Living by the Rules

Reforesting

2011-04-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

This unimpressive baby Pinus canariensis, eighteen inches tall, may someday tower eighty feet and and is only one of the twenty-five Canary Island seedlings we've just planted. Intermingled among them are another twenty-five potential giants: adolescent Sequoia sempervirens, Aptos Blue Coast Redwoods. We've spent a back-wrenching two weeks getting these trees into the ground on a precarious hillside, slick with duff, pocked by gopher holes, and strewn with the stumps of our first pine forest.

This was made up of graceful deep green Montereys, long since decimated by pitch pine canker. Sad to have to cut them down, not to mention a tremendous amount of work (buddies with chainsaws, Mike and I hauling slash to the dump for weeks), but the sick trees are finally gone, and the few survivors were spared because we didn't have the heart to clearcut that hill.

Mostly because we remember very well what it was like to plant those Monterey seedlings a quarter of a century ago. Our four kids, now in their thirties, married, with kids of their own, were very young back then. And we ourselves were newly-weds, still figuring out how people survived what was euphemistically called the "blended family." So we came up with group projects, meant to trigger enthusiasm for this new life none of the kids had freely chosen. Just think! we kept telling them as the six of us tucked those seedlings into that formidable hill: by the time you have kids of your own, these trees will be gigantic!

And indeed they grew fast and tall, filtering the sunlight, swaying in the wind, catching the precious California rain. They provided hundreds of cones for the gray squirrels, high perches for the red-tailed hawks and great horned owls and the lone great blue heron who came to fish the turtle pond. When the kids, one by one, got married on our property, the brides in their white silk gowns walked through that forest on the arms of their fathers. And when the grandchildren began to arrive, one of the first things they learned was how to negotiate the trail through the pines to get to Grandma and Grandpa's house.

So how could we not reforest? Does it matter that by the time these baby Canary Island pines reach their full height, Mike will be in his nineties? Does it matter that our kids will be senior citizens, our grandkids on their way to middle age, and the great blue heron but a feathery question mark--did we really have a heron? are we making this up?--from a quickly disappearing past?

In the old days, when most of us lived on the land and science had not yet revolutionized our modes of perception, we still understood that the world is alive with meaning and the heavens proclaim the glory of God. We knew without being instructed that the fragility and brevity of our lives require living touchstones, symbols of the eternity we cannot yet begin to fathom: the ageless seas, great, glacier-carved granite rocks, the endless sky, and towering trees.

Star of Wonder

2010-12-31T16:33:00.000-08:00

The Magi caught a glimpse of the sublime--a magnificent waterfall of light, pouring from the western sky--and promptly set out across the desert sands to see what it might mean. The world was still enchanted in those days; natural wonders were manifestations of spiritual reality and people retained their inbuilt propensity toward worship. Thus, the three wise men were not seeking a physical explanation for the majestic new star, but instead a theophany: a vision of God. And so they were able to see the Christ child for who he was and fell to their knees in humble adoration.

We've got it harder than the Magi, for we've been enculturated in non-belief. Science has long since disenchanted the universe, and if a star like the star of Bethlehem should suddenly appear in the western sky, we would immediately capture it in the cross-hairs of our most powerful telescopes. Astronomers would vie for the honor of naming it after themselves, cosmologists would work it into their favorite theories, and foundations dedicated to unraveling the mystery of its precipitous arrival would spring up like mushrooms after rain. Meanwhile, the angels would sing on, impossible for us to hear.

In a world like ours, even the most ardent faith pales beside the eager spiritual inquisitiveness of the Magi. Unhampered by the hubris of scientism, secure in the knowledge that the universe was pregnant with meaning, they saddled up their camels to follow a star, wherever it might lead them.

A Balancing Act

2010-10-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

Hanging Rock in Sequoia National Park is perched on the edge of a several-thousand-foot slide into the valley below. Though I had absolutely no desire to be photographed sitting atop this rocket-ship to hell, I'm sure that others, younger and more dare-devilish than I, have done it plenty of times (I can easily see my sister Gretchen, for example, poised one-legged with both arms over her head on the downward end of this granite missile). My reticence was automatic; other people's impulsiveness is equally so. Most of us, it seems, approach our lives in ways so habitual that others can readily predict what we will do.

Which is probably fine (our predictable responses characterize us and make us "knowable," after all), except when it comes to the spiritual life. For it seems to me that when we sign up to follow Christ, we are signing away the comforting privilege of doing what comes naturally. We are agreeing to leave behind our knee-jerk responses to what feels safe and secure, easy and pleasurable, or even thrilling and stimulating in order to be led into new and disturbing territory wherein we no longer call the shots.

Does this mean we must give up who we are? Become mindless automatons? Many people resist Christianity because they are afraid of losing their own unique selves, their power to initiate action in their own way, all for the doubtful privilege of becoming passive followers.

But this is our modern sensibility talking. The desert fathers understood the spiritual life far differently; they viewed it as a delicate balancing act between nature and grace under truly precarious circumstances. God was with them, but so was the devil; they could not afford to trust in their own habitual responses, as familiar and natural as these might feel, but must instead hold themselves poised in prayer, arms raised high in supplication: absolutely vulnerable, absolutely secure.

The Spirit of Backpacking

2010-09-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

The folks crossing this Sierra stream--Ron, Karin, Tina and Cynthia--are at this point already halfway to their goal: the 14,495' summit of the formidable Mt. Whitney. By the time they reach it, they'll have hiked 170 miles of the John Muir Trail over a period of 17 days. And all their survival gear on this arduous trek must be carried on their backs.

