Silence and Saints ~ Sermon (I Kings)

Cemeteries are usually silent places, aren’t they?  Not always – sometimes bands and speakers and Scouts appear in cemeteries, to celebrate Memorial Day, or another significant event – but on the whole, cemeteries are silent.  Quiet places, places in which we go to visit our dead, to remember them, to speak with them.  Silent places in which we commune with both God and with our beloved departed, as we do on this particular day of the church year.

Thin places.    It was the Celts, those tribes who covered much of western Europe centuries ago, who are most closely associated today with Scotland and Ireland, who coined the term ”thin places” to describe those sacred places in which it seems that heaven and earth almost kiss one another.  Places in which it seems that God is especially close.  Places often wild and remote, deserts and heaths and tundra, where God’s presence seems particularly compelling.

Some thin places are recognized the world around:  the Isle of Iona, off the coast of Scotland is one.  The labyrinth, a hundreds-years-old stone walking path in Chartres Cathedral in France.  Ghost Ranch, a retreat center in New Mexico. Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

Others might be personal to each of us.  Perhaps some special place that has come to have significant meaning for us as a locale and which we and God have found one another.  Perhaps a place like a cemetery.  A place in which the connection to God and to the next life, the life in which all is re-created and healed, seems especially intense.

For the prophet Elijah, the thin place is just outside a cave on Mount Horeb.  The Israelites whom we’ve been following for several weeks are settled in their Promised Land, but conflict is not at an end for them – especially not conflict with those who worship other gods.   And so we catch up with Elijah on the run; he has destroyed – literally – the prophets who have served the gods of Queen Jezebel, and she has vowed revenge upon him, and he has hightailed it for the wilderness. Scared and all alone, he has consigned himself to death, when an angel of the Lord appears and provides him with food and drink for the journey ahead.  And then, after he spends another night on his own, this time in a cave, he hears God’s instructions: Go outside; I am about to pass by.

God does not, however, come in the way in which Elijah expects.  Not in the wild wind, not in an earthquake, and not in fire – not in all the signs of power and majesty that might be expected.  No – God comes in the sound of silence.  A sound of sheer silence; a sound of thin silence.

We know, from our 2,000 years of Christian history, that God often speaks to us in the silence.  We remember that Jesus often went aside to pray, alone and in the silence, especially as he faced major decisions and events. We know that men and women in the early centuries of Christianity headed out to the desert, to listen for God in the thin silence.  And as Father Martin Laird, author of that most wonderful book on prayer entitled Into the Silent Land reminds us, we encounter God in the stillness, where we see “that there is something utterly vast and sacred within is,” a silent land in which God awaits our attentiveness. 

Today, as we celebrate All Saints’ Day, that day of the church year on which we pause to honor all those who have followed Jesus from this world into the next, we celebrate first in silence.  We remember the many who have led the way for us:  parents and grandparents, those who first exemplified the Christian life for us.  We remember many who have accompanied us:  brothers and sisters and friends, those with whom we have shared our lives of faith, those with whom we have shared our questions and our hopes, our doubts and our convictions.  We remember many who left us too soon: children and others whose lives seem to have been incomplete, those with whom we had expected to share much more of God’s bounty and abundance. 

And most particularly, we recall those who died in this past year.    Members and friends of this church and of our community, some of whom we knew well, and others who touched our lives through relatives and neighbors.  Today, not in a cemetery but here in church, we will light a candle for each of them, remembering them in the silence in which God speaks so profoundly. 

And then – then we will remember and share a communion meal with them.  Every time we gather at the communion table, we encounter a thin place and we feast with those already feasting with God, already healed and whole and experiencing joy through the Spirit in the presence of our Creator and Savior.   

