· … and I must confess, a bit sobering, too. For within the beauty of this glorious wildflower is a message that summer is slowly sneaking away and will soon become Mother Autumn. Fall may well be my favorite season of the year; for so many mystical reasons autumn awakens me to the sacred rhythm of life and death as greens becomes brown, orange, and red, the harvest is starting to be gathered in, and acres and acres of pumpkins will soon appear on the hillsides of New England.
· Yet catching sight of creation’s first golden rod is still startling to me: I know fall is coming, I look forward to its return, yet seeing it’s first signs fills me with a tender melancholia. It’s a beautiful yet humbling reminder of God’s gracious presence in a world way beyond my control. St. Mary Oliver of blessed memory put it like this:
In the deep fall don’t you imagine the leaves think how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the nothingness of air and the endless freshets of wind?
And don’t you think the trees themselves, especially those with mossy, warm caves,
begin to think of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep inside their bodies?
And don’t you hear the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first tuffets of snow? The pond vanishes, and the white field over which the fox runs so quickly brings out its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially, the piled firewood shifts a little, longing to be on its way.
This tender melancholia is, at least for me, an awakening to the Earth’s quiet invitation to make peace with patience. Fr. Ed Hays in his small guidebook to pray ALL ways writes: “Patience as a quality of the heart seems to be a feminine grace… It is the ability to wait and suffer time… as its Greek root word suggests.”
Hupomone is the Greek New Testament feminine noun for the capacity to endure and persevere. It is sometimes translated as steadfast or even the willingness to wait behind rather than rush ahead to the forefront. In one of St. Luke’s apocalyptic passages, Jesus tells those closest to his heart that there will be times when persecution and hatred will afflict the faithful so they must be steadfast and patient trusting God’s love.
They will arrest you… and hand you over to prisons where you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So, make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. There will be times when you will be betrayed even by parents and brothers and sisters, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish for by your endurance – your sacred waiting rather than rushing, your patience - you will gain your souls.
St. Paul uses this same word throughout Romans telling us that those committed to trusting God are able to celebrate suffering with endurance because:
Suffering cultivates patience and endurance, waiting on the Lord quietly in turn strengthens our deepest values, as these values give shape and form to our outward character, they eventually give birth to hope for hope is a gift from God which pours the presence of the Holy Spirit into our hearts.
Sacred hope, as opposed to sentimental or naive optimism, is a spiritual gift cultivated by quiet waiting. It is stillness rather than yearning. Trust instead of anxiety. And St. Paul insists that it takes practice – especially in a ginned-up culture of instant gratification and over consumption – to grow strong. “Patience” Fr. Ed writes, “is one way of examining our inner spiritual balance.” He adds that many of us do not know how to peacefully suffer time. “We want everything right now. We want love, success, happiness, social justice, equality, reform, our clothes cleaned and pressed, our hair dried, our rice cooked, and our meals ready to eat right NOW! And, it seems, that we want the Kingdom of God right now, too.” To which one of our tradition’s contemporary elders, the wise Gertrud Mueller-Nelson, replies in her Advent meditation:
Waiting, because it will always be with us, can be made into a work of art and a way of prayer… Our masculine world wants to blast away waiting from our lives… we equate it with wasting… and yet the tempo of our haste has less to do with being on time or the efficiency of a busy life – it has more to do with our inability to wait without anxiety. Paradoxically, God has constructed creation in such a way that the unpractical waiting of life is mysteriously necessary to all that is becoming. As in pregnancy, nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubi-tion: 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, simmer, fermenting, ripening, germinating, gestating are all the feminine processes of become and they are the symbolic states of being which belong in a life of value.
Have we ever, in our contemporary collective experience, lived into a time that so aches for patient endurance as this one – where our days demand a peaceful suffering of time – even as our souls grieve it all? I know that in these maddening days of covid surges and the anxiety they carry, it is essential for me to continue cultivating the practice of “suffering the slow growth of inner stillness” and deep trust. I was SO ready for a different autumn – and so heartsick when our public health experts said slow down and wait some more for this damned pandemic to run its course. I wasn’t even consciously aware of my sorrow until I saw that golden rod last week; when it caught my eye, it whispered autumn’s words of wisdom saying: things are once again changing beyond your con-trol. Could it be time to check within once more to see if you’re grounded in my steadfast love? If you’re going to ride out the approaching storms still to come with even the hint of equanimity, you must become still – patient – and then you’ll know.
