Contemplation, in Place

Every so often I'm contacted by readers who suggest (politely, but pointedly) that it's all well and good to pontificate about time-consuming spiritual disciplines when your kids are grown and gone and you no longer have an 8:00-5:00 job, but what about people in the real world? The implication being that normal life automatically precludes spiritual luxuries like the kind I write about and, worse, people who do enter the contemplative path must be part of a privileged elite. Having raised four kids--two of my own, and (on a part-time basis) two step-daughters- I do understand the objection. Before everyone grew up and moved on, before I could quit full-time teaching, my spiritual path was often characterized by frustration, even grief. I loved my family and my students, but I secretly longed for silence and solitude. How could a person even pray in the midst of such chaos?

Thus, when our oldest daughter and her husband and two-year old Eli relocated to California and joined our household last month, I wondered: would those skeptical readers of mine be proven right after all? Would the re-entry of a super-cute but demanding little person into our peaceful world change everything?

I must admit, I've been privately waiting for signs of that old frustration to arise, the long-ago fear that if I didn't regularly escape the boisterous family compound, I'd fly into a million pieces. But so far, all is calm, all is bright. What's going on?

I found a clue in a new book out from Ave Maria Press, Compassionate Fire: The Collected Letters of Thomas Merton and Catherine de Hueck Doherty. One was a world-famous hermit, and the other, the matriarch of a large network of intentional spiritual communities. The physical circumstances of their lives could not have been more different: his way of life was rooted in the legacy of St. Antony of the Desert, and her spiritual ancestor was more like the ever-active Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker. Yet in the dialogue between them lay the confirmation I was seeking: the contemplative life is not confined to the monastery, and never has been. I should have known this before, back when the kids were young and my students swarmed around me like bees. But I didn't; I couldn't help but think back then that physical circumstances were all, and mine were not conducive to a serious life of prayer.

Since those hectic days, however, I have found, praise God, what I was so ardently seeking. Most importantly, I've come to realize that a change in surface conditions cannot disturb what lies beneath. To live contemplatively means to live where we are--and to see God's hand in all of it. In this state of being, the inexhaustible exuberance of a two-year-old leads not to stress and weariness, but rather praise and thanksgiving, and family cacaphony becomes song.