So let us honor our saints, those we name today and those whose names we carry in our hearts, first in silence and with candlelight, and then in joyful praise, thanksgiving , and song, as we share in the meal served to all by Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Into the Silent Land Revisted

Martin Laird, O.S.A., journeyed to Wernersville last week-end to lead a two-day contemplative prayer retreat ~ for me, the retreat within a retreat.  Ninety people, probably all of them familiar with his books, Into the Silent Land and A Sunlit Absence, showed up to listen to his presentations and to spend time in silence with one another.

 

(Michelle and I spent some months awhile ago blogging back and forth about Into the Silent Land; those posts remain linked in my bar above.  I've read A Sunlit Absence as well and, to tell the truth, I couldn't make head nor tail of it.  I will probably give it another try soon.)

 

I thought I'd offer just a very few vignettes from the presentations, and explore them in more detail later, as I sort through my own prayer and reactions. I'm using quotation marks even though these are not verbatim quotations; they're close enough, and I want to indicate that the source is Martin Laird rather than myself.

 

*****

 

"Inner silence constitutes inner spaciousness."

 

"In our spiritual lives, we are like someone fishing for minnows from the back of a whale ~ sitting on the greatest catch of all, and yet satisfied with something puny."

 

"You will know that you are in the countryside of prayer when you experience joy and reverence at the same time." (That one comes from Evagrius rather than from Marty Laird.)

 

"The purpose of the Christian life is to open the eye of the heart, where God may be known." (That was one of Augustine's contributions.)

 

"In the practice of contemplative prayer, we move away from the chatter of discursive prayer in our heads in which, no matter how dreadful the narrative, we always have the starring role."  (A Laird riff on Evagrius, which I found hilarious, and oh-so-true!)

 

*****

 

As you might be able to tell, the presentations were divided roughly into material on the history of Christian contemplation and reflections on its actual practice.  Marty Laird is the master of metaphor, and listening to his measured, unhurried  observations is itself an exercise in contemplative prayer.

 

I've studied a lot of the material he presented and I'm somewhat familiar with the development of contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition.  (And even in my Presbyterian seminary, we were offered a tinge of an introduction to the desert fathers and mothers in the context of our church history sequence ~ a linear and factual introduction, not an invitation into the spirituality of the desert by someone who had himself delved deeply into its pathways.)  But to hear a master of the tradition, someone who has spent his life exploring its nooks and crannies, bring it to life is to be yourself immersed, however briefly, into that sea of prayer.

 

*****

 

We do, in reality, mostly relax in our beach chairs on top of the whale.

Wernersville Silence

For my friends who continue to wonder about the silence:

Another lawyer-turned-pastor and seeker of silence, Law and Gospel begins to write about her recent Wernersville retreat. 

The Silence of God - 2

I am teaching a class on the parables of treasure in the Gospel of Matthew this morning.  Parable: from the Greek verb; from nouns in Old French and Latin: to throw beside, to cast alongside; a comparison.

I have been thinking about some of my own:

The compassion of God is like a  mountaintop above the treeline: devoid of green, buffeted by wind, steady, still, silent, its surface aglow in the moonlight.

The compassion of God is like a lake at dawn: still, silent, deep, with its mysteries submerged below the surface.

The compassion of God is a like a house early in the morning: a still, silent, receptacle of memories and repository of hope.

Image, here.

The Silence of God - 1

What suddenly occurred to me today, out of nowhere:

I think that the silence of God = the compassion of God.

What do you think?

I feel a multiplicity of posts coming on, but not quite yet.

Lenten Break

"We are built for contemplation."

~ Martin Laird, OSA
Into the Silent Land

 

Image: Cedar Key FL

Supporting Silence

As you may know from one of the tabs at the top of my blog, my friend Michelle and I invested a lot of time over the past several months in our mutual exploration of Into the Silence, a book on prayer by Martin Laird, O.S.A.  Today, if all goes according to plan, Michelle and Marty are getting together in Pennsylvania while I am moping about in Ohio, wishing that I were sitting in a coffee shop with the two of them discussing the life of prayer.