And just so that I would take stock of my golden rod friend’s reminder, I started to have a melt down a few days later when a credit card company locked down my ability to pay a bill online. I had apparently entered some wrong passwords, or numbers, or something into their exasperating questioning where after three wrong tries, you’re locked me out. I understand the security of this hassle, but on this particular day it still pissed me off royally. I was actually unnerved – angry and anxious at the same time – and I wanted someone else besides myself to blame for why I was feeling unmoored. It only took a few minutes for this totally First World problem to be resolved. But my feelings of impending doom were a wake-up call to pay attention to what was going on just below my surface because NONE of it was peaceful, patient, or pretty. Fr. Richard Rohr tells us that:
Living in a transitional age such as ours is scary: things are falling apart, the future is unknow-able, and so much doesn’t cohere or make sense. Our uncertainty (can either be an emotional trap door that sinks us) or the pathway into mystery, the doorway of surrender, the road to God that Jesus called “faith.”
Another word for this is trust: the patient endurance that knows how to suffer time peacefully and readies our hearts to receive God’s spirit of hope. Interestingly, this time I caught myself melting down, giving in to frustration, and embracing those as still unacknowledged disappointments. So, I lay down, literally, breathing deeply so that my anxiety might become a portal to prayer Paul the apostle advised saying out loud to Di: I don’t know all the reasons why I become such an anxious a-hole whenever money problems pop up in real or imagination incarnations, but I hate it. I hate how I sound to you, I despise how I sound to myself, and I’m exhausted by this overwhelming anxiety. It’s got to end. So, I’m just going to lay down here, shut up, and give it all a rest, ok? And WHAT started singing inside me when I closed my eyes to be still?
When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom: let it be! And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be: Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be, whisper words of wisdom, let it be
Paying attention to our angst matters – it is part of the pathway into the prayer of patience – for as Fr. Rohr came to realize in his own life: It takes great trust and patience to remain stunned, sad, and silenced by the tragedy and absurdity of human events. To feel the confusion rather than deny or hide it, to let it become God’s invitation for you to slip into stillness is how suffering gives birth to quiet endurance, and sacramental waiting matures into a heart of hope. For SOME reason, THIS week I finally got it – both the wisdom of St. Paul – AND a taste of God’s grace-filled stillness.
That OTHER St. Paul, St. Paul McCartney of Liverpool, sang to me the wisdom of Psalm 40 in a new way and I heard again the sacred words of wisdom: be still and know that I am God. I don’t think it was mere coincidence that as this week unfolded, I came upon another gift from the wise souls at the Center for Action and Contemplation.
Each day at CAC we begin our morning sit by repeating a line from Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.” With each repetition, we drop a word from the verse until we finally say only “Be,” before entering the silence together. It is a reminder that no matter how we arrive that day, we are called to be, and be still, before God. Barbara Holmes affirms that stillness is important for all who want to transform their pain instead of transmit it: “Stillness is a state of wholeness, an antidote to the fragmentation… that comes with marginalization. Sitting in stillness allows the pieces of us to reassemble.” It seems that we have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be—to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now.
· One way to cultivate patience and nourish a sacramental endurance so that we might be whole and holy is to use that prayer: Be still and know that I am God as Rohr suggests. So before moving on, we should try it – and then maybe we’ll use it with some consistency. So make yourself comfortable – close your eyes or not as is your preference – and pray along with me as we use the be still paradigm. I’ll speak each line leaving a time for a few silent breaths and then move on leaving off a word, ok?
· First, breathe in and out gently as I say: Be still and know that I am God… (silence) Be still and know that I am… (silence.) Be still and know… (silence.) Be still…(silence.) Be… (silence.)
That’s one simple and time-tested way to get grounded again in stillness on the path towards inner patience. Another is to interrupt your chain of thought by bringing your attention to a “stone, a tree, or even a bird or and animal – not to think about it – but just to let it hold your awareness.” Spiritual directors have learned that when you perceive something natural, you take on something of its essence. “You can sense how still it is, and in doing so let that same stillness arise within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being—completely at one with what it is and where it is. And in realizing this, you too can come to a place of rest deep within yourself.” That’s one of the many blessings I experience in our garden: there’s so much beauty to contemplate and so much stillness, too.