Yet in the Sierras, where a violent thunderstorm or a sudden freeze or a misplaced boot on a slippery trail can injure or kill the unwary hiker, survival gear is everything. Thus, this team of family members and one good friend spent a year planning what would go into their 35-45 pound packs: down sleeping bags, all-weather tents, rain gear, backpacking stoves, silk underwear, wool socks, gloves, ski hats, first aid supplies, bear canisters, dehydrated food, headlamps, water filters, water bladders, sun screen. They also thought hard about their mental health on this long trek, and added chocolate, journals, New York Times crossword puzzles, a very skinny paperback or two. The night before they set out on the trail, they got on the scale with their loaded packs, then went through them one last time, eliminating anything they possibly could.

Mike and I hiked with them for the first long week, and as we bade them goodbye at Muir Ranch, they drew still more items from their packs--things they'd thought they couldn't live with 50 miles ago--and thrust them into our hands: candy, walkie-talkies, a book, a camera, extra clothes. They'd reached the tipping point: the weight of their possessions was now a bigger burden than their anxious worries about mental and physical survival.

In this, they were certainly not alone. Muir Ranch is a resupply point for most hikers on the JMT, and here was the incontrovertible evidence that, in anticipation of the worst, almost everybody overpacks: twenty 5-gallon buckets filled with discarded food, candy bars, medicine, clothing, skinny paperbacks, all free for the taking should anyone be willing to add another ounce to the already daunting weight on his back.

When Jesus says, "Come to me, for my burden is easy and my yoke is light," he is revealing one of the deepest secrets of the spiritual life: that when we lay down our anxiety-generated burdens because we simply cannot bear to carry them any longer, we are set free to accomplish remarkable things. This is the secret the underlies the strict asceticism of the Desert Fathers and the various renunciations of the monastic life: self-absorbed anxiety gets in the way of genuine liberation. Yet ironically enough, we've been taught in our time to allay that anxiety by adding to, rather than eliminating, our burden of unnecessary possessions.

We watched them saddle up, a short string of human mules who would rack up a 33,000 feet of climbing and descending before they reached their goal. I sadly suspected that sometime along the way, there would be other things they'd wish they'd left behind--but with nobody to carry them out of the mountains, they'd be stuck bearing up under the extraneous and the unnecessary.

Just like me, no matter how much I long to be entirely free of worry. Instead, the slow pushing back of anxiety is a daily thing--lots of prayer, and one foot after the other.

Purity of Heart

2010-04-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

The two birds in this tile are mounted above an old Wolf stove in our new kitchen. New, because even though we've lived on this acreage for 25 years, we've just finished building a second residence in the back of the property. Set among the oaks and olives, this small house with the big porch is the one in which we someday hope to die.

I bought this tile in the Ansel Adams gallery in Yosemite last summer, at the end of our annual sibling backpack in the Sierras. My sister-in-law Karin, a woman of exquisite taste, spotted it the moment we walked through the door. "Oh, how beautiful," she cried. "It's perfect for your new house, don't you think?" Our as-yet-unbuilt house, I hastened to remind her; we hadn't even broken ground yet, but somehow Karin could visualize the whole thing--you could see it in the bemused look on her face--even if this long-dreamed-of project still felt mostly unreal to me.

And the tile was beautiful, I had to admit that, even if the price made me balky. But Karin rarely pushes this way, and her eye for beauty is unerring, and she wouldn't stop hovering over her find with that goofy, starstruck expression, so I swallowed hard and said, okay, I'll do it. I'll buy that tile.

Now, looking at those birds singing their perpetual duet above my stove, I am astonished at the role they wound up playing during the long months of construction. They became the lodestone, the center around which all other decisions got made: wood, granite, tile, paint, fixtures. And the beauty of those two demanded that everything else become more costly. I hauled them to window stores and stone yards and lumber yards and flooring distributors. Even when they were entirely irrelevant--why did they need to be there when I was picking out the bathtub?--they were with me, hanging out together in the bottom of my backpack, warbling their laus perennis.

Single-handedly--or perhaps I should say single-wingedly--they pulled our little house together, a house we have occupied for less than two weeks, and one that still feels more like a chapel than a proper habitation for the likes of us. Yet now that they have found their permanent perch above the Wolf, they've become a different kind of lodestone for me--a curious symbol for what the old monks used to call "purity of heart."

Blessed are the pure of heart, says Jesus, for they shall see God--and the monks and hermits of the desert took this literally, spending whole lifetimes stripping away the inessential in order to arrive at the one true thing. They passionately believed in the existence of the pearl, that glorious pearl of legendary price. They staked their lives on the treasure in the field being not only real, but worth everything they might own or claim to be if only they could obtain it.

That firm belief determined what they ate or didn't eat, whether they slept or didn't sleep, and how many psalms they chanted in a day. It gave them the will to watch their thoughts, guard their hearts, and pray without ceasing: one thing coalescing the many. And with that pearl in their sightlines, focusing every effort, their hearts slowly emptied out and became pure.

We will grow into our new house. Given enough time, it will become as old hat as the battered but beloved family abode we've lived in for the past 25 years. I pray, however, that in the process of learning to take this new beauty for granted, those joyful birds continue to focus me the way they did during the building phase, when every single choice I made revolved around their singing.

Patience

2010-01-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

Marty and Eric are father and son. They are also fine stone masons, with years of experience behind their craftsmanship. In this picture, they are building the fireplace in our new house--a laborious job, since the chimney extends sixteen feet to the second-story ceiling. They don't talk much as they work--instead they listen to mellow music or hum. Every so often, they switch sides so as to keep the design balanced. Their whole focus is on what they're doing, and they move at a pace that gets the job done but also insures they'll produce their usual excellent work.

