Kindling

During these final Lenten days, our hearts and prayer remain in Lenten repose, but our hands have begun to give themselves to the liturgies of Holy Week. We are thumbing through pages of music, polishing brass and silver, plaiting strips of palm, burying last year’s oils...our hands guiding us slowly and surely toward the Vigil of Easter. It's as if through our tasks we are gathering kindling for the Easter fire. And in a way, we are.

Scripture tells us that on his final journey to Jerusalem, Jesus sent his disciples ahead to make preparations – to retrieve a colt, to prepare an upper room, to make ready for his paschal journey… And today, we still make ready. Our labor, when attended to with love and devotion, draws us into the life of Christ, becoming kindling for the fire of his light and love.

At the Easter Vigil, when the priest lights the paschal candle from the new fire, he will sing: “May the light of Christ rising in glory dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds.” In accompanying Jesus on his paschal journey, we are united with the Christ-light that banishes darkness and illumines the world.

In the palm of springtide

I don’t know if it’s possible to be embraced by a season, but lately I have felt as if springtime has me wrapped around its finger, held in its palm…captivated, captured, enraptured by a spring like none I can recall. Any and every trip outside leaves me dazzled and dazed. Crisp nights are followed by days scrubbed clean with sunshine. Languid clouds daydream their way through unhurried heavens. Everything – and I mean everything – is abloom, and no matter where I glance, star-spangled earth and sky fill my eyes.

It’s hard to remember my Lenten disciplines in the midst of such extravagance. Yet isn’t this forty-day journey through the desert an essential element of what makes our hearts supple enough to captivated, captured, enraptured by God…? These spangled springtide days need not distract us from the disciplines of Lent. Rather they can fill us with desire to be wrapped around God’s finger, held within His palm…longing for an interior springtide of blossom and bloom.


Postscript: Thanks to Sr. Therese for a couple of these photos. More springtime photos from the monastery (inside and outside!) can be found on our Monastery Moments photo gallery page. By the way, our palm for Palm Sunday has arrived and several of us (mainly Sr. Mary Jude) worked yesterday plaiting palm for the procession.

Of maps and mystery on the Feast of the Annunciation

It can be hard to absorb the mystery of God’s call when our inner map of how God works, and how we work, is fixed, allowing no room for the angel of God to surprise us with a message that is unexpected, or even astonishing. But genuine silence creates an open space within which we, like Mary, can step from from the fixed map of “How can this be?” to the receptivity of “Let it be...according to your word.”

To truly listen and truly behold, as Mary did, it is essential to be truly silent. And to be truly silent it is essential to relinquish expectations, to let go of the inner blueprints in our mind, because how can we receive the improbable, the numinous, the luminous message when our imagination and our thoughts run only north and south, east and west, up and down, left and right, like a net designed to trap mystery before it gets too close and scares us?

Our inner maps, or as the poet Rilke calls it, our “interpreted world,” serve us well, and we need our left and right, our up and down. But in order to hear and receive the call of God – a call that may draw us beyond the longitudes and latitudes of our known world – we need to be ready to see beyond these orienting markers.

Our familiar internal landmarks can be likened to an old wineskin which bursts when receiving new wine. Yet in the face of utter mystery, Mary became a new wineskin, receiving into her very being the utterance of the Word, the outpouring of New Wine. She relinquished her expectations, her plans, her interior maps of how God works and how she works. To Gabriel’s “Behold…” she responded, “Behold...” In mutual beholding, the Word was received.

The God who called Mary also calls us, sometimes in surprising ways or to unexpected places. The call may at times pierce our hearts, as it did Mary’s. Yet when we, like Mary, step beyond our interior maps of how God works and how we work, and respond to God in mutual beholding, the call ultimately leads to joy. Like Mary, like the disciples, we are called to leave our nets, our maps, our “interpreted world” on the seashore, and follow Jesus, saying "Let it be..."





Postscript: Thanks to the Geography Department of the University of Alabama for use of maps from their online map collection. If you like maps as much as I do, you'll enjoy a peruse through their website. And by the way, while I'm willing to follow God anywhere, I sure am glad he called me to the Benedictine Sisters of Cullman, Alabama!

Morning commute

This morning, with the Feast of Benedict just behind us and the Feast of the Annunciation soon to come, I realized I couldn’t quite settle into today, Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent. Echoes of Benedict and anticipation of the Annunciation kept filling my heart and thoughts.

But then, on my 'morning commute' to Lauds, I paused in the tunnel through our renovation zone and listened to the silence of the early morning. The work crew had not yet arrived to fill the air with transformation. The building was soundless. Tools were still. Everything was filled with possibility, with the promise of a word soon to be spoken. In the silence, I finally anchored my feet in today, a day which I will seek to listen with the ear of Benedict and respond with the fiat of Mary.

The liturgical cycle doesn’t stop on a dime as it moves from day to day, clicking from page to page as if it were slideshow presentation. Rather the graces of the liturgical cycle settle deeply into our hearts, holding us and carrying us from grace to grace and from word to word. Echoes and anticipation are among these graces, helping anchor us in the moment as they call us to live more deeply the days and seasons of life in God.

Today’s Entrance Antiphon for Mass contains the phrase, “constantly seek His face.” May our search for God be daily and constant, and may our morning commute, and every journey, be a voyage from grace to grace as we live fully each day that God gives us.

Color

Today is the Solemnity of the Passing of our Holy Father St. Benedict…and I am thinking about paint colors. China White and Mountain Mist, to be specific. You might wonder what in the world St. Benedict and paint colors have to do with each other. But indeed, they are related. You see, St. Benedict, during his years leading his monastic community, wrote a rule of life for monks. He wrote with such wisdom and practicality that his Rule has been a source of insight and life for generations of monastic communities.