In my recent frustration with myself and my still buried anxieties about the year to come, after my let it be rest within the stillness, I said out loud: “Jesus Christ, I’m almost 70 years old. I’ve been going down this inward journey road for more than half of my life. I should be able to do a bit better at all of this.” And, while it’s true on one level that I want to get a little better living in peace with myself, as I was saying it I realized how unnecessarily judgmental I sounded, too. That’s something else nourishing patience as prayer wants us to experience: we are blessed by grace just as much as anyone and everyone else.
· We KNOW that God shares grace with others in the world freely and joyfully. What we often forget is that God does so to us, too. I don’t know HOW many times I’ve prayed that passage from Romans 5 – or how many times I’ve preached it, taught it, pondered, fretted, and wept over it. In so many ways, it has been liberating to me over the years – AND – last week I GOT it in a profound way.
· Within and beyond me, finally from the inside out, I knew intimately that owning my wounds leads to hope because my wounds not only link me to all of creation, but to that amazing grace that I trust God shares with the world is always available to me, too! James Baldwin once made this confession that is sooo right:
You think your own pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” A mentor and professor, the late Dorothee Soelle, taught that our suffering is where we most honestly come to God’s common table to feast with the rest of the world. Our wounds are what we have in common with every other living person. Through them we can ripen in tenderness and dis-cover how to share the presence of the holy with others with compassion, safety, and respect. Fr. Ed puts it like this: “Patience is vigilant waiting, a waiting that is full, pregnant with dreams, hopes, ideas, and peace. This waiting is NOT resignation… this patience is loving and dynamic surrender. In Islam, this patient surrender is often expressed in the term, “Inshallah” which means “if God is willing.” In God’s deep love, it doesn’t matter HOW long it takes me to grasp that grace was meant for me, too: we are ALL works in progress, all doing the best we can at any given moment, and all – dare I say it from a wisdom long forgotten – bozos on this bus? Sister Joy Harjo captures the bounty of resting in the stillness of such grace in her poem, Perhaps the World Ends Here:
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on. We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it. It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women. At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers. Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table. This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun. Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory. We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here. At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
I hear Sr. Harjo recognizing that the patience nourished by inner stillness not only bathes us in grace but connects us to all of creation as well. As Fr. Ed puts it at the close of his chapter on patience as prayer: “Patience is a sign that our needs – at this very moment – must be in balance with the needs and lives of others. Waiting for anyone or anything is a prayer of communion with the rest of the cosmos. In this, it is a prayer of humility and truth – the truth that we are but a part of a much greater whole and not the sum total of all.”
That’s an aspect of patient waiting that this new phase of moving through the portal of the pandemic is trying to tell us: we ARE all connected – it is no coincidence that 99.9% of those being hospitalized and dying of the covid Delta variant are unvaccinated – and the only reason this surge is not MORE horrible is that 70% of the rest of us made the commitment to wear masks for 18 months, shelter in place, and get our shot in the arm when our time opened up. The selfishness, ideology, fear, reluctance, stubbornness, sometimes stupidity, and sometimes harsh realities of working without the benefit of time off to GET a vaccination, and then who the hell knows what else that continues to keep 30% of our sisters and brothers away from the doctor’s office is now threatening everyone well-being and threatening to upset our needed economic and emotional recoveries, too. NONE of us WANT to practice this type of waiting – we want the whole mess to be over and done with – but that’s not going to happen any time soon. I wish to God that weren’t true, but we’re in for a long haul. Owning this tragedy in the light of our interrelationships and faith tradition, it seems that those among us who choose to honor its humbling truths must find an even deeper repose with suffering time peaceably than we’ve ever practiced before. INSERT
And let me try to articulate what this means because I don’t want to lay a heavy burden on you in any way, shape, or form. In the 17th chapter of St. John’s gospel Jesus prays to the Lord that all might become as one. Fr. Henri Nouwen offers that this prayer for unity is not only for his current disciples, but for everyone born into this life. “May they all be one, Father, just as you are in me and I in you . . .” (John 17:21).