Their days are long and full of heavy lifting. I asked Marty, who's been doing this for thirty years, what the effect has been on his body. He laughed. I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "Are you talking about my knees? 'Cause they're gone." I said, "I was thinking more about your hands." He laughed again. "Oh," he said, "they're junk too. Absolute junk."

Yet at the end of one particularly grueling day, when they'd been hauling buckets of cement up the scaffolding for hours and were both beat, I could see it, they got into an intense discussion in front of the fireplace just as they were leaving. Eric was not happy with one of the stones over the arch. It was not the right size--too small. Also not quite the right shape. When they pointed it out, I could see what they meant, though barely. Eric said, "I looked through every stone in the pile to see if we could find a better one. But we're not leaving THIS one in, I can tell you that. We'll find a good one for you this weekend and replace it on Monday, okay? Is that all right?"

As though, over the weekend, we would be incapable of living with one misshapen stone in an enormous field of them stretching to the second-story ceiling in an unfinished house we were not yet even in. "Not a problem," I assured him. "No worries." And naturally, they replaced that troublesome interloper first thing Monday morning.

But every time I pass the fireplace, my eye is drawn to that spot. Why? Not because the new stone isn't perfect--it is--but because I am still awed by Eric's refusal to take his own eye off the job, whether or not anyone else ever noticed. For me, the stone is a silent reminder of what I lack. Unlike these careful stone masons, I want to get to the end of the book, see the final product, check things off my list. And my impatience colors my whole spiritual life; I sometimes think I will never experience, for example, that peace which passes understanding. That my loving will always be deficient, my courage tenuous, my faith feeble, my hope like a wavering match flame.

Yet as a priest once helpfully pointed out in confession, there's a direct link between my impatience and that wavering flicker. When we live in hope, we're willing to wait for things to unfold in their own way. We stop trying to control every outcome. We let the picture come into focus--we see the misshapen stone--before we rush on to a false completion. Patience and hope are like a mobius strip in that regard: one shades imperceptibly into the other.

When year after year, the fourth century desert dwellers sat at the mouths of their caves, gazing out over the stony vastness of the Sinai, I suspect they relied upon this relationship. Would that I might learn to do so too.

More on Gratitude

2009-11-27T14:53:00.000-08:00

This week, we welcomed yet another child into our family. Christopher's safe arrival was an occasion for joy, thanksgiving, and secret relief that all went well. For human beings are notoriously fragile, especially newborns, and each year they not only survive, but actually grow and flourish, is thus a kind of miracle.

Yet behind healthy, happy children stand adults who have devoted themselves to the cause. They have worked hard and unselfishly to provide the necessities of life for their children. They have set aside their own private hopes and dreams, sometimes for decades, in order to nurture the next generation. Their commitment is all-encompassing, and their courage profound.

Thank heavens, I thought, that my grandchildren have parents like these! Yet as I gazed down at beautiful little Christopher, asleep in the crook of his exhausted mother's arm, I found myself having to accept an additional truth, one that flies in the face of contemporary wisdom about what constitutes good parenting. When God tells us to honor our fathers and our mothers, he is asking us to acknowledge the monumental sacrifice that any parent--good, adequate, or barely sufficient--must make in order that a child might grow. According to his commandment, it does not matter whether we at the same time receive those blessings that psychology insists are mandatory for human flourishing: affirmation, encouragement, unconditional love. It is enough, God says in this difficult commandment, that someone takes on the burden of providing for our physical needs--that someone cares enough to get us through. Our obligation in return is gratitude in the form of everlasting respect for those who bring us into the world and who (however ineptly, and with whatever lack of skill or tact) enable us to survive and grow.

Though this insight made me uncomfortable (I was nearly forty before I could forgive my own hardworking, committed parents for all the "necessities" I was convinced they'd failed to provide), it was also a relief to have the obligation of gratitude spelled out in such simple and straightforward terms. Parents do not have to "earn" their children's gratitude; babies arrive in the world with this debt on their shoulders. And it is likewise in our relationship with God, our heavenly Father, who not only knits us together in our mother's womb, but breathes into us the very breath of life, and whose creation provides for us the means of growth and flourishing. Our thanksgiving, worship and praise are rooted in this most basic truth: without God, we would not exist. Every other good thing that comes our way is simply added blessing.

Gratitude is thus a necessary aspect of our spiritual identity. When we fail to grasp this reality, our vision becomes narrow and skewed, for all we can see is what we want and do not have. Instead of joy that God has promised us, we feel resentment and bitterness. The goal of the contemplative life, however, is true seeing, which begins with continual thanksgiving. The childlike lightheartedness and joy of holy people is a reflection of this unshakable gratitude.

Gratitude

2009-11-18T19:24:00.000-08:00

Who is this? I have no idea. A somber-looking stranger, sitting on a bench beside some spectacular roses in Hexham, England. I didn't even take the photo--Mike did. But there's something in it that arrests me. For lately I've been thinking a lot about gratitude--actually, my lifetime habit of IN-gratitude, of taking for granted the unutterable riches that have come to me by virtue of being alive on this earth. And there's something in this stranger's face that bespeaks the opposite, despite his distant expression. For he looks to me like a man who's suffered, who knows the worst that can happen to a fragile human being. Yet he stations himself within the realm of beauty. Knowing full well how fleeting is life, he is grateful for the mutable, the brief but stunning blossoming of roses.