Here in our monastery, we read from the Rule nightly during Compline. We study it in classes. Phrases from the Rule routinely grace our conversation. A copy sits on the bookshelf beside my desk. Another copy is up in my room next to my Bible. The wisdom of the Rule permeates our lives and guides everything we do here at our monastery, including the most practical and mundane of day-to-day activities. So when it was time to pick paint colors for our under-renovation Ottilia Hall, it was natural that wisdom from the Rule guided the process, as it has the entire renovation effort.

Simplicity, stewardship, the seeking of counsel from others, and concern for the individual are among the many aspects of the Rule that have been brought to bear on renovation decisions, including the simple task of choosing paint colors. Our monastic administrators oversaw a single, simple paint choice for the ‘big picture’ and the common areas, but for the individual rooms to which we’ve been assigned we were each able to choose from among four color options.

I am very happy with the simplicity of the China White that I chose, but sometimes I think about the Mountain Mist that will be in some of the other rooms. It is a nice, muted blue and it makes me think about St. Benedict and the mountain mists that he would have experienced in his monastery on Monte Cassino, and in the cave of Subiaco. I think about him overseeing the construction of the earliest monastery buildings at Monte Cassino. I think about his concern for his community and for the individual monks with whom he lived. I think about him as a leader of monks, as a lover of God, as a seeker of wisdom, as a lover of scripture. I think about the monks through the centuries who have planned and built and occupied the sacred spaces that we call monasteries, places in which we come to spend a lifetime seeking God.

I think St. Benedict would like the way in which our monastic leaders and our community have gone about the renovation project, including handling such practical, mundane tasks as choosing paint colors. I think he would like the consultation, the simplicity, the good stewardship, and the care for individuals. I think he would like the simplicity of the china white walls of the room to which I’ve been assigned, the room that will embrace and hold my personal prayer, my study, my lectio divina, my search for God.

Today, as Benedictines everywhere commemorate Benedict’s passing - from the yellow prairies of the Great Plains to the white-capped Alps of Bavaria to the blue mountain mists of Tanzania to the green hills of Ireland - we celebrate the countless ways in which his Rule has colored our lives with grace and beauty and wisdom, including the simplest of our everyday tasks.


Postscript: If you would like to see a few pictures of the Sisters taking a tour through the color options, click here for our weekly construction update and scroll to pages 39-42. Please continue your prayers for our renovation project and capital campaign!

Laughing in the river of time

Earlier today, just before Noon Prayer, Sr. Margaret Mary and I broke into broad smiles as soon as we saw each other, both of us wordlessly remembering a funny event from a couple of days ago over which we had laughed and laughed, a good natured, lingering laugh that neither of us could shake for quite a while. And we laughed again today, just remembering.

And then tonight, Sr. Therese and I shared a jovial conversation as we transitioned from Retreat Center dinner service to Vigil. And yesterday, a group of us laughed heartily over an experimental kitchen project.

Laughter, a smile, a jovial remark, a good-natured story, a cheery countenance – these are among the flowers that adorn the flow of time in the monastery.

Monastic time - the days, seasons, and years - tends to flow like an unhurried river through a broad coastal plain...quiet, subtle, unassuming...a river that wears its 'river-ness' with understated grace and unpretentious finesse. It doesn’t always look like much is happening, or that much is changing. But if you look closely at any flatwater river, you’ll see a tremendous amount of life and energy and even change as the river gives itself to the land, to the sky, and to its sea-ward course, drawing all the while on springs that well up from the earth below.

Likewise with our monastic call. We give ourselves to God, to one another, and to ministry as we unhurridly follow our Christ-ward course Time flows with an understated grace, with quiet subtlety, yet with energy and vitality, Living Water constantly welling up within us.

The vitality that expresses itself in the full bloom of a day in the monastery gets expressed in the most natural, unpretentious of ways, but in ways that are nonetheless full of the vigor of life. It happens in the liturgical cycle in which we move always deeper into the life of Christ. It happens in our times of personal prayer in which we draw near to the One whom we love with our whole hearts. It happens in the relationships and routines of community life and ministry. And it happens in the simplest of day-to-day encounters which enrich and enliven and bring the day into full bloom.

Sometimes it happens in tears. Sometimes in deep and serious conversation. And often it happens in the joy of laughter.

There is a balm in Chatawa

Scripture tells us of the balm of Gilead, a medicinal resin known for its ability to heal. Yet the soothing salve of which scripture speaks flows far beyond the ancient groves of Palestine. A spiritual balm, it courses through centuries and across oceans. It wells up through the Holy Spirit within, and is passed along through the ministering presence of others. It pours through prayer and spiritual song, comforting hearts with the healing touch of Jesus. And it surges from the words of Sacred Scripture.

This balm flows freely at St. Mary of the Pines Retreat and Renewal Center in Chatawa, Mississippi. While in Chatawa for my 30-day retreat, the healing balm of our dear Lord poured generously through the prayerful hospitality of the School Sisters of Notre Dame who live, pray, and minister in Chatawa. It coursed through the tranquil landscape and peaceful wooded paths of the Retreat Center. It streamed through the ministering presence of a wise and insightful retreat director. It flowed from the deep silence afforded by a simple, comfortable hermitage nestled alongside the woods. And it poured especially freely from page after page after page of Sacred Scripture.

I am told that the name 'Chatawa' means 'sparkling waters.' But to me, after these days of retreat, 'Chatawa' will always mean 'balm.'