Summer silence

Last night Math Man and I watched a documentary about life in Antarctica on Netflix. The film by New Zealand filmmaker Anthony Powell, focusses not on the science, but on the everyday life of the people who work to support the science. The cooks, shopkeepers, pilots and communications techs.  Through the austral winter.  As I sit on my back patio, surrounded by greenery, warmed by the sun, it's hard to imagine that at this moment it's dark 24 hours a day and 27^oF below zero at McMurdo station.  (Fascinatingly, Google's weather icon shows a bright yellow sun for "clear" at McMurdo, though the sun was last seen above the horizon on April 24th.)

The film is visually rich, with beautiful time lapse photography of vast panoramas and tiny details.  The rugged reality of a visit to the penguins in midsummer is revealed, along with delightful clips of penguins flying in and out of the water.  It's not hard to see why it won so many awards.

I was struck by the silence in the desolate Dry Valleys —  no trees to rustle in the wind, no birds chirruping, no traffic noise.  This morning, I was struck by the silence in my own backyard.  Yes, I could hear the birds, and the bell ringing in the tower of the Episcopal church a mile and quarter away.  But there was no roar of air conditioners, no leaf blowers screaming, no rumbling of lawn mowers.  It wasn't silence in the same sense as that scene in the Dry Valley, but there was the same sense of stillness in the air.

As an aside, Dropbox mailed me a flashback, a handful of photos taken more or less around the 4th of July for almost the past decade.  I was struck by how many years I've been on retreat around the 4th.

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.

The texture of a silence

A couple of weeks ago, PrayTell had a thought-provoking post on cognitive engagement and liturgy, based on a comparison between an experience of a Dominican rite liturgy in Latin and the current ordinary Roman Rite.  Fritz Bauerschmidt's final questions offer, at least in my opinion, an implicit definition of excellent liturgy:  "Can we craft liturgy that is clearly both something we do and something that sweeps us up in a movement quite independent of our efforts? Can our liturgy be intelligible without being mentally taxing? Can it be mysterious without being mystifying? Or is the quest for such a liturgy just tilting at windmills. I, for one, certainly hope not."

There was some suggestions in the comments that the old Latin masses (what these days is called the extraordinary form) were inherently more reverent and perhaps more silent.  I responded to one such with by noting what I see as a tendency to conflate “contemplative/mystical” with the extraordinary form and “noisy/didactic” with the ordinary Roman rite. 
    
Fr. Allen McDonald replied that "The silence of the EF Mass is different than the silences that should be observed in the OF such as before the penitential act, after the readings, the homily and Holy Communion."  These are "silences just for the sake of silence"¹ rather than silences which emerge from a properly prepared congregation contemplating "official prayers of the Church being prayed in a silent way."  

I'm going to admit that I'm a bit put off by his characterization of the Eucharist as a contemplation (by the properly disposed) of someone else praying and gesturing in prayer.  I say this even in the face of a memorable retreat where my own prayer was certainly sustained by meditating on the stalwart prayer of the sisters around me in the chapel.  

That said, I'm grateful as his comments have made me attentive to the nature of the silence during Mass in my parish over the last two weeks.  Silence is not what my community does because we should, it is our default stance in the celebration of the Eucharist, you can hear it (or rather not hear it) even between the words of the prayers.  It's a silence that feels, in fact, not of our doing at all, but part and parcel of our being.  Be still — let go your grasp — and know that I am God. (Ps 46:10)  Here, at the Eucharistic table, we find ourselves in such intimate communion with God we cannot help but know that, and respond in kind.   I think this might be what Fritz Bauerschmidt is getting at with his description of being swept into a mystery, where our own responses swell into the stillness and fade, where the presider's prayers cascade down the altar steps and wash over us, the chant swirls up and out, but all of it, ever and always pouring into a silence whose depth and breadth and height knows no bounds.  Be still — be silent — and know that I am God. 

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1.  Sacred silence in the Roman Missal, according to the GIRM, is not just for the sake of silence, but has a variety of purposes: "For in the Penitential Act and again after the invitation to pray, individuals recollect themselves; whereas after a reading or after the Homily, all meditate briefly on what they have heard; then after Communion, they praise God in their hearts and pray to him."

Photo is of the door to the chapel at the old Jesuit novitiate.  A place that has held within its share of silent prayer and more...

Be opened

At the vigil Mass last night I was struck by the tension in the Gospel reading with its challenge to be simultaneously open — to be able to hear and to speak — and silent — to hold deep within ourselves the mystery of what God has done for us. In the midst of a country and church that is stretched almost beyond bearing, I kept thinking about whether I was willing to pray for the grace to "be opened," for the grace to hear God in places that I would rather not listen. The contrast between Jesus putting his finger in the man's ear, and how often I (mentally!) stick my fingers in my ears and chant la-la-la was particularly sharp.

