my ways are not your ways...

Yesterday was a quiet day for bread baking, music practice and the journey inward. Today will be much the same. In fact, stillness and seclusion will shape the rest of this week. The last one was full and public so this one has to be quiet and wrapped in solitude. After nearly 40 years of stumbling, I have found a balance that works for me. To be fully engaged with others, I need comparable times with silence in the gentle stillness of my home. 

How many times, however, have I read about the ebb and flow that Jesus practiced? With the people for a spell, then away to the mountains in seclusion. In the fullness of community, then alone by the sea. Or in the desert. How many retreats have I attended that were all about balance only to discover that I still didn't know how to make it so? And how many books have I read and purchased about discerning the right rhythm to my own inward/outward journey only to become overwhelmed and anxious rather than grounded and open? How many times have I prayed and claimed these words from the prophet of ancient Israel, Isaiah, only to forget them?

Hey there! All who are thirsty, come to the water! Are you penniless?
Come anyway—buy and eat! Come, buy your drinks, buy wine and milk.
Buy without money—everything’s free! Why do you spend your money on junk food, your hard-earned cash on cotton candy? Listen to me, listen well: Eat only the best, fill yourself with only the finest. Pay attention, come close now, listen carefully to my life-giving, life-nourishing words.

Perhaps that's why I've taken up bread baking again as prayer. I tried a new recipe over the weekend that failed spectacularly. I am sure that both our house and the oven were too cold for the yeast. So, like another failed experiment, this one is becoming stuffing for our Thanksgiving turkey. Oh well,"to everything there is a season" right? But besides there not being enough warmth, I realized that I was also too distracted to do justice to my baking. I have long treasured the way Gertrud Mueller-Nelson puts it in her exquisite description of the work of Advent? 

As in pregnancy, nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, not a loving relationship, not a reconciliation, a new understanding, a work of art, never a transformation. Rather, a shortened period of incubation brings forth what is not whole or strong or even alive. Brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, gestating are the feminine processes of becoming and they are the symbolic states of being which belong in a life of value. 
(To Dance with God, p. 62)
   

Yesterday, I set aside time to return to a time-tested recipe. Making certain to attended to both the directions and the temperature, these loaves were crusty, fully risen and delicious. Funny what happens when I do not rush. When I pay attention. When I set time aside to simply be in the moment. Henri Nouwen speaks of this as practicing an active waiting.

How do we wait for God? We wait with patience. But patience does not mean passivity. Waiting patiently is not like waiting for the bus to come, the rain to stop, or the sun to rise. It is an active waiting in which we live the present moment to the full in order to find there the signs of the One we are waiting for. The word patience comes from the Latin verb patior which means "to suffer." Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the full, and letting the seeds that are sown in the ground on which we stand grow into strong plants. Waiting patiently always means paying attention to what is happening right before our eyes and seeing there the first rays of God's glorious coming. (Henri Nouwen)

The poet, Pat Schneider, offers a comparable call to contemplation in her poem, The Patience of Ordinary Things.

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

It takes dedication and time to notice the splendor and the patience of ordinary things. A colleague and friend who is a protoge of Fr. Richard Rohr once told me that Rohr had discerned that the best way he could use his gifts and life to advance the cause of justice and compassion was to train contemporary people in the ways of contemplation. Unless modern women and men know the rest of God's grace from the insight out, he concluded, they will always be frantic and anxious. And this inner chaos does nothing to advance the cause of peace and integrity in the world. Rather, it exaggerates what is broken and passes it on to the third and fourth generations. 

This has been my discernment, too. It is why I've chosen this year to try out the old Celtic Advent - a full 40 days of quiet waiting before Christmas - as a time of befriending the darkness and the work of active waiting. Nouwen is right that the practice of patience is a form of suffering. It is why Advent became a mini penitential season in the church year. But it is not senseless suffering or wasted time. Ms. Mueller-Nelson writes that our sacrifices "are a means to make us holy."

Sacre ficere means to make holy and holy means hale, healthy and whole. We want to make this time holy and be made whole. And it is not easy to do...(That is why) during Advent, we are invited to vulnerable to our longings and open to our hope. Like the pregnant mother who counts the days till her labor and prepares little things for the child on the way, we, too, count the days and increase the light as we light our candles and prepare our gifts. (p. 64)

Besides the bread, I'm using a small Celtic Advent altar in our front room to call me into the stillness. In a few weeks, the autumn corn and pumpkins will give way to a wreath of evergreens. This, too, is a quiet reminder of the movement of the seasons as well as the warmth of God's light in the darkness. In every era there is pain, violence, dread and despair. Just read the birth narratives of Jesus in the gospels or the trials experienced by the early church in the letters of St. Paul. At the same time, there continues to be a light within the darkness and grace beyond our grief. As the snow continues to spread a blanket of silence in our part of the world, my heart turns to the closing verses of Isaiah 55:

My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial,for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.