What to wear to Mass: Pajamas

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water –

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.

— Jane Hirshfield "A Cedary Fragrance" from Given Sugar, Given Salt

I spent last night as portress at the local shelter. Three little babies in residence, all of whom woke up simultaneoulsy at 10 pm, sending their mothers — gathered wearily at the table for a late dinner — scrambling back to their rooms, and thankfully not waking the overdone two year old who had finally surrendered to sleep.

The weather was unexpectedly cool and as midnight crept around, I wished for the sleeping bag I bring in the winter to spread on the cot by the door.  I pulled an extra blanket from the cupboard, and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up.

The van came and picked up the guests at 6:25 and I did a last sweep of the common room to tidy up the coffee making gear before dashing across the parking lot to make the 6:30 am Mass, wearing what I'd slept in the night before.  My companion on the night shift, who spent the night on a bed set up in one of the offices down the hall, was standing by her car running a brush through her hair.  Having forgotten mine, I joked that at least one of us would be presentable.

The whole scene reminded me of the morning services in some of the Buddhist temples we stayed at in Japan, people coming from every direction at the sound of the bell.  My colleague, who spent time in a Buddhist monastery, recalled that one day the abbot sighed to him in a conference, "at least you could wash your face before you come!"

I had at least washed my face, even if I was wearing what I had slept in. And much of the night was spent practicing making the unwanted, wanted.

---

And yes, I went to Mass in sneakers wearing slept-in clothes with bed tousled hair, smelling faintly of l'eau de baby drool and I still believe in the Real Presence.  I washed my face, O Lord!

Listen to Jane Hirshfield read "A Cedary Fragrance"

Writing en plein air

My sister-in-law painting en plein air

I've been working outside today, doing the hard work of structuring a sustained piece of writing. I suspect I have made progress.  I may even be able half done.  And it's been delightful to work in this enclosed space.  There are risks as well as delight in writing "en plein air"

Chipmunks. Their delight in the cherries falling onto the patio is not dimmed by my presence or the cats.  I looked up at one point to find myself eye to eye with one.

Teenagers.  Not mine, the LAX playing young man behind me having a loud inappropriate phone conversation with his friend via speakerphone.  What happened to texting?

Bugs. There are tiny mites everywhere, including, I suspect, inside my computer.  St. Isidore, pray for me. 

More Bugs.  Asian tiger mosquitoes.  Active during the day.  

Yet more bugs.  In my thermos of iced tea.  Caffeine, now with added protein.  

A rule for anchoresses: cats allowed

I'm trying to put together a piece on the eremetic life - a long essay in which I see the seeds of a book.  This morning, I'm trying to dig into the introduction of the piece, I feel as if I have a thousand threads I could grab to follow into the writing, but no good way to figure out which one to choose.

John Howard Griffin, Thomas Merton's long-time friend and biographer, spent six months living in Merton's hermitage after his death, reading his diaries and notes, soaking in solitude both internally and externally, using the solitude as a lens to see more deeply into Merton's life.

I'm outside today in the hermitage that is my back yard, alone until tonight, trying to use the solitude and stillness of the day as a lens to pick through the many threads and find one compelling enough to bring someone else into the "immense silence."

---

"You shall not possess any beast, my dear sisters, except only a cat." — from the Ancrene Wisse, Part 8: Of Domestic Matters [228]

I've been re-reading the Ancrene Wisse - a handbook for novice anchoresses written in the late 14th century, which talks about the inner rule which must be always kept, and the outer rule, which helped foster the inner rule, but ultimately falls away.  The advice about cats (and cows) is part of the outer rule!

I have Fluffy. Who proudly brought me a garden pest, then caterwauled when I declined to write with it at my feet.  No cows.

A wink

I moved my office outside yesterday.  What do I need to work?  A stack of books (A Pernicious Sort of Woman, on late medieval canon law and religious women living without an approved rule - the title is alas a quote from the 2nd Lateran Council), pen, note pads, laptop, reading glasses, and a chilled thermos of aqueous caffeine. My breviary, for yes, I'm a religious woman living without an approved rule.  And of course, the office cat.

