Locked out

At 7:30 am this morning, my neighbor found me, soaked in sweat, in clothes that looked (and had been) slept in, sitting up against a wall, a backpack full of my belongings by my side. "Are you all right?" "I'm fine, except.." I had to admit I was locked out.

I'd walked to the church last night, to be an overnight host for an interfaith network that houses homeless families. My parish is hosting this week. A breviary, toothbrush and novel were all I had in my pack. Four boys, two mothers were staying, striving for some primacy. The oldest of the boys was the same age as my youngest, and I wondered how hard it must be to be uprooted from friends.

I spent the night on an air mattress in an un-air conditioned classroom, a fan sieving tiny sparkles of coolness from the air and sending them cart wheeling in my direction. As I sat cross-legged on the mattress to make my Examen, the bed wobbled underneath, sending me diving for my breviary and promptly tumbling my rosary and pen onto the floor. I wondered if I would have the equanimity of the women across the hall if everything under me was as uncertain as my bed.

I saw them onto the van at 6:30 this morning, helping to marshal the last of the boys into the back. In the process I managed to lock myself out of the school. I left the keys in the back sacristy and walked home. Halfway there, I realized I had no keys, and I was locked out of the house, too. No one was awake at home to let me in. So much for the cup of tea I wanted, or the shower…or any thought of making it to morning Mass.

I still don't know what it's like to be homeless, but this morning keys were handed me for more than doors.

Creed

Credo in unum Deum..."I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth. "

I wrote about public professions of faith for this week's column in the Standard & Times, wondering what these words might mean hic et nunc, in the here and now that is my life. This morning I listened to a passionate homilist asking us to listen hard to what God is calling us to do. If only my hands were as sure of the next note to sound as Rich Mullins' are in this video.

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H/T to Barb at SFO Mom for this modern rendition of the Credo; a version is cross posted at RevGalBlogPals.

Devotions

Fran of There will be bread, tagged for a meme, writes about devotions. She writes of her love for the rosary and of prayers in the morning, but I love her last choice: her writing, deliberately, from her faith, and her joy in a community to share it with.

Karl Rahner, SJ, who wrote eloquent and complex theological treatises, once told a student, "Beware the man of no devotions." and spoke movingly in his homilies of the graces of simple prayer. He, like Fran, was devoted to the rosary.

I often think of devotions as schools of prayer, training our minds to reach for God on a minute's notice, but I also find them to be ports in a storm. When I can pray nothing else, I can hold a handful of beads, or pull dry words from my shelf, and hold them out, in hopes that God will yet see, yet hear, yet be within me.

So what devotions am I devoted to?

Rosary I'll admit to a lifelong need for the beads. In my pocket, in my purse, in my drawer. Their weight holds me to the prayers, keeping them from flying away like a cast off newspaper. The olive wood rosary in my pocket now comes from Jerusalem, bought to replace one I gave away to a friend's sister who had need of it and beautifully blessed by a good Augustinian friend.

Scrabble Really - you can read what I wrote one Lent here about the discipline. It's a mirror, encouraging me to see moments of grace I might otherwise miss. "In my heart, can I view seven consonants as a gift? Can I view even the annoyances in my life as sources of grace? … You can only get so many points from your letters alone; winning depends on encounters with double and triple point squares. Grace is at play in our lives, enriching what we can do with our own limited resources. "

Liturgy of the Hours The psalms are in my bones, and this prayer etches them deeper still. It joins me to the Church through time and space. I've prayed these prayers for more than a quarter of a century, half my life. I'm blessed to have a community to pray them with these days.

And here I take heart from Fran in admitting this - writing. "If we are not supposed to cease praying, then perhaps one shouldn't cease speaking about prayer; speaking about it as well and as poorly as it given to one." - Karl Rahner, SJ from the forward to The Need and The Blessing of Prayer However well or poorly I do it - prayer or writing about prayer - Rahner's writing gives me hope that it matters. Writing for me is a way to meet God, and perhaps drag a few others along with me.

Column: Credo

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 5 August 2010.

We have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. — 1 Jn. 4:14

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty ....” Even as I type these words, I can see Our Mother of Good Counsel Church, her warm walls lit by the light streaming in through the stained glass windows, and hear the rustling as the congregation rises to its feet. I consider the bishops gathered at Nicea, grappling with expressing in words the inexpressible: God from God, light from light.

The familiar words of the Nicene Creed make me think “Church” like almost nothing else. Church local, Church universal, Church present, Church past. Perhaps because this is where I always say them, in church.

