Sun on an early Saturday morning

The summer flowers remind me of people huddled against a storm of pelting sleet while waiting on a railway platform.  But this morning you feel the plants reach, stretch, straiten and open with relief.  We’re out harvesting before dawn, then the glorious sunlight, obscured for weeks by clouds and rain, pierces through the trees with symphonic luster.  Perhaps the flower pots will dry out and the unhappy peppers and tomatoes might begin to believe it is July. 

Sister Helena Marie and Suzanne this morning before the truck leaves for Farmer's Market

The sisters asked me to make some bouquets to sell this week for Farmer’s Market.  I smell like tansy, feverfew, lilies and lavender, and my sneakers and pants below the knee are  still soaked with dew while I sit at the computer.  While the garlic is harvested and hung, and baking and cooking taking place at St. Cuthbert’s, I’m now in my studio at St. Aidan’s putting together next week’s post for the Edge of the Enclosure website and newsletter.  Tomorrow our amazing intern Emily and I plan to to visit the sisters at the city convent, go to the Rose Planetarium and experience the Big Bang and Universe Walk, the halls of geology and biodiversity.  The next day we’ll go to the Met to see the temporary exhibit on Medieval drawing.  I hope we’ll be able to see the new documentary Food, Inc..

The blog entry ends here, then, because I need to finish, prepare for Eucharist and help with Farmer’s Market clean up this afternoon. So I leave you with a Wislawa Szymborska poem.  This piece seems especially appropriate to our continual embracing of The New Story, observing our lives as a mere part of the unfolding narrative of the universe. 

Sorry about the spaces between the lines.  I can’t figure out how to format a poem on WordPress.

 

A Speech at the Lost and Found

 

I lost a few goddesses on my way from south to north,

as well as many gods on my way from east to west.

Some stars went out on me for good: part for me, O sky.

Island after island collapsed into the sea on me.

I’m not sure exactly where I left my claws,

who wears my fur, who dwells in my shell.

My siblings died out when I crawled onto land

and only a tiny bone in me marks the anniversary.

I leapt out of my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,

and left my senses many many times.

Long ago I closed my third eye to it all,

waved it off with my fins, shrugged my branches.

 

Scattered by the four winds to a place that time forgot,

how little there remains of me surprises me a lot,

a singular being of human kind for now,

who lost her umbrella in a tram somehow.

 

Wislawa Szymborska, from Miracle Fair

A Day in Paradise

Yesterday we had a chapel full of guests.  In our small worship space, half a dozen guests make a crowd.  The liturgy … what’s the word… flowed? …shaped itself?  …rose through the roof and got slayed in the Spirit secretly while we were concentrating on the Angelus and then descended into the chapel charged with power?

We sang some of Ana Hernadez’ music. Ana was on a busman’s holiday from “Smokey Mary’s” and sang with us.  www.anahermusic.com. We made a huge brunch of fried Peruvian purple potatoes (from our root cellar), mixed salad greens (fresh from the garden), Swedish oven pancakes baked with just-laid eggs, and our own maple syrup, of course.  We laughed lots, as usual, and a young man played guitar as we washed up the dishes. 

 We’re entranced by the baby ducklings living up to every visual cliche.  (see links to videos below). The new chickens, now awkward adolescents, have moved outside.  Half  stay here at St. Aidan’s with the black star hens  and the others live in Cluckingham Palace, a new hen house on the far side of Duckville.  On the duckville path, the spicy and sweet scent of white roses climbing up the bower in the Mary Garden above you will stop you in your tracks. But be sure to really STOP.  If you don’t watch your step you might slip on duck poo.

Sister Catherine Grace was on vacation last week.  So she fixed herself behind one of the looms, surrounded by cones of naturally dyed thread. The new loom gently clacking adds a comforting texture to the ambient sounds of the farm.  In no time, Sister wove an Advent/Lent stole, full of prayer, conceived intentionally for worship in our small chapel.  Touch it – how can you not reach for it and hold it and run your fingers down and up the smooth patterned fabric?  For the un-practical and un-technical and un-mathematical and un-puzzle-loving human, weaving seems nothing short of a miracle.  We blessed the new stole during the liturgy.

