Keep reading

“Keep reading,” my teacher said when our class was working its way through some challenging theological writings. We were told that if we just kept going, kept turning the pages, eventually it would start to make sense. So I kept reading and kept turning pages, waiting for understanding to lift itself from the page like a golden swan lofting itself skyward with wisdom on its wings.

Eventually, understanding came. But not the golden swan variety. Rather it came like a blue collar crow moving branch to branch, steady and workmanlike, nearly hidden within the dense foliage of the maple outside my window, making its dark presence known only by the occasional caw and cry.

Study is not a glamorous pursuit. It takes place hidden amongst the foliage of folios and the branches of books. There may be an occasional caw and cry, or even the rare glimpse of a golden swan. But mostly it’s just the steady and workmanlike turning of pages and writing of notes, moving slowly from branch to branch amidst the rustling summer leaves of dog-eared texts.

I can’t yet say how well I understand the works I’ve read. But I can say that I have kept reading with a steady, workmanlike perseverance, moving page by page like a blue collar student seeking to build a home for wisdom.

325th Street

As campus settings go, Saint John’s University is as rural as I’ve ever seen. I-94 runs nearby and there is a small town within the distance of a good 10K jog, but for the most part the campus is surrounded by water, woods, farmland, and prairie grass. So imagine my surprise when along the rural entrance road I saw a side street with a sign that read 325th Street.

325th Street? If this was 325th, where the heck was 324th? I looked around and saw nothing but row crops anchoring one side of the road and unruly prairie grasses swaying on the other.  325th Street cut a narrow grey streak through all the green like a side crop of asphalt.

Of course all I could wonder besides “Where is 324th Street?" was "Where is 1st Street?" Where was the point of orientation from which 325th originated? Clearly it was somewhere far from the surrounding pastures and prairies and interstates and small towns.

Despite the obvious distance from its point of origin, I couldn’t help but realize how connected the street must be to some other place…and how even standing in the middle of the Minnesota countryside how connected I remain to Alabama, to Cullman, to Sacred Heart, and to the Sisters in my monastic community whom I miss so much.

Somehow, standing on 325th Street made the world seem a little smaller, a little more inter-connected. It was if I were standing at the intersection of 325th and Everywhere, somehow feeling right at home on a country road in rural Minnesota, which after all is only a few streets away from Convent Rd. in Cullman, Alabama.

Postscript: The liturgy also connects me with home, and at a far deeper level than my geographical imaginings. As I pray the Liturgy of the Hours and attend Eucharist with the monks of Saint John’s Abbey, I am aware of my Sisters back home who are also at prayer. We may be praying at different times, but nevertheless I am united to them in prayer and praise. Truly the liturgy places us not only at the intersection of time and eternity but at the intersection of heaven and earth as we gather as one Body, distant in time and space, but one in prayer and praise to God, the origin and destination of us all.

In the company of saints in the classroom of silence

Today I received an email from Sr. Bernadette who was reminiscing about her summer school experience up here at Saint John’s some years back. Sr. Mary has studied up here, too, and other Sisters have degrees from other places…some from Catholic U, some from Notre Dame, some from Dayton, as well as other schools, generally following our usual community dictum when it comes to working on a degree: “go Catholic and go north.”

Over the past week, as I’ve tried to wrap my mind around the writings of various theologians, I’ve known that I’m in good company not only with my fellow students here but also with the Sisters in my community who have studied along the way.

But no matter how important and beneficial the formation of my mind may be, it is of no real account if it is not accompanied by education of the heart, and in this I am in good company, too. Sr. Bernadette, a saint if I’ve ever met one in her care of our infirm Sisters, wrote today of not only of the courses that she took but also of the loons and the deer and the time spent alone in her room.

I, too, have a quiet room, and in addition to long hours of study I am also spending time

in prayer and taking leisurely walks in which I listen to the cry of loons and exchange glances with deer as we size one another up along the edge of the woods.

So even as I seek to understand the classroom thoughts of saints such Augustine and Aquinas, I also join them in the classroom of silence, seeking above all the education of my heart.

It’s a good thing to be from the South when you are studying theology. A very good thing. I’m up in Minnesota this summer studying theology at Saint John’s University and reading works filled with words that I know but that are arranged in such a way that what they say is not always what they seem to signify, as in that which “signifies that which sanctifies, it must needs signify the effect, which is implied in the sanctifying cause.” Yes, that is truly what the sentence says.

Thankfully I am from the southland and I know what to do with a sentence such as that. I already know how to move very slowly through impenetrable air that is heavy with the humidity of summertime, thick with the mist that hovers between one tree-line and the next. I know how to make my slow and careful way through the fog that rises in the hollows of the Great Smoky Mountains, or that settles into the Tennessee River Valley. I know how to sit on a front porch and shell butterbeans so slowly that the gnats don’t even know that I’m there. And I know how to sit quietly and let a sentence work on me for just as long as it takes.

So Aquinas is a piece of cake. Schillebeeckx, no problem. I’m used to moving slowly and letting the profound beauty of a summer evening – or a summer sentence – unfold in its own sweet time. After all, I’m from the South.


Postscript: We southerners may have a summertime advantage in knowing how to sit still in the heat. But it doesn’t take being from the southland to see the Beauty toward which the words of the theologians point. North, south, east or west, we are all called to pause and perceive the glory of the Lord that unfolds like a summer rose in the mist of morning.

Plate glass window at midnight

Last week, Sr. Benita took a bus trip to Kentucky to visit a couple of Sisters at St. Walburg Monastery in Covington. She’s known these Sisters for years but hadn’t seen them in a good while so she talked with our Prioress, made some arrangements, and off she went.  On her return trip, the bus schedules got tangled up, her arrival was several hours later than planned, and Sr. Lynn Marie and I found ourselves taking an unexpected midnight trip to Huntsville to meet her in the wee hours of the morning. 

During meals over the next day or two, various Sisters asked about our late night trip and I told them about downtown Huntsville at midnight, what the bus station was like, how many other people were there waiting, and so on.  At one point, while describing the plate glass windows of the bus station, I became aware of the rapt attention with which people were listening.  It was a far greater raptness than one would expect for such a mundane topic.

What could account for such high interest in such a lowly subject?  It’s not that the bus station was such an unusual place.  It’s not that downtown Huntsville at 12:30 in the morning had much of a story to tell.  And it’s not that I’m a great story teller who could pull even a sleepy bus station to vivid life.  

As I watched the intensely interested faces I realized what accounted for their focused attention.  “They care,” I thought. They cared about Sr. Benita and her travels, and they cared about Sr. Lynn Marie and I and what we had experienced waiting in a parking lot at midnight. They cared, and they listened intently.

This kind of caring for one another is characteristic of monastic community, the kind of caring that makes even a quiet bus station and empty midnight streets come to vivid life. It’s the kind of caring in which a plate glass window at midnight can become a prism through which the love of Christ shines forth.  Let us be such windows for one another!

Postscript:  St. Walburg Monastery is one of the two communities from which we were founded in 1902.  We remain connected with them both at the Federation level (we both are members of Federation of St. Scholastica) and at the personal level with ties of friendship and concern for the other's well-being.  Speaking of caring, when it became apparent that Sr. Benita's departing bus was going to be signficantly late, one of the St. Walburg Sisters waited with her until her departure.  Thanks be to God for the gift of friendship and loving concern.