Honestly, when is the last time anyone walked up to you on the street and asked, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ … who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father?” And what would you answer?

I sometimes wonder if I could proclaim my faith with the courage of the martyrs, facing a hostile crowd, alone, outside the safe confines of my parish church. A few weeks ago, I had the chance to test those waters.

The heat on the packed subway platform was stifling. Trains rattled and rumbled on every track but ours. Sagging against the walls, draped over the benches, we waited in silent, wilting despair. On the very edge of the platform, his back to the tracks, appeared a tall man in a crisp dress shirt and tie, playing a banjo. He introduced himself as a retired minister here to preach the good news: God has sent His Son to save us.

No one appeared to be listening to him; the only good news most of us wanted to hear was the announcement that our train will be next to arrive. I marveled at his ability to preach to this stone-faced and apathetic audience, as cool and collected as if he were in the pulpit of some small New England church.

He finished and wordlessly began to pass out pamphlets. As he handed me one he bent over and asked if I might already believe in Jesus. For a moment, I wondered if I should say anything at all. I was trapped on the platform, and worried about engaging a stranger in that sort of conversation. Yet I couldn’t quite help myself. “I do,” I told him, unconsciously echoing my baptismal promises. He took my hand, said he was glad to have met a sister in Christ, and walked on, tears running down his face.

The train arrived and I got on, the words of the creed echoing in my head. It occurred to me that as unlikely as I was to have the opportunity again to profess my faith in words in the middle of the street, perhaps I was passing up a chance to make it manifest in my daily life.

Does my declaring “I believe in one God” change how I face the laundry, or is it apparent to anyone — even myself — that I hold that “He suffered, died, and was buried” in the aisle of the grocery store? Perhaps I can come to believe it does.

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We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father. — Nicene Creed

Photo is of Mission San Miguel.

California dreaming

I just spent a week at my dad's farm in the hills outside San Miguel, one of the original missions founded by Franciscan friar Junipero Serra. My brother, The Reverend, and his family, who live in the small house tucked up in the corner of the orchard, were away (camping in the redwoods with Crash and Barnacle Boy), so it was just my dad, his wife and me. It's the quietest place I've been in ages, even quieter than the old Jesuit novitiate at Wernersville, or the retreat house at Gloucester where I made the Exercises.

My recent reading of Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence left me envious of her hermitage in the Scottish highlands, and this trip only exacerbated my jealousy. No traffic noises drifted over the fields. The nearest highway is 8 miles away, the roads are dirt, gravel or chip sealed, limiting speed. No trains whistles shriek. I can hear the horse in the pasture down the road nicker, and the splash the resident swallows make when they hit the pool. The wind rustles in the dry grass, and makes the green olives clack like castanets.

In Pursuit of Silence, another summer read, George Prochnik writes about the thick silence of a Trappist chapel, dug deep into the earth, a silence that can disturb as easily as it can ease. Alone in the house one morning, I walked into the brick lined food cellar, earth surrounding it on fives sides and experienced that same sort of silence. Thick as a good hot chocolate, cool and a bit damp, absorbing even the sound of my breathing. This silence rings.

I went with Mike to Mission San Antonio this week, the only one of the missions still in a remote setting. It's a 30 mile drive out from highway 101 or a hair-raising drive of similar length from the coast highway, winding along the San Antonio river bed, and through the foothills of the Santa Lucia range. on the way back, with Mike at the wheel, I eyed these rippled golden — and empty — hills with an eye to a hermitage of my own.

My dream site would be tucked into the fold of a hill, with a view of mountains and ocean. Olive trees and vineyards rolls away from my small adobe house with the red tile roof. The bed is tucked into a loft, there is a simple kitchen, a comfortable chair and a fireplace A tiny chapel with warm frescoes, candles burning in front of a wood statue, and one small but exquisite stained glass rose window forms one side of a courtyard, with a fountain. A pool (a safety feature in these dry hills, a reservoir of water to fight a fire!) edged by fruit trees forms the other side, and a low wall keeps the goats and sheep out. There is a cool storage cellar under my croft. And there's wi-fi. But no TV. California dreaming....of an entirely different sort than the Mommas and Poppas envisioned.

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Reality check: I rather think my dream of a hermitage would need a practice green out back for Math Man, and easy access to good golfing. And frankly I suspect my E of a spouse would soon find such a place to be the closest thing to be had on earth to purgatory.