Column: A Dash of Fire and Water

The lines from Hopkins' are taken from The Wreck of the Deutschland (at the end of "Part the First"). Robin's sermon and Stratoz' ruminations on fire got me thinking about fire and water, and finally about water. Though The Wreck is nowise my favorite of Hopkins' poems, I get a kick out of his reference to St. Augustine as Austin -- it always strikes me as a somewhat flippant and familiar mode of address for a saint who seems so staid in my imagination.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 29 April 2010.

Wash me, I shall be whiter than snow. — Ps. 51: 7b


Last Wednesday morning I was decorously pedaling along, dressed for work in skirt and stockings, a hundred papers to grade weighing down my bike bags and spirit. Cruising slowly up to the stoplight with the rest of the morning rush hour traffic, I was running through the day’s to-do list, and mentally bewailing a day in which I would hardly have space to breathe, let alone eat lunch. My day had barely begun, and I felt as if I’d already given it away.

Mired in my fretful meditations, I was startled by the sound of water hitting my helmet. Was it starting to rain? I looked up to see a cloudless blue sky. Not even an errant tree branch dripping a last bit of the night’s rain broke the dome above me.

I looked down. Dry pavement beneath me. No lawn sprinklers sprinkling, no one hosing out a bin at the pizza place. Mystified, I rode on, wondering if I had imagined it. Suddenly a sparkling shower of droplets danced before my eyes and hit me square in the face — flung my way by the windshield wipers of the car in front of me.

Utterly oblivious to the asperges he was affording the bicyclist behind him, the gentleman in the maroon car continued to swish and spray his windshield. He was gaining a certain clarity on the world. So was I.

“With an anvil-ding
And with fire in him forge thy will
Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
Through him, melt him but master him still.”

With these words, priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., vividly contrasts St. Paul’s fast and fiery conversion with Augustine’s slow soaking transformation. My morning’s drenching similarly had a bit of both fire and water in it. I had been awash in a gorgeous spring morning, and yet so unaware I required Hopkins’ “anvil-ding” to rouse me to the possibilities of the moment.

With a gentle touch of humor and a literal dash of water, God had found a way to get me to look up, take a breath and see His face in creation. I did have a moment to breathe, and now the clarity to see that I had been squandering it being anxious about not having time to breathe.

When we smell smoke, or hear flames or feel water on our faces, we feel compelled to look for the source. And like the spray in my face, the source can be hard to find, but we are restless until we know where to turn our attention. So we look up, we look around. We call on God.

In God’s hands, fire and water are signs that are hard to ignore. We know ourselves to be fragile in the face of such elemental forces. Too, fire and water are messy vehicles of grace. They leave little in their wake unchanged, even in small doses. They both reveal what is inside, stripping off the outer layers that can cloud mind and sight.

My morning encounter with God on the road side was not as life-changing as Paul’s on the road to Damascus — though my water covered glasses left me momentarily as blind — but like Augustine, I found God soaking into my life, “stealing as Spring.” I rode into the rest of my day, still carrying the weight of papers to grade and an overfull appointment book, but with the sure knowledge of where my next breath was coming from.

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Touch my heart with this grace, O Lord. When I reach out in joy or in sorrow for the things of this world, grant that through them I may know and love You, their Maker and final home. — Karl Rahner, S.J., in Encounters With Silence

Lost and Found

I've lost 2 pairs of prescription reading glasses in the last two months. One vanished after a day spent in a library working on an article. Somehow they didn't end up back in my briefcase -- which makes me wonder if I left them on a shelf somewhere. Will they moulder there until someone else wanders through the same spot in the stacks? And just how long might that be? I've been in some dusty corners lately.

The second pair vanished last night, seemingly into thin air. They were in my bag when we left for a student event, never used, but gone when I got home. I opened my bag but once, to check my cell phone at intermission, at which point the lenses clearly made their escape. The first lost pair was as old as Crash, and held together by prayer alone (the bailing wire having given way long ago), I didn't mourn their loss much. This funky pair, a one of a kind pair handmade in Germany, I adore. And more to the point, with almost 100 papers to grade this week, reading glasses are a necessity, not an accessory. So , I spent much of the day struggling for detachment and trying not to worry about what I would do if they did not surface (besides stock up on Advil for the inevitable headaches that would follow).

Thank heavens for Barnacle Boy, Math Man and the college patrol officer, who searched the balcony of the theater this afternoon and found...my glasses. Si quaeris miracula....