As it happened, yesterday I was in fact sitting in a coffee shop with another friend, another spiritual director, and he had this to say: "These guys who write about prayer?  They all live in community. They make the rest of us, living with our own dysfunctional communities of family, friends, and colleagues, feel as if we need to head for the empty desert when, in fact, they themselves are surrounded by others who make their lives of prayer possible."

It was actually a much longer conversation, but you get the idea.

And so the question becomes, how do we build healthy communities in which we support one another in the solitude of prayer? 

I've said many times that my own church was simply too busy, too noisy, too active for me after Josh died. 

And how many times have folks said to me, "I couldn't be silent for eight minutes, let alone eight days!"

Most of us are not about to build a literal monastery, and we are unlikely, if we are in mainline Protestant churches or ordinary 21st century families, to find much of an expressed interest in silence, whether communal or solitary.

What do you think?  Do these questions exert any pull on you at all?  Do you have some ideas about it ~ about how to introduce, create, and foster the experience of silence with God?

Words (Friday Five)

Jan at RevGals offers the following:

There is a dramatic and surprising venue for Spiritual Formation/Sunday School classes at my church: Each week a different person teaches about a "word" that expresses his/her passion or interest. The first week someone spoke about "hospitality" with abundant treats on her mother and grandmother's china arrayed on tables. Other words have been "connectivity," "Trinity," "money," and "dreams." No one knows which person will be teaching until the class convenes. I am teaching this Sunday and plan to talk about "stirrings."

For this Friday Five, please list five words that identify your passions, spirituality, and/or life. Describe as much or as little as you wish.

**********

In no particular order:

Images.

Desert Wilderness Tsunami  (So, pretend they're one word.)

Companionship.

Silence.

Frontier.

Maybe I'll do some writing about these this week.  In the meantime, an image:

Wernersville Jesuit Retreat Center (PA) ~ October 2010

Distractions: For Gold is Tested in Fire

As most of you know by now, Michelle of Quantum Theology and I have been engaged in a guest blogging adventure, exploring the book Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird.  All of the posts are linked in the relevant page header, and I urge you to take a look at them.  (It seems that we have garnered a number of readers despite few comments, which tells me that people are perhaps intrigued, but speechless in response.  Well, the series is on silence before God, so perhaps the dearth of comments is appropriate!)  Michelle's final post appears below, to be followed, we hope, by one from the author.

Michelle has been given to quoting Evagrius, a fourth century desert father, quite a bit in recent posts, so in order to illustrate this post, I went looking for one of his female counterparts. Herewith, an icon of Syncletica:

**********

Michelle writes:

I went to visit my spiritual director last week at the retreat center where he lives, dragging the tattered shreds of my prayer behind me.  I half hoped that the external silence of the place might bring a bit of relief from the "oh, look, there's a chicken" (or more likely, "hey, did you remember to put the recycling out?") quality my prayer has had for the last while.  At least (barring fire alarms) the only distractions there are in my head, not knocking at my door and flying into my inbox -- which reduces their number if not the overall decibel level. 

I had to admit that I find it consoling to know I'm not the only one who has ever struggled with distraction in prayer, and I've been seeking advice in my library (as well as from my ever patient Jesuit director): Evagrius, Teresa of Avila - and Benedictine hermit Gabriel Bunge.  (I looked up "distractions" in Bunge's index to find "see also Demons" - which promptly started me giving physical shape to my distractions: think large mosquitos and huge blaring plasma screen TVs with tentacles), and of course, Laird's Into the Silent Land. My frank director began by quoting Sirach at me:  when you come to serve the LORD, prepare yourself for trials (Sirach 2:1).  Laird, in The Riddles of Distraction (chapter 5), makes the same point.  Distractions are not to be bemoaned, but welcomed as an "education by ordeal."

Laird (and the rest of the advisors in my library) are clear:  It's not a matter of whether there will distractions in prayer -- there will be; it's how you meet them.  Will you let them put you off prayer, or will you and the clamoring hordes instead deal with each other? 

