Speaking of Gratitude

six fuzzy baby ducklings, smooth brown hen eggs, scents of cilantro, oregano, basil, sage, rosemary, lavender as you brush past the kitchen garden on the way to chapel, one giant angel trumpet opening while we watch, birdsong during meditation

Before taking off on travels again, I want to share a dream - the punchline is meant to share. 

The dream: Holy Cross monastery is undergoing a complete renovation so that nothing is in its usual place.  I’m given the task of “saying what you are grateful for” during the liturgy.  I can’t get to the monastery church the usual way - because of the complete overhaul of everything.  I’m going through the crypt, larger than in reality, full of sarcophagi.  Suddenly, out of each grave very live monks sit up grinning at me.  I laugh.  I ask, “Is it okay for me to walk through here?”  “Yes, of course,” said a Voice. “Go anywhere you like.  Just go slowly so that you know what you are really grateful for!”

Although this is a personal dream (my inner life undergoing a thorough renovation this year)  and the monastery crypt being the place I’ll be buried (not in the huge sarcophagi of the dream, but a tidy little niche for cremains in the wall), the message of the Voice is universal.  Slow down, so that you’ll know what you are really grateful for.

Each day at our mid-day meal we hold hands and say “I’m grateful for… “  It’s hard for me to say in words what I experience in wordless, image-less forms within myself.  I’m grateful for all the things the sisters usually say; the morning’s worship, the beautiful day, community life, the extraordinary food a sister or Bill prepared - usually fresh from the garden.  One sister says every week, “I’m grateful it’s SUNDAY!”

Within those prayers I also feel gratitude from the sisters for my work in the kitchen garden and for my role in community and for making the chapel nice, and I feel their thankfulness for my appreciation of each of them.  I perceive their gratitude for me, for whatever gifts I bring to the community mix, maybe just my general goofiness.  But I’ve never felt so appreciated. 

I spend a lot of time weeding.  Singing and weeding. Gilbert and Sullivan, hymns, old folk songs, and Leonard Cohen.  I sing, ”I came so far for beauty …”  I live in beauty.  Not the beauty of holiness, although hints emerge through the chant and in the cabbages and ducklings and rampant flower blossoms.  Practicing gratitude out loud helps you see holiness - just as drawing teaches you to see, and playing music teaches you to listen, and dancing teaches you to perceive space.  Gratitude teaches me to see what is there.  This life of worship and gardening slows me down and teaches me to know what to be grateful for: the simple and obvious, the subtle and hidden.  The upside down inside out Good News is rarely what you expect.

I didn’t expect to be flying to New Zealand this week.  One of the most extraordinary people I’ve known in this life has just been given a few months to live with the recurrence of an aggressive cancer.  We’ve been friends since rooming together at a summer camp when we were eighteen and nineteen.   We’re saying good-bye.  And she said something about my weeding her vegetable garden.  I feel foolish having taken so long to learn I’m loved not for accomplishments, but for general goofiness and weeding.  I’m grateful even in my foolishness.

Back to the Garden

Flaking dried dill, oregano, thyme, clipping chamomile flower heads, sweetness of blossoms perfuming breeze, hum of bees and hummingbirds, strident birdsong, antiphons of  John the Baptist

Oh, my goodness, suddenly we’re deep in harvest.  Two crates of kale in the hallway.  Chinese cabbage for KimChee.  Brocolli frozen for winter.  Very early tomorrow morning I’ll cut and tie bunches of herbs that a sister will sell with vegetables, spices, and maple syrup at the Farmer’s Market.   Yesterday we ate the most delicious shelled peas ever brought forth from the earth.  (We love superlatives around here.  One sister says of every meal, “This is the most DELICIOUS … add whatever eating … I’ve ever had in my WHOLE LIFE!”)

Yesterday, when I was out at the hospital with a sister in severe back pain, Bill came from the convent home to St. Aiden’s to find a car, a woman and child in the driveway.  She’d pulled in because a lone coyote was stalking the chickens in broad daylight, so she pulled in and beeped her horn and scared it away.  A neighbor sees the coyote in his field (there’s lots of them around - we hear them often, but rarely see them) and a number of his cats have disappeared.   Bill sat outside for an hour in the early evening, and the chickens hid motionless in the forsythia bushes sensing danger. 

