A Retreat at the Rubin

Inspired by a museum visit, we may scold ourselves for our previous belief that a salad bowl is only a salad bowl, rather than, in truth, an object over which there linger faint but meaningful associations of wholeness, the feminine and the infinite. 

 - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

Once a month the sisters take a “retreat day” to be in silence, dispensed from work and prayer offices, to do individual soul-work.  My taking retreat days is much more random and usually involves leaving the farm because I can’t stay home and not work.

So on Wednesday I went to New York City to spend the day at the Rubin Museum of Art (devoted to Tibetan and other Himalayan art) 7th Avenue and 17th Street. http://www.rmanyc.org/  

Here’s my small museum strategy: I begin at the gift shop/ book store, to see if a post card catches my eye.  A post card often presents me with a clue to exhibit pieces I might miss if I don’t pay attention.   The books on sale tell me what spheres of scholarship and interests cross in this place.  Children’s books, educational materials, toys suggest the care behind the vision: do the curators envision the whole family, the whole person engaged in this art?  (At the Rubin, yes!  Without condescending to children, thought toward a child’s interaction is considered.  In the Mandala exhibit, for example, a well-made Activity Guide was available for studying Mandala with instructions of what to look for layer by layer, what to notice and build from.  I used one!  I also listened in on a class for  teenagers of diverse backgrounds.  The young guide said, “After this class, you’ll be able to give this talk yourself!” meaning the students learn and integrate the principles of the art they studied.)  

After scanning the gift shop, my museum strategy is to check out the eating situation (will I have to go out?  can I afford to eat in?  non-gluten? vegetarian? Can I eat when I feel I need to? ) so that I won’t be distracted by my physical needs.  Then I take a walk through the building, paying attention to the ambient sound, the atmosphere, the sense of place, like settling into a retreat or meditation time, so that I won’t be distracted once I start concentrating.  For me, if I’m alone, museums create the perfect retreat.

For my walk-through I began at the top floor and worked my way down, letting myself  be drawn to one piece or another, but trying to sense the overall visionary scope and logic, noting along the way where I want to spend my time.   I should have begun at the second floor, because here was the key for the beginner – a short course in looking at Himalayan art – how to see what you are seeing.

Clearly two places called to me and although I glanced at everything,  I spent my immersion time in these two places.

First, Mandala: The Perfect Circle  (through January 11, 2010).  Brother Bede and Sister Gail each told me about seeing this exhibit themselves, encouraging me to hurry down to New York, knowing my interest in architecture and prayer, prayer structures, memory palaces, meditation maps, the “Interior Castle” and the Christian Mystical path.   Mandalas, although painted upon parchment or fabric in two dimensions, invite the person meditating into a three-dimensional world.  Like St. Teresa’ of Avila’s Interior Castle, through your prayer and its many obstacles, your goal is to eventually reach the presence of God in the very heart of the castle, the infinite center of your own soul. 

In each Mandala, you make your way through purifying rings of fire, along charnel houses full of bones and scenes of torture (the overcoming of ego and the fear of pain and death) through lotus petals and other symbols of spiritual progress to reach the particular deity within.  Thousands of deities exist in Tibetan Buddhism, and aligning oneself to one or another, and meditating upon those charisms embodied by the deity helps the person to merge with those charisms and traits.  Not unlike the Christian’s continual striving toward Christ-likeness, I thought, as I watched the Mandalas.   Ummm, interesting that I wrote “watched” the Mandalas, because that’s what you do, I think.  You don’t just “look at” them.  You “watch” them.  You’re drawn into them.  You travel through the layers.

An ingenious technological help with “watching” are the two monitors simulating a journey through a Mandala.  The computer simulation presents the Mandala, then turns it sideways, revealing its three-dimensional architecture and allowing you to explore level by level of the construction.  You don’t perceive the meaning in these simulations, but you get the sense of movement, succession of levels of achievement, balance, symmetry and thoroughness necessary to complete the whole. 