There's more than a bit of a paradox here (which Laird readily acknowledges).  The distractions teach, but to learn from them you must ignore them.  Despite Bunge's (and Evagrius and the other desert eremites) characterization of distractions as demons, I find giving them physical and psychological shape to be unhelpful.  They become more real, more troublesome.  Far more helpful has been the frame that Laird gives, to look through them to the vastness in which we are settled. 

This morning as I drove back from giving a talk in rural California, I was struck by the vast plain laid out before me.  Green fields spread out all around me; the shape of the land was not obscured by trees and underbrush.  In the distance, hills rose abruptly, leaving me with the paradoxical sense of incredible spaciousness and being cupped gently in God's hands.  There were thousands of bugs swarming around; my windshield was covered in the bodies of the unfortunates who tried to cross I-5 and instead intersected my path.  But despite my awareness of the collisions and the smears they left on the glass, my experience of that vastness was not impeded. 

I'd love to say that this dawn-fueled insight has led to less distracted prayer, but at least for the moment, the swarms remain.  Still, I sense a subtle shift in what I can see of the landscape, and in comparison with that vastness, there is little that can truly compete, or take my attention away.  So perhaps, I have learned something in the trials.

Into the Silent Land: The Healing Balm of Silence

My final post in the blogging exchange in which Michelle and I have explored  the book Into the Silent Land is up.

Michelle's will appear here in the next few days and then, we hope, author Marty Laird will weigh in. 

I'm personally hoping that, among other things, he might address the question of context.  As I wrote my previous post, I noticed that in her book When God is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor says that, "The polyvalence of silence is what makes it so intriguing.  Context is everything."

Now that I've spent months pouring over Into the Silent Land, and many more months than that listening to God's silence, I find myself in disagreement with her.  Context may surprise or perplex us, but God's silence seems to have a quality that transcends all context.

Perhaps we'll get some answers from the Silence Expert.  Or more questions, which would do as well.

 **************

All of our posts are linked in the tab above.

Silence and Noise as Spiritual Practices

And one more (added to those below) , on silence:

"The most basic spiritual practice is learning silence.  Practicing silence is an act of faith precisely because one cannot know for certain that anything is to be gained from it.  It might be a waste of that most precious commodity: time.   . . . "

Continue reading here.

Not the final word, though.

A couple of days ago I visited with First Spiritual Director (more on that later), in town for the holidays, and last night went to mass with the Carmelites, which he was celebrating.  He preached on Mary and Elizabeth, on God's activity in the midst of activity and noise. (Those women are NOT silent in that particular episode!)

Activity and noise have been hard things for me since Josh died; it's as if my inner shell is made of transparent and flimsy paper, easily battered and crumpled.   (My outer shell is apparently as solid as armor.)  And so I've been working on silence.  I've needed a lot of silence in order to make it through the activity and noise.

It was good to be reminded, in one twelve-hour period, that God is in all things, including both the practice of silence and the practice of noise.




Cross-posted in Advent blog.

Inter Alia

Inter alia is Latin for "among other things, as I explained to my law student son the other night. Herewith, inter alia:

The plan for tomorrow night is to accompany a small group of friends to a suicide prevention walk.  At least two of us are not at all sure that we believe in suicide prevention, but apparently we are willing to consider it as a possibility.  ("What do you mean, 'believe in'?" asked the Lovely Daughter.  "I don't know," I said.)

On Tuesday, it will be 50 years since this day.  Unlike my friend Laurie, looking at the photos I've been posting does not make me ill.  They bring me a great deal of pleasure.  Life can be, at times, pervaded by joy; at others, filled with darkness. So be it; we do not get to choose.

This year, ironically, I am going to spend much of October 5 driving.  First, to Pittsburgh, for breakfast with one of my seminary professors, so that we can continue our discussion about, inter alia (!), whether God suffers.  Then, to eastern Pennsylvania, for a late lunch with Michelle and Wayne (!) ~ one of my little interfaith Ignatian groups of friends, this one forged via blogging.