The Sabbath calls forth a subtle, enhanced dimension of gratitude.  The seventh day was created for gratitude.  Wearing white Sunday clothes helps you resist the temptation to pull scores of weeds as you walk by.  You look out upon the whole of the garden, ignoring the relentless daily tasks close to the soil.  The new life, beauty, music, laughter, gentle sounds, rain on the chapel roof, the scents of herbs and roses and lavender remain as sensual and holy as Saturday or Monday.  But Sunday draws forth a depth that deep practice rewards.  

Forgotten: the Saturday push to get the morning harvest ready for market. Turnip greens tearing at flesh, mud, ticks, swollen bug bites, picking the wrong crop, downpours, a truckload mess of jars and ice chests and extra produce to process, exhaustion, deadlines, family troubles, Lyme disease, back pain, and various soul sicknesses. 

Leonard Cohen says somewhere, “…a scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”

On Sundays we strive to live in the awareness of Paradise.  The rest of the week we accept with as much humility as possible the scarring and struggles of human life. Comforted by the Word Made Flesh, called to embody Paradise even while the body suffers, we’re cultivating this ground of compassion in our souls to share, both in Sabbath time and Ordinary time.

 

watch the baby ducklings here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gu77XmolOk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xpP0TDGCTo

Touching Earth

Someone accused me recently of  ”withdrawing from the world.”  I didn’t get to ask what the young man meant.  If he meant that I’m not running around helping to soothe the troubles of other people, the only difference is that these days I’m not making house calls.  People find their way here. 

And if he meant that my world is smaller than it once was, that, too, is an illusion. People’s troubles  are shocking, incredible  – in its original meaning – and universal.   

Conventual life creates an atmosphere of continual attention.  I’m not glossing over things as I did when I was so stressed (and salaried).   Having listened more deeply I take those troubles brought to me and I sit with them, especially while I’m working outside in the soil.   

Have these sisters withdrawn from the world? Three of the sisters here do the heavy garden work by hand, assisted by Bill.  The other sister processes the food, standing in the kitchen all day washing, chopping, parboiling, canning, drying, freezing, flaking.  (I have desk work but I’m also responsible for the kitchen garden in front of St. Cuthberts, and the cottage garden in front of St. Aidan’s plus a number of other chores.)  All of us are covered with bug bites.  Two of us (including me) are being treated for acute Lyme disease.  In addition to our constant tick bites we have our scars, rashes, swollen flesh, broken bones, skin infections, strained backs. The Medical Center’s physical therapy staff knows each of us intimately.  

I once wore beautiful clothes to work.  My hair looked nice.  Now I wear a succession of tee shirts which get muddy by mid-day.  My hair is bundled up in a baseball cap.  My face is slathered with suncream.   I’m lucky my husband happens to like this “look” better than dresses and gorgeous scarves.  But does wearing work clothes for physical labor indicate a withdrawal from the world?

I notice that finding myself attuned to the hidden struggle of young plants drowning in these weeks of  pelting rain, distressed for want of sunlight, is not unlike the intuition I feel just before a young person tells me her tragedy.  When a predator killed the mother and baby robins in the low nest in the cross garden, I thought vividly of predators upon human children in refugee camps before I realized how I myself would miss watching the little birds in chapel. 

The Glory of Peas, Bluestone Farm, photo by Erin Martineau

As compensation for the pain of digging, the earth offers its healing scent at the touch of my hand.  Woodland birdsong accompanies the crouching ache of the battle stance against slugs and weeds.  The sweet taste of sun’s own energy embedded in a ripe strawberry makes you forget the pain in your back for a moment . 

Never popular in ancient or modern times, the prophetic life invites envy, criticism, skepticism, or ridicule.  We’ve all exchanged more comfortable jobs to re-learn human skills in order to help others learn these skills  for times to come. 

