fading anemones

It’s Friday, late afternoon.  People expect a blizzard to the south but we expect a mere dusting. But the steel-gray sky threatens. It’s cold.  I made a thick white bean soup for lunch with fresh thyme and parsley I dug up from under the snow outside the kitchen door at St. Aidan’s. Birthday flowers freshen the air. I’m enjoying the most romantic three anemones in a little vase on my desk on this cold dark afternoon. 

Across the street the last cars leave the school parking lot for the weekend.

Yesterday, home-room teachers and staff came to chapel and announced the sudden death of one of the school parents - a beloved member of the school community and a teacher at a school in Danbury.  The older girls especially, finally gave way to their shock, sobbing. They’d already heard the news but felt they had to hold it together for the other children, so not to cause worry to them before the general announcement. So now they let go and cried.  A teacher brought a half-dozen boxes of kleenex into the chapel. The girls at once broke into smiles and laughed thankfully at the kleenex. That moment to me was like a sacrament. Their laughter sang with genuine warmth, feeling, and dignity through the mix of emotions.  

My best friend’s father died when we were the same age of the Melrose girls.  I remember my shock. I remember my grief. I remember helplessness that I couldn’t be in the skin of my friend to feel her own pain.  I remember how isolating that felt.  I remember writing in my diary that “my second father” had died. My own father found him, bringing the morning paper into his hospital room. I only found out this year from Jane that my father left work at the hospital that morning and came home to tell the young widow himself.  Jane’s mother was pregnant with her fourth child. I remember crossing out the sentence about “my second father” because it was too pretentious. Jane’s Dad wasn’t really my second father. But I was looking for a way to describe how closely his death touched me.  And that it could have been my father.  Or me. 

I’m praying for the son of a friend. The boy’s in life-threatening trouble. I’m praying for a toddler recovering from bone surgery. I’m praying for a young man with Crone’s disease. I’m praying for a young girl with both lupus and scleroderma.  My intercession list is long and heavy these days. So much death, disease. So much suffering. So many people.  And then there’s Haiti.  And Congo. And our wars.  

But there’s fresh thyme and perfect parsley under the snow. And three romantic, colorful anemones on my desk. Every moment, so fleeting.  Memories fade. And the scent of flowers. So, look. Look at them again. Smell them now. Smell them again.

 Some moments are so simple.

…all desires known

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.   

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Sanzio Raffaello, 1515, Detail

One of our sisters lives in a nursing home nearby. The last time I brought her communion, she interrupted the liturgy at the collect for purity and declared, “I don’t love God perfectly and I wish to heck I could ‘worthily’ magnify God. But I DON’T! I CAN’T.”   

Sister wasn’t asking for my help. What was she doing? Throwing down the gauntlet? Drawing a line in the sand? Just expressing spiritual frustration? The thing is, this sister and I get caught in the same kinds of spiritual traps. So at least I understood. I can step easily into that endless loop of unworthiness: I’m so unworthy I can’t even begin to hope to be redeemed or saved. Or loved.  Or pitied.  Or even noticed. Since all my effort to love God perfectly fails so miserably, it’s not worth praying at all. So there.   

Julian of Norwich has a prayer: grant me that love which thou desirest of me.  This prayer reverses the negative loop for me. Okay. Please GIVE me that love that I need to love you.  Clever!  This puts the burden upon God to give me that which I need to love God! But more profoundly, it’s a form of holy surrender.  I know I can’t manage this on my own, on my own power, my own initiative, my own strength, my own resources. I shouldn’t expect to! ”We do not know how to pray as we ought,” said St. Paul, “but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs to deep for words”.  That’s enough.   

Sister and I decided that we’d pray the collect for purity several times a day and think about it during the week.   

Like Julian’s prayer, the Collect for Purity puts the burden upon the Divine to prepare us worthily for worship. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration  of your Holy Spirit. I’m asking the Holy Spirit to cleanse my character – my attention, my mind and heart my motivations. In that cleansing I find that I can love God – which I wouldn’t know how to do even if I had the power myself.  And what’s perfect anyway?  Sometimes when I think I’ve failed, I’ve succeeded in some moral victory; a situation I perceive as unhappy turns out full of grace; a terrible mistake turns to a weird kind of blessing in some larger design of things. I can’t know what’s perfect. And to perfectly love God? Impossible. But I can wrap myself in my mantle like Elijah and step outside the crevice and let that Spirit sigh and breath, come and go, shake and crack the rocks, sing and whisper within the sound of sheer silence.   