I missed the garden for two weeks.  I went to North Carolina to chaplain (I think “chaplain” should be a verb) a Christian Education Conference.  Two weeks of garden in mid-June is a lot to miss!  The sisters were already harvesting and drying herbs from the kitchen garden I tend, but weeding, moving, staking, deadheading … so much to do!  I’m still unpacking, having stuffed the car with fabric and musical instruments and church toys and booklets for all the services, plus materials for the workshops my son, Patrick, co-led.   Too much catching up.

Of the four days I’ve been home, one day I went to New York City for a church appointment and to have lunch with my daughter, Grace.  And yesterday I spent at the hospital with a sister - now at home but very drugged up.  Back pain.  Arrrrggggghhh.

But one thing I noticed about prayer.  Although I led prayer for the week of the conference, and certainly prayed on the trip to D.C., to Durham, to Hendersonville NC and back to D.C. and then N.Y. again, I did not pray as the habit of the year in the garden draws me to pray.  I havn’t got the prayer back.  It’s like in the days I seriously played the flute - if I missed my four hours a day I felt I seriously lost something.  I trust remedial sitting in silence and singing the offices will re-wire my neurons soon, I hope.  I remember in the fall, seeing the cabbages in my prayer, and that gentle voice whispering, “Come to the garden.” 

I’m back to the garden.  Give me that love thou desirest of me.   Amen.

 

 

Sacred Heart

Green, green, and green.  happy black iridescent-feathered chickens in the front yard, scent of Lily of the Valley,  wood -thrush song like pan pipes, neat rows of new plants - free of the stifling seed room, good, dark moist sweet smelling earth, green, green, and green

I’m back from ten days in California - most of my time in the solitude of a hermitage overlooking the Pacific Ocean at New Camaldoli near Big Sur.  Good visits with my old friend Robert Hale (OSB, Cam.) and old and new friends among the other monks. (See contemplation.com).  The brother who brought me to Berkeley afterward, pointed out mountain lion footprints behind my trailer as he fetched my suitcase.   I love the scent of hot, sun-drenched anise, eucalyptus, wild spices and even the scent of ocean hovering in the fog.  The stars pressed down upon the world in the night.  I feel like a happy child in silence.

In Berkeley I went to a graduation and stayed at CDSP (Church Divinity School of the Pacific) and haunted the Graduate Theological Union library a bit, and other favorite sites.

Back home and in TRIAGE mode - getting ready for the Christian Education Conference at Kanuga.  Triage mode begets the “things left undone” in the confession of sin.   But I’m procrastinating today by posting a blog - on the Sacred Heart - which we’re observing today. 

I’d never celebrated Corpus Christi until this year (although I wonder how I missed it when I worked for two years at Holy Cross Monastery?   And the years I lived nearby and went to Eucharist regularly?)  And never never never never have I observed or even thought about The Sacred Heart.

 Without offering a history on the devotion to the Sacred Heart (being in TRIAGE mode) I’ll just gather a few threads of recent personal experience as a set up for the meditation I offer you at the end of the posting. 

When I was in France in January, I saw many “sacred hearts” carved into ceilings or walls or niches, many of them exceedingly old.   I thought, too, of the Sacred Heart while one sister, working on her “heart,” shared some images she painted of the progression of the healing of her heart. 

At a recent workshop, Andrew Harvey led us through a guided meditation on the Sacred Heart reaching into us and holding and healing our hearts.  Then I had a dream of the Sacred Heart, which reached into my own heart, and healed me of the loss of my first love.  When I woke up I said to the ceiling, “Yeah, sure, but THAT was an EASY one!” 

I painted a Sacred Heart prayer card for the sister working on the healing of her heart: a crown of thorns weaves around the heart, and stylized flames purify the space surrounding it.  I used this text from John of the Cross:

How gently and lovingly you wake in my heart, Where in secret you dwell alone; and in your sweet breathing, filled with good and glory, How tenderly you swell my heart with love.

Just before I left for California an Irish RC friend gave me a Sacred Heart medal on a keychain as a gift.  And in Berkeley, I went to feed a piece of bread to the fish and turtles in the courtyard pond at CDSP and … at an Episcopal Seminary!  a really stupid Sacred Heart statue, all chipped and funky, stood on the rim: a white Jesus pointing to his heart,  looking more like he’s pressing a button to show off his lovely pale pink and baby blue beams. 

If all this grosses you out, you probably grew up with that visceral venoumous recoiling against all things Roman Catholic, as I did.  A few months ago I could not imagine noticing Sacred Hearts in churches or courtyards, or painting a devotional card, or dreaming of, or singing an office of, or meditation upon the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

But at last night’s meditation I did. 

