I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s in the United States – an era that sometimes felt liberating to me but also at times unhinged – joyful but frightening, compassionate yet oh so self-absorbed, naive, arrogant, creative, big-hearted, and ultimately wounded. During those days I fell in love with the Lord of Godspell – a mystical, musical, marvelous God who was tender and strong at the same time, grounded in the celebration of the ordinary yet willing to bring hope and healing to all my unique, hurting places – equal parts laughter and tears, male and female, night and day, gay and straight, sensual and ascetic and wonderfully multiracial. From the outset of the pandemic I’ve been taking a long, loving look backwards over my sacred influences. And I confess that my spirituality has been mainly a series of revisions, additions, subtractions, and corrections to the central truths that first touched my heart in Godspell.
While crafting my doctoral dissertation I was drawn back to Godspell – and its
source – a small volume penned in 1970 by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox entitled, The Feast of Fools. It is a joyful yet challenging Christian critique of our culture as it became increasingly violent, greedy, unmoored from sound ethical standards, and fueled by fear and shame. It was moving to me in my youth and foundational for my study of how to discern the sacred in popular culture. Fifty years later, Feast of Fools continues to speak truth to me when Cox writes:
The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of our culture, and the weakness of God is stronger than our own. In previous generations, Christ has come in various guises: as teacher, as judge, as healer. Today these traditional images have lost much of their power. Now Christ has made an unexpected entrance onto the stage of moderns secular life and enters as Christ the harlequin: the personification of festivity and fantasy in an age that has almost lost both Coming now in greasepaint and halo, this Christ is able to touch our jaded modern consciousness as other personas cannot. (Feast of Fools, p. 167)
Interestingly, that same little book by Harvey Cox became the theological foundation for the musical Godspell itself when a young Carnegie Mellon University student was inspired by it to create an upbeat musical alternative to a thoroughly lifeless Easter Sunday liturgy. It seems that Michael John Treblak worshipped at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Pittsburgh on Easter Sunday 1970. But instead of a feast celebrating the sublime gift of grace and resurrection, he was forced to endure a mumbling, disinterested priest leading a boring, worn-out ceremony that made him feel as if the church was trying to roll the stone BACK in front of Christ’s empty tomb rather than proclaim the reign of love and fresh starts. To add insult to injury, on his way home from worship, Treblak was stopped by a policeman and frisked for drugs because his long hair made the officer suspicious. Six months later, Treblak turned his desecrated Easter experience into a contemporary festival based on St. Matthew’s gospel that was infused with the insights of Harvey Cox as well as the joy of Vatican II folk-rock music and poetry.
One song in particular captures the show’s charism for me – and I have recently reclaimed the mystical medieval English supplication for my own prayers – because “Day by Day” gets everything right. It starts with a gentle folk melody that carries a 13th century text into the present day – with a dash of 12 Step wisdom thrown in for good measure. The prayer humbly asks for daily bread in three forms: May God help me to see my path more clearly, experience grace more dearly, and follow the way of wisdom revealed in Jesus more nearly – day by day - not for all time and not in a heroic manner – just one day at a time within my ordinary world.
This morning I want to consider what it might mean for those of us who gather here at Small is Holy to pray this prayer together – or some version like it – as part of our shared commitment for the remainder of 2020. When it first became essential for many of us to shelter at home and practice solidarity through solitude none of us knew how long it would last. I know that I first thought that maybe we’ll be done by early summer. By May, however, it was increasingly clear that this manner of living was going to be a much longer reality. And now we know that we’re going to be doing this for the better part of a year – and probably well into 2021, too. So, I’m wondering what does it mean for us to be open to God’s loving presence personally when most of our time is now shaped by silence and some version of seclusion?
If it is true, as the old hymn teaches, that “time makes ancient truth uncouth,” then how might we be open to the guidance of the Spirit in this season of confinement, quarantine, and relative isolation as it stretches into autumn and then winter? I know that I have tried not to waste the first five months of this desert-like retreat nor ignore its meaning for me personally or as a citizen of our broken nation – and I haven’t always been successful. And yet during this time I have been drawn to a whole new way of paying attention to two ever-changing, always challenging passages of scripture.
