Making Headroom

Every Tuesday I trek about 20 miles to the west to a Benedictine monastery in time for day prayers.

I go because, set in the quiet of the hills, it’s open, spacious, and still. That’s the way it’s made. My heart yearns for a place that doesn’t drown God out and doesn’t pack him in.

It’s the kind of place where words are spoken slowly, as though the point is to hear them, take them in — not to see how many can fit into an already bustling space. It’s the kind of place where the next thing is glad to wait as long as it takes for an old man to shuffle across the room and even the bell rings into a hush.

The process is a reach for me. I don’t know liturgy from larceny. I bumble through the office.  At times, the phrase Stand up! Sit down! Fight! Fight! Fight! passes through my not-very-spiritual mind.

While I have been warmly welcomed, I feel out of place much of the time.

I go as a child.

But I go because I’m finding God in this quiet.

Making Headroom is a quiet blog that chronicles a year (perhaps) of these weekly trips.  I go in the hope that the stillness there teaches me stillness here, learning to meet him in the quiet so I can learn to meet him in the noise.  

If you’re interested, you can go straight there from here. Email and RSS feed updates are available on the site. Or you can watch the sidebar here at A Different Story, where we still use our outside voices, for new posts.

The journey is about making headroom, one week at a time.