Three-dimensional Mandala of Guhyasamaja; Nepal; 20th century; brass; Collection of Namgyal Monastery, Dharamsala, India

(Instead of leading retreats, I’d much rather send people to study in a museum on their own.  Because, well, how do you ”teach” prayer, really?  I mean, over a weekend?)

The other place I needed to spend time: with The Red Book of C.G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology (through January 25, 2010).  [Here's a link to an article about The Red Book in the New York Times Magazine, including an explanation of the politics of bringing the work from the Jung family safe to the scholars and public anxious to see it.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?ref=magazine. ]

Page 105 of The Red Book

The Red Book is Jung’s notebook of dreams, his active imagination interactions with them, with color paintings of the images his dreams presented, what he called a ”confrontation with the unconscious”.  Jung worked on this project from 1914-1930, writing the text in calligraphy like an illuminated prayer book, and finally having it bound in red leather.  The actual book is on display, with Jung’s psychological paintings on the wall, including some drafts of personal Mandalas. Facsimiles of the Red Book which is about to be published by W.W.Norton & Company were available to study. 

For me, The Red Book  is a challenge to “go deeper”.  I admire the sisters I live with who brave this journey.  My retreat at the Rubin helped me see how I skirt along the surface of reality, like a waterbug on top of a pond, rarely even getting wet in the unconscious.  The other challange was to think about friends’ voices telling me over and over to try to “do the art” in my own Book of Hours myself. 

If you can, try to visit the Rubin before these exhibits close.  Plan to spend a day in prayer.

Poking the ceiling of sanctity

I aspired to be a saint.  I remember telling this to a priest when I was a young woman.  He flung his handsome head back and laughed aloud.  And I fell in love with him.

Love makes you a saint.  But love gets complicated by relationship – by attachments, by loyalties, exclusivity.  When you sacrifice your dreams for your spouse’s career, or to take care of your parents, or to nurture your children, that can’t count, can it?  It’s simply required of humans. 

I remember Richard Nixon saying his mother was a “saint”.   Was he so troubled and complex because his mother was a saint?  Did I notice a tinge of unconscious hatred in his pronunciation of the word “saint”?  Is it possible for a parent to be a saint?  It seems to me that once you’re a parent, you’re out of the running for sainthood.  Because you’d betray the world (and sometimes you do) for your children.

It seems to me a saint’s child would work in a neighborhood hardware store by day, saving lives in an EMT ambulance at night.  And the saint-parent would be anonymous.  And probably already dead, as there are so many pitfalls in just living, shopping, paying taxes, acquiescence to a toxic culture, integral to the exploitive military industrial complex.

My love for the priest was unrequited, fortunately. And since those idealistic days my life wound through dark labyrinths, going from darkness to darkness of distortions like a hall of mirrors.  I often crumple into a ball and weep.  Is a saint someone who avoids the labyrinths altogether?   No, you’d have to be in a coma to avoid the labyrinth of the human condition.  Or does a saint summon up some courage, not lose heart, never go mad, and,  looking up, find a weak spot in the ceiling, prying it open?  The saint climbs out and looks down upon the maze, traces its intricacies strategically, and tearing open the covering, lets in the light, so others might make their way more transparently.

I gave up wanting to be a saint a long time ago.  The best I can do now is try not to sin too gravely,  resist evil as much as possible, and, without too much thinking, hope to be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice if called upon in an emergency.  And once in a while it seems appropriate to at least try poking half-heartedly at that dark ceiling.

Diamonds and Leopard Skin

Heavy, silvery frost.  Diamonds gleam
upon bent blades of grass weighted with light
as sunshafts melt the crystals.  A moment ago
I was rich in diamonds, but I’m no less rich
with the sun’s warmth and wet lawn.