For me, the practice of Julian’s prayer helps me let go of the control I think I need to approach worship in a worthy manner.  When I thought about the prayer this week the phrase that most touched me was this: all desires known.   I don’t know if it’s true that this prayer was composed for Charlemagne’s coronation. (God knows your desires. God sees your secrets. So you just watch it!) But because of my conversation with Sister, for the first time in many years I asked myself, “what IS your desire?”    

For the first time in my life, I think I can say, “God knows.” For like the loop of negativity reversed by Julian’s prayer, the loop of ambition reverses in the collect for purity.  My desires are hid with God. God knows what I desire. I don’t even have to know. It sounds dis-spirited and defeated, but there it is. Give me that love THOU desirest of me. That’s enough.

From 30-Rock to Our Lady in less than 200 words, Columbo coda

Every once in a while I see an image that describes my soul.  This week it was the writer’s room on the television comedy 30-Rock. January “winter madness” had set in and everyone behaved and looked more squirrelly than usual.  Oops, I thought,  That’s me – all the characters around that table.  I’m only sharing this embarrassing picture to encourage you to look for snapshot images that encapsulate the mood of your soul.  Once in a conversation about such images a friend said, “my soul tastes like the stale contents of a dirty ashtray.” THAT was a good one!   

But another, more appropriately sharable image came up this week. Not of the state of my soul, but of Beauty and Invitation into the sphere of holiness.     

In one of the small spiritual direction rooms at the Redemptoristine Monastery in Esopus (Hi, Sister Paula!) I found myself drawn to a copy of a Byzantine icon.  I’d been in that room before, but I hadn’t noticed the icon. The dangling sandal drew my eye.  A story!   Then, my eyes met Mary’s gaze – that’s not usual.   

Sister Paula explained the icon.   

Jesus looks over his shoulder at something we can’t see.  He’s run to his mother for comfort, almost losing his little shoe. Although we can’t see exactly what frightened Jesus, the upper torsos of two angels emerging from the gold heaven provide a commentary. The Archangel Michael holds an urn of gall, a lance, a reed and sponge.  Gabriel carries the cross and four nails.  We now know the child experienced a presentiment of his passion.   

But Mary looks at us. One hand open, although Jesus clasps her thumb, invites us to place our hand in hers.  Why?  When she might give her full attention to her child?   Because she invites us to run to her for comfort, just as her boy finds comfort in her arms. She can’t take away the boy’s future suffering.  She can’t take away ours – but she can offer – home, love.  And here’s a cold word but I’ll use it anyway – she  can offer context. As we suffer, we can fly to her arms and she reminds us of a world larger than our suffering.  A world of love. Home.   

(St Alphonsis, a Redemptorist Church in Rome, has the original icon. The “crowns were added later” explains Sister Paula.)   

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 13th Century, Byzantine style

   

Here’s one more image.  On the “Watch Instantly” option on Netflix, you can watch one of my favorite movies: Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire.  We watch the life of angels in Berlin, and the adventure of one angel in particular, Gabriel, who falls in love with an acrobat named Marion.  He becomes mortal and no longer sees angels.  But another ex-angel played by Peter Falk playing himself as the actor who plays Colombo, senses his old comrades once in a while.  He says, “I can’t see ya, but I know you’re there!”   Context.

to tear us to pieces

Maybe the purpose of our conscious life is to tear us to pieces.  Each survival provokes us to gather the broken pieces of our heart, putting it back together in ever-more-expansive states of repair.  Maybe that’s why we suffer.  Love makes us suffer.  Suffering can widen love.  It’s not a perfect system. Maybe we sense a surviving consciousness beyond death because too many die too soon to grow in love before the time of death.    