Now you have to appreciate the shift in this old apophat, this pray-er in darkness from infancy.  Because of this Abbey of the Imagination project, I’m composing image-full meditations for beginners in prayer.  And the richness of discovery brings forth wonders and laughter.  For example, when I was meditating at New Camaldoli, upon nothing, suddenly  ”finding” the reserved sacrament in the “treasury” of my cathedral of prayer, in the undercroft of the Lady Chapel.  Good work, Unconscious!  No “treasures” appear in the “treasury.”  Nothing but the consecrated host, in a box shaped like the Ark of the Covenant, in the “womb” space beneath the lovely chapel, pregnant with Presence.  I didn’t work at it.  This image just came up in silent prayer.  And of course I had to laugh.

So I’m writing this post for you.  Here’s the image that came up in meditation after Vespers of the Sacred Heart last evening. 

The Sacred Heart hovers over the altar in the crossing of your abbey of the imagination, the “heart” of the church.  Surrounded by purifying flames you feel a Presence of love.  You may float toward the Heart, and go into the Wound-opening in the side.  And within the Heart, you rest, without pain in your body, like a fetus in a womb, absorbing the sweet warmth, the comforting glow of fire outside, the heart shapes itself to your own fully resting floating body, the ambient sound not unlike a gentle heartbeat.  Compassion flows through you, nourishes you, fills you - you draw from this embracing, wide, universal heart of love, compassion for the whole world, as much as you can bear. 

And then, of course, you leave the Heart.  You have to leave the abbey church.  You have to exit through one or another of the sacred portals to go to your work, perhaps with a little more pain for your love of the world than before.

 

Catching Up

Blessed Ascensiontide.  My favorite season.  The Resurrected Christ is gone.  Caught up into “heaven” whatever that is.  The Holy Spirit has not arrived.  We practice extreme ambiguity.  The Dark Night of the Soul.  “Do not leave us comfortless.”

Meanwhile, in community at Bluestone Farm we’re digging, planting, sowing, transplanting, tending seedlings, hardening off.  Singing the Ascension responds and antiphons.  Praying to birdsong. 

Blogwise:  Goodness, where have I been?  Mostly busy not only with the garden, but with preparing materials for the Christian Education Conference at Kanuga in June.  Designing the worship for a week and a workshop I’ll give twice. 

Before I went to Cornell, I was working on a kind of prayerbook for beginners of all ages.  The book contains seven books of hours, a prymer, exercises for preparing for reconciliation and for Eucharist, and other spiritual exercises.  My hope is for an illustrator to create borders full of hidden pictures and symbols and puzzles and references.  Perhaps it is a coloring book - so that you can enter your own pages viscerally.  Perhaps different “hours” might be illustrated by different artists - or there would be different versions you could download from the internet. 

I’m working diligently on the project again - catching up! It’s huge, so I’ve had to be singleminded about it.  Anyway, I created a “coloring book” using the “Morning and Evening Hours” for the Kanuga Conference.  I’m not an artist so … its a struggle!   Anyway, this way an artist or publisher might get a hint of what I’m trying to do beyond the texts.   

The workshop is called, “Inhabiting Your Prayer: Creating an Abbey of the Imagination.  By placing your prayers (the books of hours, for example) into the context of an imaginary cathedral-like church with gardens and guesthouses, cloisters and towers, participants design a balanced interior life.  Based upon the medieval use of “memory palaces” the Abbey of the Imagination reclaims a playful and traditional tool for growing in depth, breadth, and prayerfulness.  

I’ve been studying and inspired by the work of Mary Carruthers.  (The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200, and also The Medieval Craft of Memory . )  I’m also studying Gothic architecture, sacred geometry, Books of Hours, etc. floor plans of cathedrals and monasteries. 

So forgive my bloglessness. 

Tomorrow I leave for a 10 day trip which will include a full week at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur California.  I’ll be connecting with the monks there - I’m an oblate of the Camaldolese Benedictines, and staying in a hermitage overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  Then I’ll go to Berkeley for Trevor’s PhD graduation ceremony.  (See Trevor on The Colbert Report - go to his website paglen.com)

Enjoy the mystical possibilities of praying in Ascensiontide.  Sit in the ambiguity and tension of loss and possibility, confusion and hope.  It’s a good practice for the times life gives you similar confluences.  Amen. 