One of the many paradoxes of monastic life is the implication of imminent apocalypse even as we live by ancient daily routines, as if such a stable life continues forever.  In our time science supports the sense of catastrophe.  Rather than averting their eyes from the impending danger, the CHS sisters seek fluency with concepts and data regarding peak oil, climate change, monoculture and seed control.  It’s difficult sometimes to face these facts day after day.  But I have children and will probably have grandchildren.   What use am I to them if I ignore reality and don’t help prepare them for their future?

Who needs leopard patterend scarves, shoes, handbags? Here's a leopard slug right outside my door! photo by Sr. Catherine Grace CHS

As we watch the orgiastic consumer culture crumble, I believe our need for beauty will help us disassociate from the compulsion to possess it.  When we can’t enjoy the cheap adrenalin rush of going to the mall to purchase a pretty frill to bring home and wear once, we’ll lose our curse of boredom.  When it is financially prohibitive to acquire a glittery object to keep for a year, we won’t suffer over the guilt that our shiny thing will end up on a poisonous trash pile in Guatemala to be picked apart by sick children to trade for food.  

Perhaps then, we’ll find the beauty at hand, in nature, imagination, through exploration of the complex symmetry of the soul.  But to absorb this beauty, we will need to reclaim the skill of slowness, of noticing.  Each person already possesses the field in which the pearl of great price is buried.  The merchant knew to look within, and had the common sense to sell all he had to secure  that one field.

 

We’ve been reading The Gospel of Thomas during our Bible study.  These two sayings influcenced my thoughts this week.

Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the Father’s imperial rule is in the sky,’  then the birds of the sky will precede you.  If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you.  Rather, the Father’s imperial rule is within you and it is outside you.  When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father.  But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.  (3:1-3)

Jesus said, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.  For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. (5:1-2)

Appointments with the Eternal Present

Geese in Formation, photo by Sr. Catherine Grace

Very near to the house, migrating white throated sparrows toss dry leaves and sing their hyper-clear two-pitched song.  Restless geese disturb the calm of sky.  Pale leaves, almost weightless, reveal the shape of air currents circling quickly, swirling slowly, rising, dropping.  I love the sweet scent of leaf decay as my shoes scriff through the path to the convent.

I love my thrillingly dull life.  The threat of a freeze driving us into Sweet William’s Field to harvest peppers provided the biggest drama this week.  Intoning groans punctuated by “tsk tsks” for belated maturing after a cool wet summer, we salvaged what we could and hung some plants upside down in the greenhouse hoping against hope for some post harvest ripening.  I brought the geraniums onto the porch at St. Cuthberts, and brought two pots into St. Aidan’s to bloom in the kitchen window over the winter.  That was the extent of excitement this weekend. 

Brush of Autumn Color in Fog, photo by Sr. Catherine Grace

I love when nothing happens but the routine of monastic Offices and Eucharist, meals and chores, work and rest.  Most of my life I’ve lived with family members or served in work places full of drama – the stirring up of usually non-issues for the sake of emotional color, often involving secrecy (because if you simply said aloud calmly what the problem was, it could be solved then and there.)  And although I’ve met monastics who tended toward drama and intrigue, the conventual life works best without flailing and histrionics.

What a luxury it is to live with people who value a life of prayer!  Yesterday we talked about the “rich young ruler” who came to Jesus, asking what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus looked at him and loved him.  “Go and sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and then, come and follow me,” said Jesus.  And the young man went away sorrowful and grieving because he had many possessions.  A sister observed, “We’re called to live in absolute detachment in order to live in absolute connection.”  Another sister said that we need face that eternal present moment between past and future “with a spirit of generosity.”   The women Bill and I live with show up every day for the insight that’s offered continually by the life they’ve fashioned.

This morning I read from the section of Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook in which she says, “If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet – one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere- there would have been no romance, no passion … “.  She goes on to say what every teacher of writing says.  You have to show up to your appointments to write.  “It comes before everything, even technique.”