The first comes from the close of St. John’s gospel where the resurrected but still wounded Jesus comes to Peter to ask his old friend: do you love me? Three times Jesus asks this of Peter: do you love me? Each time mirrors one of Peter’s previous denials and each time Peter is pushed to own his yearning for forgiveness. As the conversation closes, Jesus tells his old friend: Understand this, when you were young, you went where you wanted to go and did what you wanted to do; but now that you are older there will come a time when another will gird your waist and lead you into those places where you do NOT want to go. That’s what the reality of an extended self-quarantine for the rest of 2020 feels like to me: a place that I do NOT want to go – and yet I must.
What is God saying to me in this? What is God starting to reveal to me – and to us all – during this next cycle of uncertainty? How will our love of the holy and our commitment to our sisters and brothers in community find shape and form in the days to come? This is one text that is helping me pay attention right now even if I’m not yet clear what it fully means.
The other is a wisdom poem from the Hebrew Bible that begins: “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven” from Ecclesiastes 3. The text continues with: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
This past week we reunited with our Brooklyn children and grandchildren for the first time in person in five months. What a delight – a time of laughter and tears, rejoicing and sorrow, a little bit of dancing, a whole lot of feasting all within the context of anxiety as well as trust. When it was over our hearts were full to overflowing with gratitude and grief – it was THIS text on steroids – with all the polarities rolled into three days of love and longing. As our grandson, Louie, made his goodbye with Di as we were sharing hugs in the driveway, he said: This was the best visit EVER! And then, without missing a beat, asked her: Why do you think this was true? Man, out of the mouths of babes, yes? Zoom has its place and social media can keep us connected and I give thanks for them both, but there is nothing like heart to heart affection and the touch of a loving embrace. The intensity of this visit promises to become the norm for months to come – for us and so many others – so what will we discover in our new encounters with divine paradox and balance?
What I’m going to share with you now is very personal: less my regular mystical
reflection on Scripture for this season of solitude and more my still unfolding sense of how the Lord is luring me into a deeper practice of balance. “Day by Day,” is part of it. I must stay grounded in a one day at a time mode. For whenever I start wondering where this is heading – and it all changes so quickly that I often feel dizzy and confused – I can easily slip into fear. Not to be grounded in grace but lost in the sorrow of time and space may be natural, but I don’t believe it is where God wants me to stay. Unmoored and adrift in dread. St. Paul put it like this in Ephesians 4: We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery and their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into the life worthy of our calling… being present to the world with humility and gentleness, being patient with ourselves and bearing with one another in love.
Being patient with ourselves and bearing with one another in compassion is one way for me to get a grip on this moment in time. A spiritual friend spoke of this as the practice of contemplation taking a long, loving look at what is real. In my life and the world – NOT navel gazing or trying to escape reality but taking the time over the long haul to notice what is going on within and among us through the lens of love, truth, and patience. Recently I’ve come across the way Christine Valters Paintner speaks of this as trusting the soul’s slow ripening in real time. Isn’t that a beautiful insight? Trusting and listening to the soul’s slow ripening in real time. There’s no judgment in those words, no shame or rush to a find a bottom-line solution either; just the supple movement of the Spirit leading us towards our best selves. St. Paul encourages this gentleness when he reminds us that “now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face.” That’s another biblical touchstone for me: it gives me permission to ask questions, to stumble and try again, to gratefully embrace forgiveness and patience as I keep on with the journey until greater clarity is revealed.
One of the clues that has slowly been ripening in my soul over the past month – becoming a bit less oblique and more in focus – is the sense that it is time for my inner friar to learn to dance with my inner monk. I have playfully made these two spiritual archetypes my prayer companions on and off for the past few years – sometimes favoring one over the other – but now it feels like they want to dance together.