As I take my anti-biotic pill for Lyme, I regard my flithy fingernails.  I suppose I should have asked the young man what he meant by “withdrawing from the world.”

Dreamboat Teilhard

If Miriam McGillis is the spiritual mother of the vision here, and Thomas Berry is the grandfather (see previous post) then Teilhard de Chardin is the great-grandfather.  Yesterday the sisters told me that Mother Ruth, the founder of the Community of the Holy Spirit, was interested in Teilhard’s work, and sent Sister Elise to meetings of the American Teilhard Association from the early days of that organization.

Teilhard de Chardin

A memory.  As an early adolescent, I fell in love with Teilhard.  My mother had borrowed from the library an over-sized picture book about his life which I carefully, slowly, poured through.   Life Magazine or Time must have had an article about Teilhard around this time (early sixties) because I cut it out and slid it into the frame of my dressing table mirror.  While other girls in my class were in love with John or Paul or George or Ringo, whose pictures adorned their mirrors, the photo of Teilhard looked gently upon me when I combed my hair or polished my nails.

This memory and a myriad of other childhood passions floated up from hidden places behind my mind while I was at Genesis Farm in May.  This movement of theology and practice begins with the Universe Story as a context for human beings as part of a great whole, and not the endpoint and crown of creation.  It seems so basic to me. 

When I taught confirmation classes as a parish priest, I began with the cosmos and the timeline of the Big Bang to the sliver of human history.  (From Carl Sagan: if the Big Bang were to occur on January 1, it takes the whole of the year until the very last seconds before midnight of December 31 before human history begins.)  I provided biological timelines of life on earth to color and keep in their confirmation notebooks. I gave the confirmands thought experiments like this one: “If it were possible to know about intelligent beings in other solar systems, and we knew of a being that was, say, green and covered in eyes, would you say that being was made in the image and likeness of God?”  I loved to watch the debate, because some children instinctively and vehemently believed yes, the being is in the image and likeness of God, and other children seemed horrified at the idea.  No, they reasoned, only human beings on earth could possibly be in the image and likeness of God.  Of course I never gave them answers.  My role was to help them imagine and question in exponentially wider ways than they were usually encouraged to think.

Now I’m the beginner again, working my way through books by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme and related works, especially ones linking Christian mysticism to the new story.  And it’s time again to find a picture of my gentle hero of adolescence, and put him among the icons of saints and guides of my turbulent adulthood, as I enter this threshold of  ”the Great Work.”

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, we will have  discovered fire.    -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

What time is it?

CHS Sisters, "Green" Convent Groundbreaking

Two events drew us from the farm this past week.  The groundbreaking ceremony for the new (”green”) convent up on 150th and Convent Avenue in Manhattan took place on June 3 and we piled into the car to play music for the event and to be with “the city sisters” .  The plans of the convent are lovely, and so is the neighborhood in Harlem.  Sister Faith Margaret noted in her comments that Mother Ruth, the founder of the Community of the Holy Spirit, came from Harlem, and the sisters feel a sense of  “homecoming.”   We felt welcomed by the parishioners and priest of the Church of the Crucifixion which is next door, and from various neighbors who dropped in and watched the ceremony.  It is also a thrill to talk to the archetects, who share their delight and pride in this project.  All but one of the oldest sisters were able to come, and hearing Sister Mary Christebel’s still deep dramatic voice while she read the lesson about Jacob discovering the sacredness of the place where he dreamed of the ladder to heaven, and watching Sister Elise, the last of the “founding sisters” take a shovelful of earth from the empty lot, as she had with the founding and building of both schools  of the order, imparted a sense of history, continuity, sacredness to me. 

Sunday, six of us (four sisters, a guest, myself) drove up to Vermont to play and sing for the Burial Mass of Thomas Berry.  I never met him, but I was unspeakably moved by the love, devotion, sense of purpose, and depth of the people attending the mass.  I felt I was among “rock stars” of the ecology movement: people whose books I read currently in my work of trying to catch up with the groundwork for what Thomas Berry termed, The Great Work, to which our sisters dedicate their lives.