Altar of Repose

snowdrops, strong winds, silence, haunting chants of Tenebrae looped in my mind like a continual prayer

I never understood the practice of creating a garden for an “altar of repose” for the Maundy Thursday vigil.  I served in churches where parishioners lovingly brought flowers in pots and vases, arranging them in such a way that when you sat at your “holy hour” you were surrounded by beauty.  ”Can you not wait with me one hour?” Jesus asks the disciples after the Passover supper and before his arrest.  Jesus, praying from his anguish of body and soul begs the Holy One, Abba, to “remove this cup from me” knowing he will be tortured to death in a few hours.  Why flowers while commemorating such a terrible event?

Church people sign up to take “hours” of that night, to be with Jesus at Gethsemane, staying awake.  If the Lord’s Supper was instituted at the Passover, my guess is that the disciples were “heavy with sleep” because they had just consumed great quantities of wine.  I always got delightfully giddy at friends’ Passover meals, drinking the required glasses and more.  I always identified with the indolent disciples, for whom “the spirit is willing, but the flesh weak.”

I didn’t understand making a “garden” for the reserved sacrament in which to sit and watch during prayer.  Visiting the Holy Land only reinforced this prejudice.  The Mount of Olives is a dry, dusty place. Olive trees thrive in this arid environment, but “gardens,”  at least flower gardens, take water; too precious and rare and structurally complicated.   I believed my parishioners created these gardens to distract their minds from the horror at hand.   Wouldn’t simplicity, starkness more honestly evoke the prayer of Jesus? 

But recently I found this prayer by Padre Pio:

O Jesus, how many generous souls … have kept Thee company in the Garden, sharing Thy bitterness and Thy mortal anguish… How many hearts in the course of the centuries have responded generously to Thy invitation … May this multitude of souls, then, in this supreme hour, be a comfort to Thee, who, better than the disciples, share with Thee the distress of Thy heart, and cooperate with Thee for their own salvation and that of others.  And grant that I also may be of their number, that I also may offer Thee some relief.

In prayer, sometimes you come close to the boundary of the soul and the boundary of time.  I have put the energies of meditation into situations long past, particularly with sorrowful events in my children’s lives and my own.  I have re-lived past traumas in order to comfort my young self, to urge her on, and to take heart.   And so I understood Padre Pio’s prayer immediately.   I, too, can to some extent, go as far as my soul will allow, to join the witnesses surrounding Jesus in prayer in that olive garden.  Then, why not create a space here and now of beauty, not starkness, to travel through time as prayer, as offering, as comfort? 

The sisters suggested setting the garden of repose in the Great Room where I’d already made a winter garden of house plants, forced bulbs, and generously blooming geraniums.   I asked them what their tradition had been, (and, of course, why a garden of repose in the first place?)  Mother Ruth established  a tradition of a single white freesia blossom near the reserved sacrament to remind the sisters of the scent of nard with which Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus.

In addition to the existing garden and pots of herbs banished from the seed room since the pre-planting has begun, I added large vases of forced forsythia to form a garden background.  Pots of pansies, ready to go outside (they tolerate cold well) frame the center of the library table in front of the winter garden.  With the vow of poverty, we try to make do with what we have, but I did search for white freesia so that the “garden” scent would evoke prayers past for the sisters, and I could not resist a handful of white broom which flowers in the Negev desert spectacularly and might have pleased Jesus in his time, who noticed the “lilies of the field.”  I gathered some snowdrops, the only flower blooming at Bluestone Farm at the moment.  And one small bunch of daffodils from the grocery store.  I also placed a small cystal dish of nard oil next to the sacrament.  We’d used the oil at our foot washing earlier in the evening.   

And so, we each took our vigils on Thursday night in the fragrent garden by the light of the reserved sacrament candle, and the candle of Tenebrae on the fireplace mantle, while full moon-light flooded the Great Room.  I need to move much of that garden into the chapel this morning, for the great feast is at hand.  Holy Saturday - a day of emptiness, except, unlike the disciples, and Mary Magdalene and Jesus other friends, the faithful and the unfaithful, the watchful and the indolent, we know what will happen.  

And so we prepare the next space for our prayers with devoted anticiptation for a mystery of splendid beauty.  