Bill on the path to St. Aidan's, photo by Sr. Catherine Grace

The monastic life is a life of appointments: meditation, Lauds, Eucharist, work, Noon prayers, dinner, rest, work, Vespers, meditation, Compline.  Day after day.  Bells calling you to gather and again to focus, calling you from one task to the ongoing and never ceasing appointment with the Divine.  Calling you from worrying about the past or future into generously giving yourself to the eternal present.

Mary Oliver is writing about poetry, but she could just as well be writing about prayer. “If it is all poetry, and not just one’s own accomplishment, that carries one from this green and mortal world – that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise – then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.”

I love this dull life, fecund with inner excitement, exploration, revelation, fascination, surprise, and showing up punctually to face the Eternal Now.

Coming Home in Another Direction

I’ve returned from my two week’s retreat writing on the Eucharist.  I composed my draft not from the two boxes of reference books and notes I brought, but spontaneously from my mind and heart, aiming for brevity and intensity, for someone’s lectio, for the person who has only a few minutes a day to give to an inner life.  I have no idea what I wrote.  When I have time I’ll look at it again and get to work revising, clearing, slashing, tossing, or, maybe, ever so gently drawing out of the draft that which is lovely and good and hopeful.  Who knows?

On the return trip I took the hour-and-a-half  ferry trip from Orient Point to New London.  Sitting on a bright blue bench on the less windy side of the boat, notebook in my lap,  I prayed the swells rocking the ferry like a cradle. I prayed the gray green water and the cloudy gray sky. I prayed the rain and the wind and white foam and salt air.  I prayed, feeling utterly myself, alone between homes. 

I once took a private retreat at Lebh Shomea House of Prayer in south Texas.  I couldn’t have been there long, because I had two little children and I was pregnant with my third, but I know the retreat was long enough to sink into the holy solitude.  At the end of the retreat I flagged down the bus on the highway and found myself sharing a seat with a garrulous preacher who talked all the way to San Antonio. Recalling his service in the Korean war he said, “So a young man said to me, ‘Chaplain? That’s all very well to say I lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help but I lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh mine enemy!’”  I never forgot the shock of conversation after a week of silence.   I feel that shock now.   

The sisters have been busy with garlic planting, October mulching, harvesting and processing apples, walnuts, husk cherries and tomatillos, and making  juice from the unsold vegetables from Market Day.  I came home to lovely house guests, laughter, Saturday night pizza making, Sunday Lauds, Eucharist, common meals, meetings, Vespers, Compline, and Sunday night “reacreation” playing games together.  From writing about  Hours to real Hours.  From writing about Eucharist to a Eucharistic life.

As I sit at my desk this Monday morning surrounded by unopened mail, facing two weeks of chores to catch up on, preparations for tomorrow’s fireside (gathering costumes, completing paper mache mask for the wolf of Gubbio, marking texts for scenes from the life of St. Francis) I’m thinking about how I lose myself in work, in detail, in checking off items on my lists of things left undone.  I’m also thinking about that sense of longing for home I wrote about in the previous blog entry.  I’m thinking about how, throughout my life, I’ve always been particularly sensitive to sense of place.

Here’s what else I’m thinking.  Neither the Long Island scents of tidal marshes or the farm with its prophetic purposes is home.  (Well, that’s true literally, but go on anyway, Guthrie.)  But while I sat on that blue bench in solitude on the ferry, I had no sense of longing.  In a terrible sense, I was home then.  Home between homes.  Home between states, land forms, responsibilities, past and future, in a liminal gray fog between sea and sky while the ocean swells lifted and dropped the ferry plowing the sea between ports of home.   

 

I’d copied this quote into my notebook.  It’s John Drury writing about an Annunciation by Duccio.  I thought of it as sister rang the Angelus bell at the beginning of the offices this weekend.  

The “clean heart” is ready for the creative spirit, the clear mind for true conceptions, and the simple, pure eye for the invasion of light. 