As I sat out on the porch in the cool of the morning, I found myself contemplating what it means to speak and to be silent, to hear and to be heard, to hold God within and proclaim him in the streets, and I listened to this piece from Margaret Rizza's collection New Dawn. It's a gently haunting litany of ways in which we might hear the voice of the Lord: in the silence of the stars...in the heaving of the seas...in the words of a stranger...

While the piece itself feels like it was cut from stillness, I loved its acknowledgement of God in the midst of chaos: "in the heaving of the seas". I might desire undisturbed solitude and silence, a serene spot to contemplate the mysteries of the divine, but the reality of my life looks more like a heaving sea than a placid lake.

"Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it." Thomas Merton

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A version of this post appeared at RevGalBlogPals. Photo is of the ocean at Gloucester, MA, near the Eastern Point retreat house.

Column: An active silence

I've been reading Wound of Love, by an anonymous Carthusian (or as Google books would have A. Carthusian). It's a miscellaneous collection of essays, conferences and homilies, written by contemporary Carthusians for their brothers. The essay referred to below is called "The Facets of Silence."

This column appeared in the June 2012 issue of the Catholic Standard & Times. Read it at Catholic Philly.

A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountain and crushing rocks before the Lord — but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake — but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire — but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. 1 Kings 19:11-12

“Take a look at measure 12, it’s the most critical thing you will do in the entire piece,” cautioned the director. “Note the two rests there? Do not sing! Stop, or you’ll be very lonely.” And embarrassed.

A couple of dozen parents of choral seniors are gathered in a small practice room, trying in twenty minutes to master a sung blessing (acapella, in four part harmony) to be sung to our graduating children at the end of the night’s concert.

The text is the beautiful blessing given in Numbers — “May the Lord bless you and keep you…” — set to two dozen measures of music, hundreds of notes rippling over each other, every space on the staffs filled, except for this beat and a half. Stop. Wait.

It may sound odd, but as a cantor, my favorite part of singing the psalm is not the moment when the Church first fills with our response to the first reading. It’s not even the moment of exquisite relief when I’m sure I’ve found the note that I was tentatively hunting for in practice. No, it’s the thirty or so seconds of silence my parish keeps before the psalmist stands and goes to the ambo. We stop. We wait.

Unlike my students, who often let me know it’s time to move on to their next class by noisily packing up their books and papers, these silences are still. We aren’t collectively itching to get on to the psalm and second reading; we are as engaged in listening as we were when the lector was reading.

“Reading is bound to silence,” wrote Peter of Celle, a 12th century Benedictine abbot, in his lessons for monks. Like composer Claude Debussy, who 700 years later defined music as “the space between the notes.” Peter suggests that silence is not just empty space, but something that is active, that tunes us in to words just spoken and words to come. The silences in our liturgies aren’t accidents, the inevitable result of the time it takes to move one person off the ambo and the next person on.

As Elijah stayed safely in his cave while rock-crushing winds and harrowing fires swept past, emerging, head covered, to hear God calling him in the near total silence that followed, we hear God approaching us in the reading. So, too, we emerge, wrapping ourselves in the silence, to hear what God is calling us to, here and now.

Last week I read a series of reflections on silence by an anonymous Carthusian novice master who pointed out that sacred silence is a communal activity, that it’s not a private affair between individuals and God. We are entrusted to each other’s care in these silences, he notes, safeguarding the silence for our neighbors.

While my parish does not practice the profound silence that the Carthusian monks and nuns do, even in these brief moments at Mass, I sense the support of the assembly as we craft a silence — together — to listen to what God has to say in each of our hearts.

The novice master encourages his young monks to consider the ways in which their silence wells up and flows out over the earth, supporting God’s revelation of Himself to those far beyond the boundaries of the monastery gates.

In the end, the parents did not have to carry the sung blessing on our own. We were supported by the rest of the chorale, their gloriously well-trained voices welling up and flowing out, their eyes pinned to their director’s hands. Holding us in song, and binding us together in perfect silence.


Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear. — Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. in The Habit of Perfection

The narrow road

A week ago, I set out in my borrowed car to drive over the pass in the Santa Lucia mountain range and then head north up the coastal road. The drive is a spectacular one, and I had to admit spectacularly fun in this little car with the top down. The road winds through marsh and sea meadow and then begins to hug the cliffs in earnest. The signs warn that the road narrows, and I'm glad of the small car when I pass a bus on a tight curve going in the opposite direction. Then another sign - road narrows. How can this steep and serpentine path narrow any more and still carry two lanes of traffic? Fifty miles after I turn north I spot the sign I am looking for: New Camaldoli Hermitage, 2 miles. I turn right and head up and up. I pray that I won't meet another car going down, and take two deep breaths when I see a brown UPS van headed my way. Where can I go? I squeeze by,clinging to the cliff, thinking I could just about reach out the passenger window and touch the granite protruding from the cliff. The van, a 500 foot drop off to his left, seems unperturbed. I park, peel my fingers off the wheel and head off to find the guestmaster.



By 6 pm I have brought in my one bag and my furoshiki packed with books, and managed to figure out where the psalms and chant tones for Vespers are in the Camaldolese Office book (but not the opening verse, or Regina Caeli). The Liturgy of the Hours, usually such a stable spot in my day, now feels much like the road I've driven to get here. Chant tones I don't know, a different arrangement of the psalter; I'm clinging to the edge, watching for signs, hoping not to run into anyone. I tentatively set my voice into the chant, thankful for the strong and clear tones of the precentor. I'm almost as white-knuckled at the end of the Office, as I was at the end of my drive up. The 30 minutes of silent meditation in the chapel that followed the final hymn was more on the order of a collapse into God's arms than any attempt at organized prayer. I wonder if I'll ever have the courage to drive down the road again, or for that matter, the strength to stay up here and face God, alone except for the psalms?

Silent. Surrendered.

"Silent, surrendered.
Silent, surrendered, calm and still,
open to the word of God...."

This is the video I posted this week for the RevGalBlogPals Sunday feature. I found it while chaperoning the high school crew. They are in the throes of the final weekend of building the sets for their spring production of The Wiz. The music here is pounding, the saws are whining and every so often a voice comes over the sound system asking for a hand with the lights. Silent. Not. Still. No way!

And here I am tucked up in the back, getting warmed up to write a column that is due later this week. There is something quite wonderful about being "in" on the mysteries of constructing a set, of watching ideas take flesh. The giant green oval of yesterday that today is clearly an emerald throne, the props staff hunched over the computer hunting down a traffic signal they can afford (and that will get here in time). The myriads of details that only a few people might notice, the hammered flat soda cans affixed to the flats, the stuff atop the cabinets stage left.

I see the production with different eyes, knowing what's been poured into it. I'm writing a piece for the feast of Mary, Mother of God next year, I just gave a night of reflection on Mary in the Lenten Gospels (wrestling again with the time paradox of being a writer bound to both the liturgical year and printer's deadlines - there's a crucifixion metaphor there, I'm sure, but it might be more properly reserved to editors), and this has me reflecting on how Mary saw things, knowing so intimately what was poured into the Incarnation.

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Tangential reads: Robin on shifting perspectives in prayer and the feminine in the divine which made me think a bit more deeply about what shifts when we consider the quieter perspectives, the silent voices, in the Scriptures...

and Jayme Stayer SJ's Sh*t Christian Poets Say: The Problems of God-Talk, Sentimentality, and Style. I loved the piece, which is sharp and scholarly without sacrificing wit. As I wrote the bit for RevGals I did imagine Stayer would find the lyrics to this piece somewhat wanting. I have to admit his piece nearly made me terrified to ever pick up a pen again to write reflectively about prayer or theology, though he allows that prose writers have a bit more space to work: "A large part of the problem is the medium of poetry itself: the pressure that the lyric mode exerts on language makes the words vibrate with intensity. The problem of style is solved much more easily in prose. The casual, button-down modes of prose—such as narrative, memoir, or personal essay—are roomier places to switch registers of discourse."

Phaith: If God rested, why do we want to multi-task?

Are you old enough to remember the test pattern?

From my latest column in Phaith magazine:

... I remembered how exciting it was to stay up late when I was a kid: the TV turned down to a hush so as not to wake my younger siblings, the old B movies that showed after the 11 o'clock news, and the cut-rate commercials for used cars, the bright sunshine glinting off the cars at odds with the midnight black lapping against the living room window. And when the national anthem played and the test pattern appeared, I would creep up the stairs, adventure at an end.

In this era of "on demand" it's hard for my kids to imagine that once upon a time TV programming didn't run 24/7, that at some point the local station called it a day, leaving a technicolor pattern of stripes and squares to hold the space for morning.

The third commandment pushes back at a world that demands we — or someone — be endlessly available to work: "Keep holy the Sabbath Day." ...

Read the rest here

Elected silence sing to me

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear. — from The Habit of Perfection by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

Elected silence, in generously deep and stilling pools, is a part of the fabric of my life. I spend about three weeks being silent a year, in chunks that range from a day to a decade of days, and have done so for many years. It's not quite a tithe of my days, but close enough.

