In search of the mute button

I started a last post in the book discussion that Robin and I have been having off and on since the summer. That post (like my prayer) is still in pieces, but I decided that posting this bit from the cutting room floor might help me see more clearly where the piece for Robin's blog is going, as well as the piece on distractions for my column in the Standard.

The photo is of a snowstorm on the Long Retreat; Braces Rock in the background.

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On Friday it will have been two years since I finished the Spiritual Exercises. Blizzards came and went over the time I was on retreat at Gloucester, and the current run of snowy weather brings with it memories of the profound silence that enveloped those days.

When I came back from the 30-days, I found the relentless soundtrack of suburban Philly to be, well, relentless. I sought out pockets of silence where I could find them. The radio in my car remained resolutely off. Television had even less appeal than the radio. Everything was a bit too loud, a bit too bright and a bit too bristly. Urban Spiritual Director summed it up well, my skin felt as if it were on inside out.

The sense of being battered by the soundscape gradually faded, but the other night as I slid through the snow shrouded darkness to retrieve Barnacle Boy from the far side of the township, Elton John spilling from the speakers, it returned full force. I hit off on the radio, and drank of the bracing silence.

My prayer of late has felt tattered, like a flag snapping in the wind until its edges shred. My to-do list plays in my head like a top 100 countdown when I sit to pray, and I can't seem to find the mute button. In Into the Silent Land (the book that Robin and I have been discussing on our blogs over the last few months) Marty Laird suggests that distractions in prayer are an "education by ordeal," a metaphor I would definitely endorse at this point.

I can't control the weather — real or metaphorical, exterior or interior — but perhaps I can seek out more of those pockets of silence. To turn off what I can, and contemplate in stillness what I cannot. To become what Catherine deHueck Doherty called a poustinik (after a dweller in the poustinia, the desert): someone who walks in inner solitude, immersed in the silence of God.

Column: God of the Untidy

"We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may be sometimes deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God's." C. S. Lewis in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

My attempts to keep neat while cooking were not only fruitless, but made the process more difficult. And it made me wonder how often I want things neat and tidy and above all predictable in my relationship with God. But whose dignity am I trying to protect?

This reflection appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 27 January 2010.

I went down to the potter's house and there he was, working at the wheel. Can I not do to you, house of Israel, as this potter has done? says the Lord. Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, house of Israel. — Jer. 18:3,6

Snow days smell of cinnamon in my house. The sudden gift of a day without classes or tech call for the latest drama production lends itself to slow things, like the baking of cinnamon rolls, which must be left to rise three times.

As the snow sifted over the driveway, I pulled out flour and butter and eggs and set to work, not bothering to put on an apron. Soon the counters looked as if the storm had moved inside, and my attempts to knead the bread without getting flour on my just-washed jeans were falling flat. The neater I tried to be, the harder it was to really stretch and shape the dough. And every effort I made to keep the cinnamon filling from dotting my pristine white turtleneck went for naught.

As I stretched and turned the dough I thought about the images in Isaiah and Jeremiah of God as the potter. Of the wheel turning as God's feet kept time on the treadle. Of God's hands covered in wet clay, His face speckled with the spray from the wheel. And His hands firmly shaping and reshaping, until His creation emerges.

These images remind me that God does not hold us — His creations — at arms length. God is actively shaping me, unafraid of getting splattered in the process. And it made me wonder if I am too worried about being careful with God, too worried about the mess to allow God to shape and reshape me.

Dumping the dough on the counter after its first rise, I could feel the warm dough come to life under my hands. In Genesis we are reminded that from the beginning we are made from the clay of the earth, by God's hand, in God's likeness. And if I am made in God's own image, I imagine I am also made to work in clay and earth and flour, to get my hands dirty.

In a reflection on physical labor, The Practice of Carrying Water, Barbara Brown Taylor writes of cleaning the bathrooms in her parish's homeless shelter: "Scrubbing the bowls one by one, I thought of Saint Francis kissing lepers...I thought of Mother Teresa bathing the dying of Calcutta. By the time I reached the third bowl I was entirely out of spiritual fantasies, free to remember that...I was made of the same stuff as other humans."

We are all clay. Being potters in the image of the Potter, we are not meant to hold each other at arms length either. Am I unwilling to dig into the earth and do some of the labor God does? To think first about others and less about what I look like?

By the time I reached the third rise of the rolls, I was also out of spiritual reflections — and covered in flour from head to toe. I finally gave in and simply delighted in making a mess of counters and clothes both. Trying to keep the mess at arms length was ultimately impossible. God isn't worried about keeping His hands clean, why should I?

God our Father, gifts without measure flow from your goodness to bring us your peace. Our life is your gift. Guide our life's journey, for only your love makes us whole. Keep us strong in your love. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. — Opening prayer for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Negatives attract

A few days ago I tried to post a link to my latest column on Facebook. My attempt was quickly rebuffed, with the notation that the content had been previously reported as abusive. Prayer, solitude, Henri Nouwen? Abusive? OK, maybe referencing the rock opera Tommy and Karl Rahner in the same breath is a bit beyond the pale - but abusive?