Mystical sensibility is this: everything is one.  A person receives this insight in a flash, in a brain storm, in an insight, or through a long life of observation, or prayer, or meditation.  Some bear a predisposition to this perspective. Others come to it through hardship, the practice of loving others in widening spheres of compassion.  Even so, life is so difficult that through trial and error and with all the blunders, distractions, blindnesses, prejudices we carry inherently, even the most saintly person has “blind spots” in his or her character.  So we forgive one another and help each other to continue growing.  

A mystic can’t believe in the concept of  individual salvation – not if humanity is ”one”.  

A holy man or woman arrives at, say, a kind of Peter’s Gate of Judgement, like in popular legend, jokes and cartoons. Some people’s names appear in “the book” and Peter invites them to enter the gate of heaven while turning others away.  A good person invited to enter might perceive he or she is on the threshold of hell.  What kind of suffering lies inside the gate with knowledge of eternal separation from others?  Peter’s Gate might as well say, “Abandon all hope ye that enter here.”  For if salvation is individualistic and not universal, heaven is hell because only part of you dwells there.  The rest of your being wanders damned and tormented.

National Cathedral in Haiti before the quake, Google Images

 And yet everyone suffers.  The children in the Melrose School enjoy a priviledged life.  The parents and staff keep them in a protected world – no violence, no drugs, and the children are not sexualized like so many young children in our culture.  And yet, when I listen to their petitions during the prayers of the people, I hear their close proximity to disease and death and disabilities, the pulling at their hearts to embrace life’s suffering around them.  I am so glad that they can still be children and not forced to mature prematurely like most kids in our culture. But I know that even these children suffer.

National Cathedral in Haiti after the earthquake, Google Images

For many, Anne Frank is a ”way in” to the genocides of World War II. You read her lively diaries and come to know her and to love her very personally.  You are “one” with her. You want to know what happened after her arrest.  So you make the effort to find out.  And you are never the same again.  But you are more “conscious” than you thought possible.

Here’s a way to make a contribution to the relief effort in Haiti through Episcopal Relief and Development.
http://www.er-d.org/

that which is old and that which is new

I’m trying to think of an opening line.
This morning I woke up in a strange convent.
But that’s not right.  The convent isn’t strange or odd, it’s just a different convent than I’m used to.  Also, this post has no point or punchline.  It’s just rambling.

I’m with the sisters of the Community of Saint John the Baptist for their long retreat.  I woke in a gabled room with white walls and dark furniture and multi-paned windows with dramatic iron fasteners, and reddish tile floors – in sandals you can move noiselessly down the hall and up the stairs.  I got lost yesterday and ended up in the enclosure having taken the wrong staircase.

“Of course a convent isn’t quiet to those who live in them,” commented my old friend and new sister-in-charge, when I cooed appreciatively of the quiet this morning.  I’m happy I’m here.  As gold light threaded through the ancient fir trees before dawn outside my window I thought, I can’t believe that people don’t beat down convent doors wanting to come in.

“There’s obviously a real hunger,” my friend emphasised when I asked about the success of their guest house.  In turn, she’s interested in how our situation works for Bill and I and the other companions at the farm and for the Community of the Holy Spirit.

“People seem to want to live in community, but not necessarily…” she looked down at her habit and laughed, “as …well, NUNS.”  I think she is right.  But I think more people would actually like to try their vocations as religious – if they knew such a thing were possible.

Sister showed me “treasures” in the library last night: a medieval graduale, illuminated manuscripts by a sister painting back in the 1920’s.  Volumes and volumes of 19th century Oxford Movement memorabilia including Tracts for the Times and vicious cartoons satirizing Anglo-Catholic piety.  And today she showed me their elaborate golden monstrance. “We’ve only used it once in the twelve years I’ve been here and the priest that led us in Benediction that time has since gone over to Roman Catholicism.

“We have these treasures because we’ve been here so long,” said the sister. ”We have gorgeous vestments!  And I almost dread now when people bequeath their libraries to us – we don’t have room for more books.”  I said I’d be happy to take some vestments off their hands.