Sunday of Branches

musty Tenebrae books with Sisters’ careful notes in the endpages, red fabric draped on cross, black fabric, crown of thorns, white fabric waiting just out of sight in the closet, soggy ground, cold, tips of bulbs pushing up from the ground

You shall take the fruit of majestic trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God.  Leviticus 23:40

Keeping with our “local” and “seasonal” manifesto and specific practice in Lent, I explored the sisters’ acreage for anything we might use for “palms.”  Even the pampas grass, soaked and limp and dirty seemed unworthy of the liturgy.  Finally, I gathered the most beautiful of the dried vegetation available: fern pods, artemisia, grasses, hydrangea, with forsythia I forced, placing them in vases around the dining room at St. Aidan’s so that we could each design and bind our own assortment of branches, tied with red ribbon.

We began the liturgy at St. Aidan’s, singing and praying, and then proceeded throughout the farm to bless and be blessed at each “gate” of the heavenly Jerusalem, that is, the stations of our working, our praying, our living.  After mucking through the fields, I celebrated mass in my wellingtons.

“Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”  At these words, I wept.

A sister offered one of the best sermons I’d ever heard.  She contrasted vahana, the animal vehicle upon which Hindu deities ride, with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  After all, he usually walked.  She imagined the Roman dignitaries riding magnificent Arabian horses through the city gates.  But Jesus borrows a humble donkey, and comes through the back gate through the poor neighborhoods.   She imagined what onlookers might have thought and felt in this spontaneous act of Jesus, coming purposefully, not furtively, into Jerusalem.   She opened the metaphors into a discussion of “the field” Lynn McTaggart’s concept of influences and intention.  The cultural, political, social, spiritual ” field” of Jerusalem within the oppressive powerful “field”of the Romans.  And Jesus, coming through the back gate, bringing his own “field” of influence and subversive power, which, indeed, changed everything.

I’m happy we decided to save the passion reading for Friday.  This is the first Palm Sunday in which there is time to contemplate the “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem. 

It is ourselves that we must spread under Christ’s feet, not coats of lifeless branches or shoots of trees, matter which wastes away and delights the eye only for a few brief hours.  But we have clothes ourselves with Christ’s grace, with the whole Christ - “for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” - so let us spread ourselves like coats under his feet.        Andrew of Crete   (8th century)

     

Repenting, Returning

Spring songs of chickadees.  Soggy earth.  Melting snow piles.  Twenty six fuzzy black baby chicks with white bottoms in our store-room.  Sprays of forced forsythia, deep yellow.  Metal buckets full of sap.  The sweetness of the air by the evaporator.  The distinct clarity - liquid purity - drinking a glass of pure sap fresh from the tree.

Returning.  Re-turning.  Turning again.  And again.  Again and again.  All day long.  From the first moment, putting my feet into my slippers, Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise! And shuffling down to the kitchen to make coffee.  Stumbling down the road to the chapel by starlight.   The outside bell calling us to meditation in the dark.  Already, I’ve returned dozens of times in my attention.  Bead by bead.  Breath by breath. 

The lights come on for Lauds.  Finding my place in the books.  Brought back by the Lauds bell: three short gongs, three long gongs.  Returning from thoughts between the bells.  Squawking out those first sounds of chant, sounding like adolescent roosters.   Concentrating on the texts and the tones.  Coming back, coming back again to attention.

Repenting, not in a vague way, oh, it’s Lent, and I’ve got some repenting to do, I’d better make an appointment with myself to say some prayers and see my therapist and get ready a little self-examination for confession.  Rather, everything, things done and left undone, promising to rake the kitchen garden , feeding the new chicks from the palm of my hand, drinking the cool sap, getting lost in work and then, coming back.  Coming back, returning to awareness of the Presence.   

 How many people over the years have said to me, “Lent is my favorite season!”  I think it’s because of all the opportunities we have to repent and return.  And each time, a thousand times a day, that old man in the icon scans the landscape from his lonely tower, watching for his beloved son, the very son who shunned him, as if he were dead, “give me my inheritance, old man!”  The son squanders the inheritance, casting away the virtues so carefully tended, as well as the money. 

A thousand times a day, the patient father declares a feast.   

   

Praying in Southern France

Golden mimosa blossoms along the azure sea and in vacant lots on hillsides.  Grey-green olive trees, ancient twisting trunks.  Cork-oaks.  Almond blossoms at the edges of dormant vineyards. Cyclamen in window-boxes. Confetti scattered on pavements , residue of local festivals in the local villages.  Elaborate creche scenes in every little church.  Fresh catches of fish at the market still squiggling, then seared and served for supper.  Cheese plates.  Marron (chestnut)  spread stirred into thick rich yogurt.  The Mistral wind pulling at my shutter-door.  Intense starlight waking me in my bed.