· Do you know the difference between the friar and the monk? For a long time, I didn’t either but during my sabbatical in Montreal five years ago I kept sensing that my new vocation was less of a pastor in a local church and more of a friar – albeit it a secular mostly Protestant one. A friar is a religious brother among equals; not a leader, a priest, or a monk, nor one who is cloistered in a stable community either but one who is charged with sharing compassion and healing with the whole community. A friar spoke to my natural inclination to wander and connect with others serendipitously as the Spirit inspired. In my prayers, I even adopted the children’s song, Frere Jacques, as part of this new vocation: Brother James, the gentle bells of morning prayer are calling. Are you sleeping? Or are you ready to go where the Spirit leads this day? It was liberating and joyful and I cherished this revelation.
· You see, for decades I have made the way of the flâneur an art form. It is my preferred path to be surprised by grace, encountering new souls to listen to and learn from, finding beauty in the most unlikely places, sharing a caring presence in the midst of life's tussles in the world, and taking-in the wild creativity of cities or country sides. Living as unofficial secular friar felt like soul food to me for the past five years. But now we are in a truly a different season – unlike anything I’ve ever known – and time is calling for a different charism. What I am discerning is that Frere Jacques has been invited to dance with a monastic archetype as this moment makes wandering is impossible and becoming deeply rooted in one place – a small and cloistered home – with little engagement with the wider world my new reality.
This season of being little, being silent and grounded in ordinary prayers and work that reveal the unforced rhythms of grace and nature rather than the adventures of a pilgrimage feels like what some have called a new monasticism. It is an ordered spirituality shaped by the ebb and flow of day and night, light and dark, the steadfastness of the seasons and the very rhythms of life, death, and new life. I have long given myself to spontaneous prayer. My eyes have learned to see the holy everywhere and in all manner of things and this is a friar’s charism. But as Sr. Joan Chittister – a wise monastic master makes clear – if I am the only measure of a prayer’s efficacy, then prayer is more about “seeking consolation than risking conversion” to God’s mysterious presence. Sr. Joan writes that honoring the stability of the monastery in prayer, perspective and patience reminds us that WE are not the center of the universe.
To pray in a monastic manner is not a matter of mood. To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better options. To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer. The time must be taken. There will always be something more pressing to do, something more important to be about than the apparently fruitless, empty act of prayer. But when that attitude takes over, we have become our own worst enemies: we will call ourselves too tired and too busy to pray over and over. Eventually, life’s burdens will wear us down and we will no longer remember why we are doing what we were called to do: the work of a project, the marriage to a partner, caring for our children, sharing compassion in the midst of pain.
· One monastic discipline for honoring the sacred rhythm of life is praying the hours – coming to prayer in the middle of various tasks when the bells beacon – and learning to let go of my worldly cares for a moment as I rest within God’s healing presence.
· The Buddhist monk, Thich Nat Han, said that he came to use the telephone as his call to mindfulness: when it would ring rather than fume over yet another interruption, he would pause, take a deep breath and return thanks to the flow of life for yet another chance to express love and gratitude for simply being alive in this moment.
· To that end, I am starting to use my IPhone as a portable chapel bell to reorder my prayers: I will always go to spontaneous adoration and tears of joy and sorrow, but now I am going to embrace a measure of order, too. Monastics speak of this as regula – what some call a rule – but which is more a sense of “a guidepost or a railing, something to hang on to in the dark, something that gives us support as we climb” (Chittister, p. 7) through the challenges of the day. (talk about this and demonstrate…)
Living into a commitment to well-ordered daily prayer is going to take some time for me to fully honor – so I am trusting the slow ripening of my soul to be my guide – as I ease into the second half of 2020. One wise soul noted that the chapel bells “that call monastics to prayer… summon us from where we are to what we need to think about if the work we do is to be pure, promising, and prophetic.” Sr. Joan adds: “There is no quick and easy way to make the life of God the life we lead. It takes years of sacred reading, years of listening to the fullness of life, years of learning to listen through the filter of what we have read.”