Meanwhile I’m thinking of our city sisters as they prepare to move to their new convent – culling their 60-year-old library, clearing out three brownstone houses full of convent stuff as they trim down to the essentials they’ll bring to 150th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem.  And I think of our monthly “clearing out” days at the farm, the sister’s unending quest to simplify simplify simplify, getting rid of the kind of debris that accumulates in old farmhouses.

But I’m happily enjoying these treasures and this extraordinary and complex building and the sisters themselves – hearing them sing and laugh and (hopefully) enjoy their retreat. 

Every scribe who is fit for the kingdom of heaven knows how to take out of his storehouse that which is old and that which is new.  I love that saying of Jesus.  I was thinking just before I left of the stuff I need to clear out of St. Aidan’s – mostly papers left over from parochial ministry I feel needs sorting before disposing but I dread doing. January presents itself as a cleaning out, white, clean, spare month – maybe because of putting away Christmas decorations and the contrast of emptiness in recently busy spaces.  Maybe because I like white flowers on my birthday.  Maybe because of the new year and the perennial wish for life to unfold in less complicated ways.

In prayer you constantly want to take from your storehouse that which is old and that which is new.  I love the old.  I love the new.  It’s creatively combining what comes before you every day that makes life intriguing.

New Years Day at Bluestone Farm

New Year’s Day we enjoyed a fine dinner of rice and Vic-Amps (the excellent dry pea-bean we grow) with sauerkraut and other sides. The Vic-Amps replaced traditional New Year’s “good luck” black-eyed peas. Vic-Amps ARE OUR lucky crop.   We ate in the warm Great Room by the fire in noisy chaos surrounded by the looms, the Christmas Tree, the crèche set up, the puzzle tables, the dozen or so rocking chairs, the out-of-tune beyond-repair piano. 

Christmas week the sisters brought instruments back from the city convent, so besides the usual clack and clatter of the loom, the frustrated groanings over the jigsaw puzzle, the increasingly louder conversations, a cello lesson commenced, and then some chamber music, then some squeaks from penny whistle, and low booms from the wash-tub bass.  That Little Cluck wandered through the room in the midst of the gaiety, followed by Bill, in one door and out another seemed somehow consonant with the cacophony. 

Emily (last summer’s intern) drove all the way from Bethlehem, PA to join us for the day.  We revelled in her cello playing and four of us (piano, recorder, flute, cello,) played a Handel sonata in the chapel before Vespers.  We ended the evening by watching “The Big Lebowski” together and laughing lots and lots.     

We each wrote a New Year’s letter to ourselves on fake ”parchment” paper, in colored pens, then tied them with raffia and sealed them closed with shiny red sealing wax.  The sealed little packets are nestled in a lovely Russian inlaid wooden box for us to open next New Year’s Day.  If my letter had been a picture, I suspect it would have looked like the marginalia on the left.  I think I’m not all … attached to myself.  May this year bring us health and happiness and good growing in our souls and gardens.  And at least modest re-membering of psyche, body, and being.

But now I’m busy preparing to lead a retreat for another religious community – six presentations plus five separate sermons and daily individual conferences with the participants.  Every surface of my studio is covered with book-and-paper debris.  Bill is bringing me food today because I’ve basically locked myself in until the whole theme of the retreat falls into place and the individual talks settle logically into a coherent whole. Our community here has entered a week of “Creativity Time” so that the schedule is relaxed and I can disappear without too much disruption before I go away to lead the retreat.  And it is snowing.  Even the chickens are quiet. Lovely lovely day.

A last word before burying myself in my studio debris: thank you thank you dear readers!  Thank you for taking the “self-guided retreats” at the Edge of the Enclosure each week (or as you can).  Thank you for sharing this little corner of garden with us. 

Here’s a “last word” from  Sister Elise, my dear spiritual mentor (who lives with the city sisters of the community).  During my visit to the city this past week we spent a day together and part of that time I confided my troubles to her.  She told me of miracles she’d seen in her lifetime.  We prayed together for a miracle.  Then she said, “There’s NOTHING more exciting than the spiritual life!” 

Happy New Year, Everyone! May the year bring miracles!

