days are marked out only by the evening liturgy and my mid-morning meeting with my spiritual director. Outside of Mass, I am spending five formal hours in prayer, but the times of these are up to me, my director and God. God seems to have given me the night watches.

I get up, like Christ in this scene from Mark’s Gospel, long before dawn, make my way to the silent chapel and pray. At midnight, at 2 a.m., sometimes again at 4.

Unlike Christ, I’m not alone in my vigil. As often as not I share the chapel with one or two of the Jesuit novices making the Exercises here with me, all of us burrowed into our hooded sweatshirts against the night chill. Nor are we the first to make use of these late hours. One of the early Christian desert fathers, Abba Isidore, recalled, “When I was younger and remained in my cell I set no limit to prayer; the night was for me as much the time of prayer as the day.”

In contrast to Abba Isidore, St. Ignatius does set some limits on prayer during these Exercises: no more than five prayer periods a day. Ignatius does offer less binding advice on the times of these periods and recommends one be at midnight. In his reading of the Spiritual Exercises, Jesuit Father David Fleming suggests that Ignatius had in mind that after a few hours of sleep, both body and mind are quiet and rested. In such a state, we are open to God in ways that we are perhaps not in the midst of even the most silent and still of days.

Ignatius believed that quieting of mind and body by withdrawing, if we can, from our usual schedules and responsibilities, by praying in these night watches, help us bring our desires to grow closer to God and to move more freely about His work into sharper focus.

Dawn is famous at this retreat house. The rising sun seen through the windows behind the tabernacle in the chapel is said to be a magnificent sight. Alas, I wouldn’t know.

Truth be told, I feel no lack in missing the dawn. What I have seen through that window is the moon on the clouds, shading layers of deepest blues; snow falling in ribbons, twirling in the sea winds and the light of the Presence lamp; shards of ice beating against the glass; and, just once, a shooting star arcing across a brilliantly clear, cold night sky.

In the burst of the dawn there is no mistaking God’s hand at work. In the more subtle beauties of the night, God is teaching me anew to hear His voice, as did Elijah, in the softest of murmurs, to wait patiently for the moments when His glory arcs in all clarity across the heavens — to live and move and have my being entirely within Him.

For this, I’ll deal with jet lag when I get home.

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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. — The antiphon for the Nunc Dimittis, Night Prayer

One Dawn May Be Enough

The Long Retreat has ended. Mass was at 11:15 this morning and the silence broke with the final hymn. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam - to the greater glory of God. The experience was extraordinary. The prayers, thoughts and letters that accompanied me on this journey were deeply appreciated.

I saw only one dawn - having spent much of this retreat keeping the night watches. I took this photo on one of our two days of repose, when we had Mass early in the morning and I dragged myself out of bed after a scant hour and a half of sleep to walk to the beach. It was 3^oF out.

Returned firmly near the end of the retreat to more regular hours by my director - I rose obediently the first morning to find a grey sky. I greeted my director by noting the irony of my finally being awake for the dawn, and there being none to be seen. To which he replied, "Maybe one dawn was enough."

This dawn might indeed have been enough.

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For another view of a single dawn at Eastern Point from a 30-day retreatant - see here.

5:41

"Wakey-wakey, Mom," says the shadow next to my bed. "What time is it?" I inquire muzzily. "5:49 am. I guess I didn't need as much time as I though to get ready." This is an understatement. Barnacle Boy is fully dressed and ready to go on his 3-day class camping trip. He doesn't need to leave for almost an hour. Think he might be excited?

5:41? It's not a typo. It's the total number of hours of sleep I had last night.