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

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

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.

The setting sun spills golden light onto my desk. The change-ringers practice, brilliant sound filling the air.  The resonance always lifts my heart especially during the “ringing down” when the sky fills with overtones taking on its own shimmering sphere.   An unusual Sunday afternoon – the sisters are in Long Retreat, so no meetings today and a modified schedule, and more silence for Bill and I as well.

I’m somewhere between the apocalypse and John the Baptist – having preached this morning (Advent I) and preparing for the retreat at Holy Cross (Advent II) and getting the website ready (for Advent III.)  

I’d love to move toward the Annunciation and Incarnation, but a web-lecture called “A REALLY Inconvenient Truth” by Dan Miller pulled me back into the apocalypse again.   What I remember most clearly: the bell curve in which new data puts Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth into the shallow end of the left side of the bell curve, the top is “Biblical” and the right hand is “Game Over.”  People actually study “the psychology of climate change”  – characteristics of detachment and denial strategies, especially by elected officials.  Here’s the url. http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller 

I also remember the stricken expression on Bill’s face when I happened to walk into his study as he was watching the lecture on his computer.  This updated knowledge feels like a garment or a piece of jewelry I’m wearing, except that I can’t take it off and hang it in my closet or put with my other rings and necklaces. 

photo by Sr. Catherine Grace

Meanwhile the Advent greens and four clean white pillar candles brighten the chapel, the hens cluck amongst themselves happily, the sky radiates red-gold  light and the bell tones soar, announcing something like a wedding or Christmas or Easter on this bare, late-November afternoon. 

Bill and I went to see ”A Prairie Home Companion” at Town Hall in New York City last night.   There’s the comfort of listening to the voice of Garrison Keillor -  the familiar skits and sound effects and fictional characters.  We ate at an Indian buffet just across the street from St. Mary the Virgin and we went into the church, and I prayed not for the world, but for my children and the most immediate and smallest of concerns of the family.  During the familiar train ride home, I fell asleep on Bill’s shoulder like a child coming home from grandma’s, as if confident in the grown-up world’s immutable security. 

It’s five o’clock and I fling open the window for the “ringing down” – and when the bells stop, I listen to the overtones  “shimmering” over the darkness after sunset.

Advent begins (thematically) in Apocalypse.  There’s no better way to get in the mood for the Apocalypse than listening to Leonard Cohen.  My daughter Grace took me to Cohen’s 2009 concert tour at Madison Square Garden a few weeks ago. 

The old man on his 2009 concert tour

I loved Leonard Cohen’s poetry before Judy Collins made “Suzanne” famous sometime in the sixties.  Boys serenaded me with “Suzanne” in high school and college, but my life’s sound track took on the colors and images of Leonard Cohen’s songs at every phase of my life.  And so, in a way this concert played my own life.  Surprisingly, a gazillion other people in Madison Square Garden clearly thought the same thing.  When invited to sing along – all gazillion people sang every word, including my daughter.   I cried several times.  Grace and I clung to each other more than once.

So getting ready for Advent, I’m singing “The Future” (Get ready for the future: it is murder) and “Everybody Knows” :

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.  Everybody
rolls with their fingers crossed.  Everybody knows the
war is over.  Everybody knows the good guys lost.  Every-
body knows the fight was fixed: the poor stay poor, the
rich get rich.  That’s how it goes.  Everybody knows.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking.  Everybody
knows the captain lied.  Everybody got this broken
feeling like their father or their dog just died.  Everybody
talking to their pockets.  Everybody wants a box of
chocolates and a long-stem rose.  Everybody knows.

Everybody knows that you love me, baby.  Everybody
knows that you really do.  Everybody knows that you’ve
been faithful, give or take a night or two.  Everybody
knows you’ve been discreet but there were so many
people you just had to meet without your clothes.  And
everybody knows.

Everybody knows that it’s now or never.  Everybody
knows that it’s me or you.  Everybody knows that you
live forever when you’ve done a line or two.  Everybody
knows the deal is rotten: Old Black Joe’s still picking
cotton for your ribbons and bows.  Everybody knows.

Everybody knows that the Plague is coming.  Every-
body knows that it’s moving fast.  Everybody knows
that the naked man and woman – just a shining
artifact of the past.  Everybody knows the scene is dead,
but there’s going to be a metre on your bed that will
disclose what everybody knows.

Everybody knows that you’re in trouble.  Everybody
knows what you’ve been through, from the bloody
cross on top of Calvary to the beach at Malibu.  Every-
body knows it’s coming apart: take one last look at this
Sacred Heart before it blows.  And everybody knows.

So why sing this stuff?  Because it’s cathartic.  Everybody knows – don’t they – about the dangers of monoculture, patenting seeds, chemicals and pesticides poisoning farmland, the threats to our food security?  Everybody knows – don’t they – about the world-wide financial crises caused by corporate greed?  Everybody knows about climate change and irreversible threats to life on this planet caused by human beings.  Everybody knows  how our policies and exploitations breed terrorism … 

Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll implode carrying what I know.  Living with the sisters can be hard, because they make it their prophetic Christian business “to know.”  Knowing begets a sense of apocalypse, not just in Advent.

