The End of a Journey. Maybe.
If you’ve been around here with me for any length of time, you know that over the past several months I’ve been on a pilgrimage of sorts, a weekly trip to a Benedictine monastery near my home for a half hour, or an hour, depending on whether I stayed with the brothers for lunch. (I’ve written about that at a quiet little space called Making Headroom.)
My hope was to make this journey for 52 weeks, in search of a spacious, quiet place. I found it in the cool stone walls of a chapel, in the rhythm of a steady liturgy, in the quiet of a place where needless noise remained unheard, in the space that opens when one simply isn’t in a hurry to be anywhere but right here.
Right here.
I wanted to learn to find God in the quiet, so I could learn to find him in the noise.
To find him right here.
Mastered that, I have not. But I’ve learned it.
My journey has been cut short by the sad new of the closing of the Abbey for unfortunate but sound reasons of their own. But it continues on in other ways. (more…)
What I’m Doing
Last night I took a walk. Usually I go across the street to the small trail around the Little League fields. It usually ends with me walking a while, then sitting on the bench letting the evening sun stroke my skin and watching T-ball players toddle around the bases with a helmet bigger than their whole bodies. But last night, the sun was just dropping so I turned west and walked into it, across the highway and onto the gravel road out of town.
I thought about taking a picture of the sunset, and walked around back of a machine shed to get a view beyond the obstructions. Seeing it there, slipping down behind the round hay bales, trying to wash orange and gold over the purple-gray clouds streaked across its front, I opted to just stare into it instead.
A little further down the road, I heard a young bird, urged out of the nest but not yet ready to make a go of it on its own. Almost as though it had swallowed a tiny metronome, it sat in the grass entranced by its own rhythmic yelping, the downy fuzz circling its head moving in time as the orange diamond opened and closed, seeming to swallow up its face each time. I stood with it a while, thought about what it might mean, this squawking bundle of helpless feathers.
I decided it didn’t need to mean anything. (more…)
Harmony
I’m seated beside a young Lutheran pastor here on retreat. His voice rings out above the others as we sing a hymn and I try to follow the notes of an unfamiliar melody. No matter since I can barely read them anymore. I ponder the hymns bound in this blue volume, the single line of notes. No four-part harmony dotting lines of the staff. Is its absence for simplicity? Uniformity? I always find the harmony anyway; the melody always dances a step or two out of my range. And it’s fitting for me, in this place. But I try to keep it quiet, soft, uncertain of the reception of such diversity.
Rhythm
I’m beginning to sense the rhythm and sway of a stone that on the surface shows no movement. I come without a sense of time, no clock ticking it away, but respond to the sound of the bells almost without awareness.
No one says, “Stand up.” No one says, “Take your seat.” Still, I move in time to the hollow notes without a Protestant hiccup. Though I couldn’t tell you later the order of the liturgical process, my spirit remembers the rhythm in its practice.
And this is good.
Lament
The regular return to the psalmist’s lament, his unrelenting darkness, his inescapable sense of abandonment — in some odd way I find this comforting. I remember my own need to sit in the lament now and then. Even here, straight-backed in a hard wooden pew where the words of his anguish ricochet off cold stone walls.
Heman ends in despair. His last words do not return to hope. And yet I consider as I listen, as I recite, that though he speaks as though convinced God had stepped out of the room, he continues to pour out his heart, to talk to the one he believes had walked away.
And I wonder if he believes it at all.
Pastures
I wait impatiently through the antiphon. I’ve never felt so eager for the pause to end before. And yet it’s not for a refusal to sit still. I simply want more than anything to be saying these words out loud.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
Preparation Day: 22
The words of David, angry and bewildered, and then reminded.
Psalm 22 for your Sabbath Preparation.
He has never let you down,
never looked the other way
when you were being kicked around.
He has never wandered off to do his own thing;
he has been right there, listening.
- – -
Find some quiet contemplation in these weekend communities:
Still Saturday with Sandra King | Sunday with Deidra Riggs
(Thanks for stopping by today. I’m encouraged by your visit.
I’ll beg your understanding for the closed comment box
on Preparation Days. It just helps me not talk so much.)
Light
The Gospel is read from John 3 and I remember that no matter where I go looking, where I ever find him, it all comes back to this. God so loved the world…
The light has come into the world… I’m staring at the floor following the dance of the green and orange and red stained glass light on the floor tile while words of Gospel truth dance in the cool air. And people loved the darkness rather than the light… Just like that, the light shifts and vanishes from the floor and a grayness seems to cloak the space around me.
Just like that.
Preparation Day: 18
The words of David, upon being rescued. Again.
Psalm 18 for your Sabbath Preparation.