On the Fourth Day of Christmas

The first Christmas I was alone without the children after the divorce from their father, I discovered that Christmas could be magical even without the children to create a magical Christmas for.  I spent that Christmastide at Holy Cross Monastery with a friend who also spends holy times of the year in monastic houses.   That year the Hudson River froze and the ice boats paced up and down the river all of Christmas week to keep the shipping channels open. At Christmas dinner a man at our table remarked that the ice was so thick at the pond in the nature sanctuary “you could drive a truck onto it.”  I remember this because he and I now share a life together in marriage and Christmases at the convent.

But between then and now, I spent many Christmas mornings alone with a cup of coffee, in front of the wood stove, listening to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.  I learned that the quality of prayer makes Christmas.  The hymns and carols help in this atmosphere while for me the decorations (which I love!) do not.  Light.  Morning light, light reflected in snow, light seeking to penetrate the dark places of my heart.  Even now, this happy Christmas, with family and friends and decorations and music at the convent (this year I had it all!) the dark places in my heart still yearn for light.  The Good News is that despite how I feel, I know the Light is present, dwelling among us, full of grace and truth.

Despite the sad darknesses of my heart held to the Light, I hope, for healing, these memories of this Christmas so far (it’s only the Fourth Day of Christmas and VERY early in the morning -before dawn- of the Fourth Day!) stand out for the music.  The sisters sing and sing well.  And so we sang – joyous hymns, silly songs, haunting carols, until we all lost our voices by Vespers on Christmas Day. 

The other happy memory of this year that I’ll cherish: we’re preparing for Vespers, the creche Blessing, and Eucharist, and while the rest of us are busy with vestments, building up the fire,  preparing the incense pot, the readings, lighting the paper-bag luminarios for the path between the convent and the chapel, finding our office books and hymnals and music books,  my youngest son is in the Great Room where the creche is and where we’ll sing vespers, reading aloud to his girlfriend, his arm around her.  He’s reading O. Henry’s story The Gift of the Magi in which a young woman sells her hair to buy a watch fob for her husband’s beloved pocket watch, but meanwhile the young husband had sold the watch to buy beautiful combs for his wife’s hair.  I watch, and see his girlfriend’s lovely face, and watch her gasp as she realizes what has happened in the story.  This brought light and warmth to my heart.

One of the hymns we sang on Christmas Day comes from a poem by Richard Crashaw (d.1649).  The musical setting includes only the first verse.  But I looked up the whole of the poem and include the last verse here.

We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest,
Young dawn of our eternal day;
We saw Thine eyes break from the East,
And chase the trembling shades away:
We saw Thee, and we blest the sight,
We saw Thee by Thine own sweet light.

To Thee, meek Majesty, soft King
Of simple graces and sweet loves!
Each of us his lamb will bring,
Each his pair of silver doves!
At last, in fire of Thy fair eyes,
Ourselves become our own best sacrifice!

I woke up from disturbing dreams this morning. The darknesses of my heart had filled my dream world and still linger around me. I even took down and fingered the crown of thorns I keep on a high shelf in my studio for Good Friday liturgies and I tried to draw a meditation from it.  Humiliation?  Failure?  Silence in the face of shame? But I also thought I’d look up that Crashaw poem to get me going on the day.  I think I was meant to hear that last line,

At last in fire of Thy fair eyes,
Ourselves become our own best sacrifice!

As I finished writing this post the sun has come up, though it’s not visible behind the dark clouds and heavy snowflakes.  But I know the sun has risen, and I know the Light permeates the darkness.  And that the darkness has not overcome it  (John 1:5).

All these photos of our cresche are by Sister Catherine Grace, CHS

… and music!

After putting the “hoe down” the day before Thanksgiving the sisters now busy themselves indoors: working on plans for next year’s garden, cleaning the tools, sorting and saving seeds, end-of-year accounting, attending to things left undone indoors, and music!  And then there’s “creativity week” during which I’ve observed weaving, making liquid soap, learning to play the banjo, making cookies.  I’m busy “building” the crèche and preparing for a Long Retreat I’m leading in mid-January.  In the evening by the fire I get to read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol aloud – something I love to do. 

