…and deliver us from evil

One of the characteristics of evil, is its ability to appropriate, insinuate, spread tentacles into and entangle innocence.   You can see this in families inheriting generations of child abuse, where child victims grow up to become adult perpetrators.  You hear this in countless war stories where a good person must act, choosing between two equally impossible evils.  You and I participate in the seemingly remote choice of buying affordable clothes from a box store and find ourselves perpetuating child slave labor.  Or, innocently rushing to buy “fast food” to feed our children between the jobs we’re trying to manage, and find ourselves condoning factory farms using pesticides irreparably poisoning both farm workers and soil.  We buy packaged chicken breasts in our local grocery chain, supporting unsanitary, cruelly raised poultry.  We participate in evil innocently.

Friday I attended the sentencing of a friend for a crime he did not commit.  One day, finding that the computer given to him by the college was not working properly, the professor called the computer tech who found child porn on it.  The images were the worst kind of unimaginable evil.  Even though students and others had access to this computer, my friend was found guilty of being a “consumer” of these images.   I sat with my friend’s brother in law, a computer expert who investigates these kinds of cases for the U.S. government.  He told me that it was obvious “too late” that neither the defending attorney, the prosecuting attorney, or the judge had any basic comprehension of how computers work.  Not only that, but the college did not use common sense or follow basic protocol when dealing with the finding.

After the conviction, the best we could have hoped for was time served outside prison, community service, house arrest.  But the judge said he needed to “send a message” to other consumers of child porn.  (No one there, including my friend, denies the absolute evil – is there a stronger word for evil? – of what is done to those children.)  My friend was sentenced to 1-3 years in prison and led away in handcuffs.  His parents, wife, sisters, friends watched in horror.  How is this possible?

Evil spreads.    Exploiting children is worse than murder.  My friend said that.  He knows, as I do, that sexual abuse kills the soul.  He’d rather be accused of murder. 

My heart is heavy.

An appeal is being filed.

Pray for all of us.  Pray for exploited, tortured children.  Pray for perpetrators of child pornography.  

And deliver us from evil.

Full Moon Fireside and Flatland

 

Full Moon Fireside is a gathering here at Bluestone Farm on or near the full moon, beginning with a half-hour’s drumming, followed by a presentation and discussion either outside around the fire pit, or in the “great room” around the wood stove.  If it’s too hot and humid for fire as it was this past week, a simple candle will do.  We end by chanting and then entering the monastic Great Silence. Wednesday was both the Full Moon Fireside and the eve of the Transfiguration.

After drumming and introductions, we watched a short TED talk, Brian Greene on multiple dimensions and string theory.  http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/brian_greene_on_string_theory.html

After hearing Brian Greene, I talked about Edwin A. Abbott’s little book Flatland. The book is part indictment of Victorian social class structure, part mathematical treatise, and part mystical analogy.  The “author” is a two dimensional being writing about a three dimensional adventure. The hero, A Square, has a dream in which he encounters a one dimensional world and tries to enlighten that world through conversation and demonstration.  Not long after his dream, A Square is confronted similarly in an encounter with three-dimensional reality.  The voice seems to come from “within” the startled square.  A sphere enters A Square’s world, again through conversation and demonstration – but it is only by transportation into the three-dimensional world that A Square comprehends the concept of “up”.  While exploring Flatland from “above” (of course, he can see into everything in two dimensions, including Flatlander’s digestive systems) he learns that the Flatland authorities know about previous encounters with three dimensions and they violently suppress this information.

In further conversations with the Sphere, A Square postulates the existence of a fourth dimension and beyond.  Sphere is terribly insulted by this idea.  Sphere’s reality must be the only reality!  A Square returns to Flatland with the prophetic truth about three-dimensional reality and, despite Sphere’s scoffing, theories about multiple dimensions.  He tries in vain to teach his grandson these concepts.  Soon, however, he’s found out by the Flatland authorities, arrested and sentenced to life in prison.  (A lower class of Flatlander would have been executed.)  A Square writes his story, the little book we hold in our hands.

