saying good-bye to the friar for a time and making room for the monk...

This week Di and I were able to make time each day to share a simple late

morning breakfast on the deck before heading into our respective tasks.There's hot tea with milk and toast as we tell one another stories from the day past, consideration of the most outrageous overnight political developments in the news, and questions about how we might chart a course for engaging in life beyond the threshold of our quiet gardened sanctuary. It is just the right way for me to ease into the ups and downs of the day.

For reasons of age and health, you see, we continue to live in both intentional and literal seclusion even as the Commonwealth "re-opens." After nearly 150 days, it feels as if we are encamped on the edge of civilization. The lush foliage in the wetlands behind us is beset with every shade of green imaginable. The woods are replete with birds, woodchucks, foxes, coyotes, squirrels, chipmunks, and deer. The raised-bed garden terraces - and herb pots- are increasingly ample. And our tiny social bubble remains nearly fully sealed. Most of our groceries continue to be delivered to the garage by brave and conscientious essential workers. No one calls our house - nor our cell phones - since my retirement. And friends and colleagues conscientiously choose not to violate our self-imposed quarantine. Perhaps once a week I suit-up for necessary errands like mailing a bill or hunting down lumber for a home repair, but that's it. With one exception: the periodic pizza delivery late some Friday evenings. Ok, I own it: we are still pretty damn bourgeois even in our extended semi-monastic solitude.

What is being revealed to me after five months is that this is a time to own, confess and reckon with my wander-lust, monkey mind way of praying. For decades I have made the way of the flâneur an art form. It is my preferred

path to being surprised by grace, encounter new souls to listen to and learn from, find beauty in the most unlikely places, share a caring presence in the midst of life's tussles, and take-in the wild creativity of cities as well as countrysides. But this is truly a different season and calls for a vastly different inward discipline, too. What I am discovering is that at 68 I am neither as emotionally or spiritually supple as I once was - or that I like to believe I still am. Christine Valters Painter has a gentle way of saying this in her insightful collection of stories of the Celtic saints: she calls it "the slow ripening of the soul." I am choosing to claim that as what is taking place within me these days although there seems to be a lot more slow and a lot less ripening. Be that as it may, as Ecclesiastes observes: to everything there is a season and a time and purpose for all things under heaven.

This week on my Sunday morning live streaming reflections I plan to go more deeply into this challenge. You are likely making sense of it for yourselves in your own way, too. Last night, when I couldn't go back to sleep yet again, I started to make a list of all the ways I am being called to get centered in this new era including:

+ Honoring that this is the season of the monk rather than the friar.

+ It is a time for the monastic charism of stability rather than the more free-wheeling experience of le flâneur or pilgrimage.

+ Obliquely, it is a time to go deeper into the wisdom of the Paschal Mystery and St. Paul's confession that: "now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face."

+ And, in my heart, this is a time to wrestle with what it means to trust that the presence of the holy in this season is to make "our joy full." Complete. Real and earthy as per the gospel of St. John.

Toni Morrison has written: This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need or silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

Tomorrow we will experience our first family reunion since the start of the plague as our loved ones from Brooklyn head north to feast and rest with us for four full days. Talk about joy upon joy! I will post pictures for sure but may not be online very much as I want to savor the fullness of this blessing. 

I hope you will join me on Sunday morning, August 2 @ 9:55 am on my spiritual directions Face Book page: https://www.facebook.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531.