Sister Gail tied Thomas’s childhood epiphany ( “geophany,” she said) an experience in a meadow full of lilies which began his life work, to the meadow at Green Mountain Monastery where he was buried.  A bowl of red earth from Thomas’s home in Greensboro North Carolina was mingled with the black earth of the Vermont meadow at his grave. 

Berry wrote of the moment when he was 11 years old: “The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. … This early experience has remained with me ever since as the basic determinant of my sense of reality and values. Whatever fosters this meadow is good. What does harm to this meadow is not good.  … a good economic, or political, or educational system is one that would preserve that meadow and a good religion would reveal the deeper experience of that meadow and how it came into being. .. It was a wonder world that I have carried in my unconscious and that has evolved all my thinking.”

I think of Thomas Berry as a kind of grandfather to the sister’s mission.  And if he is grandfather, Sister Miriam McGillis is mother; inspiration, faithful nurturer to the vision of Bluestone Farm where we toil and learn and grow and worship and fumble and pick ourselves up again every day.  To see Sister Miriam, and all those profoundly generous men and women, immersed in mingled emotions of gratitude with grief, opened some kind of door or threshold in me this weekend.  I have no idea what portal this is, or what I might carry with me through it, if I choose to enter. 

But I hear in my mind Thomas Berry’s persistant, provacative question, “What time is it?”

Gathering Light

I woke from a dream this morning in which I had been writing a poem.  The poem somehow folded “humility” and “housework” together into a metaphor for learning to be present to the Present.  

The practice of presence is a constant theme here at the farm.  Monasticism itself is a practice of presence, of course.  Some of us have practiced traditions other than Christianity  (Hinduism and Buddhism) and bring a fresh language to the ancient problem of attending to the Moment.  The ecological work, the “universe story” foundational to the sister’s vision here, also brings us into a vibrant discipline of confronting ourselves in the Eternal Now.  After the daily reading of the Gospel in chapel the most frequent individual reponse to the question of  “how God is calling you today” is … “to try to learn to be in the moment.”

After getting to paper and pencil and writing down the words “housework” and “humility” I found that all the other words and the meter and shape of the poem had gone somewhere else.  But within the empty space of the vanished poem, I found the following memory and new thought.  

About a year ago a friend showed me Saturn through his telescope.  Breathlessly beautiful, I was especially thrilled because I was looking at the planet and it’s pristine rings in real time, not via photograph.  My friend had to calulate the alignment of the earth’s axis to compennsate for the earth’s rotation. The power and magnification of the instrument enables it to gather the light of Saturn to show us the image.  (The human eye can only gather so much light at one time - it’s why we can’t see Saturn and its beautiful rings with the naked eye, even though the planet is there.)    

I thought this morning about the telescope and staying in one place over time to gather enough light to see what is there.    Being in the moment invites you to give yourself the time to absorb the truth in the moment.

We listen to guests lament about the confusion and noise and fast pace of city living.  Several of us love the city and usually say so but they counter, “but you don’t live there!” and that’s true now, even though two sisters spent a majority of their vocational years in New York.  Our guests say that the pace tears at something inside of them but that it is impossible to detach from the momentum of life in New York. “You can’t just stroll and …. look at things like you do here.  And smell beautiful smells and hear the symphony of birdsong.”

I’m still learning to slow down.  I feel deeply there’s some important but unknown purpose to this, perhaps for the future.  In the meantime, perhaps I’ll think of it this way: I’ve slowed down to absorb what I would not see without being very still,  gazing, and gathering light.

The Upper Room at Genesis Farm

Loving my Bible Friends, I often try to warn them of impending danger, even while knowing their situations of suffering offer insight, hope, holiness.  This Ascensiontide I think of my Bible Friends and wanted to warn them, “Don’t go to the upper room for the Pentecost celebration.  Go to the marketplace, scatter, go down to Jericho and play in the Jordan River.  Don’t go into that room together. You will be changed forever!”