Column: Orans or not?

When I sent this piece in, I noticed that at this time last year I wrote about stillness too. There is something about the chaos April stirs into my life, or in the academic calendar, that makes me long for the still, humid days of summer.

While writing this, I asked my FB friends for their thoughts — the responses were as varied as my friends — which led to the litany of bodily postures for prayers: We can sit, stand, kneel, walk, dance, bow, genuflect, lie prostrate...

I tend to walk in prayer quite a bit (and I'm not alone), a posture that Ignatius leaves off his list, but suggests for reflecting on meditation. Patient Spiritual Director reads this omission less as a concern about walking being too "itchy" for deep meditation, as that praying deeply while walking could lead to a (non-metaphorical) fall! My feet know the paths I walk when I pray well...so not a worry for me.

I wanted to write more about walking and prayer, but space kept me focussed on still prayer postures. Another piece is brewing about prayer on the move!

The full quote from George Herbert is: “[pray] not in a huddling or slubbering fashion, or scratching the head, or spitting.” Somehow I think the spitting advice was helpful for my current readership?

I was fascinated (OK, stunned) while doing a bit of research for this piece that some people think the orans position was invented out of whole cloth in the 1960s by radical liturgists.

(The photo is of a 4th century gold glass medallion of St. Agnes, her hands in the orans position found embedded in the walls of a Roman catacomb.)

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 22 April 2010.

May my prayer stand as incense before You, my uplifted hands as the evening offering. Ps 141:2

Final exams are looming large in my students’ lives these days. Much is at stake, many of them have returned to the classroom from time spent in the Peace Corps or working in community health care to prepare to apply to medical school. A poor grade in my class will put an end to those plans.

So there is a steady parade through my office, wanting to review the details of computing pH or to understand why a molecule behaves as it does. But often the question that brings the pilgrims to my door is broader, and deeper: “how should I study for this class?”

One of the things that I tell them is that cognitive research has shown that effective studying is not all in your mind, but that it matters what your body is doing as well. That if you study listening to loud music, you’ll do better on an exam if you listen to loud music while taking it — and of course, the converse.

Contemplative traditions have long known about the intimate relationship between body, mind and soul in prayer. And men and women of faith have struggled with the question, “what should I do when I pray?” It matters.

Screwtape, C.S. Lewis’ sharp-witted devil, advises his nephew to persuade his quarry that “bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget…that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.” I’m not sure that Screwtape is as fictional a character as Lewis would like us to think. All too often I find myself making the sign of the cross to begin grace at dinner — while dashing into the kitchen to grab the napkins the teen-aged table setter forgot.

Does it matter that I’ve not taken that extra second to sit and collect myself with my family? After all, the words of thanksgiving are being said, certainly God understands that the adolescent boys He created are ravenous.

True, but I wonder if I understand. The right words, even the right thoughts, are perhaps not sufficient. Early Church father Gregory of Nyssa pointed out, “His divinity is such that it cannot be adequately manifested through verbal signs, no matter how exalted they are.” Am I saying all I could say when I stick to the letters of the prayer and ignore what my body is doing?

Long before C.S. Lewis’ tongue-in-cheek manual on how to fall from grace, both Tertullian and Origen had definitive advice on what posture to take in prayer, echoing the psalmist. Stand, with arms outstretched, eyes uplifted, carrying in the body the very image of the stance that the soul should have in prayer.

There are many postures we can use in prayer. We can sit, stand, kneel, walk, dance, bow, genuflect, lie prostrate. Our hands can be raised, or folded, or held open in our laps. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola lists many ways to be still in prayer, and recommends none, except that which brings you closer to God. He further advises not being “itchy” in prayer — if you encounter God while kneeling, don’t suddenly decide to stand up.

Christian contemplatives, from the times of the desert fathers on, have counseled bodily stillness in the presence of God. Drawing on these traditions, Augustinian Father Martin Laird, in Into the Silent Land, offers clear and excellent advice on still and stable postures for prayer. Be firmly grounded and upright and open. (Eighteenth century English poet and mystic George Herbert put it more bluntly, “[pray] not in a huddling or slubbering fashion, or [while] scratching the head.”) It’s hard to imagine a better stance for body or soul.

So I’m on the alert for Screwtape and his ilk, resisting the temptation to pray with anything less than the whole of what God has given me: mind, spirit, soul — and body.