Amen.

Coming Home

I’m on the North Fork of Long Island, surrounded by the scents of sea and tidal marshes, familiar vegetation (scrub oak, cabbage fields, sedge, marsh grass, bayberry), wood shingled dwellings, and overall, the unique Long Island light of my childhood.  One day last week I  gathered “wampum” (smooth thick shards of shell) on the beach as I did when I was enamoured of the Long Island Indians as a kid. And, as I did as a child, I look out over the water, longing for some unseen, unknowable sense of home.

I’d ask myself even then, how could I not be “home”?  We had family movies of my coming home from the hospital in my mother’s arms. I’m squished and red in the face with orange  downey hair, crying, crying.  In the movies I’m being doted over and certainly I was loved as a child. 

Heading to Long Island on the Bridgeport/Port Jefferson Ferry

Still, I longed for “home,” and when I was old enough I’d go out into the woods to weep, “I want to go home!”  That feeling transferred into a symbol of my looking out over the water to the horizon, from a painting I once saw of a little Dutch girl looking out over the sea.  I even set a musical score to the image, a plaintive piece my older brother played in his junior high school band.  I hummed the music and longed and longed for home. I’ve lost this tune but I remember the sentiment. Occasionally I encounter it in adult forms, and in prayer.

So here I am, on a two week writing retreat at The Ink Hotel in Southold, choosing to go to this home-like spit of land surrounded by sea to write the Eucharist part of my Book of Hours.  Eucharist, the ultimate longing for home.

But here’s the irony. By the end of a Eucharist, you are turned inside out, and instead of going home, you’re sent out, integrating home with your own fragile set of unique bones and blood and brain tissue and, heaven help us, personality. You are commissioned to engage fully in daily life, going out to seek danger, wield justice, bring the Love you have just taken into yourself to the broken hearted, the sick , the hungry, the displaced, the mentally ill, the violent, the unlovely and unloved, to BE home to the homesick in a broken world because you have just consumed home.

More on Distraction

During Bible Study, while we were reflecting on the scene with the woman with the alabaster jar at Simon’s house (Luke 7:36-50), one of our sisters said, “Maybe if I think my sins aren’t very great, maybe my love isn’t very great either.”

Sins against Love!

Last night at Vespers as we bowed during the chanting of the Gloria patri, bored to tears literally, I glanced out the Mary window toward “Duckville”.  And I thought, here I am, bowing in reverence in the presence of the One with such a Holy Name we can’t know or say it, but I’m furtively glancing out the window to see if anything anything is happening out there in the garden!  And I purport to love The Divine Holy One, I chose and still choose to live a life in harmony with worship and service.  And I’m yawning?  When any guest comes I manage to stay focused and interested even out of mere politeness.  When I’m tired I rifle through PBS online to keep up with new postings of British murder mysteries (Oh, boy, yet another murder in Oxford!) and manage to stay awake.  But for the Ultimate Great & Holy Mystery?

I’m not saying this isn’t normal.  It goes to show we’re like puppies when it comes to divine things. (Speak for yourself, Guthrie, you might be saying, but who do you think YOU are, the Dalai Lama?) Some breeds appear to be more prone to distraction and addled than others, but, I think it’s still early in our evolutionary journey toward Consciousness.  We’re still looking out for the giant cat stalking us when we venture outside the cave to hunt.  We need to keep the one trait and still develop the other.

Training, practice, singing the damn psalms, sitting in silence.  Opening to the Other.  Like skydiving, climbing cliffs, spelunking, scuba diving, this thrilling exploration of the Soul on the boundary of Infinity astounds us!  What happens when you lose concentration skydiving, or climbing, or spelunking, or in the depths of the ocean?  You can lose your life.  But in prayer – you simply, gently, call yourself back  “without recrimination”, as Brother Bede says, toward the Dark.  But without the endorphins.