Edwin Abbott Abbott (maybe his friends called him A Squared) published Flatland, A Romance in Many Dimensions in 1884.  His own title page illustration includes representations of dimensions beginning with “Pointland, no dimensions”, two, three, and then, entering a cloud, he notes dimensions tucked here and there, all the way to ten dimensions at the top-most billow of cloud. (see top of blog entry).

Edwin Abbott, an Anglican clergyman, also wrote about Shakespearean grammar, Johannine language and vocabulary, books on Thomas of Canterbury, Francis Bacon and John Henry Newman, and  as well as other theological topics, including an Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the Gospels which caused controversy when published.  A lovely sense of humor emerges through the voice of A Square. “Fie, fie, how frantically I square my talk!”  Flatland has been made into two movies.  Numerous editions exist, including on-line free manuscripts.

I don’t remember when I first read Flatland.  Perhaps a friend told me the story while I was in high school or college.  To me, the concept of multiple dimensions helps explain why revelation comes to us in inexplicable shards of often uninterpretable Reality.  If, as Brian Greene and other theoretical physicists and cosmologists tell us, observable reality finally makes  sense in ten dimensions, no wonder we “see” only in flashpoints and through inner intuitive depths.  No wonder Isaiah describes six winged seraphim covered in eyes, oscillating  in and out of the cloud of incense.  No wonder we strive (evolution-driven?) to “see” with an inner eye that which our infant earth eyes cannot apprehend.  No wonder we build more profound telescopes to see beyond time and microscopes to see through interior space.

And icon writers create mandorlas to signal dark infinity behind Theotokas, or Christ Pantocrator, or, in festal icons of the Ascension and Transfiguration, Jesus coming and going, at once, through the boundary of time.  A Cloud surrounded the disciples on the day Jesus appeared with Moses and Elijah on the mountain of transfiguration. Perhaps, like A Square, the Voice they heard occurred inside of them.  Frightened, they fall into ecstatic sleep, they fall down the mountain losing their shoes, they fall into stupefied incomprehension that begins to make sense only after the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. 

At the Full Moon Fireside, it turned out that everyone present could recount some unexplainable occurrence, coincidence, perception, intuition to hold in ambiguity for a later time of revelation.  Through analogy, telescopes, microscopes, or meditation, humans know more than can be seen by the naked eye.   -Suzanne

 

Here’s a photo of the CasaBlanca lilies now in bloom, with dark coleus and tall meadow rue. The building on the right is the chapel.

Interrupted by Oats

I pace myself.  I make maps of the day, (and often the year) so that I can plan my life efficiently.  Consciously or unconsciously in the end I’m looking for  guilt-free solitude with my responsibilities complete.  Getting free time is often contingent upon  other people’s maps and plans.  Or their tendencies toward wild spontaneity that involve you.  Or Nature’s insistent necessities.

You’d think living along side a monastic community would insure an ordered schedule, and here at the Melrose Covent that’s usually true.  The bell rings at the predictable times calling us to prayer or meals.  But when the mission is farming, sometimes crises determines the schedule.  This weekend it was oats.

Already behind on the webwork (www.edgeofenclosure.org) but struggling through the crafting of a sermon so that I could get back to meeting my deadline, Bill’s head appeared in my doorway on Saturday afternoon. “No need to work on your sermon. Mass tomorrow will be in the field while we’re harvesting oats. ”

Up to my ears in oats, photo by Erin Martineau (cropped, sg)

Oats need harvesting at just the right moment, and this rainy summer further complicates the window of opportunity for gathering them in.  Like the Magi calculating the birth of Jesus, the sisters carefully determined Sunday morning at ten the only dry possibility for harvest.

So I put away the sermon and worked on the website until 5:30 Vespers.  But just then the new vole-catching cats, arrived that afternoon, freaked and ran off, and everyone engaged themselves in the hunt, while one sister, taking advantage of the break in the rain, dragged herself to the field to plant carrots.  I went back to my work until someone called me just after six. “We’re having Vespers NOW, and will you please gather the two sisters from the field and bring them with you?”

