You Are Here

Yesterday I ate supper with seven young women from Notre Dame de Sion high school who are at Sophia Center for a Kairos retreat. One aspect of the retreat they have found challenging is that they aren’t given a schedule, so they can’t anticipate what is to come. My impression is that these girls like to be prepared for any contingency, as the conversation later drifted to where they would go in the event of a zombie apocalypse (Costco was the unanimous choice).

You’d think as Christians we would become accustomed to not being able to anticipate the future, because God’s ways are not our ways. As Woody Allen said, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” This sentiment is similarly expressed in the Book of Wisdom, which says that we “do not know the hidden counsels of God.” It’s frustrating to be part of the evolution of the kingdom of God without having a clear understanding of how we fit into that progression. It requires trust to believe that, although we may not understand why, we are meant to be where we are at this particular time, at this particular place, and with these particular people. When we trust God’s unfolding plans and counsels, we can honor the present moment by giving it our full attention without longing for or regretting the past or worrying about the future—even if it does include a zombie apocalypse.

Art and The Good Life

Recently, I came across the following line in the poem Mindful by Mary Oliver: “Every day I see or I hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.” As a result, in my nightly journaling, I am now reflecting on what killed me with delight during the day—because, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has observed, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement … get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. …To be spiritual is to be amazed.” It’s what we hear in the wisdom literature over and over: fear (that is, awe) of God and God’s creation is the beginning of wisdom and a primary key to the good life.  

Usually what kills me with delight is something relating to the senses—the texture of a leaf, the taste of an orange, the scent of lilies, the sound of Srs. Elizabeth Carrillo and Judith Sutera singing in harmony. Most recently, I have been killed with delight by a picture of hollyhocks by William Hook that was given to me by my friend, Martha Stegmaier, who has a particular talent for finding beautiful pieces of art. My living group graciously allowed me to take down a battered and tattered framed poster by Claude Monet and hang this vibrant picture in its place.

Art feeds the soul with delight; we need to make a place for it in our homes, workplaces, and churches and support the artists who create this key to living in radical amazement. As Winston Churchill said, “Ill fares the race that fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.” We need to make space in our lives for the arts, which remind us to live with reverence, delight and gratitude—essential ingredients of the good life.

The Divine Milieu

Why is balance so important in our lives? One reason is that it provides a “milieu” for the working of the Spirit, as suggested in the following poem.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

The Divine Milieu

The moment you choose anything…the exact opposite of that

will come into your life in some way. A context must be

produced in which you may experience what you have chosen.

                                      —Neale Donald Walsch

Balance is boring.

Eating

            (cruciferously)

Exercising

            (circuitously)

Praying

            (contemplatively)

Working

            (continually)

Sleeping

            (cyclically)

All to create a milieu for the Spirit to act

                                                        (capriciously)

Reflecting at the Threshold of a New Season

Monday, March 20, was the first day of spring. Tonight we will be having a prayer service to say farewell to winter and welcome the new season. This prayer is in keeping with our understanding that the basis of wisdom is common human experience, as noted by Sr. Irene Nowell. Thus, we will gather to reflect on what we experienced during the winter months. The threshold of a new season provides the opportunity to determine which memories to discard and which to retain as fertilizer for the seeds we plant in spring.

Here at the Mount, one of our primary communal memories of this past winter is the death of Sr. Lou Whipple. We don’t understand why she was given only 50 years to experience human life and explore the depths of wisdom. However, as noted in Sirach 24:26, “The first human never finished comprehending wisdom, nor will the last succeed in fathoming her.” No matter how many years we live, we will never be able to plumb the depths of wisdom and achieve total transformation. Nonetheless, we can take comfort in the following observation by Abbot John Klassen, OSB: “We know that [although] the transformation … will not be complete in this life, that Christ, with the Holy Spirit, will bring it to completion.”

Somehow, the wisdom that we do attain in this life and share with others helps in the evolution of the kingdom of God. Therefore, while we have breath, it is our task to continue to live in right relationship, observe life, and learn from our experiences during the cycling of the seasons. When we come to our final season, we can, like Sr. Lou, let go in trust that Christ will bring our transformation to completion.