My parish talks about giving of time, talent and treasure, the returning of the gifts we are given. I often think of the "time" part of the triad to be the hours I volunteer for the parish, whether as cantor, or spending the night sleeping in the school hall, serving as 'portress' when we host struggling families, or going to a committee meeting.

But I'm starting to wonder if the gift of time we are called to share and return is not just busy time. My book group talked a bit last month about silence in liturgy. How much is there, and how do we respond? Are we reluctant to leave it because we are afraid someone will think we don't know what we are doing? How do we use it when it comes? Are we itchy to get on with things, or thinking about the shopping list, or listening to God? Can we give of our time in this setting, not in busy-ness, but in stillness?

As I prepare to cantor the vigil Mass tonight, I thought again about time and silence. My parish sits well with silence, we can do 5 minutes at a stretch in a liturgy filled with kids, and we routinely leave space after readings and psalmody and homily for silence. (Reverent, contemplative silence is not the sole purview of celebrations of the Eucharist in the Extraordinary Form, no matter how many people want to make that case. I'm convinced it is about forming the community, not about the form of the liturgy used.)

As cantor, I'm one of the people (along with lectors and presider) responsible for reading the silence at Mass, and bringing it to a close. When do I stand after the reading to lead the psalm? The norms for the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours call for silence, but not in quantities that might be a burden for the community celebrating, and surely the same applies in this context. I feel responsible to both offer this gift of time and to be sure that it does not weary us. I don't want to count to a certain number, or watch the clock, or even get lost in my own meditations on the first reading (that would be unbearably selfish), but want to listen carefully and deeply to the assembly. I don't want people to be thinking, did the cantor forget? I'm not quite sure I can describe what I'm listening and waiting for, but I can often sense a deep stillness that follows the reading, and somewhere before that starts to fray, I stand and move to the ambo.

This listening is prayer. We believe that Christ is present in four ways in the liturgy, including in the assembly itself. I listen and sit before the assembly holding that contemplation front and center. This is the Body of Christ, can I listen and respond to what Christ is saying in this moment? Can I let the silence sing to us all before I raise my voice?

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Photo is of copper basin of rainwater in ruins of old farmhouse in rural Japan.

Phaith: Ora et labora

More on kitchen painting from my latest column in Phaith:

"But as one playlist ran down, inconveniently catching me up the ladder removing old wallpaper, soapy water running down my arms, a momentary silence descended. The quiet seemed to be doing as much to dissolve my tension as the hot water was doing for the remnants of the wallpaper paste. I left the music off.

I began to listen to the sounds of the task at hand, not obliterate them in a barrage of noise. The swish of the rag in the water, the scritch of the sandpaper on the spackle, the bass thunk as I tapped the lid of the paint can back into place at the end of the day. It reminded me to listen for the sound of God’s Hands at work in creation, in my life. To be attentive to the ways in which God would like to remake me."

Read the rest here....

Phaith in December: A contradictory Advent

“If God’s incomprehensibility does not…draw us into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths…we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.” — Karl Rahner, S.J.

I find in Advent not so much a refuge from the noisy world, as a series of mysterious contradictions that leave me slightly off balance, coaxing me past the superficial trappings of the season, into an encounter with God made flesh.

Read the rest of my column (in which I admit that I am a geek) at Phaith....

A wind in the trees

How do you know you've been traveling too much? When you walk into the concourse at Denver airport's terminal C and say, "There's a pretty good sandwich shop at the end." My kids were duly amused. The Boy wanted to know just how many times I'd been in Denver recently, and I found I wasn't certain.

I will miss the pockets of silence at my dad's. Though at one point there were thirty five people sitting down to eat, and the crush in the kitchen threatened the resident Labrador retriever's tail, it was a short walk down to the edge of the pasture. The wind runs up the canyon most afternoons, sending towels and suits hung to dry on the wall near the house sailing into my late mother's rosemary patch. The rosemary on the hillside hums with busy bees, making the retrieval of items caught in its clutches a perilous undertaking.

Late one afternoon, I sought the stillness and silence of the lath house I had appropriated early in my stay. I sat on the old steps, and watched the hawks circling lazily above. I could hear the odd horse nickering in the field down the hill. The silence was so profound I could hear the gusts gathering strength at the bottom of the canyon a mile or more away. I could hear the wind hit the almond trees at the canyon's mouth, stir the live oaks in the gully below me, finally tumbling through the high barley until like a giant's breath, or perhaps the Spirit's, it burst through the open wall of my temporary hermitage. Not even the chapel in the depths of a winter's night at Wernersville is this silent, this still, this pregnant with possibility.