Yesterday we listened to Bach’s Cantata Wachet auf (“Wake up”)  and read Philipp Nicolai’s libretto together.  Nicolai and Bach weave the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) with the Song of Songs.  Ingeniously, and unlike the parable itself, you can hear that the foolish voices (or oboes) do “catch up” and all enter the banquet together.  Sister asked, ”Isn’t this a better message than ’sorry, you’re all going to hell?’”  The music, of course, is gorgeous, but here’s part of the libretto which filled me with joy yesterday.

Bass solo recitative:
So come inside to me / you bride that I have chosen for myself/ I have betrothed myself to you from eternity to eternity. / It is you that I want to set in my heart,/ on my arm like a seal/ and to delight your grieved eyes. / Forget now, O soul, / the anguish, the sorrow / that you had to suffer./ On my left hand you should rest / and my right hand should kiss you.

Duet, soprano (Soul) and bass (Jesus)
Soul: My friend is mine.
Jesus: and I am yours,
Both: nothing shall divide our love.
Soul: I want to gaze on heaven’s roses with you,
Jesus: You will gaze on heaven’s roses with me,
Both: There will be fullness of joy, there will be delight.

I always felt badly for the foolish virgins who didn’t bring enough oil in their lamps.  As a child I knew I would have been one of them because I was always so disorganized, and yet I knew my love and passion was as deep and steady (oh, listen to those calm voices singing the cantus firmus!) as the honor-roll sopranos.  Musically, the oboes and voices “catching up” with the cantus firmus add interest to the whole of the piece!  Anyway, as sister pointed out yesterday, the parable of the workers hired at the last hours provide an alternative scenario to salvation that seems more Jesus-like to me.

There's more time for music in the dead of winter. After a Handel Sonata.

Nevertheless, it’s good to keep working on the spiritual oil in the lamp problem.  Those damn honor-roll type sopranos make it look easy, though.  They CAN’T be for real.

Enjoy this season of inner light.  May the holy shine forth as you give to others of your love. amen.  -Suzanne

This Embertide

It’s Embertide and several friends, all women, are being ordained to the priesthood, including one of the girls in the Episcopal Church program at Vassar when I was chaplain there.  One has small children, one is a nun.

I’m praying for these wonderful women. How beneficial for the church to have their gifts!  I’m also realizing it’s similar to how it might feel when your children have children: a mix of intense happiness for them, but knowing they’re on a trajectory of pain and joy and surprise and mystery – and more anguish than you once thought possible.  When I was young I wanted to experience “human life” (as if I was from another planet or something.) Parenthood is one way. Ministry another.

Tomorrow is my 25^th ordination anniversary. I’ll be glad when the day, and when Embertide is over this year altogether.  I’ve been unusually moody and sensitive and kick-the-rock-along-the-road irritable. When other people behave this way I suspect they’re going through a spiritual transition. It’s those between-places, the closing of one door and the indistinct threshold of you-know-not-what-yet that stir up the debris usually settled along the dusty path of consciousness. “Stir up your power” we pray this week in Advent, but I get cross if holiness gets stirred up in my own life.

I suppose its been a privilege to be with people at their worst.  And to dodge the rocks thrown at you for not being “visible” in the office while you’ve been hidden in the emergency room, the intensive care unit, the citadels of the shut-in, the court-room, the jail, the psych-wards, the burn-ward, or curled up on the kitchen floor praying with a parishioner’s beloved dying cat. Negotiating through a myriad of funerals, each grief unique. Countless weddings and new babies and baptisms.  The long aftermath of rapes and abortions, divorces, suicide attempts, drawn-out painful deaths that make you question the existence of God.  Receiving veiled death threats from a drug addict. Chatting at length weekly with a charming woman with advanced dementia.  Being the sole person with a dying old woman abandoned by her family, singing her to heaven. The children killed in automobile accidents, “acts of God”, crib-deaths, cancer. Spousal abuse, neglect, incest, AIDS. Blessing body parts at Ground Zero. Children in paralyzed shock after the death of a young parent.  All the while patiently mediating impossible and contradictory expectations and deflecting the wildly out of proportion projections upon you of undeserved adoration and hatred.

Pastoral life is hid with God in Christ. People want their priest with them.  And, as I was able, I was present.  