A generation of Pop Tarts and instant cocoa and TV dinners and computer calculations and instant Xerox copies does not prepare us well for the slow and tedious task of listening and learning over and over, day after day in the monastery, until we can finally hear the people we love and love the people we’ve learned to dislike and grow to understand how holiness is here and now for us. But someday… we may have listened enough to be ready to gather the yield that comes from years of learning Christ in real time…
First, I am renewing a commitment to pray “Day by Day” and other prayers in a
well-ordered daily rhythm – and invite you to join with me. Second, and this comes from my former spiritual director, Fr. Jim O’Donnell of Cleveland, who used to say: one step at a time, ok? At Lent, I would develop these grandiose plans for my devotional life – fasting every week for two days, an hour every morning in quiet meditation – to which he used to say: Just light a candle every day, man, and say the Lord’s Prayer for God’s sake. You can’t change yourself quickly so don’t set yourself up for disappoint me and more shame, ok? He was right, of course, and now 30 years later I am trusting his wisdom in a new way.
· What I’m talking about is the monastic perspective of stability: living into a rhythm of paying attention to God in one small place. Stability is the antithesis of wandering. It seeks to ripen our souls to rest in grace even when life is hard. “There are some things in life,” writes the prioress of a Benedictine monastery, “that cannot be avoided: death, illness, change, personal expectations. What each of them does to us depends a great deal on the way we have allowed ourselves to deal with lesser things. The purpose of stability is to center us in something greater than ourselves so that nothing lesser than ourselves can possibly sweep us away.”
· I tend to get bored easily – maybe you do, too. After five months in self-quarantine and semi-lockdown I really want a road trip. Something beyond our small but lovely house, something different from the grass, garden, and wetlands. But my wanderlust and aching for distractions while very, very real is not going to be realized. So, what do I do with this? How can I take this insight and let God lovingly wear down some of its rough edges? Again, the words of Sr. Joan are helpful: Staying in one place – stability – is an outward demonstration of what we say is our inward disposition: that the love of God is in ALL things and especially in the humdrum and mundane, in the here and now and the them and those.
This is a quiet invitation to trust that the small IS holy. That God HAS been incarnated in the form of a small, helpless baby in ancient Palestine. That home is every bit as holy and important as the pilgrimage IF I cultivate the eyes to see. Two other Bible stories came to me as I have stated walking around our yard and garden and trying to remember the times Jesus told those who loved him to stay home.
· That happens you know? Not everyone was called to physically follow him; some were told to get home and start practicing a quiet, healing love in what was ordinary. Do you know the story of the young boy possessed by a demon who roamed through a Gentile cemetery each night cutting and wounding himself – sometimes tearing off his clothes – and terrifying the community of farmers?
· Each of the synoptic gospels retells it and St. Luke’s version in chapter 8 is particularly vivid. First, it tells us that this young Jew is haunted by an inner pain that causes him to cut himself. I know young people who have been wounded who do this – cut and scar themselves – like the song says, “I bleed just to know I’m alive.” When Jesus meets him, he listens to the boy – he takes him seriously rather than in fear – realizing that the boy’s scarification is a pathological re-enactment of his circumcision – his wound that brought him into community. So with prayer, compassion and time Jesus brings him into healing and then asks his disciples to offer a new symbol of community by giving up a piece of their own clothing to help this child re-enter society. Clarence Jordan of Koinonia Farms says that Jesus asked Peter for a shirt, and Andrew for some sandals, and Matthew for a pair of paints until this boy was fully clothed from within the resources of the Jesus family. And when he was restored in every way, and asked Jesus if he could follow him, he was told: no, my friend, you need to go home. Your healing won’t be complete until you reclaim the safety of your family and the fullness of your community.
The stability of home, you see, is every bit as salvific and sacred as the pilgrimage and road trip. And if the story of the Prodigal Son is illustrative – and I suspect it is – then it goes on to tell us what happened to the boy possessed by spirits in the graveyard after he was healed and restored: it is the story of what happened when he DID go home to be embraced by his father with forgiveness, joy and feasting. Taking a long, loving look at my life over these past five years suggests that that seems to be what God has been sharing with me as well: the small sacred healing of being at home.
· Of preparing supper every night for my loved ones. Of learning to make a limited income an encounter with creativity. Of shopping not as a burden, but an act of devotion. Of cutting the grass as an encounter with God’s first word in creation. Of building garden terraces and learning how to use power tools to care for our small cloistered shelter in safety and beauty.