I've been reading Evelyn Underhill for the course I'm teaching on silent spaces this fall. She writes of St. Cuthbert, who longed for his hermitage on the river Farne, but enjoyed it rarely, and of St. Francis Xavier, who wanted a orderly life on Rome with his companion Ignatius, but found himself bound for the far side of the word on a moment's notice. She is unsympathetic. The externals of place and how it is ordered toward prayer and contemplation seem very much secondary considerations to Underhill. Prayer is simply what you do, whether in the deep silence of my hermitage, or in the press of the boarding line for the plane. Prayer may be an interior work, but it orients what is external, not so much the reverse.

In the end, I return to the Principle and Foundation, I desire not so much silence or tumult, but whatever draws me closer to God. Or so I pray.

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.

David Fleming, S.J.'s paraphrase of Ignatius' Principle and Foundation.

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Photo is of the lath house at sunset.

Envied silence

(Michelle is on retreat here, but thanks to the scheduled post feature, she virtually inhabits this space as well. The ability to bilocate used to be considered a saintly characteristic....)

In Kamikatsu — a month ago today — I came down with a serious case of hermitage envy (and not for the first time). Sitting on the tatami on the second floor of Nakamura-san's house, the shoji open, I was drawn to the sound of the wind stirring in the trees, by the insects humming as they went about their work, by the still, centered nature of the place. In that moment I wanted a home that was that simple, two rooms: one to cook and eat, one to sleep and work. I desired a pace of life that was less frantically driven. I longed to let go my grasp, be still and know God.

My guys have gone off on adventures of their own, for the last few days it's been just me and the cat at home, and I found that I've subtly shifted into my typical retreat time zone -- and waded deeply into the silence. This morning, praying the Office downstairs, every window open, the wind stirring in the trees, I realized I no longer envied the life of a hermit. The stillness is here, underpinning the chaos. I don't need to leave to seek it, I simply need to clear enough space to see it occasionally (much like the coffee table - which I also cleared off this week.) Perhaps it is enough to know that such great silence permeates this space, even when I cannot hear it.

That said, I'm off to my retreat proper....

Set in stone

Friday May 27 Kyoto (then on to Koyo san via Osaka)

We were out early again this morning, to see Daitoku-in, a complex of independent Zen monasteries. Arriving well before official opening time, we were nevertheless able to walk into the complex. It's a virtual sea of peaked roofs, some of the monasteries here date to the 14th and 15th centuries.

Our first stop was a famous stone garden, this one representing waves battering islands, which remain unmoved. It made me think of the spiritual, "No storm can shake my inmost calm, when to the Lord I'm clinging..." The wave look high, battering the land but the rock islands are unmoved.

The abbot appeared as we came in and sat with us on the steps of the garden, having an animated conversation with Hank, which he translated for Marc and I. Advice for us: The breath matters, sit up straight so that the oxygen can really get in. That and good breathing makes you beautiful.

I found the garden both more striking than the iconic garden at Ryoanji we saw yesterday, that least quiet of Zen gardens, and more still. Perhaps it's the contrast between the flash frozen stones and the soft moss in which the stones are set that enhances the sense of stillness.

We looked at another old tea house. Outside this one were three stones perched on another, tied with ropes. The stones are placed on the stepping stones leading up to the tea house entrance when it is occupied, to discretely signal that the tea house is in use and other visitors should stay away. Maybe I need a set for my office?

We saw several other stone gardens of various sorts, perhaps the most Zen of them all is this one, set into the floor of the cloister, rather than outside the abbot's quarters as most of the rest were placed. It was hard to photograph, and hard to imagine where you might sit to meditate in front of it. but I liked it very much. All these cloister spaces were still and silent, no hordes of teenagers trooping through. Despite their stony nature, these small enclosed landscapes seemed aglow with life.

For the next two nights we are staying at a monastery on Mount Koya, arrived at by train, then cable car. It reminds me very much of Wernersville in many ways, though less silent. We had to sign in by 5 pm, gates close by around 8. Our room has a lovely view out onto the monastery garden. I'm on the third floor (where I often stay at Wernersville). There are reminder of meal times in your rooms and not to leave your valuables in your rooms, since these do not lock. These rooms do have a TV (!) and wi-fi (!!). And there are Japanese style baths.

I sat on the veranda outside our room for my Examen and evening meditation. The air was cool, it felt like water on my face, the rain fell on the pond below, and the sound of the cistern overflowing was like a litany. Showers and dew, bless the Lord!