Today's Old Testament reading was one that has always made me shudder: the faithful Hebrew mother whose seven sons are to be slaughtered before her eyes for their refusal to engage in profane practices. If they remain steadfast, they are all doomed, these young men she once carried through pregnancy, nursed and protected and raised to healthy adolescence despite the dangers of the world. What does she tell them? "I do not know how you came into existence in my womb; it was not I who gave you the breath of life nor was it I who set in order the elements of which each of you is composed. Therefore, since it is the Creator of the universe who shapes each man's beginning, as he brings about the origin of everything, he, in his mercy, will give you back both breath and life, because you now disregard yourselves for the sake of his law" (2 Maccabees 7: 20-31).

Her grateful awe for the miracle of their existence is so profound that she does not even think of selfishly clinging to them. Instead, she urges them to be noble, to be true to their faith, to respect the God who gave them life by refusing to defile his holy name. And so they die, and she is left alone, a widow with no sons to care for her. Her gratitude is not thoughtless or cheap but comes at a terrible price: loss, grief, insecurity.

I look at the stranger in this photo, his white shirt carefully buttoned to the neck, the cane that rests beside him against the bench, and I see the marks of physical pain upon his face, pain that has perhaps kept him from a life he truly wanted: wife, children, grandchildren, a community of friends. There's loneliness in that distant gaze. Without the roses, he might well become an icon of suffering.

The roses, however, redeem the scene. Their fragile beauty speaks of grace, the limitless bounty of a generous God, his endless showering of love upon the world. And this man knows that. You can see it in his grip upon the handrail, the resting of his weary hand beside the flowers. Unlike me, who demands perfect safety for my loved ones, who whines about shaky finances and lost opportunities and political disappointments, this man is grateful for what he has been given: a warm place in the sun, a bow of exquisite blossoms.

Fear and Trembling

2009-09-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

As someone who has battled anxiety my whole life, I've often wondered what Evagrius was thinking when he failed to put "fear" at the top of his sin list--the famous "eight evil thoughts" of the Praktikos that eventually morphed into the "seven deadly sins" of Medieval times. Fear in all its forms, from mild anxiety to abject terror, can be paralyzing. Love for others is displaced by the overriding need to preserve the self at all costs. As Christians, we are pretty well worthless when we are cringing in fear. Aren't we?

Even after writing a book on the virtues (By Way of Grace) and spending a lot of time on the cardinal virtue of fortitude, including Aquinas's insistence that true courage can only be displayed by those who are sincerely afraid, I remained privately ambivalent. It seemed to me that every fearful response to life (and for me, these happen far too frequently) is simply more evidence of incorrigible self-centeredness--never mind if that response is eventually overcome through tooth-grinding will power. When things get remotely scary, my first thought is for myself and my short list of beloveds. . . never mind Christ's many assurances in the Gospels that God is aware of every hair upon our heads, and that his providence is infinite and unassailable.

No surprise, then, that the perilous descent from Half Dome, shown in the photograph above, was the very stuff of nightmares for me. When my siblings decided to make the climb during our annual family backpack, I stayed noncommital--but inside, knew I'd never do it. How foolish, I told myself, to risk death just to say we'd met some silly challenge. We have families, careers, obligations. Half Dome is for marathoners, I told myself--or at the very least, physically fit twenty-somethings. I'm a grandmother, for heaven's sake.

Yet much to my surprise, I found myself rolling out of the tent at 5:30 a.m. on Half Dome day. How could I let my own siblings go off on this lunatic quest without me? I'm the oldest, I kept telling myself. I owe it to Mom to ride herd on this silly group.

In the end, with some moments of serious trepidation along the way, I made it to the top, and the high was almost enough to offset the awful view of the descent. Almost, but not quite. As I stood trembling at the top of the cables, however, it came to me, the reason Evagrius must have left "fear" off his list of evil thoughts: the instinct toward self-preservation is not a sin but a perfectly rational response to danger; it is spiritually healthy. We were made in the image of a loving creator God, who put us here for a purpose. We're not meant to throw away our lives, or to waste them in foolhardy pursuits. In this light, casual disregard for health and safety may be a bigger sin than automatic fearfulness in the face of danger.

On the other hand, we cannot cling to life at the expense of other people. We cannot hoard our days in anxious miserliness, or habor the illusion that somehow, if we are only careful enough, we can escape pain, suffering, physical death. As fragile human beings, these are our legacy. In this sense, we are doomed to someday experience that which we most fear.

What came to me at the top of the cables was this: all of human existence, if only we can take it in, is fraught with peril. Yet we are meant to walk in joy and hope. How do we reconcile these two realities? I don't know that I can put it into words. But as I put my hands on the steel chords and my boots against the granite, I felt it: a surge of pure happiness in the midst of my quakings, and the calm assurance of being loved and cared for and most of all, preserved, despite the ever-present danger.

The Supper of the Lambs

2009-08-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

If it is possible for two-year-olds to share anything, then these young men are sharing a meal. Though they are trying their best to eat amicably, Eli is getting new molars, as evidenced by the bib of drool, and Ben is coming off a week of bronchitis. Cousins, they have only just begun to know one another and aren't yet quite sure if this is going to work. Serious impediments to the full flowering of liberty, fraternity, and equality in this new relationship exist, paramount among these being the question of who controls Thomas Train. Yet because people they love have told them they should, they are trying.

Their expressions reveal what they aren't old enough to express, however: love is hard. You can get fooled. You can get bullied. You can lose your place in the sun to someone more charming than you are. So why open your heart at all?

Many of us, ostensibly far older and wiser than these two, never do. Most of us learn to hold something back for our own protection. We hardly know what to make of Christ's seemingly impossible injunction to "love one another as I have loved you"--even when it comes to the people we most adore.