· “Stability” teaches the monks, “says we will stay with what seems to be humdrum if only to condition our souls to cope with the unfleeable in life. We stay with what, if we anted to, we really could get away from so that we can come someday to cope with what we will not be able to leave.”
First, a new and ordered engagement with daily prayer so that it’s not all about me; second, a deepening connection to this place through the practice and perspective of stability so that I learn to pay attention to what is real; and third a slowly ripening silence to help me patiently trust the love of God during the second half of this year. The other day I noticed that my gladiolas were finally blooming with a bold and arresting beauty. They would have blossomed without my noticing, of course, and been just as happy singing their praise to God whether I saw them or not. But there they were in all their majestic glory and my heart was full to overflowing when I saw them. If I can put it this way: that’s how I want to live, too. Silently singing something of God’s glory without ever having to be noticed.
Right now feels like the time for a radical reordering in a wildly upside-down way. Carrie Newcomer cuts to the chase in this poem she calls “Because There Is Not Enough Time.”
I used to think that because life was short
I should do more – be more – squeeze more into each and every day.
I’d walk around with a stick ruler, with increasing numbers
As the measure of fullness. But lately I’ve sensed a different response
To a lack of time. Felt it in my bones
The singular worth of each passing moment.
Perhaps the goal is not to spend the day
Power skiing atop an ocean of multitasking
Maybe the idea is to swim slower – surer – dive deeper
And really look around
There’s a difference between a life of width – and a life of depth.
I am going to invite you – if you feel inclined – to sing and pray with me right now – and then join me at least once a day in singing and praying this together as we grow into this new way of being:
While crafting my doctoral dissertation I was drawn back to Godspell – and its
The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of our culture, and the weakness of God is stronger than our own. In previous generations, Christ has come in various guises: as teacher, as judge, as healer. Today these traditional images have lost much of their power. Now Christ has made an unexpected entrance onto the stage of moderns secular life and enters as Christ the harlequin: the personification of festivity and fantasy in an age that has almost lost both Coming now in greasepaint and halo, this Christ is able to touch our jaded modern consciousness as other personas cannot. (Feast of Fools, p. 167)
Interestingly, that same little book by Harvey Cox became the theological foundation for the musical Godspell itself when a young Carnegie Mellon University student was inspired by it to create an upbeat musical alternative to a thoroughly lifeless Easter Sunday liturgy. It seems that Michael John Treblak worshipped at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Pittsburgh on Easter Sunday 1970. But instead of a feast celebrating the sublime gift of grace and resurrection, he was forced to endure a mumbling, disinterested priest leading a boring, worn-out ceremony that made him feel as if the church was trying to roll the stone BACK in front of Christ’s empty tomb rather than proclaim the reign of love and fresh starts. To add insult to injury, on his way home from worship, Treblak was stopped by a policeman and frisked for drugs because his long hair made the officer suspicious. Six months later, Treblak turned his desecrated Easter experience into a contemporary festival based on St. Matthew’s gospel that was infused with the insights of Harvey Cox as well as the joy of Vatican II folk-rock music and poetry.
One song in particular captures the show’s charism for me – and I have recently reclaimed the mystical medieval English supplication for my own prayers – because “Day by Day” gets everything right. It starts with a gentle folk melody that carries a 13th century text into the present day – with a dash of 12 Step wisdom thrown in for good measure. The prayer humbly asks for daily bread in three forms: May God help me to see my path more clearly, experience grace more dearly, and follow the way of wisdom revealed in Jesus more nearly – day by day - not for all time and not in a heroic manner – just one day at a time within my ordinary world.
Day by day – day by day
Oh, dear Lord, three things I pray:
To see thee more clearly, to love thee more dearly
To follow thee more nearly, day by day
This morning I want to consider what it might mean for those of us who gather here at Small is Holy to pray this prayer together – or some version like it – as part of our shared commitment for the remainder of 2020. When it first became essential for many of us to shelter at home and practice solidarity through solitude none of us knew how long it would last. I know that I first thought that maybe we’ll be done by early summer. By May, however, it was increasingly clear that this manner of living was going to be a much longer reality. And now we know that we’re going to be doing this for the better part of a year – and probably well into 2021, too. So, I’m wondering what does it mean for us to be open to God’s loving presence personally when most of our time is now shaped by silence and some version of seclusion?