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I will beg God our Lord for grace that all my intentions, actions, and operations may be directed purely to the praise and service of His Divine Majesty. St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises [46]

Hot topics

So...Saturday night Crash, I and his girlfriend were in the kitchen talking about chocolate and the amount of radiation it contains (it's a good potassium source, and hence a significant source of radiation exposure from potassium-40 -- enough to set off radiation detectors!) I pointed out that they, too, were radioactive, and curling up with the cat on the living room couch to watch a movie had exposed them to yet more radiation. Sleeping with another human, it turns out, adds to your risk. Crash snaps back with, "another good reason to be celibate!" After we all got through laughing on the floor (celibacy is perhaps not a topic frequently discussed with your girlfriend when you are on the verge of 16), it was generally agreed that this conversation would blog. But on whose? It had to be on Crash's...why, you ask?

As it turns out, Crash is an Ignatianphile (probably not a surprise living with me as he does). He's been reading Fr. James Martin SJ's The Jesuit Guide to (almost) Everything. The first installment of his review of the book looks at Fr. Martin's take on chastity. The follow-up post? Argument for Celibacy #245...with the kicker: "So if you don't want cancer, join the Jesuits!"

AMDG

Column: Murmuring Octaves

I really do hear shouts in my head when I encounter this passage at Evening Prayer in the Office! Tony is infamously in a hurry for Morning Prayer to start - he needs to be at work by 9 down the road. He's also five minutes faster than any other priest in the priory when presiding at Mass -- and manages it without seeming rushed and giving a cogent homily. Needless to say we tease him unmercifully. And yes, I have his nihil obstat on this piece....

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 15 April 2010.

Every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: JESUS CHRIST IS LORD! — Philippians 2:11


“707, 427, 440,” Father Tony rumbles, thumbing through the breviary and calling out the page numbers for Morning Prayer. “It’s still Sunday.” It is the fourth day of the octave, the eight days the Church devotes to this great feast, a week of Sundays following the Sunday. Father Tony, like most of us gathered, has other places to be by 9 a.m. The sooner we are all on the same page, the sooner we can be out the door.

After the thundering glory of Easter’s liturgies, it’s always a wonder to me that these workday Sundays do not feel more awkward than they do. I’m lugging a tote bag overflowing with papers to grade, lectures and meetings are twined around my calendar like invasive vines, yet for these few minutes of my day, alleluias arise and resound from the walls. Garbed to toil in the kitchen, suddenly I am pulled into the feast as a guest. For me, at least, this week of Sundays is a swirling mix of expectations and hospitality, of sacred and secular.

I wonder what the first days after the resurrection must have been like for the disciples. Confusing, I imagine. Terrifying, I am certain. But Jesus comes again and again to them, opening doors that remained locked even by those who saw Him and believed, offering bread and fish and gentle humor. The Church echoes this hospitality, allowing us to soak again and again in these Easter mysteries.

In the midst of these warm invitations to rejoice, to join in the great feast, to know our redemption, there are other invitations being extended, harder questions being asked. The same questions that those first disciples must have asked themselves run through my mind. Jesus was gone from the tomb, where should I look for Him now? He has risen from the dead, how does this change what I have to do today? I suspect many of the disciples were as torn between the demands of the everyday and the intensity of the events of the previous days, as I am now.

Every time I see this passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians my mind, conditioned by modern email etiquette to read all caps as a shout, turns up the volume, like the DJ at a raucous party. Yet the very next line reminds me “God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Easter Sunday trumpets He is Lord, but in these quieter octave days it murmurs: feed the hungry, heal the sick, let the Word be heard through all the Earth.

This year the flowering trees came into their glory for Easter and already they are giving way to a faint haze of new green leaves. No longer distracted by the brilliant hues adorning bare branches, we see again the winter’s detritus — the dead foliage and old leaves, the bits of trash blown into the garden by winter winds. The first triumphant beauty has faded, leaving a gentler growth in its wake, one that calls us to weed and clean, to tend what has been planted, in expectation of a yet greater glory to come in the summer.

What are we tending now that was planted in Lent and set its fruit in the burgeoning triumph of Easter? Can I sing alleluia, rejoice, and be glad — and get out the door to work in the vineyards before 9? I trust that God is at work in us all.

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This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad, alleluia. — Response to the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours for the octave of Easter