Shining Like the Sun

On Saturday, I had the privilege of attending a conference at Bishop Miege High School at which Fr. Ron Rolheiser spoke about “Fear and Her Many Children.” He identified three healthy religious fears (fear of God’s holiness/magnitude, fear of the moral order of life, and fear of God inbreaking into our comfortable lives) and seven unhealthy religious fears, one of which was fear of being condemned for believing that God wants us to let our light shine, leading us to be too inhibited to do great things. This fear reminded me of a statement by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” I was also reminded of the following meditation by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Fr. Rolheiser said that the only way to remove people’s fear of shining like the sun is by blessing them, both by showing through our own actions that it is okay to shine and by confirming their own giftedness. The world’s problems are overwhelming, and we can’t begin to address them by ourselves, but we can help unlock the immense energy for good that resides in others by blessing them with our attention and our belief that they contain light and it is meant to shine.

Today I Am Irish

Although my heritage is German on both sides of my family, today is St. Patrick’s day, and thus in solidarity with the members of the Mount with Irish ancestors, I am wearing green. Similarly, when I go to a Greek festival, I eat spanikopita and baklava, and when I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, I rooted for the Jayhawks. When I greet Hispanic inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility on their birthday, I say, “Feliz cumpleaños!” and when I pray with Buddhist friends, we meditate.

Does all this adaptation mean that I do not know who I am? Actually, it means that I know exactly who I am—a member of the body of Christ, which means that I am Irish, Greek, a Jayhawk, Hispanic, and a Buddhist. Such diversity makes me grateful for all the expressions of Christ that I encounter. Today I am Irish. Tomorrow, who knows—but I’m sure it will be unique and wonderful.

Late-Winter Wisdom

The worship aid for Sr. Lou Whipple’s funeral included the following quote by Thomas Merton: “All of creation teaches us some way of prayer.” What is creation teaching us about prayer when we have two weeks of 60- and 70-degree weather in late February, followed by a return of frigid temperatures and snowflakes in early March?

• Perhaps creation is teaching us the prayer of acceptance of whatever each day brings us, whether or not it is to our liking. Do we truly believe that God is to be found in blustery winds and snow, as well as in warm breezes and gentle rains?

• Perhaps creation is teaching us the prayer of patience by showing us that we can’t rush the growth of creation or of ourselves, and that a certain amount of time must be spent in winter cold and darkness to prepare for new growth.

• Perhaps creation is teaching us the prayer of gratitude for a late-winter break from cold temperatures and for our warm coats, scarves, and mittens when wintry weather returns.

The wisdom of creation is vast that and is imparted to us on a moment-by-moment basis, so perhaps the most important prayer we can learn is to live in the present so we can be awake to what creation wishes to teach us.

Attaining Wisdom Through Silence

I suspect that Jesus was a man who was comfortable with and even craved silence. As Sr. Genevieve Glen has noted, “The evangelists … show him over and over again to be a person who paid intense attention to the world around him.” Such intense attention is facilitated by silence.

We at the Mount maintained silence during our recent week-long retreat, except during our communal prayer times and mass. The silence cleared away the clutter of conversation and made us more attentive to the words we did hear from our retreat director and in our songs, psalms, and Scripture readings. Although I was somewhat concerned that our silence would seem inhospitable to our guests and employees, I believe they sense that we practice this discipline not to shut them out but to enable us, and them, to be more open and attentive to the world.

In today’s Gospel reading, we heard “Give, and gifts will be given to you” (Lk 6: 38). What we seek is facilitated by its opposite. To obtain fullness, we practice emptiness. To obtain life, we practice dying to self. To obtain wisdom, we practice intense attention and silence—out of which comes the Word to guide us, sustain us, and help us recognize and respond to God’s presence in the Body of Christ.

How to Achieve a Happy Death

Sr. Lou Whipple, who died this week at the age of 50 years, taught us a great deal about how to approach death. Although she greatly loved her family, her monastic sisters, and her life in the monastery, upon learning that her cancer was terminal, she did not cling to life. Instead, she attended to what each day brought with what energy she had—going to daily prayer and meals, working a few hours in the business office, and spending time with loved ones. When diminished breath confined her to bed, she continued to pray and visit in that space, and when her body ceased to function, her soul slipped away peacefully.

Recently I read that of the three elements that make us who we are—body, mind, and soul—there is no doubt that it is the soul that is in charge at the time of our death. Nonetheless, our mind (that is, our ego, or who we think we are) and body often resist death, because they believe it means the end of them. The poet Louise Glück said, “The great thing / is not having / a mind.” I’m not sure that is possible, but somehow Sr. Lou’s trust in her soul, the agent of God, allowed her to come to an acceptance of her impending death and override the objections of her mind and body. Thus, she had what we would call a “happy death,” and gave us a model for how to achieve that ourselves. It was her last gift to us.