And then, on to Wernersville for eight days of retreat. 

So, over the next few days: lots of walking and driving and conversation and then  . . . SILENCE.

A Conversation III: Let Go Your Grasp

 Michelle and I continue our guest blogging discussion of Into the Silent Land.  One of the things Marty Laird emphasizes is the use of a "prayer word," a sort of repetitive mantra, as a means by which to diminish the distractions that inevitably fill our mind.  I asked Michelle whether we might write about that -- focus on the focus, I suppose -- and she responded with a letter:  

Dear Robin,

I find to my dismay that you are counting on me to wax eloquent on the subject of prayer words.  I will have a hard time topping your pithy summing up - “This is a lot more confusing and difficult than it sounds.” -  since I entirely agree, and wonder if I'm not going to cloud the issue more. 

So I'm going to admit right off the bat that I have never settled into a single prayer word, or even the Jesus prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner), all advice to the contrary notwithstanding.  I tend to wake up each morning with a snippet of a prayer or a single line of Scripture, usually from a psalm, though not exclusively, bouncing around my head.

For a long time I thought I was a failure on the prayer word front, or at the very best a mere contemplative dilettante bouncing from phrase to phrase.  It was the fortuitous discovery of Gabriel Bunge OSB's practical down to earth book on prayer [1] in the stacks at Wernersville that helped me realize that I'm not a failure, but perhaps a throwback.

Originally these prayers were "hurled quickly like spears." They were meant to be short and to the point, not dulled by hanging onto them too hard or too long, and Evagrius Pontikos advises that they be aimed directly at the distracting demon.  In much the same fashion Jesus, tempted by Satan in the desert, hit back with single, appropriate lines from the Scripture.  For Evagrius the prayer word was less the refuge some authors describe - a sort of muffling veil you pull over yourself to hide you from the distractions or the distractions from you - and more of a weapon to beat off the distractions, or better yet, pin them squirming to the wall so they can't return!  Your image of the prayer word as a shepherd's crook quite neatly captures both these senses, I think.  The crook pulls us back from the brink again and again, while it's not a bad weapon to shake at a wolf or crack over the head of a snake.

Too, I like Laird's image of the prayer word as a "vaccine" - a small dose of what ails you when you are distracted - and the advice that follows: it doesn't really matter what word you choose.  It's not about the "spiritual buzz" you get picking one or using it.  In this vein, I would think "to do list" would be far better at vaccinating me against distraction than "grace" or "Jesus"!  I think we can be too fastidious about prayer, sometimes; too high-minded for a people tied to the humility of the cross.  So no way am I going to laugh at your choice of "grass" as your prayer word!

I split the difference between the older tradition of picking an appropriate phrase to hurl at specific distractions, and sticking with a single phrase as Laird (and most others) advise.  Instead I stick with my snippets.  In part it's a way to "pray unceasingly" with this tidbit that rises again and again even when I'm not formally praying.  Of late I've begun to suspect it's also a catalyst for a kind of detachment from prayer words when I sit in prayer.  I spend so much of my day sorting through piles of words, looking for the pieces that fit just right, like pieces into a complex jigsaw puzzle, that the picking of prayer word, and the repeating of it, can be distracting.  Instead I seem to let my unconscious consult with the Holy Spirit and dispense a word or two for me, which I take up in humility and gratitude. 

Snippets may stay a day, a few hang around for a week or a month or more, but I've learned not to try to hurry their departure, no matter how repetitive or unappealing (or appealing!) I find them.  I find that it's best if I don't treat these phrases or words as koans -  puzzles to be solved -  but use them as hallway runners, quieting my footsteps as I move from door to door, or spears to puncture the particular distractions that are haunting me.  I never have to strain to recall the phrase - it's automatic; the changing nature does not cloud the discipline of always returning here.