The candle on the table, now blown out, is a silent witness to the possibility of what seems ridiculously naive, however. It was lit at Ben's request, just as we sat down together to eat. He, a two-year-old, wanted to pray. Looking around at each other in proud amazement, we obediently joined hands, this multigenerational gene pool gathered in one place, and waited for the lambs to speak. Eli was both forthright and succinct: "Thank you for the food." Ben, however, had more on his mind this special evening. He closed his eyes and bowed his head and prayed his prayer of gratitude for chickens and windmills and dogs and corn on the cob and Grandpa and Grandma and Mama and Dada and--miracle of miracles--his new comrade and competitor, Cousin Eli.

Then he said amen.

Contemplation, in Place

2009-08-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Here Today

2009-06-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning when I was doing the readings for Vigils, I came across lines I've read hundreds of times before, but this time around, they stunned me: "As for us, our days are like grass; we flower like the flower of the field, the wind blows and we are gone and our place never sees us again" (Psalm 102: 15-16). Why was this suddenly such startling news? Perhaps because I am spending hours mowing and weed-whacking the grasses that always overtake our pasture and orchard this time of year. Perhaps because I so love the spring wildflowers that are so quickly dessicated and blown away. Perhaps because I have been losing too many good friends to death these days.

Yet how accurately the metaphor--dried grass, blown flowers--captures the brevity and fragility of human existence! Over the years I have spent so much time looking inward with such meticulous attention to every minor detail of thought and emotion that I have managed to convince myself I am a solid, weighty, immutable thing, incapable of not being. Which of course I am not, as the psalmist here is reminding me. Like a brief spray of yellow petals in an open field, I have my one chance at flowering here on earth before the wind takes me and I become something else--something that, even with faith, remains a vast and disturbing mystery.

Without the counterweight of God, this deep insight can lead to vertigo, as the early Modernist writers found out to their despair. But with God in the foreground, this picture of precarious human existence becomes aureoled in hope: "From your dwelling you water the hills; earth drinks its fill of your gift. You make the grass grow for the cattle and the plants to serve our needs, that we may bring forth bread from the earth and wine to cheer our hearts; oil, to make our faces shine and bread to strengthen our hearts" (Psalm 103: 13-15). Physical life, no matter how brief, is filled by God with meaning and purpose. The dry stalk of wheat, the lowly olive, the individual human life: all are meant to become blessing.

Creative Destruction

2009-06-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

A few minutes after I took this photo near Truchas, New Mexico, the storm broke: rolling thunder, fireworks of lightning, a whirlwind of hail. A violent June storm, completely out of sync with the normal weather pattern for this time of year. For some reason, the foreboding scene made me think of a Robinson Jeffers poem that drew me hard in the old days before I came back to Christianity. Here, the storm that comes is fire rather than rain. When the siege is over, the poet returns to the still-smoldering hillside to see an eagle perched "insolent and gorged" on a burnt jag, the lucky recipient of free game, driven toward him by the flames. Jeffers speaks of the "merciless blue" of the sky, the "merciless black" of the ravaged hillsides, and the "sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them." And then, when it seems that this poem can only end in nihilistic despair, he adds a final redemptive line: "The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy."

Though Jeffers was a pantheist rather than a Christian, his work helped call me back to the great mysteries of Christ, which are often rife with frustrating paradox. But it was not until I found the monastic path that I began to discern the religious truth in Jeffer's last line. He is speaking here of the blessing of creative destruction--the magnificent but eerie beauty that rises out of death. And it occurred to me that the whole monastic vocation is about voluntarily embracing dying.

What must be put to sleep? The ephemeral delights that give our life meaning. Our jealously guarded self-image. Our most private and personal notions about God. Former Benedictine abbess Mary Margaret Funk calls these the "three renunciations" necessary for monastic transformation.

Such un-selfing can be agonizingly difficult. This is why St. Romuald of Ravenna, founder of the Camaldolese Benedictine congregation, adopts such a gentle tone when he describes the creative destruction we must undergo: "Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. . . .Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing but what his mother gives him." If we give in to it--if we raise our arms to the licking flames or our faces to the bursting skies--then God can do the work in us. If we refuse to go through this annihilating passage, however, we risk trading away our spiritual inheritance for Esau's pot of steaming porridge.

The Uses of Anger

2009-05-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

The immense creature on the right is Roxy, nanny to the next-door neighbor's herd of goats. The little guy on the left is Ben, our two-year-old grandson. Like us, he was awed by the sheer bulk of this dog, who squirmed with joy and whimpered in delight when he stuck his hand through the wire and straight into her slobbery mouth. Roxy spends all day, every day, with her gang of goats, many of whom are pregnant or nursing mothers. I watch her lying in the pasture, head on paws, while goat kids gambol past her. There's something beatific in her gaze, as though she blesses these aggravating charges of hers--as though she blesses the world and all that is in it.

Unless you happen to be canine. Our two dogs, part Border Collie, part Catahoula, part Lab, are not small (Sam weighs ninety pounds), and they are used to thinking of themselves as pretty tough customers. The first time they approached the fence line in order to check out Roxy, however, they got the shock of their lives: the gentle white mountain in the middle of the wildflowers leapt to her feet and charged them, roaring and baring her teeth. If I hadn't been there, she might have easily gone over the six-foot fence and eaten them both. They slunk off with nary a peep.

Roxy has become my icon for discipline and self-control. Clearly, she is naturally affectionate and easy-going, and I believe she loves those goats of hers (though she can be hired out by other goat-owners, so it is clear she doesn't confine her loyalty to the animals she already knows). However, let any canine threat appear on the horizon--bored dogs, opportunistic coyotes--and she becomes Aslan, a lion-like defender of the weak and the dependent, a crusader for justice and goatish dignity. And she cannot be fooled. Our dogs might be friendly, even charming, but she knows the canine heart; she knows they cannot be trusted, particularly together, when one might talk the other into a little playful but deadly mayhem. So Roxy stands firm against evil in all its disguises. Yet when the crisis passes, she does not bear any grudge; neither does she brood and plot. Her vision is clear; that sudden swelling of frightening anger in the presence of evil does not linger on and on, and it has no lasting effect on her sweet-tempered nature.