· In his day as in ours, social unity was not on the horizon: his disciples mistrusted one another, civil society was on the edge of revolution, Israel was under the bootheel of imperial Rome, and rich and poor hated one another as much as America’s walking wounded despise our cultural and economic elites. There was a desire for social unity, but no formula for it to happen. So, notice two truths in the prayer of Jesus: first, when Jesus prays for unity, it is as a gift from God by grace NOT human achievement; and second, it is grounded in the humble reality that God can hold together what we cannot.
· Every social movement I’ve participated in – and nearly every faith community, too – yearns for solidarity. Deep trust. Even love. As Nouwen observes we try to accomplish this unity by discovering common ground with one another: what values, hopes, dreams, art, music, and culture do we all share? This often works for a time until “we eventually become disillusioned with one another realizing NO human being is capable of consistently offering us the care and compassion we all want profoundly.” Often, our disillusionment leads us into bitterness, cynicism, and a brittleness that finds enemies lurking everywhere except within our own hearts.
I still recall vividly how broken-hearted I became while working for Cesar Chavez and the farm workers movement: as young idealists in the early 70’s we were certain we were going to change the world – at least advance the revolution of love and peace. But, for reasons deeper than anyone knows, Cesar became distracted – self-destructive and un-moored as well – and began to systematically chase out of the movement everyone who disagreed with his narrow vision including its early founders. I left after a year of ugly and cruel attacks upon mostly young, vulnerable Anglo volunteers who were open-hearted and committed to La Causa but emotionally naïve. I was angry, wounded, and resentful that the man once celebrated as the Mexican Gandhi had become a Little Cesar dictator. My own spiritual naivete was so fractured by this experience that for three years I couldn’t speak about what it meant to see my hero’s feet of clay.
Thanks be to God I didn’t get stuck there – that’s what James Fowler calls the adolescent stage of faith development – where disillusionment becomes normative and always looks for someone else’s demons out there. Never within. In time God led me into seminary where I came under the guidance of a wise and humble mentor, Ray Swartzback, who showed me over and over again that it’s not my brother nor my sister, not the deacon nor the preacher, nor even the rabbi or the mullah, but it’s ME, it’s me, it’s ME o Lord standing in the need of prayer. Ray was a master at helping me get over my hurt and get over myself and learn some good Biblical theology, too. He would sometimes kid me and ask: What did old St. Paul say in Romans 7? And when I didn’t know at first, he told me to go and find out. I love Peterson’s rendering of this text:
If I know what is loving but still can’t do it, if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I can will it, but I can’t do it consistently. I decide to do good, but don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, my false self is there to trip me up. And while I truly delight in God’s commands, it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me rebel just when I least expect it…
That’s why Jesus didn’t pray for a unity based on what we know or want or will: he taught us that the love needed for unity and solidarity is greater than our ability. So, he prayed that we find unity through resting in God’s love and opening our hearts to God’s compassion. It won’t come about, simply by singing “Solidarity Forever,” or bowing down to doctrine, dogma, systematic theology, or institutional hierarchy in ANY religion. To paraphrase Marcus Borg, Jesus told us that: Centering in God is what transforms us. It changes us. It produces what Paul called ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ and ‘the gifts of the Spirit.’ It is what Jesus meant when he said, ‘You will know them by their fruits.’ The fruits of centering in God are many and intertwined, but the most important are compassion, freedom, courage, and gratitude. No one is more important than the other – they are all essential – and all flow from being centered in God’s grace.
THIS is the unity Jesus advocated: being mystically centered and grounded in God’s love – experiencng from the inside out and beyond anything we have done or earned – the blessed grace of being the beloved of the Lord. About this time last summer, I sensed that our charism together was going to be quietly revolutionary: we – and others like us – were being invited by God to offer a clear alternative to the fear, anxiety, hatred, and ignorance so prevalent in this country. Like the first disciples, our sacramental action was NOT about strengthening an institution, but living with such trust and simple compassion that a new way of being was visible for others trapped and oppressed by the status quo. I believe this NOW more than I did a year ago. So, as the uncertainty of late summer 2021 opens to the mysteries of autumn like the greens of the wetland behind my house are giving up their verdancy for yellows, browns, and reds, let us be those who practice transforming our fear and anger into patience, listening, and sharing the beauty of God’s love wherever we find ourselves. If you are able, pray with me again the short “be still prayer” as anticipation of living Eucharistically: Breathe in, breathe out gently: Be still and know that I am God… (silence) Be still and know that I am…be still and know… be still… be…
No comments:
Post a Comment