I dutifully filled out the form to contest the decision (by a human? which human?) and within a day all was resolved.

Meanwhile while doing some research for a piece in an upcoming Nature Chemistry column on the roll of blogging in chemistry (due out in March), I ran across a fascinating paper in the European Physical Journal B: "Networks and emotion-driven user communities at popular blogs." The authors mathematically analyzed the topology (connectedness) of a large network of blogs and posts, assessing the emotional content along the way. (If the word bipartite doesn't scare you, read the paper.) They noted that large communities grow around posts with very negative language - and in the absence of such posts, there ends up being far less "cross-talk" between blogs. Nasty posts acted as glue.

Their data suggests that being negative also makes you popular in the blog world. More negatively worded posts attract more comments. Negative language in the comments attract more comments. Being obnoxious acts as a amplifier.

When I look at blogs — on any topic, science, theology, parenting — that provoke rather than explore or reflect, I've noticed that they tend to have many comments. (A couple come to mind, but I find myself reluctant to name names…though it strikes me it would be an interesting experiment to stir things up and see what happens to my comment box!)

Robin and I were wondering about our guest book blogging adventure, which we wished had excited a bit more conversation. Clearly we are too nice!

And I did roughly assess the emotional tone of my post (word cloud above) to find that 7% of my words were tagged "positive," 1.5% negative and less than 1% "hostile"!

Venturing Into the Silent Land: Robin on The Doorway into Silence

My scars (mostly) don't show, I tend not to wear shorts so you can't see the surgical scars that cover my right knee and you might know me for years before you learn that I was widowed. Like Robin, the word "healed" sounds a bit too simplistic for me most of the time (and I'm similarly allergic to "closure").

I rather firmly believe that God grieves and rejoices - that the silence with which we engage in prayer is not a bland equilibrium.

Here is what Robin has to say about suffering, silence and contemplation, in her last contribution to our discussion of Marty Laird's book Into the Silent Land:

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I hate the word wound. I hate the sound of it, that "oooo" sound. I hate the look of it: those three open letters in the middle. It sounds and looks like vulnerability, and I don't want to acknowledge how vulnerable we are.

I am suspicious of the word heal. It sounds and looks like the word easy. It seems too easy. Many, many people have used that word in addressing my life experience of the past two years, and I basically think, as they speak to me, "You have lost your mind. There is no healing here."

Those conversations and this book have made me think about what healing is, however ~ or about what my unexamined assumptions about healing are.

I have a huge scar down my middle. A physical scar down my physical middle. It's from the car accident when I was seven, from an emergency laparotomy done to determine whether my spleen was bleeding and needed to be removed. (It wasn't and didn't.) It's thick and ugly, made worse by a twin pregnancy and several decades of living.

I never even notice that scar. I remember well the day the doctor yanked the stitches out ~ the terrible pain, the screaming. But it's completely healed: I can't feel it, it has no impact whatever on my life, and I don't care about it one way or another.

Is that what I think healing means, I wonder? No feeling, no impact, no concern about something that was once a gaping wound?

I think that I am wrong.

I wrote a brief introduction to Michelle's last post on my blog, in which I said that I remain fascinated that there seems to be a direct, albeit often obscure, pathway leading from crisis and loss to silence and contemplative prayer. And then I opened the book in preparation for writing this final post, and was surprised to the point of laughing. Look at what Martin Laird has to say:

The doorway into the silent land is a wound. Silence lays bare this wound. We do not get far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition.

It occurs to me now that what this book articulates, at least in part, is that healing is the opposite of what I have been taught and assumed. And it tells us that healing is discovered in silence.

Opposite? Well, like many people, I grew up in another kind of silence: the silence of avoidance and denial. A family in which stiff upper lips and movement forward were encouraged. And my family was traumatized. Believe me, when a young mother and her baby are killed in a car accident, trauma hardly begins to describe the consequences. And yet, you would think, to look at us a couple of years later: no feeling, no impact, no concern. We must have been all healed, right?

Now I am not seven, I am all grown up, and I have had to contend with sadness in the last two years such as seems indescribable and incomprehensible. And what do I now think leads to healing?

A direct gaze.

As complete a degree of feeling as is tolerable, and then some.

An acknowledgment of the impact.

Caring very much.

Healing, in other words, does not mean that pain is eradicated. It means that we learn to integrate it into our living so that it is no longer disabling, stopping us in our tracks. It means that we learn to integrate it into our living so that we recognize it in others and can stop to offer presence and companionship.

And where did I learn this? Where did I come by this knowledge that I cannot yet apply?

In silence. The silence of God.