But of course they do go to the Upper Room.  And the Holy Spirit comes upon them like fire and wind or something indescribable except by words like fire and wind.  Their Christian initiation is complete.  They finally give  themselves over to the Holy and go into the world, “beginning at Jerusalem” toward the “ends of the earth.”  All will be martyred, except perhaps John, although the tradition that does not have him living out his old age in a cave in exile on Patmos has him boiled in oil.   The idea is: this initiation by fire costs you your life. 

And one reason Christianity grew (besides the well-fertilized ground set by the dying and rising gods of the Mediterranean that preceded Jesus; Isis, Mithras) was that martyrs went to their deaths with integrity, often singing, in unity with one another and a firm sense of belonging to Something Greater than themselves.  The onlookers reflect,  ”I want that.” 

It’s Monday morning after my first weekend at Genesis Farm*.  Bill and I took the short course on The New Cosmology.  We’re asked to re-consider the fundamental assumptions of human beings and culture.  How is it possible that as a species we can set ourselves up for destroying our planet home?   We’re not “bad.”  Most of us. But we have a primitive and exploitative world view that has allowed us to use up forever non-renewable resources. 

We’ve poisoned the food chain.  We’re irreversibly set in motion a diminishment of species differentiation (200 species a day become extinct) – but it is bio-diversity that makes our life possible, destroying the principle underlying life on Earth.  While making the daily commute from Westchester into New York  City to provide food and housing and schooling for our children and families, we don’t SEE the devastation.  But day by day this diminishment threatens our own survival.

We “know” this.  Most of us know that de-forestation threatens our oxygen supply.  We “know” that the massive swirling mass of plastic in its componant parts is killing life in the Pacific Ocean (and the food chain).  We know global warming caused by our chemical emmissions will make earth un-inhabitable and human life impossible.  We all “know” this.

What Sister Miriam, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and other theologians, philosophers, scientists, farmers, activists ask us to contemplate,  is re-thinking the very fundamentals of our world view.  I watched as other participants relaxed into this change of mind.  Many of us sensed the inter-connectedness and inter-dependency of the web of life as children.  And of course, mysticism is simply the experience and contemplation of that sense of one-ness.

I felt like I was in the upper room. 

What next?

Here at home, I toured all the gardens of Bluestone farm before anyone was up this morning.  I have a new appreciation for the hard work the sisters do here: prophetically ”re-skilling” themselves for a future that isn’t based upon petroleum products.  It is hard work.  It is part of what Thomas Berry calls “The Great Work.”  It is our work.

*see www.genesisfarm.org

Ascension and the Dark Night of the Soul

Bride and Groom (Church and Christ) Bible Historiale

Ascensiontide is my favorite season of the Christian Year.  I also love Advent because I live in a perpetual Advent of the soul.  The practice of Advent helps me live in my soul and with its anguishes and loneliness and sense of urgent purpose.  But Ascension helps me live with the inner sense of abandonment and occasional random purposelessness.  Ascension teaches me year after year that it is through this acknowledgement of abandonment that the soul goes out from itself and becomes free and full and whole, ready to receive the Gift of Union.

The liturgical year is a school of love.  Ascensiontide, the period after which the resurrected Jesus leaves the disciples, but before the Holy Spirit comes upon them at Pentecost,  teaches the detachment necessary to love in the world.  A story is often told by the Dalai Lama about a Tibetan monk who had been tortured in a Chinese prison for 22 years.  When the monk reached Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama asked him, “What were you afraid of the most in prison?”  The monk replied, “I was afraid that I might lose my compassion toward the torturers.”

Love stronger than death.