The prayer-highlight of my trip to Provence: climbing Sainte-Baume to the cave where Mary Magdalene lived as a hermit. 

According to Provencal legend, Lazarus, Martha, their servant Maximin and Mary Magdalene fled Bethany after Jesus’ death and resurrection and arrived Marseilles in 42 C.E.  They evangelized southern France (and indeed, Christianity did come very early through that port-city.)  Mary’s bones (or some Mediterranean woman of the first century) are entombed in a reliquary beneath the church of St. Maximin.   

After preaching and teaching, Mary chose the ascetical life, living in a cave in the cliffs of the still remote mountains of Sainte-Baume.  Each day, angels lifted her from the grotto to the mountain-top at the hours of prayer.  She died in Maximin’s arms, who lovingly preserved her remains.  We say, “The church is built on the bones of the martyrs.”  More than a mere Christian adage in Europe, churches literally grow around relics.  And every church seems to have a bit of St. Martin or a thread of St. Therese’s hair or a photo of Padre Pio along with other treasures in their stores both old and new.    

Mary Magdalene exemplified that living-martyrdom so popular in the desert and later the monastic tradition.  My favorite image of the Magdalene is the late 15th century Giovan Pietro Birago’s painting from The Sforza Hours (British Library). Mary, clothed in her hair, hovers above the rocky mountain, the sea, the city, the road, carried by four handsome angels as she prays the Hours, oblivious to the action below her.  She’s oblivious of the studly angels as well.

In our party of friends, competing claims made conversation interesting.   One position clung to the historicity of the family from Bethany settling in France.  The other equally literal position expressed a desperate need for the rest of us to acknowledge the legend as a cynical invention.    

To me, hearing ”Maria!” “Rabbouni!”  sends chills through me whether Mary subsequently went to Marseilles with Lazarus, to Ephesus with John, or disappeared into obscurity in Jerusalem.   Her power surfaces even through conflations of the various Biblical Marys with Pelagia the Harlot and Gregory’s fifth century layering of the woman with the alabaster jar over Mary as a model of repentance.  It doesn’t matter to me whether she came from Bethany or from Magdala, whether Magdala means Migdol (fortress/tower/) or ”the great” or whether her name signifies a place or a title, or whether she was Jesus’ wife, mistress or financier.

To me, the liminality of prayer breaks down boundaries of time and space making the inner experience of companionship in the communion of saints fruitful, whether in a grotto in France, a cave on Patmos, a tourist marketplace in Jerusalem or my fuzzy brown chair at St. Aidan’s.  Mary’s encounter with the risen Lord in John 20 illustrates the progress of contemplative mystical life from darkness to apostolic union in eighteen verses. 

Of course, my kinds of observations just frustrated everybody.

Monks have tended the grotto set into the cliff in Sainte-Baume since the fourth century - first Cassianites, then Benedictines, and now Dominicans.  The monastery clings to the cliff like a swallow’s nest.  Benedictine sisters run a retreat and guest house at the base of the mountain.  After lunch at the hostel, we climbed to the grotto.

I knew the hike might be a struggle physically, so I chose a prayer of reparation to keep me going.  Like many people, I find it easier to do things for other people than to bother to do those same things for myself.  Reparation is the offering of a sacrifice, a suffering, pain, a difficulty on behalf of someone else.  I dedicate my ordeals in the dentist chair to a specific person or issue on my intercession list.  I’ll scrub at the stubborn baked-on muck on a cooking pan praying against a friend’s cancer tumor.   Perhaps I’d just think getting my teeth fixed or scrubbing the pot was a waste of time without good works attached.

A close friend of ours suffered a trauma just before our trip, and her anguish affected all our experiences during our vacation.  So I dedicated my hike to the healing of my friend, step by step up the mountain to the grotto. 

I mention this only because prayers of reparation seem to be a lost art.   I recommend this practice if you are used to an active intercession life.   I can imagine abuses, exaggerations, and excesses - and of course the key to any practice is always balance, always moderation.   

Reparation gives you something to do when you are helpless to help, impotent to solve, bereft of resources to rescue, and your own words and deeds offer no comfort.  Perhaps in that strange economy of the kingdom,  reparation in one soul touches the soul of another.  At the very least, this kind of intercession widens the inner landscapes of empathy.