Saturday is Market Day, already busy and stressful. Clearly everyone’s day had been interrupted repeatedly as mine had.  Seated in the chapel, as the Angelus bell rang at six-twenty, I looked at my watch.  Innocently.  But … it was enough to start the giggling.  Everyone pushed to the edge that day felt punchy. We only made it through the office because at any given moment at least one voice carried on.  Tears and snorts and gasps and nose blowing = healing, liberating, cleansing, sanctifying. 

A sister harvesting oats, St, Aidan's in the background

Sunday dawned gray and by nine a soft steady drizzle meant all the weather calculations had been off.  The Magi took a wrong turn and ended up in Gaul.  ”Well, do I go back to my sermon for half and hour?” “No, they’re going to harvest the oats anyway,” said Bill.  So we set up a little table for a Eucharist in Sweet William’s field, and Bill and I started early – Bill scything while I carried the bundles to the truck.  The sisters came with two unsuspecting guests who’d planned on a nice, indoor musical Eucharist.  Instead, they joined us good-naturedly but ruined their clothes with mud and stains.

After getting oats to the refectory “barn” and a short coffee-break, we bundled the stalks into shocks.  We celebrated the Eucharist, finally, but indoors  and without a sermon. A sister sang this hastily written hymn of praise:

For our morning worship, we’re harvesting grain
In a hopeful attempt to beat the rain.

Our work IS worship, our work is play
We live out our liturgy in the field each day.

We gathered into barns, we bundled in shocks

Oat Shocks in the Refectory/Barn, photo Erin Martineau

We’re learning on the farm; it’s the school of hard knocks.

Creator, bless our harvest, in deepest gratitude to You we bow…

A prayer with words

Once in my mid-twenties, I heard about a conversation between one of my mentors and a seminary professor.  “She backs into it, but she gets there.”  Most likely, they discussed my struggle with the Incarnation and Resurrection and my problem with Jesus in general. 

I’m thinking lately about how ever so slowly I’ve “backed in” to praying aloud.  (When necessary).  And with words.  (And I’m approaching sixty.)  

 The dilemma, of course – words, sentences, subjects and predicates, the shape of language, thought itself.  Just think, for example,  how words fail in love!

As a child I learned instinctively to pray without words.  Except for the beloved (1928) Book of Common Prayer shaping my soul’s expression profoundly, I prayed without words.  I knew that the prayerbook’s words, better crafted than my thoughts, more beautiful than language usage in my little suburban culture, even these words only pointed a way into praying. 

Not until falling into the Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila at the age of twenty-two did I manage to begin putting together a life of prayer.  I realized that I’d been praying since early childhood,  and both the Book of Common Prayer, and, well, that other, wordless inner way of seeing and knowing and being, provided a robust foundation for that life.

But as a church professional, improvised public prayers with words caused me panic.  Even responding to the spontaneous request for simple grace over meals by a polite host caused me anguish.   Celebrating the Eucharist always costs me a kind of unexplainable psychic depletion.   (That’s another topic altogether.)

From this convent garden, from this one flawed, introverted, contemplative sinner comes a prayer I wrote for others with similar flaws, introversion, contemplative-leaning inner lives.  Perhaps these words came forth for you.  Words you can’t find from your wordlessness, when you need words.   

Half a lifetime ago
I perceived
I could not know You
by knowing.
Rather,
step by cautious step
I come toward You
within the dark spaces
between knowing.

I now know less and less.
You fill space more and more.

I am grateful for emptiness.

Awe Takes Time

Thirty three years ago today I gave birth to a child. (The second of four).  This morning, walking through the dewy clover field, the rising sun felt suddenly warm upon my back.  Forty years ago today I watched two men walk on Earth’s moon from a television set at a church camp.  At this moment, while I write, I stop  to listen to the call of a hen announcing she’s laid an egg.  What I have learned: awe takes time.