Ascension, Unknown Flemish Master, 1465

The images of Ascensiontide in words and music and art clumsily present Jesus entering the Cloud, the Presence of God, going “up” to “heaven.”  In illuminated manuscripts you often you see whimsical “feet” protruding from the cloud above the disciples.  Only this clunky modern age takes that fancy literally. It’s a clumsy image because the poets and evangelists and theologians and artists have to explain in two or three dimensions that which takes place in multi-dimensions and unbound by time. 

It’s why I love the mystics.  They don’t “look up”. To them, Jesus isn’t flying off somewhere into the clouds enthroned on high and out of sight – although they understand the analogy.  Jesus may be obscured, but it is because he has become radically intimate:  the enthronement takes place – within ourselves.

Here in our chapel we sing at Lauds on Saints Days: Come, mine elect (my chosen one): and I will set my throne within you.  -Antiphon at Lauds, Saints Days

See the website http://www.edgeofenclosure.orgfor a bit more background on this blog entry.  “By all accounts the Dark Night of the Soul, the abandonment by God is torment to the faithful soul which has come so far in her journey of love.  But the mystics testify to a stunning paradox.  The abandonment IS the union.  It is in the Dark Night of the Soul that the Lover meets the Beloved and transforming union takes place.”  – Suzanne

Today…

Today: sunshine pouring through the lace curtains.  Chickens clucking with contentment and the occasion announcment of a new egg.    The promise of planting in today’s cool beauty perfumed by lilacs and lily of the valley.  Guests lingering an extra day to help with gardening today.

Yesterday:  we danced after the liturgy.  Patrick and Bill labored to remove the broken stone wall in front of St. Aidan’s.  Slowly, slowly we’re reclaiming and giving new life to this old house once sheep shed, bunk house, convent, guest-house, junk depository.

On Saturday night we hosted a Full Moon Fireside (see www.chssisters.org. ) After our drumming Sister Carol Bernice talked about the Transition training she went to – an international movement working from local communities to transform our lives and ways of being in the world.  I can’t begin to describe this, so, please see  www.transitiontowns.org.   It rained on and off as we listened to one another around the bonfire.  Twice the sky above the meadow provided a spectacular rainbow just as we talked of the promise of the future.

Today is the sisters’ Sabbath from the daily routine.  Today the seedlings need planting, and Patrick  and guests are here to help. Tonight the new addition to the bee colony arrives.

There’s so much suffering – in the world, near and far.  We pray, we listen, we try to do what we can and repent for what we can’t.  And meanwhile, we learn to grow and preserve food to eat, we learn to live in ways after “peak oil” to prepare for an uncertain future so we can be of help with basic necessities.  We grow flowers for the bees and to “lift the heart to God” and to beautify the chapel and gardens.  Hard work.  Ora et labora.

Today the sunshine glistens on the grass.

V-Day and the Vine

So I’ve been gathering beautiful art and quotes on Jesus’ discourse on “the vine” for my website, The Edge of the Enclosure.  This week’s meditation prompts move in the direction of loving neighbor.  See http://www.edgeofenclosure.org

But what’s really on my mind and heart is Eve Ensler’s work, http://www.VDAY.org  consiousness about mass rapes the DRC – eastern Congo, the hospital at Panzi, the overwhelming work facing Dr. Denis Mukwege and M.D. volunteers to repair fistulas, for example, and other conditions caused by rape and torture.  

Perhaps the work of the world, the  work of life itself is transforming “pain to power” the phrase Ensler attached to her latest consciousness raising tour.  Here’s a link to an introductory interview.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/9/playwright_v_day_founder_eve_ensler

The image of the Vine in Jesus’ discourse is of our lives engrafted like a vine branch upon the source of  Divine Love.  Abide in my love.  Abide in my love.  Little children, love one another  …

And I’m thinking of survivors of Rwanden genocide “managing” to live along side the very people who killed their families with machetes (see Philip Gourevitch’s article The Life After, May 4, The New Yorker).  The victims of rape bringing food to the men who raped them (see the film, God is Asleep in Rwanda).

Do not bring us to the test.  And deliver us from evil.  Amen.