 Public ministry as a pastor and priest is over for me. But something is “stirred up” instead, with challenges and griefs and joys and heartbreaks to come, and, of course, ever-present Mystery. 
Looking for material for this week’s web-post on www.edgeofenclosure.org  I re-discovered Merton’s poem, The Quickening of John the Baptist.  Here’s a small portion from the poem that gives me comfort this week.

 Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied
sermon. Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
with hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.

 -Thomas Merton 1915-1968

Suzanne Guthrie Paglen, December 15, 1984, St. Martin's Church, Davis, California

Advent Retreat

Cloister, Holy Cross Monastery. Photo by Brother Randy OHC, from a previous winter.

Sunday. Holy Cross Monastery

The snow looks like confectioner’s sugar dusted upon a chocolate tort in this light before sunrise.  I prayed a variation of the Angelus when the monastery bell rang, weeping in my prayer and for the concerns in my prayer and for the sheer comfort of the familiar resonance of the bell itself.  But I stayed at the computer and didn’t go to Matins.

Another Advent Retreat at Holy Cross.   I love this retreat, and the freedom the participants give Brother Bede and I to experiment or adjust and build on what we’ve done before, although we do something different every year.  But the last few years, we have had a pilgrimage to the crèche, nestled in the sunken pool,  a circular area beneath the Chapter Room in the enclosure library. ”The cave,” Bede calls it when we turn it into the manger-crib.

On this Saturday night pilgrimage we gather in the chapel and we each burn a piece of paper upon which we’ve written something we want to “leave behind” this Advent.   We light our papers with the Gospel candle and drop them into a huge black kettle used for the lighting of the New Fire at the Easter Vigil.  We process to the Chapter Room to wash in a large bowl, renewing, refreshing ourselves.  Then we process down a stairway and through labyrinthine ways, really, to the darkened library where  Sister Helena Marie provides a live soundscape for our meditation.  Last night people sat at the illumined crèche for a long long time. 

My interest in progression – moving from room to room, station to station, soul-scape through soul scape, journeys (Bunyan, Dante), labyrinths and ladders of perfection, of humility, of divine ascent, intensifies every year.  My thinking about progressions began when I read Teresa’s Interior Castle when I was in my twenties.  And I quickly discovered the mysticism of the liturgical year with its progression of conversion and purgation, dark nights, illumination toward union, all the modes of the Christian year mirroring the seasons of the soul with Pentecost’s dramatic “sending out” of the adept soul into a broken, troubled, suffering but beautiful world.  After the ”year” (Grace’s Window) I worked on the “day” (Praying the Hours).   For that matter, any story arc does the same thing – sets up the circumstances and challenges and works them out dramatically until the moral triumph (hopefully).

Retreats mime this progression.  You begin on Friday night with some sort of event to shake the soul up.  Saturday you begin working on “it” whatever that “it” might be, Saturday night you again enter some kind of event to heighten or bring to a climax the potential for an unnamed experience.  On Sunday, you “unpack” what has happened and share insights and pull it all together in words and personal testimony.

I see my life, too, as a progression with its varied geographies, Long Island to Holland, Michigan to Boston to Washington D.C. to San Antonio to Northern California to Germany to several locations in the Hudson Valley with the monastery as our center, to Ithaca, and now  the convent- farm.  Each place presented moral and spiritual and personal challenges.  This phrase just now came into my head: “sadder but wiser.”  I hope I’m wiser.  At least, I found friends at each resting place who love me and whom I deeply love.  And maybe love is enough for a good life.

Today after the Eucharist we have our final session.  I’m anxious to hear if people “got” it – or deepened in some way, at least embraced the analogy of the soul’s endless resources of rooms within.  Christ and ultimately the eternal beyond-time at the center.  And, through Christ … beyond.

Purify our hearts, Holy One,
that Jesus Christ
at his coming
may find in us
a mansion
prepared for himself.

Let every heart prepare him room.

(adapted from collect for 4th week in Advent, and a Christmas carol)

 Afterword.  I’m pleased with the response to the Advent Retreat.  And I came home to candles in the windows of Saint Aidan’s House, a silvery cover of snow and the change-ringers bells filling the last light of day with brilliant sound.