If it is true, as the old hymn teaches, that “time makes ancient truth uncouth,” then how might we be open to the guidance of the Spirit in this season of confinement, quarantine, and relative isolation as it stretches into autumn and then winter? I know that I have tried not to waste the first five months of this desert-like retreat nor ignore its meaning for me personally or as a citizen of our broken nation – and I haven’t always been successful. And yet during this time I have been drawn to a whole new way of paying attention to two ever-changing, always challenging passages of scripture.
What is God saying to me in this? What is God starting to reveal to me – and to us all – during this next cycle of uncertainty? How will our love of the holy and our commitment to our sisters and brothers in community find shape and form in the days to come? This is one text that is helping me pay attention right now even if I’m not yet clear what it fully means.
The other is a wisdom poem from the Hebrew Bible that begins: “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven” from Ecclesiastes 3. The text continues with: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
This past week we reunited with our Brooklyn children and grandchildren for the first time in person in five months. What a delight – a time of laughter and tears, rejoicing and sorrow, a little bit of dancing, a whole lot of feasting all within the context of anxiety as well as trust. When it was over our hearts were full to overflowing with gratitude and grief – it was THIS text on steroids – with all the polarities rolled into three days of love and longing. As our grandson, Louie, made his goodbye with Di as we were sharing hugs in the driveway, he said: This was the best visit EVER! And then, without missing a beat, asked her: Why do you think this was true? Man, out of the mouths of babes, yes? Zoom has its place and social media can keep us connected and I give thanks for them both, but there is nothing like heart to heart affection and the touch of a loving embrace. The intensity of this visit promises to become the norm for months to come – for us and so many others – so what will we discover in our new encounters with divine paradox and balance?
What I’m going to share with you now is very personal: less my regular mystical
Being patient with ourselves and bearing with one another in compassion is one way for me to get a grip on this moment in time. A spiritual friend spoke of this as the practice of contemplation taking a long, loving look at what is real. In my life and the world – NOT navel gazing or trying to escape reality but taking the time over the long haul to notice what is going on within and among us through the lens of love, truth, and patience. Recently I’ve come across the way Christine Valters Paintner speaks of this as trusting the soul’s slow ripening in real time. Isn’t that a beautiful insight? Trusting and listening to the soul’s slow ripening in real time. There’s no judgment in those words, no shame or rush to a find a bottom-line solution either; just the supple movement of the Spirit leading us towards our best selves. St. Paul encourages this gentleness when he reminds us that “now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face.” That’s another biblical touchstone for me: it gives me permission to ask questions, to stumble and try again, to gratefully embrace forgiveness and patience as I keep on with the journey until greater clarity is revealed.
One of the clues that has slowly been ripening in my soul over the past month – becoming a bit less oblique and more in focus – is the sense that it is time for my inner friar to learn to dance with my inner monk. I have playfully made these two spiritual archetypes my prayer companions on and off for the past few years – sometimes favoring one over the other – but now it feels like they want to dance together.
· Do you know the difference between the friar and the monk? For a long time, I didn’t either but during my sabbatical in Montreal five years ago I kept sensing that my new vocation was less of a pastor in a local church and more of a friar – albeit it a secular mostly Protestant one. A friar is a religious brother among equals; not a leader, a priest, or a monk, nor one who is cloistered in a stable community either but one who is charged with sharing compassion and healing with the whole community. A friar spoke to my natural inclination to wander and connect with others serendipitously as the Spirit inspired. In my prayers, I even adopted the children’s song, Frere Jacques, as part of this new vocation: Brother James, the gentle bells of morning prayer are calling. Are you sleeping? Or are you ready to go where the Spirit leads this day? It was liberating and joyful and I cherished this revelation.