You wrote of praying with the phrase from Psalm 46, "Be still and know that I am God."  and turning the word "know" around in your head as you walked.  Patient Spiritual Director once suggested I pray with this verset, paring it back word by word: Be still and know that I am. Be still and know.  Be still.  Be.    But why not strip it back to know?  Or and  for that matter? 

I prefer Robert Alter's translation of this line, "Let go, and know that I am God."  He points out that the Hebrew verb is a bit of a surprise here; it carries the connotation of relaxing your grip on something, rather than the freezing of motion.  And in the end, of course, that's what must happen with the prayer word at what Laird calls the third doorway, release your grip on it, stop wielding it as a tool, stop immersing yourself in it, just let it go and let what happens, happen.

My most potent recent experience of that release was on my visit to the old novitiate at Wernersville last week.  I was floating in the pool, seeking relief from the heat, and decided to experiment with praying in that place, rather than get out and sit for a meditation on the side of the pool. I began, then quickly realized that I was no longer paying attention to floating.  Panic surfaced, until I realized I wasn't in fact sinking.  The whole period ended up being this continual "letting go my grasp" on my need to do something to stay afloat -  in both body and spirit. 

Which perhaps brings me to my next question - at one point as we were planning this conversation, you said that you found the section on the breath to be less helpful to you.      It may be the scientist in me that is intrigued about the connections between the body and prayer;  certainly the very bodied experience in the pool continues to play out in my prayer.   What about the body in all this?

Here’s hoping for some relief from the desert heat!

Michelle

[1] Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition - it's not as smoothly written or as dryly humorous as Laird's book can be, but like Into the Silent Land is deeply practical, straightforward discussion of the contemplative life and well grounded in the Church's tradition, particularly that of the desert hermits

[2] Augustine reports that the desert mystics used these phrases -  quondam modo iaculatas -  which can translate as “hurled like so many javelins” though Laird uses the translation “shot like arrows”.  I have to say I prefer the imagery of the less lady-like spear-thrusts, which may be a bit bloodthirsty for someone who claims to seek detachment!

(Image: Evagrius of Pontus, 4th century Egytian monk, as he appears on his Facebook page!)

Retreat Suggestions

A friend is off to her first 8-day silent retreat, and she asked me what she should take.  I thought others might be interested in what (slightly edited) occurred to me, and might have some ideas of their own:

A really good novel or two, not fluff but not War and Peace either, because you need some time immersed in something completely different.

A couple of prayer books if you have some that you like and you want to maybe impose a little order on yourself.

A beautiful new journal.

A camera, your knitting, art materials, whatever it is that you need for some playtime.

Extra pillows. I have never been to a retreat house that has adequate pillow resources.

Whatever you need for walking or yoga if you do those things.

A degree of openness and availabilty to the Spirit that is more than usual for you!

Anyone else? 

PS: I forgot: A swimming suit?  Longtime readers may remember the humor I found in the silent swimming in the much-appreciated pool at Guelph a few summer ago when it was in the 90s all week ~ and how it led to other thoughts on encountering God in silence.

Silence, Blogging, Books

I don't think I quite have this guest/exchange blogging thing down. 

Michelle of Quantum Theology and I are posting in one another's blogs on occasion this summer as we discuss Martin Laird's Into the Silent Land.    I'm starting to think about the next set of topics, and it occurs to me that I should provide direct links to my posts at Michelle's place.  I'm not sure whether she's thought to do the same ~ oh yeah, I see that she did ~, but I think it makes sense.

Anyway, here was mine, posted some days ago.

I'm reading another book in which Silence is practically a character: Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl. 

And, as long as I'm on books, I've just started what looks to be a wonderful book, about Saint Genovefa of Paris and Saint Brigit of Kildare -- 5th-6th century women famous and sainted for their travels and building projects.