Ladder of Paradise, inspired by John Climacus (525-606), Russian manuscript page, 16th century

Here’s a helpful and humorous quote from John Climacus that I didn’t find a place for on the webpost this week.  (www.edgeofenclosure.org).  The beginning underscores meditation prompt three (don’t judge) and the rest of it cautions not to attribute natural-born character traits to your good discipline.  Good quote for ego-watching.

Some, I know not why (for I have not learned to pray conceitedly into the gifts of God) are by nature, I might way, prone to temperance, or stillness, or purity, or modest, or meekness, or contrition.  But others, although almost their own nature itself resists them in this, to the best of their power force themselves; and though they occasionally suffer defeat yet, as men struggling with nature, they are in my opinion higher than the former.  Do not boast, man, of the wealth you have obtained without labour.  For the Bestower, foreseeing your great hurt, and infirmity, and ruin, at least saves you to some extent by those unmerited gifts. 

-John Climacus, Ladder to Paradise, Step 26, Section 28-29

Toddlers and Truth

One of our sisters believes we’d be a lot better off with toddlers running around the convent.  Other sisters look at her in horror when she sighs like that.  Yesterday a little girl coming out of the Melrose School pointed to this sister and said, “Mommy, Look!   A Grandma!”  Our sister beamed all day.  She is, in fact, a grandmother of three and misses terribly “her babies” living far away across the country.

Bill just became a happy grandpa.  I don’t have grandchildren yet, but I feel the grandmother hormones erupt when I see certain children.  I amuse myself composing long nonsense songs for my children’s not-yet-conceived children.  I understand our sister’s sense of longing and loss.  The most endlessly fascinating part of my life was playing with, observing, and just generally being enthralled by my own four children.  I still miss each of them from each childhood age.  So I miss them exponentially, four times however many ages.  However, I don’t possess any unrealistic maternal after-glow or a selective memory of how difficult and exhausting and heartbreaking it was to be their mother.

When I found the Nicholaes Maes painting I used on the Edge of Enclosure website this week, I laughed aloud.  The child in the foreground enchanted me.  The hand of the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Light, the Word, the Good Shepherd, the Gate, the Resurrection and the Life, The Paschal Lamb, son of the Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, Ivory Tower, Ark of the Covenant, rests upon her head. 

Her mother dressed the child up in Sunday best clothes and fussy little church offering purse for the occasion.  Nevertheless, at this supreme sacramental once-to-every-man-and-nation moment, the child’s uncompromising distraction lures her from the event at hand toward something glittering beyond our view.

Yes!  And look at the child in the background, thrust toward Jesus, but going limp in protest.  Yes!  Finally, an unsentimental look at children and the child as symbol of  innocence and spontaneity.

Well, I simply loved that child because she’s me at prayer.  Every day.  Toddlers keep you honest. 

Here’s my Saturday Morning prayer, after keeping the child in the Maes painting in my mind this week.  ( When I refer to the “Chicken Parade” it means this: Bill opens St. Eggburt’s House in the morning and the chickens jump out one at a time by rank, first the eight matronly Black Stars, and then the flock of nine adolescent golden brown Red Stars.  They stretch their wings and run to the corn, clucking amongst themselves and hastily get to work scratching up the night’s offering of grubs and worms.  I love the morning chicken parade.)

Saturday Morning Prayer

I’m empty.  I’m hungry.  I love this quiet early in the dark of the morning.  No noise from the road or school or house.  The clattering rain abruptly stopped.  Now, only the invasive sound of my quiet keyboard, padding, like a guilty cat sneaking across the counter-top.

I hiccup twice.  The de-humidifier kicks in.  Soon the windows will brighten, Bill will get up, the microwave will roar, the toaster ping, the scent of cinnamon and English muffins ascend the stair, the dog’s long nails clacking along the floor overcoming her age in her quest for crumbs and attention.  The chicken parade will thrill me for a moment and soon the traffic will speed along the road.  My brain will distract me.  I’ll know NPR news is on and I’ll want to take it in - after all I might need to know something.  My mind will sound like the chicken parade and the microwave and the dog’s long nails on the wood floor and Weekend Edition Saturday. 

