St. Benedict

Getting Up Again

One sunny fall morning, a friend and I shared coffee and conversation in an old city park. It’s become a favorite rendezvous. Covid-conscious, neither of us is keen on eating inside. Besides, the park was aflame with color: Maples showing orange and red. Ginkos glowing yellow in the sunlight. Majestic ash and elms flaunting their grand canopies for all to see.

In such a beautiful setting, one might expect lofty thoughts and happy moods. But I was having none of that. I wasn’t dismal, just disconnected. I was tempted to blame my floundering on a three-week vacation, but really, I was adrift before that. If anything, vacation helped me relax and connect with my center, opening me to meet to each day without an agenda, welcoming whatever came: Visits with two of my daughters out east, great food, and long conversations, country walks sandwiched between hurricane Ian’s lingering rains, wanders along the beach, and a little drawing and painting.

Back home, re-entry was difficult. I’ve lived alone for eleven years, but after three weeks in the delightful company of others, I felt lonely. I watched too much TV and ate way too much, wiping out months’ of hard-won weight loss. Settling back into writing routines just didn’t happen. Not much luck with prayer practices or journaling either.

All in all, I felt a mess.

My friend is a good listener. After the rambling “confession” of my failures, we grew quiet and sipped coffee. The air was chill, and I cradled the mug in my hands, grateful that he had brewed coffee and carried it in proper mugs from his home across the street. Hot drinks in styrofoam are way less comforting.

“We’re all in a mess, one way or another,” he volunteered.

“True.”

I thought of Sharon Salzberg, a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher in the West. One of her “On Being Project” interviews with Krista Tippett was titled, “The Healing Is In The Return.” She talked about starting meditation and her mistaken ideas of what it was and how it worked. She thought that each day she would be able to sit longer with a quiet mind. It would accumulate until she reached her goal of long, still, meditative sits. She discovered that wasn’t the point at all:

“… learning how to let go more gracefully was the point. Learning how to start over with some compassion for yourself instead of judging yourself so harshly—that was the point. … It’s still the most significant thing I’ve ever learned from meditation and that I use it every single day, because we do. We must start over and do a course correction, or pick ourselves up if we’ve fallen down, every day.”

In thirty-plus years of meeting with my spiritual director, I have heard her recommend self-compassion more times than I can count. Why is it difficult to practice?

Instead, it’s easier to listen to my inner critic picking on all the things I haven’t done or have done poorly, the stuff I did that I didn’t want to do, like buying chocolate and eating it all at once instead of a piece a day as I told myself I would.

“Good thing God’s in the mess,” I offered.

Isn’t that point of incarnation? The Holy One being with us wherever we are? However we are? Jesus liked to be in the mess, and he liked the people who were in them. He hung out with the marginalized, exasperated the righteous religious leaders by ignoring their pious rules, and got into trouble speaking the truth.

I love Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message of Jesus quoting Isaiah in Matthew, “I prefer a flexible heart to an inflexible ritual.”

Jesus got it. Being a human being isn’t easy. Growing into one’s true self isn’t a linear journey. Lots of stops and starts, fear and love, failures and successes circle around over and over. As Mother Teresa said, “We are not called to be successful, but faithful.”

Salzberg learned that as she embraced meditation. The point is getting up again. Forgiving yourself and showing yourself the same compassion that you show to others.

That’s what I’m learning too. Again. When I blow my efforts to eat better, eat less, and lose weight. When I stay up way too late, even though I’m a natural night-owl. When I binge TV instead of reading the books I want to read. When I don’t journal or draw or paint or engage in prayer practices that bear fruit. Basically, when I’m in a mess and am discouraged—and how often it that?—I need to have faith in God-with-me and start fresh. Like the next blank page in my journal.

This is part of perennial wisdom tradition, a great river that feeds all wisdom traditions from ancient times. Jewish, Christian, Buddhist. All of them, religious or not. It shows up in holy books, literature, embroidery on pillows, and prints on magnets. Here are a few examples:

In Pirke Avot: The Sayings of the Fathers, a collection of ancient Rabbinic texts, there is a short saying that points to the importance of not giving up: “You are not required to finish your work, yet neither are you permitted to desist from it.”