· You see, for decades I have made the way of the flâneur an art form. It is my preferred path to be surprised by grace, encountering new souls to listen to and learn from, finding beauty in the most unlikely places, sharing a caring presence in the midst of life's tussles in the world, and taking-in the wild creativity of cities or country sides. Living as unofficial secular friar felt like soul food to me for the past five years. But now we are in a truly a different season – unlike anything I’ve ever known – and time is calling for a different charism. What I am discerning is that Frere Jacques has been invited to dance with a monastic archetype as this moment makes wandering is impossible and becoming deeply rooted in one place – a small and cloistered home – with little engagement with the wider world my new reality.
This season of being little, being silent and grounded in ordinary prayers and work that reveal the unforced rhythms of grace and nature rather than the adventures of a pilgrimage feels like what some have called a new monasticism. It is an ordered spirituality shaped by the ebb and flow of day and night, light and dark, the steadfastness of the seasons and the very rhythms of life, death, and new life. I have long given myself to spontaneous prayer. My eyes have learned to see the holy everywhere and in all manner of things and this is a friar’s charism. But as Sr. Joan Chittister – a wise monastic master makes clear – if I am the only measure of a prayer’s efficacy, then prayer is more about “seeking consolation than risking conversion” to God’s mysterious presence. Sr. Joan writes that honoring the stability of the monastery in prayer, perspective and patience reminds us that WE are not the center of the universe.
· One monastic discipline for honoring the sacred rhythm of life is praying the hours – coming to prayer in the middle of various tasks when the bells beacon – and learning to let go of my worldly cares for a moment as I rest within God’s healing presence.
· The Buddhist monk, Thich Nat Han, said that he came to use the telephone as his call to mindfulness: when it would ring rather than fume over yet another interruption, he would pause, take a deep breath and return thanks to the flow of life for yet another chance to express love and gratitude for simply being alive in this moment.
· To that end, I am starting to use my IPhone as a portable chapel bell to reorder my prayers: I will always go to spontaneous adoration and tears of joy and sorrow, but now I am going to embrace a measure of order, too. Monastics speak of this as regula – what some call a rule – but which is more a sense of “a guidepost or a railing, something to hang on to in the dark, something that gives us support as we climb” (Chittister, p. 7) through the challenges of the day. (talk about this and demonstrate…)
Living into a commitment to well-ordered daily prayer is going to take some time for me to fully honor – so I am trusting the slow ripening of my soul to be my guide – as I ease into the second half of 2020. One wise soul noted that the chapel bells “that call monastics to prayer… summon us from where we are to what we need to think about if the work we do is to be pure, promising, and prophetic.” Sr. Joan adds: “There is no quick and easy way to make the life of God the life we lead. It takes years of sacred reading, years of listening to the fullness of life, years of learning to listen through the filter of what we have read.”
A generation of Pop Tarts and instant cocoa and TV dinners and computer calculations and instant Xerox copies does not prepare us well for the slow and tedious task of listening and learning over and over, day after day in the monastery, until we can finally hear the people we love and love the people we’ve learned to dislike and grow to understand how holiness is here and now for us. But someday… we may have listened enough to be ready to gather the yield that comes from years of learning Christ in real time…
First, I am renewing a commitment to pray “Day by Day” and other prayers in a
· What I’m talking about is the monastic perspective of stability: living into a rhythm of paying attention to God in one small place. Stability is the antithesis of wandering. It seeks to ripen our souls to rest in grace even when life is hard. “There are some things in life,” writes the prioress of a Benedictine monastery, “that cannot be avoided: death, illness, change, personal expectations. What each of them does to us depends a great deal on the way we have allowed ourselves to deal with lesser things. The purpose of stability is to center us in something greater than ourselves so that nothing lesser than ourselves can possibly sweep us away.”
· I tend to get bored easily – maybe you do, too. After five months in self-quarantine and semi-lockdown I really want a road trip. Something beyond our small but lovely house, something different from the grass, garden, and wetlands. But my wanderlust and aching for distractions while very, very real is not going to be realized. So, what do I do with this? How can I take this insight and let God lovingly wear down some of its rough edges? Again, the words of Sr. Joan are helpful: Staying in one place – stability – is an outward demonstration of what we say is our inward disposition: that the love of God is in ALL things and especially in the humdrum and mundane, in the here and now and the them and those.