Flight of the Spirit

I have a confession to make: I’ve never really cared for the stained glass windows in St. Lucy’s Chapel here at the Mount. To me the design is jagged and disharmonious, a harlequin-like mishmash of colors that don’t really go together: pink, orange, purple, yellow, red, and blue. And yet, the other day, in a pane of clear glass at the top of the chapel, the reflection of the stained glass formed the image of the wing of a monarch butterfly, and suddenly it became quite beautiful.

Just so, to many of us, the recent death of our treasured sister, Lou Whipple, felt harsh, disharmonious, a clash between the desire to continue life in its present form and the need to die to let new life unfold. And yet, to Sr. Lou, death became the unfolding of a butterfly wing, or the wing of one of her beloved bees.

Death can be like a storm we must weather before we can take wing. After I heard that Sr. Lou died (despite the prohibition against use of the word “Alleluia” during Lent),  I thought of the following refrain from a song by Bob Franke, which is often sung by John McCutcheon:

Alleluia, the great storm is over,

lift up your wings and fly!

Alleluia, the great storm is over,

lift up your wings and fly!

Lift up your wings and fly, Lou—to that home on God’s celestial shore, where glad and happy we will meet on the day we too fly away.*

*See the lyrics to I’ll Fly Away by Alfred E. Brumley.

How to Eat a Banana in the Monastery

In his book Monastic Practices, Charles Cummings, OCSO, notes, “There is a monastic way of doing things, a monastic way of living, that may seem strange at first because the reasons underlying it are not immediately evident.”

Such as the way that Benedictine sisters eat bananas in the monastery.

After I was at Mount St. Scholastica a few weeks, I noticed that many of my new dining companions have a curious method for eating a banana; they place it lengthwise on a plate, pull back one strip of the peel, cut the fruit into bite-sized sections, and proceed to eat each bite with a fork. I asked why they eat bananas this way and was informed that they were taught the practice when they were in formation, because to eat a banana in the manner of a monkey was considered uncouth.

Notwithstanding appearances, eating a banana monastically offers the benefits of slowing down and being mindful about this food before us, thus encouraging us to savor it. And so, although the reasons for eating a banana in the monastic manner are not immediately evident, it turns out there’s nothing strange about them at all.

Mindful Eating

On Ash Wednesday, we ate our meal(s) in silence at the monastery. As a result, I was much more attentive to the taste, texture, and amount of the food I ate than usual. As the poet Jane Hirshfield says, “Attention alters what it touches.” The food itself wasn’t altered, but my appreciation for it was.

Several years ago I attended a course on mindful eating. I remember an exercise in which we spent about two minutes eating a single potato chip. Eating the chip that slowly and attentively made me realize how greasy and unappetizing it was…and yet, how many times have I mindlessly devoured half a bag of such chips in a single sitting?

I also recall a story of an immigrant who had come to the United States from a country where she and her family experienced great deprivation. The first time she was taken to a grocery store, she burst into tears because of the bounty spread out before her. I can’t remember the last time I marveled at all the fresh produce and well-stocked shelves at my local grocery store.

Eating is such an integral, repetitive part of life that it’s difficult to do it mindfully. However, eating slowly and in silence, and fasting from certain foods now and then, are tools that can awaken our senses…including our sense of gratitude.

Fasting From Worry

I wonder if perhaps we are called to fast from worry this Lent.

Yes, many of the policies currently being implemented by persons with political power are contrary to our Gospel values and are certainly a cause for worry. However, to worry implies that we, rather than God, are at the helm of our life and the world. As Alan Jones notes, “even our despair is to be given up and seen as the ego-grasping device that it really is.” Worry, anxiety, and despair ultimately are reflections of our desire to be in control. Freeing ourselves from this desire enables us to respond to our individual call to serve the body of Christ. Then the kingdom of God—where all persons know they are loved, have what they need, and are free from fear—is closer to fulfillment.

I suggest the following Lenten practice: Place a bowl and some small stones in your prayer space. Every day, choose a stone and voice a worry about your own life, the lives of your loved ones, or the world. Then place the stone and your worry in your offering bowl and lift the bowl to God as you pray, “You, O God, are my rock of safety and my source of peace. Into your hands I place my worries. Guide me in your way.”