Monastic wisdom has always listed anger as one of the "eight evil thoughts." The old monks warn again and again that getting angry is the fastest way to lose focus. "Armed as you are against anger do not submit to any powerful desire. For it is these which provide fuel for anger, and anger in turn is calculated to cloud the eye of your spirit and destroy your state of prayer" (Evagrius Ponticus). On the other hand, however, they believe that anger has a spiritual purpose: it is mean to be a good watch dog against our own evil thoughts: "Anger is given to us that we might strive against the demons. . . ." (Evagrius).

St. Hesychios the Priest has this to say about anger, "The incensive power [anger] by nature is prone to be destructive. If it is turned against demonic thoughts it destroys them; but if it is roused against people then it destroys the good thoughts that are in us. In other words, the incensive power, although God-given as a weapon or a bow against evil thoughts, can be turned the other way and used to destroy good thoughts as well, for it destroys whatever it is directed against. I have seen a spirited dog destroying equally both wolves and sheep."

Thank heavens for the good dog next door, ever on watch but never dominated by rage. This is my prayer--that I can become as spiritually disciplined about the uses of anger as the blessed Roxy herself.

Good Friday Pilgrimage

2009-04-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Easter Seder kept us up till midnight, but we were awake again by 3:30 a.m.--little Eli, crying in his sleep. My daughter Andrea opened the front door and peered outside: a moon so brilliant it was casting shadows over the high desert landscape. "What do you think?" she asked. "Shall we start walking?" When Josh assured us that there would be plenty of people on the pilgrim trail already, we decided to bundle up (it was 25 degrees outside) and take off. By 4:30, we were walking alone through Pojoaque Pueblo, which was eerily silent except for the occasional barking of dogs.

Two miles later, we were crossing through the pueblo of Nambe, heading for the highway. There, we became part of a great stream of people moving along the asphalt in the dark. Every half mile or so, we came to a card-table stand manned by generous folks: free oranges, apples, bananas, coffee and water bottles. Some good Samaritans had built bonfires for frozen pilgrims. When I asked why they did it, they said, This is our way of doing the pilgrimage when we can't walk it ourselves.

As dawn broke over the Jemez Mountains, and over the great buttes and mesas of northern New Mexico, we could look back along the highway and see hundreds of people strung out along the road--nothing, we were told, compared to later in the day, when thousands of walkers and cars would clog every route into Chimayo. We pulled off our wool hats in honor of the sunrise, then jammed them back on as the temperature took a sudden dive. Six miles in, we came to a huge cross with a circle at the nexus of the beams, wound through with gossamer white cloth. People were stopping to pray.

I saw lots of people praying, each in his or her own way. Some prayed by dragging enormous wooden crosses behind them. Some prayed by walking the whole route barefoot. Some prayed the Rosary, and some held aloft fluttering banners. Some prayed for the souls of the dead, whose names were stitched on their jackets. One man prayed in his wheelchair as he pulled himself manually along the highway toward El Sanctuario. I prayed in thanksgiving for the daughter by my side, and for the fact that I can still walk, and for beloved friends who cannot.

Four hours and thirteen miles after we launched off in the dark, we crested the last hill and came down into the old village of Chimayo. We were part of the first wave; behind us, thousands more were just beginning to walk. Though the Sanctuario with its healing dirt has been a major shrine since the early 1800's, it was only after the Holy Week celebration of 1946, when masses of World War II veterans and former prisoners of war walked the highways of Northern New Mexico to the chapel, that Chimayo became the foremost pilgrimage destination in the U.S. Nowadays, Holy Week draws nearly 100,000 people.

I waited in line for twenty minutes to enter the chapel, a place I've visited many times before. This Good Friday morning, however, was different: as I knelt in one of the pews to pray, I could hear the hushed scuffing of hundreds of feet filing by me, and was amazed to realize that in all that packed church, there was not a word or sound. Perhaps this would change later on, when the town was filled to overflowing with people from as far away as Albuquerque, ninety miles south. But for now, we were immersed in reverent silence, the awed silence of people who have walked for miles in the freezing dark, who have been fed and warmed by their Christian brothers and sisters along the way, who have seen for themselves that the Body of Christ lives and moves and has being.

Easter Seder

2009-04-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

For centuries, Jews have commemorated liberation from their Egyptian overlords with a Passover feast called the Seder. As Psalm 77 declares, "The things we have heard and understood, the things our ancestors have told us, these we will not hide from their children but will tell them to the next generation: the glories and might of the Lord and the marvelous deeds God has done. . . . God gave a command to our ancestors to make it known to their children that the next generation might know it, the children yet to be born."

The Seder is most often a family meal that tells and retells the history of the exodus, when "God divided the sea and led them through and made the waters stand up like a wall; leading them by day with a cloud, by night, with a light of fire." The word Seder means "order," and refers to the order in which the liberation story narrated in the Seder handbook, the Haggadah, is related. Each food served at the meal is symbolic of some aspect of the rushed and dangerous journey out of Egypt.

Sometimes Passover falls during Easter week, which lends a special significance to Holy Thursday, or the commemoration of the Last Supper. This year I was in New Mexico with my daughter and son-in-law and grandson Eli, who offer a Seder meal every Passover as Josh's family has done for generations past. I was startled by two things: how much the Eucharistic meal depends upon its Passover roots, and how right and good it felt for me as a Christian to be a guest at this venerable and beloved Jewish celebration.