O Holy One!  Do not abandon me to my distractions.  I love your chivalry, but I’m mesmerized by the glamour of the crowd and ‘thralled to the contests, and I somehow overlook your gentle hand, reaching for a token of my love.

Chrsit Blessing the Children, Nichoaes Maes, 1652-53

The “C” word

“Well,” said the sister, “we don’t really want to use the ‘c’ word (crisis) for the weeds, but we’re close!”  So this weekend, all hands in dirt.  No booth at the Farmer’s market.  No regular Sunday mass – we’re celebrating a “making-brunch-and-Eucharist-event” instead.  Its all weeds all the time.

The chickens have a portal from their yard into Sweet William’s Field.  As you pull up the weeds, the hens surround you, feathers iridescent green in the sun.  They love petting and make good companions in the garden, scratching the dirt for grubs and worms.  You compete for worms, wanting the worms to stay working  in the soil.  But you can almost see a laser beam between the golden orb of a chicken’s eye and the camoflagued annelid.  

Weeds or no weeds I still have the website deadline on Monday.  Some people use the site for Bible study and get anxious if the meditations don’t appear as their meeting time approaches.  Monday, being the monastic Sabbath (each sister on her own, no schedule of offices or prepared meals or work times) I have a long period of uninterrupted time to finish off the site, the newsletter, and the blog.

Because the site provides a self guided retreat every week based on the lectionary, and because it’s only to help enter the coming Sunday’s texts in personal devotion, (not for scholarly interpretation or sermon preparation -although some preachers have written in gratitude! thank you, guys!) I never know what’s going to emerge.

This week “take up your cross” highlighted itself and within that, the idea of the devotional symbol of the cross emerged.  Another “C” word.  Besides chicken.   So I found more than enough quotes about devotion to the cross. (see www.edgeofenclosure.org ).   And I thought I’d write about the devotional cross I’m wearing.

In December I will observe my silver anniversary as a priest.  At my ordination I was given a beautiful Jerusalem cross a friend bought for me in Israel.  I loved it because it looked as much like a medalian as a cross and I felt free to wear it every day without attracting attention to the complications of my often shaky faith or offending people for whom the cross creates anxiety.

One day this past winter somewhere between segments of a series of errands, the cross finally wore out and shattered, the top piece disappearing – somewhere in the road, parking lot, the nursing home, or the hardware store.

Not long after this I received an unexpected package from France with a note.  “Is this the cross you were looking for?”  I unwrapped it and held in my hand my old confirmation cross, the celtic cross given to confirmands by our parish church in St. James, NY.

I’d cherished this cross for years, all through junior high and high school.  I loved the weight, the feel, the sense of sanctity, the memory of the sacrament I’d so desired and petitioned for earlier than was normally allowed.  I’d loved the consecration it represented.

But while my growing and thinking and exploring took me away from the church with sadness and regret during college years, my friend Elizabeth “found Christ.” I’d lost faith and she’d found it.  So I gave her my beloved cross.

Almost forty years later during a visit with one another I remembered the cross and asked if she still had it.  Elizabeth has five children and lived her married life in Colombia, Holland, Hong Kong, Japan, and various places in France.  She didn’t remember it, or so I thought until a few years later when that little packet arrived from France. 

Now I’m wearing the cross I wore when I was twelve years old when I began this journey of dedication and its mix of emotions: sadness, joy, disappointment, grief, humiliation, ecstacy, surprise, passion, and mostly just difficult plodding along, kind of like weeding.

