(This is the second of
four reflections from a group of us, based on our recent visit to the Abbey of
Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky over the weekend. Over the course of the next
few weeks, others will share their insights and revelations, poems and epiphanies
emergent from this adventure.)
This week’s guest blog is by Cathy
Maciariello. When Cathy is not at First Presbyterian Church, she keeps busy in
her hometown of Atlanta, Illinois by volunteering at the local library. You are likely to find her with a book in hand, tending her flowerbed during the growing
seasons, and spinning many tales about her trips around the world.
***
Ora et labora
I
On the path to the prayer hut
there are no soft bells calling me to prayer
Instead, stones assert their
unyielding precedence.
Until you learn to pray with your feet
walking at Gethsemani is hard.
The holy impossibility of it can nail you
to the ground.
Under the silence, I listen for
Echoes.
In the tantalizing pain of old Kentucky stones,
there is a memory of Creation.
Don’t think for a moment that
God did not groan
with the work of it.
Who am I to resist the groaning?
Are not my tears prayers
of compliance?
Were there not there stones on the path
to Golgotha?
***
There is a place in you where you have
never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a
seamlessness in you, where there’s a confidence and tranquility in you. The intention of prayer and spirituality and
love is to now and again visit that kind of inner sanctuary. (John O’Donohue, Irish poet)
In college, I was that shy girl who never talked in
class. Truthfully, I was always so busy
composing a perfect and abidingly intelligent response to whatever question was
on the table that I just missed my opportunity.
I think I must have spoken about three sentences during my entire
college classroom career. That’s not
such a bad thing. Reticence can be a
blessing, since—with a little time and distance—real meaning is free to emerge
from the shadow of self-conscious rhetoric.
This is why it has taken
me some time to sort out my experience at the Abbey of Gethsemani. I’ve been waiting for the shadows to
fade. Before we left for Kentucky, my
spiritual adviser told me not to expect too much, repeating what a wise monk
once told him: “You get the retreat you
get.” So I went, with as few
expectations as possible, but with the hope that surely “something” would
happen. I also went with a powerful memory:
that during the inscrutable times of my life, God has shown a wonderful—if
sometimes exasperating—way of gathering uncertainty into understanding and
weaving the loose threads of my experience into a comfortable tapestry—if I
simply have the patience to wait out the apparently inexplicable and accept
whatever image appears—whether or not it resembles the meaning I am trying to
make on my own.
So for me to describe the impact of Gethsemani, I
need to back up a bit and talk about a couple of those dangling threads….
Several months ago, I
visited Muir Woods. I had wanted to do
this for a long time, and I expected to be astounded. But what got to me wasn’t the trees. On the bus from San Francisco, our driver
pointed to the massive granite walls hugging the road and said, “These rocks
are a billion years old. They’ve been
here since California rose up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.” And then we flew on by. “Whoa, wait a minute,” I wanted to say. “Stop!
I need to touch them.”
Later, in the natural redwood cathedral that is
Muir Woods—a place that should inspire prayer from anyone—I couldn’t find the
words. All I could think about were
those rock walls. Suddenly, the Creation
story became very real and very personal.
I imagined the excruciatingly hard work of it: God’s hands lifting rock
from the sea, laboring under the strain of birthing a continent, nearly weeping
with the effort, and finally resting when the work was done. And how many miles must Christ have walked
even long before those final crushing days in Jerusalem, throat sore from all
the preaching, callused feet bone tired, heart breaking from the ineptitude of
his disciples? Theoretically, I
understood all this, but I had just never felt
it.
Only Michelangelo’s breathtaking “Prisoners” at the
Accademia in Florence have ever given me anything like this feeling—those
massive, unforgettable figures heaving, willing
their way out of the stone under the sculptor’s blade. In that moment in Muir
Woods, I knew the reassurance of
God’s continuing participation in Creation.
Just as God suffered with Christ on the cross, he also labored alongside
Michelangelo, and agonized with the deaf Beethoven as he fought to bring his
Ninth Symphony and all those haunting late string quartets to life. God has been and is with us in every moment
of Creation no matter how big or small—with the Apostle Paul and Nelson Mandela
in prison, with victims of abuse, every woman in childbirth, every laborer in
the fields, every struggling 4th-grader trying to learn
multiplication tables, even with me in my garden, feeling the pain of my
blisters as if they were his own. We are
in this Creation thing together, and it is hard work. Sometimes it hurts. And sometimes you have a hard time praying in
the midst of it.