As I pondered this, I was reminded of the core of St. Benedict's Rule for monastics: that we should "pray without ceasing." And it seems to me that the Seder fulfills some of the same functions as the Daily Offices do; these are all ways to worship God, to praise him, and to thank him for his never ending goodness, mercy and compassion. Though I can certainly pray in this worshipful way on my own, my efforts in this regard are often puny and self-referential. When I pray this way in concert with other believers, however, as we do in the Seder, as we do when we pray the Psalms and Canticles during Vigils, Lauds, Eucharist and Vespers, then my petitions transcend the level of the purely personal and become one with those who have gone before me: at one with the prayers of the angels.

Vespers

2009-04-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

For the last fifteen hundred years, every evening, every day of the year, in all Benedictine and other monasteries around the world, prayers rise like evening incense in thanksgiving for the day that is coming to its natural end. Where morning Lauds sings praise for new birth and creation, Vespers is poignant farewell to daylight, and to life itself. Yet it is also a time of hushed and hopeful anticipation.

Each Sunday evening, the Camaldolese sing of this "homeland of our hope," as St. Aelred of Rievaulx puts it, that lies beyond the edges of the horizon and the last flare of the sinking sun: "O Radiant Light, O holy Glory of God the immortal blessed Father in heaven. O Christ Jesus! Now as the sunset comes upon us and we see the evening lights, we praise God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit! It is right at all times to sing your praise with all the universe, O Son of God: you are the Life of the world!"

I often find myself close to weeping during Vespers: it is a daily reminder that everyone and everything I love is fragile, mutable, and passing. But at the same time--and this, perhaps, is what really accounts for those trembling tears--it is a powerful symbol of the promise of Christ that though we die, yet shall we live.

Lauds

2009-03-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

Last week sometime, the spring hatch began. Within a matter of hours, flies arrived in the chicken coop, spiders materialized in the bathroom, fleas invaded the winter coats of our dogs and cats, and mosquitoes came humming off the pond. Most dramatically, three of our hives split and swarmed within minutes of one another--huge buzzing masses of bees, circling gyroscopically over the fava beans, then settling in the nearby oaks and forming thick, protective clusters around their new queens. Before evening, migrating blue birds, goldfinches, and red-shafted flickers had zoomed in for the feast.

When I stopped to think about the event we'd just witnessed, I found myself astonished--first, at the sheer numbers involved, then at the intricate timing and coordination required to make it happen, and finally at the realization that such phenomena are commonplace in the natural world. This daily astonishment at the munificence of God is what inspires Lauds, I think.

"The lands of sunrise and sunset you fill with your joy," sings the Psalmist. "You care for the earth, give it water; you fill it with riches. Your river in heaven brims over to provide its grain. And thus you provide for the earth; you drench its furrows; you level it, soften it with showers, you bless its growth. You crown the year with your goodness. Abundance flows in your steps; in the pastures of the wilderness it flows" (Psalm 64).

My theory is that the simple act of noticing what goes on, even at the level of the insects, irresistibly leads to thanksgiving and praise: Lauds.

Vigils

2009-03-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

Somehow, every time I'm at the hermitage, I manage to sleep through the 5:15 a.m. bell for Vigils. The strange thing is, I love Vigils, and most mornings, I do the office on my own, using the same Psalter the monks use. But for some reason, I can't seem to get out of bed when I've got the chance to actually be in chapel with the community. What's going on?

Laziness, perhaps, or resistance to being ordered out of bed by the bell. Who knows? What's more important is Vigils itself, and what can happen spiritually during the wee hours of the night. And thinking about that helps me realize something important: for years, God has been waking me up for Vigils without my realizing it. Regular bouts of insomnia that keep me wakeful till 2:00 a.m., or (more frustratingly yet) wake me out of a sound sleep at 3:00, have actually led to some of the richest and most fruitful times in my life. Almost invariably, I wind up at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a single light burning while the rest of the household sleeps around me--and in that deep silence and peace, I find myself writing about things that are far beyond what I consciously know. In those somber, chill, moonlit hours before dawn, everything else has been suspended, and all the stresses and challenges of the day are hushed. And this is the one time of the day I am sleepy enough and uncomfortable enough to be distracted out of my usual cares and responsibilities, the one time I'm momentarily capable of listening instead of thinking or analyzing.

Vigils: the lonely depths of the night, in which I'm sometimes--if I am very blessed--able to hear the still, small voice of God.

Desert Day

2009-03-02T15:23:00.000-08:00

The monks of New Camaldoli each have one "desert day" per month, to be used at their own discretion. For those hours, they are released from their normal duties and the need to show up in public. The desert concept harkens back at least a thousand years, to the time of St. Romuald, the Benedictine monk of Ravenna who heeded the call to leave behind his cenobitical life in a monastery in favor of a more eremetical, contemplative existence. In so doing, he was following the path of the fourth-century Christian hermits and cave dwellers of Syria and Palestine and the great Sinai wasteland. New Camaldoli's desert days are meant to open up space and time for the kind of solitude, silence, and individual prayer that are often hard to find in a busy monastic community.

I've always admired the desert day policy, but never adopted the practice for myself. Yesterday, however, I woke up under a cloud; I felt disconnected, disinterested, and listless--fairly unfamiliar territory for an energizer bunny like me. Was I depressed? I didn't think so. Getting sick? Perhaps, but if so, without any particular symptoms. Discouraged? That seemed closer, though I couldn't think of a cause. All I could say was that life had suddenly lost its savor. If I had to put a label on it, I'd have chosen the ancient spiritual term "acedia," as in Kathleen Norris's recent book on the subject. Acedia refers to a state of being imprisoned by malaise or ennui in regard to spiritual matters; it is a pronounced boredom, with nihilistic undertones.