When is Zen not quiet

We arrived in Kyoto in the late evening, to stay in a small inn, again with traditional rooms (but Western toilets!). We had dinner at a small space down the street that served various sorts of Japanese savory pancakes. Batter mixed with vegetables, then filled, and cooked on a griddle. I had negi-yaki, a green onion based, quite thin pancake. Few of the places we have eaten have been non-smoking, and I'd forgotten how quickly you can ignore the smell of cigarette smoke when it is ubiquitous.

Breakfast was a quick "thick toast" with marmalade in the hallway of the inn, where I could admire the old fashioned salmon pink pay phone. We got an early start this morning to see Ryoanji temple, which is famous for its Zen rock garden. The grounds are gorgeous, but because it is a stop on the standard school tour (think Independence Hall in Philadelphia), it is generally overun with kids in school uniforms and their tour guides. We got there when there were only two busses in the parking lot, by the time we left, the lot was full.

The garden was created behind the abbot's quarters by Tokuho Zenketsu in about 1500. The garden is empty, except for 15 rocks (of which you can see only 14 at any one time), and was created (perhaps) for night time meditation. I can imagine it would be gorgeous in the moonlight. It's surrounded by low walls, with a lone cherry tree dropping its branches over the side. One side of the abbot's quarters is an open veranda, which is where you sit. For all that is a icon of Zen, of stillness and contemplation, the place is anything but still and quiet.

As you can see, there are lots of people looking at the garden, tour guides chattering, and recorded announcement playing (in Japanese) which, I'm told, tells how quiet this space is. Still, sitting there, tuning out the chatter, I could get some sense of what it might be like in the middle of the night to sit in this space. I suspect it would be a very still spot.



From there, we went to Rokuon-ji temple, which was, if possible, even more frenetic than Ryoanji, if you can imagine. Packed with school tours, signs everywhere forbidding group pictures (a prescription which seemed to be ignored, but you could see the logic of, as it clogged up the viewing area). Rokuon-ji's grounds are open and lovely, but the pavilion at the edge of the lake is the draw, the top two floors are covered in gold leaf. It is spectacular. But not quiet.

Where is God? Here and now.

On Monday night I'm giving an evening reflection at a nearby parish (St. Margaret's in Narberth). Where is God in our everyday lives? Here and now? Karl Rahner, S.J. writes in Encounters with Silence, "if there is any path at all on which I can approach You, it must lead through the middle of my very ordinary daily life." How can we seek out God in the midst of our ordinary days, in the laundry, the kids, on the drive to work or the aisle in the grocery store? How do we respond when we find Christ sitting next to us on the bus, or encounter God at dawn in the kitchen?

St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians tells us we are clothed in Christ, who was God in the everyday — so our call to be quotidian mystics, saints of the daily, is a call to seek Christ, God walking among us, seen and unseen, recognized and anonymous....

Where am I going? The examen — a practice of gratitude and attentiveness — and finding moments of stillness....I'm going to try to podcast it in sections post facto.

Column: Draw my circle just

The story behind the first gift of the rosary appeared here; these days the prayers are bound to my wrist in the Orthodox fashion. Truly always to hand.

And I really did have a hard time leaving the chapel at Wernersville on my last visit - the stillness and silence were so profound that I wanted to sit there forever. St. Ignatius' advice to neither lengthen nor shorten your previously decided upon time of prayer was what got me to stand, bow and leave!

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 3 March 2011.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

I opened the note on my desk and turquoise beads spilled out into my hand. The rosary that I had given to a friend to comfort her sister, is once again made a gift, this time to me. I ran the beads through my fingers and the words rose unbidden, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” I prayed for the repose of Peg’s soul and the consolation of her family — and for my own consolation.

There is something profoundly comforting about linking my prayers to these familiar strands, to feeling their weight in my hands. Counting them on my fingers, ticking them off on my iPod, tallying them mentally, all come up short in comparison.

Moving from one bead to the next takes time, it automatically slows the pace of my prayer. Like the meters on the Blue Route ramps, the individual beads keep one prayer from crowding up against the next. In his Apostolic Exhortation, Marialis Cultus, Pope Paul VI encourages us to pray the rosary slowly, “By its nature the recitation of the rosary calls for a quiet rhythm and a lingering pace, helping the individual to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord’s life....”

Unlike my iPod or my fingers, which I use for so many different tasks, the rosary is a sacred object, something I use only for prayer. To handle it then is to enter into a distinctly sacred space, one so small it fits into my pocket — and at the same time so vast that the entire universe cannot contain it.

Body, mind, and spirit are not disconnected. The desert fathers knew this well and recommended that prayers be accompanied by metania — prostrations. A monk might prostrate himself fully, or he might bow and brush the floor with his hand. Such gestures, large or small, are impractical in many times and places, and so the sliding of the beads through the hands has come to take their place. Each prayer, each bead is an opportunity to practice a small metania, that I might experience in my soul metanoia, conversion.