This is a quiet invitation to trust that the small IS holy. That God HAS been incarnated in the form of a small, helpless baby in ancient Palestine. That home is every bit as holy and important as the pilgrimage IF I cultivate the eyes to see. Two other Bible stories came to me as I have stated walking around our yard and garden and trying to remember the times Jesus told those who loved him to stay home.
· That happens you know? Not everyone was called to physically follow him; some were told to get home and start practicing a quiet, healing love in what was ordinary. Do you know the story of the young boy possessed by a demon who roamed through a Gentile cemetery each night cutting and wounding himself – sometimes tearing off his clothes – and terrifying the community of farmers?
· Each of the synoptic gospels retells it and St. Luke’s version in chapter 8 is particularly vivid. First, it tells us that this young Jew is haunted by an inner pain that causes him to cut himself. I know young people who have been wounded who do this – cut and scar themselves – like the song says, “I bleed just to know I’m alive.” When Jesus meets him, he listens to the boy – he takes him seriously rather than in fear – realizing that the boy’s scarification is a pathological re-enactment of his circumcision – his wound that brought him into community. So with prayer, compassion and time Jesus brings him into healing and then asks his disciples to offer a new symbol of community by giving up a piece of their own clothing to help this child re-enter society. Clarence Jordan of Koinonia Farms says that Jesus asked Peter for a shirt, and Andrew for some sandals, and Matthew for a pair of paints until this boy was fully clothed from within the resources of the Jesus family. And when he was restored in every way, and asked Jesus if he could follow him, he was told: no, my friend, you need to go home. Your healing won’t be complete until you reclaim the safety of your family and the fullness of your community.
The stability of home, you see, is every bit as salvific and sacred as the pilgrimage and road trip. And if the story of the Prodigal Son is illustrative – and I suspect it is – then it goes on to tell us what happened to the boy possessed by spirits in the graveyard after he was healed and restored: it is the story of what happened when he DID go home to be embraced by his father with forgiveness, joy and feasting. Taking a long, loving look at my life over these past five years suggests that that seems to be what God has been sharing with me as well: the small sacred healing of being at home.
· Of preparing supper every night for my loved ones. Of learning to make a limited income an encounter with creativity. Of shopping not as a burden, but an act of devotion. Of cutting the grass as an encounter with God’s first word in creation. Of building garden terraces and learning how to use power tools to care for our small cloistered shelter in safety and beauty.
· “Stability” teaches the monks, “says we will stay with what seems to be humdrum if only to condition our souls to cope with the unfleeable in life. We stay with what, if we anted to, we really could get away from so that we can come someday to cope with what we will not be able to leave.”
First, a new and ordered engagement with daily prayer so that it’s not all about me; second, a deepening connection to this place through the practice and perspective of stability so that I learn to pay attention to what is real; and third a slowly ripening silence to help me patiently trust the love of God during the second half of this year. The other day I noticed that my gladiolas were finally blooming with a bold and arresting beauty. They would have blossomed without my noticing, of course, and been just as happy singing their praise to God whether I saw them or not. But there they were in all their majestic glory and my heart was full to overflowing when I saw them. If I can put it this way: that’s how I want to live, too. Silently singing something of God’s glory without ever having to be noticed.
I used to think that because life was short
I should do more – be more – squeeze more into each and every day.
I’d walk around with a stick ruler, with increasing numbers
As the measure of fullness. But lately I’ve sensed a different response
To a lack of time. Felt it in my bones
The singular worth of each passing moment.
Perhaps the goal is not to spend the day
Power skiing atop an ocean of multitasking
Maybe the idea is to swim slower – surer – dive deeper
And really look around
There’s a difference between a life of width – and a life of depth.
I am going to invite you – if you feel inclined – to sing and pray with me right now – and then join me at least once a day in singing and praying this together as we grow into this new way of being:
Day by day, day by day, o dear Lord, three things I pray:
To see thee more clearly,
To love thee more dearly, to follow thee more nearly, day by day
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