The second memory I
carried with me to Gethsemani was a dream I had a few weeks ago. For some unknown reason, I was walking
somewhere carrying an unidentified man on my back. While I felt his weight, it wasn’t much of a
burden, and he wrapped himself around my shoulders in a way that was more
affectionate than demanding. I could
feel his warm breath even through my jacket.
When evening came, I laid him to sleep on the ground while I continued
to walk in place until morning. No
progress on the journey—just a lot of apparently meaningless walking. I was working, but to no conceivable
end. I had no idea what to think of all
this, and the dream was still poking around at me when we arrived at the Abbey.
That’s where the monks
come in. Here I was again—worrying
myself over the meaning I could make
when God was already busy tying up the loose ends for me. Early on that first morning we met Brother
Paul Quenon—fit, smiling, with penetrating eyes, an easy gift for laughter, and
a tiny notebook with his latest Haiku tucked away in a pocket. Not to mention an unfiltered insight that
must be possible only for someone so attuned to silence and so unburdened by
the world’s intrusions. “God gives us
too much,” he told us. “Think about the
abundance. It’s just too much to
bear. Better not to talk about it. We don’t.”
I know that feeling.
I started paying closer
attention to the monks and keeping time by their prayers. Vigils,
Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline.
My own “work” of the retreat kept time with their daily work
responsibilities. I read and wrote
between prayers, took a walk in the woods with our little group, even found
time for some shopping in the gift shop.
But always it was the prayers that drew me back. Arriving early in the chapel, I would look
forward to the doors opening as the monks wandered in one by one to take their
places, to hearing their soft footsteps and the rustling of liturgical books,
to anticipating the subtle rhythmic chants of the psalms—to disappearing into
the “work” of the monks that is prayer.
Seven times a day they pray.
Seven times a day, seven days a week, until the end of time. The gift is nearly unbearable.
I began thinking about the relationship
between prayer and work, a relationship that, we know, helps define the monk’s
day. Ora
et labora….prayer and
work. What would life be like if we,
too, shaped our days like this? Would we
be more purposeful in both working and praying?
Would the boundaries between work and prayer begin to blur as they seem
to do for the monks? Would we think of
prayer as our chief “work” or purpose?
Would our daily work obligations start to feel a lot more like prayer
than meaningless walking in the night toward some destination we can’t
see? Would we call out to God
unabashedly in both pain and gratitude as we stretch our “Creation muscles” in
service to others? Would we live our
lives in a simpler rhythm that pulses with the transfusion that is God’s
love—the love Brother Paul told us was better embraced than discussed? Would we stop trying to make our own meanings
and let God have his way with our hearts?
Sister Joan Chittester says in her book, Wisdom
Distilled from the Daily, “Work gives me a place in salvation. It helps redeem the world from sin. It enables creation to go on creating. It brings us all one step closer to what the
Kingdom is meant to be….The purpose
of work…is to carry
others, to care for them, and to see them safely home.” I can think of nothing closer to prayer than
this. The dream of it—my dream—makes me
smile. Ora et labora…when done
with God, is there really any difference?
Seven times a day they pray.
Seven times a day, seven days a week, until the end of time. Somewhere in the world a monk is praying for
me now—and will be for as long as I live.
There’s an overwhelming comfort in that, especially when I feel like I’m
failing in my Creation responsibilities, when the effort is just too much, when
I lose my way. What the monks gave me at
Gethsemani was the determination to just keep walking, the courage to wrap
myself in the tapestry God is making for me, and the freedom to let him turn my
footsteps into prayers.
***
Ora et labora II
A cautious
memory of dreams lingers
like silent mists
on Kentucky hilltops
in reluctant contemplation
of the morning.
Who hasn’t fled
from that moment
of first
awakening—
too long even
before the point verge
for certainty?
The hour of
vigils.
Monks already
about their daily work
begin the
antiphonal prayer of daily watch,
garden gloves
and caps tucked away in pockets.
O Lord, open my lips,
And my mouth will declare your praise.
Should I, yet asleep, hesitate before the day,
when God has already been praised?
In the liturgy of the hours is a comfort
softer than first light or compline candle.
From dark to light to dark again,
prayer and work without ceasing.
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
No matter the place or moment
of awakening,
monks are praying the miracle of the hours,
proof enough of Love.
Seven times a day,
seven days a week
until the end of time.
Amen.
From a dark crevice in the night
my voice rises
to join the chant.