I’ve been reading and looking at the picture book Voices From the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences by Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl.   Between the lines, and sometimes directly, the astronauts reflect that the missions might have been more successful, in retrospect, had they had time to simply…be.  To admire.  To look at moon and Earth and space through the lens of their souls.  To take an extra two-hour orbit around the moon without being busy.  To simply watch the passing surface of the moon for the sheer childlike joy of it.  To explore the ground not merely at the service of geology, as interesting as the rocks were, but to also note the very extra-ordinariness of what they saw and felt.  And not just for themselves, but for respect for humanity’s collective sense of awe in that moment. 

Against their instincts, the men keep calling themselves back to the tasks at hand with the tools of a lifetime of training and discipline.  But seeing the solitary frailness of the earth “the biggest philosophy,  foundation-shaking impression” as Bill Anders put it, was this: 

Earthrise, Christmas Eve, 1968, Apollo 8

Looking back upon Earth.  It’s very delicate.  It reminded me of a Christmas tree ornament.  Very fragile, delicate.  And you could imagine that we only live in that tiny little skin around the outside…. The only color you could see in the whole universe.  Everything else was black or white or gray.

 

 Stu Roose said it this way. I think that might add to the effect, this feeling of how very, very small the Earth is.  I don’t know.  Kinda hard to express. That’s why we need to send a writer.  We need to send a poet.  

Aside from the inadequacy of words to describe myriads of indescribable visual impressions, trying to respond to questions from a public anxious and deserving to share the adventure, causes much frustration.  People ask about the astronaut’s experience but with preconceived notions of what they want to hear, or what they are able to hear.  The questions seem too small.  This dynamic reminds me of mystics, coming back from the edge of the soul with portions of Reality to fold into the growing data of existential wonder in human beings.  The existing categories do not possess enough dimensions to absorb the witness rendered by the traveller of inner space.

Then there’s the coming back itself.

Return to Earth [Aldrin's book] was to readjust to life after an event that brought on tremendous impact, tremendous changes in a person’s life.  And it’s not just that trip, because I’ve found there are a lot of little “return to earth’s.” … Then you gotta come back and do the laundry, and all the rest of that stuff, and face reality.  Sometimes as if it never happened.  Or despite it ever happening.  -Buzz Aldrin

I remember thinking in lunar orbit, that if I got back from this, I was going to live my life differently, in that I was going to try to live it … like I want to live it.  I’m just going to do like I think is right.  That’s what I’m going to do – I’m going to do that more, because I don’t want to miss this chance …. Mostly it made me have a lot of courage to do what I wanted to do and be happy about it …. That’s one thing that really allowed me to be an artist.  I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to be an artist.  -Alan Bean

Awe takes time.  I try to slow down and look at something, like the perfect cream-white moth against the screen door.  Or hear the ingenious inner melodies within the Bach dances Emily plays on solo cello.  Or stop to decode the profusions of scents the sun releases from the herbs in the kitchen garden.  I have never slowed down enough since childhood, to observe and appreciate the wonders within the days’ journeys.  And now it takes a new discipline and training and spiritual tools to wait for Awe, just as it took discipline and training to wean myself from childhood’s awe.

Here at Bluestone Farm, we intentionally take the time and discipline to try to discern patterns of consciousness we share with all being.  Awe is the Opus Dei we call each other to as often as the bell calls us to the monastic Opus Dei.  After a lifetime of skipping over the surface, running to the next demanding task while thinking beyond to the tasks demanded after that, never doing anything really well in the moment, this Opus Dei is hard work.  “Noticing” Brother Bede calls it.  Noticing beyond the egoic self to recognise human immersion in the One.

Here’s one of Ed Mitchell’s astounding observations that resonates with our life here, of perceiving the universe as an organism of emergent consciousness, of which we humans play such an odd and humble part.

What I do remember is the awesome experience [on the trip back from the moon] of recognizing the universe was not simply random happenstance…. That there was something more operating than just chance…. I’ve assiduously spent the last fifteen years figuring out what was true….I know that information flows…[and] transmits in some way beyond electromagnetic equations….I see [the universe] as a learning organism, like the human is a learning, growing, changing, information-assimilating and -organizing organism.  -Ed Mitchell

Awe takes time.  But, from what does Awe take time?  Truly, awe is the only really memorable part of life, piercing moments breaking through time.