I come from a religious tradition in which word ~ language, speech, proclamation ~ is central. I learned a lot about words and Word in seminary: Greek words, Hebrew words, preaching words. Jesus as Word. The Word. I am engaged in and with words and Word every day.

But silence I learned about in other places, and I have learned about it most of all in the vast silence which has been God's response to my child's death. There are no healing words for such a terrible thing. And the Word, who for all time is God, responds accordingly.

Only in silence is there space for genuine healing to occur; healing that makes it possible to feel, to accept impact, and to care.

I wonder, now, whether I would have found my way into this silence of God in other, more preferable circumstances. To some extent, I can answer in the affirmative. I recall the first time that I became convinced of the presence of God: in the vast and wild silence of the world that lay before me in the midst of Glacier National Park, during a week of backpacking in which that cathedral of granite and sky and long stretches of wind-blown grass affected me in ways that no written or spoken words ever could.

But alongside that silence, the silence which communicated creativity and goodness, lies another. A silence which communicates sorrow and compassion for the pain of our human experience. Laird tells us that "there is deep conversion, healing, and unspeakable wholeness to be discovered along the contemplative path" but that, paradoxically, "this healing is revealed when we discover that our wound and the wound of God are one wound."

Is there a wound of God? Some of my readers know that I have been engaged in an on-and-off discussion with one of my professors (for nearly two years now!) with respect to whether God suffers. My professor distinguishes between the human Jesus who suffers and the divine Jesus who cannot because, he says, for God to participate in our suffering as we do would subvert the perfect goodness of God who overcomes all suffering. I am not sure whether Martin Laird would agree, or what to make of that distinction myself. But I do believe, although my own experience has been one of halting and unsure steps both backward and forward, that "contemplative practice places us . . . where the balm of divinity annoints broken humanity."

Column: Of prayer and pinball (with apologies to The Who)

My thanks to Inward/Outward, who in October posted the tidbit from Henri Nouwen that I quoted here -- and which has been bouncing around my head since then. The reflection by Karl Rahner, S.J. appeared in Die Presse, an Austrian newspaper, on December 22, 1962. I found in in a collection (alas out of print): Everyday Faith.

And finally, here's a link to a clip of Elton John's performance in Tommy - the real pinball wizard!

The photo was taken at Eastern Point Retreat House in an early summer's fog. The ocean is there - really!

Publish Post

This reflection appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 19 January 2010.

Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place? — Ps. 24:3

A few weeks ago I was multi-tasking away in the kitchen: sorting through school forms, responding to student email, organizing the week’s dinners, drilling Latin vocabulary, all while a pot of chicken stock simmered on the stove.

For a moment, I felt like Tommy, The Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” pulling levers and snapping flippers, while lights flashed and bells rang and glittering silver balls danced around the machine. I’m just racking up points. Four for figuring out a tough Latin cognate, two for dinners using up leftovers. How do you think she does it?

The game is seductive. How many points can I collect before a ball misses its mark and it all ends with an obnoxious honk and a flashing “Game Over?” I end up bouncing tasks off a multitude of bumpers, each item dispatches with a neat quick flick of my pen, though no lights flash or bells ring to advertise the win. It’s definitely all in the wrist.

As crazed and demanding as the ongoing pinball game of my life is at times, it’s hard to ignore the comfort that conquering a well circumscribed set of tasks and clear goals brings. It gets tempting to shortchange my prayer time in favor of getting one last task completed or catching a few extra minutes of sleep, the better to tackle the list tomorrow.

But being productive in prayer, as Father Henri Nouwen points out, requires the commitment of unproductive time: “Being useless and silent in the presence of our God belongs to the core of all prayer.” It takes more than a bit of discipline, humility and courage to spend time with God, and God alone. Without multi-tasking.

In his reflection The Answer of Silence, Karl Rahner S.J. sounds a similarly bold call to abandon what seems to be most urgent, and seek God: “Have the courage to be alone.” This is practical advice he is offering, no mere rhetorical device: seek out a quiet path or a lonely church; find a room where you can be alone; wherever you go, he says, go!

Once there, wait. Silently. Don’t talk to yourself, or even to God. Just wait. Just listen. Patiently. Without expectations. And courageously. For this takes courage beyond measure.

What might we see, alone with our God, standing in His holy places? Ourselves — and each other — as we truly are, cracked and broken and glorious and beloved of God? God, mysterium tremendum et fascinans? God within us, and without?

And most frighteningly of all, what if we hear nothing? In Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin, the monk Corrigan tells his brother that his prayer has been reduced to the point where there are no words on either part, his or God’s. He is sure only of this: “God listens back.”

I’m still learning to be unproductive in prayer, still practicing how to listen patiently in stillness and solitude. No lights blink, no buzzers sound, there are no points to be counted. Success lies only in going — faithfully, quietly and alone — to stand in His holy place. The place where God listens with me.

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Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
— John O’Donohue, from “For One Who is Exhausted" in To Bless the Space Between Us