Find some quiet contemplation in these weekend communities:
Still Saturday with Sandra King | Sunday with Deidra Riggs
(Thanks for stopping by today. I’m encouraged by your visit.
I’ll beg your pardon for the closed comment box on Preparation Days.
It just helps me not talk so much.)
Blessing
The others partake of the sacramental elements and I stay where I am, preferring my place at the periphery. Listening. Not seeing, not touching. But feeling, yes. I hear the young priest, the one with the rich lilting voice, approach my place. His hand rests lightly my head while my knees rest bent against the wood.
The Lord bless you and keep you, now and forever.
I consider the tender might carried in words that mean to call out blessing. My eyes burn at the words, at something I hear but cannot see.
Hearing
So then I walk by sound, not by sight. Movement makes its way in a sort of clunky unison, not synchronized, but together. Hinged wooden seats thump as they rise and fall, kneelers drop to the floor, robes rustle. Heavy footsteps paired with shuffling ones trace their steps from one end of the chapel to the other, the length so needfully punctuated with a simplicity of empty, yet inhabited, time. Each sound nudges me to the next thing, nearly without thought or effort.
The reading draws to its close and we join voices in the antiphon:
My sheep listen to my voice;
I know them, and they follow me.::
Preparation Day: Selah
. . . and surround me with songs of deliverance.
Selah.
Taken from Psalm 32 today, but there’s a Selah around every corner.
[In the Amplified Bible, Selah reads "pause and calmly think of that."]
:: (more…)
Desperation
Teach me and I shall live.
This quiet sense of desperation sometimes meets me there in my seat, and whenever we repeat this line I remember it. I’ll die if he doesn’t teach me how to live. I’m dying in a way already, I feel that in my bones some mornings when I awake. He teaches and I look the other way. Here, reminded, I look ahead. My eyes trace the crimson stain that bleeds on the edge of the grain of that one odd brick in the wall and somehow I know he is teaching me this life even as I sit here, still, out of place, in the quiet.
Teach me and I shall live.
Preparation Day: 80
God, come back!
Smile your blessing smile:
That will be our salvation.
From Psalm 80 –
a testimony of Asaph
How well that we can look to God
when our face is set wrong,
that he may turn us,
and so his face shine on us,
as to bring blessing and
present deliverance to his people.
– J. N. Darby, quoted in
TheTreasury of David
:: (more…)
Live Into This
Every time I go to the abbey lately, it seems I return to my car with a fist full of books. That “FREE BOOKS” table in the entry is still there after several weeks. Each time I see it, I’m convinced there are more books on it than the last time, despite my best efforts to clear it.
As you can imagine, this works mighty wonders for my “to read” stack.
Unrelated to that, I’m working my way through Eugene Peterson’s five “conversation” titles, and hoping one day to get to those tattered used books I keep bringing home.
But meanwhile, I’m still here, reading Eat this Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading. It’s been a long read. Longer than I intended. But life sometimes has a way of getting tangled up in itself. I got a little caught up one day when he gave me permission – me! — to do exegesis: (more…)
Present
Wine pours into a chalice somewhere behind me. It’s brief, but a sudden rush. We’re waiting here in the quiet. I notice the space again. This bread, this cup, they are prepared in our waiting. In our presence. It’s neither hasty nor efficient. It requires our presence to be what it is. Absent the community, it is but wine in a chalice. Bread on a plate. But this bread and cup, it nourishes as flesh and blood come present together.
And so we wait, present, together.
::
(Photo: Sandra Heska King, at Laity Lodge, used with permission)
Inflection
This is where he meets me, time and time again. All this place is unknown and my ignorance bleeds a trail with every step. But meeting him in the quiet place where the Word is all one hears, this I’ll always know though even on foreign soil.
In this slow reading, where the monotone drags, the Word speaks its own drama, unaided by cosmetics of human inflection. Its authority is gentle. Its crispness strangely soothing.
Empty Hands
My smallness meets me nose to nose today and I discover, perhaps, just one of the reasons I hear him here.
I bring nothing to this table.
In this place, I show up. That’s all I have. I follow, and clumsily at that. I do not lead.
I bring nothing. I offer nothing. The morning goes on like it always does whether I make an appearance or not. No one looks to me.
It is — if perhaps I can say this way– it is the place where I come with empty hands.
Company
I don’t realize that I stopped thinking during my time there alone in my seat. I listened, I watched, I recited when it was time. And when it grew silent I bowed. I don’t remember that God was saying anything. I don’t remember that I was saying anything. I think we were just there, together, enjoying each other’s company.
As I sat, bent over toward the front of the pew with my face in my hands, I felt the priest’s hand on my head and heard him murmur a blessing.
I hadn’t heard him approach. And I was not startled.
The Conversation