Poet John Donne wrote, “Thy firmnesse drawes my circle just and makes me end where I begunne” The prayers kept on the rosary’s circle are the first devotion I can remember, the beads tucked into my mother’s purse and pooled on her dresser kept the sense of God at a constant simmer. Now when I’m too tired to think about what or how to pray, the habits of my hands can draw my circle just, bringing my prayer life back to where it began.

Late one night last week, I sat in a chapel so silent, so still that the very air seemed to have ceased to move. A part of me wanted to stay, wrapped in that profound stillness, held by God. I left, longing in my heart for such a place nearer to hand.

Back home, when I found the rosary on my desk, I realized that I had access to such a chapel, one was always to hand. That stillness, that center is held firmly within the circle of beads in my pocket. The Lord is with me.

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God of mercy, give us strength. May we who honor the memory of the mother of God rise above our sins and failing with the help of her prayers. — from Closing Prayer from the Common of the Blessed Virgin

In search of the mute button

I started a last post in the book discussion that Robin and I have been having off and on since the summer. That post (like my prayer) is still in pieces, but I decided that posting this bit from the cutting room floor might help me see more clearly where the piece for Robin's blog is going, as well as the piece on distractions for my column in the Standard.

The photo is of a snowstorm on the Long Retreat; Braces Rock in the background.

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On Friday it will have been two years since I finished the Spiritual Exercises. Blizzards came and went over the time I was on retreat at Gloucester, and the current run of snowy weather brings with it memories of the profound silence that enveloped those days.

When I came back from the 30-days, I found the relentless soundtrack of suburban Philly to be, well, relentless. I sought out pockets of silence where I could find them. The radio in my car remained resolutely off. Television had even less appeal than the radio. Everything was a bit too loud, a bit too bright and a bit too bristly. Urban Spiritual Director summed it up well, my skin felt as if it were on inside out.

The sense of being battered by the soundscape gradually faded, but the other night as I slid through the snow shrouded darkness to retrieve Barnacle Boy from the far side of the township, Elton John spilling from the speakers, it returned full force. I hit off on the radio, and drank of the bracing silence.

My prayer of late has felt tattered, like a flag snapping in the wind until its edges shred. My to-do list plays in my head like a top 100 countdown when I sit to pray, and I can't seem to find the mute button. In Into the Silent Land (the book that Robin and I have been discussing on our blogs over the last few months) Marty Laird suggests that distractions in prayer are an "education by ordeal," a metaphor I would definitely endorse at this point.

I can't control the weather — real or metaphorical, exterior or interior — but perhaps I can seek out more of those pockets of silence. To turn off what I can, and contemplate in stillness what I cannot. To become what Catherine deHueck Doherty called a poustinik (after a dweller in the poustinia, the desert): someone who walks in inner solitude, immersed in the silence of God.

Column: Of prayer and pinball (with apologies to The Who)

My thanks to Inward/Outward, who in October posted the tidbit from Henri Nouwen that I quoted here -- and which has been bouncing around my head since then. The reflection by Karl Rahner, S.J. appeared in Die Presse, an Austrian newspaper, on December 22, 1962. I found in in a collection (alas out of print): Everyday Faith.

And finally, here's a link to a clip of Elton John's performance in Tommy - the real pinball wizard!

The photo was taken at Eastern Point Retreat House in an early summer's fog. The ocean is there - really!

Publish Post

This reflection appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 19 January 2010.

Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place? — Ps. 24:3

A few weeks ago I was multi-tasking away in the kitchen: sorting through school forms, responding to student email, organizing the week’s dinners, drilling Latin vocabulary, all while a pot of chicken stock simmered on the stove.

For a moment, I felt like Tommy, The Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” pulling levers and snapping flippers, while lights flashed and bells rang and glittering silver balls danced around the machine. I’m just racking up points. Four for figuring out a tough Latin cognate, two for dinners using up leftovers. How do you think she does it?

The game is seductive. How many points can I collect before a ball misses its mark and it all ends with an obnoxious honk and a flashing “Game Over?” I end up bouncing tasks off a multitude of bumpers, each item dispatches with a neat quick flick of my pen, though no lights flash or bells ring to advertise the win. It’s definitely all in the wrist.

As crazed and demanding as the ongoing pinball game of my life is at times, it’s hard to ignore the comfort that conquering a well circumscribed set of tasks and clear goals brings. It gets tempting to shortchange my prayer time in favor of getting one last task completed or catching a few extra minutes of sleep, the better to tackle the list tomorrow.