Ignatian Spiritualiy is celebrating its fifth anniversarty this month, and have put out a beautifully designed flipboard magazine with fifty two of their favorite posts. I had missed this one, God Winks, by Andy Otto when it first appeared.  Working out here is like being at a cocktail party, with someone I share inside jokes with, winking from across the room.  Wink. I look up to see three baby squirrels emerge from the nest in my neighbors tree, out to practice their walking on wire technique, chittering loudly and harrassing each other to no end.  The race out to the end of the wires, screech to a halt and use the pear tree to turn around.  (Mostly successfully, though there have been some near misses.) Wink.  A chipmunk pops up from the fern, delighted to have found a ripe wild cherry in the garden.

I am reading Follow the Ecstasy, a biography of Thomas Merton's last years - as he moved gradually to a hermitage on the monastery grounds, exploring the boundaries between the monastic life and the eremetic life, testing his limits and his community's limits.  As I sit in this green enclosure, alone, alternating between tending to the laundry, the last bits of paperwork from the academic year, my writing and my prayer, I'm wondering if I've not undertaken a similar experiment.

The Clothes of Glory

As I waited in the back of church with the pastor and deacon for the Vigil Mass to begin yesterday, the commentator announced that we were celebrating the Fifth Sunday of Easter.  The pastor leaned over and murmured, "that can't be right, is it the 6th?"  "It's the 7th," I assured him.  It's easy to lose count as our memories of the celebration of Easter shift into the "more than a month ago" bin of our memories.  I was sure, because I am 'preaching' this weekend - having written a homily for the 7th Sunday of Easter in Naked and You Clothed Me.

As I rode my bike to run errands yesterday, I was aware of all the people out and about on a gloriously exquisite summer day.  Children, babies in strollers, my almost 80 year-old neighbor walking the dog. It's easier to notice them when I'm moving slower.  And I'm more alert to my surroundings overall when I ride.  Bikes are a vulnerable method of transportation, as I share the road with cars operated by drivers who are not all as attuned as I am to the surroundings.  I cried, "no..." as two cars (neither of whom stopped at the stop sign) came within a foot of colliding.  Tight inside their bubbles, no one heard me yell — or my sigh of relief.

I saw too, the people who the people in their automotive bubbles are well buffered against.  The elderly African-American man struggling with his scooter in the parking lot of the dialysis center, trying to maneuver around potholes and curbs to get to the bus stop on Lancaster Ave.  The exhausted nursing aids walking an extra half mile along a road with no sidewalks, because the trolley fare drops at the station one before the hospital. The clerk from the 24 hour convenience store at the gas station, his bright orange smock rumpled, sagging against the rough hewn electric pole, waiting for the bus.  Bike riding is kenotic.

The rides and this Sunday's reading have me pondering C.S. Lewis' essay The Weight of Glory again. We are to be clothed in glory, we are cherished children of God.  Each of us. Yet somehow we chose to clothe ourselves in hard shells, insulating us from the noise and sounds and smells of our brothers and sisters. We think, as do the people in this video, that the clothes that matter, the clothes that draw us to be attentive, are the clothes of respectability.  Not the cloak we all wear, the glory we are clothed in by Christ's death and resurrection.

"We hear over and over again in the scriptures the promise that we shall be clothed in glory. In his essay The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis tries to help us imagine what glory might look like on us, as if it were a cloak we are trying on now to see how it might fit on us in eternity. What might it be like, Lewis asks, to stand before God and have God appreciate us for who we are, what we have accomplished—to see in God’s face how we are cherished, to know in our depths that God rejoices in what He has made? 

It’s an overwhelming thought. Even so, Lewis proposes flipping the contemplation around to ponder what is, at least to me, an even more oversetting reality: none of us are ordinary, that “[n]ext to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” Imagine the driver that just cut you off, the neighbor whose political stance you find untenable, or the homeless woman foraging just after dawn in the dumpster behind the grocery store standing before God wrapped—as are you—in a garment of glory and light. Would you still blast your horn, tell them off, or walk past? Or would you be drawn to see them as they are, images of the glorified Christ, cherished creations of the God of glory?" — from a homily for the 7th Sunday of Easter, cycle A