What's not to do?

Sometime midweek tasks were landing on my desk (and in my inbox and tossed onto the kitchen counter and...) at such a rate that I couldn't even manage to jot them on my to-do list. I felt like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice scene from Fantasia, the pails — uh, tasks — multiplying with abandon.

I scribbled reminders on post-its, ran through mental lists of emails I had to answer as I dashed up the stairs from meetings to teach class and reminded people to remind me later (just in case). Half-forgotten tasks lurk around mental corners and jump out at me at the least provocation. (Write check for choral uniforms ambushed me even as I sat here on the sofa nominally relaxing.) I keep looking over my mental shoulder — sure there's something major I've forgotten to do stalking me. (So far so good, but now that I mention it, am I supposed to cantor this weekend?)

As I was flipping through a magazine (which promised a month of stress-free dinners, if only people in my house would eat pork loin with sauteed cauliflower and capers), one piece of advice caught my eye: write an "ignore list."

I wonder if what I need more than a to-do list is a not-to-do list. What can I let go of before I even pick it up? or spend mental space and energy on coralling?

(P)haith

The Philadelphia archdiocese not only has a new archbishop (who rumor has it is a Star Trek fan), but a new archdiocesan publication. I've yet to see a print copy, but this is modern evangelization and so "there's an app for that": on the iPad, and on the web. My article is here. (If the text in the call out looks familiar to anyone who's made the Exercises, that's because it's St. Ignatius, which the article makes clear!)

And while I may look dressed up on top, the photo was taken this summer, and I've got on capris and tennis shoes along with the pearls!

Zen and the art of mother maintenance

I'll admit straight off that I've never read Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Excavating my desk this afternoon, I found a note to myself which says only, "Zen and the art of mother maintenance." Would that I could remember exactly what I meant by that!

Could it have something to do with the conversation I had two weeks ago with Patient Spiritual Director in which I said I wanted to find a Carthusian abbey? Where my cell is sacrosanct?

Breathing space has been in short supply (as the lack of blog posting suggests!) and my guys have been doing their best on the home front to help me maintain some equanimity. Math Man had a class tonight and as the boys and I cleaned up after dinner, we talked about who had what for homework. I told them I had a column to write and they promised me at least one uninterrupted hour (and gave me two!). At this point in my life, a more cherished gift than roses or chocolates for the maintenance of their wishfully contemplative mother. It's an art!

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Photo of 1954 Triumph. Used under Creative Commons license.

Pneuma

Classes began on Monday. I'm a veteran of 48 first days of school (will I ever grow up?), I know what to do to be ready the night before. My books were collected, my lunch organized, my clothes laid out (though no shiny new saddle shoes). Alarm set, check.

My alarm went off on time, but hearing Math Man in the shower, I hit the snooze button. And snooze I did. I didn't notice that Math Man was done, and long gone downstairs to have breakfast — or that my alarm was gently chiming — before I woke up again. Yipes. Well, at least I was organized, I could still make morning prayer.

At 8:13 I was ready to sail out the door. Math Man offered to put some air in my bike tires, but I demurred. "I really need that prayer time with my community." I reached for my keys. Which. were. not. there. Or any of the next four logical places I looked. No keys, no way to (un)lock the bike. And no morning prayer.

"Breathe," I chanted under my breath. I hadn't had my keys since before the hurricane hit. Where would I have tucked them on Thursday afternoon? My contemplative stance is fraying fast. Breathe. I finally located them tucked into the bag I taken to the academic fair. Too late for morning prayer, but still in time to get set up for my class on spaces for contemplation. Breathe.

Math Man offered again to add some air to my tires. I decided my soul could use some pnuema as well. Now. Not when I got to my office. I pulled a chair from the garage (stored there against the winds of the hurricane), set it on the lawn, pulled my breviary out of my bag and prayed morning prayer. (It was the feast of the beheading of St. John the Baptist, by comparison, I was having a fine day.) Breathe. Math Man pushed air into my tires, the Spirit gently wafted Her way into my soul. Air. Spirit. Breath.

My bike ran more smoothly with full tires. My day felt less frantic with a full soul (though it wasn't at all smooth!).

Breathe in me O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may all be holy; Act in me O Holy Spirit, that my work, too, may be holy; Draw my heart O Holy Spirit, that I love but what is holy; Strengthen me O Holy Spirit, to defend all that is holy; Guard me, then, O Holy Spirit, that I always may be holy. Amen. — Prayer of St. Augustine

Column: Calming storms

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that they aren't after you. Could I extrapolate that to just because I'm anxious, doesn't mean that there isn't actually something to be anxious about? Who knows, but out of 4 classes this week, I've had serious tech fails in 3. The teaching week is over for me, but next week brings travel for the course on contemplation. I'm about to discover the difference between being a retreatant on a silent retreat and a director on a silent retreat. I suspect the former is more restful than the latter.

The music is Margaret Rizza's Exaudi Nos Domine:

Exaudi nos Domine. Dona nobis pacem. Hear us, O Lord. Grant us peace.

Just listening to it, calms the storms....

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 1 September 2011.

A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” The wind ceased and there was great calm. Mk 4: 37-39

The wind runs up the canyon most afternoons at my dad’s, sending anything imprudently still hung out to dry sailing into the hillside rosemary patch.

Late one day, I sought the solitude of the old lath house by the south pasture. The silence was so profound I could sense the wind gathering strength at the bottom of the canyon, a mile or more away.

I could hear each gust hit the almond trees at the canyon's mouth, set the live oaks shivering 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 at Wernersville in the depths of a winter's night is this silent, this still, this pregnant with possibility.

Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote of the way in which silence teaches us to be in “the grip of the present,” to be alert and aware of what might be possible in this moment. The contemplative, Merton notes, attends closely to what is, not what might blow through the door in the next moment. It is a silence that doesn’t cling to itself, that doesn’t “demand light instead of darkness,” or even, I suspect, soundlessness instead of noise. It “waits on the Word of God.” Silence is open to possibility.

I’m tucked in my silent study at the moment, literally and figuratively in the calm before the storm. Hurricane Irene’s clouds shroud the sky, and a multitude of new students are ready to pour through the college’s hallways, their voices rolling like thunder off of the stone walls. Like the disciples bobbing in a tiny boat on the Sea of Galilee, I’m anxious about possibilities. About my flood prone basement, about the course I’m teaching for the first time, about the tumult the fall will inevitably bring.

St. Cyril of Alexander, a fifth century bishop and theologian, is not critical of the storm wracked disciples’ nerves — and perhaps by extension, mine. He suggests instead that such anxiety “sharpens our sense of what is to come.” My start of the semester jitters remind me, even after a quarter century of teaching, to be attentive to what is unfolding in the hubbub. We become watchful in storms of all sorts, alert to ports where we can shelter, open to stepping into places where we can be still with God. Storms, too, are open to possibility.

The winds of Irene batter at my study window and questions from students and colleagues pop in and out of my inboxes. Suddenly I am sharply aware of my need for Jesus to speak His Word to the churning sea of my life, “Quiet!” and keenly alert for God’s invitation to be still within Him. I can’t cling to the silence much longer; I wait instead on the possibilities.

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No storm can shake my inmost calm,While to that refuge clinging;Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,How can I keep from singing? — From the traditional hymn “How can I keep from singing?”