And I'm engrossed in the topic of God's suffering (or not), which is generating fascinating conversations, irl and on both blogs.  I suppose I am going to have to return to the density of Moltmann soon; perhaps he will be more comprehensible Now than he was Before.

It's quite wonderful, to be able to read at my own pace and follow each rabbit trail as it makes itself apparent.

Apropos of Yesterday's Post

"Those who are in a hurry delay the things of God".
(St. Vincent de Paul)

HT to Rumours of Angels

Image (yesterday's too): Guelph (Ontario): Loyola Retreat House

A Conversation II: Augustinians

Here we go!  Below you'll find the first guest post written by Michelle of Quantum Theology, in which she provides a great deal of information about Augustinian friars, about whom I previously knew next to nothing:

Before all else, I want to say thank you to Robin for this invitation to visit her blog, and that I'm very excited about her guesting at my space!  Robin and I met (epistolary if not literally) several years ago, through the RevGalBlogPals webring we both belong to.  We share an interest in Ignatian spirituality — Robin is a spiritual director in the Ignatian tradition and we have have both made St.  Ignatius' Spritual Exercises, Robin in everyday life with an extraordinarily gifted and experienced Jesuit director, while I spent 30-days wrapped in silence at the Jesuit retreat house in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  

Recently, both of us have been reading Into the Silent Land, a small, wonderful book about deepening a practice of Christian contemplation.  I'm drawn to the rich mix of the mystic, the academic and the pragmatic that the author, Martin Laird, OSA, stirs up for us.  

Speaking of the author, the first question Robin asked me is about the author.  Martin Laird is an Augustinian friar, and since I regularly join the Augustinian community at my parish to pray the Litugy of the Hours (aka the Divine Office), Robin wonders: what makes an Augustinian?

The OSA stands for Ordo Sancti Augustini (Order of Saint Augustine in Latin; this is the Roman Catholic communion after all).  And while the order traces its roots to St. Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430), the foundations of the modern order date to the 13th century.  The Augustinians are one of the major orders in the Church, in company with the Franciscans, Benedictines, Dominicans, and of, course, the Jesuits, founded by St. Ignatius.

The Augustinian friars are monastics who live out the evangelical counsels —  poverty, chastity and obedience — but are not enclosed in their monasteries like the Trappists that Thomas Merton belonged to or the Carthusians of Into Great Silence, but venture forth to minister. Villanova University, just down the road from me, was founded by the Augustinians, and education is a major apostolate for them.  (And for the science geeks among us, Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian monk.)

Perhaps more relevant to venturing into The Silent Land, the Augustinians value their life in community, in balance with a serious attention to the interior life.   The rule requires that there be places that the monks can go and give their full undisturbed attention to prayer.  They seek explicitly to encounter God in Holy Scripture.  For me, watching this balance between community life and the interior life and prayer in common and individual prayer play out has been formative in my own spiritual life.  And spending all that time with people who are seeking God in His Word is in all likelihood what drew me to Ignatian spirituality.

In the mornings, the move from bustle and banter to a full and focussed attention on prayer never ceases to amaze me. The praying of the Hours may be required by the Rule of the order, but it is an office of love for these men.  I've been praying the Hours with the Augustinians for 20 years, and through that, they have had the forming of me.  When I made the Exercises, I had a very hard time laying down the Office, and even as the contemplations of the Passion grew more intense, clung to it.  When I washed up in my director's office at the end of the 3rd week it became clear that Hours were not something I said, even in the midst of the taut exhaustion of those final meditations, but prayed from the depths of my heart.  The psalms are in my bones, put there by two generations of Augustinians.

I'm not an Augustinian, so I can't really say what it is like to be one, but from where I sit, I might say that they are men who have a serious interior life, are grounded in scripture and who live out a life of service, drinking from those two fonts.  So I'm not surprised to find an Augustinian writing a book about the contemplative Christian life!

(Image: St. Augustine as painted by Botticelli in 1480, here.)