Acedia can thus be dangerous, and something told me I needed to respond quickly. So I declared a desert day for myself, which meant canceling several upcoming events, setting aside a writing project despite a looming deadline, and "disappearing" in regard to phone calls and emails. I also skipped my usual morning routine of devotions and Mass. Instead, I bundled up and took a walk, then sat by the pond with my brain in neutral, not even trying to pray. By late afternoon, I felt the faint stirring of desire to do something useful, so I sewed a couple of patches on Mike's holey jeans, but that was it. A completely useless day, by all normal standards.

Yet, mysteriously, it worked. I slept hard and dreamlessly that night, and woke up this morning as myself, full of energy and thanksgiving and joy, full of delight in the newness of the new day. I have no idea what happened, only that complete rest--from duties, from creative work, from social relationships, from spiritual practice--helped avert looming despondency. That Sabbath-like rest was a balm for my silently hurting soul, a soul that cannot speak for itself but instead relies on me to love it and care for it in the ways it requires.

Elusive Solitude

2009-02-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from three days at Pecos Benedictine Monastery in New Mexico, a 50-year-old community of a dozen or so monks and two sisters who live on a thousand acres of pinon forest, meadow, and river in the mountains east of Santa Fe. This is wild country, and the contrast between warm chapel interior and frosty outdoors is stark. Everything seems arranged for aloneness before God, and despite my long years as an oblate of a contemplative order, I found this curiously unsettling. Why?

It seems that by now my life is so intertwined with New Camaldoli that going there is like visiting family. Those tender human relationships I've built up over the years have come to dominate my experience there, which in turn colors my experience of God while I'm on retreat. The landscape at Big Sur-- one of the most dramatic in the world--has become so familiar to me I can walk it in the dark. At Pecos, I know nobody but the busy abbot, so I was capable of being jarred in a good way by an experience of solitude I am no longer able to find at my beloved monastic home base.

Genuine solitude, it seems, is as elusive and fleeting as a light snowfall; it barely touches us before we have managed to melt it in the warmth of human relationship.

Yet occasional experiences of solitude are critical for those of us on the spiritual path. What can they do for us? They can shake up our complacency, thrust us up against the fact of death, challenge us to face the mystery of God without the usual screen of beloved human faces in between. This helps me understand why the writers of the two Rules I am trying to follow took solitude so seriously. Benedict spent three years living in a cave; Romuald, founder of the Camaldolese, adopted the eremetical life of the desert fathers. My guess is that they knew who they were--how easily they were swept into the warmth and security of human love--so they purposely restricted their access to people. As a wife, mother, grandmother, my times of solitude are going to be much rarer, but also that much more necessary and precious.

The Plan

2009-02-01T18:49:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to distill the essence of the two Rules into practical set of guidelines for myself. Reading the whole Rule of Benedict, for example, is a worthwhile project, but it's hard to see how it applies to contemporary life. What I've come up with is a highly personalized version of both, and over the next couple of years, I want to explore this in greater depth. In other words, I've lived with these Rules and their peculiar manifestations in my life without having the chance to step back and see what's going on. So here's what I want to talk about--ancient disciplines that somehow foster transformation, even today:

Manual labor (food production, repairing tools, building, cooking, cleaning, sewing, food preservation).

Hospitality (providing lodging, hosting meals, counseling, listening).

Frugality (resisting consumerism and debt, recycling, not wasting, saving).

Discipline of body (nutrition, not overeating, rest, sleep, chastity about sexual matters,exercise).

Study (resisting mindless entertainment, filling the mind with nutrititious food, reading the Bible and other holy works, lectio divina).

Stability (not lusting after other places, good stewardship of what we have, willingness to commit and sink roots, care of relationships).

Anchoring ourselves in the Psalms (daily offices, memorizing Psalms, study of Psalms).

Silence (Sabbath rest, custody of tongue, not participating in gossip, curtailment of news and email, silent prayer, sitting in nature).

The lay monastic life is truly antithetical to contemporary culture. The project can feel overwhelming. Where to start? After ten years, I still ask myself that question. But one thing I can now say: by the grace of God, it is possible to enter on to this ancient path, even in the era of YouTube.

2009-01-25T20:49:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from our annual oblate retreat at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Fifteen of us gathered for three days of sharing the daily offices--Vigils, Lauds, Eucharist, Vespers--along with evening meditation before the Host. In between, we congregated in the chapter room near Rubelov's haunting icon of the Theotokos for presentations on Christian mysticism. Fr. Daniel, a longtime Franciscan friar before becoming a Camaldolese hermit fourteen years ago, spoke eloquently about Franciscan spirituality of the heart. Fr. Bruno described Thomas Merton's apophatic form of mysticism--the way of darkness. Fr. Robert spoke about the deceptively simple but utterly rigorous mindfulness of the 14th century Carmelite Brother Lawrence in the Practice of the Presence of God; he also presented a sesssion about the vertical path into mystery taken by the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

As I looked around the chapter room at these longtime oblate friends of mine, I was struck by the varied ways in which we've tried to live out the vow--to become lay monastics in a busy, high-pressure world. And I realized that despite the very real differences in our lives, we're united by several tendencies. First, we love the monks, from whom most of us receive spiritual direction along with friendship and support. Second, we genuinely love the liturgical structure of the monastic life. Third, we've almost all left demanding careers for something more tenuous and less profitable. And finally, most of us have done considerable simplifying.

Have we struggled along the way? Yes, we have. But the rewards have been unbelievable, which is why I was moved to begin this blog.