Here’s a last word from Dag Hammerskjold’s Markings: 

Thou who has created us free, Who seest all that
     happens – yet art confident of victory,
Thou who at this time art the one among us
     who suffereth the uttermost loneliness,
Thou – who art also in me,
May I bear Thy burden, when my hour comes,
May I -

A Geography of Prayer

I’m just back from the west coast where we celebrated the wedding of my second oldest son and his wife.  The couple rented a beach house for a week for an extended party.  As tempting as it is to show pictures, etc, this is a prayer blog, so I’ll reluctantly spare you the mom stuff. 

I prayed on the beach early in the morning and at sunset. 

My mother liked to tell me I was born seven feet above sea level, not including the delivery table.  I suppose people of Dutch descent tend to note land/sea correlations.  But I did grow up in the scent of salt air and tidal marshes under the white Long Island sky which turns blue by suggestion: some adult tells you the sky is supposed to be blue, and only then it is.

Prayer on the edge of the sea draws upon a quality from something deep within me – the brain stem? the considerable proportion of salt water in the body? the primal connection to tides and moon and gravity?  the mind’s  image of a semi-amphibious creature evolving from the deep to dwell upon land?  Childhood sensate memory?

For whatever reason, prayer along the seashore allows a directness and clarity unencumbered by the tricks and fussyness I sometimes have to employ in day-to-day working time.  The pristine sand, the stunning and awe-full crash of waves, the sense of danger so nearby, the definitive line of horizon between sea and sky offers a clarity uncommon in my usual surroundings.  Rarely do I pray with words, but on the edge of the Pacific I felt small, inhabiting my body in a fragile and specific way.  Rather than losing myself in prayer, I felt particularly myself in my worries, concerns, and limitations.

Now, back at the farm, we’re observing an octave of Foundations, in commemoration of the founding of the Community of the Holy Spirit.  We sing the most gorgeous antiphons and responds:

How awesome is this place! this is none other than the home of God, and the gate of heaven: Surely the Holy One is in this place, and I knew it not. And when Jacob was now awak-ed, as one out of a deep sleep, he said, Surely the Holy One is in this place, and I knew it not.

And,

Behold the tabernacle of God is with us and the Spirit of God dwelleth within you: for the temple of God is holy, which temple we are, for the love of whom you do this day celebrate the joys of the temple with a season of festivity.

And,

I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And,

This place shall be called a place of prayer, says our God.  In it, every one that asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it shall be opened.  Holiness becomes this place, O God, for ever and ever. 

Yesterday in her sermon, the sister who preached said that one of the themes of the Song of Songs is Paradise reclaimed.  Throughout the day and late into the evening our conversations referenced this idea.  We live in Paradise.  We keep forgetting, but we keep remembering, too.

How is it that I came to live in Paradise?  Only through awakening to it.  Or, being interrupted into awareness.  In my particularity I feel like Zachaeus in the antiphon we sing this week at Lauds:  Zachaeus  (who I imagine as short and round and bald and sinful and delightful) hurry and come down (from the tree), for today I must abide in your house: and he made haste and came down, and received him into his house joyfully.  This day is salvation come to this house from God, alleluia.

I came from the west coast beach prayer my usual sinful, hopefully delightful self, and, to my surprise, like Zachaeus, entertaining the Holy ever so unexpectantly in my particularity. 

Last summer in New Zealand I walked along the coast near the end of a storm and watched as waves destroyed a sea wall and threw pilings and rocks up onto the road.  The crashing power of the sea came home with me, and as we chanted I heard the sea in the silent pauses between the psalm phrases.  I lost myself in that prayer.

This summer, the sea prayer follows me into specific Paradise.  A small “me” inhabiting a short-lived, particular life.

When I finish this entry and post the website and this week’s “retreat” I’ll need to go into the garden.  A week of heavy rains on the east coast knocked over my cutting flowers.  Plants overgrew into other plants, and I’m determined to break the spell of a wicked enchantment of weeds.  Just to tidy up Paradise a little bit.  The breeze through trees reminiscent, ever so slightly, of waves.

You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.  – Thomas Traherne