I loved praying in Southern France. But I’m also happy to shuffle through the snow to our little round chapel at Melrose as the bell rings.  This place of prayer opens to the communion of saints as surely as the ancient and holy shrines of our fathers and mothers in the faith.  I’m grateful to be home.   

theophany

In the form of a dove the Holy Spirit was seen; the voice of the Father was heard, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.  It is the Lord that commandeth the waters, it is the glorious G-d that maketh the thunder, it is the Lord that ruleth the sea.   Respond, First Vespers of the Baptism of Jesus 

Cleansing, beautiful snow.  The scent of foundation honeycomb as Bill assembles the bee hives.  Garlic and soybean sprouts with sesame oil.  My friend Suk-Hui, here on “vacation” she’s calling it,  recovering from cancer treatments.  She taught me to make KimChee the way her grandmother made it.  We watched The Way Home, a Korean movie about a little boy from Seoul who has to stay with an elderly grandmother far in the country over a summer.  A lovely movie offering images to treasure in the mind.

The Baptism of Jesus.   At the Eucharist on Sunday we used several orthodox sources found in Liturgy Training Publications Christmas book.  “In the feast foregone, we have seen you as a babe, and in the present feast we see you as a perfect man, 

today, the grace of the Holy Spirit, in the likeness of a dove, come down upon the waters; today there shines the Sun that never sets, and the world is sparkling with the light of the Lord; today the moon is bright, together with the earth, in the glowing radiance of its beams; today the brilliant stars adorn the universe with the splendor of their twinkling; today the clouds from heaven shed upon us a shower of justice;

Twenty three “today” ’s. …

We also took LTP’s adaptation of the Great Blessing of Water from the Byzantine rite, and addressed the prayer intimately to “you” rather than a detached  ”him.”  So that instead of “The angels serve him …” we prayed, “The angels serve you.  The archangels adore you. The many-eyed seraphim veil their faces before you.“  We circled a bronze bowl on a stand at the center of the chapel, filled with rose scented water with an added splash from the Jordan river.   I’d be surprised if passers-by did not see a glimmer of prayer-light glowing from the octagonal chapel - one man, two dogs, and we ordinary middle-aged women in work clothes praying and trembling with awe. 

Like last week at this time, I’m preparing Thursday’s children’s chapel service.  Saint Anthony? Confession of Peter?  Christian Unity? Baptism of Jesus? This Epiphany is the shortest one I can remember … and I’ll be in France one of my chapel days.   Maybe I should talk about the two theophanys that hold the season in a powerful parenthesis.  The theophany at the Baptism and the theophany on the mountain, and the Voice from the cloud, interrupting the ordinary prayer. 

This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.  

Lord, they shall walk in the light of thy countenance.  

Oh, my, let us walk in the light of G-d’s face!  Let us walk with the light of G-d’s face reflected in us.  Oh, my.  Such light.  Like the glistening snow on this bright diamond day!

The Day after Epiphany

Three are the precious gifts, of divine and mystic meaning, which the wise men offered to the Lord as upon this day: gold the power of the king betokeneth, mark ye how incense the high-priest sheweth, and myrrh the Lord’s burial.  Our salvation’s Author did the wise men worship in his cradle, and of their treasures they offered im gifts of mystic meaning …     -   Respond at Second Vespers of Epiphany Day 

After a quiet two weeks the school playground across from Saint Aidans rings with children’s voices.  ”Children’s voices ringing” is a cliche but the pitch of children laughing and calling and shrieking and chattering actually sounds like bells to me.   I love bells, I love the Melrose change-ringing bells, and I love the sound of the kids on the playground.  I loved the quiet of school vacation but I’m excited that school is in session again.

In an almost-waking dream this morning I realized I need to provocatively “decorate” the chapel today so that on their way to the cafeteria the kids will wonder what worship will be about this week.  So I’ll drape the very long gold cloths (20′ curtain swags) over the altar and lectern, and maybe find three interesting boxes to represent the Magi’s gifts over purple, gold, and black fabric.   A homily began forming in my dream, evoking the Jewish mystical idea of the “sparks” dwelling within us, longing for the Source, the One.  Before time began, the Holy One withdrew into himself, creating space and then with a divine bursting forth of light, not unlike the Big Bang, that light rocketed through space, breaking into infinite shards throughout the universe.   Those divine ”sparks” dwell in each of us, inciting that unspeakable longing to return to the One.   Whether this thought experiment will evolve into a children’s sermon for Thursday’s Eucharist, I don’t know.  I love having the relative leisure to watch thoughts develop and lead to other thoughts.  Nothing is ever wasted, even if an idea does not bear fruit.  It’s at least compost.