Last verse of “The Future”

Things are going to slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure any more
The blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT
I wonder what they meant.

Repent.
But that’s the second week of Advent.

My apocalypse-defying geraniums in the kitchen window of Saint Aidan's House, Bluestone Farm.

Today (Friday) is a retreat day – meaning the sisters are in silence – no corporate worship or meals but lots of quiet.  I had a productive morning working on an Advent Retreat address, a power-point presentation with art and meditative text.  Bede and I lead a retreat at Holy Cross Monastery every year (with soundscapes by Sister Helena-Marie CHS during the Saturday night event).  This year it’s December 4-5-6.

I’m working still (35 years of this, maybe?) on the sense of movement from one place to another within the soul – by analogy – rooms to other rooms, landscapes, ladders, labyrinths, windows.  Mary Carruther’s extraordinary book The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400-1200, still offers a banquet for my imagination and non-stop inspiration.  And I’m just finishing The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton.  Here’s some quotes from the latter book from a meditation on incorporating virtue into ourselfs from our surroundings.

“Architecture can arrest transient and timid inclinations, amplify and solidify them, and thereby grant us more permanent access to a range of emotional textures which we might otherwise have experienced only accidentally and occasionally.” 

“While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.”

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”

John the Divine watches Michael slay the seven-headed dragon from his "prayer palace". Unknown Weaver C.1380

For the Friday night presentation I’m looking at art depicting interiors, both real and imaginary.  Countless Annunciations taking place in a symbolic shelter.  Monks watching their own meditations on Biblical adventures through a window of prayer.  Donors and saints watching with Jesus in retrospect at the foot of the cross, in an eternal now of pain and possibility.

Advent offers its own set of symbols which propel us through a series of obstacles, problems, and archetypal and universal images. Signs in the heavens, purgations of flame, repentance with water, and the earth-womb … air, fire, water, earth … the four Sundays create an itinerary which we try to negotiate over a weekend on our retreat.  I’m not sure yet of the final form of the retreat – every year we do something different according to intuition and inspiration.

Bede and I worked with pilgrimage and space the past few years.  Saturday night culminated in a pilgrimage to the crèche we’d set up ahead of time in either the crypt or the enclosure library.  I think we’re doing that again this year. Moving from space to space, and “noticing” as Bede says.  Noticing what you’ve seen a thousand times but never seen.

Oh, I love Advent.

The righteous shall shine and shall run to and fro
like sparks among the stubble…
                 -Antiphon on the Psalms, First Vespers of All Saints

The sisters are busy putting the garden to bed: uprooting the spent plants, enriching the soil, putting layers of compost and generous piles of shredded leaves over everything. 

November Harvest Morning, photo by Erin Martineau

We woke to a heavy frost on Saturday morning.  At first light as the sisters went out with scissors and knives to harvest for Farmer’s Market, they found the kale and collards frozen through.  After some distress about this, we found that most of the harvest revived in buckets of water and the leafy greens went off to market with our syrup, eggs, horseradish.

While the garden dies back and turns brown, the church gives us eight days of reflection upon death while celebrating the saints and our beloved departed friends and family.  After a celebratory, golden liturgy of All Saints Day, we sang our gorgeous plainsong requiem on All Souls Day.  We remembered the departed sisters of the order.  We remembered our family members by name.  On each subsequent day we prayed through the list (one page each day) of departed Associates of the Community of the Holy Spirit.

All week we sang Lauds and Vespers for the Octave of All Saints.  Sunday, the last day of All Saints, we renewed our baptismal vows, remembering again the cycle of life, death, renewal and re-birth in the unique Christian lens of that universal process.

Day of the Dead Altar, photo by Erin Martineau

The last few years we’ve created an Altar of the Dead.  We place pictures of our dearly departed as well as mementos.  This year I put my father’s medical bag, my grandfather’s cigar box, my mother’s rings, a deck of cards to recognize my grandmother.  On Friday night, we had a festive meal followed by an evening by the fire, a show & tell of the items on the altar, with anecdotes and stories. 

 We created marzipan skulls (in imitation of Mexican sugar skulls for the Day of the Dead celebrations - so that children associate the sweetness of the candy with remembrance of the dead.)

 I love the octave of All Saints – the prayers, the remembrances, the contemplation of my own death and the challenges those thoughts bring me to when confronting each day.  I’m reminded to make something good of what’s left of the life alloted to me. 

Sister Elise delights in finding Therese of Lisieux on my icon shelf.

Last summer my beloved Sister Elise visited the farm.  I took her to my studio and showed her my icon shelf.  She looked at all my books, and the pictures of my favorite saints surrounding me as I work.

“Well,” she said, gesturing at the books and pictures. “You don’t have ANY excuses. “

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.

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.

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)