A Conversation: Into the Silent Land

Some weeks ago, Michelle of Quantum Theology and I discovered that we had both been reading the same book, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Martin Laird, O.S.A.  It wasn't too long before we decided to try out a series of guest posts about our reading at one another's blogs.

Michelle and I "met" through some combination, now blurred in memory (mine at least) of our mutual RevGals participation, experiences of family loss, and love for Ignatian spirituality.  I'm not sure exactly how this will turn out, but I hope you'll all enjoy the effort.  Michelle is a Catholic who's also involved in Augustinian community life (which I'm hoping she'll explain), a chemistry professor who writes a column on prayer for her local Catholic paper, and a wife and mom of teenage boys who teaches contemplative classroom practice.

We're also hoping that our author, a professor of religious studies and philosophy at Villanova University, will put in an appearance.  What fun! ~ to explore a writer's work through conversation with a good friend, and then to hear his response to ours!

Welcome, Michelle!

P.S. Jan over at Yearning for God is also reading and blogging about this book!

Into the Silent Land

I have been reading this book by Martin Laird for several days, meaning that I've read it through and now I'm reading around in it, a paragraph or two at a time. My former spiritual director recommended it, saying that someone else had told him that it's the best thing that's been written about prayer.

I'm not sure about that. I'm still partial to Anthony Bloom's Beginning to Pray and Henri Nouwen's The Only Necessary Thing. In fact, I like the latter so much that I've used it to teach a class on prayer at my home church, and another friend has just run with that idea and used it as the basis for an entire retreat day at hers.

But Laird does offer an amazing chapter on meeting your pain in the silence of God. He uses fear, physical pain, and compulsion to illustrate what he means, but his thoughts are applicable to any kind of affective torment -- mine being anger, sadness, and overwhelming and indefinable emotional pain. The point is to move from reactivity to witness, from endless inner commentary to direct gaze. As a person who moves constantly within the dimensions of story, I find it quite challenging to subtract narrative and imagery from my inner life. But perhaps that is exactly the invitation I need to heed right now.

The other night, having had something of a meltdown at school and witnessing the shock and dismay on the faces of others who perhaps have not come face-to-face with this depth of grief before (in part because I, myself, for instance, have kept most of it to myself), I looked up some material online. Mostly I just needed to be reminded that there is nothing unusual about my feelings. And, indeed, I read repeatedly that deep and pervasive grief last much longer than most people are aware that it does, especially in situations such as ours, where the multiplier of two of life's worst traumas is in effect.

That said, however, the groove worn by the endless replay of memories and of things that might have been different becomes unproductive at some point. The therapist I saw for some months at the beginning said that for a trauma like loss to suicide, you need to find "a good enough story," something close enough and accurate enough offer some peace. She's an excellent therapist, but I'm not sure that there is a good enough story. Perhaps what there is instead is the very thing which was the source of so much anguish for so long: the vast silence of God.

I just glanced at the book to see whether there were some words more precise than mine. And here they are:

"Now we can see how afflictive thoughts and feelings play a rather important role. They provide an invitation to be still and gaze into the vast silence they manifest. This is how Eckhart could say, 'what used to be a hindrance now helps you most.' Such is the simple sifting of silence."

Connected Encounters: More on Silence

Last week-end I heard a homily in which a bit of the following poem was quoted at the end. I recognized the name of the poet, because my former spiritual director had sent me another poem of his months ago. Yesterday as I arrived for my chaplaincy interview, the Jesuit who'd offered Saturday's homily was walking out of the hospital's pastoral care office. I don't know him (well, now I sort of do), but I intercepted him, and last night he sent me the poem he'd quoted.

I have had a series of other encounters between yesterday and today that I think have great bearing on my vocational discernment, but those will take a bit more time than I have this morning to relate. For now, this piece by R.S. Thomas, which seems to me to be intimately entwined with my experiences of what yesterday marked as exactly one and one-half years:

But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?

~“AD” by R. S. Thomas in Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000 (2004)