No more words

I come home from the 
soaring in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the refrain which is God 
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still 
and plain:
No more words.

— Rainer Marie Rilke (translated by Joanne Macy and Anita Barrows)



I've emerged from the roaring of the semester, stepped out of the torrents of song.  It might not be as mystical an experience as Rilke is evoking here, but like Karl Rahner, S.J. who 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" the daily is all that I have — a pragmatic mysticism.

I am still and plain at the moment.  Hobbled by my injured ankle, I am stilled.  No mad last minute Christmas shopping dashes for me.  I am plain, dressed in what accommodates the orthopedic boot which cradles my left ankle.  And I have no words.  On Thursday night, my voice inexplicably and inexorably began to vanish.

It is making me think of those last stages of labor, when you can't speak through the contractions any longer. I think of Mary laboring to give birth, her verbal "fiat" now silenced, she has now surrendered utterly and wordlessly to the workings of God within her.

So I am silent for now.  To see what worlds are forming in my heart.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night.
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my heart.

— Meister Eckhart in Expands his being (trans. by Daniel Landinsky in Love Poems from God)

Column: People Look Up! (With apologies to Eleanor Farjeon)

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 17 December 2012.

O Lord, we look to you; your name and your title are the desire of our souls. (Is. 26:8b)

I love the music of Advent. At a time when most people seem to be dreaming of white Christmases and Silent Nights, I’m tuned into Isaiah, at least as Handel imagined him. A firm voice calling out, “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.”

I listen to these songs and carols, these hymns and chants, because I long to know what it is I — and all creation — awaits. I listen because I want to know want; I want to grasp what it means to thirst for the living God.

“People look east, the time is near, of the dawning of the year…” pipes my car’s radio. This fall, I’ve been practicing looking, not east, but up. My return to teaching after a nine-month sabbatical leave proved to be intensely busy. All too often I’ve been mired in a swamp of details, my concentration tattered and fluttering in the breeze. I abandon an unfinished email and my tea on my desk to answer a student’s question, only to return two hours later to find both my train of thought and tea long gone cold.

Late one October afternoon, on a dash to the grocery store, wearily running through what I still had to tick off the day’s list, I happened to look up. The warm sun was washing over the front of the old parish school across the street, and my eye followed the lofty thunderheads piled into soft peaks up and up, untold miles into the atmosphere. My breath caught. The heavens declare the glory of God….

It was as if my tangled, confined heart could reach up and stretch into this gloriously infinite space, into God’s very being. I breathed, no less weary, no less harried, but somehow at rest.

Now each time I walk outside, I’ve been reminding myself to look up. To practice stretching into eternity, to extend hands and heart and soul toward the Creator of this firmament that surrounds me, yet does not confine. And each night I’ve been bundling up and going outside. To stand in the backyard, or on the driveway, and look up.

The cold brings a sharp serenity to the world outside. I find it seems easier to listen for the still, clear voice of God, to sense the breath of the Spirit stirring in the darkness, to hear the echoes of the prophets in these night hours.

To stand in the night to pray has a long history in the Church. As early as the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom spoke of monks who were roused in the depths of the night “to sing the prophetic hymns” and pray.

The word “desire” is thought to derive from the Latin siderus, star. Desires come to us from above, descend on us from the stars. Each night, when I venture out, I look up at the stars, a vast spatter of sparkling suns, of which Isaiah tells us that God knows every one of their names, and marches them around the sky like an army.

Like the monks of old, I sharpen my ears with the prophetic hymns of Advent. And in the depths of these dark Advent days, I practice looking up. In the Acme parking lot, at the stoplight on the corner of College and Haverford road, in my back yard, on the driveway. That I might see will descend, know what I desire, hear the voice of the One who calls me as He does the stars. The eternal, living God. Emmanuel. God with us. People, look up!

---

Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim
One more light the bowl shall brim,
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as sun and moon together.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the star, is on the way.
 – Eleanor Farjeon from “People, Look East”

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Photo is of dawn at Eastern Point Retreat House.