But being productive in prayer, as Father Henri Nouwen points out, requires the commitment of unproductive time: “Being useless and silent in the presence of our God belongs to the core of all prayer.” It takes more than a bit of discipline, humility and courage to spend time with God, and God alone. Without multi-tasking.

In his reflection The Answer of Silence, Karl Rahner S.J. sounds a similarly bold call to abandon what seems to be most urgent, and seek God: “Have the courage to be alone.” This is practical advice he is offering, no mere rhetorical device: seek out a quiet path or a lonely church; find a room where you can be alone; wherever you go, he says, go!

Once there, wait. Silently. Don’t talk to yourself, or even to God. Just wait. Just listen. Patiently. Without expectations. And courageously. For this takes courage beyond measure.

What might we see, alone with our God, standing in His holy places? Ourselves — and each other — as we truly are, cracked and broken and glorious and beloved of God? God, mysterium tremendum et fascinans? God within us, and without?

And most frighteningly of all, what if we hear nothing? In Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin, the monk Corrigan tells his brother that his prayer has been reduced to the point where there are no words on either part, his or God’s. He is sure only of this: “God listens back.”

I’m still learning to be unproductive in prayer, still practicing how to listen patiently in stillness and solitude. No lights blink, no buzzers sound, there are no points to be counted. Success lies only in going — faithfully, quietly and alone — to stand in His holy place. The place where God listens with me.

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Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
— John O’Donohue, from “For One Who is Exhausted" in To Bless the Space Between Us

Alarms, Excursions and Stained Glass: A night at Wernersville

Excursions

On Wednesday I drove up to the Jesuit Center in Wernersville to see Patient Spiritual Director and spend a day and a night in silent silence (as opposed to the less quiet silences I've been writing about here and there.) Going at all was a near thing, as we had snow and howling winds the night before. But Math Man dug me out and once the boys were on their way to school, I headed out in time to make lunch, if not Mass.

Stained Glass

About a year ago, I wrote about this stained glass window by Dennis McNally SJ, depicting key movements from the Spiritual Exercises which I'd found through People for Others. I, along with Stratoz and others, wondered (to no avail) where it was - in hopes of spending some time sitting contemplatively in front of it. On Wednesday, I was walking down the 3rd floor hall and ran into a Jesuit friend. He was chatting with another gentleman. First names were exchanged, but when my lanky Jesuit friend mentioned that Dennis was an artist, at St. Joe's University, my brain put two and two together and asked, "Do you work in stained glass?" Yes, and yes, he was the artist who imagined this gorgeous window. Dennis McNally, SJ - you can read about the window here.

Alas, it does not exist — so sitting in front of it is not in the cards (unless you have a 8'x8' square in a wall somewhere that is crying out for a stained glass window). Apparently the center window — The Two Standards — was deemed too modern for the intended setting (the chapel at the Maryland Province Infirmary).

Alarms

Around 9:30 at night, I finished up what I was doing in the library, cleared up my books and papers and went off to pray in the main chapel. I went in my sock feet, clutching shawl and breviary, to sit on the floor in front of the altar. (There's just enough light there to pray the Office by!) I blessed myself from the holy water font at the front, and as I took a step in to the chapel proper suddenly lights began to flash (including around the tabernacle) and alarms began to hoot. My first thought was I'd transgressed some boundary - had I missed a message that said the chapel was off limits? Surely both Lanky Jesuit and Patient Spiritual Director would not have failed to mention this. Second thought was, Lord, I am not worthy to sit at your feet? Rational thought kicked in about 30 milliseconds later. Fire alarm. I headed (in my sock feet, no coat, the wind chill is in the single digits, and did I mention there was snow on the ground?) out the door, pajama and robe clad retreats streaming behind me. Mercifully the alarm stopped before I got out the door.

Just in case, I retrieved my shoes from my room. Back to the chapel. I sit on the floor, compose myself and breathe. Suddenly, I hear an alarm again. This time it's softer; it sounds like it's coming up through the floor of the altar. "The crypt?" I wonder. I get up, seeing if I can find the source. I track it out of the chapel and into the front foyer, where the alarm station reads "Fire Auditorium" Uh-oh. No sign of a response anywhere, so I head for a phone. On the way, I run into a security staff person. Yes, they know. Yes, they're working on it. I go back, alarm is off. I settle to prayer again. Breathe. Chirrup, chirrup…there's the alarm again.

I've been having trouble with distraction in prayer (which is the subject of a post for my conversation with Robin about Into the Silent Land!)- and all I could think was, "God, this is not funny." In the end I did manage to stay my hour. In silence. No further alarms.