So the thought of compost made me think of farming, and farming to the unseasonable weather.  After bitter the cold over Christmas, it’s near 60 degrees today threatening the maple sugaring.   Sap pours from a few injured trees.   Bill is busy with the new bee hives and planning the chicken coop.   We’ve been eating brussels-sprouts and very sweet parsnips pulled out of the frozen ground.  And enjoying sauerkraut, frozen vegetables, beans, corn, jams and jellies put up in the summer and fall.     

All day today, a left over glow calls to mind yesterday’s Epiphany celebration.  At the Eucharist we processed from the kitchen to the chapel with the projects we’d worked on during creativity week, (part of the bee hive, office book, dream work and drawings, a crochet picture, a knitted prayer shawl, a knitted blanket, a calendar of photos, a book of recipes, a drum, a sermon,  a writing project, a flower arrangement) placing them at the altar.  Before the offertory hymn we presented the story behind our work to one another. 

After brunch we played “In Cahoots,” and rested until Vespers when we sang the gorgeous antiphons and Respond of Second Vespers of Epiphany, and a faux-bourdon Magnificat.   Then we gathered in the Great Room by the fire. 

We talked about the day, the offices, updates to the very silly murder mystery serial we’re posting to one another, finished off the marzipan Twelfth Cake, each of us hoping we’d get the gold coin planted inside so that we’d win a “treat” of our choosing redeemable at a time of our choosing.  The second to last piece of cake held the coin, and the sister who got it threatened a sabbatical for herself as her ”treat.”  “Hey, it’s supposed to be a treat for the community,” someone protested.  “My sabbatical WOULD be a treat for the community!” she mugged.

Bill and I were also celebrating our “church wedding” anniversary.  We have a “justice of the peace anniversary” in October, so we celebrate twice a year.  We had no intention of having a church ceremony unless it was a quiet monastery wedding.   But at the time I was serving a cluster of parishes, and when a wheel-chair bound little girl of the parish heard I was just married she sighed, “No one will ever let ME be a flower girl.”  So Bill and I had a church wedding after all so that we could have an “open cast” for flower girls.  A bunch of girls answered the call, and made flower crowns and wore pretty dresses and the wheelchair looked like a float at the Rose Bowl.  

One of our sisters described her reservations about being at that wedding twelve years ago although she’d overcome her insecurity about driving in the snow and getting lost in order to appear.   During the priest’s admonition, “If any of you can show just cause why this couple may not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace” she resisted jumping up to say, “She’s one of ours!” as she watched me marry this handsome stranger.  Now, in the “strange economy of the Holy Spirit,” she said last night, “we didn’t lose a sister, but we gained a brother!”  And we are all quite happy with the present arrangement.

We played a poetry writing game, heard a few more poems and stories ( including one about a rabbit that saves a baby mouse from the cold and the heroic bunny’s “carcass” is found the next day), we sang The First Noel and placed the camel and camel driver and the three kings in the creche. 

A stunningly beautiful sermon was preached yesterday morning at the Eucharist which many of us referenced the rest of the day and into the evening.  (We’re putting up a sermon blog and that will be the first sermon.)  And while the sermon yielded gems throughout the day, I had also played with a sermon by Saint Bernard in my own preparations for Epiphany Day.  

Bernard admonishes the wise men for being fools: looking for a king, a Deity, in a wretched cave among poor people!   But the wise men had become foolish in order to become wise.  ”The Spirit has taught them in advance what later the apostle preached, ‘Let him who would be wise become as a fool, that so he may be wise.’” And, “He, Who urged them on by means of the star without, has Himself taught them in their inmost heart.”

Maybe Bernard inspired the morning’s dream image of the “sparks.”  The guiding star within draws us away from the transient glitter of all kinds of worldly achievements and distractions.  At first, the wise men assume that they should go to Herod’s palace in Jerusalem.  Quickly, they see their mistake, and proceed to the shepherd’s outpost of Bethlehem.   The star guides us toward the humble comfort of home, and, the extraordinary wonder of Divine Love hidden within ordinary life.