Buddhist author and teacher, Pema Chodron has a book titled Start Where You Are. Author Lucy Maud Montgomery, in Anne of Green Gables, writes, “Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it.” It’s possible to let go one day’s disappointments and have enthusiasm for the day to come.

I find strength and hope in knowing that I don’t tackle tomorrow on my own but can draw on the transforming Love and Presence within. Of all the words on this topic, I gravitate to these, most often attributed to Saint Benedict:

Always, we begin again.

Seeing Everything Shining Like the Sun

Originally published in The Catholic Times, November 12, 2016 issue

Liturgically speaking, November begins with celebrating the holy ones who have gone before and who live among us: the saints and the saints-becoming. Canonized or not, they are those who open our eyes to both the presence of God-with-Us and to the responsibility to reverence that Presence in how we live our lives.

What if we looked at this month through the eyes of the saints? Would we see things we usually overlook? Would we be moved to act in ways out of our ordinary routines?

Trees blazing with color will soon drop their leaves and stand starkly against winter skies. On some days, snow will cling to their branches and cover the ground. Beauty has many faces. Growth often happens deep within, out of sight. While autumn’s riot of color shouts, winter’s muted palette speaks in whispers. Silence guards the life that has withdrawn to the center, content to wait and gather strength.

The great contemplatives speak of encountering God within, spending silent time resting in the Sacred Presence. Often, though, in the midst of contemplative practice, nothing much seems to be going on other than distractions. When tempted to wonder where God is in those times, we can remember the winter trees and landscape where the mystery of life deepens unseen.

The saintly scientists invite us to encounter God in the ordinary and spectacular realities of the universe. St. Hildegard of Bingen living in the 12^th century, wrote about ecology, natural science, and medicine. St. Albert the Great, whose feast we celebrate next week, was a philosopher and scholar recognized for his knowledge and writing not only about theology but also about the sciences including physics, and astronomy.

Watching the super moon rise on November 14 or gazing at the dance of the moon and planets can be worship.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest born in the late nineteenth century was a mystic and accomplished geologist and paleontologist. His vision of the evolutionary nature not only of matter but of spirit and his understanding of the Cosmic Christ continues to inspire today.

Looking with these saints helps us see not only the magnificence of creation, but also the connectedness of all things. We are a small part of a universe beyond imagining. From the perspective of such immensity we become aware of our place in the world, participants in Infinite Life. What happens to one affects us all.

The great challenges of our time require such a universal view. Pope Francis has emphasized our moral obligation to respond to protect the earth. He also calls us to be merciful and to create a culture of encounter with one another.

How many stories are told of saints who lived their lives serving the poor and marginalized, the sick and suffering? Elizabeth of Hungary, whose feast is also celebrated next week, was a queen and mother who gave herself so whole-heartedly to sharing her fortune with the poor and nursing the sick, that, when her husband died on the way to battle, she was thrown out into the street by his parents who were offended by her discipline of prayer and good works!

Monument to the Immigrant in New Orleans. A statue depicting a female muse whose flowing gown leads to family of four immigrants. By Franco Alessandrini (1944), American sculptor of New Orleans

Monument to the Immigrant. 1995 New Orleans by Franco Alessandrini (1944), American sculptor of New Orleans.
Dedicated to the courageous men and women who left their homeland seeking freedom, opportunity, and a better life in a new country.
Photo: Mary van Balen

Martin de Porres entered a Dominican monastery as a lowly lay helper, but spent much of his life using gifts for healing not only tending the monks, but also the poorest in his city of Lima, Peru.

Today as millions of refugees leave their homelands destroyed by wars and violence, looking for a safer place to live and raise their families, we do well to remember how these saints saw every person. St. Benedict instructed his monks to greet every stranger who came to the monastery door as Christ. Mother Teresa saw the face of Jesus in every dying person she lifted from the street. How do we see these people, fleeing for their lives? How do we welcome them when they arrive at our shores?

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton wondered at God dwelling within every person he saw at a busy intersection in Louisville, Kentucky: “…There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun!”

When we are able to see the hand of God in every speck of earth or distant star, to recognize the Holy Presence in others, or to trust the Indwelling in ourselves, we can pray for Grace so, like the holy ones who have gone before us, we will reverence the Sacred that is in our midst or knocking on our doors.