Step by Sacred Step

Little Cluck supervises Emily as she harvests beans

Our extraordinary intern Emily enriches our life with Bach cello suites at Eucharists, an eye and ear for the rhythm of the sung offices, vegan desserts, industrious weeding, planting, gathering, shelling, hanging, drying  produce.  She’s almost half-way through her month-long internship and already we can’t bear the thought of letting her go.

Sunday evening Emily and I joined the sisters in the city for Sister Elise’s birthday celebration.  On Monday we walked the Big Bang and Universe Walk at the Museum of Natural History.  Each step of the long spiral walk represents 45 million years.  Human life appears along the last few inches.  Human history, a mere thread’s breadth at the end.  Easy to miss, really, unless you’re actively searching like one earnest father pointing out this little line to his son.  But the boy’s eyes greedy for the huge planets and molecules hanging in the vast space above, refused to focus on something so small, a concept so impossible. 

We lingered in the dark Hall of Planet Earth watching volcanos and earthquakes and shifting tectonic plates.  We studied the giant wall of biodiversity with its myriad trees of specimens of life forms.  We explored the Hall of Ocean Life, the subtle underwater atmosphere soothing as you watch screen after screen of fascinating life in the sea and upon the shore. By then we were image sated, so we had lunch, visited a bookstore, and headed downtown for vegetarian food.

We met our friends Annie and Erin at the Film Forum where we watched Food, Inc.  Please please see it.  Tell everyone about it.  www.foodincmovie.com  ”Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment.”  It’s so easy to not notice.  To not want to notice.

On Tuesday we arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at opening time.  Emily, who paints and draws herself, revelled in the Francis Bacon exhibit.  I studied (cried, laughed, oogled, sighed, gasped) my way through Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages.  I re-embraced my dream of my Book of Hours texts illustrated with drawings so that the person praying with the texts might color them, add to them, engaging physically with the book’s pages.  How this is EVER going to happen I don’t know, but I leave it to the Spirit with its trickster way of Knowing How and When but not letting on.

We arrived back at the farm to host a Full Moon Fireside, (see www.chssisters.org)  taking a tour of the gardens, talking about Food, Inc. and the issues the film raises, and drumming at the last.  The week since then gave us some sun and fecundity in the vegetable patches, good food, good visits with friends and family, Bible study, work, farmer’s market, and the celebration of St. Benedict.

Brother Bede is here today, our sabbath (day off).  The sun is shining again, and as I write a hen announces she’s laid her egg, a robin sends up a warning from a distant tree, I smell like tansy,  my nails are delightfully dirty after weeding the cottage garden early this morning.   I’m about to finish this blog entry, take a shower, and post the newsletter.   The sisters seem to disappear on their day off, and one sister is at General Convention and another at a novice training conference in Chicago.  Emily is visiting friends in the city.  Bill is puttering around with projects.  Bede and I will go out for Indian food and “talk of holy things” as we say.  At the moment, I’m enjoying an interlude of inhabited silence.

The silence itself fills me with gratitude.  The sun, the robin, the breeze, the sound of puttering downstairs, a gentle note from the windchimes, the thought of one step equals 45 million years and one step between rows of beans, our spring’s imagination, our summer’s wonder, our fall’s harvest, our winter’s meal, seasons of holiness on earth, step by sacred step.

Sun on an early Saturday morning

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Speech at the Lost and Found

 

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

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

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

Island after island collapsed into the sea on me.

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

who wears my fur, who dwells in my shell.

My siblings died out when I crawled onto land

and only a tiny bone in me marks the anniversary.

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

and left my senses many many times.

Long ago I closed my third eye to it all,

waved it off with my fins, shrugged my branches.

 

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

how little there remains of me surprises me a lot,

a singular being of human kind for now,

who lost her umbrella in a tram somehow.

 

Wislawa Szymborska, from Miracle Fair

A Day in Paradise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

watch the baby ducklings here

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

Touching Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreamboat Teilhard

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

Teilhard de Chardin

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

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

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

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

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