On reading Rahner in the emergency room

Several years ago, on an 8-day retreat, my director asked me if I had seen something in the news. (The papers were laid out every day in the library, so it was perfectly possible to have done so.) "No," I told her, "I never look at the news while I'm on retreat.  It's a distraction for me."

"Ah," she replied, "but sometimes you read things differently on retreat."

I didn't read the paper while on that retreat, and haven't since, but her question has stuck with me. It surfaced again this week when I found myself treated to an ambulance ride to the Georgetown Medical Center emergency room.

I've given Advent its due.  Last week I gave an Advent evening of reflection, the week before I went to an Advent retreat.  I've written Advent reflections (here, here and here). It's been fruitful, reflective.  Still, I would like to suggest that if you are really looking for a potent extended meditation on Advent, you try hanging out in the emergency room for a while.

I've been re-reading Karl Rahner SJ's Advent homilies, in which he suggests that we are always in Advent, always living provisionally, waiting for what we see only dimly now, but know will one day arrive with a breath-taking clarity.  I read Rahner — and thereby Advent — differently in that liminal space, waiting on a gurney literally in the doorway between the damp winter day outside and the warmth of the ER, waiting for what I could see only dimly.

The ER is by its nature a provisional space.  Admittance is provisional.  I waited on the triage nurse's decision as to whether I merited a bed.  Diagnoses are provisional.  I waited on the X-ray results.  Treatments are provisional.  Would I be able to walk once my foot was immobilized?  To be comfortable in that space, I had to be willing to be, as Rahner would say, comfortable with the provisional.  To be willing to surrender autonomy as well as certainty.

Can I be comfortable with the provisional, not as a some-times thing, as it was in the ER, but as a way of life?  I looked at the exhausted woman who has returned for the third time today, still not knowing what is wrong. The provisional has stretched her reserves beyond her capacity. The young father with his wilted toddler son, draped over his shoulder, pacing and waiting to be seen.  On a pilgrimage that takes him round and round the waiting room.  This is not an easy choice.

Can I read Advent as less of a waiting space filled with comfortable chairs and soft music, and more as a provisional place that pulls and pushes us at paces we may not prefer?  Too fast. Too slow.

Provisionally, yes.

---

I'm still in the provisional - off to see the ankle/foot specialist tomorrow to get a better sense of the damage. The photo is of my foot, but that's not the ER!  I'm in the lobby of the Georgetown University hotel, waiting for Crash Kid to come pick me up.  And if you must know, I slipped on the stairs between Old North and the Dahlgren chapel and landed badly.

Phaith: Las Posadas - can I make room?

Will I make room for Christ when he knocks at the door? And for his companions?  My December column up at Phaith!

When I was in high school, I spent a memorable Christmas at my grandfather’s house outside of Oaxaca, a mile high in the mountains of Mexico. It was a long trip, more than a week’s travel time in all, perhaps as long as might have taken Joseph and Mary to traverse the 70 miles between Nazareth and Bethlehem.  

My mother was not pregnant, but she was encumbered with six children, the youngest of whom was only 4. No donkeys either. We took the train to Mexico City — the lot of us crammed into three compartments for two nights, the conductor proudly announcing he had found seating for “¡ocho!” in the dining car at each meal — then drove a wheezy rented van through the mountains to Oaxaca. I don’t imagine it was an easy journey for my parents, despite the joys to be had when we finally arrived. 

Read the rest at Philly archdiocese's online magazine: Phaith.

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Photo is from Wikimedia and used under a Creative Commons license.

O Adonai

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,

qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,

et ei in Sina legem dedisti:

veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O sacred Lord of ancient Israel, who showed yourself to Moses in the burning bush, who him the holy law on Sinai mountain:  come, stretch our your mighty hand to set us free. — from Evening Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours, December 18

The full sun in the backyard today was a welcome sight, stretching out its rays to bathe the floor in light.  A bridge to the holy.